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Barlow, Jeffrey G. Revolt of the Admirals: The Fightfor Naval Aviation, 1945-1950. Washington, D.C.: Naval Historical Center, 1994. 420pp. $30
Jeffrey Barlow has been a historian with the Contemporary History Branch of the Naval Historical Center since 1987. His publications include chapters in Gray and Barnett's Seapower and Strategy and Howarth's Men of War: Great Naval Leaders of World War II, as well as articles in various national security periodicals. His latest work, Revolt of the Admirals, is a compelling, thoroughly documented account of the bitter fight for key military roles and missions between the newly independent U.S. Air Force and the Navy during the latter half of the 1940s. This complex struggle was as vicious, and at times unseemly, as any in U.S. history, which helps to explain the high drama in which it culminated and from whence the title derives.
Barlow starts by tracing the interplay of various factors that led to the so-called revolt. These included the politics of military unification under a single defense department, the establishment of an independent air force, the U.S. Navy's struggle to establish its relevance in the absence of a significant naval competitor, disparate Navy and Air Force views on the role (and control) of atomic weapons and their implications for conventional forces, and the key programs each service pushed in pursuit of its vision. The struggle raged amidst a constant backdrop of decreasing budgets, fierce publicrelations battles, and unremitting political infighting. Large figures, among them Arthur Radford, Omar Bradley, and Arleigh Burke, plus a big cast of lesser characters, played important roles in the unfolding drama.
By 1949, under that year's extraordinarily stringent budget constraints, it was clear that the country could not (or...