Review of The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-1944 by Ian W. Toll (W.W. Norton, 2015)

The second installment in a trilogy that charts the Second World War in the Pacific, this book focuses on the period mid-1942 from the Guadalcanal campaign through to mid-1944 and the battle for Guam, and US strategy of island-hopping and bypassing, and the strategic blunders of the Japanese and their overstretched resources. Toll’s aim is to provide a grand narrative, detailing the key decisions and battles, some of the key personalities and inter-service rivalries, and the wider politics of the war from a US and Japanese perspective. The challenge is to balance the broad sweep of history with enough detail to give a sense of the various actions and interactions. For the most part he succeeds, providing an overarching picture of the theatre, strategies politics, and rivalries, while also describing the views and experiences of key personnel and ordinary servicemen. He also manages to balance the perspectives of the US and Japanese. While it’s an interesting and engaging read, it suffers a little from an unevenness in coverage, with some campaigns or specific experiences getting fuller treatment than others, for example the extended description of three cruises of one submarine and concentrating on the Mariana Islands approach rather than the hopping up the Solomon Islands to towards the Bismarck islands and engagements in Papua New Guinea. The ending also seemed somewhat directionless, giving a general view of Japanese society at that point of the war, but giving little sense of the Allies plans for the final phases. Overall, a decent though uneven, overarching narrative of the mid-phase of the Pacific War.

Review of Spies in the Sky by Taylor Downing (Little Brown, 2011)

Whilst intelligence gleamed from spies on the ground in the form of resistance, double and SOE agents, and spies in the ether in the form of signal intercepts and their decryption, has received quite a bit of attention in recent years, the role of aerial photography and its interpretation during the Second World War has been relatively understudied.  Downing’s book goes some way towards to filling the gap by providing an overview of British and American air photo reconnaissance and interpretation, focusing in particular on the RAF Medmenham at Danesfield House, sited to the west of London on the Thames.  The book provides an initial, sketchy overview of the early development of aerial photography and its uses during the First World War, before detailing a more in-depth history of aerial photography in the immediate run-up to the Second World War (very underdeveloped and promoted by private interests not the military) and during the war itself.  Within a year of the war starting aerial photography was being routinely used by the British, with over a million photos a month being processed and analysed in Medmenham.  Every port in Europe was being photographed at least once a week, and aerial photography and physical models developed from them were used to brief troops ahead of every major battle and campaign.  The photographic programme led to many important success stories, such as the neutralisation of the Italian navy in the Mediterranean and the starving of resources to Axis troops in North Africa, the sinking of key German battleships, the identification and destruction of German secret weapon development and launch sites, and the Normandy landings.  The techniques and processes developed in Medmenham were replicated in other locations, notably in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and South Asia.

Spies in the Sky provides a popular history overview, written in a breezy, accessible and engaging style.  The narrative does suffer from some over-generalisations and assertions, for example, that a new science was developed at Medmenham, that of photogrammatery and military photo interpretation, which is not the case (though some new technical developments were achieved), and sometimes the pace is a little too fast.  It would have been nice to have a bit more technical detail at times, also some more biographical details of some of the key players and the political machinations they were caught up in, and more information of aerial intelligence in other arenas.  That said, this book is aimed at wide, generalist audience, rather than the specialist.  And in fulfilling that brief, the book succeeds admirably.  It certainly makes a strong case that aerial intelligence played a very important, but unappreciated role, in the Allies strategising and execution of war plans.