1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  From the Allied point of view it was critical to keep the Chinese fighting because it tied up a million Japanese soldiers and their support services, which could—and would—have been better used elsewhere, particularly in 1942, at places such as Guadalcanal and New Guinea. Although the Chinese armies did not initiate any major operations against the Japanese, they were still a threat because of their hit-and-run tactics, employed against any Japanese force with a perceived weakness. If the Japanese had been smarter, they might have pulled their large units out of China altogether, and let the Chinese have it, and used them instead in the big Pacific battles against the Americans. But this they did not, and apparently could not, bring themselves to do for fear of losing face. After all, the whole war in the Far East began in the first place over the Japanese invasion of China. For the Allies, particularly the Americans, this Oriental face-saving was a good thing, because it doesn’t take a military genius to figure out what would have happened if the Japanese army had arrived at Guadalcanal early on with four or five infantry divisions to the marines’ one.

  In any case they did not, and the Chinese kept on fighting their subdued, stubborn, guerrilla-type war, while at the same time performing such services as rescuing the fliers from Doolittle’s raid. That the Japanese remained in force in that vast country with their hands tied must have been a strain on Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo.

  After Japan had taken Burma and shut down the Burma Road, it became obvious to the Allies that some alternative method must be found to supply Chiang Kai-shek’s armies. The solution arrived at was a vast airlift flown out of bases in India with American air transports and pilots crossing the Hump, an extremely trying experience for crews and aircraft alike. This involved a flight of thousand or so miles, much of it above the wild, 15,000-foot-high Himalayan foothills,* which was close to the altitude ceiling for the planes, and encountering weather that was simply atrocious. As it turned out, this American airlift actually managed to move to China more supplies than had been done so along the Burma Road, but nevertheless a new road directly from India to Chungking was begun by American engineers, using coolie labor and American money. It would be paved with gravel and wind high across the misty mountainsides and, when completed, would handle convoys of hundreds of trucks around-the-clock—a stupendous undertaking more than twenty times as long as Virginia’s Skyline Drive.

  For his part, Chiang Kai-shek demanded that the Americans send him fifty infantry divisions and five hundred planes, which was not only ridiculous but a practical impossibility since the North African invasion was just getting under way. Instead, to keep Chiang on the hook, Roosevelt offered him $500 million more in Lend-Lease supplies, which that wily and ruthless old general mostly hoarded away to prepare for the inevitable postwar conflict he envisioned between himself and Mao Tse-tung’s army of communists. In fact, from Chiang’s point of view, China’s most important role was merely to come through the war intact, so that afterward he could get at his old nemesis.

  While on the subject of China, it is appropriate to revisit the travails of Commander Columbus Darwin Smith, the first U.S. prisoner of the Japanese, and who did not intend to be the last. We left Commander Smith in a Japanese prison in Shanghai, following his first unsuccessful escape attempt. The Ward Road, where he was kept, was actually a huge old jail, with all the accoutrements associated with jails that made escape problematic—iron bars on the windows, walls, and moats. And most of the prisoners housed there were not POWs but all manner of murderers, thieves, forgers, gamblers, and rapists. Compared with most Japanese prison camps, however, Ward Road was almost luxurious. Commander Smith’s private cell had a flush toilet and the food, while monotonous, was at least tolerable and there was enough to sustain life. There was even a prison library, where Smith settled in to a copy of War and Peace and began to formulate renewed plans for escape.

  The cell across from his housed his old partner in flight, Commander John B. Woolley, of the British navy. The two of them, being of upper middle age, knew they would need a young and strong man to help them through and they soon singled out Marine Corporal Jerold B. Storey, who had been a guard at the U.S. embassy at Peking. The first hurdle would be to break out of Ward Road prison; the second was how to get through seven hundred miles of Japanese-held territory to friendly lines.

