Hornfischer’s 'One Ocean' in the Cold War

Review by Bill Doughty––

In his best, pure “The Last of the Tin Can Sailors” style, James D. Hornfischer tells the harrowing story of the fate of the submarine USS Cochino (SS-345) in “Who Can Hold the Sea: The U.S. Navy in the Cold War, 1945-1960” (Bantam Books, 2022).

USS Cochino and other submarines, including USS Tusk (SS-426), were operating near the Arctic Circle in August 1949, seventy-three years ago this month, four years after World War II and at the start of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Hornfischer writes of the heroism of U.S. Navy Sailors trying to save their submarine after a gas leak, fire, and explosions. “Heroism,” he writes, “was never a function of rank.”

Hornfischer’s account of the Sailors’ valor, both aboard Cochino and the rescue submarine Tusk, is typically gripping and dramatic –– and too long to adequately excerpt here. Readers can find it in Chapter 11, “Abandon Ship.” But readers who invest time in reading all 400-plus pages of this book will be rewarded with an understanding of how the United States Navy and Marine Corps survived, thrived, and helped maintain peace in the aftermath of WWII and in the face of communist expansion, especially by the Soviets.

As a result of America’s commitment to democracy and its alliance with Western Europe –– impelled by the Truman Doctrine –– twelve nations, including the United States, signed the North Atlantic Treaty on April 4, 1949, four months prior to the Cochino incident. Norway is one of those original NATO members.

Capt. Roy Benson, Commander of Submarine Development Group Two, met with the surviving American Sailors of Cochino and Tusk in Norway. He also met with Norwegian diplomats. Hornfischer writes:

“The relationship between Oslo and Washington, fully reciprocal and secure within NATO, was based on the security needs of democratic Norway and the strategic value of its coast … the Norwegian fjords offered plentiful tactical advantages for an enterprising fleet commander. These included ‘ready concealment; year-round ice-free deepwater paths to the sea by diverse routes, easy protection from surface or ground forces, ideal antiaircraft gun protection possibilities, [and] large seaplane sheltered landing areas. Thus, bases in the fjords could be advantageous to us as denial of them to the opponent would be disastrous to his plans.’ These insights would not be forgotten.

“The Norwegian officers who met Roy Benson and his men were ready to meet Russia in war. ‘Within thirty minutes of declaration of war,’ a host officer boasted to the Americans, ‘every Norwegian male would be in uniform and under arms and in another half hour every Communist would be dead or in custody.’ Scandinavians had known recently the sound of the treads of Russian tanks and held no illusions about Moscow’s continuing ambitions. They knew that Russia coveted naval bases in the fjords as a means of escaping the polar ice prison that constrained their potential to project naval power into the world. As Worthington put it, the Norwegians were ‘happy to see evidence that the U.S. Navy was thinking of their part of the world.’”

In his profound way, Hornfischer observes, “Nations that perceive threats globally were compelled to operate on the outer membrane of the possible.” Freedom and democracy took a stand against Communism and autocracy in the Cold War.

Now there are 30 nations as part of NATO, with Finland and Sweden on their way to becoming members in the face of Russian revanchism after Putin’s unprovoked attack on neighbor Ukraine earlier this year.

Stalin and Putin

Hornfischer examines the mindset of authoritarian Joseph Stalin under “Communism’s self-hypnosis” of blind belief but with the “political reflexes of a perpetually fear-bound despot.” He examines Russia’s national psychology and Stalin’s “mastery of the tools of the paranoid art.” Such feelings of persecution and victimization are familiar in studying other autocrats.

In sharp contrast to Putin, is the pivotal leader who brought about the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, who died today at the age of 91. A generation after the era covered in this book, Gorbachev famously proposed doing away with nuclear weapons. He worked with Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush to reduce nuclear arms. Putin, on the other hand, threatens to use them, especially if NATO threatens to help Ukraine directly. Gorbachev’s USSR was brought down in the aftermath of the Chernobyl meltdown; Putin has his military fire upon and otherwise threaten nuclear power plants in an attempt to make Russia great again.

The fifteen-year span covered in this book covers the evolution of submarines and the nuclear navy and the game-changing development of the Polaris missile. Hornfischer briefly covers the Korean War, U.S. nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific, “Revolt of the Admirals,” and threats by Communist China to Taiwan. He reveals sometimes startling milestones that occurred in August or September:

• The secret mission of Operation Sandy near Bermuda, in which USS Midway (CV-41) would test for the first time a Navy ship’s ability to launch strategic ballistic missiles, Sept. 2-6, 1947.
• The creation of the CIA, led by its first director, Navy Rear Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, Sept. 18, 1947.
• The discovery by a military “Pole Vaulter” from Misawa Air Base of the Soviet Union’s apparent first nuclear test, Sept. 3, 1949.
• The first time Marines moved from ship (USS Sicily CVE-118) to shore aboard helicopters (HRS-1) into the Inchon area in South Korea, Sept. 1, 1952.
• The U.S. Navy’s confrontation with Communist China over bombardment in the staged attack on Quemoy islands in the Taiwan Strait, Aug. 23, 1958. (USS Midway was deployed from Pearl Harbor to provide deterrence and protection to Taiwan.)
• The first (unsuccessful) attempt by USS Nautilus (SSN-571), captained by William Anderson to find an “undersea Northwest Passage in reverse” under the Arctic, Aug. 19, 1957.
• The second (successful) attempt by USS Nautilus, captained by William Anderson, to transit the Arctic, arriving beneath the North Pole on Aug. 2, 1958.

