1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  *In May 1942, Miller was awarded the Navy Cross for heroism by Admiral Chester Nimitz in a ceremony aboard the Enterprise. After the West Virginia was wrecked, Miller served briefly aboard the ill-fated cruiser Indianapolis, then was assigned to the U.S.S. escort carrier Liscome Bay, on which he was killed less than a year after the Pearl Harbor attack.

  *The expression “taking to the mattresses” was a time-honored tradition in Sicily, lower Manhattan, Chicago, and other regions with large Italian populations where gang warfare was prevalent.

  *That was what Knox had initially thought too, that “they must mean the Philippines,” and others involved had similar reactions.

  *Admiral Stark, chief of naval operations, testified later that he thought Kimmel was getting MAGIC raw material, though he never explained the basis for this assumption.

  *Whenever a calamity strikes, the conspiracy people go into business. After President Lincoln’s assassination, it was suggested that his secretary of war Edwin Stanton and abolitionist members of the administration conspired to have Lincoln killed because they thought he would go too easy on the defeated South. The assassination of President Kennedy still abounds in conspiracies today: e.g., the Mafia, Fidel Castro, the CIA did it. Since the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001, there are those who insist that President Bush knew of the plot in advance and “let it happen” in order to somehow raise his poll numbers.

  *Roosevelt had arrived in style. The Treasury Department, at the request of the Secret Service, had turned over Al Capone’s bulletproof limousine to chauffeur the president to the Capitol.

  †Roosevelt, who suffered from polio, rarely walked, and the press in those days, out of courtesy, rarely photographed him in his wheelchair.

  *The dissenting vote was cast by Montana Republican congresswoman Jeanette Rankin, a die-hard pacifist who had also voted against American entry into World War I. It was reported that she hid in a telephone booth afterward to avoid newsmen.

  †Hitler was not obligated to do this under the Axis agreement with Japan, but did so anyway because he was angry about the United States supplying weapons to the British. With most of his armies now tied up in Russia, it probably would have made better sense to let the German-American question linger until the Russian situation clarified itself, instead of declaring full-scale war simultaneously against a nation so powerful as the United States.

  *Because of its sanctuary status, no cats or dogs were allowed on Wake and a vast population of a large and odd kind of rat, big as a prairie dog, had infested the place by the time Americans began to arrive in numbers. They were shot, poisoned, and electrocuted but it made no difference; the rats flourished, and threatened to prevail.

  *The origin of the “Send us more Japs” remark has never been successfully explained. Some have ventured that it was the work of a public relations officer at Pearl or elsewhere, or the creation of an overenthusiastic journalist. Historian John Toland believes it was created by the wire room on Wake as “padding,” the sort of nonsense telegraphers put at the end of messages to confuse anyone trying to break their code.

  *“Tokyo Rose” was an American citizen of Japanese ancestry who made propaganda broadcasts for the Japanese. There were actually several Tokyo Roses but the American one was imprisoned after the war. Likewise, an American actress named Mildred Gillers broadcast propaganda for the Germans under the name “Axis Sally.” She got twelve years. An Englishman who broadcast from Berlin was dubbed “Lord Haw Haw,” and so obnoxious was his palaver that after the war the British government hanged him.

  *By 1943 there were still nearly a hundred American civilians left on Wake, ordered to remain and work for the Japanese. On October 7, the Japanese, using a pretext that they were operating a secret radio, marched the civilians out to the beach and to a man machine-gunned them to death. After the war, the Japanese commander of Wake and eleven of his officers were sentenced to death by hanging by an Allied tribunal.

  *The Vanay was a U.S. gunboat on the Yangtze River patrol that was attacked and sunk by yet another rogue Japanese army commander and nearly precipitated war between Japan and the United States four years early. The two-hundred-foot warship carrying American consular officials escaping from the Nanking horror was first fired upon from shore by Japanese batteries, then relentlessly bombed by Japanese planes flying high and low, even though she had American flags plastered all over her as well as her own U.S. ensign flying. The Japanese government avoided a confrontation by hastily apologizing—insincerely, it turned out—and paying a large indemnity.

  †Apparently the Japanese in Shanghai had offered similar largesse to other U.S. officers and officials so as to determine where they would be when the planned Pearl Harbor attack occurred.

  *Among these included a wish by Churchill to send some kind of U.S. naval fleet into the Mediterranean to cooperate with the British—this when half the fleet was at the bottom of Pearl Harbor and the other half fighting for its life against German submarines in the Atlantic. Another was a plea to divert thousands of the U.S. troops earmarked for the Philippines to help defend Malaya.

  *Churchill’s mother, Jenny Jerome, was the daughter of a New York speculator and racetrack owner, Leonard Jerome. She married Churchill’s father, Randolph, a son of the sixth duke of Marlborough, in 1874.

  *The historian John Toland tells us that Yamashita’s impatience was caused by the fact that he had suddenly realized the British army outnumbered his own four to one and that he actually feared the Japanese army could lose the fight. After the war Toland says Yamashita described his strategy as “a bluff, a bluff that worked.”

