Customer Reviews

Sweet Pea at War: A History of USS Portland (CA-33)

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I am grateful for Generous' contribution of the details of the USS Portland and all the officers and men who served onboard her from launching to decommissioning. He is deserves praise for the efforts made to insure that those stories would not be lost to history. If he had just concentrated on this great task, I would have had no problem with his work. But he was not content with this. He seems to have taken this opportunity to project himself as a great naval tactician and analyst. It was bad enough that he proved himself nothing more than an amateur, but he did this at the expense of some great naval figures of the war. I, personally, cannot tolerate those who attempt to promote themselves at the expense of others, especially when facts are not properly researched or left out to accomplish this goal. His treatment of Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan, the Officer in Tactical Command (OTC) of the task force that met the Japanese at the First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal ("Night Cruiser Action") is the most blatant example of this. Generous seems to have had a grudge against this fine officer, who lived and died in the best of United States Navy tradition. He states that Callaghan "never had a major sea command before" taking on this task. It just so happens that he commanded the heavy cruiser USS San Francisco (a more prestigious command than that of the Portland) for a year before being promoted to admiral and being taken by the newly appointed Commander-in-Chief South Pacific Area. Admiral Ghormley had his choice of many who were senior to Callaghan, but chose him because of his competence. I would choose an admiral's evaluation for ability and competence over any academic historian of the following century. If, as Generous maintains, Ghormley was also as much a failure as he was, he would have sought out as his chief of staff one who he felt made up for what he lacked. Generous proved completely ignorant of the tactical situation that enveloped the days before this battle. He praised Rear Admiral Scott (well deserved) for his ability to train the ships in his force prior to his victory at the Battle of Cape Esperance. Generous leaves out the fact that Scott had weeks to accomplish this. He neglects to inform his readers that Callaghan only knew of his task and the ships that would be at his disposal the day of the battle. Escorting the supply ships and providing protection for them left him with no time to train or even meet with the commanders of all of his ships to discuss the strategy that would be employed. This was typical of the situations that confronted our forces at that time. While Generous again comes down on Callaghan for the placement of his ships, real naval analysis has never been able to come to such a conclusive conclusion. Generous, is so intent on destroying Callaghan's reputation that he also leaves out that he was killed in that action as a result of his not staying in the battle-hardened command and control station. He, as many other brave officers felt that they could not maintain proper perspective of the battle within an area that so restricted their observation. He died because he put his supreme duty before his personal safety. Generous exhibits such contempt for Callaghan that he even uses his receiving the Medal of Honor as a means of getting in a final stab. This is hardly what makes a competent writer of military history. Only his treatment of the crew of the Portland keeps it out of my trash can.

At the very introduction of the book I became concerned for what might follow when Generous admits that he had never even heard of the USS Portland until two years before he wrote the introduction. I knew then that the writer would not be of the caliber that normally writes on naval history subjects. Anyone who had not heard of the Portland could not have known much of the war in the Pacific. The rest of the book only supported my fears. I began to feel that I was not reading well researched material but what had been gleaned from interviews from crewmembers. This really comes out when the ship did not get a battle star for its one-ship raid on Tarawa in October 1942. He makes a major point of this at the event and then ends the book with a reminder of this neglect on the part of the Navy. Add this to his repeated effort to convince his readers that the turning point of the war was when the Portland played its most important role (where he blasts Admiral Callaghan) instead of the Battle of Midway. Both of those seem to be supported mainly from the tactical viewpoint of most sailors. There is nothing wrong with a crew seeing things as they do and judging events and their treatment from the perspective of themselves. But when a historian takes the same view, he misleads his readers if they are looking for the facts. He seems to think that a war's turning point is a tactical rather than a strategic event. This extends to the incident at Tarawa where Admiral Tisdale forces a cease fire before the captain wanted to. It is right for a captain to want to continue an engagement. But an admiral has a bigger picture of what the goals of whole operation encompasses. For Generous to imply cowardliness on the part of Admiral Tisdale is, once again, irresponsible.

After reading the first hundred pages, I reverted to just reading sections that talked about the ship and crew. By that time Generous had lost all credibility with me. By doing so, I enjoyed much of the remainder. As I said at the beginning, Generous is to be commended for his treatment of the ship and crew.

