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Willmott, H.P Grave of a Dozen Schemes: British Naval Planning and the War against,3apan, 1943-1945. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1996. 342pp. $36.92
In Grave of a Dozen Schemes, H.P Willmott, author of many excellent books on war, and especially on the Second World War, has assumed the difficult task of making clear what the British political and military chieftains wished to do when they were able (or so they imagined) to assume a substantial part in the war against Japan; what their options really were; what they found themselves actually doing; and in the end, how much it mattered.
The principal actors in Willmott's account are the prime minister, Winston Churchill, and the professional heads of Britain's armed forces: Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Cunningham, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal. Others, such as Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia (whose title suggests more than reality allowed), play bit parts. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff do not appear, but offstage they rumble ominously. The Japanese army and navy, nominally the objects of everyone's attention, are merely the subjects of occasional allusion.
The central difficulty, Willmott makes plain, was that while the places where the British could fight the Japanese were far away from home, the more pressing war against Germany was being fought right at hand, and even when, at long last, victory over the Germans seemed nigh, the Germans refused to be defeated on the schedule the Allies had set for them.
Moreover, Britain's power was exhausted, and that of Australia, upon which Britain's leaders had assumed they could draw, was waning swiftly. Another supposed pillar, India, had revealed itself not as a source of strength but as...