Customer Reviews

The Battle of Savo Island: The Harrowing Account of the Disastrous Night Battle Off Guadalcanal that Nearly Destroyed the Pacific Fleet in August 1942

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Just finished this work. I have not read any other books dedicated to this battle alone; my searches indicate, however, that this is still the definitive account of the battle, 60 years later.

Plusses: Clear, lucid style. Prominent featuring of eyewitness accounts. Strikes balanced level of detail, rendering the work readable and valuable to readers of varying familiarity with naval terminology. And perhaps biggest plus of all; if you want to read something specifically about Savo, well, this is pretty much all there is (to my knowledge).

Minuses: "Ship by Ship" narrative style sometimes leads to repeating relatively minor anecdotes, without apparent need. After a superb introduction, detailing Japanese operations up to the first salvo, the author almost completely ignores the Japanese perspective during the battle itself. Newcomb obviously had access to Japanese participants in order to write the opening chapters; why did he not include their accounts of what happened during the battle?

Overall, well worth reading.

Newcomb repeatedly emphasizes the shortcoming of a fractured chain of command, and divided forces (so too, did the investigating admiral after the fact). I would wholly agree that these were deep shortcomings in the Allied force. I suspect, however, that these specific factors may not have been decisive. ALL ELSE BEING EQUAL, if all 6 cruisers had been together in one group, under positive command of one flag officer, I personally believe that the outcome would have been similar. Horrifically poor long-range reconnaissance, poor communications, superior Japanese night tactics and weapon (an outstanding torpedo), and an early-war complacent atmosphere were more pertinent to the case at hand. The biggest SINGLE factor, I believe, was the complete breakdown of reconnaissance.

These guys simply had no situational awareness. The most ably led, superbly trained force will still get bushwacked if they simply don't know what their environment is.

On the evening of August 9, 1942, a Japanese force of cruisers and destroyers steamed down "the slot" toward the American beachhead at Guadalcanal. Despite being spotted on four different occasions by Allied forces, these Japanese ships managed to achieve complete surprise on the unsuspecting Allied forces covering the entrance to Savo Sound. In the span of eight minutes, four Allied heavy cruisers (USS Astoria, USS Vincennes, USS Quincy, and HMAS Canberra) were sunk by the Japanese, whose expertise at night fighting and the use of torpedoes became painfully clear to the Allies on this night.

Why were the Japanese so successful and why were the Allies caught so completely by surprise? There are several factors. First, the Japanese cruisers carried torpedo tubes while the Allied cruisers did not. The Japanese used their torpedoes with deadly accuracy, while the Allies had to rely on guns alone. Second, the ultimate failure of the command structure of the Allied forces played a large part in the defeat. The Japanese force was spotted on its approach at least four times. Each time, the sughting was inaccurately described, or the message never reached those in charge of the ships. Also, the overall commander of the Allied forces, Admiral Crutchley, failed to notify the commanders of the other ships that he was removing his flagship, the HMAS Australia, from the group. This left no one in overall command. The cruiser captains were forced to fend for themselves. These factors, plus an overwhelming desire by the Japanese to succeed, led to the disaster at Savo Island. Had the Japanese continued the fight and attacked the American transports which were unloading off of Guadalcanal, the disaster would have been much worse for the Allies.

Author Richard F. Newcomb does a very good job describing this great loss for the Allies. He describes the intrepid Japanese Admiral Mikawa, who decided to attack the Americans, as well as all of the sightings of his force by the Allies. Perhaps his best work in this book is how he describes the action on each Allied cruiser, devoting a separate chapter to the Astoria, Vincennes, Quincy, and Canberra. A good follow-up to the battle is also provided at the end of the book.

I recommend this book. It does a good job of describing one of the darkest days of the United States Navy and the lessons which were learned from the defeat. These lessons led ultimaely to the defeat of Japan.

The Battle of Savo Island by Richard F. Newcomb is a fine book with a wealth of background material, details, human-interest stories, and official assessments (including the findings of the post-event examinations of the breakdowns in the U.S. Navy's failures in this early defeat). The book is constructive in that it does not simply castigate the Navy for its ineptitudes, but discusses the positive lessons that were learned from this defeat that had positive effect later one in the war. It is a timely book to help understand the battle that occurred as part of the first major U.S. offensive at Guadalcanal in the summer of 1942. It is well written and is informative to those who are interested in learning more about this aspect of the war in the Pacific. The one negative criticism I would offer is that the map (pp. 112-113) is poorly done. First of all it is not completely drawn (for example, the outline of the northern coast of Guadalcanal is missing as are parts of some words) and it is not dynamic in character (showing the progress of the battle with ship log times and fates). It would have been far better to have included a map similar to another one on p.192 or the Savo Island battle map shown in Samuel Eliot Morison's The Two Ocean Navy, Holt, New York, 1963: pp 170-171. Such a detailed map would greatly facilitate understanding of what occurred in that engagement, beyond the verbal descriptions.

