Michael Sturma

The U.S. and the War in the Pacific, 1941-45 analyzes the Pacific War with a focus on America’s participation in the conflict.

Fought over a great ocean and vast battlefields using the most sophisticated weapons available, the Pacific War transformed the modern world. Not only did it introduce the atomic bomb to the world, it also reshaped relations among nations and the ways in which governments dealt with their own peoples, changed the balance of power in the Pacific in fundamental ways, and helped to spark nationalist movements throughout Asia. This book examines the strategies, technologies, intelligence capabilities, home-front mobilization, industrial production, and resources that ultimately enabled the United States and its allies to emerge victorious. Major themes include the impact of war, conceptions of race, Japanese perspectives on the conflict, and America’s relations with its allies. Using primary documents, maps, and concise writing, this book provides students with an accessible introduction to an important period in history.

Incorporating recent scholarship and conflicting interpretations, the book provides an insightful overview of the topic for students of modern American history, World War II, and the Asia Pacific.

World War II submariners rarely experienced anything as exhilarating or horrifying as the surface gun attack. Between the ocean floor and the rolling whitecaps above, submarines patrolled a dark abyss in a fusion of silence, shadows, and steel, firing around eleven thousand torpedoes, sinking Japanese men-of-war and more than one thousand merchant ships. But the anonymity and simplicity of the stealthy torpedo attack hid the savagery of warfare -- a stark difference from the brutality of the surface gun maneuver. As the submarine shot through the surface of the water, confined sailors scrambled through the hatches armed with large-caliber guns and met the enemy face-to-face. Surface and Destroy: The Submarine Gun War in the Pacific reveals the nature of submarine warfare in the Pacific Ocean during World War II and investigates the challenges of facing the enemy on the surface. The surface battle amplified the realities of war, bringing submariners into close contact with survivors and potential prisoners of war. As Japan's larger ships disappeared from the Pacific theater, American submarines turned their attention to smaller craft such as patrol boats, schooners, sampans, and junks. Some officers refused to attack enemy vessels of questionable value, while others attacked reluctantly and tried to minimize casualties. Michael Sturma focuses on the submariners' reactions and attitudes toward their victims, exploring the sailors' personal standards of morality and their ability to wage total war. Surface and Destroy is a thorough analysis of the submariner experience and the effects of surface attacks on the war in the Pacific, offering a compelling study of the battles that became "intolerably personal."

The fate of the USS Flier is one of the most astonishing stories of the Second World War. On August 13, 1944, the submarine struck a mine and sank to the bottom of the Sulu Sea in less than one minute, leaving only fourteen of its crew of eighty-six hands alive. After enduring eighteen hours in the water, eight remaining survivors swam to a remote island controlled by the Japanese. Deep behind enemy lines and without food or drinking water, the crewmen realized that their struggle for survival had just begun. On its first war patrol, the unlucky Flier made it from Pearl Harbor to Midway where it ran aground on a reef. After extensive repairs and a formal military inquiry, the Flier set out once again, this time completing a distinguished patrol from Pearl Harbor to Fremantle, Western Australia. Though the Flier’s next mission would be its final one, that mission is important for several reasons: the story of the Flier’s sinking illuminates the nature of World War II underwater warfare and naval protocol and demonstrates the high degree of cooperation that existed among submariners, coast watchers, and guerrillas in the Philippines. The eight sailors who survived the disaster became the first Americans of the Pacific war to escape from a sunken submarine and return safely to the United States. Their story of persistence and survival has all the elements of a classic World War II tale: sudden disaster, physical deprivation, a ruthless enemy, and a dramatic escape from behind enemy lines. In The USS Flier: Death and Survival on a World War II Submarine, noted historian Michael Sturma vividly recounts a harrowing story of brave men who lived to return to the service of their country.

From the first European contact with Tahiti in 1767, the myth of the South Sea maiden has endured through many incarnations. Although the maiden frequently provided an idealized antidote to Western women's self-assertion, the South Pacific also afforded a space where boundaries between the sexes could be relaxed and transgressed. From James Cook and Captain Bligh to James Michener and Margaret Mead, the Island girl has occupied a special place in the erotic imagination of the West. In a sweeping study that embraces history, literature, visual arts, anthropology and film, this study gives fresh insight into the myths and reality of a Western icon. While women from far off lands have always been presented as exotic and alluring, the South Sea maiden has come to symbolize feminine sexuality, as an integral part of the adventure, sensuality, and romance of the South Pacific. Everyone from early explorers to 19th century writers and artists to latter day anthropologists, film makers, and tourism promoters have extolled their virtues and their bodies. Sturma looks behind the popular clich^D'es to reveal how the myth-making process reflected not only Western desires, but the cut and thrust of changing sexual politics. The result is an intriguing look at both South Sea image-makers and the women whom they found so seductive.

