1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  *Midway Island is scarcely mentioned in most Pacific Ocean history books. The physical description I have used here comes from Dr. Morison’s volume on the battles of Coral Sea and Midway, in which he notes that he culled his historical data from the American Neptune of July 1948.

  *That Nimitz was able to get the Yorktown, which was more severely damaged than either of the above-mentioned Japanese carriers, seaworthy in just two and a half days, is testimony enough to American ingenuity, perseverance, and resolve.

  * Unfortunately for the Japanese, the strict radio silence imposed upon the fleet by Yamamoto did not allow this important news to be conveyed to the Midway Striking Force under Admiral Nagumo; thus, the commander with the most to lose was lacking this crucial information.

  *The Japanese had been lulled into a further false sense of security when it was reported, correctly, by one of their scout planes that an American carrier task force was operating in the seas near Samoa. This had been Halsey’s Enterprise and Hornet, rushed fresh from the Doolittle raid to help out Fletcher at Coral Sea, but rushed just as quickly back north when Nimitz discovered the Japanese intentions toward Midway. It has been suggested that Nimitz actually ordered the Enterprise and Hornet to sail within reconnaissance distance of the Japanese in the South Pacific and let themselves be seen (and heard), in order to deceive the Japanese into thinking they were still there.

  *Perhaps the pilot’s qualification stemmed from the embarrassing episode in the Coral Sea, where the Japanese attacked the U.S. oiler Neosho and had reported sinking a carrier.

  †All 108 did not return. The exact number shot down has never been determined but it is believed to be about thirty. The antiaircraft fire from Midway was formidable.

  ‡Before the Battle of Trafalgar, Admiral Horatio Nelson signaled to all ships in his fleet: “England expects every man to do his duty.”

  *This attack proved the futility of sending in slow torpedo bombers to attack big ships against a superior cover of fast enemy fighter aircraft. The U.S. Navy learned the lesson the hard way, but from then on their tactics would improve.

  †Few other than naval officers and seamen can appreciate the strains and stresses of a large ship jerking and lurching at speeds of up to nearly forty mph trying to avoid an aircraft attack. These ships, up to 45,000 tons and more, can list as much as fifteen degrees, throwing men down on the decks, while planes, gear, supplies, and armaments are often heaved about with the enormous force, making it sometimes impossible for men to do anything but hang on and hope not to break an arm or leg, which frequently happened.

  *There remains today some controversy over which carriers were attacked by whom. Dr. Morison asserts that McClusky attacked both Akagi and Kaga but other experts, including John Toland and Thaddeus Tuleja, write that McClusky attacked Akagi and Soryu and not Kaga. The truth will probably never be known. The Japanese carriers didn’t have their names on their sterns, and even if they had it would have been nearly impossible for the dive-bomber pilots to see them. But Kaga was a large carrier and Soryu a smaller one, and one of Commander Leslie’s pilots was later quoted as saying the carrier they attacked “was one of the biggest damned things I have ever seen.” On the other hand, Morison, the official naval historian, shows charts placing Kaga nearest to Akagi, which McClusky’s group attacked.

  *There were in fact three men left alive aboard Yorktown, somewhere down in the bowels of the ship. One of these was not badly injured and summoned rescue by firing a machine gun from the deck, which alerted one of the circling destroyers.

  *No one can know how these seemingly pointless suicides affected the ultimate outcome of the war, but it is reasonable to speculate that with so many senior commanders—not only in the navy but in the army as well—killing themselves after a loss (or, to them, a humiliation), or allowing themselves to be killed, the Japanese military lost an appalling number of first-class superior officers.

  *The eminent historian John Keegan in his latest book, Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda (2003), suggests that the American victory at Midway was as much due to luck as to the U.S. intelligence cracking of the Japanese naval code. This may be true, but if the code had not been cracked, then the American carrier fleet would not have been there, would it? And if not, of course, there would have been no luck to depend on in the first place.

  * Commander Smith’s story is taken entirely from his fascinating account, Officially Dead, written with Quentin Reynolds and published by Random House before the war ended.

  †Worn so that if they were captured upon landing they would be treated as prisoners of war, not spies.

  *Three years after the war Dasch and the other turncoat Nazi were deported to Germany, where they were reviled as traitors.

  *As we have already seen, the Battle of the Coral Sea thwarted Japanese designs on a quick taking of Port Moresby by seaborne invasion, but this did not stop them from their plan to occupy all of the Solomon Islands. They soon developed an alternative and costly strategy to take Port Moresby anyway, from the north side of New Guinea.

  *These big vacuum-tube radios were so large and complicated—and included gasoline generators used to recharge their batteries and tall antennas enabling them to transmit several thousand miles—that they sometimes required up to sixteen natives to bear them through the rough and slippery terrain. But for the sailors and marines fighting at Guadalcanal, they were worth their weight in gold.