Hornfischer’s taut style, found in “Tin Can Sailors,” "Neptune's Inferno," and "Ship of Ghosts," captures readers as his words pulsate about USS Nautilus's attempt.

USS Nautilus underway.

The submariners squeeze under and around walls of ice, not knowing what might lie ahead. “Only Neptune knew what kind of ice was in store for them in these tight underwater caves.”

From descriptions of Cochino’s failed attempt to transit the Barents Sea and Arctic Circle in August 1949 to Nautilus’s victorious achievement in August 1958, Hornfischer shows the resilience, commitment, and innovation of the U.S. Navy to “Hold the Sea.”

Echoing ret. Adm. James Stavridis, Hornfischer writes, “Though landsmen speak of the world’s seven seas, there is in fact only one global ocean.”

NATO Response Force and Allied Marines from the U.S., Sweden, Finland, and U.K. simulate amphibious assaults on a Swedish beachhead during BALTOPS June 10, 2015. The 17 Allied and partner countries integrated air, land, and sea operations and procedures to demonstrate the combined-forces capability to respond to threats in the Baltic region. (Sgt. Tatum Vayavananda.)

Chilling with ‘Icebound’

Review by Bill Doughty––

As the summer heats up literally, here’s a way to cool off literarily: Andrea Pitzer’s goosebumps-inducing history-science-adventure true story, “Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World” (Scribner, Simon & Schuster, 2021).

It’s the otherworldly true story of Dutch sailors, led by navigator William Barents, as they attempt to find an open polar sea in the Arctic in the age of sail.

Barents, who pioneered map-making in the Mediterranean, made three voyages for the Dutch Republic in the 1590s. This book covers all three ventures, but zeroes in on the third and final fraught attempt. The Dutch, along with other nations, wanted to discover a northern trade route to China.

It was time of growing empires and growing sea trade in slaves and spices.

It was also a time of war between Spain (Catholic and monarchistic) and the Netherlands (Protestant and based in liberty). While war raged in western Europe, Barents and other Dutch sailors headed East and North, hoping to find a warm sea beyond the ice.

Barents was considered a “magician” for his ability at celestial navigation. “He could look into the sun and fix their ship’s position not he globe. He could watch the stars and tell them the day of the year.”

Though no navigable route was found, the young Dutch Republic would continue to expand over the next hundred years –– thanks to the slave trade, spice trade, exploration, and art –– to become the largest economy and naval power in the world at the time, according to Pitzer.

“William Barents would play a role in that drama, but as he readied himself for his first voyage into the Arctic, his country was a blank slate, its sins and achievements still unwritten,” she writes.

Navy readers will appreciate Pitzer’s recounting of history and science, naval lore, and the courage and commitment of sailors in the face of seemingly impossible odds.

For example, as regards history and science…

We are reminded that Vikings “discovered” Ukraine and that the science of navigation relied on the discovery of trigonometry in 1080 by Arab Astronomers, as well as inventions by Babylonians, Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, Greeks, and Scandinavians. What they knew in the late 16th century, though, was dwarfed by what Barents and the sailors didn’t know. Many great scientific discoveries were yet to be made.

“As they set forth, they knew some things. They knew how to set the sails on the ship to catch the wind. They knew how to steer. They knew how to work wood, and hunt, and trap. Barents could reckon latitude and knew the stars, and those he didn’t know, he had charts for. Sailors understood that icebergs haunted the northern regions and could stretch for miles. Sometimes rising more than two hundred feet above the waterline, they were capable of rewarding vessels and the tiny human presence guiding them.

“Barents and his fellow crew members knew some things, but it wasn’t enough. They possessed no scientific understanding of gravity, no telescopes, and no calculus. Though they could find their latitude, they couldn’t yet determine longitude from aboard a ship. They were centuries away from deciphering the germ theory of disease. More than a hundred years could pass before humanity would discover that lightning was electricity. Decades remained before doctors would realize that blood circulates in the body, and that a cell is the unit of life. As he sailed into the Arctic, Barents would, in time encounter wonders and terrors without understanding most of the forces at play in his universe.”

Nenets idols, Vaigach Island.

Naturally, in the absence of information and in the embrace of superstition, early sailors believed good –– and bad –– fortune was the will of God. They believed their religion condoned slavery, for example, and ordained “man” to overcome and rule over nature.

