This book is an excellent book for novices in military and naval historical battles. Though the author, Graig Symonds, only covers five naval battles he writes about them in a compelling way. He chose the battles based upon their significance in transitioning from one era of naval warfare to the next. He gives the background (political, economic and historical)that leads up to the confrontation. Thus the battle makes sense within the zeitgeist of the times. He doesn't just give out facts ad nauseum like many military history books do. This book reads like a gripping novel with good coverage of the actual battles.

Craig Symonds has long held a lofty place in the pantheon of outstanding American naval historians. I have enjoyed his scholarship and analysis for a number of years. His understanding and perceptions of the Early Republic Navy and the Navy of the Civil War era have been invaluable additions to American naval historiography, and his "Historical Atlas of the U.S. Navy" in collaboration with cartographer William N. Clipson, in my estimation, ranks among the most useful and valuable works of recent naval scholarship.
That being said, I have several quibbles with Decision at Sea, not the least of which is his selection for analysis of three of the five (actually six, if you count the 1781 action off the Virginia Capes) naval battles. Certainly Perry's victory at Put-in-Bay halted a British invasion and saved the Northwest for the United States, but I would have preferred to see Macdonough's conclusive victory a year later on Lake Champlain as being the real "turning point" in U.S. fortunes in the War of 1812. Macdonough has always seemed to have taken a back seat to Perry but thoughtful naval historians, particularly Theodore Roosevelt and A.T. Mahan, have opined that Macdonough's battle was the more skillful in its management and execution, and it had significant consequences in that it prevented the British army from splitting New England from the rest of America (thereby enabling what would have been the annexation by Canada of most of what is now the state of Maine). The outcome at Lake Champlain additionally proved to be the decisive factor in the British decision to come to terms with the U.S. representatives and the resulting Treaty of Ghent signed several months after the battle, ending the war on terms acceptable in an overall sense to both parties in this unfortunate and unnecessary squabble. Oddly, Macdonough and Lake Champlain do not even merit a mention in the Index of Symonds' book, although as a skilled naval historian Symonds has demonstrated in previous writings his appreciation of the ramifications of this battle.
Symonds' analysis of the Monitor and Virginia battle and its associated consequences upon the concept of warfare between armored ships is an obvious choice. Although the U.S. and Confederate navies were not the first to develop armored warships (England and France led in this in the 1850s and early 1860s), this was the first combat at sea between these types of ships and Symonds rightfully places this event in its international historical context.
The outcome at Manila Bay, while establishing for the first time the primacy of the Navy as a player on the global scene, was little more than a mop-up action against an inferior Spanish force. The war of 1898 clearly marked the emergence of the Navy onto the world stage in the manner envisioned by Mahan, Luce, T.R. Roosevelt and others but if Symonds had to include that turning point in his book wouldn't the events at Santiago Bay have been at least a little more appropriate? Particularly in light of the fascinating controversies arising from that outcome with the Sampson-Schley unpleasantness?
Midway is a no-brainer. The outcome neutralized Japanese advances in the northern Pacific, likely saved Hawaii from invasion and occupation, and enabled the USN, psychologically and, soon enough, materially, to assume the offensive in the central and south Pacific campaigns.
I concur with previous reviewers about the not-so-subtle agenda articulated in the closing pages of Decision at Sea. Professor Symonds uses the final chapter on the Persian Gulf of the 1980s and beyond as a platform for his somewhat politicized views on current Middle East affairs, which is fine and well and certainly within his purview as an analytical naval historian. However, Praying Mantis, to me, is hardly on a par with Lake Erie, Monitor-Virginia and Midway in the scale of changing the course of naval warfare or critical points in American naval history. Praying Mantis did not "Shape American History" as stated in the subtitle of Symonds' book. I submit that a far more "history shaping" event of the modern era would have been an analysis of the Carter-Reagan-Lehman naval buildup from 1979 through 1987 in which American blue-water naval forces were expanded both technologically and in numbers of ships (almost 600). This, to me, really did change history by clearly tipping the balance of power in the Cold War to the U.S., preserved the Pax Americana, particularly at sea, and further fueled the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union (and, by extension, its own naval buildup). The 600-ship navy had important consequences, not the least of which was that it sent the unequivocal psychological message that the United States Navy was going to remain superior to the Soviets at sea and that the USSR could not hope to match the U.S. expansion from the standpoint of technology and financial resources. Professor Symonds may have been better served, even as a detached, analytical, historian, to follow that formula rather than his choice of Praying Mantis.

