Brent E. Jones

Even though the history of the Second World War remains my favorite subject after all these years, I've gotten fairly picky when I choose my next book; there are just too many pot-boilers out there. However, this history of an American cruiser in the last year of the Pacific War is a good one. The author writes in the spirit of trying to push behind the silence of the men who returned home, and who just could not stand to relate their experiences of grinding endurance, punctuated by moments of horror and outrage.

It was actually something of a minor miracle that USS "Astoria" even managed to get into action, as the shipyard that built her was an exercise in wartime emergency measures, and many were the inefficiencies and failures. Add to that a scratch crew, without much of a trained cadre of leaders. The real difference maker was the initial captain, one George Dyer, who took the unpromising ingredients he'd been given, and produced a crack ship that men were proud to have served in. Well, most men; a running theme through this book is the epidemic of desertion that the USN experienced in the last year of the war, and Captain Dyer made hunting down miscreants a personal mission.

As for the nature of the cruiser's war, that mostly involved the grinding battles of attrition off Iwo Jima and Okinawa, along with operations related to the naval siege of Japan itself. Based on personal accounts, Jones does a good job of capturing the horror of it all, and it's a story that remains relevant because the "special attack" pilots were essentially conducting the first naval cruise-missile war; it's a possible vision of what the USN's next major war might look like.

Highly recommended.… (mehr)