Pitzer describes interactions with indigenous people in the far north, including the Sami and Nenets, who worshipped wooden idols, which fascinated the sailors. One sailor stole an idol and took it aboard ship only to be forced to return it later.

As the Scientific Revolution was beginning to blossom in Europe with Copernicus, Descartes, Francis Bacon, Barents and his crew were collecting and measuring polar bear pelts and walrus tusks and studying flora and fauna –– three hundred years before Darwin. Barents explained mirages, experienced the gap between Earth’s magnetic pole and true polar north, and mapped the geography at the edge of the Arctic. He also resolved a centuries-old superstition about barnacle geese: that they did not spontaneously hatch from barnacles (because no one had previously seen their nests and eggs).

Pitzer hides her history and science within harrowing tales of survival aboard their ship, at Vaigach Island, on boats, and at then-ice-covered Nova Zembla.

We feel the cold chill the crew to the bone. We hear chunks of ice hit the hull of the ship, see the men fend off frequent attacks by polar bears, smell the stink of sickness, and taste the desperation as the men are trapped in the ice over the winter: “Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World.”

Arctic fox

Navy history readers will appreciate passages about sails, masts, knees, joint pegs, and planks; scurvy; mutiny; keelhauling; and generally what life was like for age-of-sail sailors at sea –– endless routines, fear of storms, and trying to thrive in a crowded space.

Ultimately, this is a story of perseverance, the strength of the human spirit, and the will to survive.

The sailors relied on trapping Arctic foxes and finding birds and eggs. They rationed what food they could salvage from their ship. And they built a cabin and collected drift wood to keep warm.

Hampton Sides, author of the great “In the Kingdom of Ice,” blurbs: “Engrossing … Andrea Pitzer brings Barents’s three harrowing expeditions to vivid life –– while giving us fascinating insight into one of history’s most intrepid navigators.”

Pitzer visits Nova Zembla in 2019.

Pitzer bases her research on journals, material in museums, and interviews with scholars. She relies on entries in the original diary of Gerrit de Veer, one of the sailors who returned to tell the story.

She also makes a remarkable visit in August 2019 to Nova Zembla, “a numbing, desolate place,” near the ruins of Barents’s cabin. The land is now a Russian Arctic preserve.

The book concludes with a sobering account of the effects of global warming in the Arctic and the loss of ice during summer and over recent decades. Pitzer gives a stunning conclusion about the intersection of Barents’s exploration, our understanding and acceptance of science, and a context for how humans impact the planet.

Survival of individuals, and perhaps the species, depends on the will to endure, adapt, and overcome.

“Icebound” can be a springboard to confront cold, inconvenient truths.

The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Ross (DDG 71) prepares to replenish stores and fuel with the Henry J. Kaiser-class replenishment oiler USNS Laramie (T-AO-203) in the Barents Sea, Oct. 29, 2020. Ross is currently on its 10th Forward Deployed Naval Forces-Europe (FDNF-E) patrol in the U.S. Sixth Fleet area of operations in support of U.S. national security interests in Europe and Africa. (MCSN Christine Montgomery)

Stavridis’s 50: ‘The Sailor’s Bookshelf’

Review by Bill Doughty––

The FedEx van pulled up in front of my home as I backed into my driveway. It’s a special feeling when a wished-for book arrives. I carefully sliced through the padded mailer and there it was: “The Sailor’s Bookshelf: Fifty Books to Know the Sea” by Admiral James Stavridis, arriving just days before Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day. This year’s commemoration comes on the 80th anniversary of the attack on Oahu of Dec. 7, 1941.

Stavridis gives a very personal reflection of some of the favorite books on his bookshelf, and some relate to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and the Pacific, which he calls “the mother of all oceans.” Others center on Europe and his favorite ocean, the Atlantic. Still others offer a diverse window into the art of reading, the lure of history –– and the terrible yet tempting beauty of the sea.

Some of the books in his collection go back to Stavridis's childhood. Many were influential in his choosing to apply to the U.S. Naval Academy or were part of his life throughout his distinguished careers both in and after the Navy.

Retired Adm. James Stavridis, former supreme allied commander, Europe, gives the keynote speech during the Armed Forces Communication and Electronics Association-U.S. Naval Institute (AFCEA/USNI) West 2016 conference. (MC2 Liam Kennedy)

His midshipman cruise in 1972 was to Pearl Harbor.

So was his first cruise as an ensign and anti-submarine warfare officer aboard USS Hewitt (DD-996), in which Stavridis sailed first to Hawaii and then westward across the Pacific in some of the same waters once explored by Capt. James Cook. 

Cook’s voyages come to life in one of Stavridis’s recommendations, “Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before.” The book follows Cook’s “three epic cruises in the mid-1700s” when only about a third of the world globe was known and mapped for navigation.