As a Naval Academy grad currently on my 13th year of active duty, I've read a lot of naval history--voluntarily or otherwise. Relative to other works nearby on the bookshelf, this one is engaging, easy to read, and genuinely insightful. The author understands naval warfare and delivers his accounts and his interpretations with a deft balance between the strategic and the tactical, between the theoretical and the practical. I concur with earlier reviewers who commend the overall quality of Decision at Sea... and I also concur with those who note the political agenda that emerges as Symonds' history closes with current events.

Anyone who writes a book on history is entitled to append a few pages of personal opinion on what that history teaches us, so I don't grudge Symonds for doing so. And the presence of the standard anti-war talking points toward the end of the book, masquerading as detached scholarly analysis, should not discourage any student of naval history from reading it. (Heck, if people who support the Iraq War allowed the presence of anti-war sentiment to determine what we see and hear, we'd have to lock ourselves in our houses, turn off our cable TV, spray paint our windows black, and block out every internet web site except National Review and Power Line.) I disagree with a previous reviewer who criticized the inclusion of the Spanish-American War and Operation Praying Mantis here: History is unintelligible if not rendered as a story, and Symonds does his job when he selects those two posts to span a coherent narrative.

His treatment of the Spanish-American War is valuable despite the rather obvious preparation of negative analogies to the Iraq War, and you just have to roll your eyes and read on as he tries to cast Reagan's shwacking of Iran as nothing more than a continuation of Carter's fearsome policy of passive-voice press releases.

My only real gripe with Symonds is the flagrant contradiction between 1) his adulation of commanders at sea who had the fortitude to act on imperfect information and the initiative to accept risk rather than wait in vain for victory to work itself out, and 2) his criticism of the Bush administration for doing EXACTLY THAT with respect to the threats of rogue-state WMD and mass-casualty terrorism. Perhaps Symonds' understandable affinity for the niceties of international custom in the age of fighting sail led him to the same mistake of many of his peers: the confusion of the means of international law with the end of freedom. Our professors seem unable to understand that we've entered an age when the former, when honored thoughtlessly, can be an impediment to the latter.

Bottomline: Those of us who understand the "neo-con" argument for shaping history before it shapes us must accept that many of our best historians and most talented writers are immersed in an academic/political culture that, literally, cannot understand it. We have to live with that, at least until the passage of time gives us the abilty to look upon the Iraq War with the same dispassionate precision that Symonds deploys against the most significant naval engagements in U.S. history.

Symonds's book reviews in detail five landmark naval battles in American history. He has selected these five battles not only for their significance to the military conflict of which they were a part, but also for being representative of different phases of America's ascent to superpower status.

As the book is divided into distinct and separate sections dealing with each battle, it is perhaps inevitable that these sections will vary in narrative quality. The best chapter by far is Symonds's magnificent telling of the battle of Hampton Roads, when the Confederacy's and the Union's fantastic new weapons, their first fighting ironclads, squared off in battle. The significance of this event has been well covered in other popular histories, but Symonds really brings it to life. He conveys the full shock of the Virginia's swath of destruction through the Union forces, as well as the stunning nature of the Monitor's spirited defense the next day. But where Symonds really shines is in conveying the experience of battle aboard the two ships. I was haunted by the imagery that Symonds weaves, the claustophobia, the heat, the smoke, the water overhead obscuring the sun every time the Monitor terrifyingly dipped below the waves.

Symonds doesn't sustain this level in the other chapters. His relation of the battle of Lake Erie is interesting enough. The chapter on Midway could hardly miss, so dramatic were the events, but I didn't find that his Midway chapter stood out in any way from others I have read.

Historians often get into trouble when they veer away from more distant history, where they have the advantage of historical perspective, and try to characterize current events without the same objectivity. Symonds stumbles badly in the later chapters, presenting a partisan and at times clumsily-informed take on the US's current conflicts. (For example, he repeats the oft-propagated canard that the Bush Administration tried to justify war on Iraq by blaming them in part for 9/11, when in reality the Administration's case for war with Iraq was different and more nuanced -- that in the post-9/11 world, America could no longer tolerate defiance of UN controls on weapons proliferation, and violations of the Iraq war cease-fire, from a nation with active connections with terrorist organizations, including those that have attacked us.) Symonds's credulity in accepting a political version of current events detracts from what would otherwise be a fully credible history.

