Combat Loaded: Across the Pacific on the USS Tate (review)

An amphibious landing was the exemplar offensive maneuver of the American armed forces during World War II, but little has been written about the specialized auxiliary ships the U.S. Navy employed to project American power onto hostile shores—the attack transports and attack cargo ships that were, in the words of Admiral Richmond K. Turner, "the backbone of the Amphibious Forces." The most widely read book that focuses on this class of ship is Kenneth Dodson's Away All Boats, the 1954 novel that served as the basis of the 1956 film of the same name, so a scholarly, well-researched examination of a front-line amphibious transport is to be welcomed in the literature of the Pacific war. Combat Loaded: Across the Pacific on the USS Tate nicely fills this void in the history of the American navy's Second World War amphibious operations.

Tate (AKA-70) was one of the nearly 350 attack transports and attack cargo ships that saw service in World War II. One could argue that Tate's career was not representative of all transports: it was not commissioned until late 1944, was in commission less than two years, and only saw combat service during the Okinawa Campaign. In contrast, many other auxiliary ships experienced a considerable amount of combat action in multiple theaters of operations. Yet, in other ways Tate's experiences were typical of an attack cargo ship, the construction program for which did not fully get underway until late in the war. Like Tate, most only served in the Pacific and their combat service was limited to the landing operations of 1944–45. And in common with all ships of the navy's auxiliary fleet, Tate was a product of the massive American shipbuilding effort of the 1940s, was crewed by hastily mobilized civilians with only a thin leavening of "old salts," spent its wartime career carrying out mundane—yet vital—logistical tasks, and on rare occasions found itself facing off against a terrifying and determined enemy.

Combat Loaded is everything one would expect in a ship's history. Crew explains Tate's construction at a North Carolina shipyard, providing details on everything from the christening ceremony, to technical aspects of its armament and air defense system, to its shakedown and trials. In February 1945 Tate was assigned to Transport Squadron 17, the ships of which carried the Army's 77th Infantry Division during the Okinawa Campaign. The author relates details of a fierce Japanese aerial assault on the squadron on 2 April 1945, an action that resulted in a "horizon punctuated with burning ships" (p. 66). Although an orderly analysis of a mass Kamikaze attack is a difficult undertaking, Crew succeeds in breaking down the sequence of events through a careful sifting of ships' logs, after-action reports, eyewitness accounts, and oral history interviews. Crew's research also unearthed previously unpublished details on the last days of famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle, for Tate was the last ship Pyle visited before one of Tate's boats transported him to the island of Ie Shima, where the reporter met his untimely death.

Combat Loaded paints a detailed canvas of the ship's personnel. The author spent a number of years tracking down aging veterans who had served on Tate, and ended up interviewing nearly fifty of them. The book's dominant personality is Tate's skipper, Commander Rupert Lyon. Lyon is a study in contrasts. Although he was a master mariner and veteran of World War I who had seen service throughout World War II (including combat actions and a citation for heroism at Guadalcanal), Lyon was not a "spit & polish" officer of the regular navy. As Crew rightly points out, Lyon's unorthodox command style meant he was "not the kind of man the navy would pick as a commanding officer in normal times, but...