Category: Book Review

GoodReads Meta-data is 336 pages, rated 3.65 by 519 litizens.

Genre: Popular Philosophy (as is Popular Science).

Verdict:  More!

Classical historian Edith Hall delves into the mind and works of the one and only Aristotle her BFF.   He is the leader of the pack as far she is concerned and there is no one else.  The enthusiasm for the subject with the light touch, simple prose, punctuated with real life examples and references to the popular culture are delight.  Though I doubt it got her tenure or promotion.  On that more below.

At the outset she briskly dispatches two of the rotten tomatoes thrown at Aristotle.  His remark that women lack deliberative capacity has empowered generations of the virtuous to hurl rotten fruit at him.  Yet in the Politics there is a more fine-grained remark that women have deliberative capacity but it is not authoritative; if an interpreter were less interested in scoring retrospective points, this remark could be taken as a sociological fact of the time and place.  In subsequent passages he goes to refer to wives running (ruling) the households of slaves, servants, extended family, provenders, tradesmen, and the like.  This oikos is the economy which has become the god all worship now.  Though, of course, he concedes less to woman than Plato does twice over. 

The most common trope used to justify ignoring Aristotle is this remark: 

‘Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; in the case of other animals observations have not yet been made’ (Animalia 3).  This obscure passage and paraphrases of it abound among those who specialise in cheap shots.  Yes, Aristotle was wrong, but he was wrong because he was misinformed about observations, not because he did not value observations, though that it the drum most often thumped when this passage is cited.  Let’s take that drumbeat seriously for a minute.  

Though this statement is joyfully repeated on thousands of web sites, none of these bloggers themselves settle the empirical question empirically.  No writer who has belaboured Aristotle with this remark has ever then said, and I counted (to be strictly parallel) my wife’s teeth and we have the same number.  Think about that.  

As any dentist will say, counting teeth is easier said than done.  It is not just a matter of saying Aaah.  Any ten people people on Oxford Street today may well not have the same number of teeth.  Ditto dead bodies for the ghoulish. There are congenital omissions (I never had two adult molars), damage in childhood, and in Ari’s world most adult simply lost a lot of rotten teeth which accounts partly for all the soft food: olives, cheese, figs.   But her main defence of him on this point is simply that it was a passing, incidental point in his biological studies which he cited from other sources as a fact. He neither proclaimed it himself, not declared it a priori. In the passage where it is cited, he draws no grand conclusion about the inferiority of women as thus proven by teeth.  At most it proves difference.

The female of 1940s popular culture in film and fiction was flighty, easily frightened, weak, lacking concentration, physically inept stereotype. It continued into 1950s television where its steady diet went some way to make real the fiction it portrayed, repeatedly showing it so did make it so.  It took a great effort — intellectual as well as social — to see through those shadows on the cave wall, single them out, test, and reject them, and for that All Hail.  

The book is thematic starting the governing narrative of happiness, which is not an ephemeral feeling but a contentment and calm perhaps like zen, but she does not go that far.  When I look at the gang leaders on television news these days… oh, did I say ‘gang leaders,’ I meant world leaders, none of them look contented and calm.  They look driven, angry, confused even, bitter, overwhelmed, determined, purposeful in some cases. There are far too many angry old men who have never had anything to be angry about and aren’t going to take it any longer!

She does not mention Jean Vanier, Happiness – Aristotle for a New Century (2002).  But it is a companion piece, though it lacks the depth of the volume at hand.  

She goes on to treat such topics as Family, Friendship, and Mortality. There is also a discussion of discretion that made me uncomfortable.  In my years as Associate Dean, Institute Director, Head of Department I made it a point not to exercise discretion.  My rule was: what cannot be done for all that cannot be done for one.  Believe me there were a great many instances of special pleading, mostly by staff, but some by students.  But I knew that to concede one would set off an avalanche of more pleaders.  To say yes, would be to open the flood gates.    

