1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  Men from the fifteen other planes were having similar experiences. One man landed in a tree and was caught, but before he tried to free himself and climb down he smoked a cigarette. When he threw away the butt he watched its orange glow descend into some unfathomable depth; turns out he dropped onto the edge of an enormous rock cliff. He decided to spend the night in the tree. Here may be the world’s only example of a cigarette saving someone’s life.

  Peasants and farmers all over that part of China were startled to see and hear the violent crashes of the planes against their mountains and into their rice fields, and they had no idea what to make of it. Practically all of the bailed-out crews found one another next day, but Lushu hoo megwa Jugi seemed to make no impression whatsoever on any of the Chinese. Many of the crews were rounded up by Chinese militia, who did not comprehend who they were or what they had just done. A few were robbed by Chinese bandits or guerrillas. Many were injured in the landings and, miraculously, only three were killed. Gangrene set in on Lieutenant Lawson’s leg and it had to be amputated under the most trying conditions.*

  Eight of the crew members were captured by Japanese troops in China and three of these were executed on the basis of a trumped-up document concocted by the Japanese army after the raid and entitled “Japanese Regulations for Punishment of Enemy Air Crews.” Five of the prisoners were sentenced to death but for no particular reason the sentence was commuted to life in prison. Lieutenant William G. Farrow and Sergeant Harold A. Spatz of Bat Out of Hell, the unlucky plane that had cut off the Hornet sailor’s arm, and Lieutenant Dean E. Hallmark of plane number 6, Green Hornet, were ceremoniously marched to a cemetery where three white wooden crosses had been set up. They were made to kneel while their arms were tied to the crosses. Then they were blindfolded and a firing squad of six Japanese soldiers shot each in the head. When Roosevelt heard the news he announced it in one of his fireside chats, which began with, “It is with the deepest horror ...” The unrepentant Japanese responded with a radio broadcast of their own: “Don’t forget America you can be sure that every flier that comes here has a special pass to hell. Rest assured that it’s strictly a one-way ticket.”32

  The crew of the B-25 that had landed in Russia were greeted initially with welcome by the Soviet army, but this treatment quickly changed as they were shifted through higher and higher levels of that strange and brutal government. At first they were given borscht and vodka and shown American movies, but soon they were transported to the bleak and freezing interior of the Soviet Union, where they were put under guard in a dismal house. The food was so poor that their gums bled and they began to lose weight and become ill. Out of desperation—and to the horror of their warden—the chief pilot, Edward J. “Ski” York, decided to write a letter to Stalin himself, asking that they at least be moved to a warmer climate. To everyone’s surprise they were, and the tale of their escape is right out of a movie.33

  By some miracle the rest of Doolittle’s bunch—sixty-seven pilots and crewmen—managed to find their way into the hands of friendly Chinese forces and were escorted in everything from junks to sedan chairs across the mountains, often through Japanese-occupied territory, to Chungking, a thousand miles distant. There they got to meet Chiang Kai-shek and his famous wife, Madam Chiang,* and were given medals and then flown back to the United States.

  For their part, the Japanese were furious. Emperor Hirohito himself approved orders for a punitive bloodbath against all Chinese in the areas near where the Americans had come down and were helped to safety. Accordingly, an army of 100,000 Japanese marched into the region and in a carnival of boiling vengeance turned the entire province—large as Tennessee—into an abattoir. When they were finished four months later some 250,000 Chinese civilians had been murdered, many by the most barbaric methods. One old man, a schoolteacher who had fed some of the Americans, told two Catholic priests the monstrous story of how Japanese soldiers had “killed my three sons; they killed my wife, Ansing; they set fire to my school; they burned my books; they killed my grandchildren and threw them in the well.” (The schoolteacher himself escaped death only by hiding in the well with his slain grandchildren.) Another man was immolated by being wrapped in a kerosene-drenched blanket that the soldiers then ordered his wife at gunpoint to set afire.34

