“I understand your people carried off the Buka operation splendidly, without a hitch,” he said.
“It went well, Sir. I just saw the two men we took out.”
“They should be decorated. Have you thought about that?”
“No, Sir,” Pickering confessed, somewhat embarrassed. “I have not.”
“Recognition of valor is important, Fleming,” MacArthur said. “I have found it interesting, in my career, that I have the most difficulty convincing of that truth those men who have been highly decorated themselves. You, apparently, are a case in point.”
The subject of Bill Donovan’s people, obviously, is now closed.
“It may well be,” MacArthur went on, “that many people who have been given high awards, myself included, feel that they were not justified.”
A swinging door opened.
“General,” MacArthur’s Filipino steward announced, “luncheon is served.”
MacArthur turned to Pickering and said, smiling broadly, “Just in time. I was about to violate my rule that one drink at lunch is enough. Shall we go in?”
[THREE]
* * *
TOP SECRET
EYES ONLY—THE SECRETARY OF THE NAVY
DUPLICATION FORBIDDEN
ORIGINAL TO BE DESTROYED AFTER
ENCRYPTION AND TRANSMITTAL TO SECNAV
Brisbane, Australia
Saturday 17 October 1942
Dear Frank:
I arrived here without incident from Pearl Harbor. Presumably, Major Ed Banning is by now in Washington and you have had a chance to hear what he had to say, and to have had a look at the photographs and film.
Within an hour of what I thought was my unheralded arrival, I was summoned to a private—really private, only E1 Supremo and me—luncheon. He also had a skewed idea why I was sent here. He thought I was supposed to make peace between him and Admiral Nimitz. He assured me that he and Nimitz are great pals, which I think, after talking with Nimitz at Pearl Harbor, is almost true.
When I brought up Donovan’s OSS people, a wall came down. He tells me he has no intention of letting “Donovan get his camel’s nose under the tent” and volunteered that Nimitz feels the same way. (I didn’t even mention Donovan to Nimitz.) I also suspect this is true. I will keep trying, of course, both because I consider myself under orders to do so, and because I think that MacA is wrong and Donovan’s people would be very useful, but I don’t think I will be successful.
The best information here, which I presume you will also have seen by now, is that the Japanese will launch their attack tomorrow.
Admiral Ghormley sent two radios (16 and 17 October) saying his forces are “totally inadequate” to resist a major Japanese attack, and making what seems to me unreasonable demands on available Naval and aviation resources. I detected a certain lack of confidence in him, on MacA’s part. I have no opinion, and certainly would make no recommendations vis-a-vis Ghormley if I had one, but thought I should pass this on.
A problem here, which will certainly grow, is in the junior (very junior) rank of Lieutenant Hon Song Do, the Army cryptographer/analyst, who is considered by a horde of Army and Marine colonels and Navy captains, who aren’t doing anything nearly so important, as…a first lieutenant. Is there anything you can do to have the Army promote him? The same is true, to a slightly lesser degree, of Lieutenant John Moore, but Moore, at least (he is on the books as my aide-de-camp) can hide behind my skirts. As far as anyone but MacA and Willoughby know, Hon is just one more code-machine lieutenant working in the aptly named dungeon in MacA’s headquarters basement.
Finally, MacA firmly suggested that I decorate Lieutenant Joe Howard and Sergeant Steven Koffler, who we took off Buka. God knows, they deserve a medal for what they did…they met me at the airplane, and they look like those photographs in Life magazine of starving Russian prisoners on the Eastern Front…but I don’t know how to go about this. Please advise.
More soon.
Best regards,
Fleming Pickering, Brigadier General, USMCR
TOP SECRET
* * *
* * *
TOP SECRET
EYES ONLY—CAPTAIN DAVID HAUGHTON, USN
OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF THE NAVY
DUPLICATION FORBIDDEN
ORIGINAL TO BE DESTROYED AFTER
ENCRYPTION AND TRANSMITTAL TO
SECNAV
FOR COLONEL F. L. RICKABEE
OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT ANALYSIS
Brisbane, Australia
Saturday 17 October 1942
Dear Fritz:
At lunch with MacA yesterday, he justified his snubbing of Donovan’s people here by saying that he has a guerrilla operation up and running in the Philippines.
