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December 2016/January 2017, Volume Twelve, Number Four
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FEATURES
14 THE GOAT OF PEARL HARBOR Husband Kimmel, commander of the US Pacific Fleet, took the fall for the Japanese attack. But was that just a convenient way for the navy to pass the buck? By Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan
22 DAY OF INFAMY, PART TWO Smoke was still rising over Pearl Harbor as Japanese forces arrived at Wake Island to deliver more destruction. The American defenders weren’t about to make that easy. By Drew Ames
30 THE BIRTH OF ROUND-THE-CLOCK NEWS No story was bigger than the Pearl Harbor attack. And no medium was better equipped than radio to spread it day and night. By Ken Bush
36 A SILENT NIGHT TORPEDOED Viewed through a periscope soon after Pearl Harbor, Los Angelenos appeared arrogantly indifferent to the Japanese threat. The insulted skipper of a lurking sub went on the attack, just before sunrise on Christmas Eve. By Donald J. Young
departments 2 KILROY 4 V-MAIL 6 HOME FRONT: The First Wartime Christmas 8 THE FUNNIES: The Black Terror 10 PINUP: Carole Landis 12 LANDINGS: Ike’s England 42 WAR STORIES 44 I WAS THERE: Trapped on the USS Arizona 45 FLASHBACK 55 BOOKS AND MEDIA 58 THEATER OF WAR: 1944’s The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress and 1990’s Memphis Belle 60 78 RPM: “O Little Town of Bethlehem” 63 WWII EVENTS 64 GIs: Witness to the War’s End COVER SHOT: The foremast of the USS Arizona collapses as the once-mighty battleship burns wildly in Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The Arizona might have survived the Japanese bomb strikes that day, but the fluke explosion of her forward powder magazines killed 1,177 men on board and turned the ship into an unsalvageable inferno. WORLD WAR II VALOR IN THE PACIFIC NATIONAL MONUMENT
AM E RICA I N
WWII The War
A KILROY WAS HERE
• The Home Front • The People
December 2016 / January 2017 Volume Twelve • Number Four
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[email protected] A Publication of 310 PUBLISHING, LLC CEO Heidi Kushlan EDITORIAL DIRECTOR James P. Kushlan AMERICA IN WWII (ISSN 1554-5296) is published bimonthly by 310 Publishing LLC, 4711 Queen Avenue, Suite 202, Harrisburg, PA 17109. Periodicals postage paid at Harrisburg, PA, and additional mailing offices. SUBSCRIPTION RATE: One year (six issues) $41.94; outside the U.S., $53.94 in U.S. funds. Customer service: call toll-free 866-525-1945 (U.S. & Canada), or write AMERICA IN WWII, P.O. Box 421945, Palm Coast, FL 32142, or visit online at www.americainwwii.com. POSTMASTER: SEND ADDRESS CHANGES TO AMERICA IN WWII, P.O. BOX 421945, PALM COAST, FL 32142. Copyright 2016 by 310 Publishing LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this issue may be reproduced by any means without prior written permission of the publisher. Address letters, War Stories, and GIs correspondence to: Editor, AMERICA IN WWII, 4711 Queen Ave., Suite 202, Harrisburg, PA 17109. Letters to the editor become the property of AMERICA IN WWII and may be edited. Submission of text and images for War Stories and GIs gives AMERICA IN WWII the right to edit, publish, and republish them in any form or medium. No unsolicited article manuscripts, please: query first. AMERICA IN WWII does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of advertisements, reviews, or letters to the editor that appear herein.
