An Ocean in Common: American Naval Officers, Scientists, and the Ocean Environment (review)

Though late in joining the train of critical recognition accorded Gary E. Weir's An Ocean in Common, this "caboose" review is nonetheless dedicated to adding its perspective on this estimable publication. A book that can attract signal attention and praise from critics in several intersecting fields (among them naval history, naval research and development, oceanography, and the environmental and marine sciences) is rare indeed, and the welcome bellwether of a kind of "writing across the curriculum" ecumenism worthy of imitation and encouragement in the maritime research community.

Following Dr. Weir's own description of his research and publishing path from his Building American Submarines, 1914-1940 (Washington: Naval Historical Center, 1991) and Building the Kaiser's Navy (Annapolis, Md: Naval Institute Press, 1992), through Forged in War: the Naval-Industrial Complex and American Submarine Construction, 1940-1960 (Washington: Naval Historical Center, 1993), and into the broad reaches of An Ocean in Common, one is struck by the evolution of the author's focus from detailed and synthesized assaying of the processes whereby increasingly complex oceangoing (and ocean-penetrating!) vessels came to be conceived and created over less than a century, right up to his "Aha!" decision to take as his latest subject certain convergent approaches to the very globe-girdling medium his previous inspirations had made their milieu, the ocean.

The reader who is up to the challenge of this very intelligently written book will find the author's ingenious format a helpful foil to the sometimes daunting waves of analysis, explication, and information his excellent prose and notes set forth. In interposing his two perspective-lending "Interpolations" at key junctures among the eighteen chapters, Dr. Weir enjoins the interested reader to review and contextualize naval-scientific struggles and developments from the World War I era to the outbreak of World War II (after the first five chapters), and then (after Chapter Ten) to consider how collaborations during that second great conflict further solidified the connections between the U.S. Navy and the scientific community, setting the stage for the last eight chapters' elucidation of key oceanographic developments shared by these increasingly close partners in the early years of the Cold War. The well-chosen photographs following each Interpolation bring the reader closer to the important players, institutions, and events portrayed in An Ocean in Common, pointing up the intricate human relations that defined and cut across the scientific accomplishments of the communities involved.

While limiting his work to the rich possibilities that a focused study of the American experience in this wide arena afforded him, Dr. Weir does particularly note the valuable contributions of Canada in this convergence, a full accounting of which he believes would merit another book. Indeed, developments beyond 1961 necessarily also fall outside the comprehensive purview of An Ocean in Common, a situation that should inspire a continuation of this valuable line of inquiry: the era of a deepening Cold War and beyond brought about further notable scientific and naval collaborations such as the employment of purpose-built submersibles—with the help of advanced sonar technology—in finding and documenting sunken civil and military ships once thought irretrievably lost, or the exhaustive mapping of the world oceans for the Soviet Navy's multi-volume Atlas Okeanov (Atlas of the oceans; Leningrad: Ministry of Defense, 1974-1980). For those writers who are game, the expanding study of the world's oceans is their research oyster, and Gary Weir, for one, has cultured a true pearl.