Bob Drury

Dramatic true story of a maritime military operation interrupted by an enormous typhoon. Admiral Halsey’s fleet was preparing to support MacArthur’s invasion of Luzon in the Philippines in 1944, when they steered directly into the course of Typhoon Cobra with its 90-foot waves and over 100 knot gusting winds. This book tells an inspiring story of sailors confronting life-or-death situations. Though much of the story is tragic, the highlight is a valiant rescue effort by a relatively show more inexperienced captain and crew of a small Destroyer Escort.

The first part of the book sets up the military objectives and participants. The second part tells of the gathering storm, leadership decisions, and the ships’ maneuvers. The rescue effort is riveting, and it is worth reading the book just for this portion. The travails of the sailors contending with the elements, wounds, sharks, madness induced from drinking saltwater, and numerous miseries are heart-wrenching. Though the authors do not dwell on the carnage, the graphic descriptions are not for the faint-hearted.

The authors are journalists, trying to determine if the sinking of ships and loss of life was preventable. The transcripts of the U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry had been recently declassified and formed much of the basis of their analysis, along with survivors’ stories and in-depth research. These stories jump around a bit, and it is sometimes difficult to keep track of which ship is being referenced. The personal anecdotes are particularly effective in showing what the sailors encountered as their ships were battered by the storm.

Two examples of these personal accounts include:
“Clinging to the top of the Cape Esperance’s center mast with every muscle in his body, Paul Schlener was not sure what to do as the storm increased in intensity. His watch was technically over, but whether through oversight or intention, no crewmate had relieved him and no officer had signaled for him to climb down. In fact, the scud was so thick that he could barely make out the deck sixty feet below. He was petrified.”
and
“Kosco sat upright in his bunk. He was overwhelmed “with a feeling of great, leaden weights pressing on [my] shoulders.” He threw on his heavy weather gear and scrambled up the iron skipper’s ladder to the navigation deck. Leaning into the wind and listening to the pounding surf, he surveyed the otherworldly tableau; giant, mottled whitecaps stretched endless in every direction under a black, starless dome. If the dark side of the moon were covered by sea, he thought, this is what it would look like.”

I am very glad that meteorology has progressed since WWII, and it is unlikely that a fleet would be unaware of the location of such a large storm today. There are definitely lessons in leadership to be gleaned from this book, primarily related crisis management. It definitely creates food for thought on how the reader would react in a similar situation. Part military analysis, part man vs. nature, part survival story, this book is filled with peril, catastrophe, and heroism. I read it in observance of Veterans’ Day and found it a powerful tribute to the Brotherhood of the Sea. show less

In my youth Daniel Boone was a hot commodity, as were Lewis and Clark, Crockett, Custer, Carson, and a long list of other figures whose lives made America’s dream of manifest destiny a reality. At my young age, Boone’s adventures in opening the wilderness were a thrill, but that is all they were, adventures. The authors of the books I read back then did little to provide context to his deeds.

Over the years, America’s attitudes towards its interactions with native Americans underwent a show more quantum shift. The publication of books such as Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee changed our view from that of Indian wars to genocidal extermination. In the final decades of the twentieth century the heroic luster of early American explorers and pioneers tarnished in the face of unrelenting condemnation to the point where my daughters, both in their twenties, had never heard of Daniel Boone before today.

Fortunately, the new millennium has brought us a new generation of historians whose interests lie more in telling an accurate, unbiased story than in glorifying one side or the other. Authors such as Nathaniel Philbrick and Erik Larson have made careers out of taking all we think we know about famous people and events and turning it on its head by the simple expedient of telling the unvarnished truth. High on this list of authors are Bob Drury and Tom Clavin who have cowritten books spanning U.S. history from Valley Forge to Vietnam, including a biography of Oglala Sioux Chief Red Cloud. Their newest book, Blood and Treasure, relates the events surrounding Daniel Boone’s settlement of Kentucky and his role in the American Revolutionary War.

It has been fifty years since I last read a book about him. Back then, books told the story of Daniel Boone, the legend. Now, I finally get a chance to learn about Daniel Boone, the man. It is not a ‘warts and all’ exposé aimed at trashing his reputation, but a skillfully researched account of his life provided in the context of the times in which he lived.

