The American Navy of the war against the Axis

While the scholarship on naval operations in World War Two is vast and impressive, much of it suffers from the natural weakness in details on the technology that fought at sea. The slight is not intentional. Rather, the time (and space) devoted to identifying and explaining the great questions surrounding history’s greatest naval war leaves little room for a thorough examination of the weapons used to fight in three dimensions. Fortunately, reference works authored by historians with the skills of incredible attention to details, exist to fill the void. Mark E. Stille’s The United States Navy in World War II, From Pearl Harbor to Okinawa, offers a relatively inexpensive and extremely useful reference to the major U.S. Navy combatants employed in both the Atlantic and Pacific. A retired Navy Commander, naval intelligence officer, and former faculty member at the Naval War College, Stille has been a prolific author of World War II and Cold War naval histories, including several other reference works on both U.S., Allied, Imperial Japanese Navy and Axis warships, and World War II naval operations.

As a reference, Stille’s work is rather impressive. The book includes detailed information and operational histories for every major USN combatant employed in the war. Within each combatant type Stille breaks down the ships into their individual classes, methodically explaining their specifications, construction history, armament, service modifications, and an assessment of their contribution to victory in the Pacific and Atlantic. Extensive use of photographs, schematic drawings, and interesting historical inserts complements a narrative which is extremely informative and well written. Readers will notice the absence of destroyer escorts, amphibious ships, and auxiliaries in the book. Stille does not explain why these types of vessels were left out of the book. Perhaps they fell victim to the expenses associated with publication, particularly given Stille’s rich use of photographs and illustrations. But their absence does not detract from the quality of the work.

Stille’s first two chapters, explanations of USN strategy and tactics, and an operations overview, do suffer somewhat. Again, the emphasis on the reference material perhaps informed too concise summaries in these chapters. His overview of War Plan Orange, for example, is too concise. In this case, Stille should have broadened his bibliography to include Edward Miller’s seminal work on WPO, and explained in more detail the plan’s transformation from the “Thruster” vision of a “through ticket” to Manila, to the methodical plan outlined in the “Royal Road” in the mid-1930s. The development of USMC amphibious warfare doctrine, which was integral to Pacific operations, is also not mentioned in the chapter. Summaries in the chapter on operations are similarly too succinct. The deficiency is, however, minor, and does not detract from the importance of the reference material.

Stille’s detailed portrayal of the ships that defeated the Axis and Japanese navies is not just meant to inform readers in search of more detail on USN warships. His object is also to illustrate the quality of these combatants. In this his work is a great success. More importantly, Stille’s work clearly shows that, while the war was fought at sea, it was won by important factors ashore. The first was the prescience of President Franklin Roosevelt and congress, who passed Navy Acts in 1938 and 1940 which expanded the size of the service beyond the restrictions of interwar treaty limits, and then again to fight a two-ocean war. A second factor was U.S. industrial capacity, which produced not only thousands of warships, but built them in record time (the 50 Casablanca Class CVE’s for example, were constructed in a remarkable seventeen months). Finally, Stille’s work clearly demonstrates that the Navy was a learning organization. That every subsequent class of major surface combatant underwent significant design changes demonstrates that the Navy applied lesson learned in peacetime, and even in the cauldron of war.

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Our Reviewer: Dr. C.C. Felker is the author of Testing American Sea Power: U.S. Navy Strategic Exercises, 1923-1940, and most recently No Moment of Victory: The NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan, 2009-2011 (with Dr. Martin Loicano). He was a permanent military professor in the history department of the U.S. Naval Academy from 2004-2016, and is currently the Executive Director of the Society for Military History.

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Note: The United States Navy in World War II is also available in several e-editions.

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