In Need of a Little Christmas IT’S A TOUGH TIME TO SIT HERE AT MY COMPUTER and write about a world in turmoil 75 years ago. That’s because the world is in some turmoil as I type. Not to the same degree, but seemingly more so than many of us have experienced in our adult lives. Before a chaotic backdrop of world events, we now have a president-elect unlike any we’ve seen before. Some of you may find that exhilarating, even comforting. But I suspect most of us, whichever candidate we chose, are feeling varying degrees of nervousness. Will the man who was so unpredictable on the campaign trail be more predictable in the White House? Will he keep the promises he made to his cheering crowds? Your reaction to the yes-or-no answers may depend on where you cast your presidential vote. Whatever your personal response to the global situation near and far, you can be thankful you aren’t suffering before the world’s chaotic backdrop as Seaman First Class Donald Stratton was on December 7, 1941, aboard the USS Arizona. Flames engulfed the battleship that morning, and Stratton suffered life-threatening burns whose scars prove he was in the thick of things. He survived and has given us the first-ever full memoir by an Arizona survivor, a gut-wrenching portion of which appears in this issue. Despite his ordeal, Stratton considers himself lucky; he lived to tell his story. You can be thankful, too, that you weren’t Admiral Husband Kimmel. His life wasn’t directly threatened, but his lifelong career as a US Navy officer burned up overnight. Commander of all naval forces in Hawaii, he was an easy scapegoat for US forces’ unreadiness for the Japanese attack. In this issue, a couple of Pulitzer Prize finalists make a strong case in Kimmel’s defense. Eighteen midnights after GIs aboard ships in Oahu’s Pearl Harbor or standing on the island’s soil felt the brunt of Japan’s decision to pull the United States into the world war, the clock turned to Christmas Day. The youngest generation of American adults had never lived through a great war. Their parents knew the First World War, but that was different. They or their relatives went off to fight, and some didn’t return, but no belligerents turned up on America’s shores with planes, ships, bombs, torpedoes, bullets, or fighting men to deliver war to her people. This time the nation was not only a participant, but also a target. Christmas would be different for WWII Americans. Yet it would also be the same. They were anxious about the war, but uplifted by the timeless spirit of the season. These days, in our own time of uncertainty, with displays of mortal might on the world’s stage—by Russia, China, North Korea, ISIS, and others—we need a little Christmas, as the WWII generation did. And be thankful, as the day approaches, that whatever our worries as a people, they’re not as great as the worries of December 1941.
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A V-MAIL
RPS E CO ARIN US M
A Browning Automatic Rifle, user-switchable to fire semi-automatic or fully automatic.
ONE MARINE’S WAR STORY I JUST FINISHED READING Nick Cariello’s beautifully written account of his experiences in the Pacific theater during WWII [“One Marine’s War,” October-November 2016]. I wish I could shake his hand and thank him personally. I agree with what he wrote in his epilog. War is indeed man’s greatest tragedy. It hurts me deeply that so many who have never seen, tasted, smelled, and lived the most horrible experience any human being can endure [agitate for war]. I thank God for men, and now women, who were and are willing to serve so bravely, to suffer so quietly, and all too often give the ultimate sacrifice in the name of freedom. Thank you, Mr. Cariello, for your service and for telling your story so eloquently. J AMES CARR peacetime US Air Force veteran Batavia, New York
IN THE EPILOG of “One Marine’s War,” Nick Carriello mentions having grenade fragments removed years after the war. This is apparently common. I was fortunate in that I was not wounded in Korea. In conversations with other veterans later, they said they had to make appointments with the VA hospital because fragments had come to the surface and had to be removed. Being uninitiated, I asked why. The explanation was that, when being treated originally, if a fragment was not apparent or if extensive surgery was required to remove it, it was left where it was, unless there was potential for further injury, to work its way out in the future. C ARL SARDARO Milan, New York 4 AMERICA IN WWII
D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 6 / J A N U A RY 2 0 1 7
I ENJOYED the Nick Cariello article, but I am certain that the reference to the Browning Automatic Rifle as a “light machine gun” (page 46) was not written by him. Have heard the rifle called many things but never a machine gun. ROBERT BRACHT 80-year-old Marine Galveston, Texas
Editor’s reply: It’s true that Cariello didn’t explain what a BAR was. He was busy telling his story. So we added that explanation for our readers. The BAR had a switch allowing the user to choose between safety (non-firing), semi-automatic, and fully automatic modes. This last mode let the BAR fire continuously while the trigger was squeezed and used the burst of gas from each cartridge’s firing to eject spent shells, chamber new rounds, and fire. That’s the definition of a machine gun. T HE TINTED PICTURE of then-private Nick Cariello show him with a black tie. Marine’s ties are khaki-colored, the same color as his shirt. I wore one for 26 years. I enjoyed the article. SAMUEL E. THAMES major, US Marine Corps, retired received via e-mail
THE GENERAL’S PERSONAL PILOT I GRABBED the June 2016 issue of your magazine off the shelf at the Barnes and Noble store in Springfield, Illinois, as I saw it contained the late Robert F. Dorr’s last article, “The Flying Turkey,” about the Avenger torpedo bomber. I had not read your magazine before. Grand job with presentation and content.