  Barbaric as the Japanese reprisals were, the Doolittle raid achieved the desired effect on American morale. The first newspaper reports were sketchy and overstated the damage done, but all Americans felt that somehow Pearl Harbor and all the rest of it had been at least partially avenged. It gave Roosevelt a chance to engage in his favorite sport—tweaking newsmen. When everyone clamored to know where Doolittle’s planes had come from in order to get to mainland Japan, the president, flipping his famous cigarette holder Groucho Marx—style, told them, “From Shangri-la.”†

  Doolittle had no sooner gotten back to Washington when he received a call from Hap Arnold to await his staff car outside his apartment. Doolittle did as he was told and was astonished to find not only Arnold but General Marshall sitting in the backseat. When they drove off, Doolittle inquired where they were headed.

  “We are going to the White House,” Arnold said.

  “What are we going to do there?” Doolittle asked.

  “The president is going to give you the Medal of Honor,” said Marshall.

  Doolittle was shocked and began to protest that the medal “should be reserved for those who risk their lives trying to save somebody else.” He continued by praising all the men who had flown the mission, then began to notice that not only was Arnold beginning to look flushed and angry but so was Marshall, who was scowling.

  “I don’t think I’m entitled to the Medal of Honor,” Doolittle concluded, by now a little hesitant.

  “I happen to think you are,” Marshall said icily.

  The trio rode on in stony silence while Lieutenant Colonel Doolittle blanched at the gaffe he had just made.

  “The highest ranking man in Army uniform had made his decision. It was neither the time nor the place for me to argue.”35

  Chapter Twelve

  By the spring of 1942 the Germans seemed poised on the edge of victory in their war against the vast Soviet Union. Their attack the previous summer, before America entered the war, had left them a thousand miles inside Soviet borders, poised at the gates of its most important cities, Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad. Then the Russian resistence stiffened and, more ominiously, the Russian winter closed in, just as it had for Napoleon a century and a half earlier. But with springtime the thaw arrived, and the Germans again began their relentless attacks. The Roosevelt administration had quickly recognized the danger and pledged to Stalin a billion dollars in Lend-Lease aid, a stupendous sum for the times. American tanks, warplanes, clothing, guns, and ammunition were pouring into ports in northwest Russia, but would it be enough and in time?

  The Nazi armies steadily made progress against the more poorly equipped, trained, and led Soviets. They swept into the town of Tula, birthplace of the revered Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, entered his shrine, flung the original manuscripts of such celebrated novels as War and Peace to the winds and snow, and burned his furniture for heating fuel; they treated likewise the home of the immortal composer Tchaikovsky, near Moscow. Few observers at the time gave the Russians much chance against Hitler’s powerful armies, and the great fear of the time was that if the Soviets were defeated, those same German armies would be free to turn on the Allied forces, principally Great Britain, then fighting for its life in the North African deserts.1

  By late spring of ‘42 General Rommel had captured the British stronghold of Tobruk, in Libya, took 25,000 Allied prisoners and an immense amount of supplies, and pushed the British army back into Egypt. It began to appear that the British might not be able to hold the Middle East, with all its crucial oil reserves, nor for that matter India itself, which the Japanese army was also pushing toward from the east. All in all, it had been an abominable year and prospects looked bleak.r />
  By March of 1942, the Americans and British had concluded an agreement: the United States would assume responsibility for driving the Japanese out of the Pacific while the British would take on the Germans and Italians in the Middle East and defend the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Both would continue fighting the Germans on the Atlantic and cooperate in taking the French North African colonies from the Vichy French to (possibly) use as a launching pad for operations against Italy. The Americans were also champing at the bit to cross the English Channel, drive the Germans from France, and begin a thrust against Germany itself. (They were wisely talked out of this by Churchill, who warned that such a premature invasion would cause the Channel “to run red with blood.”)