The flag flies at half mast while Marines of 3rd Marine Regiment "man the rails" of the USS Arizona Memorial in 2011. (Maj. Alan Crouch)

In the Explorers section of his book, Stavridis also features James P. Delgado’s “Across the Top of the World: The Quest for the Northwest Passage.” Delgado is a maritime archeologist and veteran diver who has explored hundreds of shipwrecks, including USS Arizona (BB-39) and USS Nevada (BB-36), both hit in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Delgado goes far, far north to present a history and heritage of exploration of the Arctic region. Sir John Franklin’s perilous journey in 1845 is at the heart of the story.

Rear Adm. Fiske (NHHC)

Another intrepid explorer of a sort is a “consummate seaman” and commander who invented technology in the late 1800s and turn of the century to help sailors on steam vessels and promote sea control and sea power. Admiral Bradley A. Fiske is author of “The Navy as a Fighting Machine.” Like Alfred Thayer Mahan, who is also featured in this collection, Fiske lobbied for and helped establish the position of Chief of Naval Operations. 

He was a champion for readiness as “a persuasive and thoughtful operational maritime thinker and writer.”

Exactly one hundred years ago, Fiske was president of USNI.

Stavridis writes:

“He was also a prescient strategic analyst. He served as president of the U.S. Naval Institute, the intellectual heart of the naval profession, for eleven years, 1912-1923, thinking, writing, and publishing constantly. As late as 1924 he was commenting on international affairs, correctly predicting the inevitability of a U.S.-Japanese war. He lived to see that dire proclamation come to pass with the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor in his eighty-seventh year but sadly not quite long enough to see the pivotal battle of Midway in the early summer of 1942 turn the tide in the Pacific.”

Speaking of heroes and Pearl Harbor, Stavridis features a book in the “Oceans” section co-authored by Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, along with Professor E.B. Potter, titled “Sea Power: A Naval History.” Nimitz, of course, commanded the Pacific Fleet from Pearl Harbor and led the effort to defeat Imperial Japan in less than four years. In this classic 932-page book, first published in 1960, Potter and Nimitz provide a history of the American and world navies and how naval warfare has evolved to become a fundamental part of national power.

 

Stavridis, who was a student of Potter’s at the Naval Academy, wrote his own book with the same name but “different in tone and style” and in homage to his former professor. Adm. Stavridis’s “Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans” is one of many of his works I’ve featured on Navy Reads over the past decade. 

Stavridis acknowledges he could have chosen to showcase many other books about the War in the Pacific in addition to the Potter-Nimitz “Sea Power.” He considered Samuel Eliot Morison’s multi-volume “History of Naval Operations in World War II” and Craig L. Symonds’s single-volume “World War II at Sea: A Global History."

Lt. Cmdr. Ernest E. Evans, at commissioning ceremonies of USS Johnston (DD-557), Seattle, WA, 27 October 1943. He was Johnston's commanding officer from then until she was sunk in the Battle off Samar, 25 October 1944, and was lost with the ship. (U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command)

The “cornerstone book about the naval war in the Pacific during World War II” he chooses, however, is the captivating “Sea of Thunder: Four Commanders and the Last Great Naval Campaign, 1941-1945.” The book centers on the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944 and, as the subtitle says, four commanders:

“Admiral William ‘Bull’ Halsey, a swaggering (and deeply racist) commander of the American fleet for much of the combat; the elegant Japanese admiral Takeo Kurita, a battleship force commander who launched a near-suicidal attack on the American forces poised to retake the Philippine Islands; another Japanese admiral, Matome Ugaki, who saw himself as the purest of samurai and led the kamikaze forces at the end of the war; and –– the most appealing of the four –– the relatively junior Navy commander Ernest Evans, captain of USS Johnston (DD-557), a small destroyer that undertook a deeply heroic attack on a far larger Japanese force … In the course of telling the story of the battle, Thomas takes the reader through the vast U.S. maritime strategy to reconquer to Pacific Ocean and its hundreds of atolls, islands, barrier reefs, and littoral nations after the Japanese offensive wave of conquest had swept over much of it in the early days of the war” [in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor]

Pearl Harbor is just one of the many themes touched on in this wonderful collection that also includes diverse works by Rachel L. Carson, Simon Winchester, Thomas J. Cutler, Caroline Alexander, Nathan Philbrick, Herman Wouk, Patrick O’Brian, Sebastian Junger, and Joan Druett.

Throughout the collection, Stavridis shares personal joys and discoveries through reading. He expresses his deep love for the sea, starting in childhood. “What fascinated me then, and still does so many decades later, was the unpredictability of the ocean. It could change color, smell, wave pattern, surface condition, and a dozen other variables in an hour. It was a chameleon…”

The admiral’s curiosity also drives unpredictability in his selection of books in this collection, which features a book of poetry (“Moods of the Sea: Masterworks of Sea Poetry” by George C. Solley and Eric Steinbaugh), a book about art (“Turner & the Sea” by Christine Riding and Richard Johns, about artist J. M. W. Turner, who painted "The Battle of Trafalgar" and "The Fighting termeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up," pictured above), and a book of magical fiction (“Life of Pi” by Yann Martel), requiring the reader to suspend the constraints of science.