At cocktails-before-dinner earlier tonight, I tried to pump General Willoughby about this, and got a very cold shoulder; he made it plain that whatever guerrilla activity going on there is insignificant. After dinner, I got with Lt Col Philip DePress—he is the officer courier you brought to Walter Reed Hospital to see me when he had a letter from MacA for me. He’s a hell of a soldier who somehow got out of the Philippines before they fell.
After feeding him a lot of liquor, I got out of him this version: An Army reserve captain named Wendell Fertig refused to surrender and went into the hills of Mindanao where he gathered around him a group of others, including a number of Marines from the 4th Marines, who escaped from Luzon and Corregidor, and started to set up a guerrilla operation.
He has promoted himself to Brigadier General, and appointed himself “Commanding General, US Forces in the Philippines.” I understand (and so does Phil DePress) why he did this. The Filipinos would pay absolutely no attention to a lowly captain. This has, of course, enraged the rank-conscious Palace Guard here at the Palace. But from what DePress tells me, Fertig has a lot of potential.
See what you can find out, and advise me. And tell me if I’m wrong in thinking that if there are Marines with Fertig, then it becomes our business.
Finally, with me here, Moore, who is on the books as my aide-de-camp, is going to raise questions if he spends most of his time, as he has to, in the dungeon, instead of holding doors for me and serving my canapes. Is there some way we can get Sergeant Hart a commission? He is, in faithful obedience to what I’m sure are your orders, never more than fifty feet away from me anyway.
I would appreciate it if you would call my wife, and tell her that I am safe on the bridge and canape circuit in Water Lily Cottage in Beautiful Brisbane on the Sea.
Regards,
Fleming Pickering, Brigadier General, USMCR
TOP SECRET
* * *
[FOUR]
Office of the Brig Commander
US Naval Base, San Diego, California
0815 Hours 18 October 1942
There was, of course, an established procedure to deal with those members of the Naval Service whose behavior in contravention of good order and discipline attracted the official attention of the Shore Patrol.
Malefactors were transported from the scene of the alleged violation to the Brig. Once there, commissioned officers were separated from enlisted men and provided with cells befitting their rank.
As soon as they reached a condition approaching partial sobriety, most of these gentlemen were released on their own recognizance and informed by the Shore Patrol duty officer that an official report of the incident would be transmitted via official channels to their commanding officers. They were further informed that it behooved them to return immediately and directly to their ship or shore station.
The enlisted personnel were first segregated by service: sailors in one holding cell, Marines in another, and the odd soldier or two who’d somehow wound up in San Diego, in a third.
Then a further segregation took place, dividing those sailors and Marines whose offense was simply gross intoxication from those whose offenses were considered more serious.
In the case of the minor offenders, telephone c
alls would be made to Camp Pendleton, or to the various ships or shore-based units to which they were assigned, informing the appropriate person of their arrest. In due course, buses or trucks would be sent to the Brig to bring them (so to speak) home, where their commanding officers would deal with them.
Those charged with more serious offenses could count on spending the night in the Brig. Such offenses ran from resisting arrest through using provoking language to a noncommissioned, or commissioned, officer in the execution of his office, to destruction of private property (most often the furnishings of a saloon or “boardinghouse”), to assault with a deadly weapon.
In the morning, when they were more or less sober and, it was hoped, repentant, they were brought, unofficially, before an officer. He would decide whether the offender’s offense and attitude should see him brought before a court-martial.
A court-martial could mete out punishment ranging from a reprimand to life in a Naval prison.
