Carrier Battles: Command Decision in Harm’s Way, and: Aircraft Carriers at War: A Personal Retrospective of Korea, Vietnam, and the Soviet Confrontation (review)

As we approach the centennial of naval aviation, it is appropriate to take a long view of the aircraft carrier, which by the middle of the last century supplanted the battleship as the premier warship in the world’s navies. Although these two books have similar titles, they approach the aircraft carrier from very different perspectives. To Smith, the epic carrier engagements of the Pacific provide practical leadership lessons for would-be senior commanders; to Holloway, the carrier and naval aviation were central to his career advancement while providing a bulwark for the Free World during the Cold War.

Smith selects five carrier battles as case studies in command-Coral Sea, Midway, Santa Cruz, Eastern Solomons, and the Philippine Sea–juxtaposing the decisions made by senior American officers in those engagements against the doctrinal lessons they had learned at Newport from the War College’s Sound Military Decision, which despite its emphasis on a decisive battlefleet action, inculcated a “warrior mentality” in a “cadre of offensively minded officers” (pp. 37–38). That may have been so, but success or failure in command is the result of the complex interaction of a wider mix of objective and subjective criteria and is not usually reducible, as Smith would have it, to a handful of pedantic bullet points. On the other hand, Smith does arrive at informed conclusions about how and why the United States succeeded and the Japanese failed.

Taken together, Coral Sea and Midway demonstrated the abilities of Nimitz, Fletcher, and Spruance to comprehend the strategic situation facing the United States in the spring and summer of 1942 and how they adapted doctrine and formulated courses of action that yielded victory. In his treatment of Midway, Smith takes a middle course, reflecting recent thinking about the battle’s decisiveness and arguing that the Japanese loss of four big carriers was far less important than the loss of aircraft and trained aviators. The subsequent course of the war, during which the Japanese successfully reconstituted their carrier fleet by the spring of 1944 bears this out; they had the ships and aircraft to challenge the United States in the Marianas at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, but their lack of experienced aviators ultimately spelled defeat.

In contrast, Holloway’s book is a professional reminiscence of his rise through the ranks from junior naval aviator at the end of World War II to flying Panther jets in Korea to Chief of Naval Operations in 1974 where he faced the challenge of overhauling navy morale and material in the aftermath of Vietnam. Not surprisingly, a major part of the book deals with Vietnam, where Holloway served as skipper of the carrier Enterprise early in the war and as commander of the Seventh Fleet late in the conflict. Of most importance in the context of the development of the aircraft carrier was his tour as carrier program manager from 1967 to 1970. Holloway’s political savvy and ability to work with the irascible Hyman Rickover paid off in the development of a new two-reactor powerplant that lay at the heart of the highly successful and adaptable Nimitz-class ships, which remain at the core of the American large-deck carrier fleet.

Holloway makes a convincing case for big carriers and is quick to dismiss those who have periodically advocated the utility of smaller, less complex ships that could be built more cheaply and in larger numbers than the Nimitizes. It is an issue that has currency, when it is likely that today’s carrier fleet will stabilize at ten ships...