In general, this book does better when narrating specific naval events than in trying to comprehend or explain the broader sweep of American history. It is mostly readable and informative, with one truly outstanding chapter on the battle of Hampton Roads.

Symonds's book reviews in detail five landmark naval battles in American history. He has selected these five battles not only for their significance to the military conflict of which they were a part, but also for being representative of different phases of America's ascent to superpower status.

As the book is divided into distinct and separate sections dealing with each battle, it is perhaps inevitable that these sections will vary in narrative quality. The best chapter by far is Symonds's magnificent telling of the battle of Hampton Roads, when the Confederacy's and the Union's fantastic new weapons, their first fighting ironclads, squared off in battle. The significance of this event has been well covered in other popular histories, but Symonds really brings it to life. He conveys the full shock of the Virginia's swath of destruction through the Union forces, as well as the stunning nature of the Monitor's spirited defense the next day. But where Symonds really shines is in conveying the experience of battle aboard the two ships. I was haunted by the imagery that Symonds weaves, the claustophobia, the heat, the smoke, the water overhead obscuring the sun every time the Monitor terrifyingly dipped below the waves.

Symonds doesn't sustain this level in the other chapters. His relation of the battle of Lake Erie is interesting enough. The chapter on Midway could hardly miss, so dramatic were the events, but I didn't find that his Midway chapter stood out in any way from others I have read.

Historians often get into trouble when they veer away from more distant history, where they have the advantage of historical perspective, and try to characterize current events without the same objectivity. Symonds stumbles badly in the later chapters, presenting a partisan and at times clumsily-informed take on the US's current conflicts. (For example, he repeats the oft-propagated canard that the Bush Administration tried to justify war on Iraq by blaming them in part for 9/11, when in reality the Administration's case for war with Iraq was different and more nuanced -- that in the post-9/11 world, America could no longer tolerate defiance of UN controls on weapons proliferation, and violations of the Iraq war cease-fire, from a nation with active connections with terrorist organizations, including those that have attacked us.) Symonds's credulity in accepting a political version of current events detracts from what would otherwise be a fully credible history.

In general, this book does better when narrating specific naval events than in trying to comprehend or explain the broader sweep of American history. It is mostly readable and informative, with one truly outstanding chapter on the battle of Hampton Roads.

I just finished this book. The historical naval battles are well written and entertaining. They appear to be well researched as well with plenty of footnotes.

Though it is well written, I have to question the choice of naval battles that the author claims changed the course of history. He's on safe ground with the choice of the battle of Yorktown, the battle of Lake Erie, and even with the battle of the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia. After that, and he too clearly starts pushing a political agenda.

For some reason, the next chosen battle is when Dewey defeated the Spanish "fleet" in Manila Bay. But there isn't much of an enemy fleet, one of the two ships worth mentioning aren't even able to move under their own power. So there really wasn't much of a "decision" and it's purely politics that makes this an interesting engagement. It's not a very inspiring battle, and perhaps that's why it was chosen.

Next was the battle of Midway, another good choice, where the fate of the war with Japan turned, as has been claimed by many scholars.

It's the last choice that makes the reason for including the Battle of Manila Bay make sense. The author has now included the very obscure Operation Preying Mantis where the US sunk two and disabled a third small, hardly significant Iranian craft, albeit one armed with a harpoon missile.

The author stretches to make the claim that this operation was equally comparable to Perry on Lake Erie or the battle of Midway for their impact on US history, and it's not very believable.

What is believable is that he compares Manila to Reagan's decision to attack Iran, and then makes numerous mocking attacks on President Bush.

It's also worth noting that in a book filled with footnotes, his attacks on Bush and Reagan with scandalous claims that we provided substantial quantities of arms to Iraq, and his claim that Bush insisted that Saddam Hussein was involved in Al Qaeda's attack on 9/11 and other mindless statements are curiously devoid of footnotes.

I've been to Iraq and haven't seen any US arms there, though I've seen lots of French, Russian, Italian, and other country's weapons there.

