When a veteran British historian and a gifted artist team up for a big book, the result is a work of art and a great early holiday gift for Navy readers: “Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II” (Yale University Press, 2022) by Paul Kennedy with paintings by Ian Marshall.
Kennedy’s theses: (1) 1943 was the pivotal year for victory for the Allies, and (2) World War II accounts for America’s rise as a consummate and exceptional world power, “an extraordinary shift in Great Power history.” Kennedy makes the point in three data-driven appendices, a ream of research notes, a preface overview, and more than a dozen charts, maps, and tables.Paul Kennedy
If that sounds boring, just turn to the book’s compelling narrative and gorgeous art.
You’ll find a rich sweep of naval history leading up to and during the Second World War –– in both the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean areas of operation and in the Mediterranean Sea. Ian Marshall’s sketchy watercolors in soft pastels convey human commitment and achievement even in the fog and gloom of war.
“At the onset of 1943 the US Navy was down to a single carrier fleet in the Pacific War, and German U-boats were poised to launch their largest-ever offensive against the critical Atlantic convoy trade. Changes had to come if the Allies were to prevail.
“The changes came in 1943. World War II defies easy summary, but the key to an eventual Allied victory, essentially, was to get the increasingly vast numbers of American and British Empire fighting men and munitions across two oceans so that the combined armies (along with the Russians) could crush Italy, Germany, and Japan. This involved two elements, sea power and a productivity revolution. In the sea-power story, the struggle for control of the North Atlantic was won by the defending forces, quite dramatically, in May and June of that year, with severe U-boat losses. North Africa was consolidated, Malta relieved, and Italy defeated. Things moved more slowly in the Pacific fighting, but victories in the Gilbert, the Solomons, and northern New Guinea confirmed an American advance that would not be thrown back. Yet the year 1943 meant more than just another saga of hard-fought convoy battles, amphibious landings in the Mediterranean and Pacific, and the sinking of a German battle cruiser off Norway. It was the year in which the sheer productive muscle of the United States, which had existed in latent form in so many measures before that time, at last realized itself in all of the arenas of the world war … In place of the dearth of fleet carriers, new powerful ones began to stream across the Pacific from June onward. Over the Atlantic, high above the now-secured convoys of supply ships and troopships, flew thousands of US aircraft on their way to their new bomber and fighter bases in southern England. Landing craft and Liberty ships poured out of American shipyards. Even the Royal Navy’s hard-fought defeat of the U-boats in 1943 could not have been imagined without the productive American force behind the ultra-long-range B-24 patrol planes, the escort carriers, the mass-produced radar sets, the homing torpedoes, and Lend-Lease stock for Canada’s and Britain’s production of escort vessels. By the year following, this flow of munitions to the fronts had become a flood, producing in turn the victories of Leyte Gulf and Normandy. And behind all this military hardware and productivity was a financial, tax-raising strength bigger than anything known to history. Allied naval predominance was assured because of a surge in the American economy that dwarfed that of all its rivals. It was not just a story of more and more warships; it was also a tale of a new international order emerging. Victory at Sea was affirmed, with the clear winner of the war being the United States of America.”
America’s massive production output came about through progressive New Deal initiatives under President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a country of immigrants, largely from Europe, hungry to work. Women and African Americans, previously disenfranchised, came into the workforce.Henry Kaiser's Star of Oregon was the first of many Liberty ships built in U.S. shipyards.
An industrialist who harnessed the moment and accelerated production in the United States was Henry Kaiser, a friend of FDR, who built shipyards and who embraced innovation and technology. [See our post last year about the amazing HJK, whose company helped build the Bay Bridge, Hoover Dam, Western highways, and 1,552 Liberty ships.]
Kaiser’s innovations dovetailed nicely with what Kennedy calls, “the New American Navy,” one that could put multiple fast-carrier task forces to sea. The Navy invested in more than two dozen light fleet carriers (CVLs) and built or converted 122 escort carriers (CVEs).
“Already the creative genius of Henry Kaiser, soon to become famous chiefly for his Liberty ships, had obtained from his friend Roosevelt permission to build an entirely new class, the Casablanca-class, from the bottom up. They would draw 11,000 tons, steam at 20 knots, and carry 28 planes, a 5-inch gun, and smaller armaments, and they would operate as a jack-of-all-trades covering every new amphibious operations s well as the escort duties mentioned above. Kaiser’s scheme was symptomatic of the entire story of American wartime expansion.”
“The victor’s ships, planes, and guns need courageous men to steer them, insightful men to organize them, and clever men to give them superior battlefield performance. When the tides of war in the great Atlantic fight turned against the U-boats, it was because hundreds and hundreds of little ships, sloops, frigates, ore carriers, tankers, and cargo vessels, manned by tens of thousands of very brave crewmen (Americans, Britons, Norwegians, and Greeks), steamed back and forth from New York to Liverpool. If the vital strategic position of Malta held out, it was because the eventual winners, the Allies, were willing to take repeated heavy losses to both convoys and escorts and the home garrison. If victory in the great four-part Battle of Leyte Gulf went to the side with the most battalions (to employ Stalin’s phrase), it was because American submarine commanders were extraordinarily skillful, American carrier air forces extremely professional and American gunners remarkably well-trained…”
In fact, Kennedy credits two fellow historians for highlighting the human factor in their watershed works. “It is not surprising that when those two mature official historians of the American and British naval effort, Samuel Morison and Stephen Roskill, came to write the final pages of their respective multivolume works, they preferred to focus on human agents rather than on broad underlying forces.”
This is actually two books in one.
Kennedy had told his friend Ian Marshall he would write a foreword and some text for Marshall’s planned book of original paintings, Fighting Warships of the Second World War. But in the wake of Marshall's death, the book project expanded.
Kennedy reflects on his late friend: “I miss his gentle manners, his great professionalism, and his remarkable erudition in the realms of maritime history and warship design. Each painting is not only a fine work of art but also an understated display of Ian’s impressive topographical and historical knowledge.”
Marshall was a fellow and past president of the American Society of Marine Artists. Kennedy is the New York Times best-selling author of “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.”
This book is recommended by Admiral James Stavridis (U.S. Navy, ret.), who blurbed, “This extraordinary work of both global history and nautical art brings two brilliant minds together in Paul Kennedy’s luminous prose and Ian Marshall’s lovely paintings.”
(Top photo: Battleships USS Oklahoma and USS Nevada at Charlestown Navy Yard, Boston, 1935. Detail from a painting by Ian Marshall. Oklahoma was damaged beyond repair at Pearl Harbor; Nevada survived and served throughout the war (including D-Day and Okinawa operations). Ian Marshall via Yale University Press.)
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