Naval Battles of World War Two; Pacific and Far East. By Leo Marriott. Pen and Sword Maritime, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, 2022. ISBN 978 1399 098984.
Reviewed by John Johnston
This book summarises the naval war in the Pacific and the Far East (or Near North). It offers no new insights into grand strategy, nor does it explore the conduct of operations, innovations in tactics, or the influence of technology on the course of battles in a trans-oceanic theatre.
For that relief, much thanks – here is a simple account of the war that begins with a summary of the events at Pearl Harbor and Singapore and which continues through the battles of the Java and the Coral Seas to Midway, the maelstroms of the Solomon Islands, and the recapture of the Philippines before concluding with the final battles off Okinawa. The reader is guided throughout with a clear and straightforward narrative of events, readily understood maps of each action, and copious illustrations from contemporary sources.
Whilst Marriott has avoided the oceanic expanses of grand strategy and the like, he gives the reader a chart for navigating out of the harbour of simple narrative and into deeper waters for their own more specialised works and narratives. There are, for example, obvious analogies between US and Japanese actions in the Solomons Slot in 1942 and the Argentine and British actions off the Falkland Islands a couple of generations later, and this work will be essential reading to start comparing and contrasting the role of sea power in putting forces ashore and securing and maintaining their position in order to conduct offensives on land. Students at naval academies and staff colleges will be grateful to Marriott for marking the channel to further studies.
Marriott, then, has produced a work that introduces the general reader to an often overlooked part of the Second World War at sea and which gives the specialist researcher bearings to further studies. If there is one cavil, it is that the book deals exclusively with purely ship on ship actions when ‘island hopping’ was a strategy that depended totally on sea power. Focusing on the one to the exclusion of the other leaves the work unbalanced, but keeping the book manageable has precluded Marriott from examining that aspect of the war in the Pacific and one may hope that he will produce a volume similar to this on the war through the islands, from New Guinea to Okinawa.
