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(More customer reviews)The subtitle of Barlow's book says it all. Post-World-War-II Baby Boomers may not know that--while they were in strollers--the seamlessly integrated sea-air fighting capacity taken for granted today in America's military nearly died on the drawing boards over five decades ago. The politicians representing the war-weary American people were naive to events presaging war in Korea and unable to foresee the kind of military the nation would need in the yet-unnamed Cold War. Ignoring military science, intent on gratifying the voters by slashing postwar military budgets, some in the Truman administration and in Congress raced to eliminate what they saw as duplication of functions in the Armed Services. Empire builders in the nascent Air Force saw their chance to propagate the simplistic notion that all military flying should be under their charge. It was even buzzed about Washington that the country might get the cheapest military of all if Army, Navy and Air Force were merged into a single service; and that atom bombs had made carriers & their planes obsolete. Barlow's carefully-researched & clearly-written book tells--with thrills & chills worthy of a spy novel--the story of how the politicians' ignorance & the generals' grandstanding came within a whisker of wrecking American naval aviation forever.
In telling this important story--an object lesson to this day--Barlow has done the writer of these comments a favor: he has given meaning & substance to the dim memories of someone who watched it happen as a child. My dad was one of the Navy's first aeronautical engineering duty officers. In the time covered by Barlow's book, he was in the guts of the Navy's research & development, working on technical adaptations such as the angled deck, the steam catapult, and the mirror landing system--developments that would make carrier-based flight under jet power feasible.
Meantime, I was tasked with learning manners, which I tried to do during my parents' "at-homes" [Navy lingo for cocktail parties], by shaking hands with the likes of "Admiral [Arleigh] Burke" and "Mr. [Dan] Kimball." At one of these, I got the idea of offering for sale, to guests of this ilk, the miscellaneous bottle caps and wine stoppers that were accumulating behind the bar, much to my wondering eyes. My parents concluded I had a lot to learn about manners.
I remember my dad's voice late one afternoon, a few minutes after he arrived home from the Navy Department, saying to my mom, "Dear, Jim Forrestal's dead." I remember their indignation over the morning papers as they read about the cancellation of the aircraft carrier "United States." I remember my mom's resentment that in those years Dad was usually doing two jobs for the price of one. Indeed, by May 1949, he was both Director of the Guided Missiles Division and Deputy Chief for Research & Development in the Bureau of Aeronautics.
Thank you, Jeffrey Barlow: in recounting this crisis in American military history, you have also enabled one woman to identify her childhood.
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