THE MIGHTY MOO

Big aircraft carriers dominate histories of the Pacific war to the near exclusion of small ones; this is a rare and entertaining exception.

Early on in his debut book, Canestaro, intelligence officer for the National Intelligence Council, reminds readers that by the end of 1942, four of the six big carriers in the Pacific had been sunk and weren’t completely replaced until 1944. As a stopgap, Franklin Roosevelt, against objections from the Navy bureaucracy, ordered nine light cruisers under construction hastily rebuilt to host aircraft. Smaller, ungainly, overcrowded, with a dangerously narrow, shorter flight deck and holding one-third as many planes, these light carriers turned out to be successful workhorses and critical supporting players in winning the war. Several of their big brothers rest in museums, but all light carriers were discarded and forgotten after 1945. Canestaro tells the story of the Cowpens, named after a celebrated Revolutionary War victory. Commissioned in May 1943, it fought in most of the battles without achieving any spectacular glory, but doing the job for which it was built. The author offers a detailed, bottom-up account of more than two years of campaigning, with pauses for interesting minibiographies of sailors, airmen, and commanding officers as well as the traditional epilogue describing their postwar lives and the mechanics of the ship, which was mothballed in 1946 and sold for scrap in 1960. Military buffs will know what to expect, but general readers, accustomed to military histories emphasizing iconic battles, may squirm at the reality of day-to-day naval warfare. Training and landing accidents, in addition to bad luck, killed as many men as battle. Air-to-sea rescue capabilities were primitive, so innumerable pilots who landed safely at sea were never heard from again. Incompetence was no less prominent than heroism, but heroism was not in short supply.

Satisfying military history.