‘Annapolis Goes to War' Review: From the Yard to the Fire

Wall Street Journal

a day ago

It had been a long buyer's market for the U.S. Naval Academy Class of 1940. Its 750 inductees first arrived at 'the Yard' in 1936 following 16 years of peacetime budget cuts; with Congress in an isolationist mood, few midshipmen would have foreseen an American war in Europe and the Pacific when they sat for their entrance exams. But when the 456 graduates left Annapolis in June 1940, war was burning on two ends of the world. Their baptism by fire was a matter of when, not if.
Craig L. Symonds, a historian and Naval Academy professor emeritus, has spent decades studying American naval warfare. His 'World War II at Sea' (2018) deftly covers the war on the waves while his biography 'Nimitz at War' (2022) takes a deep dive into the life of the admiral who led history's largest armada.
In 'Annapolis Goes to War,' Mr. Symonds shows the struggle through the eyes of young officers thrown into combat 18 months after graduation. The 'Forties,' as the Class of 1940 became known, lost 76 graduates in World War II, suffering the highest death rate of any class from either Annapolis or West Point.
The book begins with wide-eyed students converging on the banks of Maryland's Severn River. 'When they arrived in Annapolis, they were filled with confidence and eagerness, innocents who embraced and internalized the conventional values of their era,' Mr. Symonds writes. Over the course of the first four chapters, he chronicles each coming school year, covering the discomfort, exhaustion, minor terrors and small pleasures that followed the young men.