  During his many years in Shanghai, Smith had made good friends and he would now have to count on them for help. First the prisoners would need hacksaw blades to cut their way through the cell bars. Then they would need clothing, money, and forged papers to get past the ever present Japanese guards and patrols. To facilitate this, Smith buddied up with a convicted murderer, a man named Jenkins, whose ten-year sentence was soon due to expire. He offered Jenkins a large sum of money if, when he was released, he would visit a friend of Commander Smith’s in Shanghai and request of him to provide the necessary items. Jenkins agreed, and after he was let out he procured a package of hacksaw blades and pitched them over the prison wall at a specified place where Corporal Storey was tending a garden of beans.

  The escape plan was right out of a gangster movie. They would saw through the steel bars in Smith’s cell and using bedsheets climb down into the prison yard; then, arriving at the tall outside brick wall, they would scale this, too, using the sheets with a piece of bamboo tied to the end as a grappling hook. All went well but for one thing: Smith, to accomplish his sawing, had to stand on the only piece of furniture in his cell, a three-legged stool, then strain to reach up to the high cell window and saw through the bars. One day as he was reaching to his limit, he “felt something snap” and then a terrible pain in his abdomen. The loss of sixty pounds since becoming a prisoner had caused the tissue holding the muscles of his abdomen to rupture. Now he was the victim of a double hernia. Painful as it was, Smith soon discovered that by holding the rupture in with his hand he could manage, although he was uncertain how it might hold up on a seven-hundred-mile hike. In any event he went ahead, sawing by night and covering his handiwork with dry soap molded to the shape of the bars and disguised with black shoe polish.

  When the night for escape came, Woolley and Storey arrived at Smith’s cell. They had each sawed through the bars of their own cell doors, and Woolley had knotted the sheets. Down they went through the cell window, across the yard, and up over the main prison wall. Had it not been for Storey, Smith would never have made it. When they dropped down onto one of Shanghai’s busiest roads, it looked like they might have a chance. They immediately raced to a prearranged spot where Jenkins was to meet them with the clothing, money, and forged passes. But Jenkins was not there. They waited, then decided to go directly to the house of Smith’s friend. He was not there either. Knowing that at any moment the Japanese could discover their escape and sound the alarm, Smith decided they must press on anyway, using only his detailed knowledge of Shanghai’s streets and of the Chinese language, and the courage and fortitude within each of them. As it turned out, they would need this last most of all.

  Smith somehow got them to the edge of the city, past Japanese bridge and rail crossing guards, and into the countryside, which was swampy and crisscrossed by myriad streams, creeks, and canals. By the end of the first day they noticed Japanese planes patrolling overhead and were forced to lie flat in mucky ground. They knew then their escape had been discovered, and that all Japanese patrols would have been warned to look for them. For the Japanese, losing a prisoner to escape became a severe loss of face.* Smith and his fellow escapees’ first encounter with Chinese peasants was fearful. All Chinese were well aware of the reign of terror visited upon them by the Japanese after the Doolittle raid. And the three prisoners had already resigned themselves to the notion that if they were captured they would be beheaded.

  The second night out they came across a Chinese peasant and Smith told him they were trying to get away from the Japanese and needed food and somewhere to stay. He immediately took them to his hut, cooked up a supper of chicken, rice, and vegetabl
es, and gave them straw mats to sleep on. To the escapees’ astonishment and relief, this treatment was repeated over and again during the weeks they trekked southeastward toward Chungking and friendly lines. The Chinese villagers provided them with sampan transportation over wide streams and directions on how to avoid Japanese-held villages and patrols as well as the Chinese puppet soldiers, who were in the pay of the Japanese army.