Although none of the malefactors brought before him believed this, Lieutenant Max Krinski, USNR, most often tilted his scale of justice on the side of leniency. This was not because Lieutenant Krinski believed that there was no such thing as a bad sailor (or Marine), but rather that he believed his basic responsibility was to make his decisions on the basis of what was or was not good for the service.
Lieutenant Krinski, a bald-headed, barrel-chested, formidable-appearing gentleman of thirty-eight, had himself once been a Marine. In his youth, he served as a guard at the U.S. Naval Prison at Portsmouth. He did not, however, join the Marines to be a guard. More to the point, he quickly discovered that all the horror stories were true: Prisoners at Portsmouth were treated with inhuman brutality and sadism.
Although he was offered a promotion to corporal if he reenlisted, he turned it down, left the service, and returned to his home in upstate New York. After trying and failing to gain success in any number of careers (mostly involving sales), he took and passed the civil service examination for “Correctional Officers” in the Department of Corrections of the State of New York.
His intention was to go to college at night and get the hell out of the prison business; but that didn’t work out. On the other hand, as he rose through the ranks of prison guards (ultimately to captain), the work became less and less distasteful.
In 1940, a Marine Corps major approached him and asked if he was interested in a reserve commission. As he knew, Marines guarded the Portsmouth Naval Prison; but the major made that point specific. This made it quite clear to Krinski that The Marine Corps was seeking Captain Krinski of the Department of Corrections, rather than former PFC Krinski of the Marine Detachment, Portsmouth Naval Prison. He declined the Marine major’s kind offer.
But if war came, he realized, he could not sit it out at Sing Sing. He approached the Army, but they were not interested in his services. (He still hadn’t figured out why not.) And so when he approached the Navy, it was without much hope…. Yet they immediately responded with an offer of a commission as a lieutenant (junior grade), USNR, and an immediate call to active duty.
If war should come, the Navy explained to him, they would be assigned responsibility for guarding prisoners of war, and they had few suitably qualified officers to supervise such an operation.
But shortly after he entered active duty, it was decided that prisoners of war would be primarily an Army responsibility. Not knowing what to do with him, the Navy sent him to San Diego to work in the Brig. Three months later, he was named Officer-In-Charge. And two months after that, just as the war came, he was promoted to full lieutenant.
In Lieutenant Krinski’s judgment, there were a few bad apples who deserved to be sent to the horrors of Portsmouth. But most of the kids who came before him would not be helped at all by Portsmouth discipline. And sending them there would not only fuck up their lives, but deprive the fleet or The Marine Corps of a healthy young man whose only crime against humanity was, for example, to grow wild with indignation when he discovered that the blonde with the splendid teats was not (pre–sexual union) going down the boardinghouse corridor to get a package of cigarettes (to better savor her post–sexual consummation time with him), but off in search of another Iowa farm boy…taking his four months’ pay with her.
Instead of delivering them to confinement pending court-martial, Lieutenant Krinski would counsel these kids (eleven years spent counseling murderers, rapists, armed robbers, and others of this ilk had given him a certain expertise) and send them back to their units.
This morning, unhappily, he realized he had a different kind of case entirely. And that didn’t please him. Handcuffed to one of the steel-plank cots in the detention facility, he had a twenty-year-old Marine whose deviation from the conduct demanded of Marines on liberty could in no way be swept (so to speak) under the rug. This was one mean sonofabitch…or at least as long as you took at face value the report of the arresting Shore Patrolmen (augmented by the reports of their fellow law enforcement officers of the San Diego Police Department). Krinski had no reason to doubt any of these.
Though the Marine was obviously drunk when the alleged incidents occurred, that was no excuse.
At any rate, according to the documents Krinski had before him, this character began the evening by offering his apparently unflattering, and certainly unwelcome, opinion of a lady of the evening. She was at the time chatting with a gunnery sergeant in one of the bars favored by Marine noncommissioned officers.
