The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by Manchester, William

Yamamoto was a genius, an Oriental Nelson. He had masterminded the multipronged naval offensive which had seized 300,000 square miles of Oceania in six months. Had he known that the U.S. Signal Corps had broken his Purple Code, the war would have taken a very different turn. As it was, he came so close to annihilating American power that he became a perennial Pentagon argument for staggering defense budgets long after he was dead.

  After his total victory in the Battle of the Java Sea, the rising sun was blinding. Singapore had capitulated on February 17 (“All I want from you,” Lieutenant General Yamashita told Britain’s Lieutenant General A. E. Percival, “is yes or no”), and fourteen of her huge Vickers naval guns were moved to an atoll in the Gilbert Islands exotically named Tarawa. Burma followed swiftly. By the second week in March 1941 the Nips were on the Road to Mandalay, which they took on May Day, sealing off China.

  Singapore had been a big name; its loss was shocking. Less familiar, but more vital, was Rabaul, an Australian outpost in New Britain captured by the enemy in January. He moved in 100,000 troops, paved five airfields, and built Rabaul into an impregnable fortress, the key to a chain of outposts in New Ireland, the Solomons, and New Guinea. Jap pilots were now within range of Australia; after heavy air raids, Darwin, on the north coast, had to be abandoned. In New Zealand every man under sixty-five was called up, and the country’s pursuit planes were readied for combat—all nine of them. The prime minister of Australia warned his people to expect invasion hourly. In Washington Ernest J. King, the new Admiral of the Fleet or COMINCH (the abbreviation had been hastily changed from CINCUS), was arguing against the abandonment of both dominions. “The Pacific situation is now very grave,” Roosevelt cabled Churchill, and Tokyo Rose jeered, “Where are the United States Marines hiding?”

  Apart from the southern Solomon Islands, Port Moresby (the tail of bird-shaped New Guinea) and dying Corregidor, the Japanese controlled the entire Pacific west of Midway and north of the Coral Sea. They had expected 20 percent casualties in their blitz, and they had been scarcely touched—one of their fleets had sunk five Allied battleships, a carrier, two cruisers, and seven destroyers without receiving a scratch. MacArthur spoke brave words in Australia; King ordered Admiral Nimitz, who had been hastily sent out in mufti as the Pacific’s new commander, to hold the Midway-Samoa-Fijis-Brisbane line “at all costs.” Yet this seemed like whistling in the dark. After the Java Sea disaster America was fielding scratch teams. U.S. forces in the Pacific were beset by every conceivable calamity, including subversion. U.S. headquarters at French Nouméa were infested with Vichyite colonials, who sent the enemy bulletins on U.S. ship and troop movements.

  At home, American morale was being braced with cheerful lies: that an Air Corps flier named Colin Kelly had sunk the battleship Haruna (he didn’t); that a naval brush in Macassar Strait, off Borneo, was a great victory for the U.S. (it wasn’t); and that the marines on Wake had radioed “Send us more Japs” (they certainly hadn’t). Tojo and Yamamoto, undeceived, confidently reviewed the Japanese war plan of 1938. Guadalcanal and nearby Tulagi in the Solomons were next on the timetable, and were easily taken May 3. On May 6 Corregidor surrendered. The Philippine tragedy was now complete. In Australia MacArthur wrote, “Corregidor needs no comment from me. But through the bloody haze of its last reverberating shot I shall always seem to see the vision of its grim, gaunt and ghostly men, still unafraid.”

  The following day a Japanese amphibious force steamed into the Coral Sea, east of Australia, intent upon capturing Port Moresby. They were heartened by the conquest of the Philippines and flushed with what Admiral Hara, the carrier commander, later called a “victory disease.” The battle which followed was the first carrier versus carrier action in history, and it was a curious engagement. The Americans were desperate. To save Australia they had to save Moresby, and two of the five surviving U.S. flattops had been sent to block the way. For the enemy, this was a sideshow. Yamamoto was saving his strength for the great Battle of Midway. Even so, Japanese airmen inflicted heavy losses in the Coral Sea; among others they sank the Lexington and crippled the Yorktown. U.S. Navy fliers picked off seven ships, including a light carrier—“Scratch one flattop,” the pilot radioed. A draw, at best. Yet Moresby and Australia had been reprieved. The pagoda forecastles turned back. And at Pearl 1,400 mechanics, working around the clock, took less than two weeks to repair the Yorktown in time for Midway.

