Category: Nautical

Day of Infamy, by Walter Lord – 1957 [Ben Feder] [Updated, with new detail…]

First created in December of 2017, this post – now updated – illustrating Walter Lord’s Day of Infamy has now been updated to include a portrait of the author (actually, John Walter Lord, Junior) – from the book’s cover, as well as the book’s interior/cover maps of Ford Island and, the Pacific Ocean route of Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack force.  I’ve also included the descriptive blurb from the book’s cover, and, quotes from book reviews also carried  within the cover. 

Though intended as popular literature, I t h i n k (?) that this book was the first serious study of the attack on Pearl Harbor prior to the publication of Gordon W. Prange’s At Dawn We Slept in 1981.

DAY OF INFAMY
By Walter Lord
Illustrated with Photographs

Sunday, December 7, 1941 – a day no one will ever forget – the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.  Now, a book has been written that does full justice to the epic events of that incredible day.

In DAY OF INFAMY Walter Lord traces, in brilliant detail, the human drama of the attack: the spies behind it; the pilots on the Japanese aircraft carriers; the crews on the stricken warships; the men at the airfields and bases; the Japanese pilot who captured an island single-handedly when he could not get back to his carrier; the generals, the sailors, the housewives and children responding to the attack with anger, numbness, and magnificent courage. 

DAY OF INFAMY is an inspiring human document, a thrilling account of how it is to live through history.  It is certain to be one of the most popular, important, and lasting books of our time.

________________________________________

DAY OF INFAMY combines the careful scholarship and deep understanding of human nature that led to such comments as the following concerning Mr. Lord’s book, A Night to Remember:

“…a magnificent job of re-creative chronicling, enthralling from the first word to the last.”  The Atlantic

“The quality of Mr. Lord’s work seems all the more remarkable when one reflects on the fact that he has invented nothing, not even a single conversation.”  The Wall Street Journal

“…breathlessly exciting…with a suspense, a drive and a compelling reality which make it endlessly fascinating as well as brilliantly informative.”  Boston Herald

“…a panorama of many individuals, introduced to the reader by name, and of their briefly told acts, reactions and words.  The result, almost to the reader’s surprise, is a mosaic picture, clear in form and in the sense of movement and direction.  It took skill to do this…his timing is sure and the unity and continuity are never lost.”  Baltimore Evening Sun

“…the rarest of reader experiences – a book whose total effect is greater than the sum of its parts.”  The New York Times Book Review

________________________________________

Rear cover…

Walter Lord brings to this story of December 7, 1941, the same restless search for truth – the same devotion to facts – that made A Night to Remember, his best-selling account of the Titanic, one of the truly memorable books of the decade.

In piecing together the saga of Pearl Harbor, Mr. Lord has traveled over 14,000 miles, has talked and corresponded with 577 of the people who were there.  He has obtained exclusive interviews with members of the Japanese attacking force.  He has spent hundreds of hours with the Americans who received the blow – not just the admirals and generals, but the enlisted men, the housewives, the children too.  He has spent weeks in Hawaii, going over each of the bases attacked.  He has pored over maps, charts, letters, diaries, official files, newspapers, and some 25,000 pages of testimony.

Mr. Lord’s meticulous research has uncovered many facts about that famous day that have never been known before.  The events and characters are presented in a new light – with detachment and restraint.  Stripped of legend, the human drama of Pearl Harbor is not a story of military defeat, but one of the truly great epics of American history.

________________________________________

Photograph of Walter Lord from the book’s rear cover.  This is the same image which, in appreciably cropped form, appears in the Wikipedia entry for Lord.  The map before him appears to show Oahu.

Russian Submarines in Arctic Waters, by Ivan Aleksandrovich Kolyshkin (Иван Александрович Колышкин) (Translated by David Skvirsky) – April, 1985 [Christopher Blossom]

Bantam Books’ 1985 edition of Russian Submarines in Arctic Waters is an English-language translation of Hero of the Soviet Union Rear Admiral Ivan Aleksandrovich Kolyshkin’s (Иван Александрович Колышкин) book Submarines in Arctic Waters, the latter originally published by Progress Publishers in Moscow, in 1966. 

Nautical artist Christopher Blossom’s cover depicts the submarine S-103 (“С-103“), which served in the Soviet Navy from mid-1939 to January of 1956.  The image of S-103 below, from Evgeniy Chirva’s website “The Great Patriotic War Undersea – About Submarines and Submariners 1941-1945” (Великая Отечественная под водой – О подлодках и подводниках 1941 – 1945 гг.), was perhaps the inspiration for Blossom’s art.  Certainly Blossom’s evocative composition parallels the perspective, angle of view, and rocky coastline in the wartime photo of the submarine.   

The cover of the original (English-language) publication of Admiral Kolyshkin’s book (from Ainsworth Books) is rather rudimentary, showing the Naval Ensign of the Soviet Navy adjacent to the Kola Peninsula, the location of the headquarters and bases of the former Soviet Union’s – and now the Russian Federation’s – Northern Fleet.  (At Severomorsk and around Murmansk, respectively.)   