  They had many close calls, some of them only perceived. Once they encountered a Chinese puppet patrol who demanded their papers. Smith was able to bluff his way through, saying they were French priests. Most of the way they could not use roads or trails for fear they were being guarded and so had to move across country through malarial swamps and sometimes unbearable terrain. It rained almost every day. Storey contracted malaria and was in a bad way. Woolley’s feet were in terrible shape and he was having to pull his toenails off one by one. Smith slipped and fell on a rock and cut a nasty gash in his knee, plus he had to keep holding in the painful hernia all the while. At one point he was able to pawn his expensive watch for some local money, which amounted to five U.S. dollars. Each time they met Chinese, which was practically every day, they had no idea whether they would be helped or turned over to the Japanese. In many parts of the provinces the Chinese had never before seen a white man, and the Japanese had persuasive methods.

  Most of the time it was the peasants who took them in. Never once, Smith marveled, had he had to use any of the five dollars he’d gotten for his watch to repay them for their kindnesses. “The more I traveled through this back country,” he remembered, “the more convinced I became that Japan could never subdue China. I never heard of a single instance where the Japanese secured the whole-hearted cooperation of the Chinese.” In this he was correct. Even though it was mostly peasants who helped them, occasionally it was well-heeled Chinese too. “This flight of ours,” Smith recalled, “was beginning to have too many characteristics of a bad movie melodrama.” Once they were feted at the elegant home of an old, white-bearded mandarin dressed in silks, who greeted them formally, speaking French, and offered them a sumptuous meal complemented by a fine white wine. It reminded Smith of the scene from the movie of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, the part when the travelers arrive at Shangri-la and are told to their astonishment by the old Tibetan lama, “I’ve been expecting you.”

  Little could be done for their ailments, however; there were almost no Chinese doctors and, if there were, they had no medicines. And they still had a long way to go. The best they could expect was some food, an occasional bath in a hot washtub from Chinese friends, and a few meager clothes to replace their own rags. After weeks of walking the trio finally began to give out. Storey’s malaria had left him very weakened, Woolley’s feet became nearly useless, and Smith’s hernia and the knee injury, which had caused his whole lower leg to turn black, forbade him to go any farther on foot. The Chinese accommodated this by rounding up some “grandmother’s chairs” and stringing them from bamboo poles. Coolies were instructed to carry the party toward friendly lines. This involved trekking over steep mountain trails when even the jerry-rigged sedan chairs were of no use, and so they had to get out and walk again.

  Time and again they dodged Japanese patrols. Most conversation was limited to either how to evade the Japanese or where they would sleep at night, and any such casual conversation as arose usually revolved around the food they would eat when they were finally free. After intense discussions of this pressing subject it was unanimously agreed that they would have a steak and lobster champagne dinner. With french fries. That is, of course, if they made it.

  On the other side of the world, just about the time the marines were invading Guadalcanal, there had broken out a great sea battle frought with danger for the Allies. This became known as the Battle of the Atlantic.

  As we have already seen, shortly after the declaration of war on the United States, Germany set submarines onto the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts, which wreaked havoc on coastwise shipping. At first the losses were horrendous but land-based aircraft, convoys with armed escorts, and subchasers began to solve the problem. There was, however, another target the Germans sought even more, which was the U.S. “lifeline” to England and Russia. The Russians, then locked in deadly battle with the Nazi invasion of their country, desperately needed American-made tanks, planes, guns, ammunition, clothing, and just about everything else for their large but as yet poorly equipped army. These were sent over on a steady shipment of Lend-Lease convoys from U.S. ports via Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Reykjavik, Iceland, then on to Murmansk or Archangel in northern Russia. More important, for the contemplated Allied invasion of France enormous transoceanic shipments of those same armaments had to be built up in England, as well as hundreds of thousands of American troops.

  Admiral Donitz, Hitler’s submarine force commander, was quick to recognize the importance of this lifeline and by mid-1942 had shifted much of his U-boat fleet to prey on the vast convoys of Allied transports crossing the northern reaches of the ocean. During the autumn and winter months, when darkness fell early along the ice packs at the top of the world and daylight lasted only a few hours, the Germans had little success. But as the days grew longer and the sun began to shine nearly twenty-four hours a day, the peril from German U-boat “wolfpacks,” surface warships, and aircraft based on the Norwegian coast became acute.

