1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  After dark Carlson sent his executive officer, Major James Roosevelt, son of the president, ashore with four more boats and they rescued almost all of the stranded marines. Practically all of the hundred or so Japanese on the island had been killed, but thirty marines had died as well. Nine marines, however, had somehow been left behind, though Carlson didn’t know it,* and the submarines submerged and departed Makin for Hawaii. What happened to the nine missing marines was yet another example of Japanese consideration for the provisions of the Geneva Convention.

  At first the nine were treated fairly well by the Japanese reinforcements who soon arrived and captured them. They were quickly shipped north to the island of Kwajalein, in the Marshalls, where other Japanese troops gave them cigarettes and candy and described the things the marines would see when they were eventually shipped to a POW camp in Japan. The nine prisoners remained on Kwajalein for six weeks, languishing in what they thought was the goodwill of their captors. Then the Japanese naval commander of the islands, Vice Admiral Koso Abe, intervened. (It was he who had commanded the Japanese transport fleet that was foiled from landing at Port Moresby following the Battle of the Coral Sea.) For some grotesque reason Abe sent an order for the Kwajalein commander to execute the nine American prisoners.

  The naval commander of Kwajalein, Captain Yoshio Obara, protested Abe’s repulsive order, but to no avail. Not only that, Obara couldn’t even find volunteers willing to carry it out, so he selected four of his own officers to do the dirty work. On October 16, 1942, the nine marines were taken to a freshly dug gravesite, forced to kneel, and one by one were beheaded by the sword-wielding Japanese officers, with Vice Admiral Abe on hand to watch.

  Doubtless it was small consolation for the dead marines, or for their families, but a native Makin Islander had been hiding in nearby weeds and saw the executions. After the war, when an inquiry was made by the U.S. Marines as to where their nine captured men were, the native man testified as an eyewitness before one of the Allied military tribunals. Admiral Abe was convicted of war crimes and hanged, and Captain Obara received ten years’ hard labor.*14

  The destruction of Colonel Ichiki’s force by the marines at Guadalcanal did not discourage the Japanese; in fact it propelled them into further action. It was decided between Imperial Army headquarters in Tokyo and the Japanese military authorities at Rabaul to send an even more powerful force to deal with the upstart Americans. This was the so-called Kawaguchi Detachment, named for its commander, Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi, some 4,000 men strong. This bunch was ferried to Guadalcanal* in an almost nightly “rat run” of fast destroyers and slow “ant run” barges by Admiral Raizo Tanaka, who came to be known as Tanaka the Tenacious, commanding what would become branded infamously as the Tokyo Express, the transport service of Japanese troops to Guadalcanal through the Slot between Rabaul and Guadalcanal.

  By this time the Japanese had begun a Monday-through-Sunday nighttime aerial and naval bombing of the marines on the island, but the U.S. Navy, Marine, and Army planes on the “unsinkable aircraft carrier” of Guadalcanal now “owned the daytime,” so far as Japanese shipping went, and the Japanese “owned the night,” reinforcing their troops on Guadalcanal and bombarding the U.S. troops from warships. Thing about the Japanese bombers was that they had to fly the six hundred miles south from Rabaul, and then back, while the Guadalcanal pilots had only to take off and fight when the enemy entered their own flight range. But this was far easier said than done. The Japanese bombing missions caused damage, misery, and death among the beleaguered marines but it also was beginning to cost the Japanese even more dearly in losses of aircraft and pilots; here are some reports: “August 26: sixteen Japanese bombers shot down and seventeen Zero fighters; August 29: four Japanese bombers shot down, four Zeros; August 30, eighteen Zeros shot down,” and so on.15

  Naturally this was taking a hard toll on the American fighter pilots and their planes as well; of the original nineteen Wildcat fighters flown in by Admiral McCain on August 20, only five were still flyable by August 30; thus 75 percent of U.S. fighter strength on Guadalcanal had been knocked out in only ten days.16 Indeed, something had to be done, but there wasn’t much McCain could do because he was in charge only of land-based aircraft. Then there came a series of dubiously fortunate calamities; in the space of the next few weeks the aircraft carriers Enterprise, Saratoga, and Wasp were either torpedoed or hit by Japanese bombs and put out of action (the Wasp was actually sunk), but almost all of their planes had managed to get off and were recovered and many eventually wound up at the Guadalcanal airfield.* This prompted one marine general’s cynical calculation that “Guadalcanal was saved by the loss of so many carriers.”17

