Lars Celander's Blog
November 12, 2019
On Footnotes
The book has been criticised for not using footnotes. I understand that criticism. Like any well-behaved historian I tried to have the usual footnotes but in the end I gave up. It simply didn't make sense.
What I ended up doing instead was a Notes on Sources section. For each chapter, I provide the reader with the most useful and important sources. This is a more qualitative approach, easier to read but does not provide full traceability. I knew that it would make the book less useful for academia. This was accepted. They were not the intended market.
But why didn't footnotes make sense for what I was writing? Good question. One pretty good answer is that there simply aren't a lot of sources to reference. But that is not unique for what I was doing, that's a standard problem. A deeper answer is probably the focus of the book, the "how" instead of the more common "what" and "when". Much of the book consists of what basically amounts to my own conclusions based on my own professional experience in areas like navigation, radio, radar, gunnery, weather, aerodynamics etc. Writing the book, I did what we theoretical physicists are trained to do, build theories that agree with available experimental data. Or, in cases, built on nothing but logic. This made referencing, using footnotes, awkward. It was also of doubtful value since so much depended on my own experience anyway. Which is probably why footnoting felt like the wrong tool.
Would it be possible to tweak the usual footnoting/referencing in some way in order to have it make better sense when doing a work of this type? The need for traceability is certainly real. Physicists certainly have the same need and they also use footnotes. I don't have a good answer here. A simple answer would be that I'm my own source but that is neither satisfactory nor true.
Anyway, a byproduct of having used this approach is that I've become quite critical of how much of history is traditionally written. There is tendency to simply hoard facts. The more detailed facts, the better. The problem is that after painstakingly finding and presenting (and footnoting) all these facts, much is still poorly understood. To quote Albert Einstein: "Any fool can know. The point is to understand.". Knowing is not enough. You have to understand what you are talking about on a deeper level, in this case the engineering and physics of it all. Without that understanding, descriptions and conclusions can be quite wrong. As shown by all the myths busted in the book.
What I ended up doing instead was a Notes on Sources section. For each chapter, I provide the reader with the most useful and important sources. This is a more qualitative approach, easier to read but does not provide full traceability. I knew that it would make the book less useful for academia. This was accepted. They were not the intended market.
But why didn't footnotes make sense for what I was writing? Good question. One pretty good answer is that there simply aren't a lot of sources to reference. But that is not unique for what I was doing, that's a standard problem. A deeper answer is probably the focus of the book, the "how" instead of the more common "what" and "when". Much of the book consists of what basically amounts to my own conclusions based on my own professional experience in areas like navigation, radio, radar, gunnery, weather, aerodynamics etc. Writing the book, I did what we theoretical physicists are trained to do, build theories that agree with available experimental data. Or, in cases, built on nothing but logic. This made referencing, using footnotes, awkward. It was also of doubtful value since so much depended on my own experience anyway. Which is probably why footnoting felt like the wrong tool.
Would it be possible to tweak the usual footnoting/referencing in some way in order to have it make better sense when doing a work of this type? The need for traceability is certainly real. Physicists certainly have the same need and they also use footnotes. I don't have a good answer here. A simple answer would be that I'm my own source but that is neither satisfactory nor true.
Anyway, a byproduct of having used this approach is that I've become quite critical of how much of history is traditionally written. There is tendency to simply hoard facts. The more detailed facts, the better. The problem is that after painstakingly finding and presenting (and footnoting) all these facts, much is still poorly understood. To quote Albert Einstein: "Any fool can know. The point is to understand.". Knowing is not enough. You have to understand what you are talking about on a deeper level, in this case the engineering and physics of it all. Without that understanding, descriptions and conclusions can be quite wrong. As shown by all the myths busted in the book.
May 16, 2019
Indian Ocean Raid bonus chapter
Just finished a bonus chapter on the Indian Ocean Raid. It's You can download it here:
http://www.raserbaden.com/IndianOcean...
The Indian Ocean Raid never made it into the book as there was never any real carrier combat, hence providing no useful statistics. It's still a fascinating topic, perhaps the most tactically interesting carrier encounter of the whole war.
http://www.raserbaden.com/IndianOcean...
The Indian Ocean Raid never made it into the book as there was never any real carrier combat, hence providing no useful statistics. It's still a fascinating topic, perhaps the most tactically interesting carrier encounter of the whole war.
April 26, 2019
Origin of the Combat Model
Some readers have expressed befuddlement over the origin of the combat model. That the battle accounts are the basis, providing the necessary statistics, is so fundamental to the structure of the book that it was explained already in the Introduction. My suspicion is that by the time the reader reached the combat model itself, the reader had forgotten what was said in the Introduction. Should perhaps have been repeated. Samuel Eliot Morison says in one of his books that a writer should not assume any knowledge on the part of the reader but should assume that the reader is both interested and intelligent. Morison says nothing about the reader being forgetful.