Confession: I did make one exception.  As Associate Dean there was always tsunami of special pleading about admission.  Students whose track record made it abundantly clear they could not do the work of the course, wanted to pay the tuition.  I aways rejected them on the ground that no one should be admitted to fail.  Even so on one occasion a letter of appeal got through the buffers from one Veronica.  She had done the HSC fifteen years before and hashed it.  Since then she had done all manner of things including very successful study on TAFE, and she wanted to go to University to do things not available at TAFE.  If she had applied on the basis of the TAFE results, she would have been admitted.  However, in NSW one never escapes the HSC score and hers was so lousy that it pulled down the TAFE results.  That ghostly and ghoulish HSC result was always going to be there. I admitted her. (Though I never made her acquaintance I noted that she graduated in minimum time with a credit average.)  

Back to Aristotle and our author, who went to and spent time everywhere Aristotle did, walking where he walked. Who paid for that junket? Well whoever did spent the money did well.  That tactile immersion adds depth to the page.  

It is a book by an Aristotelian scholar but not one that is not written for Aristotelian scholars, and therein lies the reference to tenure above. Nor is it a textbook which a promotions committee might grudgingly acknowledge at a heavy discount.

When I gathered the meta-data from GoodReads my eye fell on a few of the niggardly comments, reminding me why I don’t read them.  So pompous, so self-centred, so much like a department meeting. 

Peersonal note. When we traversed the Anatolian plateau in 2015 one of our stops was Assos on the Aegan Coast. I was keen on this when I saw it in the program because Aristotle lived there for a time and married a woman from there. The tour guide assured me that in 2009 a statue of Ari had been erected to affirm the connection.

Our stay at Assos was rainy and the roads were clogged with desperate Syrian refugees who could see the European Union a few miles away across the water in the Greek island of Lesbos. The plinth for the statue of Aristotle was there but not the likeness. It had been vandalised and dismounted for repairs. I have since learned it was replaced in 2017.

Lee (1935 and 1958) by Douglas S. Freeman and Richard Harwell.  

GoodReads meta-data is 648 pages, rated 4.27 by 1644 litizens.

Genre: biography, hagiography.

Verdict: Ineffable.  

Robert Edward Lee (1807-1870) is a storied figure in American history and the definitive biography is a massive four-volume work by Freeman which I read in its entirety years ago. Freeman took twenty years to complete the biography and a Pulitzer Prize crowned the result.  Yet at the time I first read it I felt I knew nothing more about Lee the man after I finished the two thousand pages than I did before I started on page one. To double check on that recollection I recently skimmed through the one-volume abridgement cited above. My earlier conclusion stands: Lee eluded the biographer.  There is a blizzard of detail but in the ensuing white-out no overall picture of the man is to be seen.  

In the abridgement the focus is nearly exclusively on a day-by-day account of Lee’s war after a few short chapters on his early and late life.

The treatment of Lee after the end of the Civil War is itself an historical study, I am told.  While he was revered throughout the South and respected throughout the North, at the end of the war he sought seclusion free from the terrible times he had endured and became a very private citizen.  

Then the survivors began re-writing history with a fury.  Many of his subordinates found ways in their autobiographical works, and there were many such works, to blame their shortcomings and failures on Lee.  Each book was peppered with unerring hindsight.  I read a couple: one by James Longstreet and another by Jubal Early.  Both took full credit for their successes, some fictional, and sheeted home full responsibility for failures to Lee.  It was a litany repeated ad nauseam in the Reconstruction period as Confederate memoirs gushed out from every officer desperate to earn a living by the pen in those hard times. Lee himself, by the way, did not publish a word about the war, turning down considerable interest from publishers willing to pay him a fortune.  He had no wish to profit from the blood of followers to paraphrase something Dwight Eisenhower once said.  That reticence remained firm, while others had verbal diarrhoea.   

