Book Review: In the Highest Degree Tragic

In the Highest Degree Tragic:The Sacrifice of the U.S. Asiatic Fleetin the East Indies during World War IIby Donald M. KehnPotomac Books, 2017New from the Potomac Books imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, issued in an oversized and hefty hardcover edition, is a book that seeks to accomplish one hell of a tough task: In his In the Highest Degree Tragic: The Sacrifice of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet in the East Indies during World War II, naval historian Donald Kehn devotes lavish attention to a chapter of the Allied naval war in the Pacific that most broad narrative histories have tended to ignore, and he attempts to highlight the heroism of a campaign that's usually noted only as a sloppy failure.It's the story of the old U.S. Asiatic Fleet, comparatively small and under-gunned but with an excellent complement of tough, ungainly “tin can” destroyers (a class so memorably chronicled in Tin Can Titans by John Wukovits, which tells the story of a squadron far luckier than any in Kehn's book), which was under the command of Admiral Thomas Hart and given one hell of a tough task of its own: to repel the attack of the Imperial Japanese Navy on what were once called the Dutch East Indies. The conflict took place in the wake of Pearl Harbor and well before the more-publicized Battle of the Coral Sea, and Kehn does a finely-detailed, and pleasingly dramatic job of narrating the scattered, terrifying, ad hoc nature of this brief campaign, in which old salts and untested teenagers fought recalcitrant equipment, inconsistent orders (the Asiatic Fleet was part of the larger ABDA, American, British, Dutch, and Australian fighting group), and, as for instance in the approach to the Battle of Balikpapan, the elements themselves:

For the doughty tin-can sailors it was an uncomfortable approach, “under dark clouds across a rough, rolling sea,” yet all were conscious that the heavy weather concealed them from the enemy even though it made them miserable. Gale-force winds and dense rain drove the topside force to seek shelter wherever possible. On Ford, “leading her division into a sea that broke monstrously across the bows as [they] rounded Cape Laiking,” the gun crew for the number 1 4-inch gun on the foc's'le had to take cover in the well deck. Dan Mullin would remember that “the ships pounded through the waves, water flushed over the decks, and spray carried by the wind reached as high as the gun director platform. Sudden wild lurches caused all hands to grab for support.

This is of course the chronicle of a defeat, and the key turning point was the Battle of Sunda Strait in late February of 1942, when an Australian light cruiser and an American heavy cruiser were sunk by Japanese forces. Kehn's book gives the best and most detailed account of this battle that's ever been written in English – a battle he believes to be underestimated in almost every way by historians:

What would follow over the ensuing two hours of that dark night would be one of the war's epic naval encounters, and one in which every imaginable element was present: violent gunnery at close range, repeated torpedo attacks, wild and remarkable ship handling, devastating friendly fire accidents, with terror and extraordinary heroism on every quarter. Yet through its very chaos and the number of participants involved, it would remain one of the least understood and misrepresented of all sea battles during the Pacific War and for many decades afterward.

By the time General John Wainwright surrendered his forces to the Japanese at Corregidor in May of 1942, the U.S. Asiatic Fleet had been mauled almost beyond recognition: a third of its surface vessels were gone, whole complements of men missing, the remaining fleet more battle-scarred than battle-ready. In the Highest Degree Tragic doggedly tracks down as many aspects of that grim aftermath as surviving records and participants make possible, and it likewise pays a ship-by-ship and player-by-player attention to every aspect of the Fleet's brief, heroic turn in the Pacific Theater (the extensive End Notes are a mini-education in their own right). When writing about the US Navy in light of “the dismal Java campaign,” Kehn correctly observes that “we learned more, and better, from our defeats than our enemies had from their victories,” and whether this is more true in hindsight or not, one of the ugliest little defeats in World War II history now has its greatest accounting.