World War II at Sea: A Global History

"I chose it, partly because I wanted to get an American perspective and Craig Symonds is, I think, one of the best US naval historians. Again, he’s not trapped in an American bubble. He is good at standing back and looking at the whole war—obviously with an American perspective—but understanding the significance of what’s going on around the world, because this really is a world war. When most people talk about the ‘World War’ they’re not really talking geography at all, they’re talking about a period. But Symonds really is looking at the war from a worldwide perspective. There are not too many people writing who do this well, and seriously. Most of the immense mass of literature about the Second World War is really about particular parts of the world, particular services, particular countries and particular periods, often rather short ones. This is at least a history of all the major elements of the war—obviously fairly high-level—between roughly 1940 and 1945. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Of course on any realistic count, you’d have to say that the elements which went to make up the Second World War start much earlier than that and end much later than that. My own estimate would be that the Japanese war against China is one of the main constituents. And you’d have to date that from 1937. And it finished after the USA pulled out, but the Chinese carried on the civil war until 1947. So, really, a history of the Second World War that runs from 1941 to 1944 or 1945 is really only a small part of the whole thing. At the end of the war, when the US forces occupied Japan, the occupying powers forbad Japanese journalists and historians from referring to the war using the phrase which was standard in Japanese, which is ‘the Greater East Asia War’. But Greater East Asia War is a very accurate and not a contentious description for what was going on, or had been going on, since the mid-1930s. But the US did not want it. And, in particular, the occupying forces, which was the US Navy, did not want it. They insisted that the Japanese adopt the US Navy standard term, which was ‘the Pacific War’. That eliminates the Chinese altogether. It eliminates most of the war, it eliminates all the armies, it eliminates all the millions of dead, and it reduces the whole thing to a series of naval skirmishes on the remote margins of the real battlefield—but skirmishes that heavily involved the US Navy, and which the US Navy won. So it’s a brilliant piece of public relations, a brilliant piece of propaganda. It captures the war for the US Navy, which has owned it ever since. Probably nuclear submarines because they are the first real submarines. In the Second World War, what were called submarines were still essentially submersibles. They stayed on the surface most of the time, and dipped down now and again. But nuclear submarines are real submarines in the sense that they can go to sea and stay at sea for months, continually submerged. And that makes for a completely different world. Generally I insist that I’m an historian and my job is the province of the past, not the future. But, so far, I haven’t seen drones do anything that aeroplanes haven’t been doing for a long time. It’s just that they’re a lot cheaper and they don’t have pilots on board. I think the time will come before long when carriers fly fewer and fewer aeroplanes with pilots and more and more aeroplanes without pilots, but whether that will make a fundamental change, I don’t know."