Books: African Armada

• Share

OPERATIONS IN NORTH AFRICAN WATERS, OCTOBER 1942-JUNE 1943 (297 pp.) —Samuel Eliot Momon—Little, Brown ($5).

More words were written and read about World War II than any other war in history. But much of the writing came from correspondents who were usually in a hurry, and often able to observe only one closeup section of a big scene. And the official writings were usually cramped by the dictates of security and the censors.

In the past year there have been beginnings of an attempt to put together the war as it really was—its grand strategies, the sprawling campaigns, the great inside hazards and little offside fumbles. Samuel Eliot Morison's book, and the series of which it will form a part, is the most considerable attempt to date. Extraordinarily well informed and detailed, it is authoritative without the curse of being "official."* Its subject is the U.S. Navy's part in Operation Torch, the Allied assault against French Northwest Africa in November 1942. (Historian Morison's book is Volume II, though the first to be released, of a series which will eventually run to 13 or 14 volumes.) The story:

The Devious Course. When the U.S. convoy in Operation Torch set out, it was the "largest . . . overseas expedition in the history of man." With its outriders, it covered 600 square miles of sea. It crept out of east coast U.S. ports at different times and in different directions. Five "beacon" submarines sneaked out of Long Island Sound. The new battleship Massachusetts, with cruisers and destroyers, set out from a point near Portland, Me. The Air Group, consisting of U.S.S. Ranger and four Sangamon-class escort carriers, sailed for Bermuda, presumably for maneuvers. The bulk of the 40-odd other warships and 35 transports and cargo vessels left Norfolk, Va. as though also

West Indies bound. The rest steered northeast, in the direction of Britain.

Following courses as devious as "the track of :,, reeling drunk in the snow," the several groups circled, twisted, finally met on schedule off Cape Race, Nfld. Long before sunrise, eleven days later, having zigzagged 4,000 miles without mishap, the entire convoy lay nervous and expectant within reach of French Morocco. Here & there along the coast a few lights gleamed in the darkness, writes Morison. "Africa was never so dark and mysterious to ancient sea rovers as she seemed that night to these 70,000 young men who had retraced the path of Columbus."

Full, Accurate, Early. Harvard's tall, austere Trumbull Professor of American History knows what he is writing about. He is not only the best of Columbus biographers (in his Pulitzer Prizewinning Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 1942) but he was a member of the ship's company aboard U.S.S. Brooklyn in those anxious invasion hours. Soon after Pearl Harbor, he had suggested his assignment himself to his fellow Harvardman and fellow naval enthusiast, Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was Morison's idea that a "full, accurate and early" history of the naval war ought to be written. In May 1942 Morison was commissioned a lieutenant commander, with a special assignment: to get the history written.