摘要：The papers by Douglas Smith, H. Michael Gelfand, and Robert Schneller are important contributions to American naval history in sub-fields of history that have either been ignored or gone relatively uncovered by traditional naval historians. Each of the papers gets at the education of American naval officers in the 20th century not just in terms of their war fighting capabilities or their institutions' effectiveness in preparing them for war. Instead, each of the authors is really looking at the United States Naval Academy and the United States Naval War College as educational institutions in and of themselves. More importantly, these papers place these institutions in the historical context of American higher education in the early to late 20th century. The authors and their subjects are, therefore, trail blazers in both the sub-fields of American naval and educational history, and they should be studied as such. Douglas Smith's paper on the U.S. Naval War College in the interwar years is one of the few accounts dealing with what was at that time the Navy's closest equivalent to a civilian liberal arts graduate school. More importantly, Smith's paper clearly details how the curriculum at NWC may have prepared U.S. naval officers for the Pacific war. It is also a case study, to some extent, in how education is offered and consumed in an organization that is undergoing profound technological and institutional change. To be sure, as Smith points out, the curriculum, with its emphasis on battleship operations, may have focused on the wrong material to properly prepare mid-grade and high ranking officers for the carrier-centered fighting in the Pacific war. However, the focus on flexibility in warfare may have been the key to creating an officer corps that could change its orientation from battleship to carrier operations in a relatively short span of time in the winter of 1941–1942