Many of the more memorable stories of him are about Boone the Indian fighter, his close calls and escapes, but they leave out the fact that these events were part of a larger war. During the Revolution, the British actively recruited warriors from numerous tribes to make war on the American settlers. By opening up a western front, they hoped to pull men and resources away from George Washington’s army and thereby end the war. To this end, the British Army offered bounties for American scalps. When the Shawnee and several other tribes besieged Boonesborough in 1778 they were accompanied by forty to fifty British and and Canadians and fought under the Union Jack. Had the siege succeeded, they could have easily taken several smaller settlements and “flank the coastal revolutionaries from the rear, forcing Washington’s Continental Army to defend two fronts. Gen. Cornwallis was already planning to open a southern theater, and it is easy to imagine he and Hamilton crushing the southern rebels between them”. In the Shawnees’ defense, The British were offering them the one thing that their survival depended on, all the land west of the Alleghenies and laws prohibiting white settlements in Indian lands. Stamp Acts and ‘taxation without representation’ be damned. This vast expanse of unsettled land is what the war was all about.

Bottom line: Drury and Clavin penned an amazing book that revisits a history that has been all but forgotten. As a genealogist, I appreciate the tremendous amount of research that went into it. I highly recommend this book.

*Quotations are cited from an advanced reading copy and may not be the same as appears in the final published edition. The review was based on an advanced reading copy obtained at no cost from the publisher in exchange for an unbiased review. While this does take any ‘not worth what I paid for it’ statements out of my review, it otherwise has no impact on the content of my review.

FYI: On a 5-point scale I assign stars based on my assessment of what the book needs in the way of improvements:
*5 Stars – Nothing at all. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
*4 Stars – It could stand for a few tweaks here and there but it’s pretty good as it is.
*3 Stars – A solid C grade. Some serious rewriting would be needed in order for this book to be considered great or memorable.
*2 Stars – This book needs a lot of work. A good start would be to change the plot, the character development, the writing style and the ending.
*1 Star – The only thing that would improve this book is a good bonfire. show less

I would imagine the first question is why this crime fiction lover chose to read a book about a tragedy at sea during World War II. The answer is simple: my grandfather. My grandfather served in the US Navy aboard an LST in the South Pacific during World War II. He drove landing craft up on the beachheads and also served as an anti-aircraft gunner. He was very tight-lipped about his service, only mentioning three things. One of them was being caught in a typhoon and how everyone aboard was show more well beyond being merely seasick. When I read the synopsis of Halsey's Typhoon, I wondered if this could be the typhoon my grandfather mentioned.

When I finished reading the book, I did a little research and compared some dates. This wasn't the typhoon my grandfather mentioned, and for that, I am eternally thankful. What I couldn't foresee was how emotionally involved I would be as I read Halsey's Typhoon. Of course, I learned things. What makes a typhoon in the Pacific deadlier than a hurricane in the Atlantic. How ships were refueled at sea. I learned about ship design and how retro-fitting some of the old destroyers in the Pacific Third Fleet sealed their doom during the typhoon. (Stay away from top-heavy ships.) I also gained respect for a future president who survived this tragedy.

Authors Bob Drury and Tom Clavin gave us readers Halsey's background, they set the scene, they let the typhoon bludgeon us then cast us adrift in rough seas with no water and no protection from the sharks before letting us be rescued. Reading this book was sometimes exhausting. I was completely emotionally invested in Halsey's Typhoon. I grew to know the men, to care about what happened to them. I was a nervous, seasick wreck during the horrendous typhoon. I cried as the ships sank and men-- most of them barely out of their teens-- desperately tried to save themselves. And my heart swelled when the commander of the badly damaged USS Tabberer defied orders in order to continue to search for and rescue survivors. As far as I'm concerned, there would never be enough medals to give Lieutenant Commander Henry Lee Plage.

When all is said and done, what was at the heart of this hushed-up disaster? I think it can be summed up in one sentence from the book: "Meteorology was not high on the U.S. Navy's list of wartime priorities." That is not wise when you're responsible for thousands of men aboard hundreds of ships traveling vast expanses of water that are at the mercy of the weather.

Halsey's Typhoon is a brilliantly written piece of wartime naval history that reads like the best fiction. I couldn't put it down. show less

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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WHAT'S BLOOD AND TREASURE ABOUT?
It's pretty much in the subtitle—this book is about 2 things—Daniel Boone and the fight (literal and metaphoric) for America's first Frontier—with a focus on what we now know as Kentucky, but pretty much everything on the Western edge of the American colonies/states.