  Now came the first great crisis in the Pacific war. The Allies were running out of islands. Japanese troops had seized the islands of Attu and Kiska in the Aleutians, and Roosevelt, like the Australians, had to contemplate the incredible possibility of an invasion of his own homeland. Hirohito’s navy had never been more confident. It had three times as many warships as the decimated U.S. fleet. May 27, 1942, was the thirty-seventh anniversary of Japan’s great victory over the Russian Navy, in which Yamamoto had fought as a junior officer, and he chose that day to make his historic move on Midway. Steaming seaward, his force was led by a screen of sixty-five destroyers. Then came twenty-two heavy cruisers and eleven battleships, headed by the admiral’s flagship, the superdreadnought Yamato. Twenty-one submarines ringed this armada, four fast fleet carriers kept seven hundred planes overhead, and eighty transports bulged with troops. Bulling through the water, the men gaily sang war songs, and the Jap marines, who were to land in the first wave, were issued beer. “It looks, at this moment,” Roosevelt told MacArthur on June 2, “as if the Japanese fleet is heading toward the Aleutian Islands or Midway and Hawaii, with a remote possibility it may attack Southern California or Seattle by air.”

  That was precisely what Yamamoto wanted—confusion over where the blow would fall. He had sent a second task force (Japan at this point had more ships than the admiral knew what to do with) in a feint toward Alaska, hoping to humbug the Americans into splitting their forces. Here the admiral overreached himself. He wasn’t as invincible as he thought. “Magic,” the Signal Corps cover name for the broken Purple Code, was deciphering his messages almost as fast as he was sending them and passing them along to Admiral Nimitz, who was organizing Midway’s defense. Every foot of the island was crammed with troops; every warship that could be spared was at sea: seven heavy cruisers, a light cruiser, seventeen destroyers, twelve submarines, and the carriers, Hornet, Enterprise, and the patched-up Yorktown.

  In the beginning the battle went badly for the Americans. The first Jap air strike, a hundred seagoing bombers, softened up Midway for the invasion, and the U.S. pursuit planes were pitifully inadequate. Nimitz had two new advantages, however. Not only was Magic telling him where the enemy was; Yamamoto hadn’t the foggiest notion where the U.S. fleet was. And then the Jap carrier commander committed a grave tactical error. He cleared his decks to recover his planes from the Midway strike—leaving himself almost defenseless when U.S. aircraft arrived overhead first.

  American torpedo bombers went in first that morning of June 4, 1942—and they were massacred by flak. Of forty-one, only six survived, and none scored a hit. The pilots of those obsolete planes sacrificed themselves as surely as any kamikaze, and they died believing it was in vain. In fact they had provided the thin edge of victory. The Jap carriers, frantically wagging their fantails to dodge torpedoes, hadn’t been able to get any planes off, and the few Zeros that were in the air were down low, intercepting the martyred American pilots. At that decisive moment Lieutenant Commander Clarence McClusky’s two squadrons of Dauntless bombers from the Enterprise arrived high overhead and swooped down in 70-degree dives. They blew three carriers apart, then jumped another that afternoon and sent her down, too. Since four carriers were all Yamamoto had brought with him, he had to retire; he had lost his umbrella. He sat slumped on his bridge, listlessly sipping rice broth.

  Eight weeks later the U.S. Marines whom Tokyo Rose had twitted were in the Fijis, rehearsing the first American offensive of World War II. It was to be a shoestring operation, first to last. With every modern weapon headed for Europe, the 1st Marine Div
ision was armed with 1903 bolt-action Springfield rifles. Their leggings dated from 1918; their Browning machine guns and their mortars had been cosmolined since the Argonne.

  The only first-class part of the push was the quality of the troops. The Marine Corps was an elite force, and these were its picked regiments. On August 7, 1942, they waded ashore at Guadalcanal and immediately wished they hadn’t. The ’Canal, as it was known evermore, had been accurately described by a former British colonial resident as a “bloody, stinking hole.” Taking it would have been difficult any time, and in the summer of 1942 it presented a special difficulty. In capturing Java, the Japanese had acquired the Allies’ source of quinine, the only known cure for malaria. In the 1930s German chemists had discovered a substitute called atabrine, and American firms were working feverishly to synthesize it. But not much was available yet. The order was: no man could leave the line unless his temperature rose to 102 degrees. Even so, two thousand were hospitalized by October.

