Pacific Tale, Twice Told

CORAL SEA, MIDWAY AND SUBMARINE ACTIONS (307 pp.)--Samuel Eliot Morison--Little, Brown ($6).

THE STRUGGLE FOR GUADALCANAL (389 pp.)--Samuel Eliot Morison--Little, Brown ($6).

BATTLE REPORT: VICTORY IN THE PACIFIC (548 pp.)--Walter Karig--Rinehart ($5).

The U.S. Navy began to write the history of its part in World War II while its ships and men were still being sent to the bottom. The Navy decided on not one history, but two. One was to be a popular narrative told largely in the words of the men and officers who did the fighting. Tapped for the job by Navy Secretary Knox in 1943 was Captain Walter Karig, U.S.N.R., in civilian life a newsman and prolific writer of children's books. The other was planned as a formal history based on all available information--"unofficial" to allow for criticism but backed to the hilt by all the resources o.f Navy documents and officialdom. The man who proposed the idea to F.D.R. early in 1942 got the job. He was Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard professor of history and Pulitzer Prizewinning biographer of Christopher Columbus (Admiral of the Ocean Sea--TIME, March 2, 1942).

With Battle Report: Victory in the Pacific, Captain Karig and his assistants have finished their five-volume stint. Like the other four, Victory moves at the brisk pace of journalism, seldom pauses for reflection or criticism. Its eyewitness reports of the Pacific slugging match are graphic, often moving; but except for interpolations of hindsight, Karig's history seldom rises above the work of the better on-the-spot reporters. Future historians will read this big job, done with loyalty and likable gusto, only for passing footnotes and occasional colorful quotations (one pilot's description of the night battle in Mindoro Strait: "It looked like hell upside down").

Tanaka Was Superb. Morison, another breed of sea dog entirely, is rapidly but thoroughly chewing on the bigger chunk (14 projected volumes) that he has bitten off. To judge from the first five, Morison's history may well be the permanent hull which future workmen will occasionally caulk but never have to dismantle. Because "he has had full access to captured enemy documents and has used them with imaginative skill as well as care, his accounts of battle action have a quality of two-sidedness which dissolves crude jingoism. In Coral Sea and Guadalcanal, as in his three earlier books (Battle of the Atlantic, North African Waters, Rising Sun in the Pacific), readers will be aware every minute that the enemy was in there too, and doing well at his job.

In his latest pair of books Morison makes it plain that U.S. naval victories in the Pacific were often due to numbers and weight of metal rather 'than to tactical superiority. During the Battle of Tassafaronga in the Guadalcanal campaign, the Japanese picked off Rear Admiral Carleton Wright's cruisers "like mechanical ducks in a carnival shooting gallery," while U.S. marksmanship "was abominable . . . It is a painful truth that the Battle of Tassafaronga was a sharp defeat inflicted on an alert and superior [U.S.] cruiser force by a partially surprised and inferior [Jap] destroyer force." Nor does Historian Morison hesitate to give individual enemies their due. Of Japan's Rear Admiral Razio Tanaka he writes flatly: "He was superb." Morison is just as forthright in putting U.S. combat brass in its place. He chides Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher for lack of aggressiveness, credits him with winning the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, "but only because the Japanese were more timid than he." Morison's warmest applause for a U.S. leader goes to Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, who "emerged from this battle [Midway] one of the greatest fighting and thinking admirals in American naval history."

That Stinking Island. U.S. ordnance experts will squirm at Morison's critical account of defective torpedoes which turned many a daring submarine attack into a bitter dry run, and champions of shore-based aviation in naval warfare will learn (in contradiction to the Army Air Forces' bumptious claims after the Battle of Midway) "that during the entire course of the war no Japanese carrier (so far as I can discover) was hit by a PBY, a B26* or a B17" (dive bombers, torpedo planes and submarines did all the scoring). Besides straightening out such misconceptions, Coral Sea and Guadalcanal are superior accounts of no-quarter fighting told with dash and color as well as scrupulous accuracy.

No desk historian, Morison saw much of the action he describes from the decks of ships in action. Frequently the combat veteran takes over from the scholar: "We cannot pretend to write of that stinking island [Guadalcanal] with the detachment and objectivity expected of trained historians . . . For us who were there, or whose friends were there, Guadalcanal is not a name but an emotion . . ." Combat Veteran Morison has registered his emotional involvement without surrendering any of the detachment and objectivity so much prized by trained Historian Morison.

* B-26s did hit one tied up at Kure.

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