Yet this flood of self-righteous libel between covers mattered not one whit to the public as statues of Lee proliferated, like that in New Orleans, where he never set foot during the War, with an inscription bearing historical errors.  Nonetheless up it went up along with a forest of others. He became a demigod to the wider public even as he was a whipping boy for those colleagues disconsolate and desperate in defeat.  That none of this mud ever stuck to him and the proliferation of statues led one biographer, Thomas Connelly, to refer to him as The Marble Man (1978). 

Regrettably these statues have recently been caught up in the political tornados, but I rest content in recalling Robert Penn Warren’s observation (discussed elsewhere on this blog) that Lee would have spurned the strutting, fulminating segregationists of the 1960s as he had the firebrands of the 1860s.  By the way, before the war began he personally freed the slaves he had inherited from his wife’s family, herself a distaff relative of George Washington.  

The abridgement, like the original work, is a hostage to its sources.  There are so many extant letters, reports, telegrams, diaries, logs, inquiries that a mountain of primary material exists, and it overwhelms any insight, meaning, or lesson in the biography.  More yields less in this case.

Lee was an intensely private man all of his life and the pressures of command exacerbated that centripetal force. His most outstanding social characteristic was silence. He had iron self-control and even in the face of disaster brought about by an inept subordinate, he would strive to rectify the situation as best as possible with a nary a word of rebuke.  He left it to subordinates in respite, if they lived that long, to see the errors of their ways.  As the war went on he also realised that he had to make do with the officers available, whatever their limitations, because so many of their predecessors had been killed.     

At war’s end surviving subordinates would list this forbearance as a fault, though they benefited from it.  Likewise, his famous reluctance to give a direct tactical order to a subordinate became in hindsight a fault. Lee’s approach was that once a strategy had been set, he would not interfere in it, leaving it to the officers on the spot execution as the circumstances dictated.  

His campaigns in Maryland and Pennsylvania have long attracted the most fire from armchair generals, yet each has a perfectly obvious albeit mundane explanation.  The Army of Northern Virginia was a gigantic locust swarm that stripped the land of food, forage, provender, shoe leather, horses, grease, lead, firewood to say nothing of the impact on hygiene. Not even the bountiful Shenandoah Valley could sustain it indefinitely and also supply the civilian population.  To stay in Virginia meant ever more stripping down to the roots, whereas to move north his army could live off lands as yet untouched by the needs of 80,000 mouths, 40,000 equines, and other camp followers.  These incursions suited the Confederate government, too, which dreamed that these offensives would threaten Washington D.C., throwing the North on the defensive and weaken the will to fight, and might also win European support.  Pipe dreams to be sure, but we have all been misled by dreams. 

I used the word hagiography above because the treatment is almost reverential.  The modest Lee would have blushed to see how his every move is parsed, exalted, and praised.  Though I hasten to add that the author(s) does acknowledge that Lee made mistakes, but insists that he always learned from them and never repeated them. Ergo, the treatment is not completely blind but close to it.

There are two minor incidents that struck this reader.  The first is Judah Benjamin’s noble lie.  For those who missed Plato’s Republic — shame on you! — a noble lie is a one told in order to secure a greater good for the community.  When after the crushing Confederate victory at the battle of Second Manassas, the Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia did not pursue the defeated Unionists an outcry went up in the Southern newspapers, whose writers saw in this victory a great opportunity to crush the North.  What could explain the treasonous failure to capitalise on it?  

Indeed, what could?

The simple facts were that the Confederacy had not one ounce of reserves left to chase down its enemy.  There were no more horses, nor horse shoes, nor forage for the horses.  No rations for the men. There was no ammunition for the muskets.  No shot or shell for the artillery.  Nor wagons to carry the ammunition. No leather for marching shoes. Everything had been expended at Manassas; nothing was left in the locker.  But to admit that fact of complete martial impoverishment at this stage would be to encourage the North and depress the South, and cause European powers to withdraw interest in the Confederacy.  