As the book says in the Introduction, the combat model is based on the battle accounts. That's why the battle accounts are there. That's also why the battle accounts are written the way they are, as a sequence of air operations with all relevant numbers clearly presented. Armed with the statistics provided by the battle accounts, it is then straightforward to assign average/typical hit percentages etc. Exactly what hit percentages to use is still somewhat subjective. That is why the model is described in detail so the reader can understand exactly what's going on. Special care was taken to make the description of the model mathematically unambiguous, enabling it to be transposed into a spreadsheet, should the reader wish to experiment with different percentages.
That the battle accounts serve as a basis for the combat model is why Operation Pedestal is there. It's the only RN multi-carrier operations that could provide useful statistics. The book would also be amiss without any battle involving the RN. The Pearl Harbor and the Indian Ocean raids are not included as neither provides relevant statistics.
As the book says in the Introduction, the combat model is based on the battle accounts. That's why the battle accounts are there. That's also why the battle accounts are written the way they are, as a sequence of air operations with all relevant numbers clearly presented. Armed with the statistics provided by the battle accounts, it is then straightforward to assign average/typical hit percentages etc. Exactly what hit percentages to use is still somewhat subjective. That is why the model is described in detail so the reader can understand exactly what's going on. Special care was taken to make the description of the model mathematically unambiguous, enabling it to be transposed into a spreadsheet, should the reader wish to experiment with different percentages.
That the battle accounts serve as a basis for the combat model is why Operation Pedestal is there. It's the only RN multi-carrier operations that could provide useful statistics. The book would also be amiss without any battle involving the RN. The Pearl Harbor and the Indian Ocean raids are not included as neither provides relevant statistics.
Parrothead
The book was written entirely while listening to Radio Margaritaville. Yes, I'm a big fan of Jimmy Buffett.
Editing
There are seven references to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy hidden in the book. The editor ran into one of them and wasn't all that amused. I managed to convince her to let it stay. I certainly wouldn't have told her about the others.
Yes, there really are seven references. No, I'm not sadistic enough to say seven and then only put in six. Trust me!
The chapter I had the most fun writing was that about carrier pigeons. It was also the last chapter written before publication. I struggled hard to keep the text reasonably serious. I fully expected the editor to toss it out. Amazingly it was allowed to stay. Maybe editors do have a sense of humor after all.
Yes, there really are seven references. No, I'm not sadistic enough to say seven and then only put in six. Trust me!
The chapter I had the most fun writing was that about carrier pigeons. It was also the last chapter written before publication. I struggled hard to keep the text reasonably serious. I fully expected the editor to toss it out. Amazingly it was allowed to stay. Maybe editors do have a sense of humor after all.
Foreword
I was asked by my publisher if I had anybody in mind to write a foreword. I really didn't know anyone suitable. I've never actually met anyone from either the US Navy or the Royal Navy, much less from Japan. The closest I could think of was Adolf Hitler. I'm three handshakes away from Hitler. A friend of mine has a friend in Germany that once shook hands with Hitler. On reflection I decided that Hitler was not a good choice. After all, what does he know about carrier operations? Which is why the book has no foreword.
Origin of the book
The original title was "Carrier Operations in WWII - An Operations Research Analysis". This was a pretty hard-core essay focusing on the game theory behind carrier battles. It wasn't really a proper book, it read more like a scientific paper. I submitted the text to a publisher. They were suitably impressed but thought that the audience was perhaps a bit too limited. I basically agreed.
I then uploaded the essay to my personal web site, free to download as a PDF, for search engines to index and others to find. The feedback I received encouraged me to make a full length book of it. The major addition was the battle accounts. I also weeded out all the math and added some general interest and background material. What was of general interest, was of interest to me as well, so I ended up adding quite a lot. The text was now triple the size of the original essay. The text then sat and matured for about two years. The first publisher was interested enough to accept a copy of the manuscript but after a year I still hadn't heard from them so I submitted the manuscript to Casemate. Within days they came back and said they were interested. The reason I chose Casemate was the book by Alan Zimm on Pearl Harbor. Of all the books I've read, that book was the one closest to mine in style and approach. I figured that if they liked his book, they'd like mine. They did.
I then uploaded the essay to my personal web site, free to download as a PDF, for search engines to index and others to find. The feedback I received encouraged me to make a full length book of it. The major addition was the battle accounts. I also weeded out all the math and added some general interest and background material. What was of general interest, was of interest to me as well, so I ended up adding quite a lot. The text was now triple the size of the original essay. The text then sat and matured for about two years. The first publisher was interested enough to accept a copy of the manuscript but after a year I still hadn't heard from them so I submitted the manuscript to Casemate. Within days they came back and said they were interested. The reason I chose Casemate was the book by Alan Zimm on Pearl Harbor. Of all the books I've read, that book was the one closest to mine in style and approach. I figured that if they liked his book, they'd like mine. They did.
