Angus Konstam’s ‘Sumatra 1944-45’ presents the little-known raids that destroyed vast Japanese oil production and elevated the Royal Navy.
The raids on Sumatra by the British Pacific Fleet is a little known piece of World War II history. In fact, according to Angus Konstam’s new work, “this is the first history of the Sumatra raids.”
Konstam, one of the most prolific maritime historians living, has recently written a concise work on this brief piece of British naval history, entitled “Sumatra 1944-45: The British Pacific Fleet’s Oil Campaign in the Dutch East Indies.” The author, who hails from the UK, is not shy about why the history of these raids is so obscure. They were conducted in the shadow of the behemoth that had become the United States Navy.
Catching Up
Konstam discusses how the U.S. Navy had controlled the Pacific War and ultimately won it pretty much single-handedly. For their British counterparts, they were significantly behind in the advanced world of naval warfare. The British had long ruled the seas. But after World War I, the Royal Navy could no longer compete, specifically on an economic level, in building its naval fleet. Naval warfare had graduated from the battleship era to the carrier era, primarily because of the advances in aviation.
