Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/March 2019/Book reviews




 * By Hawkeye7

In the 1950s, the US Navy had a serious problem with accidents. In 1954 alone, it had 2,213 major mishaps in which an aircraft was badly damaged, people injured, or both. In all, 776 aircraft were written off and 536 people killed. It was not unheard of, or even remarkable, for a squadron to lose all its aircraft during a single cruise. Many naval aviators simply accepted the high death rate as a hazard of the job. The causes of mishaps were many and varied, and the book spends several chapters just listing them. A running problem throughout the book is that while we often know the causes of accidents, it is hard to know how many people and aircraft were saved.

Demobilisation and cutbacks after the end of World War II decimated the ranks of naval aviators and maintenance crews. Between 1950 and 1960, 28 new aircraft designs were accepted into service; in the following 50 years, there were just 23. The new jet aircraft were more difficult to handle and less similar to each other than the World War II generation of piston-engined aircraft. Yet many aviators, some reservists recalled to active duty during the Korean War, and others who had been desk-bound for years but had kept their ratings flying a trainer for four hours a month, were given just a cursory introduction to an unfamiliar aircraft. Many had little or no training in instrument flying, necessary at night and in bad weather.

The new aircraft were often faulty and poorly designed from a safety point of view. Some had similar switches which did very different things. Over the decade, devices like crash helmets, pressure suits and ejector seats were implemented. Procedures that had been developed for the older generation of aircraft were frequently inadequate to cope with the jets. The very layout of the straight-deck aircraft carriers was a problem, aircraft having to fly near stalling speed, and impacting the crash barrier if they overshot the arresting hooks. This was addressed with the introduction of the angled deck. More powerful catapults were installed to cope with the heavier jet aircraft.

This book chronicles how the problem was tackled, and step by step takes us through the measures that were taken, which halved the accident rate over and over again. In 2000, there were 29 major mishaps, resulting in the loss of 24 aircraft and the deaths of 46 people. In the process, the U.S. Navy had to take a hard look at itself. Poor leadership and a failure to prioritise safety were recognised as part of the problem, as well as organisational structures and processes. As the more obvious technical problems were resolved, the focus shifted to human factors like culture and behaviour.

This book will probably only be read by naval history enthusiasts, which is a pity. In describing how an organisation came to grips with the a severe safety problem, it has applicability far beyond naval aviation. (I invite the readers to consider the caption of the image at right, and how many safety issues are raised therein.)

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 * By Hawkeye7

I'm always sceptical of claims (usually on the cover) that a book recounts something "forgotten". In this case, the subject, the war crimes trials conducted by Australia after the Second World War, has hardly been forgotten. There are many accounts of the individual Japanese atrocities and the subsequent trials, and books such as Australia's War Crimes Trials 1945-51 (2016), which covered this ground in more technical detail. There are also many articles in legal journals discussing the issues surrounding trials for war crimes and crimes against humanity, as they remain a contentious issue today, even as more trials occur.

This book is accessible, but its broad scope means that it is frequently light on details, even though it sometimes goes into extraordinary detail on matters that are hardly central to the subject at hand. It presents its material in a manner easily followed by the general reader, minimising the use of obtuse legal terms (usually in Latin). Wakeling, a lawyer himself, does not flinch from acknowledging unpalatable truths, like the deficiencies of the Common Law legal system with which Australia is saddled for historical reasons.

Defendants were charged with crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The first was regarded as the most serious. The Japanese defendants often pointed out how, after the First World War, their proposal that racial equality be considered a principle of international law was dismissed by the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, as repugnant to American values. They argued that Japan was forced into war by economic sanctions imposed by Britain and the United States. The legal justification for the charge of crimes against peace, and the trials in general, was always uncertain, but the principle that triumphed was not the legal one that "there is no crime without a law", but the moral one that people know when what they are doing is wrong.

Inevitably, the trials are compared with their counterparts in Europe. Wakeling is frank about how trials in Asia could not be conducted as simply; the barriers of different cultures and languages were just too great. The Indian judge on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo, Radhabinod Pal, took the attitude that British imperialism was so great a crime that any means was justified to overthrow it, and therefore what the Nazis and Japanese did was justified. On the other hand, the Filipino judge, Delfin Jaranilla, a survivor of the Bataan Death March, saw things very differently indeed. (Wakeling notes that it is often considered poor form for a judge to be a witness to the crime he is trying.) It was never possible to reconcile Asian points of view.

Australia played an important, instrumental and independent role in the conduct of war crimes trials in Asia. It was the last to discontinue trials, in 1951. They remain an important and contested epilogue to the Pacific War.

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