Customer Reviews

The Saga of Hog Island: And Other Essays in Inconvenient History

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When this book first appeared, the title THE SAGA OF HOG ISLAND AND OTHER ESSAYS IN INCONVENIENT HISTORY appeared strange until he read the essays. These essays are thoroughly documented with end notes taken from the public record and show what an honest historian can do with some work in the library as opposed to error filled "documentaries" and rehash of "mainstream" hisorians that are filled with distortions, fabrications, sloppy research, and omissions. Why the study of history has deterioated to this point may be due to cowardice, political connections, etc. "Historians" show a desire to be apprensively conventional rather than fundamentally honest which was ruined both the writing and teaching of history. Anyone who want to escape such dismal writing would find this book "a breath of fresh air."

James J. Martin's Introduction to this book is in itself a careful look at the sad state of historical writing. Historians actually did serious reading and research to write their books. This began to deceline in an attempt to write history as literature rather than give accurate accounts of history. Then the craft of historical writing declined further in that "historians" decided to write unreadable prose to be "popular" and politically correct. The refusal to do serious research and do any original thinking so historians can "fit it" was diagnosed by A.J.P. Taylor when he was asked if history repeats itself. Taylor's response was no, but dull historians repeated each other.

The first essay titled "The Saga of Hog Island" is instructive. This essays deals with the financial scandal and massive theft and fraud that took place during World War I when wealthy contractors got lucrative contracts to build transport ships to send U.S. troops to fight the forces of evil in Europe. The financial scandals, theft, sloppy accounting, etc. was a scandal so expensive that it made the Teapot Dome Scandal of the early 1920s look like petty theft by comparison. The record keeping was so bad that government auditors who tried to unravel the problems surrendered in their attempt. One should note after all the flag waving and "patriotic" effort to build these ships, not one ship was launched to carry any troops, but some corporate executives were rich thanks to the American taxpayer.

Of particular interest are the essays dealing with the criminality of U.S. policy makers regarding Pearl Harbor to enter World War II in Europe through the "Back Door to War" as Charles Tansill titled his well written on this topic. Martin reveals that erronous judgement that the Japanese who lived on Islands the size of California with less than the population of the United States and natural resources of the state of Mississsippi would not last six months in a war with the United States. This prediction was undermined by four tough years of war against an enemy who controlled much of China and were vastly outnumbered and outresourced. Martin makes the poignant remark that the this war was imposed by U.S. policy makers on behalf of the "Open Door" in China. The only thing the Japanese did in China was what the British, French, Russians, etc. did in China for much of the second half of the 19th century. In other words, the only crime of the Japanese was that they were the new player in the imperialist game in Asia. Yet, what did the Americans get for their "victory?" The Chinese Communists came to power in 1949 and slammed the Open Door shut for all of the Weaterners including the Americans. By eliminating the Japanese in China, the Americans left Asia wide open for Big Communism. Martin shows Asians were very impressed that the Japanese fought the British and Americans and made the war a tough fight in spite of overwhelming odds. Other Asians were aware of the Westerner's feet of clay and decided to "act up" with their large populations and huge land area. As an aside, an American diplomat was rattled by a Japanese diplomat who asked how the Americans enjoyed fighting the Chinese Communists since the Americans removed the only effective force against Chinese Communists by ruining the Japanese during World War II. One should note that the Japanese checked Mao tse-Tungs's emerging Communists from the 1930s to 1945.

Martin also has a thoughtful essay on British efforts to first declare war on the Germans in 1939 and preach the utter destruction of the Germans during the entire war. Churchill's lads preached fire and vengence against the Germans and refused any negotiated peace. What did Churchill & co. have to show for this "victory?" The British brought the Soviets much closer to Great Britain. The Soviets who were now armed with nuclear weapons posed a much more serious threat than the Germans ever dreamed of, and six Soviet hydrogen bombs could make the British Isles uninhabitable. The British lost their empire very quickly and in turn their economic status. The declining value of their currency made the British as second class, and their brutal efforts in attempting to stop rebellions in Asia and Africa were equal to anything the Germans were accused of during and after World War II. Martin proves his case that the British have become an American welfare case ever since World War II and probably will be for a long time.

Another interesting essay in this book is Martin's essay titled "The Death and Life of the Mafia." The Italian government under Mussolini crushed the Italian Mafia and their "homcidal greed" only to see the restoration of the Mafia beginning in 1944. This essay shows that the revival of Mafia was yet another one of those unintended consequences of World War II.

