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FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE: The U.S. Navy Since 1945. By Paul B. Ryan. Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif., 1981, 256 pp., $14.95. (Member $13.45)
This is superb modern history, written simply and clearly based on an impressive amount of research and a number of personal interviews. It is the Navy's story from the end of World War II to the present with emphasis on the larger political aspects of its steady decline in strength over 35 years. Most of us who have served or who are serving in the Navy or the Marine Corps are aware to some degree of the change from worldwide dominance in 1945 to a position today facing equality with, if not inferiority to, Soviet seapower. At the same time, those who have served for some years at sea or on foreign station, deprived of easy access to the magazines, books, and professional contact that kept us informed, must welcome this authentic, short, and very readable history. There are abundant quotations of officers we know, at least by reputation, often accompanied by an illuminating commentary about the speakers themselves.
After a brief but pithy discussion of the realities of seapower, diplomacy, and defense, the book opens with the Navy's transition to a peacetime...