The discussion moved to the alley behind the bar, where the gunnery sergeant suffered the loss of several teeth, a broken nose, and several broken ribs, the latter injury allegedly having been caused by a thrown garbage can.
That was incident one. Incident two occurred several hours later when a pair of Shore Patrolmen finally caught up with him. At that time, he took the night stick away from one of them and used it to strike both Shore Patrolmen about the head and chest, rendering them hors de combat.
Incident three took place an hour or so after that in the Ocean Shores Hotel. This was an establishment where it was alleged that money could be exchanged for sexual favors. There was apparently some misunderstanding about the price arrangement, and the Marine showed his extreme displeasure by causing severe damage to the furniture and fittings of the room he had “taken” for the night. Mr. J. D. Karnoff, an employee of the establishment, known to many (including Lieutenant Krinski) as “Big Jake,” went to the room to inform the Marine that such behavior was not tolerated on the premises and that he would have to leave. When Big Jake tried to show this upstanding Marine to the door, he was thrown down the stairs, and suffered a broken arm and sundry other injuries.
Incident four occurred when six Shore Patrolmen, under the command of an ensign, came to the Ocean Shores. These men were accompanied by two officers of the San Diego Police Department. This force ultimately subdued the Marine and placed him under arrest, but not before he kicked one of the civilian law enforcement officers in the mouth, causing the loss of several teeth, and accused the ensign of having unlawful carnal knowledge of his mother.
It was Lieutenant Krinski’s judgment that Marine staff sergeants should know better than to beat up gunnery sergeants; assault Shore Patrolmen with their own nightsticks; throw bouncers down stairs; kick civilian policemen in the mouth; and accuse commissioned officers of unspeakable perversions—especially while they were engaged in the execution of their office.
Having completed his unofficial review of the case, Lieutenant Krinski shifted into his official function. He called in his yeoman and told him to prepare the necessary documents to bring the staff sergeant before a General Court-Martial.
“Charge this bastard with everything,” Lieutenant Krinski ordered. “And do it right. I don’t want him walking because we didn’t cross all the t’s or dot all the i’s.”
An hour later, Lieutenant Krinski’s yeoman told him that he had a call from some Marine captain in Public Affairs.
“What does he want?”
“He di
dn’t say, Sir.”
“Lieutenant Krinski,” he growled into the telephone.
“I’m Captain Jellner, Lieutenant, from Marine Corps San Diego Public Affairs.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
“This is the Brig, Captain.”
“I know. I’ve looked everyplace else. I’m clutching at straws, so to speak.”
“You have a name?”
“McCoy, Thomas J., Staff Sergeant.”
“I’ve got him, and I’m going to keep him.”
“Excuse me?”
“He’s going up for a General Court-Martial, Captain. I hope they put him away for twenty years.”
“McCoy, Thomas J., Staff Sergeant?” Captain Jellner asked incredulously.
“That’s right.”
“Good God!”
“You know this guy?”
“Yes, I do. And he’s on his way to Washington, Lieutenant. To receive the Medal of Honor.”
“He was. Now he’s on his way to Portsmouth.”
“Did you hear what I just said? About the Medal of Honor?”
“Yes I did, Captain. Did you?”
“I strongly suspect that someone senior to myself will be in touch with you shortly, Lieutenant. In the meantime, I would suggest that you—”
“This sonofabitch is going to get a General Court-Martial. I don’t give a good goddamn who calls me,” Lieutenant Krinski said, and hung up.
VII
[ONE]
Noumea, New Caledonia
1115 Hours 18 October 1942
The Admiral’s Barge is the boat that transports naval flag officers from shore to ship, from ship to shore, or between men-of-war. The traditions connected with it—its near-sacred rituals—predate aircraft by centuries.
Originally, flag officers were thought to possess a close-to-regal dignity (“Admiral” comes from the Spanish phrase “Prince of the Sea”). Such dignity required that they be able to descend from the deck of a man-of-war to an absolutely immaculate boat manned by impeccably uniformed sailors.
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