Carriers in Combat: The Air War at Sea

Air & Space Power Journal, Winter, 2007 by David R. Mets

Carriers in Combat: The Air War at Sea by Chester G. Hearn. Praeger Security International, Greenwood Publishing Group (http://psi.praeger.com), 88 Post Road West, P.O. Box 5007, Westport, Connecticut 06881-5007, 2005, 336 pages, $49.95 (hardcover).

Chester G. Hearn has published 18 books, most of them about maritime affairs and the American Civil War. Carriers in Combat purports to be the history of naval aviation, mostly that of the United States, with some attention to the subject in the Japanese and British navies. The first combat for American naval aviation came in 1914 at Vera Cruz, Mexico. That makes the story over 90 years old. Hearn discusses the first 30 years or so in 228 pages and the last 60 in 52 pages. The whole book is not authoritative, but that part covering the postwar period is strictly superficial.

The author devotes the bulk of his attention to World War II, and it certainly behooves Air Force professionals to know something about naval aviation in that period. The naval officers that they will meet in joint assignments will be well versed in that part of their history, and Air Force officers can develop good relations if they too are conversant with the story. Moreover, since World War II, command of the sea has hardly been contested, and the mission of the Navy has increasingly become power projection ashore, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thus, aside from the takeoff and landing location, the missions of the two services have largely converged. But Air Force officers should look elsewhere for their knowledge.

At least Hearn does nothing to hide his prejudices, identifying aviators with all that is good and true in the Navy and painting everybody else as incompetent or worse. He is especially hard on Adm Raymond Spruance but is a stout fan of Adm Marc Mitscher. Spruance was not an aviator; Mitscher belonged to the first generation of aviators. Yet Spruance--victorious air leader of the Battle of Midway--comes in for criticism with regard to the Battle of the Philippine Sea because all of the Japanese carriers were not sunk, though by far the greater part of their airplanes went down, and three of the flattops followed them to the depths of the ocean. That was really the last chapter in the winning of air superiority in the Pacific (aside from the kamikaze problem). As Hearn reluctantly admits, the point is that Spruance's mission was the protection of the landing forces in the invasion of the Mariana Islands--which was accomplished. The author criticizes Adm Harry Fletcher for abandoning the landing forces at the time of the Guadalcanal invasion, and here he condemns Spruance for not abandoning them. It now appears that Spruance could have chased off after the retiring Japanese, but that is easier to see now than it was then. That is but one example of Hearn's blatant bias--never sufficiently recognizing that Adm Chester Nimitz was the Pacific commander. He too was not an aviator but seems to have done well enough. Furthermore, Adm Ernest R. King--chief of naval operations, stationed in Washington--escapes the author's wrath. King won wings, but he never served as a crew member since he was an O-6 (captain) when he went through pilot training at Pensacola.

Like the Bible, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) is so voluminous that it can be used to justify all sorts of sin. Hearn, who seems not to have delved very deeply into it, uses it to buttress his claim that aircraft carriers are the greatest conventional weapon in history without noting that the USSBS credits a combination of the submarine campaign and strategic bombing as being decisive against Japan. According to Hearn, the Army and Air Force (when he recognizes them at all) also ran in a minor way in that war, as well as in the combat we have had since then.

Bias and imbalance are not the only problems with this book. Every reviewer can nitpick every bibliography there ever was for its omissions. However, there are simply too many important ones here to ignore that problem. Hearn frequently refers to Adm U. S. Grant Sharp in connection with his tirades against Pres. Lyndon Johnson, who gets all the blame for the Vietnam fiasco. Yet he does not refer at all to Sharp's own book on that subject. He sides strongly with Sharp's view of things but does not point out that the good admiral was not an aviator any more than Spruance had been. Both the Navy and Air Force came out of the Vietnam War with the determination to change many things about their approaches to air war, yet Hearn seems to be building a stab-in-the-back legend, heaping all the blame on politicians in Washington. Here, he depends heavily upon secondary sources (almost all of them coming from naval people), especially articles in the US Naval Institute Proceedings (a worthy journal that every Air Force professional should know, but there is more to research than that). The author also omits Clark Reynolds's fine biography of Adm John Towers, whose story covers most of the same ground as this work--but does so authoritatively. Granted, Hearn cites the definitive work of Norman Friedman in his bibliography but does not show much evidence of having read it, as is the case with the work of Norman Polmar. I could go on and on with this, pointing to the works of Jeff Barlow, Eliot Cohen, Robert Futrell, and Conrad Crane, all of whom would make much better fodder for the Airman's professional reading program.