It's not a biography of Boone (I'll tell you now, I wrongly expected this to be more of one), it's more like he's the organizing show more principle for the book, as we learn about Boone's roots, early life, and adulthood the authors talk about the conflicts with the Indians on the edge of white civilization's expanse. We'd get a chunk of a wide-view of history over a period, and then we'd focus on Boone's life around that time. Then the focus would widen a bit and we'd look at another period of time—and so on.

Two significant ingredients in "the Fight" for the Frontier were what's called The French and Indian War and the American Revolution. There's the French and Indian War (and conflicts that led up to it and sprang from it) to begin with, paved the way for the latter conflicts—we see the pressure put on various tribes from the expansion of settlers, the resistance those settlers faced (from shifting alliances of Indians between themselves, and varying alliances between Western powers and the Indians).

As for the Revolution—while most histories/documentaries/etc. about it will acknowledge the fighting in the South and West, few take any time to focus on it. Instead, we casual history readers just get repeated retellings of the stuff we learned in elementary school—Washington*, the Continent Army, Benedict Arnold, Nathan Hale, the Green Mountain Boys, and whatnot—and whatever expansions on some of those topics that Hamilton has taught us in the last few years. This book is a great corrective to that showing how the Indians were largely pawns for the British to use against the colonies, to distract from the larger skirmishes as well as to try to open up another front on the war—another way to steal power and influence from the colonies. You see very clearly how easily the entire War could've changed if not for a couple of significant losses suffered by the British and their Indian allies.

* Washington is also featured pretty heavily in the earlier chapters, too—even if he maybe only briefly met Boone on one occasion.

LANGUAGE CHOICES
I know this sort of this is pretty customary, but I really appreciated the Note to Readers explaining the authors' language choices—starting with the tribal designations they used—the standard versions accepted today (there are enough various entities mentioned throughout that if they'd gone with contemporary names and spellings, I—and most readers—would've been very confused).

At the same time, they did preserve the varied and non-standard spellings for just about everything else. For example, there were at least three variant spellings for Kentucky: Cantucky, Kanta-ke, and Kentucki (I think there was one more, but I can't find it).

I was a little surprised that they stuck with the term "Indian" as much as they did—but their explanation for it seemed likely and understandable.

AN IMAGE SHATTERED—OR MAYBE JUST CORRECTED
Yes, I know that the Fess Parker TV show I saw after school in syndication was only very loosely based in reality. And that the handful of MG-targeted biographies I read several times around the same time were sanitized and very partial. Still, those are the images and notions about Boone that have filled my mind for decades. So reading all the ways they were wrong and/or incomplete threw me more than I'm comfortable with.

His appearance was particularly jarring—the actual Boone eschewed coonskin caps because they were flat-topped and preferred a high-crowned felt hat to look taller. THat's wrong on so many levels. "Tall as a mountain was he" is about as far from the truth as you can get.

The fact that he spent most of his life bouncing between comfort and/or wealth and massive debt is both a commentary on his strengths and weaknesses as it is the volatile times he lived in—he lost so much thanks to colonial governments being mercurial. It was reassuring to see the repeated insistence that he was an honest man, who worked to repay his debts even if it took too long.

In the end, Boone seemed to be a good guy trying his best to get by and provide for his family—who accidentally stepped into some degree of celebrity, that magnified some good qualities and replaced the man with a legend.

SO, WHAT DID I THINK ABOUT BLOOD AND TREASURE?
The writing itself? There are moments that were fantastic. On the whole...., but from time to time, when Drury and Clavin wanted to drive an image or description home, they could be stunning. I would have preferred things to be a bit more even—a bit more balanced and consistent on that front. But the topic and scope didn't really allow for that. So I'll just enjoy those moments of it that I got.

As for the book as a whole? It was impressive, entertaining (generally), and informative. When it was at its best, it didn't feel like reading dry history but a compelling look at that portion of US History. At its worst, it was a litany of names, dates, and ideas that didn't do much for me. Thankfully, those moments were few and far between. It's not a difficult read at any point, just pretty dry on occasion.

There are so many other things I'd like to have mentioned or discussed—but it would make this post unwieldy. The notes about hunting (both the good and the horrible), Boone's heroics, his character, and family; various aspects of the Indian customs discussed and so much. There's just so much in this book to chew on that I can't sum it up.

I liked this—I liked it enough to look at a few other books by this duo to see what they can do with other topics, people, and eras. I think anyone with a modicum of interest in Boone will enjoy this and be glad for the experience. show less