"Sweet Pea at War" is seriously flawed. The author, William Generous, really knows very little about naval warfare of the period, with the result that his interpretations of events are misleadingly wrong. I'll give two examples:

1) Generous obviously has looked into the Portland's battle reports, but he does not have the knowledge level to interprete them correctly. In one, the commanding officer included a number of technical commentaries and complaints and suggestions from various crew members. Generous goes into a psychological rant about how this shows that the commanding officer was insecure, and how this reflected on his poor leadership style and why he was disliked by the crew, and on and on and on. Obviously he has not read other battle reports; if he had, he would have found that it was standard procedure for crew comments to be included in the reports, ver batim, when they were available. There are reports of AA actions that include the comments down to the seaman second firing 20mm guns. COs were instructed to sit their troops down and get written after-action reports from anyone with something to contribute - often not done because of circumstances, but still a required process. Thus Generous ends up trashing the reputation of an officer because he did not understand the procedures for naval after-action reports.

2) In one action Portland was off-axis from the line of approach of a Japanese air attack on a carrier. The Portland gunnery officer decided to put up a fixed barrage over the CV to deter / interfere with Japanese dive bombers. In the after-action report he claims that the barrage worked very well, and recommends that all CV escort ships follow the procedure. Generous then spends some ink telling the readers how this shows that the particular gunnery officer was so innovative and forward thinking and contributing to the advance of the art of AAA. This was, in fact, not the case. Barrage AA fire was an early technique borne of the lack of a good director. With the advent of the US mk 37, and good fuse setters, tracked fire was possible and more effective than barrage. The gunnery officer's "innovative thinking" was actually regressive. Generous does not know this; in addition, later in the history, when the Portland's gunnery officer again uses the barrage technique, and it fails, he is silent about this, ignoring the event, likely because it would undermine his previously-made case. Either we have a case where Generous picks out and highlights facts that support his positions and ignores those that do not, or Generous simply did not recognize that the later incident shattered his previously-made argument. In either case, we have a situation where the author really does not understand what he is commenting upon, something like reading a high-school paper on quantum theory.

There is lots of dross like that scattered throughout: Generous' analysis of Midway is sophomoric, and he continually makes editorial comments on things that just are not so, such as his statement that the .50 cal AA guns on the ship were replaced because they were "flimsy."

Given all that, you have to recognize what is available in this book. You are not buying Generous' expertice, obviously; you are buying the story of the ship, and the tales related by the crewmembers, **their** views and anecdotes and histories, along with the occasional direct quote from action reports, if one can assume that Generous quoted accurately, such as ammunition expenditure or AA aircraft kill claims.

From that approach, "Sweet Pea at War" is a worthwhile acquisition if you are savvy enough in naval warfare to separate the good from the bad, or if you are just looking for an interesting read on WW II in a cruiser mostly from the enlisted point of view. This book would be a worthwhile read for someone expert in naval warfare and the Pacific campaigns, but I would not recommend quoting the author on anything else, and I would not

recommend it as a casual read for anyone not an expert in the field.

Dr. Alan D. Zimm CDR USN (ret).

The book is a disappointment. The author is a cheerleader and partisan for his subject (justly so, as far as the crew goes), inflating the significance of the Portland's role in various affairs, but offering harsh and sometimes poorly informed judgments of many figures in this history. He is deeply unfair to many of them, including Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan, as one reviewer has noted. Ditto for his treatment of Gilbert C. Hoover, captain of the light cruiser Helena who was unjustly relieved of command after the sinking of the USS Juneau.

That sad event, if objectively considered, is a story of the difficult decisions a commander faces in wartime. On November 13, 1942, Gilbert Hoover faced an impossible choice: Stop and try to rescue the Juneau's survivors with an enemy sub lurking and risk your own ships to further attack, or steam on and get your force home. Hoover made a tough call. Author Generous is anything but: he crucifies Hoover, rather childishly pointing out that Hoover left himself "wide open for inquiry, something that Captain Laurence DuBose in the Portland did not do," as if their circumstances were comparable. Five pages later, the author, evidently forgetting what he had just written, recounts how Admiral Halsey censured DuBose for failing to report that his fire-control radar was broken before going into battle. (Of course, according to Generous it was Halsey who was wrong.)

Generous, discussing Hoover's relief from command, misleadingly suggests that opinion on his case was unanimous and the verdict inarguable. "No one in the chain of command then would cut [Hoover] any slack," he writes. Well, not quite. None other than Admiral Chester Nimitz himself, immediately upon reading the reports, defended Captain Hoover's judgment very clearly and specifically in response to Halsey's hot-headed and impulsive decision to relieve him on the spot. Hoover still got relieved, but the consensus today, supported by Nimitz's contemporaneous response to the matter, is that Hoover got the rawest of deals.