  Among the first marine pilots to land on Guadalcanal were members of the 212th Fighter Squadron, whose planes had taken off from the little escort aircraft carrier that Admiral McCain had sent and inspired Vandegrift’s stunningly emotional “Thank God you’ve come!” Having just arrived from the brand-new training base on the New Hebrides island of Efate, these men, like the vast majority of American pilots at the time, were completely inexperienced, having never before seen combat. But they were a rare breed, trained on Efate by one of the rarest of the rare breed, Lieutenant Colonel Harold W. (“Joe”) Bauer, a former standout football player at Annapolis and a widely acclaimed master of the skies. Bauer had personally developed a number of aerial techniques to try to overcome the almost universally conceded superiority of the Japanese Zero against any fighter plane the Allies could put up against it at that point. They all called Bauer the Coach.

  The Zero was lighter, could climb and accelerate faster, and was far more maneuverable than the Grumman F4F Wildcat, which the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps at that point considered their top-of-the-line fighter. The Wildcat was a stubby, square-winged little plane whose main advantage was heavy armament and durability (which made it slower and less maneuver-able). In other words, it took a lot to bring one down. It had self-sealing gasoline tanks, unlike the Zero, and instead of two 7.7mm machine guns and two 20mm cannons, the Wildcat carried six heavier. 50-caliber machine guns. The trick with the Wildcat was to teach the young American pilots how to get the advantage over the much-daunted Zero. Colonel Bauer believed he had come up with a solution, which was the so-called overhead pass, a fearsome and complicated maneuver in which the American pilots were trained to dive at the Zero head-on at their flat-out max speed of 320 miles per hour, then suddenly swoop, flip the plane over, and, flying upside down so as not to lose sight of the Zero, pass him by overhead, delivering a long burst from all six .50-calibers.

  Bauer’s overhead pass was not for the faint of heart, but the marine aviators of Fighter Squadron 212 were not fainthearted people. In fact, among military pilots, they were the elite, carefully selected for fighter duty because of their intelligence, mechanical instincts, dexterity, coordination, reaction time, common sense, and, well, just plain fearlessness. And it was a good thing, too, because flying an airplane, especially a high-performance fighter, was not, in those days—any more than these—like operating any earthly vehicle, such as a car or boat or train or even a horse and buggy, propelled by unmanageable beasts. Flying is a multidimensional affair: up, down, forward, sideways, at all angles, at terrific speeds, and factoring in wind speed and direction, altitude, humidity, tremendous cold and stifling heat, which change the flying characteristics of the plane at various heights. Engine oil, for instance, could freeze above 20,000 feet or run too hot at ground level. Even normal weather was a tribulation: rain, fog, clouds, or blinding sun; all of these elements had to be calculated instantly by the fliers and recalculated, and then recalculated again, without the aid of a computer, and put correctly into the constantly changing mix.

  These pilots were welcomed as heaven sent by the ground-pounding marines fighting on Guadalcanal and taking a daily beating from Japanese airplanes. “It looked so damn good to see something American circling in the sky of the airfield,” one of these grounded m
arines later recalled. “It was like being all alone, and then the lights come on, and you’ve got friends from home in the same room with you.”18

  Flying above the Solomon Islands then was an especially tricky and deadly business. The job of the U.S. Wildcat fighters was to shoot down the Japanese bombers, which normally came in well above 20,000 feet to get over the marine positions on and around Henderson Field. But to do that the American fliers first had to tangle with the bombers’ escorting Zero fighters. To understand the complexities and sheer scariness of this task it is worth listening at length to Marine Lieutenant Jack Conger, who gave these impressions to the fabled writer Max Brand* during a rare stateside leave from Guadalcanal.