This book is an outstanding account on the Battle of Savo Island. My Uncle was killed in the battle on the USS Quincy and it really helped me to know what had happened the day he died. I am very grateful to the author for presenting a complete picture of what happened.

This was a well-written, easy to read account of a horrible "battle". I ordered the book because my husband's grandfather's death was detailed. This is the first time we have really been able to find out what happened and what the battle was about. I do not read war books but I could not put this one down. The description of what went wrong was well done. I can appreciate all of the work that went into putting this together!

This is an excellent account of a tragic battle that occured early on in the Guadalcanal campaign. My mother lost a brother in this battle. His name was William Moore Stack, he was on the Quincy. This book is required reading in our family. To this day Newcombs work remains the definitive account of what happen on August 9, 1942. Unfortunately this latest paperback addition omits the pictures that earlier additions have.

Guadalcanal, Tulagi, Savo, Rendova, Vella Lavella, Kula Gulf, Kolombagara, Bougainville were, for many decades, justa a bunch of islands with strange-souding names in a far-flung South Pacific archipelago, lost somewhere between Hawaii and Australia. That was, until 7 August, 1942, exactly 8 months after Pearl Harbor, when started a bloody campaign that would span for 17 months, cost hundreds of lives and sent to the bottom of the ocean about 100 warships - Allied and Japanese - so many that it is called officially The Ironbottom Sound.
The Battle of Savo Island started as a Japanese Navy attempt to counter the landing at Guadalcanal and Tulagi. Sending in a force of cruisers and destroyers under Admiral Gunichi Mikawa aimed at the fleet off the beaches supporting the landing of the US 1st Marine Division, the Japanese were confronted by an Allied motley force of cruisers and DD's under Australian Admiral V.A.C. Crutchley. Like in the Murphy's Law, everything that could go wrong went wrong. No one was in command; the American skippers just didn't know what was going on until too late. Taken pants down by the Japanese, the multinacional force was smashed ship by ship, under cannon fire and the dreaded Long-Lance torpedoes, losing 4 cruisers and suffering heavy damage on a cruiser and two DD's.
In a harrowing account, Richard Newcomb gives an almost minute-by-minute description of the night engagement that almost turned back the American forces from the Solomons. Savo Island, thru its mistakes and blunders, taught the US Navy a lesson, learned the hard way, but learned for good.

Richard F. Newcomb's The Battle of Savo Island is the story of the U.S. Navy's first of many surface actions against the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Solomons campaign, and the series of oversights, assumptions and lack of communication that led to the destruction of four Allied cruisers (three American and one Australian) in little more than an hour in the early morning of August 9, 1942.

First published in 1961, Newcomb's book makes use of numerous vivid firsthand accounts, since the youngest of the combatants would have still been in their thirties while the author was conducting his research. The chapters that cover the Japanese attack and its immediate aftermath are therefore filled with detailed anecdotes derived from events less than two decades old.

In the final chapters Newcomb wraps things up by analyzing the fallout of the battle: which officers were blamed or not blamed and how it affected their careers. It is interesting that the commander of the Allied cruiser force, the Briton Crutchley, emerges officially unscathed. Perhaps this is due to a reluctance by the U.S. to seek discipline for a British officer. I thought Newcomb could have been more opinionated in his analysis in this area.

The story of the Battle of Savo Island is highly instructive to students of the Pacific theater of WWII. It demonstrates just how great a tactical blow the U.S. forces could sustain, with minimal strategic impact. The long range result of this debacle for the U.S. was that they learned a lot very fast, not just about how to improve their surface tactics, but in how to better their command and communication structure in the South Pacific.

Overall, Newcomb does a great job with the available sources, and manages to create a thorough history without sacrificing narrative momentum.

This is a well-written, insightful book on one of the most interesting naval battles of World War II. You've got to wonder about the publisher of the paperback edition, though, since the cover has a picture of some Marines making a landing. They sure didn't land on Savo Island, and the battle relates only tangentially to the landings at Guadalcanal. Ignore the cover art and buy the book.

In the fall of 1961, I read the original version of this work. Upon completion, I was troubled and puzzled. I reviewed the entire work finding no answers to my many questions. This has little to do with the brilliant writing of Mr. Newcomb. In a highly interesting style, Mr. Newcomb wrote what history had to offer. It was the history itself that caused the quandaries. This is a fascinating battle with many questions yet today, and it represents the worst naval battle defeat of our Navy, which few know about. The many unanswered questions were taken up 35 years later, in 1996, when I commenced research for "The Bode Testament," which appears on this site. Is there any higher compliment to a book that it becomes the basis for another? That the subject matter and the excellent writing of Mr. Newcomb were so pervasive that it was recalled 3 ½ decades later. I think not...