  These were bold commitments since, with exception of the pitiful American soldiers and marines hanging on in Corregidor, the Japanese had everywhere conquered the Pacific beyond their wildest dreams and were knocking at the door of Australia itself. As well, Rommel was still driving for the Suez Canal and the Japanese had by now sunk every decent warship the British had in the Indian Ocean. Moreover, every month German U-boats were sending hundred of thousands of tons of Allied shipping to the bottom of both the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico and there seemed to be no way to stop them. For their part, the Japanese had persuaded themselves that they were invincible and quickly succumbed to what was afterward called, by the Japanese themselves, “Victory Disease,” the manifestation of which was to expand and speed up their conquests beyond what they could prudently handle.

  The Americans had so far to content themselves with small raids against the Japanese, such as the one Doolittle had conducted, as well as a series of hit-and-run carrier strikes against Japanese-held islands in the Marshalls chain as well as the areas around Australia. With the exception of Doolittle’s raid, these were successful only inasmuch as they gave the navy pilots valuable on-the-job training and because no American carriers were lost. The Japanese considered these raids of no more importance than being attacked by gnats, but gnats could be obnoxious and they resolved to eliminate them.

  To that end, in May 1942, the Japanese decided to expand their empire even further to the small island of Tulagi in the Solomon chain, and to Port Moresby, on the southern tip of New Guinea, in order to extend their mastery of the air over the vast Coral Sea and presumably give them protection from any aerial bombing or surface-ship attacks from the new and growing American presence in Australia. It would also give them a launching point for the further conquest of eastern Pacific island chains including Fiji, Samoa, New Caledonia, and the New Hebrides. Once accomplished, this would completely isolate Australia and New Zealand from further American support or interference. It would also be the beginning of the Japanese military’s unraveling.

  The Doolittle raid, meanwhile, was having consequences in Japan far beyond its modest intentions. Aside from achieving the desired boost to American morale and damaging some Japanese facilities, the raid created near panic among top Japanese military officers, particularly in the navy, since it was quickly learned that the planes had been launched from aircraft carriers and thus had been their responsibility. Immediately after the raid the Japanese, like a disturbed colony of ants, sent practically every plane and warship in their fleet out looking for the American task force, but of course Halsey was far away by then. Importantly, all these Japanese ships generated a huge amount of radio chatter and American radio-intercept stations from Australia to the Aleutians, from Midway Island to Hawaii, plucked thousands of signals out of the air and quickly began to piece together the missing parts of the top-secret Japanese naval code puzzle.

  It will be remembered that at the time of Pearl Harbor Lieutenant Commander Rochefort and his team of cryptologists back in Honolulu could read less than 10 percent of the Japanese code; a week after Doolittle’s raid they were reading nearly half of it, and by June they were reading almost all of it. This was an incredible stroke of good luck as well as masterful work by the code breakers, for they soon divined that the Japanese were planning a big naval operation somewhere in the mid-Pacific. Reading the code, however, did not mean reading Japanese intentions; they had a code within their code, as all codes do, which told what it actually meant, and this would prove far more perplexing.

  Here manifested the second unintended consequence of Doolittle’s raid. Admiral Yamamoto had been the instigator of this big mid-Pacific operation in order to lure the remains of the U.S. fleet into a trap where he could annihilate it thoroughly. Yamamoto’s naval colleagues and superiors on the Naval General Staff, however, were not warm to the notion. They felt the Japanese navy would be better employed supporting the continuing Southward Movement, gobbling up more territory, probably even Australia. After the Doolittle business, however, these naysayers either changed their minds or kept their counsel. The Japanese homeland had been attacked and Yamamoto’s scheme suddenly made sense: to extend the defensive ring around Japan thousands of miles farther northeast toward Hawaii—from whence the U.S. carriers had come and from where they could better monitor and deflect U.S. naval movements. To accomplish this, they would need to capture the important American fighter-bomber, air reconnaissance, and naval outpost of Midway Island, stuck way out in the central Pacific, too close for comfort and a thorn in the side for Japan.

  Equally important, the Japanese at the same time were determined to continue their expansion in the South Pacific and, to that end, dispatched three of their aircraft carriers to support an invasion of southern New Guinea—almost within shouting distance of the north Australian coast as well as a series of Australian-controlled islands in the Solomon chain just to the eastward, including one whose name would soon become infamous, Guadalcanal.

  Now that they were able to read much of the Japanese code, the U.S. Pacific Fleet headquarters in Pearl Harbor quickly formed a picture of the expanded Southward Movement: a Japanese fleet built around the three carriers, two large and one small, guarding a flotilla of troop transports for the invasions. In other circumstances this precious information would have been a godsend, but at the moment the U.S. Navy did not have enough available carriers in the Pacific to ensure superiority against the Japanese force now headed south. Of the five now on hand, Saratoga was laid up in a West Coast shipyard after being torpedoed and almost sunk a month earlier. Halsey’s task force, including the Enterprise and the Hornet, was still making its way back across the Pacific following the Doolittle raid, and it would have to be replenished before putting to sea again. That left only the Yorktown, already operating in the Coral Sea, and the Lexington, which was ready and waiting at Pearl. Admiral Nimitz decided to send these two anyway, against a superior Japanese fleet, with hopes that surprise would be a deciding factor. On May 1,1942, the two U.S. task forces rendezvoused in the Coral Sea.

  The Coral Sea, described here by the official naval historian Dr. Samuel Eliot Morison, who sailed it, “is one of the most beautiful bodies of water in the world. Typhoons pass it by; the southeast trades blow fresh across the surface almost the entire year—raising whitecaps from the lee shores of the islands, that build up into a regular, gentle swell that crashes on the Great Barrier Reef in a 1,500-mile line of white foam. There is no winter, only a summer that is never too hot.” He goes on to describe the various island and island groups: “Here the interplay of sunlight, pure air and transparent water may be seen at its loveliest, peacock-hued shoals over the coral gardens break off abruptly from an emerald fringe into deeps of brilliant amethyst.”2 And here, he could have added, among all that beauty, two large naval fleets were on a collision course, and many men would die violent deaths and large ships would go down to the deeps.

  On May 3, 1942, a Japanese invasion force of fourteen troop transports left the big naval base at Rabaul at the northern end of the Solomon Island chain and headed south to invade Port Moresby and capture its airstrip on the southeastern tip of New Guinea, only a few hundred miles from the Australian coast. Protecting the troop transports were the thre
e carriers, eight cruisers, and twelve destroyers under Vice Admiral Takeo Takagi. To meet this force and stop the invasion of eastern New Guinea, Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher had sailed his task force, built around Lexington and Yorktown, into the sparkling emerald waters of the Coral Sea.

  Neither commander was aware of the presence of the other. Fletcher had been receiving intelligence reports from William Friedman’s code-breaking operation at Pearl Harbor, giving the size and intentions of the Japanese force but no precise location for it. For his part Takagi had no idea that there were any American warships in the Coral Sea at all, until on May 3 the newly captured island of Tulagi was bombed by U.S. planes that could only have come from a carrier. Accordingly, he barreled southward at full steam to do battle. What ensued could be described as a comedy of errors if the stakes had not been so high and the consequences so deadly.

  First, Takagi’s fleet was sailing under protection of a weather front, which prevented him from being spotted either from Fletcher’s planes or by land-based aircraft from Australia. By the time Takagi pulled out of the front, Fletcher’s search planes had been recalled just a few miles from the Japanese force and any chance for a surprise strike was lost. Likewise, Takagi had launched no search planes at all; if he had he likely would have caught Fletcher’s carriers refueling, a prime opportunity for attack. As night closed in over the Coral Sea the two opposing fleets lay a mere seventy miles from each other, though neither knew it at the time.