Chapter XX
UNIQUITIES
i
Each of these five is a book which, either from its subject, its authorship, or its handling, is sui generis. I call such books “uniquities”; it sounds a little less trite than saying they are unique. I think I will let someone else speak of these books. I will look to see, and will let you see, what others have said about my uniquities.
ii
First we have Our Navy at War by Josephus Daniels. W. B. M’Cormick, formerly of the editorial staff of the Army and Navy Journal, reviewing this book for the New York Herald (28 May 1922) said:
“Josephus Daniels always was an optimist about navy affairs while he was Secretary of the Navy from 1913 to 1921, and now that he has told what the navy did during the world war he demonstrates in his narrative that he is a good sport. For in spite of the many and bitter attacks that were made on him in that troubled time he does not make a single reference to any of them, nor does he wreak any such revenge as he might have done through this medium. In this respect it may be said that truly does he live up to the description of his character set down in the pages of Rear Admiral Bradley A. Fiske’s autobiography, namely, that ‘Secretary Daniels impressed me as being a Christian gentleman.’
“In its general outlines and in many of its details there is little in Mr. Daniels’s story that has not been told before in volumes devoted to single phases of the United States Navy’s war operations. For example, his chapter on the extraordinary task of laying the great mine fields, known as the North Sea barrage, from Norway to the Orkneys, is much more fully described in the account written by Captain Reginald R. Belknap; the story of ‘Sending Sims to Europe’ is also more extensively presented in that officer’s book, The Victory at Sea, and the same qualification can be applied to the chapter on the fighting of the marines in Belleau Wood and elsewhere, and the work of our destroyers and submarines in European waters.