Book Review - Strategy in Crisis

The Pacific War, 1937-1945

by John T Kuehn

Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 2023, 220 pp.

ISBN 9781682477656

Reviewed by: Dayton McCarthy

The 19th century German polymath Rudolf Virchow wrote that ‘brevity in writing is the best insurance for its perusal’. If this aphorism is correct—and I suspect that most military officers would support such a belief—then John T Kuehn’s Strategy in Crisis has done its best to ensure it has wide appeal among its prospective readership. Although not explicitly stated, it is clear that this relatively thin tome (it is 220 pages in length, of which 51 pages are endnotes, bibliography and index) has been written as a professional military education resource. Hailing from the US Naval Institute Press, Strategy in Crisis is the first in a planned series examining the ‘essentials of strategy’ wherein the aim is to ‘develop a broad strategic literacy’. As such, we may assume that it targets mid-level officers, either pre or post staff college, who wish to gain a greater understanding of the linkages between the strategic and operational levels of war. It is a short, punchy book that can be read in two to three sessions; such brevity surely makes it just the thing for a time-poor staff officer or staff college student!

The scope of Kuehn’s book is wide. He situates the reader with a prelude, the 1921–22 Washington naval conference, which determined the postwar naval strengths of the major powers at the time. In short, it decreed that the Japanese navy should be smaller than the British and United States navies. Kuehn indicates that the Japanese saw this as deleterious for their longer-term national security and thus the seeds for future discord between Japan and the US were sown. He also makes it clear in his introduction that the ‘Pacific War’ was in fact the ‘Asia-Pacific War’, which commenced in 1937 with the Second Sino-Japanese War in mainland China. By doing so, Kuehn lays the foundations for the rest of the book. Firstly, it makes Western readers understand that Japan was fighting (and thus allocating manpower, materiel and resources) in China well before (and of course, after) its post-December 1941 Pacific campaigns, and that the Asian-Pacific theatre was immense in terms of geography and number of belligerents involved:

Japan’s meddling in China constituted the cause of the war in the Pacific between Japan and the United States, the Netherlands, Great Britain, their colonies, and commonwealth partners, Australia and New Zealand. It was a war that stretched from the Sri Lanka and eastern India to Japanese submarine operations off the West Coast of the United States. From north to south it spanned from the frozen Aleutians to steamy Darwin and Port Moresby south of the equator. The sheer geographic scope of the conflict boggles the mind, especially if one is a logistics planner. But it was always about Japan’s undeclared war, and its quagmire, in China.^[1] (Emphasis added)

Kuehn examines the pre-war plans of these belligerents to examine whether linkages existed between such plans and the subsequent wartime conduct and execution. Here he is to be commended for covering not only the US and Japanese plans (which have been discussed extensively in other works) but also those of Britain and the Commonwealth, the Dutch and the French. While this wider context is useful, the reader is nevertheless guided to understand that the ‘strategy in crisis’ of the book’s title refers to the Japanese strategy, or perhaps more correctly, the lack thereof. There was little coordination—and no real joint strategic decision-making apparatus—between the highest echelons of the Japanese army and navy. Accordingly, the competing priorities (the army remained focused on the war in China, while the navy naturally wished to pursue a maritime-centric strategy in the Pacific) almost doomed the Japanese from the start. This situation was exacerbated by the Japanese military’s fervent belief in the efficacy of the ‘decisive battle’. This idée fixe saw the Japanese continually seeking such a contest, but almost always being in a worse position afterwards. Even the stunning success of the Pearl Harbor attack proved to be only a temporary fillip; now the Japanese were bogged down in China while simultaneously attempting to prosecute a far-flung Pacific war with an awakened United States and all the industrial might it brought with it. As Kuehn notes in his conclusion, this exposed the inherent Japanese weaknesses and highlighted the United States’ strengths:

All levels of war in [the maritime] environment favour the nation that can best manage, as well as supply, its forces … however it was at the operational and strategic levels where the allies proved most formidable … the old truism that professionals talk logistics was never truer than in the Pacific. Here the allies’ care, attention and planning exceeded the Japanese approach.^[2] 

Kuehn pinpoints that the unity of effort and clarity of command provided by the Allied Combined Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Chiefs of Staff was never replicated in any way, shape or form by the Japanese. With these threads woven throughout, Kuehn covers the conduct of the war from the initial reversals to the gradual wresting of the initiative from the Japanese and the endgame played out in the Philippines and Okinawa. Australian readers will enjoy the coverage of the bifurcated US operations, with the tensions between the different ‘ways’ and ‘means’ employed by General Douglas MacArthur in the South-West Pacific Area and Admiral Chester Nimitz in the Pacific Ocean Area that were accommodated because they nested within the overall strategic ‘ends.’ While tensions existed, the overall efficacy of the Allied effort starkly contrasted with the utterly dysfunctional Japanese strategic/operational/tactical nexus.

I had a few quibbles with the book. Kuehn did not take a standardised approach to the use of ranks, so some are written in full whereas others are abbreviated. Likewise, some military acronyms are spelt out, whereas others are not. Perhaps this is simply a reflection that the book was written for a professional military audience with an assumed knowledge of such terminology. Australian readers may also raise eyebrows when reading about the wartime prime minister ‘John Curtain’. On the whole, however, these are minor oversights and do little to detract from Kuehn’s work.

When writing this review, I pondered whether a reader who had absolutely no knowledge or background in the Pacific war could read this book and attain the ‘strategic literacy’ it sought to provide. To this question, I believe the answer is generally ‘yes’. Certainly by pursuing brevity, Kuehn necessarily had to forsake detail. Nonetheless, Strategy in Crisis achieves its stated aim and would be an excellent starting point for any Australian military professional wishing to explore the linkages between strategy and operations, or those wishing to enhance their understanding of how warfare in our near region was planned and executed in the Second World War. If, after consuming Kuehn’s impressive little book, a reader’s appetite for such topics is whetted, I can thoroughly recommend John C McManus’s magisterial three-volume series on the US Army in the Pacific for a broader and deeper treatment of the same subject.^[3]

Endnotes