SHORTER NOTICE
Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record. By Ernest J. King and Walter Muir Whitehill. (Eyre & Spottiswoode.. 30s.) THE Silent Service has recently been growing less silent. Of the nine members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff in the war, four have published memoirs; and of those four, three have been sailors. Admiral King's book has been awaited here with particular interest. For, rightly or wrongly, he has often been regarded as the main, and most forthright, opponent of the British strategy; and his account should have been the more interesting because his grasp and intelligence have never been in dispute. But, though clear and pleasantly written, this book does little directly to satisfy such hopes. Points of view are stated; but the authors seem to have been deterred from discussing them to any length by a wise, but surely essentially separate, decision to avoid personal controversy, King's personal contribution to strategy thus tends to go by default; and indeed both his views and his personality, as reflected in other accounts, seem curiously to have shrunk in the telling. But if the text of the book 'does not answer the questions which a British reader tends to ask, perhaps the reason may be deduced from its arrangement. Of the twelve chapters devoted to the war from December, 1941, five of the last six are devoted principally to the Pacific; and in them may be,seen the Admiral's particular and necessary preoccupation with the massive problems, mainly of interest to the American navy alone, whose solution made of it the most powerful sea force in the world. J. E.
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