So instead the Confederate Secretary of War, Judah Benjamin (a biography of whom is treated elsewhere on this blog) proposed to take publicly the blame.  Though he was surely the most competent, persistent, industrious, creative, and conscientious member of the the Confederate cabinet he was never popular with elite or mass for the simple reason that he was a born Jew. So the word was leaked to the Confederate free press and they hastily and happily hung Benjamin in effigy in their pages. Once a scapegoat was to hand, no further inquiries were made by the investigative journalists of the day because if the media sharks have blood, they are sated.  Rien ne change jamais. 

In this case the Confederacy did not have to admit how ill-equipped it was for war. Just blame the Jew.  Thus the near fatal weakness of the Confederacy was concealed from the North, from the Confederacy itself, and the European powers. 

I also noted that in 1869 when Lee, then president of Washington College in Lexington Virginia, was soliciting funding for the college at a reception, a youth of thirteen wormed his way through the crowd to see and meet the demigod.  This spout was Woodrow Wilson. This incident by the way is not mentioned in the biography of Wilson discussed elsewhere on this blog.  In that strange way that history connects the living and the dead, nearly a century later Wilson’s aged widow attended Jack’s inauguration which I watched on television in the auditorium of junior high school, and so the shadow of Lee fell even there, though I did not know it. 

Lee did some post-war travelling and attended events to honour the fallen and veterans as well to promote the college and wherever he appeared a crowd gathered to catch a glimpse of him, and usually did so in church-silence.  He might then, at the urging of his host, step onto the porch to bow in acknowledgement and then retreat.  At most he might say,  ‘Thank you.’  He, unlike his biographers, was a man of few words. 

Finally, a minor incident recorded in these pages says it all.  In 1870 Lee, while walking in Richmond, encountered John Mosby, a one-time colonel in the CSA Army, and they stopped, shook hands, and then, observed by another who reported this occasion, stood in silence.  After some minutes Lee said, ‘The War.’  Mosby nodded and walked on.  Nothing more can or need be said.  This Colonel commanded Mosby’s Rangers of legend.  

Honeybee Democracy (2010) by Thomas Seeley

GoodReads meta-data is 273 pages, rated 4.19 by 901 litizens.  

Genre: nonfiction, popular science 

Verdict:  Hive mind.  

In this beguiling, informative, and elegant study, the author tells us much about the bees and a little about himself and other bee-ologists.  

All that buzzing, flitting, and waggling that bees do is purposive behaviour and the more closely it is studied the more the purpose(s) are revealed.  While hearing someone speak Cantonese sounds like gibberish to the uninitiated when one learns to hear, speak, and write it, the meanings encoded within it gradually appear.  So it is with language of bees in their activities.

While the main focus of the book is on site selection for a new nest when a hive swarms (i.e., divides), there is much about how the hive comes to that juncture.  An important part of that story is the division of labour among bees.  Among the 10,000 bees in a typical hive in upstate New York where most of the research underlying this study was done, a certain percentage are foragers who leave the hive’s nest each morning with the first light on dry days to harvest from sources of food to carry back to the nest.  

At certain times some of the emeritus foragers become scouts for a new nesting site.  The number is not a great. maybe 50-100 in a hive of 10,000.  This is highly specialised role and only a few undertake it.  When each single bee finds a potential spot she examines it and then reports back to the hive, which absorbs the input from all of the several scouts.  One spot may be scouted by many bees, but another will be scouted only by a few.  Yet the ultimate selection may be that latter which only a few scouts initially reported.  But as it gains favour, more scouts will visit it and report back.

The bees’ decision is not clouded by history, ego, institutions, or ideology.  Site selection shows no preference for doing what they did last time or the time before.  Swarms do not try to return to areas used previously.  History is not a determinate.  Nor does ego enter into it.  Even scouts who continually brought back data about a reasonable site, go along with the swarm when it opts for an alternative.  Nor are there institutional constraints like a fixed calendar or an electoral college.  Still less is there an ideology (or religion) that takes precedence. 