  On the first day the marines had been lucky. The landing had been unopposed; a handful of Nips fled into the jungle, leaving a 3,600-foot airstrip they had been building. But the second night was disastrous. Yamamoto still had lots of ships and skilled seamen, and after dark he sent a Rabaul task force down the Slot, the channel between the Solomon Islands. The volcanic cone of Savo Island obscured its approach, and the Battle of Savo Island, as that night’s engagement was to be called, was one of the most crushing defeats in the history of the U.S. Navy or, for that matter, any navy. Four precious cruisers were sunk; a thousand bluejackets drowned. Next morning the remaining American warships withdrew southward, and the transports, only partially unloaded, followed. As the marine general put it, his troops had been left “bare-arse.” They had to go on half rations at once and defend themselves with only a four-day supply of ammunition. Meantime transports of what the marines called the Tokyo Express began landing Jap soldiers from Rabaul on the far shore of the ’Canal—nine hundred a night, forty-five hundred one night.

  Supplied via their crude airstrip, the marines hung on in their muddy foxholes, shelled by enemy artillery, attacked by mass formations of charging Jap troops, swept by tropical rains, and weakened not only by malaria but by dysentery and fungus infections (“jungle rot”) as well. Then, slowly, the world began to grasp the significance of the struggle for Guadalcanal. Now they were there, withdrawing them was unthinkable. By mid-October MacArthur was warning Roosevelt, “If we are defeated in the Solomons… the entire Southwest Pacific will be in gravest danger.” Roosevelt wrote Churchill that he was praying that the men could hold their beachhead. Both sides were making the ’Canal a test of strength. In Tokyo Emperor Hirohito announced that Guadalcanal was “a decisive battle.” Like Stalingrad and El Alamein, which were reaching their peaks at the same time, the jungle island became a powerful magnet, attracting forces far out of proportion to its strategic importance because each side had decided to commit all, in confidence that it could win all.

  MacArthur’s plea for Guadalcanal reinforcements contained a sharp barb, as MacArthur communiqués often did. He asked that America’s “entire resources” be diverted to the Southwest Pacific. This would have meant stopping all shipments to Britain and Russia and diverting every U.S. troopship bound for Europe to Australia. In his opinion the Japanese threat was that great. But the President was bound to see things differently. Unlike theater commanders, he had to take a global view of the war. That meant risks, and the greater risk would lie in throwing everything at the Japanese. What would he gain if he succeeded there, only to turn and find he had to face Hitler alone? Needing the Anglo-Russian alliance, he was committed to the Atlantic first strategy. Nazi Germany could not be defeated until the Wehrmacht had been destroyed. The Russians were appealing for a second front, and he and Churchill would have to provide it, or something like it, very soon. He knew the peril in the Solomons; he even intervened to send Guadalcanal reinforcements. Beyond that, the embattled Americans and Australians down under would have to manage.

  ***

  It is improbable that MacArthur could even have imagined what had happened to Washington. Outwardly the capital looked like a city at peace: the cars were shiny, they became entangled in traffic jams, there was plenty of food in the stores, there were almost as many parties as ever. In high places, however, men were driving themselves furiously, trying to deal with high-priority crises. Winston Churchill’s visit and his speech before a joint session of Congress had been a matter of very high priority. Even more pressing was the continuing Battle of the Atlantic. The first step had been to turn off a lot of light switches; the glare of cities like Miami, whose six miles of neon shone far out to sea, had been silhouetting merchantmen for U-boat captains. Starting in May 1942 dimouts (or “Byrne-outs,” after Economic Mobilizer Jimmy Byrnes) had deprived the subs of that advantage, although another year passed before improved radar, air surveillance, and new destroyer tactics turned back the U-boat challenge.

  Building a twelve-million-man Army was expensive, and Roosevelt was sending Congress a $108,903,047,923 military budget, then the greatest in world history. The production challenge was tremendous. Boeing was responsible for the B-17 Flying Fortress (and later for the B-29 Superfortress). Consolidated was making B-24 Liberators, North American P-51 Mustangs, Vought F4U Corsairs. The names of Hughes, Kaiser, and Frazer were becoming familiar. Factories with good records were awarded Army-Navy E (for Excellent) pennants to fly over their shops, and the largest shop of all would soon be Ford’s Willow Run. On Pearl Harbor Sunday a lazy creek had meandered over untilled land there, where now stood the biggest room in the world, with a half-mile assembly line. In it Ford expected to turn out a thirty-ton Consolidated bomber every hour. They would be coming off the line so fast that he wouldn’t even try to store them; they would be taxied to an adjacent airfield, make their test flights there, and then fly off to combat.