G. W. Bush was very clear at all times that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11.

So why is an otherwise apparently well researched book have these errors? The book is little more than a political hack work. It makes me question the legitimacy of some of the other claims made in the book.

I would recommend if anyone is interested in naval history to avoid this book. The author has talent as a writer, but his political bias is not only misplaced, but ruins his credibility.

Craig Symond's "Decision at Sea: Five Naval Battles that Shaped American History" is an excellent book. He uses five key naval battles in American history - Lake Erie, Hampton Roads (the Monitor and the Virginia), Manila Bay, Midway, and Praying Mantis (1988 operations in the Persian Gulf against Iran) - as the vehicle to tell the story of the US Navy. However, this book is not a comprehensive history of the US Navy. He also uses these battles to trace American history from the frontier battles of a fledgling nation to its preeminence as the single world superpower

Symond's descriptions of the five battles (actually, six, since he also describes the Battle of the Capes between the British and French during the American Revolution) are superb. He describes the action and also gives sufficient background into the overall military situation and the importance of each battle. Finally, he writes for the general reader, and is willing to write the explanatory sentence or paragraph to describe the distinctive world of naval combat.

Symond weaves into each battle examples of the development of naval warfare. He compares the weapons, armaments, and propulsion with the previous battle, and describes how the experience of the sailors evolved from the deck-bound, unskilled combatants of the 18th century to the below-deck, unskilled combatants of the 19th century finally to the highly-skilled, technologically-adept sailors of the modern US Navy.

Finally, Symond uses each battle to illustrate how America's role in the world evolved. During the Revolutionary War, the colonial forces fought a frontier battle on a lake against a small British force. Although the battle of Lake Erie was important in securing America's frontier, and it was more of an out-of-the-way skirmish against the most powerful Navy in the world. The Civil War battle between the ironclads showed that America was still struggling to found itself as a nation, but that America was a technologically-advanced country. Finally, America emerged as a world power between the end of the 19th century (the Spanish-American War) and the Second World War (Midway), and by the 1980s (Praying Mantis) the US was the preeminent world power.

This ambitious book attempts to do many things, and Symond's narrative successfully accomplishes them all. This is an excellent book for anyone interested in American history or naval history.

I write this review from the somewhat unique perspective (at least compared to the previous reviewers) of being one of Professor Symonds' former students. I had the privilege of taking his course called "The Civil War to Modern America" while at the Naval Academy, and I will tell you, that it was because of Professor Symonds that I went from being a history student to a lifelong student of history. The style in which he writes puts the reader right in the moment. The quality of the research and the level of detail he provides all make for more than just a recap of battles long since past. In my mind, Prof. Symonds succeeds in bringing the past to life. If I didn't know any better, I'd swear I was standing right along side Perry at Lake Erie as well as the other key players at Hampton Roads, Manila Bay, Midway, and the Persian Gulf. Furthermore, not only does Prof. Symonds accomplish his goal by clearly demonstrating how the outcomes of these battles impacted our country's future, he also leaves us with a few things to think about as we continue to move forward into the 21st century. I think his epilogue is one that is extremely thought provoking with respect to this new role that the U.S. Navy has had to assume in the last several years. Regardless of your position, it certainly does raise a few questions; questions that can only be answered in the years to come.

Karl Darden
CDR USNR (Ret)
U.S. Naval Academy Class of 1984

I thought this naval action was brilliant and thorougly enjoyed reading this chapter.

Err . . . I kind of wanted to write a review of this book until I read Mr. Holmes's below. I don't think I could ever top that, he says pretty much all you'd need to know about this book in a review.

I guess I'll just try to add a few things, beyond the tactics and technology which are the focus of the book.

In the section on the Battle of the Capes you get a very clear sense of how important timing is in the strategic sense for setting up Battles. The French were not the dominant maritime power in the American and Carribean waters, but the fates gave them an opportunity to mass a force that could defeat one half of a split British force, which then made them the dominant power. You can also see how, to a certain small degree, the Royal Navy was resting on it's laurels and how small inefficiencies in the way the British fought the Battle of the Capes cascaded into a decisive defeat.

The Battle of Lake Eerie impressed me with the sheer determination and drive of both sides. The Americans and the British practically had to build small shipyards, then naval bases, then a few handful of ships themselves, and then throw them at each other with little more than a few scraped together supplies, pseudo-sailors with next to no training, and a prayer. The leaders on both sides were clearly walking the razor's edge, and it shows how much leadership can make the difference.