It is all so unlike human decision-making where history is always a factor:  we keep repeating what we already did (even when it no longer works).  Ego which is all for many of us: my way or the highway (for you or me).  The fixed calendar prevails in the timing of elections. And ideology: god told me this is THE tree.  Compared to much human decision-making, the bees are rational. 

There are rare occasions when a hive mind cannot decide. In such instance the hives may (1) stay where it is too long and suffer the fatal consequences or (2) the swarm leaving the hive may itself divide, dawdle, and dither and likewise suffer the consequences delivered by the changing seasons.  In these two cases all members of the swarm perish.  

To explain the bees’ hive mind the author makes analogies to human decision-making, particularly the fabled New England town meetings, but I fear he has seen few of those or he would have seen history, ego, and ideology driving out assessment, fact, and science.  Perhaps he was influenced at a remove by Robert Dahl’s Who Governs? (1961), which rather idealised these meetings.  (Dahl changed his mind later in How Democratic is the American Constitution? [2001].)  

The methods this author uses to study bee decision-making are ingenious, labor intensive, amusing, and fruitful, yielding a plethora of data as well as stings!  The location of a new nest is a life-or-death decision for the members of a swarm and it may take several days for it to be determined.  And sometimes the site is not adequate and the swarm dies.  This failure is not due to mistaken decision-making so much as the intensity of the elements.  The swarm may have chosen the best available site, but not even that site could not withstand the depth of that particular winter.  Sad to say, a surprising high percentage of swarms dividing off from a hive, die as hostages to climate and weather. Perhaps a third of them meet this fate.  The mortality rate among bees is surprisingly high to this neophyte.  

I did find much of the exposition too technical for this layman.  

N.B.  Many bees were killed in the course of this study. Many.  

All these buzzing bees remind me of Dutchman Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1705 [1714]). In it Mandeville implies that private vices lead to social benefits, and that conversely private virtues may lead to social collapse.  That is, society is an aggregation of self-interested individuals bound by convention and regulated by law who are more interested in themselves than anyone else. Social cohesion results, paradoxically, from competition and conflict. All benefit from a rules-of-the-game cooperation which constrains the competition and conflict.  Hobbes’s war of all against all is brought constrained by baselines with a rulebook and some referees.    

If, however, competition and conflict are replaced by a rule of singular virtue, the result will be ruin.  The effort to regulate every aspect of life according to (someone’s idea of) virtue will strangle productivity, cooperation, and more.  Think of a society ordered by Pat Robertson!  Or Rush Cancer.  Thomas More. George Pell.  Fred Nile.  Alan Jones. Bernie Sanders.  A monocular society weakens itself.  

While the metaphor of the bees may bring to mind Adam Smith’s invisible hand, that is more focused on economic production and distribution, while Mandeville’s remit is more social than economic. 

Inspired by this book I read a sample of José Luis de Juan’s Napoleon’s Beekeeper (2019) but found it so convoluted and cryptic it made no sense to me, probably destined for a Booker Prize. However, at the time it rated a respectable 3.25 from 8 litizens on GoodReads.      

Most Unexpected Twist award goes to…. [drum roll, Maestro].

Robin Bailes for The Vengeance of the Invisible Man (2019) 

I didn’t see the coming but I should have. 

Razor Tongue of My Dark Corner of This Sick World (on You Tube) has written three novels in homage to the Universal horror film series. This one is the latest and features a corker of an ending, which I will not spoil. I have discussed it elsewhere on the blog with equal restraint for those seeking more intel.

Target Tokyo (2016 ) by James Scott

GoodReads meta-data is 672 pages, rated 4.1 by 865 litizens.

Genre: History.

Verdict: Genius at work.