  The Willow Run contracts, like everything else, wound up on some Washington desk. In mid-June 1942 Nazi submarines landed six English-speaking spies on Long Island and the Florida shore. Two turned themselves in; the others were captured and their dynamite caches seized. Someone in Washington had to arrange the trial and, later, the execution of the defiant six. Yale wanted to protect its ivy walls with sandbags; somebody in Washington approved it. Sometimes the orders, decisions, and colloquies were ludicrous. In early summer members of the Women’s Army Corps (WACs) began to don their new uniforms, designed by Lord & Taylor. Women’s Wear Daily exulted; “Adoption of girdles and brassieres as part of the women’s Army wardrobe will add to the prestige of the corset and brassiere industry.” Then the Brooklyn Tablet started an arble-garble by revealing that the WAC concept was subversive, cunningly designed “to break down the traditional American and Christian opposition to removing woman from the home and to degrade her by bringing back the pagan female goddess of de-sexed, lustful sterility.” Even the liberal Catholic Commonweal opposed the recruiting of women. Girls joined up anyhow. Everyone wanted to serve, including dog lovers. The Army gamely organized a K-9 Corps of useful pets and gave it the nickname “Wags.” Arthur Roland, dog editor of the New York Sun, even wrote a K-9 marching song:

  From the kennels of the country,

  From the homes and firesides too,

  We have joined the canine army,

  Our nations work to do.

  America, Philip Wylie observed at about this time, bestows its affection in peculiar ways; it was, for example, the only World War II army which formed an entire division on a parade ground to spell out MOM. But trivia helped mask the significant and the top secret, some of which needed all the camouflage they could get. In Oak Ridge, Tennessee, eighteen miles northwest of Knoxville, workers were clearing a hillside and putting down footings for a series of buildings. No one there had the slightest notion of what it was all about. Asked what he was making, a worker replied, “A dollar thirty-five an hour.” Two thousand miles westward, in the lazy New Mexico town of Santa
Fe, tourists, many with foreign accents, were strolling up to a house at 109 East Palace Street and then being ferried thirty-five miles away to a camp they knew only as Site Y which the world would later come to know as Los Alamos.

  Huge industrial complexes were rising in the Pacific northwest, and employees who asked the boss what they were doing were told they were turning out “the front part of horses, to be shipped to Washington,” or “wheels for miscarriages.” The boss himself didn’t know. The secret was confined to a few scientists, a major general, and a handful of civilians personally chosen by President Roosevelt. The two billion dollars being spent was hidden in various categories of the federal budget, and when Senator Harry Truman came nosing around to be sure the taxpayers’ money wasn’t being misspent, the White House warned him off.

  The scientists believed they were working against time. British intelligence reported that Berlin had ordered Norway’s Norsk Hydro plant to produce 3,000 pounds of heavy water, and then increased the order to 10,000 pounds. Czech uranium was moving steadily into the Reich. On the night of October 15, 1942, a party of commandos parachuted into Norway and destroyed part of the Hydro works. That provided a respite, but no one doubted that the Nazis would rebuild it.

  ***

  In this instance Senator Truman’s time had been wasted. In most cases it was well spent. Roosevelt’s introduction of rationing and controls brought expected howls from civilians, and Bumbledom being what it was, some howling was justified. That spring saw the creation of what may have been the longest and least successful acronym attempt in history, the PWPGSJSISIACWPB (Pipe, Wire Product and Galvanized Steel Jobbers Subcommittee of the Iron and Steel Industry Advisory Committee of the War Production Board). There was also something called the Biscuit, Cracker and Pretzel Subcommittee of the Baking Industry of the Division of Industry Operation, War Production Board, and in the first week of December the Office of Price Administration (OPA) decreed that “Bona fide Santa Clauses shall be construed to be such persons as wearing a red robe, white whiskers, and other well-recognized accouterments befitting their station of life, and provided that they have a kindly and jovial disposition and use their high office of juvenile trust to spread the Christmas spirit they shall be exempt from the wage-freezing Executive Order of October 3.”