  A tragic example of this is illustrated by the fate of convoy PQ-17, which departed Halifax, refueled in Iceland, and set out from Reykjavik on June 27, 1942. The convoy, composed of thirty-three merchant ships, was well protected at first, escorted or supported by a combined American-British force of no less than forty-two warships, including two battleships, an aircraft carrier, seven cruisers, and seventeen destroyers. This should certainly have been enough to fend off any German attack but then, on the Fourth of July, things began to unravel.

  At about seven P.M. on July 4, the convoy recieved word that a powerful German force consisting of the battleships Tirpitz and Scheer and the battle cruiser Hipper with an escort of seven destroyers had broken out of their sanctuary in a Norwegian fjord and were headed toward PQ-17. The order came down for the Allied warships protecting convoy PQ-17 to abandon it and go after these prized German targets. The thirty-three ships of PQ-17 were then ordered to scatter and make their separate ways to the north Russian ports.

  What followed was a massacre. As the ships of the Allied convoy entered the Barents Sea they came within range of German fighters and bombers based at airfields in northern Norway. There was no hiding in darkness because there was no darkness, and the arctic ice pack blocked them from steaming farther north and out of harm’s way. German planes picked off the lightly armed merchantmen at their leisure, and when it was finished twenty-two of the thirty-three ships of PQ-17 lay on the cold bottom of the northern seas.

  The German high command was delighted, but not for long. Plainly, the Allies could see that something further had to be done. First of all, they had been taught a stern lesson about leaving an unarmed convoy to the mercy of German planes and warships. Second, they had begun to realize that two things must be accomplished in order to keep the Atlantic lifeline open. One was to produce more transport ships than the Germans could sink;* the second was to organize more effective antisubmarine and antiaircraft defenses. This they did in the time-honored American way: producing more of everything—warships, antisubmarine aircraft, transports. To add to this orgy of construction, they were receiving priceless information from the British as to the plans and location of the German “wolfpacks.” This was courtesy of Ultra, England’s code-breaking counterpart to the U.S. code-breaking MAGIC, with which the Allies, following the capture of one of the German U-boat’s decoding machines, were able to read the Germans’ mail. By the end of 1942 the number of German submarines sunk had doubled from the first half of the year, and by war’s end there were practically no U-boats left at all.

  At about the time that convoy PQ-17 was meeting its fate a
nother great American military institution was being formed in England. This was the famed U.S. Eighth Air Force, which was to lay waste not only to innumerable German industries but to entire German cities.

  The workhorse of the Eighth Air Force was the B-17 Flying Fortress, the big four-engine bomber so toughly constructed it was immensely difficult to shoot down and so well armed, with up to fourteen .50-caliber machine guns, that it became a formidable foe to any enemy pilot who ventured anywhere near it.

  Take, for example, the celebrated Memphis Belle, which flew her first combat mission for the Eighth Air Force on November 7, 1942. Over the next seven months she flew her required twenty-five combat missions, bombing German installations in France and Germany and shooting down at least eight German fighters (and probably more), remarkably without a single loss of life to the crew.*

  While the B-17 was a tough customer, it was certainly not invulnerable to enemy attack. Initially the Eighth Air Force had concluded that the best way to get at the heart of German industry was to hit them in daylight when the targets could be clearly seen. The British had already tried this, with terrible losses, and they now struck only at night. The brash Americans, however, stuck to their daylight bombing strategy, which cost them a frightful 80 percent loss in planes from July to September 1942. A major problem was that in order to hit Germany proper the bombers had to fly without fighter escorts to fend off the German fighters for hundreds of miles over enemy territory. This difficulty was not solved until new American fighters with much greater fuel capacity came on line in 1943 and afterward. Consider the chilling irony and shocking conclusion of Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” one of the best-known American poems to come out of the war.