Why does Generous portray Hoover as he does? It's clear in the text that it's because the author is annoyed that Hoover, captain of the cruiser Helena, declined to tow the damaged Portland from the battle area on November 13. This is incredibly small-minded stuff -- and just one example of the author's unreliability. I'll provide just one more, lest someone think I'm a relative of Gilbert Hoover.

In the book, Generous offers snarky comments about the cruiser San Francisco, which participated in action with the Portland off Guadalcanal on November 13. The San Francisco, the American flagship, was grievously damaged in that action, and both her captain and the admiral of the American task force, Callaghan, were killed along with about 100 other men. During the battle the San Francisco inflicted heavy damage on several ships (enemy and, sadly, friend alike). Well, Generous seems not to like the San Francisco very much. He makes a couple of egregiously ignorant statements denigrating the San Francisco's contribution in the battle. He doesn't seem to know that the San Francisco was most directly responsible for the crippling, at close range, of the Japanese battleship Hiei.

The best explanation for the author's myopia in this instance seems to be that he shares the parochial irritation of the Portland veterans he interviewed that the Portland did not receive a Presidential Unit Citation like the San Francisco did. He all but states this outright, raising questions as to his reliability as a historian.

Guadalcanal's complexities dispensed with, onward he roams, rudderlessly taking potshots at anyone who might seem to slight the Portland's preeminence in every situation and her officers' brilliance in every decision, and heaping tendentious praise on his subject ship for the tiniest of things.

Make no mistake. The Portland was a great and gallant ship. The problem with the book is that the author does not seem to understand that people, even the Portland's men, were fallible, and that there were other ships in the United States Navy other than the storied CA-33.

There's some good new anecdotage about one ship's participation in the Pacific war here, but given its narrow parochialism I'd recommend you read the book warily, and maybe even just leave it on the shelf.

Generous opens the world of the Navy to those of us civilians, with personal stories full of drama and humor. And he writes with a refreshingly clear & direct style...

Strongly recommended! :)

A wonderfully factual and entertaining account of the WW2 war in the Pacific. Brings back fond (and not so fond) memories of life on a heavy cruiser.

My grandfather TK Erickson served as a five inch gun "talker" on the USS Portland in world war two. He died in New Mexico about 15 years ago, and I've missed hearing his stories. In remembrance of him, I built a working radio controlled model of the USS Portland, but was never able to find any books about the ship.

When I ran across this book, I immediately had to purchase it. The book is a high quality, and it provides a true account of each battle star earned by the crew of the Sweet Pea. From the pre-war years when Portland escorted FDR on the USS Houston, to the final battles in the Pacific War, and finally the big Navy day celebration in Portland, Maine, this book lays it all out. My grandfather gave me a newspaper clipping from Navy day in Maine, and it was so cool to read more about that event, which obviously meant so much to the crew.

Like any other book about historical events, this one is not perfect, but regardless this book is a treasure as one of the few books about one of the most significant ships of the US Pacific Fleet in world war two.

Great book, too bad none of the heavies outside of USS Salem never made it into memorials, I would love to have seen one.

Like so many other ships, the USS Portland was one of the unsung heroes of the War. Author William Thomas Generous Jr. did extensive research yet correctly focused on the men, both swabbies and officers, as the real story within the facts. Personal experiences are interwoven with the larger story of battles and the War and sometimes with more personal analysis and opinion than many may think warranted, especially given the forcefulness at times. However, the reader will undoubtedly become attached to ship and crew alike as they progress further and further into the book. By the end, you want more, always the mark of a good book.

Steven Bustin, Author: Humble Heroes, How The USS Nashville CL43 Fought WWII Humble Heroes: How the USS Nashville CL43 Fought WWII

What an awesome book! I was really sad when I came to the end. I wanted to read more about Sweet Pea and her courageous crew. This book should be made into a movie. An amazing book, about an amazing ship. Dr. Generous thank you for sharing the story with us!

This book finally shows what the USS Portland was all about. The book is a page turner, it kept me interested and made me cry. The author brought to life the environment on this ship as well as the comraderie aboard her. I had always wondered what had happened to her, now I know. I think everyone who wants to learn about WWII, needs a copy of this book.