  *Because the Japanese language does not include the sound of the letter “L,” Guadalcanal was to them “Guadacanar.”

  *This gross error does not seem to attach itself to Vandegrift; he assumed, as he had been told by officials in Washington, that his marines would not be called on to fight for at least six months. On the other hand, as a senior commanding officer, he might have considered the possibility that in war things can change quickly.

  *Among the conferees boarding the Saratoga was Admiral John McCain (father of U.S. senator John McCain), who commanded Fletcher’s land-based planes. Just as he began scaling the precariously swinging Jacob’s ladder up the carrier’s sides, somebody aboard Saratoga opened a garbage chute and covered McCain with refuse. As Vandegrift remembered it, “He managed to retain his hold, but a startled officer of the deck soon faced one mad little admiral.”

  †Lexington at Coral Sea and Yorktown at Midway.

  ‡This was probably a correct decision since if the Japanese completed their air base on Guadalcanal, which they were close to finishing, they could have bombed the American fleet and landing force practically with impunity.

  *His account of the battle, Guadalcanal Diary, published in 1943, became an instant best seller and is one of the classic works of American war reporting.

  *The maximum range of a Zero fighter at cruising speed was 1,150 miles; this did not take into account the dramatically increased fuel consumption during fighter engagements.

  *U.S. naval intelligence had expected 4,000 to 6,000 Japanese combat troops for the marines to contend with.

  *The marines quickly named this the Toonerville Trolley after the cartoon image of the day, but it proved invaluable in transporting fill and other landing-strip materials.

  *It is merely a matter of speculation as to whether or not the presence of Australia on the scene would have made any difference. Might it have brought its guns to bear decisively on the Japanese fleet, or just become another ship to be sunk? Who can possibly know?

  *This is what the U.S. Navy officially concluded. But the fact was that the Japanese had perfected naval night-fighting techniques beyond anything the U.S. Navy had ever imagined. It would take them a long and agonizing period of time to figure this out themselves.

  *Frustrated by the U.S. Navy’s silence on the results of the Savo Island debacle, Time magazine took it upon itself to announce to the public some two weeks later “a licking for the Japs.” Where they got this ridiculous information has never been determined. But the marines on Guadalcanal,
listening to Tokyo Rose, knew the truth, which was that they were there and that at least they hadn’t been sunk.

  * Within weeks, because of press reports, the Matanikau became almost as well known to Americans as the Hudson or the Potomac.

  †The flag turned out to be just a Rising Sun flag, which, drooping in the tropical heat, concealed the red rising sun and looked white to the marines from across the river.

  *The shoes were borrowed, and were two sizes too small and squeezed his feet, but Englishmen of his class had a dress code, and proper shoes were deemed essential.

  *The maps are still bad today. Pick up any book on the battle for Guadalcanal and you are likely to see the Ilu and Tenaru rivers interchanged in the insets. In any case, the marines who fought this battle believed they were fighting on the Tenaru and the Marine Corps got so tired of hearing all the arguing that five years after the war they officially named the action the Battle of the Tenaru. So be it.

  *Leckie became one of America’s finest war writers; his book Helmet for My Pillow is one of the classic first-person accounts of the marines in the Pacific war.

  *Schmidt later became one of the principal characters in the blockbuster 1943 movie Guadalcanal Diary, based on Richard Tregaskis’s book of the same name.

  *Ichiki’s behavior, beginning with the ill-advised attack and ending with his suicide, demonstrated the remarkably flawed thinking (“military logic” would not be a term properly applied here) of so many Japanese officers. Once a plan was set to paper, there was no turning back, nor was there any flexibility, no matter the circumstances, and if the plan failed suicide was the only recourse. Before the war’s end, Japanese commanders would be killing themselves at a rate far higher than the Americans could kill them.

  *A flexible, perforated, all-weather runway surface placed, on Guadalcanal, on top of a crushed coral base, rolled smooth.

  *Carlson declared later that he never would have left if he had known it.

  * What effect the Makin Island raid had on Japanese intentions to refortify Guadalcanal is uncertain, but it appears it had little.

  *Not all of them made it. U.S. warplanes now stationed at Henderson Field sank several of their barges and transports with great loss of life.

  *The damage done by the Japanese to these U.S. aircraft carriers left the U.S. Navy, for several months, with only one carrier, the Hornet, in the entire Pacific. But the American production system, which Admiral Yamamoto had so much feared, was gearing up, and before the war’s end there would be more than one hundred aircraft carriers, large and small, in the U.S. fleet.

