Sea of Thunder
by Evan Thomas
The author's thesis, and of course he's right, is that when we have understood the big outlines of an event, we can gain insight by delving into the lives of people who shaped it. In this case the event is the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the last mass naval engagement in history (knock wood) and a central concern of some dozens of books, and the foreground figures are a mix of likely and unlikely names: for the U.S. Navy, Admiral William Halsey and Commander Ernest Evans; for the Japanese, Admirals Takeo Kurita afloat and Matome Ugaki commanding the kamikaze forces.
Thomas interweaves four biographies, a perilous enterprise at best and, ironically, even more difficult when pairs of subjects belonged to the same career networks. The danger of confusing Kurita's and Ugaki's backgrounds and blending their professional circles is fully realized, too, despite the author's efforts to construct distinct characters for these officers. (Halsey and Evans are less confusable because of the difference in their ages and the scopes of their commands.)
A person who's quite familiar with Leyte Gulf will have no problem sorting this out and keeping the time relationships straight; it's hard for a casual reader. Thomas has some excellent research in here, including not only publications in English and Japanese but also interviews--final ones in many cases--with veteran officers and ratings as well as their surviving family members. The well-illustrated book (useful maps, too!) shows both a solid understanding of the battle and practiced skill in explaining complex processes. Sea of Thunder is worth reading for those reasons. If you find the swirling narratives confusing, cultivate serenity: At least you don't have to try doping out what some people a hundred miles away, who mean to kill you, are going to do next. And you can find plenty of books that take a more linear approach to the battle account.
A picky reader, meaning anyone who learned to read English before about 1985, will have some items to discuss, and since I'm in that group, here we go.
The old Simon & Schuster house followed a practice going back to the early days of book publishing: They hired "editors" and charged them to help authors check facts (and spellings) and revise their work, cutting excess and clearing away ambiguities and infelicities. This service to writers and readers is no longer offered. Today it's one pass through a Microsoft spell-checker and off to the press. I know I'm a mossback--sometimes, in a restaurant, I even ask to have a salad brought to the table rather than build my own--but I respond well to the look and feel of an edited book and sort of resent having to use up my margins with notes. Ah well, Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis, as they used to say down at the firehouse.
A selection of my marginalia:
| p. 43 | midshipmen were abjured "not to appear unduly bright" | You can adjure or enjoin them, but abjure means "swear off, renounce." |
| p. 46 | died-in-the-wool | From one of those "cute mistakes by third-graders" email forwards. |
| p. 75 | ancient Sumaria | I hope this is just a misspelling and not an old country I missed hearing about. |
| p. 115 | the route at the Java Sea | OK, let's be fair: English is not an easy language. Lots of the words look sort of like lots of the others. Probably tons of people can't tell the difference between "catastrophic defeat" and "itinerary." |
| p. 133 | Ugaki watched from his bridge as his ship and the rest of the vanguard slew around, making 90 degree turns | The spell-checker wins out over a big vocabulary. Slewed is the past tense of slew while a different slew is the past tense of slay. . . . Harder question: Did he mean yawed? |
| p. 134 | a fleet comprised of most of the navy's battleships and cruisers | One of the things you got when you hired an "editor" was somebody who could tell the difference between comprise and compose. |
| p. 145 | Cape Engaño, which in Portuguese means Cape Deception | Portuguese placenames in the Philippines? A Portuguese word with the letter ñ? Uh-uh. It's Spanish. |
| p. 167 | one-upsmanship | One-upmanship: a word coined by Stephen Potter in the late 1940s to describe the condition of always being one-up on the other fellow. Rookie mistake. |
| p. 175 | petty officers cadging their postprandial smokes on the fantail | Cadge in the context of cigarettes means "bum." Is this what Thomas meant? |
| p. 206 | They had never been fired at a ship, and now they never would | A stylistic hiccup. Never would be doesn't make the reader reread and rewrite the sentence. |
| p. 332 (note) | At Okinawa, the Japanese sunk thirty-four warships | The lesson: Don't let hack movie producers teach you how to conjugate verbs. Sank. |
| p. 348 (note) | Halsey won a measure of redemption after he died from the release of a series of working papers | Jesus, did anybody read the damn manuscript? |
| The worst, though, is this, from page 205: | ||
| might damage the smooth bores of the giant guns. | It cost me 45 minutes of online research to make sure what was going on here. The naval guns in question can be said to have polished bores, slick bores, shiny bores--indeed, they were chrome-plated to cut friction--but not smooth bores. They are rifled guns. "Smooth bore" means not rifled. An error that's not just wrong for its own sake but makes the writer look foolish. | |
As you see, I'm applying a new policy here. People who put stupid mistakes into books don't respond to admonition. I could, and occasionally do, write to them pointing out what they've messed up, and the net effect? Nil. More idiotic clangers in their next crummy book. So my New Year's resolution for 2007 is to poke merciless fun at authors and publishers who don't check their facts, their style and their idioms. Join me!
| Approved Ben Teague web site |
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Books and plays:
History and archaeology
Sea of Thunder