“I have always loved magical realism in the world of literature. This is a strain of fiction writing in which things exist in a novel or short story (or even a poem) that cannot quite be squared with the real world. The most famous writer of magical realism, who is especially prominent in the literature of Latin America, is the Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez. His extraordinary novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is widely regarded as the classic example of magical realism. Some other authors who deal in this style of writing include Toni Morrison (“Beloved”), Salman Rushdie (“Midnight’s Children”), Haruki Murakami (“IQ84”), Günter Grass (“The Tin Drum”), and Neil Gaiman (“The Ocean at the End of the Lane”). In such novels there are often ghostly visitations, dreamlike sequences, mythological gods, talking animals, imagined events, and unreliable narrators.”

Stavridis is a most-reliable narrator and navigator as he takes us on his voyage to “The Sailor’s Bookshelf” and a journey of self discovery. “I’ve always believed that reading allows an individual to essentially expand their life every time they open a book,” he writes in the book’s preface.

U.S. Navy Airman Benjamin Adams, from Panama City, Fla., reads a book on the fantail of the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN 68), July 5, 2017, in the South China Sea. Nimitz was on deployment in the U.S. 7th Fleet area of operations. The U.S. Navy has patrolled the Indo-Asia Pacific routinely for more than 70 years promoting regional peace and security. (MC3 Ian Kinkead)

While he provides ample inclusion of fiction titles, most of the selections in “The Sailor’s Bookshelf” are nonfiction and history. Based on his recommendation, I added this title to my to-read list: “Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World,” a book about the Battle of Lepanto, and a book that had special meaning to Stavridis when he was the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO.

“For a sailor to read ‘Empires of the Sea’ is to almost feel the ships under way and hear the sails snapping in the breeze. You can smell the gunpowder and hear the crack of cannons over the waves and wind. Crowley focuses on the geopolitics as backdrop, but the great strength of this book is a realistic focus on war at sea. It includes descriptions of the sea battles and sieges against the islands of Cyprus and Malta as well as the more or less constant activities of pirates. The centerpiece, of course, is Lepanto, and there is not a better description written. The entire book is truly an engrossing read, and one that keeps the reader’s sensibility under way with every page.”

The subtitle of “The Sailor’s Bookshelf” says “50 books,” but the author can’t help himself. Readers will find hundreds of titles of great books tucked inside “bonus” suggestions, lists, and notes as well as the fifty essays themselves.

                                                                                                                                         (PO2 Patrick Kelly)

Among the recommended reads are titles of books that were read by Pearl Harbor Survivors and other World War II veterans. I’ve had the honor to meet and interview many Pearl Harbor Survivors, most of whom are gone. Before and after and sometimes even during the war they read Jules Verne, Herman Melville, and Ernest Hemingway, all featured in this collection. Stavridis’s “The Sailor’s Bookshelf” is a labor of love.

It is dedicated “To my parents who taught me to love reading, To my teachers who taught me to love writing, To my shipmates who taught me to love the sea, and To my wife and daughters who taught me to love life.”

I will revisit this collection for a future Navy Reads “Bookshelf Part II.”

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RIP Senator Robert J. Dole

American statesman Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas died yesterday, Dec. 5, 2021, after a long bout with lung cancer. Like another of his colleagues, late Sen. Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii, Dole wanted to become a doctor prior to the attack on Oahu and the start of American involvement in World War II. And like Inouye, Dole joined the Army shortly after Pearl Harbor and was severely, nearly mortally, wounded but recovered and dedicated his life to continued public service.

Senator Bob Dole and President Gerald Ford, Oval Office, 1976. (Bob and Elizabeth Dole Archives, KU)

While in Congress, Dole helped bring about the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. He helped save Social Security when it came under threat in 1983, and he was a lifelong strong supporter of national defense.

Dole, known for his dry-wit sense of humor, support for the Constitution, and general grace in defeat, was vice presidential running mate to Navy/WWII Veteran President Gerald Ford in the 1976 U.S. campaign; Dole became the Republican nominee for president in 1996. President Bill Clinton presented Dole with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1997 (pictured below).

Flags are flying at half-staff to honor both Dole and Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day on the 80th anniversary of the attack.

Change 'How and How Fast'?

NASA

Review by Bill Doughty

How and how fast humans move to confront climate change is at the core of "The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming" by David Wallace-Wells (Tim Duggan Books, Crown Publishing Group; 2019).

The Aedes Aegypi mosquito can carry the Zika virus. (CDC/James Gathany)

Among the threats of a continually warming planet are disease hot zones and pandemics:

"There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years –– in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter them. Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice. Already, in laboratories, several microbes have been reanimated..."

The author describes reanimation of bacteria (and a worm) from tens of thousands of years ago, even some microorganisms from millions of years ago. He shows the connection between a warming world and increasing Zika, Lyme disease, malaria, and yellow fever.

Written before Covid-19 was discovered outside of China, "The Uninhabitable Earth" warns of "plagues that climate change will confront us with for the very first time –– a whole new universe of diseases humans have never before known to even worry about ... Scientists guess the planet could harbor more than a million yet-to-be-discovered viruses. Bacteria are even trickier..."

Sunset in southern California during fires, Oct. 23, 2007. CA National Guard.

Wallace-Wells offers the usual dystopian menu of threats: famine, rising ocean levels, floods, unbreathable air, economic collapse, mass extinctions, more destructive storms, greater displacement and migration, and growing conflicts and war.

Countries at risk for conflicts and/or civil war, according to researchers, are Haiti, Pakistan, India, Philippines, Cambodia, and Guatemala.
Climate change represents a growing threat to the U.S. military –– particularly for the Navy –– as water levels rise at some bases and Arctic melting opens new pathways to potential conflict. Some rivals and competitors are taking advantage of the situation even as free nations insist on honoring treaties and freedom of navigation.

"Given the right war-gaming cast of mind, it is also possible to see the aggressive Chinese construction activity in the South China Sea, where whole new artificial islands have been erected for military use, as a kind of dry run, so to speak, for life as a superpower in a flooded world. The strategic opportunity is clear, with so many of the existing footholds –– like all those low-lying islands the United States once used to stepping-stone its own empire across the Pacific –– expected to disappear by the end of the century, if not before. The Marshall Islands archipelago, for instance, seized by the U.S. during World War II, could be rendered uninhabitable by sea-level rise as soon as midcentury, the U.S. Geological Society has warns; its islands will be underwater even if we meet the Paris goals."

Ships and submarines from the Republic of Singapore Navy and U.S. Navy gather in formation in the South China Sea July 21, 2015 during the underway phase of Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (CARAT) Singapore 2015. CARAT is an annual, bilateral exercise series with the U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps and the armed forces of nine partner nations. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Joe Bishop/Released)

China could be capitalizing on the changing environment at the same time that it may be slow-walking a green revolution, yet "it does hold nearly all the cards." How –– and how fast –– China will go greener becomes the question:

"How and how fast China manages it own transition from industrial to postindustrial economy, how and how fast it 'greens' the industry that remains, how and how fast it remodels agricultural practices and diet, how and how fast it steers the consumer preferences of its booming middle and upper classes away from carbon intensity –– these are not the only things that will determine the climate shape of the twenty-first century. The courses taken by India and the rest of South Asia, Nigeria and rest of sub-Saharan Africa, matter enormously. But China is, at present, the largest of those nations, and by far the wealthiest and most powerful. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, the country has already positioned itself as a major provider, in some cases the major provider, of the infrastructure of industry, energy, and transportation in much of the rest of the developing world. And it is relatively easy to imagine, at the end of a Chinese century, an intuitive global consensus solidifying –– that the country with the world's largest economy (therefore most responsible for the energy output of the planet) and the most people (therefore most responsible for the public health and well-being of humanity) should have something more than narrowly national powers over the climate policy of the rest of the 'community of nations,' who would fall into line behind it."

Global warming, like a pandemic, does not respect walls or borders.

"No human has ever lived on a planet as hot as this one; it will get hotter," Wallace-Wells writes.

Unless the human race as a community of nations faces the threat, the world will cross a tipping point. Already, 96 percent of the world's mammals by weight are either humans or domesticated animals (livestock or pets); only 4 percent are still wild. We see a mass die-off of bees from the world's ecosystem. A dead honeybee is featured on the cover of "The Uninhabitable Earth."

"The arrival of this scale of climate suffering in the modern West will be one of the great and terrible stories of the coming decades," Wallace-Wells says, describing the "Anthropocene" era. "There, at least, we've long thought that modernity had paved over nature, completely, factory by factory and strip mall by strip mall."

Great minds have identified the threats and outlined solutions. Here's what we need to do as individuals and nations: control population, reduce fossil fuels including with a carbon tax, incentivize use of green technologies, phase out dirty energy, consider new approaches to agriculture and diet, and invest in carbon capture. Although the Navy has embraced a need go green –– seeing clearly the threats of climate change and global warming –– some people still reject science, deny reality and resist change.

Green technology: Lance Cpl. James Russell, an electrician with Combat Logistics Battalion 3, 3rd Marine Logistics Group, explains how he and other Marines operate MAGS (Micro Auto Gasification System) at Pohakuloa Training Area, Hawaii, Jan 25, 2013. The system was tested as a waste disposal solution during Lava Viper, a Marine Corps field training exercise. Processing about 50 pounds of solid waste per hour, MAGS is capable of handling the daily waste disposal needs of approximately 1,000 troops, converting 95 percent of the waste to gas, which is then used to fuel the process. (Photo by Cpl. Ben Eberle)

Wallace-Wells presents a wealth of information on many levels and refers to an enlightened group of authors and thinkers including Albert Einstein, Joseph Conrad, Paul Ehrlich, Jared Diamond, E.O. Wilson, H.G. Wells, Steven Pinker, Bill McKibben, and Yuval Noah Harari.

