Resurrection: Salvaging the Battle Fleet at Pearl Harbor (review)

Immediately after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the U.S. Navy began a massive salvage operation to refloat ships and clear docking facilities for fleet use. Sunken ships, save for the superdreadnought Arizona and the target ship Utah, were raised or refloated in a series of complex operations requiring innovative salvage work that lasted until March 1944. Heretofore, the only readily available account of the salvage operations has been Vice Admiral Homer Wallin's Pearl Harbor: Why, How, Fleet Salvage, and Reappraisal, published by the Navy History Division in 1968. But now we have this book by Daniel Madsen. In eight chapters, based on the records of the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, the Hawaii War Records Depository, and the papers of Vice Admiral Wallin, Madsen chronicles the creation and evolution of the salvage organization, the initial trial-and-error approach to much of the work along Battleship Row and in Dry Dock 1, the rescue of the beached Nevada, the righting of the capsized Oklahoma, and the failed attempt to refloat Utah.

Although Madsen is a self-trained historian, he has done a credible job in chronicling the progression of salvage operations. Unfortunately, however, his intermittent forays into the larger framework of the war often reflect a dated historical perspective. His claim that the Pearl Harbor disaster crippled the navy's plans for a "battleship shootout in the Western Pacific" (p. 70) ignores the navy's prewar adoption of the task-force concept built around new aircraft carriers and the seventeen new, fast battleships authorized since 1937. The battleships at Pearl Harbor were strategically and technologically obsolete by December 1941, as was the already-defunct War Plan Orange they had served. Madsen's later observation that "Victory was far from certain in 1942, defeat a definite possibility" (p. 219) is apocalyptic and misrepresents Japanese war aims and American capabilities. It also ignores the industrial basis of World War II and the disparate research, development, and productive capabilities of the United States and Japan.

Madsen's interesting story of the Pearl Harbor salvage operations is hindered by minor errors, some of which are irksome because of their repetition. For example, he consistently presents the caliber of naval guns as the caliber of small arms. In small arms, "caliber" refers to the diameter of the barrel (9 millimeters or .45 inches). The caliber of a naval gun is the ratio of the barrel length to the bore; this error, which should have been caught by the Naval Institute Press, makes the reader wonder what other, more opaque, technical errors or analytical shortcomings exist. At times Madsen draws from official reports without seeming to understand them or to clarify ambiguities. For example, he writes that the destroyer Downes's boiler room contained "turbines" (p. 103). Some boiler rooms, or "fire-rooms" as the navy called them, did have small, turbine-driven pumps, but not the main-engine turbines Madsen's passage implies. Another problem is that arcane terms such as "backout slugs" often go without definition. There are also disconcerting, abrupt transitions in the text, and the publisher should have cropped some of the photographs in order to show more clearly the items mentioned in their captions.

The Pearl Harbor salvagers received scant recognition for their grueling efforts. But many would quibble with Madsen's claim that they should have been recognized as heroes. Official recognition aside, Madsen's account leaves no doubt about the difficulty of their task as they "resurrected a fleet that had suffered a humiliating defeat in one of their nation's darkest hours" (p. 220).