The other essays in this book are well worth reading. Martin shows precision in his research, and his writing style in concise and clear. Anyone who is tired of canned historical accounts and wants a starting position to more comprehensively understand the complexities leading the World War II and the Cold War would enjoy this book and would have the resources to write more honest and inconvenient history. As one of this reviewer's former students wrote one time, if one opens a can of worms, go fishing.

In an article published soon after James J. Martin's death in April 2004, interviewer Jeff Riggenbach, said:

"He didn't regard himself as a "revisionist," really, Martin told me near the beginning of our first telephone conversation late in 2002, so much as an "additionist" - the fellow who comes along after the historical accounts have been written and adds what's been (inadvertently or deliberately) left out..."

The phrase may as well have been the dedication for Martin's "The Saga Of Hog Island And Other Essays in Inconvenient History" (1977). These essays, like James J Martin himself, are both inconvenient and cannot easily be pigeon holed into the prepared square boxes labelled with your favourite or least favourite "-ism". There are six chapters (i.e. long essays) and three appendicies (i.e. short essays). The writing style is excellent and engaging, and I found only one of the essays (Hog Island) too long. Martin's writing style is plainly superior to over ninety per cent of the non-fiction writers out there, but this isn't the real jewel. That honour belongs to Martin's footnotes. Martin's footnotes are long, copious, scholarly, yet entertaining, incisive and opinionated all at the same time. To read the book ignore the footnotes, would be in this case, like ordering a fine meal and missing desert.

Martin's additionist essays are historical correctives that have relevance to events today. The first essay tells the story of the massive world war 1 ship building yard built at Hog Island, now the site of Philadelphia International Airport. Legend has it that the "Hoagie" sandwich may have had it's origin among the many Italian American shipyard workers. At it's peak as many as 36,000 workers were employed on Hog Island yards. This vast facility was established to mass produce cargo ships for the WW1 war effort, along the lines of the more famous "Liberty Ships" of WW2. But the program was dogged by scandal and massive accounting "incompetence". In the end Hog Island, owned and operated by a consortium who's membership register reads like a "Who's Who" of the American business and industrial elite, delivered 122 ships that cost of "at least" $235 million to build (that is $2.4 billion in 2007 dollars, ~$20M each). Most of the ships were ultimately sold for a mere $35,000 each ($353,000 in 2007 dollars). Hog Island itself was a part of a larger web of mismanagement that embraced the Shipping Board and the Emergency Fleet Corporation. "Alfred D. Lasker, who assumed the direction of the Shipping Board under President Harding, on July 16, 1921 decalred that the total government 'loss' on the ship construction, operation and leasing activities during the World War came to $4,000, 000, 000- double the figure originally thought." Corrected for inflation, those 1921 dollars amount to approximately $40.3 billion in 2007 dollar terms. In a January 31, 2005 CNN article published under the headline "Audit: U.S. lost track of $9 billion in Iraq funds". "Nearly $9 billion of money spent on Iraqi reconstruction is unaccounted for because of inefficiencies and bad management, according to a watchdog report published Sunday." It's probably not being over dramatic to say that the vast 'losses' in US military-industrial spending represent part of a 90 year tradition of apparently unending fiscal incompetence.

On the 10th January 2000, "The Weekly Standard" declared that Winston Churchill was `Man of the Century'. In his second essay "The Consequences of World War Two to Great Britain: Twenty Years of Decline, 1939 -1959" provides a much needed tonic to Churchill worship, and his elevation to the status of prophet, as regularly recycled by the History Channel and George W Bush's bedside reading. In 1942 Churchill declared "I have not become His Majesty's first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire." Yet to a large extent that was his real legacy as Martin explains. Martin's piece also illustrates the extraordinary fickleness of many American conservatives. Ever ready (and probably rightfully so) to condemn FDR for bending over too far to accomodate Josef Stalin, FDR's "willing accomplice" Winston Churchill largely escapes scot free from conservative criticism. Yet less than a year before his famous 1946 Fulton Missouri "Iron Curtain" speech, Churchill was praising Comrade Joe in parliament. Perhaps had FDR, who died in April 1945, had lived another year he would have had time to perform a public somersault too.