Between 1788 and 1840 about 80,000 male and female prisoners were transported from the United Kingdom to New South Wales. The social consequences of this migration were most forcefully stated by a British select committee in 1838. The committee sounded the death knell of convict transportation to the colony when it concluded that the system not only failed to reform criminals, but also created societies "most thoroughly depraved, as respects both the character and degree of their vicious propensities". According to the committee's chairman. Sir William Molesworth, there existed in Australia "a state of morality worse than that of any other community in the world". Historians concur that the credibility of the Molesworth Committee was seriously undermined by the prejudices and preconceptions of its chairman and principal witnesses. But they tend to attack the committee's motives rather than to contradict its conclusions. Indeed, Molesworth's portrayal of New South Wales represented less a new departure than the climax of British perceptions of the colony. The committee shared with most accounts of the colony's moral condition two basic assumptions. First, it assumed the existence of a "criminal class". Persons who committed criminal offences were believed to form a class, detached from the working classes, which lived entirely off the proceeds of crime and which threatened social order. As fear of revolutionary violence subsided in Britain, concern with the "criminal" or "dangerous classes" faded. However, the belief that offenders were mainly drawn from a professional criminal subculture prevailed during the first half of the nineteenth century. The conception of a "criminal class" provided part of the rationale for transportation, since it assumed that offenders were from a distinct group which could be exported. A second pervasive assumption was that criminality was contagious. Contemporaries summed up the demoralizing influence of criminals in the word "contamination". According to Sydney's superintendent of police, William Augustus Miles, "contamination" resulted because "a convict will talk over his deeds of guilt till crime becomes familiar and romantic". Others believed that the process of contamination was even more insidious. Chief Justice James Dowling, while offering some fatherly advice to his son, warned that, "Vice is so fascinating, that she cannot be looked upon without peril to the beholder .Some held as well that criminal traits were hereditary. Judge Alfred Stephen stated his conviction that "crime descends, as surely as physical properties and individual temperament". These same assumptions, if in a less virulent form, are reflected in the works of major writers on the convict period. Studies by C.M.H. Clark, L.L. Robson and A.G.L. Shaw tend to confirm that most convicts were drawn from a "criminal class". All three writers associate the typical convict with city-dwelling professional criminals. Central to their argument is the high proportion of convicts (estimated at two-thirds of all those transported) with prior convictions in Britain. The hardened and habitual criminals, more or less deserving of their fate, have become the textbook view of convicts exiled to Australia. The interpretations of Clark, Robson and Shaw serve to correct romanticized characterizations of the convicts. "Obvious victims", in the sense of Tolpuddle Martyrs or Canadian Rebels, comprised only a small percentage of the men and women transported. But the convicts' criminality remains debatable. The statistical data available hardly justify the conclusion that most convicts transported to New South Wales had prior convictions. In any case, changes in the judicial system, criminal law, police force and definitions of offences make prior convictions a very dubious indicator of the convicts' character. It should also be remembered that most people transported were convicted of simple larcenies, rather than robberies, burglaries or other offences usually associated with professional criminals. A study of crime in England's Black Country from 1835 to 1860 indicates that most persons prosecuted for criminal offences were normally employed, and although they occasionally supplemented their incomes by theft, they were not members of a "criminal class". Even assuming the reformatory nature of the transportation system, the high proportion of convicts with good records in the colonies appears as further mute testimony against their alleged recidivism. The concept of "contamination" is still more problematic, both because of its vague connotations in nineteenth-century usage, and because it is more subtly translated into historical interpretations. Some historians have accepted uncritically the demoralizing influence of convicts on the honesty and moral standards of the general population. More importantly, convict vices and values such as hard drinking, hard swearing and a hatred for the police are viewed as leaving a lasting imprint on Australian culture.Convict "contamination" becomes in effect a component in the development of a distinctively Australian ethos...