Here’s a map view of the Kola Peninsula.  Note that the geography of the area as depicted on the cover of the 1966 edition doesn’t – hmmm – match the actual geography of the Kola Peninsula and its adjacent coastline.  Artistic simplicity?  Cold War era misinformation?  Or, both?

References

Biography of Hero of the Soviet Union Rear Admiral Ivan Aleksandrovich Kolyshkin  – at WarHeroes.ru

Submarines in Arctic Waters – at Ainsworth Books

Russian Navy – at Wikipedia

Soviet Navy – at Wikipedia

“The Great Patriotic War Undersea – About Submarines and Submariners 1941-1945” – Великая Отечественная под водой – О подлодках и подводниках 1941 – 1945 гг.

 

Incredible Victory, by Walter Lord – 1967 and 1976 [Unknown Artist, and, Robert McGuire]

1967 edition (art by unknown artist) features SBD Dauntless Dive-Bomber and Mitsubishi Zero Fighter

______________________________

1976 Edition (art by Robert McGuire) features TBD Devastator Torpedo Bomber

They Were Expendable, by William L White – 1942 [Unknown Artist]

“And through those plump cities the sad young men back from battle wander
as strangers in a strange land,
talking a grim language of realism which the smug citizenry doesn’t understand,
trying to tell of a tragedy which few enjoy hearing.”

FOREWORD

THIS story was told me largely in the officers’ quarters of the Motor Torpedo Boat Station at Melville, Rhode Island, by four young officers of MTB Squadron 3, who were all that was left of the squadron which proudly sailed for the Philippines last summer.  A fifth officer, Lieutenant Henry J. Brantingham, has since arrived from Australia.

These men had been singled out from the multitude for return to America because General MacArthur believed that the MTB’s had proved their worth in warfare, and hoped that these officers could bring back to America their actual battle experience, by which trainees could benefit.

Their Squadron Commander, Lieutenant John Bulkeley (now Lieutenant-Commander) of course needs no introduction, as he is already a national hero for his part in bringing MacArthur out of Bataan.  But because the navy was then keeping him so busy fulfilling his obligations as a national hero, Bulkeley had to delegate to Lieutenant Robert Boiling Kelly a major part of the task of rounding out the narrative.  I think the reader will agree that the choice was wise, for Lieutenant Kelly, in addition to being a brave and competent naval officer, has a sense of narrative and a keen eye for significant detail, two attributes which may never help him in battle but which were of great value to this book.  Ensigns Anthony Akers and George E. Cox, Jr., also contributed much vivid detail.

As a result, I found when I had finished that I had not just the adventure story of a single squadron, but in the background the whole tragic panorama of the Philippine campaign – America’s little Dunkirk.

______________________________

We are a democracy, running a war.  
If our mistakes are concealed from us, they can never be corrected.  
Facts are frequently and properly withheld in a war,
because the enemy would take advantage of our weaknesses if he knew them.  
But this story now can safely be told because the sad chapter is ended.  
The Japanese know just how inadequate our equipment was,
because they destroyed or captured practically all of it.

I have been wandering in and out of wars since 1939,
and many times before have I seen the sad young men come out of battle –
come with the whistle of flying steel and the rumble of falling walls still in their ears,
come out to the fat, well-fed cities behind the lines,
where the complacent citizens always choose from the newsstands
those papers whose headlines proclaim every skirmish as a magnificent victory.

And through those plump cities the sad young men back from battle wander
as strangers in a strange land,
talking a grim language of realism which the smug citizenry doesn’t understand,
trying to tell of a tragedy which few enjoy hearing.

These four sad young men differ from those I have talked to in Europe
only in that they are Americans,
and the tragedy they bear witness to is our own failure,
and the smugness they struggle against is our own complacency.

W.L. WHITE

Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana – 1869 (1969, 1977) [Unknown Artist]

I wished to be alone,
so I let the other passengers go up to the town,
and was quietly pulled ashore in a boat,
and left to myself. 
The recollections and the emotions all were sad, and only sad.

Fugit, interea fugit irreparabile tempus.

The past was real.
The present, all about me, was unreal, unnatural, repellent.
I saw the big ships lying in the stream,
the Alert, the California, the Rosa, with her Italians;
then the handsome Ayacucho, my favourite;
the poor dear old Pilgrim, the home of hardship and helplessness;
the boats passing to and fro;
the cries of the sailors at the capstan or falls;
the peopled beach; the large hide-houses, with their gangs of men;
and the Kanakas interspersed everywhere.
All, all were gone! not a vestige to mark where one hide-house stood.
The oven, too, was gone.
I searched for its site, and found, where I thought it should be,
a few broken bricks and bits of mortar.
I alone was left of all, and how strangely was I here!
What changes to me!
Where were they all?
Why should I care for them –
poor Kanakas and sailors,
the refuse of civilisation,
the outlaws and beach-combers of the Pacific?