Martin provides an eye opening essay on Mussolini's campaign against the mafia. Like most students of history I had heard of this but had assumed Mussolini must have conducted some kind of fascist purge or authoritarian "round up" of mafiosi. Not so. Mussolini's campaign was quite civilised with the accused being provided legal rights and indeed many accused successfully defended themselves against the charges and walked free. Still despite these 'handicaps', Mussolini's lawful and orderly campaign against the mobs was one of the largest and most successful campaigns against organised crime anywhere, and much of it's gain was unravelled by a mixture of postwar chaos and some allied cooperation with the mafia. Martin explores this last angle too. Many of us have heard of Lucky Luciano's claims to have helped protect the New York waterfront from German saboteurs and to have aided the allied advance across Sicily. These stories indeed have become legends of sort. Martin sees them as shameless self promotion from a crook on the make. The allied armoured and amphibious campaign in Sicily wasn't dependent on local mafiosi to show them goat tracks behind the Axis lines.

Martin has three essays on the Pacific War. Only one could really be called revisionist. In "Pearl Harbor: Antecedents, Background and Consequences" he outlines the background to Japanese-American rivalry in the Pacific in the decades and days before Pearl Harbor. Usually "the revisionist position" here (as if there were just one) is summarised as the claim that FDR engaged in a conspiracy over Pearl Harbor. The old mainstream belief that FDR was really an innocent victim of a surprise attack has now largely been dismissed from serious scholarship, thanks to decades worth of unpraised work by revisionist historians. The new mainstream belief is that the unheeded warnings of imminent attack were mishandled. Administrative incompetence rather then conspiracy provides a better explanation. The revised mainstream account arbitrarily assumes incompetence and conspiracy are mutually exclusive categories. More to the point was "Rainbow 5", the then secret ABDA (Australian-British-Dutch-American) agreement "..to fight the Japanese in Asia if their forces crossed a geographic line..[which]..approximated the northerly extremity of the [Dutch East Indies]." The US government was advised that the Japanese had crossed the magic line on December 3 (Washington time) and that America's allies naturally expected the US government to live up to it's agreements. The apparent mishandling of reports concerning Japanese fleet movements in the northern pacific need to be considered with the ABDA timeline in mind. Considering the great difficulty the administration had in having conscription passed in Congress, it squeaked through by just one vote, a certain degree of planned incompetence, an art form familiar to anyone who has worked in a bureaucracy can attest to, is not an unreasonable explanation (although one inherently and deliberately hard to prove). Nor is such a hypothesis equivalent to Roswell UFOs or the Bavarian Illuminati as anti-conspiracists like to maintain.

Martin also essays the stories of Colin Kelly and "Tokyo Rose". Kelly was an airman who died early in the Philippines campaign after his aircraft was hit following an indecisive attack on a second or third tier Japanese vessel, probably a supply transport. In the dark days of continuous bad news from the Pacific his deeds were inflated to legendary status by the media, and indeed the administration, until it sounded as if he single handedly sank a battleship in a one-man kamikaze attack. Subsequent revisions of the official account deflated the Kelly story down to a footnote before disappearing in later versions. The whole story seems to echo in the 2003 Jessica Lynch story. Times indeed have changed, the spin cycle is faster these days. The "Tokyo Rose" essay details how a soldiers' myth, that there was one seductive Japanese propaganda broadcaster luring GIs with tales of unfaithful girlfriends back home, led to a miscarriage of justice that scarred the life of Iva Toguri, a young Japanese American woman accidentally caught up in Japan whilst visiting family in the days surrounding Pearl Harbor. Toguri, one of many english language broadcasters was made carry the can for the lot. With the boom in recent years of feminist and multicultural studies, all under the history banner, it is surprising that Martin's "The Framing of Tokyo Rose", especially with it's hints of sexuality, hasn't become a standard in gender studies. This too has modern references, and not just in the United States. The current "War on Terror" is leaving in it's wake a growing "bodycount" of innocent bystanders caught at the wrong place, often to become the victims of tragic miscarriages of justice as government security apparatus strikes out at it's elusive quarry.

The book is rounded off with three brief appendix essays, essentially magazine articles. The first compares the blacklists imposed on Axis commerce in South America by the US in the years before Pearl Harbor to the attempted Arab boycott of jewish owned firms in the US in 1975. The second discusses the Morgenthau Plan and the third is a brief history of political assassination in the first half of the 20th century. The last article is definitely the best, the Morgenthau Plan article is not comprehensive and seems to have been prematurely ended, neglecting to cover it's demise and the boycott article seems to me to be "drawing a long bow". The Rockefeller administered Axis boycott in South America, whatever else it was, was part of an actual economic warfare plan, the Arab boycott barely deserved the name and was almost entirely a propaganda campaign lacking serious enforcement teeth. If anything it probably boomeranged and hardened international opinion against the Arab campaign.

"The Saga of Hog Island" is recommended to anyone interested in modern history.