  *There are conflicting versions of the sequence of these events: Brereton’s, Sutherland’s, and MacArthur’s. Brereton’s seems to this author the most convincing, but the true story may never be known.

  *The B-17 was truly the workhorse of the war. Dubbed the Flying Fortress because of its heavy armor and eleven .50-caliber machine guns bristling in every direction, it was extremely hard to bring down, as the Japanese learned at Pearl Harbor. It carried a crew of nine or ten, could fly at 317 mph at 25,000 feet, and deliver a 5,000-bomb load at targets a thousand miles distant. It cost $236,000 to build. When war broke out there were 150 B-17s in the U.S. Air Force; by war’s end there were 12,700.

  *Then still visible from shore were the rusted, blackened masts of the Spanish fleet, which was sunk in Manila Bay in 1898 by the U.S. Pacific Fleet of Admiral George Dewey.

  *Cabanatuan would soon become known for another reason besides its rice stores. It was the site of the most infamous Japanese prison camp in the Pacific.

  *Manchester cites the source of this vignette as Major General Courtney Whitney’s book MacArthur: His Rendezvous with History. However, the page cited in Whitney’s book by Manchester for the “Blow it” quote alludes to an order given by General Wainwright about the dynamiting of the Calumpit Bridge, not the library warehouse. I therefore cite Manchester’s book as the secondary source, on the assumption that he had supporting material other than Whitney.

  *The success of the tank attack against the Japanese column was all the more remarkable because all they had was armor-piercing shells—good for antitank work but practically useless against personnel. There was not a round of high-explosive tank ammo in the Philippines. Some U.S. tankers, if they happened to be located on a road, would depress their guns and fire ahead of the enemy so as to blow deadly chunks of stone or concrete into their faces.

  †It also, of course, would have denied use of these same bridges to the Japanese themselves, who were pushing for Manila.

  *The man sent to accomplish this task was Lieutenant, j.g., Malcolm Champlin, a former FBI agent. Champlin sneaked back into the city and contacted the representative of Standard Oil, whom he found in the bar of the University Club. This man agreed to the torching, but representatives of British-owned Shell Oil said they could not cooperate without instructions from their superiors. Champlin bought
the men drinks as the Standard Oil man went to a phone. Suddenly huge explosions reached their ears. “Gentlemen,” Champlin said to the astonished Englishmen, “your oil is now in flames.”

  *The PT boat was the brainchild of MacArthur. Designed as a very fast (50 to 60 mph) motor torpedo boat, these craft were lightly constructed of wood and armed only with .50-caliber machine guns. Equipped with huge Rolls-Royce engines, as MacArthur envisioned it, there was to be a fleet of hundreds of these boats able to dash in and out of any Japanese convoy and sink ships with torpedoes. As it turned out, like the troop reinforcements, tanks, and massive airplane reserves, there was not time enough to build the PT boats and at war’s outbreak there were only half a dozen in the Philippines.

  †Banzai stood for, more or less, “May the emperor live a thousand years!”

  *This was vintage MacArthur. The “I shall return” remark was printed and broadcast all over the world. It was stamped on matchbooks provided by the army for soldiers in the Pacific theaters. It was glazed into commemorative china and scrawled on the walls of outhouses and public toilets. The general certainly had a way with words and, like “Remember the Alamo” or “The British are coming!,” it slipped easily into the American lexicon.

  *For instance, on Terminal Island in Los Angeles there were thousands of Japanese, mostly fishermen, who could plainly see any warship or troop transport leaving the harbor.

  *Curiously, one person who did not agree with the relocation was J. Edgar Hoover, dictatorial director of the FBI. But his reasons were probably not as pure as might at first be supposed. According to biographer Curt Gentry, Hoover believed that all Japanese who might be involved in espionage had already been arrested by his agency, which had responsibility for domestic security, and thus the mass relocation somehow “implied criticism” of his agency; i.e., that the FBI hadn’t done its job.

  *Part of the controversy over the Japanese relocation stems from the fact that many were U.S. citizens, either by virtue of naturalization or by being born here. A few years after the war was over the Japanese were given compensation by the U.S government for problems associated with the relocation. Then, some forty years later, descendants of the relocated Japanese began a campaign for reparations for their removal, which resulted in further compensation.

  †Fortunately, most German submarine commanders ignored these repellent orders. In 1945, after the death of Hitler, Donitz became the temporary leader of Germany, which he quickly surrendered to the Allies. At the Nuremberg trials he was sentenced to ten years in prison for war crimes.

  *After the war, a stupendous public works project was set in motion to guard against these deadly attacks against American shipping. This was the completion of the Intracoastal Waterway System, first authorized by Congress just after World War I but which became a thirty-year-long, three-thousand-mile system of inshore canals that connect vital ports from Boston to the Texas border with Mexico, inaccessible to submarines.

  †Ultimately it turned out only five hundred bombers a month at its peak.