  Conger had become separated from the rest of his flight, and knew he was in trouble: “That’s very bad. You never should get split up. I was watching the Zeros coming down and not paying enough attention to where the rest of the boys were going. I was too inexperienced. I was too green to remember everything that the Coach [Colonel Bauer] had been hammering into our heads. Pretty soon I found myself scissoring with a Zero. That is to say, he had the altitude to keep diving at me, and I kept turning into him, trying to stay behind and below. We scissored five or six times, and every time I made a sharp, steep bank I lost altitude. Altitude is what pays off in an air fight, and this looked bad. He forced me to keep making those quick turns to keep him off my tail, and with each turn my plane shivered and shook and lost altitude. It was hell.

  “He passed above me and did a steep wingover. I dived and started to climb. It wasn’t an intelligent thing to do, but I was lucky. He couldn’t quite get his guns on me. Then he did the damnedest thing you ever saw. He came down from above and behind, and instead of riding it out on my tail and filling me full of bullets, he let himself go too fast so that he went by me. He should have dodged off to one side and got out of there, but instead the fool rose right up under my nose, and did a roll.

  “What was he trying to do? Impress me with his gymnastics? I don’t know. Apparently those fellows had been told that they were the best flyers in the world, and so they were like little children with toys; they had to show their tricks when they had an audience. Or maybe he thought I couldn’t hit him if he kept his plane tumbling like that. As a matter of fact, he was just making himself a bigger target. I used a three-second burst and he was dead before I stopped firing. We had scissored all the way down to eight thousand—to show you how he had been driving me into the ground—but even eight thousand is a long way when you’re looking down. He made a splash no bigger than a porpoise. Then he was just part of the soup.”19

  Back in the United States, things were chugging along. The Departments of the Interior and of the Navy had figured out that it was unproductive to keep transporting gasoline and fuel oil from the rich Texas and Louisiana fields up to the cold Northeast via tanker ships, which were too frequently blown up by German submarines. So now railroad tanker trains were being used, and while they stood no chance of being hit by torpedoes they certainly caused infuriating tie-ups for the passenger trains, which were already taxed to their limits with the huge influx of military personnel shuffling from one place to the next around the country. A convoy system was beginning to come together, but escorting destroyers were hard to come by since they were being so heavily employed in North Atlantic convoys bringing desperately needed arms and supplies to England and the Soviet Union.

  Subchasers were coming into place too, but presently they consisted for the most part of a few old World War I converted boats, which quickly became known as the Donald Duck Navy. As well, the navy recruited a number of large private yachts and converted them, too, often with the whiteflanneled yacht owner remaining aboard as skipper. These included several famous Bermuda Race sailing yachts and other pleasure craft renowned in society circles—not unlike the private boats that went out from England in 1940 to help evacuate the British army stranded at Dunkirk. And like the Donald Duck Navy, this collection of “college boys, adventurous lads of shore villages, Boy Scouts, beachcombers, ex-bootleggers and rum-runners” was soon enough characterized as the Hooligan Navy. Blimps were used as well, and more and more Civil Air Patrol volunteers were coming in.* The army and navy were also beginning to ratchet up their domestic presence, as Washington authorities both civil and military became more and more alarmed by the commercial shipping losses. Interlocking airfields were established along the U.S. coast from Galveston, Texas, to Maine, and for a change it was starting to work: German subs found that for the first time they were becoming the hunted and not the only hunters.20

  The “sailor suit” had become one of the most popular items for young children to wear—navy blues with bell-bottom trousers and white-striped collars and the little white cap. Children continued to donate their lead and tin soldiers to scrap-metal war drives, and women were still turning in their aluminum pots and pans. Now that warm weather had arrived, the victory gardens that had been planted in backyards and vacant lots all over America—from slums to mansions—were beginning to thrive. Also thriving was a national black market, which had evolved in practically every town and city to trade and sell things rationed or no longer available in stores.

