![]() The British Royal Navy, still mighty but showing cracks, leaned on U.S. World War II was a showstopping duet when Britain and the United States teamed up, as few powers have ever done. The Anglosphere, for good and ill and notwithstanding the occasional serious challenge, has policed the world’s seas for more than 200 years. ![]() As an example, Kennedy cites how the raw material from a bauxite mountain in Suriname eventually became the aluminum critical to the construction, speed, and battle-sturdiness of the hugely successful U.S. He details networks of far-flung causes and connections-more about why things happened the way they did versus focusing on who sank what, which many other popular naval histories focus on. ![]() What Kennedy does is masterfully integrate economics, technology, and strategic options to explain why the naval war went the way it did. William Halsey Jr.’s blunders, bad torpedoes, the virtues of wooden flight decks for aircraft carriers compared to armored ones, and stories that describe the chasing down of the German battleship Bismarck as if she were robber Clyde Barrow on the run from the G-men. There are plenty of books about the naval fights of World War II that focus on Adm. Chuichi Nagumo had pressed farther west, threatening Aden, Yemen, and the Suez Canal-and how this might have affected Britain’s ground war in the Middle East and its ability to keep hold of Malta, a strategic linchpin and annoying rock in the Italian shoe. He speculates what might have happened if Adm. Kennedy spends several pages describing the sometimes-forgotten Japanese navy raid in the Indian Ocean in April 1942, which saw ships sunk, shore facilities in present day Sri Lanka bombed, and general terror sowed. But Victory at Sea looks at more than just the United States’ steel-hulled rise to superpower status: It also explores the other five major naval powers of the war-Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan-starting in 1936 when rearmament began in earnest to the immediate postwar demobilization. By the end of 1944, that number was 6,084. More broadly, there’s nostalgia for an America ascendant. There’s Kennedy harkening back to his earliest days when he published works specializing in naval history. In Victory at Sea, there’s nostalgia on two fronts. Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II, Paul Kennedy, Yale University Press, 544 pp., $37.50, Apr. The scope is most reminiscent of historian Craig Symonds’s 2018 World War II at Sea: A Global History.īook cover of Paul Kennedy's Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II Alfred Thayer Mahan, this book may not be for you.) The result is part coffee-table book, part sweeping, single-volume narrative. (And the paintings are stunning: If you’re not stirred by a portrait of the Italian battleship Vittorio Veneto at La Spezia, Italy, a marriage of painter Claude Monet and Capt. Richardson Dilworth professor of history and director of international security studies at Yale University, is clear at the outset that the book began as brief text to accompany acclaimed maritime artist Ian Marshall’s paintings of warships, and it grew from there. Instead, it hearkens back to his The Rise And Fall of British Naval Mastery in its theme of maritime superiority being intimately connected to economic power and industrial capacity. Victory at Sea is not The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers-neither groundbreaking nor likely to be controversial. But critics lashed out at Kennedy’s apparent defeatism military strategist Edward Luttwak’s review of the book was titled “Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall.” presidential candidates a copy even made its way onto al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden’s bookshelf. The notoriety ensured that his book became a bestseller and that Kennedy would be consulted by U.S. His sin was forecasting the United States’ decline. In 1987, with the publication of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, historian Paul Kennedy ignited a firestorm.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |