Decision at Sea: Five Naval Battles that Shaped American History [Paperback]

"Decision at Sea" is a well-written description of six decisive naval battles, each of which illustrates a key period in the development of naval warfare.

The prologue reviews the Battle of the Capes, which enabled the French fleet to prevent reinforcement of Cornwallis' army at Yorktown and led to the American-French victory that effectively ended the Revolutionary War. This was a classic naval engagement fought between large wooden ships firing broadsides and sailing in line-ahead formation on the open sea.

The rest of the book is devoted to more thorough explorations of five other important battles (thus the subtitle), each of which is explored in detail:

The first is the Battle of Lake Erie, in which the Americans under Oliver Hazard Perry built a small sailing fleet and used it to defeat an equally small British force. The victory enabled America to hold on to the Old Northwest territories in the War of 1812 and ultimately to begin expanding westward without British interference. Though the battle was small and the scene was a lake (albeit a great one), the tactics and equipment used were basically similar to those used in the Battle of the Capes.

The Battle of Hampton Roads covers the slugfest between the ironclads Virginia and Monitor. Before the Monitor arrived on the scene, the ironclad CSS Virgnia had inflicted on the Union fleet at Hampton Roads the largest defeat experienced by the American navy before Pearl Harbor. The guns involved were much more advanced than those used in the Battle of Lake Erie and each ship moved under its own power, but the battle was still fought at close quarters where each combatant had a fairly good view of the other.

The Battle of Manila Bay represents the next phase in naval warfare: cruisers with long range guns bombarded each other at ranges of up to two miles, leading to suprisingly few (but devastating) hits on the Spanish squadron in the Philippines. Admiral Dewey quickly asserted control over the Philippines, and the United States was soon bogged down in a four-year long fight against Filipinos seeking independence.

The Battle of Midway represents the next iteration in naval warfare, when a decisive American victory was won by carrier planes launched by ships separated by distances of hundreds of miles.

Finally, Symonds describes Operation Praying Mantis, the 1989 battle between the American navy and Iranian forces that resulted in the destruction of several Iranian gas and oil separation platforms, the sinking of two Iranian frigates, and the near-sinking of a third. The damage was inflicted by American warships firing guns and long-range missiles while coordinating with similarly equipped aircraft and helicopters.

Symonds' writing style is crisp, and his description of each battle is gripping and insightful. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a succinct overview of the evolution of naval warfare over the last two hundred years.

Err . . . I kind of wanted to write a review of this book until I read Mr. Holmes's below. I don't think I could ever top that, he says pretty much all you'd need to know about this book in a review.

I guess I'll just try to add a few things, beyond the tactics and technology which are the focus of the book.

In the section on the Battle of the Capes you get a very clear sense of how important timing is in the strategic sense for setting up Battles. The French were not the dominant maritime power in the American and Carribean waters, but the fates gave them an opportunity to mass a force that could defeat one half of a split British force, which then made them the dominant power. You can also see how, to a certain small degree, the Royal Navy was resting on it's laurels and how small inefficiencies in the way the British fought the Battle of the Capes cascaded into a decisive defeat.

The Battle of Lake Eerie impressed me with the sheer determination and drive of both sides. The Americans and the British practically had to build small shipyards, then naval bases, then a few handful of ships themselves, and then throw them at each other with little more than a few scraped together supplies, pseudo-sailors with next to no training, and a prayer. The leaders on both sides were clearly walking the razor's edge, and it shows how much leadership can make the difference.

The Battle of Manila Bay is very interesting, especially since it is so rarely mentioned in the literature despite the fact it announced America as a real power and gave us our only official colony. The most amazing thing about it was the extreme inaccuracy of the fire, an effect of technology outpacing tactics and training. Also interesting was the confusion that effervesced on the American side as a result of the mixture of being so far away from the Spanish fleet that accurate estimates of its strength could not be made, and miscommunications about how much ammunition remained. This caused a nearly comical worried withdrawal of the US fleet halfway through the battle before it realized it was winning resoundingly and rejoined the engagement. This by no means makes you think less of the prowess of the US Naval forces, but shows clearly just how thick the fog of war really can be.

The section on Midway however was not terribly interesting considering how well documented Midway is and how much, in contrast to Manila Bay, it is mentioned in the wider literature. The original concept of the book was to discuss the campaign for the Solomon Islands instead, which included both novel carrier-to-carrier warfare (Battles of Eastern Solomons and Santa Cruz), night-time big gun battles with radar (Savo, USS Washington & South Dakota vs. Hiei & Kirishima, etc.), and combined air-sea-land amphibious operations. I think that the book would have done better to stick to this concept, but perhaps that would have made it too long.

Operation Praying Mantis is again fascinating for the same reason as Manila Bay, the generally poor "common" knowledge of it. This was also the engagement in which an AEGIS cruiser accidentally shot down an Iranian Airbus. Knowing the actual combat environment in which this mistake took place allows one to much better appreciate its causes and effects. How an American blue water force designed to take on the Soviet Navy in the middle of the Atlantic or Pacific fought a small, irregular navy in the restricted waters of the Persian Gulf is also highly prescient and salient to post Cold-War naval warfare.

To echo Mr. Holmes this is indeed an excellent and easily accessible overview of how technology and tactics have shaped naval warfare over the past 200 years.

Craig Symonds has long held a lofty place in the pantheon of outstanding American naval historians. I have enjoyed his scholarship and analysis for a number of years. His understanding and perceptions of the Early Republic Navy and the Navy of the Civil War era have been invaluable additions to American naval historiography, and his "Historical Atlas of the U.S. Navy" in collaboration with cartographer William N. Clipson, in my estimation, ranks among the most useful and valuable works of recent naval scholarship.
I enjoyed this book immensely, for both its content and its style. Professor Symonds writes with academic vigor, yet most entertainingly, and uses superb organization of material and facts to enable the reader (and researcher) to easily track the flow of details. This is particularly true of the Midway battle in which multiple events are occuring simultaneously. Symonds manages to keep us informed by seamlessly knitting together the flow of events without overlooking the larger context of the campaign itself.
Perry's victory at Put-in-Bay halted a British invasion and saved the Northwest for the United States, but I would have preferred to see Macdonough's conclusive victory a year later on Lake Champlain as being the real "turning point" in U.S. fortunes in the War of 1812. Macdonough has always seemed to have taken a back seat to Perry but thoughtful naval historians, particularly Theodore Roosevelt and A.T. Mahan, have opined that Macdonough's battle was the more skillful in its management and execution, and it had significant consequences in that it prevented the British army from splitting New England from the rest of America (thereby enabling what would have been the annexation by Canada of most of what is now the state of Maine). The outcome at Lake Champlain additionally proved to be one of the deciding factors in the British decision to come to terms with the U.S. representatives and the resulting Treaty of Ghent signed several months after the battle, ending the war on terms acceptable in an overall sense to both parties in this unfortunate and unnecessary squabble.
Symonds' analysis of the Monitor and Virginia battle and its associated consequences upon the concept of warfare between armored ships is an obvious choice. Although the U.S. and Confederate navies were not the first to develop armored warships (England and France led in this in the 1850s and early 1860s), this was the first combat at sea between these types of ships and Symonds rightfully places this event in its international historical context.
The victory at Manila Bay was an excellent choice for inclusion in Symonds' narrative, for the outcome of Dewey's action clearly propelled the United States (and its growing Navy) onto the larger world stage. Manila Bay was the "coming out" party for the Navy and Symonds provides ample support for his argument that this action represented a turning point in the history of the United States, and perhaps the world as well. The war of 1898 clearly marked the emergence of the Navy onto the world stage in the manner envisioned by Mahan, Luce, T.R. Roosevelt and others.
If Manila Bay was America's Navy stepping tentatively onto the world stage for the first time, then what occurred at Midway marked the emergence of the Navy as the clear-cut leader, and foremost sea power in the world. The outcome neutralized Japanese advances in the northern Pacific, likely saved Hawaii from invasion and occupation, and enabled the USN, psychologically and, soon enough, materially, to assume the offensive in the central and south Pacific campaigns. Symonds' descriptions of the air attacks by both sides and the compelling factors that factored in the decision-making processes of the key players in the battle, are wonderfully done. Midway, in my opinion, is the best chapter in this book.
Professor Symonds uses the final chapter on the Persian Gulf of the 1980s and beyond as a platform for somewhat politicized views on current Middle East affairs, which is certainly within his purview as an analytical naval historian. However, Praying Mantis, to me, is hardly on a par with Lake Erie, Monitor-Virginia and Midway in the scale of changing the course of naval warfare or critical points in American naval history. Praying Mantis did not "Shape American History" as stated in the subtitle of Symonds' book. I submit that a far more "history shaping" event of the modern era would have been an analysis of the Carter-Reagan-Lehman naval buildup from 1979 through 1987 in which American blue-water naval forces were expanded both technologically and in numbers of ships (almost 600). This, to me, really did change history by clearly tipping the balance of power in the Cold War to the U.S., preserved the Pax Americana, particularly at sea, and further fueled the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union (and, by extension, its own naval buildup). The 600-ship navy had important consequences, not the least of which was that it sent the unequivocal psychological message that the United States Navy was going to remain superior to the Soviets at sea and that the USSR could not hope to match the U.S. expansion from the standpoint of technology and financial resources. Professor Symonds may have been better served, even as a detached, analytical, historian, to follow that formula rather than his choice of Praying Mantis.

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