  Try as it might, the federal government was able to do little about this; entrepreneurs to the last gasp, Americans with the cash were simply not going to be denied that which they wanted. Rubber, of course, was in even tighter supply and new (or even used) tires were almost impossible to come by. Somebody thought to start manufacturing wooden tires for cars, but these did not work well, especially on highways, and in any event gasoline was so short that very few could go much of anyplace anyway. As the Roosevelt administration’s resident playwright, tall, gaunt Robert Sherwood, observed, “The American people, who were so willing and proud to give whatever was required of them in blood and sweat, were loudly reluctant to cut down on their normal consumption of red meat and gasoline and their use of such essentials as electric toasters and elastic girdles. More than any other people on earth, Americans were addicted to the principle that you can eat your cake and have it too; which was entirely understandable, for Americans have been assured from the cradle that there is always more cake where that came from. “21

  In Washington, the New Dealers in the Roosevelt administration were about gone by mid-1942, replaced by regular politicians and so-called dollar-a-year businessmen who, it was believed, could better get the nation on its war footing. Henry Kaiser, for instance, was now churning out “liberty ships” by the thousands—the ubiquitous cargo transports* that were to become the indispensable backbone of the navy—at the rate of several per week from various shipyards on both coasts. As a publicity stunt he even produced one, from keel laying to launching, in the remarkable time of just three days.

  Meanwhile, trouble had been boiling up in other parts of the world. With the Japanese military now in control of most of Burma, Japan was threatening to expand its empire into India, and thence westward across that vast subcontinent to Iran, Iraq, and the oil-rich regions of the Persian Gulf. There it was feared the Japanese would link up with their Axis partners, the Germans, who were pushing eastward in the opposite direction. This would have spelled much difficulty for the Allied war effort, and to make matters worse Mohandas Gandhi, the charismatic, popular spiritual leader and advocate for India’s independence from Great Britain, had suddenly issued an appeal to all Indians not to resist a Japanese invasion of their country.

  This was an irresponsible position for Gandhi to have taken. Great Britain by that time had already promised India its independence but felt it had to postpone the promise when war suddenly broke out, lest the Germans or Japanese invade and occupy the subcontinent.* The rightly suspicious Gandhi apparently based his position on the theory that even if the Japanese conquered India, his country would at least be rid of the British once and for all. He didn’t seem to take into account what would happen to his people if and when the Japanese occupied India. To complicate matters further, Roos
evelt and his administration kept trying to persuade Churchill to give up India immediately on the (basically prewar) notion that Americans would be more favorably disposed if they did not think the war was about saving the British empire. This was basically nonsense—most Americans at that point did not care a whit about India vis-a-vis Great Britain—but it still caused all sorts of weird finagling and behind-the-scenes diplomacy, which only detracted from the instant issue, which was the winning of the war against the Germans, the Italians, and the Japanese.22

  Then there was the problem of old Joe Stalin, sitting in the Kremlin in Moscow and refusing to meet with free-world leaders because he was afraid to fly, and ships or trains couldn’t get him close enough for a face-to-face meeting. The Americans and British were sending him all the guns and tanks and planes they could spare* but he was fighting a desperate battle on his western front against his erstwhile “ally” Nazi Germany. Now he was demanding that England and America open a second front, on the shores of France, so as to relieve Soviet troops battling ferociously around Stalingrad and Moscow. To open a second front in the summer of 1942 probably would have been suicidal and both the Americans and the British knew it, but they went ahead anyway and drew up plans in case the Russians began to crumble. They had already named it Operation Sledgehammer but, mercifully, it never had to be set into motion.

  Stalin then sent to Washington his foreign minister, V. M. Molotov (he of “Molotov cocktail” fame), who arrived at the White House under the curious pseudonym “Mr. Brown.” Molotov told the president that if the Americans and British could open a second front it would “draw off 40 German divisions,” and then the Russians would win the war before the year was out.23 But drawing off forty German divisions (about 600,000 men) was a tall order, and Roosevelt wisely declined to commit himself to this improbable scheme. What Roosevelt did do, after the foreign minister’s departure, was crank up his plan to invade North Africa and capture or expel the German-Italian forces there.