 From 7 December 1941 the bad news began and continued: Pearl Harbor, Guam, Wake, Attu, Manila, Bataan, Corregidor, Malaya, Singapore, Puna, HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse with more everyday.  In that context Doolittle’s Raid in April 1942 was a welcome harbinger of things to come.

While the man had a PhD he was not that Dr Dolittle.  Get that, and get it straight!  

James Doolittle (1896-1993) caught the flying bug as a child and went to Ohio as a teen to learn to fly where his teacher was Orville Wright.  He signed up for the US Army Air Corps in 1917 but did not make it to Europe, however, he stayed in the Air Force because that was where the airplanes were and at the time the Air Force was trying to establish itself.

He became a test pilot avant le mot and soon was a celebrity, making and breaking flying records of speed, distance, endurance, and complexity.  Much stemmed from his reckless, devil-may-care attitude in the air but as he matured he earned an undergraduate engineering degree from the University of California, and then a PhD from MIT.  He began to rely on homework, stress tables, meteorological reports, wind tunnel tests, vector analysis, and pounds per square inch measurements while devising new instruments to fly further, faster, and in impossible circumstances.

If Antoine Saint-Exupéry was the poet of the sky, Doolittle was the scientist.  Among the developments to which he contributed are the barometric altimeter, the aerial gyroscope, and avgas.  When he married and children came he needed more money than the Air Force could pay so he sold himself to Shell Oil where he developed avgas for the burgeoning airline industry.  It boosted power on existing aircraft by 35% and sold itself almost overnight.

He also pioneered the hood, that is, flying blind on instruments alone.  To do this he designed and built prototype instruments and controls and then did demonstrations, taking off, flying a fixed course, and landing exactly back at the point of departure.  He did not patent any of his innovations and so had no financial reward.  That was not the point. The point was to fly. 

By 6 December 1941 he was certainly the most famous aviator in the country, succeeding Bill Mitchell who had died and Charles Lindbergh who had gone into politics.  He had proven three things: he was an innovator, he could do things with an airplane no one else could, and he could teach others to do them, too.  

Now add the insight of a naval staff officer that medium range bombers might conceivably take-off from the deck of an aircraft carrier.  The seeds were sown for an attack on Japan.  

There were many technical problems to overcome:  the bombers need twice the length of the deck to take off, their flight range was half the minimum required to get to safe place in China.  To get the bombers to Japan the aircraft carrier would have to be within 400 miles of Target Tokyo, well within the range of Japanese patrols.  With its deck crowded with bombers, the carrier would be defenceless.  To protect it with escorts would add ships and increase the chances of detection and risk even more precious assets.  And so.  For every solution there was a catch.  

There were also strategic objections to overcome.  Did the US Navy want to risk one of its few aircraft carriers and its crew of two thousand salts on an untried mission of no lasting importance?  Could such a complex plan be kept secret?  Would the Army Air Corps give up scarce bombers to such a cockeyed mission?  What was the weather like in the North Pacific?  Who had maps of Tokyo?  Most of all, could take-off even be done?

From the start one thing was obvious: it was a one-way mission. Taking off from a flight deck might be possible with modified aircraft, but landing a B-25 on one was impossible.*  The arresting gear used for deck landings would rip the tail off the bombers turning them into cannon balls which would then topple into the sea at best, or crash into the command island killing the crews and more. 

Aircraft designed to land on carrier have reinforced tails to accommodate the jerk of the arresting line. To manufacture B-25s with that kind of reinforcement would take months, and then with the reinforcement they would be then too heavy to lift off the decks.  Always a catch. 

More homework followed when Doolittle got the job.  He studied the weight of fuel versus the gain of thrust on takeoff and range in the air, factoring in the weight of the fuel tanks themselves, the ship’s speed on launch from the deck. He also considered the body weight of the flight crew and the instruments.  He set a maximum weight for the crew members, and stripped the planes of armour, weapons, padding, and much else, including transmitters since radio silence was to be the rule.  