The Battle of Manila Bay is very interesting, especially since it is so rarely mentioned in the literature despite the fact it announced America as a real power and gave us our only official colony. The most amazing thing about it was the extreme inaccuracy of the fire, an effect of technology outpacing tactics and training. Also interesting was the confusion that effervesced on the American side as a result of the mixture of being so far away from the Spanish fleet that accurate estimates of its strength could not be made, and miscommunications about how much ammunition remained. This caused a nearly comical worried withdrawal of the US fleet halfway through the battle before it realized it was winning resoundingly and rejoined the engagement. This by no means makes you think less of the prowess of the US Naval forces, but shows clearly just how thick the fog of war really can be.

The section on Midway however was not terribly interesting considering how well documented Midway is and how much, in contrast to Manila Bay, it is mentioned in the wider literature. The original concept of the book was to discuss the campaign for the Solomon Islands instead, which included both novel carrier-to-carrier warfare (Battles of Eastern Solomons and Santa Cruz), night-time big gun battles with radar (Savo, USS Washington & South Dakota vs. Hiei & Kirishima, etc.), and combined air-sea-land amphibious operations. I think that the book would have done better to stick to this concept, but perhaps that would have made it too long.

Operation Praying Mantis is again fascinating for the same reason as Manila Bay, the generally poor "common" knowledge of it. This was also the engagement in which an AEGIS cruiser accidentally shot down an Iranian Airbus. Knowing the actual combat environment in which this mistake took place allows one to much better appreciate its causes and effects. How an American blue water force designed to take on the Soviet Navy in the middle of the Atlantic or Pacific fought a small, irregular navy in the restricted waters of the Persian Gulf is also highly prescient and salient to post Cold-War naval warfare.

To echo Mr. Holmes this is indeed an excellent and easily accessible overview of how technology and tactics have shaped naval warfare over the past 200 years.

"Decision at Sea" is a well-written description of six decisive naval battles, each of which illustrates a key period in the development of naval warfare.

The prologue reviews the Battle of the Capes, which enabled the French fleet to prevent reinforcement of Cornwallis' army at Yorktown and led to the American-French victory that effectively ended the Revolutionary War. This was a classic naval engagement fought between large wooden ships firing broadsides and sailing in line-ahead formation on the open sea.

The rest of the book is devoted to more thorough explorations of five other important battles (thus the subtitle), each of which is explored in detail:

The first is the Battle of Lake Erie, in which the Americans under Oliver Hazard Perry built a small sailing fleet and used it to defeat an equally small British force. The victory enabled America to hold on to the Old Northwest territories in the War of 1812 and ultimately to begin expanding westward without British interference. Though the battle was small and the scene was a lake (albeit a great one), the tactics and equipment used were basically similar to those used in the Battle of the Capes.

The Battle of Hampton Roads covers the slugfest between the ironclads Virginia and Monitor. Before the Monitor arrived on the scene, the ironclad CSS Virgnia had inflicted on the Union fleet at Hampton Roads the largest defeat experienced by the American navy before Pearl Harbor. The guns involved were much more advanced than those used in the Battle of Lake Erie and each ship moved under its own power, but the battle was still fought at close quarters where each combatant had a fairly good view of the other.

The Battle of Manila Bay represents the next phase in naval warfare: cruisers with long range guns bombarded each other at ranges of up to two miles, leading to suprisingly few (but devastating) hits on the Spanish squadron in the Philippines. Admiral Dewey quickly asserted control over the Philippines, and the United States was soon bogged down in a four-year long fight against Filipinos seeking independence.

The Battle of Midway represents the next iteration in naval warfare, when a decisive American victory was won by carrier planes launched by ships separated by distances of hundreds of miles.

Finally, Symonds describes Operation Praying Mantis, the 1989 battle between the American navy and Iranian forces that resulted in the destruction of several Iranian gas and oil separation platforms, the sinking of two Iranian frigates, and the near-sinking of a third. The damage was inflicted by American warships firing guns and long-range missiles while coordinating with similarly equipped aircraft and helicopters.

Symonds' writing style is crisp, and his description of each battle is gripping and insightful. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a succinct overview of the evolution of naval warfare over the last two hundred years.