  *Typical of these “housing projects” was a place named Birdville, near Brookley Air Base in Mobile, Alabama. All the streets were named for birds, e.g., Robin Drive, Red-bird Street. The houses were identical single-story, two-bedroom wood structures on tiny lots, but they were occupied quickly and gratefully by workers at the base. They remained after the war as a sort of low-income alternative but over the years fell prey to the usual urban blight of dilapidation, drugs, and crime. The Birdville housing remains today.

  *Later the project expanded to include nearby Ship Island as well, which had been used by the British to launch their expedition in 1814 that culminated in their ill-fated Battle of New Orleans and, forty-eight years later, was the launching point for Admiral David Farragut’s successful capture of New Orleans during the American Civil War.

  *Dogs did prove very useful in all theaters, as sentries and scouts.

  *Unlike Admiral Kimmel and General Short, none of the blame for the Pearl Harbor disaster was placed on Stark’s head. But he was quietly shipped out to a cushy job in London commanding the U.S. European fleet, of which there was none.

  *Doolittle himself gave as odds only fifty-fifty that anyone would make it back alive.

  *Some say twenty miles, but that seems a bit of a stretch.

  *There was another reason, which MacArthur expressed directly to Roosevelt: the notion of abandonment. If the Western nations in the Pacific had simply turned tail and run, the Asian peoples from China to Borneo to India would lose all respect for them and probably side with the Japanese because there was no one else to turn to.

  *There are conflicting accounts as to whether or not King and Wainwright spoke about the surrender. King says they did not. Wainwright’s account is somewhat confusing. The account above comes from Brigadier General (retired) Steven Mellnik, the artillery officer who was on the scene.

  *It must also be said that in some of the accounts the Filipinos sold these items to the American soldiers.

  *The source material for the role of Colonel Tsuji seems to originate with the historian John Toland, who revealed it in his 1970 book The Rising Sun. Subsequent authors, including myself, have gone by Toland’s accounts. But it also seems that Toland did not interview Tsuji himself, and used for his authority an unpublished article by one of the Japanese officers on Bataan. What historical weight should be given this article is debatable, since after the war the Japanese tried to distance themselves from atrocities in the Philippines and elsewhere. It should also be pointed out that Toland, of all the Pacific war historians, tended to be more sympathic to the Japanese as a whole.

  *When he returned to the United States Lawson wrote the best-selling book Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, which was published in 1943 and soon made into a major motion picture.

  *Said by some to be the model for the “Dragon Lady” in Milton Caniff’s comic strip Terry and the Pirates.

  †Name of the legendary kingdom in James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon. Also the name of the U.S. presidential retreat in Maryland, which is now known as Camp David.

  *Sixty-four of the sixty-eight sailors who had jumped into the life rafts perished after a nightmare often days adrift in the Coral Sea. It caused the navy to rethink its entire practice of survival-at-sea tactics.

  †Even this proved to be in error, for when the American planes got there all they found were two antiquated Japanese cruisers of World War I vintage and a couple of rickety gunboats.

  *Many of those several thousand men last in line regretted removing their shoes; the decks were becoming intolerably hot from the belowdecks fires and many feet were scorched.

  *What this meant was that, more or less, every 150 feet of Corregidor land had at least one large-caliber Japanese artillery piece firing on it nonstop, day and night.

  *These enormous weapons fired a shell weighing in excess of 800 pounds and could destroy a city block when exploded. Wainwright himself estimated that on May 1 the Japanese had hit Corregidor with 1,800,000 pounds of explosive shells.

  *Almost all of these guns were of World War I vintage, or even earlier, but they were large and powerful and certainly intimidated Japanese ships that might want to try and enter the bay.

  †This was no idle fear. One smaller tunnel not far away from Malinta had done just that a few days earlier, burying alive forty-six men, who were suffocated to death.

  *The author grew up in Mobile and though the war was finished by then, Miss Bessie Rencher was not; she stayed on as truant officer for many more years, patrolling known hangouts of delinquents and striking a note of fear, even terror, in the hearts of layabouts.

  *King was a gruff sailor of the old school, of whom it was said, “Not only did he not suffer fools gladly, he did not suffer anybody gladly.” In the navy of King’s day “intelligence” was not considered a proper job for career officers, i.e., professional Naval Academy graduates. Service aboard ships, preferably battleships, was. Thus, only the more medi
ocre officers were assigned to the intelligence branch, although as it turned out many of these were anything but mediocre. It is therefore all the more remarkable that intelligence had as much to do with winning many World War II battles as the actual fighting ships did.

  *Another Japanese failure was wrapped up in a scheme to send one of their own flying boats to Hawaii to report on whether the U.S. carriers were there or not. But the flying boat would obviously need refueling and the Japanese had planned to do this at a remote pile of rocks in the ocean well northwest of Pearl Harbor called French Frigate Shoals. When the Japanese submarine carrying the fuel surfaced at French Frigate Shoals, however, the captain was unpleasantly surprised to find that the U.S. Navy was already there, occupying it, and so this scheme unraveled; consequently, neither Yamamoto nor the Japanese Naval Staff in Tokyo had any precise information as to where the U.S. carrier fleet actually lay.