In many years of reviewing reference books, I do not recall that I have ever encountered one written under a pseudonym. Under that pseudonym, the author is as well known for his numerous books on intelligence as Scarecrow Press are for their ever‐growing output of historical dictionaries. The present one encompasses 600 articles of between 30 and 1,500 words on organizations, people, places, ships, weapons, battles, operations and codenames important in the field of naval intelligence. I had almost written “twentieth‐century naval intelligence”, for there turns out to be little on earlier periods. For example, there is practically nothing on the American Civil War, one in which naval intelligence had a significant role, and little on the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (should the author one day prepare a revised edition, I should suggest he considers the career of Philip D'Auvergne, who ran an extensive British spy network in French ports).
The supplementary material includes, as one would expect in this series, an introduction explaining the major goals of naval intelligence and its effects in recent times; a list of abbreviations and acronyms; a chronology which, though beginning in 1588, devotes 90 per cent of its length to the twentieth century; a bibliography of 120 items (with an introduction explaining why coverage of the subject is inevitably incomplete); a short list of websites; and a substantial index. Particular to this volume are graphs of losses of Allied shipping and of German U‐boats during the Second World War, and a list of the signals intercept stations of the US Navy.
Readers will find in these pages many striking examples of the use of naval intelligence which would have been unknown until recently; for example, particulars of the extensive system established by NATO to record the sounds of Soviet submarines, or the fact that the Royal Navy's successful deterrence of a potential Argentine attack on the Falklands in 1977 had been kept so secret that it proved impossible to repeat it in 1982. The misuse of intelligence is often equally striking. The Imperial Japanese Navy believed that it had won a decisive battle with the US Navy off Formosa in 1944 when in fact it had done little damage.
There are, however, aspects of the book which might be questioned. One of these concerns the balance of entries. Why, for instance, is the article on the engagement at Bluff Cove in the Falklands War longer than that on the Battle of the Atlantic? Or why is the entry on the Chinese Navy entirely devoted to its submarines? When the author departs from his specialised field of intelligence into other naval specialities, his knowledge sometimes appears inadequate. His attribution of 16‐inch guns to the cruiser General Belgrano may be merely an example of the kind of minor errors that an editor should have picked up; but when he declares that the Nagato was “the largest and most powerful battleship ever built, which displaced 58,500 tons” the only true statement in that sentence is that she was a battleship. This dictionary will inform the general reader about many important and obscure aspects of twentieth‐century naval affairs, but a little more care would have improved it.
