.Shoriet 1\o/ices
The Dutch Navy at War. By Lieutenant-Commander Kroese, Royal Netherlands Navy. (George Allen and Unwin. 6s. od.)
ALTHouox Dutch warships haw. fought many actions during the war, this book deals only with those few disastrous days in which Holland was overrun and with the early fighting in the S.W. Pacific ; but what it tells, it tells well. The greater part is an account of three months' intensive naval warfare frbm the beginning of the Japanese war to the Battle of the Java Sea: It was a fight to gain time for the building up of defences further back, and the few naval vessels available to the Allies faced vastly superior forces in their attacks on Japanese convoys, he destruction of which was the only way to delay the enemy's advance through the islands. They attacked until they were sunk or disabled. Actions against overwhelming odds always possess a heroic flavour, but Lieutenant-Commander Kroese's account is delightfully simple, leaving both the horrors and the heroism to the imagination of the reader. In his chapter forecasting the Allies' task in the Pacific he does not underrate its magnitude, but he mistakes its length, believing that the final assault on Japan could only be undertaken when the Chinese seaboard had been recaptured ; and that this in turn demanded the elimination of the Japanese strongholds that lay in the path. The book badly needs maps ; there are two indifferent track charts of battles, which might have been much more informative, and a few illustrations which add little to the book. An appendix, containing a chronology of the events in the S.W. Pacific during this early fighting, gives an indication of how much a few ships contrived to do.
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