Harari, author of "Sapiens," explains the resistance to action against climate change because of humans' belief in myths. We often fail to react to gradual threats only when our paradigms are shattered.

An example of this phenomenon –– a sudden shattering of a paradigm –– may be seen in the widespread realization this month that systemic racism still exists in some areas of society and cannot be tolerated.

NASA

As for reclaiming a habitable Earth, will global citizens again rise and come together? In the midst of this pandemic, will we have a similar revelation and awakening regarding the need for global change? To use Wallace-Wells's words: "How and how fast?"

Maritime Strategy vs. The Wall

Review by Bill Doughty

Former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman writes a version of history in "Oceans Ventured: Winning the Cold War at Sea" (W. W. Norton, 2018) in which the United States Navy was key in bringing down the Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall. 

Admirals Stephen B. Luce and Alfred Thayer Mahan

How did the Navy take on the Soviet Union, and what are the lessons of history for us today in facing 21st century threats?

Starting with the earliest naval history and foundational strategies of Admirals Luce and Mahan, Lehman builds the case for the importance of a forward-deployed, well-resourced, and innovative Navy committed to global exercises with partners and allies. 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had been Assistant Secretary of the Navy earlier in the 20th century, had a deep devotion to the sea service. Under FDR, the Navy was indispensable in winning WWII, especially in the Pacific.

"The U.S. Navy ended World War II with more than seven thousand ships, including ninety-nine aircraft carriers," Lehman writes. "Many politicians demanded that the navy mothball, scrap, or otherwise dispose of this massive and expensive fleet." In fact, they debated the need for a blue-water fleet.

Missouri steams to Turkey as U.S. support against Soviet territorial claims.

The Cold War began almost immediately after the Second World War as the Russia-led Soviet Union began expanding into other nations' territories, desiring supremacy, hegemony and empire.

Truman, a former soldier, showed his preference for the Army. Nevertheless, when it came to flex power and show support to NATO in the face of Soviet aggression, Truman sent "big stick" USS Missouri (BB-63) to Europe. The Korean War was further evidence to the nation of the need for a forward deployed, trained and ready navy.

Lehman shows how LBJ used the Gulf of Tonkin incident, involving Navy ships, as an excuse – "despite skepticism of Navy leaders" – to ignite the Vietnam War. 

USS Halibut (SSN-587) underway in the Pacific Ocean.

Cruisers, destroyers, aircraft carriers and submarines played different but critical roles in countering the Soviet navy. Lehman reveals formerly classified reports and information, including Operation Azorian and recovery of part of Soviet nuclear submarine, K-129, and operation at the heart of John Piña Craven's "The Silent War: The Cold War Battle Beneath the Sea."

Although the fleet shrunk under President Richard Nixon, the late 60s and early 70s saw the rise of great strategic thinkers and leaders in the Navy, including Admirals Zumwalt and Holloway.

"In September 1970, the new chief of naval operations, Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, launched a detailed, comprehensive, and coherent blueprint for initiatives the navy needed to take to regain momentum and prevent the Russians from gaining naval supremacy. The project was called Project SIXTY. It included many new programs that were essential to prevail against the new cruise missile, submarine, torpedo, Backfire bomber, and missile threats that the Soviets were beginning to deploy in large numbers in their growing blue-water fleet. It included new ship and aircraft systems needed to operate in Arctic waters as well as shallow tropical seas. It provided for planning and training to operate in those unfamiliar and difficult environments. Zumwalt's successor, Adm. James A. Holloway, revised and adjusted some of the priorities, and because of his skills in dealing with Congress, he was able to get funding for the development of most (but not all) of the initiatives, which were then eventually successfully funded and deployed by the navy during the Reagan administration."

Adm. Thomas B. Hayward, who served as Pacific Fleet Commander and CNO, was "a major player in the development of a forward naval strategy."

President Jimmy Carter, a Naval Academy graduate, surprised many Navy veterans by reducing the size of the fleet and "turning the other cheek" instead of confronting the Soviets.

"In the name of détente and cutting the budget, Carter had prepared to give away some of the crown jewels of Mahanian naval superiority," Lehman writes.

On the cusp of President Ronald Reagan coming into power and Lehman becoming Secretary of the Navy, the Soviet navy showed its reach in the Arctic, the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, and Soviet-backed Iraq invaded Iran.

President Reagan increased the defense budget, called for a new strategic bomber, reactivated battleships, ordered the building of four new nuclear aircraft carriers, and revised the rules of engagement. "And he sent the U.S. Navy forward."

A rejuvenated U.S. Navy showed its skills in the Norwegian Sea and in the Ocean Venture 81 exercise, involving 15 nations and 250 ships.