He also lobbied hard to get the operational command on the grounds that to train and motivate the crewmen they had to know he was coming with them.  This appointment proved to be the hardest sell because General Hap Arnold of the USAF thought Doolittle’s genius was too valuable to risk on what, when all was said and done, was a demonstration.  The decisive factor was Doolittle’s reputation.  When volunteers were solicited for a secret and perhaps fatal mission there were few takers until his name was mentioned, and then other flyboys were ready to go with the great Doolittle and volunteers flooded in for the unknown.  Once that happened, he had to go. 

There are many more details about the engineering, logistics, and planning with the attendants SNAFUs.  These are best read.  Some are a sad reminder that McKinsey management has been with us for a long time.  Stories about foot powder and carburettors are reminders that even in war, even in a top priority most secret project, even in a rigid hierarchical chain of command there is scope for individuals to gum up the works by putting process before product, which in this case surely lead to the death of the members of at least one crew.  I particularly liked the instance of Doolittle, in a rush, refusing to fill out a feedback questionnaire after the planes were poorly serviced at the Alameda Naval Air Station, and then being threatened with court martial for not providing customer feedback.  McKinsey management at its best.  

He was in a rush because a host of considerations, chief among them was that the weather in the North Pacific yielded a window over Tokyo of about ten days.  It was do it then or miss the chance for months and who knows how far the Japanese might have advanced by then.   

While the purpose of the attack was to bolster American morale it had two strategic results that had not been fully anticipated arising from the Japanese conclusion that the B-25s had taken off from barren Midway Island.  First, the Imperial Navy was pulled back many hundreds of miles to patrol more intensely the home waters to prevent another attack.  Second, Midway became a goal, and attacking it, long on the cards, was rushed with the resulting Japanese defeat because preparations were hastily executed. 

Thus, the raid, first, softened the perimeter of Japanese advance making possible the US build up around Midway to be undetected by the Japanese and, second, precipitated a rash Japanese attack that led to a major defeat leaving the Imperial Navy unable to take the offensive again.  That latter result meant the Japanese plan to occupy Fiji, Noumea, and Tonga to cut the seaway from Australia and New Zealand to the United States was abandoned.    

The book has nearly minute-by-minute details of the flight, bombing, fate, and survival of the crew men.  It bulks the book out.  

The most difficult task was the takeoff of a fully loaded bomber with vast amounts of extra fuel (see 5 below).  None of the pilots had ever taken off from a carrier before. Such was the secrecy that this had not been practiced.  The USS Hornet steered into the wind with mountainous heavy seas rolling at it.  When the Flight Controller gave the green light to each plane at launch, the prow of the ship was down and at the end of flight deck the forthcoming wave filled the pilot’s cockpit screen.  The aim was to time each takeoff so that the aircraft reached the end of the deck as the Hornet rose from the trough.  Note also that many of the flight crewmen had been seasick for days.  

Despite the meticulous planning much went wrong. 

