Graveyards of the Pacific: From Pearl Harbor to Bikini Island
Graveyards of the Pacificoffers exactly what readers expect fromNational Geographic: A beautiful book full of outstanding photos and graphics. It is worth reading (bestselling historian Stephen E. Ambrose writes the introduction), but even better to look at. Coauthor Robert D. Ballard, of course, is the explorer best known for discovering theTitanicon the Atlantic seabed. As the title suggests,Graveyards of the Pacificfocuses on the Second World War. It includes fewer underwater photos than what one might expect from a book coauthored by Ballard--no more than a dozen or so. But each is well selected: A Japanese torpedo lying on the floor of Pearl Harbor, planes encrusted by decades of marine growth, the mast of an aircraft transport surrounded by fish and covered with seaweed--in the shape of a cross, it looks "like an underwater shrine"--and vessels sunk during the Bikini Atoll atomic bomb tests. Most of the photographs and other illustrations (there are more than 150 in total) are contemporary pictures taken during the war, from a blurry image of Japanese battleships heading toward Pearl Harbor before the sneak attack to a sequential series of photos showing a kamikaze plane approaching an American aircraft carrier, and then smashing into it. The text of the book moves back and forth between historical descriptions of the naval war and accounts of how Ballard found many of the ships lost during the fighting. His most significant discovery in the Pacific was probably the U.S.S.Yorktown, destroyed during the battle of Midway in 1942 and now resting 17,000 feet below the waves. The description of its dark, final resting place is eerie: It "looks like a huge craft dropped down from space, shorn of many of the antenna and cables and protrusions that had once made her serviceable, but now reduced to her core, which is still massive and formidable. ...[A] huge sunken sea-beast from another time, a steel dinosaur out of another era, when deluded men still thought they could conquer the world." AsGraveyards of the Pacificproves once again, we are fortunate to have Ballard embarking on an altogether different kind of conquest.--John Miller