Tom Cruise in Top Gun.

Lehman describes how Hollywood's Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson approached Holloway and Lehman with the proposal to produce "Top Gun," which Lehman thought garnered public support for the U.S. Navy in general and naval aviation in particular.  

In a similar venture, Lehman green-lighted Dr. Robert Ballard, in coordination with National Geographic, to use Navy technology to search for and find the Titanic in the North Atlantic. Lehman subsequently declared Ballard "Bottom Gun."

Navy's modernization efforts and maritime strategy were "gaining global velocity" in the early to mid 80s as USS Ticonderoga, the first Aegis cruiser came on line. In 1984, Lehman led a delegation to Beijing to arrange a deal to modernize the Chinese navy "to deal with the Soviet threat."

Readers of "Oceans Ventured" may wish to see more discussion of Lehman's initiative with China as well as the importance of collaboration and cooperation with other nations' navies, although there are several mentions of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (incorrectly called the "Japanese" Maritime Self-Defense Force).

On March 13, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Soviet Union. 

"Faced with political economic stagnation, [Gorbachev] advocated and began to implement policy reforms based on perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness). Glasnost meant giving publicity to problems, issues, and proposed solutions to generate support for perestroika, which meant restructuring the government bureaucracy and rebuilding the economy and industry."In his first dramatic foreign policy move, he suspended deployment of Soviet SS-20 intermediate-range nuclear ballistic missiles in Warsaw Pact states. He then began to cut back on resources to the Soviet Armed Forces, including the navy."

On the 40th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, Gorbachev announced a moratorium on nuclear testing. Lehman gives details of how the "diplomatic thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations accelerated."

Adm. James A. Lyons, Jr.

"President Reagan was keenly interested in nuclear arms control and the reduction of the superpowers' bloated nuclear arsenals. He and Gorbachev slowly formed a partnership over the next three years or so to reduce the amount of nuclear weaponry on both sides. He was far less keen than Gorbachev, however, to constrain the U.S. Navy, which he regarded as an essential and unique pillar of U.S. military strength."

Adm. James "Ace" Lyons, who commanded the U.S. Pacific Fleet in the mid-80s, "launched into planning a furious succession of exercises, often unprecedented or deviating from their predecessors, especially in their predictability." Lehman notes," Pacific Fleet exercises had already become more aggressive, more forward, more innovative, and less predictable."

On May 6, 1986, three U.S. nuclear-powered submarines, Ray, Hawkbill and Archerfish, surfaced simultaneously at the North Pole, demonstrating the Navy's power and capabilities. Navy surface ships continued successful FONOPS asserting freedom of navigation in Avancha Bay, the Black Sea and near the Kuril Islands.



Was the U.S. Navy solely responsible for turning the tide in the Cold War? Apparently not. Other events put pressure on the Soviet economy.

Chernobyl disaster

In 1986, the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl melted down, creating "an unprecedented international crisis." Then, oil prices dropped, hitting Russia and its satellites and forcing Gorbachev to look inward. His military doctrine became less offensive and more defensive.

"For over three years, U.S. and Soviet diplomats had been negotiating to reduce or eliminate intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. Finally in Washington in December 1987, at their third meeting, President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev signed the historic Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty, agreeing to eliminate completely all their nuclear and conventional ground-based ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. This was a major milestone in the warming relations between the two superpowers."

The fall of the Soviet bloc in 1989-1991 accelerated hopes for peace. President George H.W. Bush ordered the withdrawal of tactical nuclear-armed Tomahawk missiles from U.S. Navy ships.

Gorbachev and Reagan sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force (INF) treaty in December 1988, committing to a safer world.

The wall came down, and "the once-powerful Soviet navy faced being split apart." United States maritime strategy, "supported by a bipartisan Congress," proved to be the West's advantage in the geopolitical balance of power, according to Lehman.

In "Oceans Ventured's" epilogue, Lehman warns of a new potential axis of China/Russia/Iran, "eerily similar" to Germany/Italy/Japan more than 75 years ago.

U.S. President Trump and Russia President Putin meet in Helsinki, Finland in July 2018

He says Russian President Vladimir Putin has revanchist goals and "seems to suffer from delusions of grandeur," noting, "Putin has become the master of 'hybrid warfare,' using cyber attacks, disinformation, 'fake news,' election meddling, paramilitary 'little green men,' intimidation, and occasionally assassination against adversaries."

Lehman adds, "China presents a different kind of problem. Its leaders do not hide their intention to establish command of the western Pacific, and they are progression rapidly toward achieving that regional goal." He contends that China continues to use North Korea as a foil to distract and "dominate world attention."

What is the history yet to be written for the U.S. Navy? "The lesson of this book is that we must restore the capability of our naval forces and sailors not because we might have to go to war with North Korea, Russia, Iran, or some other adversary but because we must prevent having to go to war at all," Lehman concludes.