1. The weather was terrible for man, plane, and ship. Far worse than anticipated based on the sketchy history of weather in the area. 
2. The plan was to launch the planes at 400 miles from Tokyo and to fly on to China.  That was easily possible in the modified aircraft.  It was even possible at 600 miles on Doolittle’s calculations. But when detected by Japanese patrols, the flotilla was 800 miles away.  The naval commandeer did not want to risk his ships and ordered the launch.  It was now or never.  Doolittle gave the crewmen the chance to back out but none took it.  (There were extra crews onboard.)
3. At that distance and in that weather, once airborne there was no fuel to waste in coming into a formation.  It became every airplane for itself.  
4. Nor was there fuel to hold in position and recalibrate compasses which had demagnetised on the steel hulled aircraft carrier. In addition, recalibrating would have required using radios to re-set with the aircraft carrier below, and that traffic would surely now be heard by the Japanese patrols. Once aloft each aircraft flew alone by dead reckoning.  
5. The rough weather, the iffy takeoffs, and the untried nature of the fuel bladders crammed into every nook and cranny of the aircraft proved unequal to the test and many seeped fuel into the aircraft. They used field dressings to stem the leaks. 
6. The iffy takeover led to cracks in the plexiglass nose on some aircraft which had been hit by flying debris on the deck. They stuffed flight jackets into the holes.  
7. The result was that nothing thereafter went according to plan.  Though the weather over Japan on the day was fine, the crews were lost, and only with luck found targets.
8. Because of the secrecy surrounding the plan they had done little bombing practice, and on the day seldom hit the targets they found.  The Japanese public neither expected nor prepared for bombing and crowded the streets to watch what many thought was a drill. Civilian casualties mounted.   
9. If they could not find the assigned targets in the day time over an orderly Japan, it was impossible to find the Chinese airfield hours later in flak-damaged aircraft in the dark with the fuel indicator on Empty.  Some crashed landed on sandy beaches and pastures, while other crewmen bailed out.  The only B-25 from the raid that remained whole went to Russia where the crewmen were imprisoned to honour Soviet neutrality with Japan.   
10. Few of the arrangements in China for the flyers had in fact been made, and in any event they could not find the meeting points.  Some were injured in the crashes or parachute landings.  Again secrecy hampered the efforts that were made in China. To confuse the Japanese, secrecy remained the order of the day for a long time. Despite the efforts of the free press to reveal all to its enemies.  
11. The Japanese reprisals in eastern China in the search for the downed flyers were extensive and brutal.  One Red Cross estimate put the death toll at 250,000.  

Some of the crewmen were captured by the Japanese, one plane landed in Vladivostok in neutral Russia, and the rest crash landed or bailed out in China, as did Doolittle himself.  When he made it t0 safety he bent every effort at recovering his crewmen and that continued throughout and after the war in recovering the bodies of the eight that perished.  

Two things I had not appreciated before reading this book emerged.  One, that interning Japanese-Americans on the West Coast probably saved some of their lives.  The public reaction, outcry, and hostility to Japanese after 7 December 1941 was nearly out of control — and many local officials did not want to control it.  Vigilantes were primed and ready to exact their vengeance on anyone whom they took to be Japanese.  In the luxury of hindsight the internment is now pompously condemned.  

Two, I had not realised just how popular in Japan was the attack on Pearl Harbor.  The author amasses an extensive cross section of film and newspaper, as well as memoir material, to show that the Nippon public was delirious with joy at the destruction recorded by the gun camera on the Zeros, including the strafing of the Tripler Military Hospital (the other pink palace on Oahu).  Just as earlier the Japanese movie-going public had been delighted by the rapine, murder, and destruction in China, where contests in bayoneting bound Chinese prisoners were filmed like sporting events and shown in Japanese theatres to the cheers of the audiences.  Footage is on You Tube for those with strong stomachs. I expect that there are Chinese today who have not forgotten this fact.  

Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle is easy to spot in the photographs of the time.  He was invariably, at under 5’ 2” tall, the shortest man in any picture.  Compared the shambling bear Antoine de Saint-Exupéry he was an elf, though their paths never crossed. Or did they, I discovered that Doolittle was in Algeria in 1943 and St Ex was there in February 1944.  A lot of time and a big country to be sure.   

I noticed that the release date of film I commented on earlier coincided with Doolittle’s Raid and that got me thinking about it and shopping on Kindle for some reading.  Of the many titles available I chose this in the hope it would be dispassionate, informative, and explanatory.  It is but the minute-by-minute detail was too too much information for this reader. 

*The B-25 is called the Mitchell after Billy Mitchell who was courtmartialed in 1925 and drummed out of the army for his endless advocacy of airpower in the next war.  After his death all was forgiven. At the time it was the only Army Airforce airplane named for a person.