  *Max Brand, the pen name of Frederick Faust, was the creator of, among many other works, Destrj Rides Again and the Dr. Kildare movie series. In 1943 he managed to interview a number of the Guadalcanal Marine Fighter Squadron 212 aviators who were temporarily living at an oceanside cottage near Los Angeles. Brand had intended to turn the interviews into a book but a year later he was shot dead in Italy while serving as a war correspondent and the manuscript, a true gem, languished for more than fifty years until it was discovered and published, thanks to his daughter, by the Naval Institute Press.

  *There were now about 75,000 members of the Civil Air Patrol.

  *One of these ships was made famous in the splendid movie Mister Roberts (1955), starring Henry Fonda and James Cagney and featuring Jack Lemmon as Ensign Pulver in his award-winning first movie appearance.

  *A German occupation of India would have been the perfect launching point for invasions of other British colonies in Africa and the Middle East, and even more so for Japan when she entered the war.

  *During April, May, and June of 1942, the United States sent eighty-four cargo ships to the Soviet Union. Half of them ended up at the bottom of the sea, destroyed by German torpedoes.

  *At some point they managed to ship in a fairly large consignment of flour. One of the cooks had been a chef at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria and his specialty was making pancakes for breakfast. And so for more than a week the marines’ diet at Henderson Field was pancakes, morning, noon, and night, topped with some jelly that had turned up in big five-gallon cans.

  *The Japanese called it “the centipede.”

  *Roy Acuff was a popular country music singer on radio, television, and the Grand Ole Opry, from the 1940s until his death in 1992. Accounts of expletives used against him by the Japanese appeared on the jacket cover of at least one of his old record albums. Some years ago the author encountered him in the makeup room of a television program, on which both were appearing, and asked about the truth of the story. "Yep," Acuff replied, "that’s what I always heard. And I was really flattered."

  *This gave rise to the curious “cargo cults” of New Guinea and elsewhere in the South Pacific. The natives frequently were able to recover for themselves the booty dropped by Allied airplanes and considered it some kind of manna from heaven. For many years after the war some native cultures continued to clear drop zones and landing strips, in the belief that Allied planes would someday return and resume offering these generous gifts.

  *At one point one thousand Boy Scout knives were ferried in. The garden seed must have been a boon, though; because of the climate, it was said that if a man threw a half-eaten tomato onto the ground in a sunny place, within three weeks there would be an entire vineful of ripe tomatoes to eat.

  *“Bull” was a nickname given Halsey by the press, possibly due to some misspelling or mistranslation. People who knew him well called him Bill, which he had gone by since his Annapolis class of 1906. People who didn’t called him “Sir.” Nobody actually called him Bull, except the newspapers and radio. But Bull he became to millions of Americans.

  * Author of A Bell for Adano (1944) and Hiroshima (1946), among others. He recorded his experiences on Guadalcanal in a wonderful short book called Into the Valley, published in 1943.

  *The expression that an island airfield was “an unsinkable aircraft carrier” is true enough in a sense. But the difference was that island airfields could not sail around like carriers and so the combatants on both sides always knew where they were.

  *To get an idea of what it must have been like, picture yourself in an area of about five square miles where, in the space of two hours, more than a thousand gigantic lightning bolts are cracking down all around you at the rate of about one strike every seven seconds.

  †Whenever these American troopships would arrive, marines manning the launches would flock out to them, loaded to the gunwales with souvenirs: Japanese flags, rifles, helmets, whatever they could scrounge. Pathetically, they would trade these things to the sailors for food: canned ham, fruit, canned milk, fresh bread—anything to supplant their meager, twice-a-day diet of Japanese rice, powdered eggs, Spam, crackers, and canned vienna sausage.

  * Roosevelt also told Hopkins to compose these sentiments into a message for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  *Some historians do not believe the Matanikau attack was intended as a diversion, but was simply another example of an uncoordinated or badly executed plan. After reviewing all points, the author is convinced that it was indeed a diversion gone awry—or, perhaps, a combination of both theories.

  *Because the ships were “buttoned up” for battle, almost all ports and doors and vents were closed, and temperatures in the engine and boiler rooms often exceeded 150 degrees F.

  *Some say this order was intended only for Callaghan’s own San Francisco, but that does not explain why it was broadcast throughout the fleet, except as a mistake.

  *Not to be confused with Admiral Koso Abe, who had ordered the beheadings of the American prisoners—Carlson’s marine raiders—on Makin Island.

  †The Sullivan brothers became nationally celebrated after this horrendous episode. After Pearl Harbor the five brothers had enlisted in the navy on condition that they could serve together. Their wish was granted and they were assigned to the Juneau. A popular motion picture was made of their story and their liknesses were placed on a U.S. postage stamp. But the War
Department was alarmed at the devastation that could fall upon a single family if siblings were put in the same unit, and decreed it would no longer be official practice. Not only that but the department also decreed that if one sibling was killed in action, the other would be pulled out and assigned noncombatant duty.