William Floyd, Jr.’s article “Rising Star, Falling Star,” on General Mark Clark, was an excellent read. As an aside, Lieutenant Colonel (then Major) John Thornton Walker of Springfield, Illinois, was General Clark’s personal pilot. The duo narrowly escaped death in 1944 over Civitavecchia when their L-5 [a Stinson Sentinel small aircraft] slammed into an Allied barrage balloon. On February 19, 1945, Lieutenant Colonel Walker was headed home on leave as a passenger on a British Royal Air Force Lockheed Hudson Mark VI (serial number FK608) piloted by Flight Lieutenant Harry Barron Cooper. The plane lost its left engine on takeoff from Peretola (Florence). All 10 aboard were killed in the subsequent crash. J OHN D. BYBEE Vermont, Illinois
THE BEST HOME-FRONT FILMS I HAVE ENJOYED the listing of motion pictures dealing with World War II [V-Mail, December 2015–June 2016]. Would you please consider compiling a similar list dealing with the American home front during World War II? To qualify, a film must have wartime content in the actual story line. Simply being produced or set during 1941–1945 would not be enough. To begin the process, here are some representative titles from my own collection: Biloxi Blues (1988), The Clock (1945), Fort McCoy (2011), The Human Comedy (1943), I’ll Be Seeing You (1944), Little Boy (2014), Miracle in the Rain (1955), Molly: An American Girl on the Home Front (2006), Since You Went Away (1944), Summer of ’42 (1971), Sunday Dinner for a Soldier (1944), Swing Shift (1984), and Tender Comrade (1943). R ICHARD VEIT received via e-mail
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DECEMBER 7, 1941... Rediscover the surprise attack that shook a Pacific island paradise and launched America into World War II
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A HOME FRONT
(Red,White, and) Blue Christmas by Carl Zebrowski
I
T’S AN UNUSUAL HOLIDAY SEASON
6 AMERICA IN WWII
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fdr presidential library
when the British prime minister sneaks across the Atlantic aboard a Royal Navy battleship. By that time of year in 1941, the world war had preceded Winston Churchill to America, and he was braving a voyage through U-boat–infested waters to discuss global military strategy with his prime ally. Three days before Christmas, he arrived at Hampton Roads, Virginia, and ducked into a car waiting to drive him to the White House. He settled into the backseat beside his distant cousin, President Franklin Roosevelt. Other matters in the States were less unusual than might be expected in a country newly at war. The NFL had just hosted its championship game the day before Churchill’s arrival, with the Chicago Bears drubbing the New York Giants 37 to 9. The war hadn’t yet affected travel much, so citizens were still able to make long trips to visit family. Decorations dressed up public squares, city streets, and private residences. Only lights were scarce, due to blackout restrictions. Inside homes, lights were OK as long as blackout curtains were pulled down. There were Christmas trees too. Real evergreens would soon be scarce—with the manpower to cut and transport them diverted to the war effort—but for now a six-footer went for 75 cents ($12.50 in 2016). The ornaments were mostly new, because many people trashed their old German- and Japanese-made tchotchkes. The government reassured citizens that the food supplies essential for a proper holiday dinner would remain widely available. Nonetheless, housewives stocked up on the most critical ingredients, such as sugar at 15 cents ($2.50) for a two-pound bag. Bottles of Coke were easy to come by, promoted by Santa himself in colorful Madison
Franklin Roosevelt (with Winston Churchill to his right) speaks during the 1941 National Christmas Tree lighting ceremony. The free world listens via radio.
Avenue ads spreading the drink’s slogan of the day—“the pause that refreshes” —to a nation that needed exactly that. Americans passed free time in movie theaters or in front of their radios. The nowclassic film Citizen Kane was playing on big screens, as was the Three Stooges’ You Nazty Spy!, featuring Moe Howard as the Führer. There was also the short with cartoon cat and mouse Tom and Jerry enacting The Night before Christmas. Newsreels with footage of the Pearl Harbor attack were arriving and theater-goers viewed them before feature films. On radio, Sealtest ice cream sponsored a Christmas Eve reading of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol by actor Lionel Barrymore. Glenn Miller could also be found on the tuning dial that night with a special holiday show—his last as a civilian. Gift-buying revved up at year’s end, as always. Newspaper and magazine ads touted luxury goods such as diamond rings, fancy gowns, and fur coats. For the less-well-off, there were toy military planes, Arthur Murray dance lessons, and
ladies’ stockings, the last of which would become scarce once nylon and silk were diverted to the war effort. War bonds were a popular new gift. Another new addition to the season was hundreds of thousands of GIs scattered coast to coast. About half a million of them got furloughs to visit home. For those stuck on base, the War Department ordered 1.5 million pounds of turkey. Many families who lived near military installations invited boys to their dinners. Hordes of boys in uniform weren’t the only obvious signs of war. Civil defense volunteers kept watch on the skies for enemy aircraft. Important war factories remained open throughout the season. “To supply steel for the war,” the Wall Street Journal reported, “many plants in the industry will operate on Christmas Day for the first time in 24 years, or since the First World War.” Kids and neighborhood groups came together to collect rubber, metal, and other items to be recycled for military use. The nation as a whole came together too—near dusk on Christmas Eve, listening to the radio broadcast from the South Lawn of the White House. Churchill and Roosevelt appeared on the portico overlooking a crowd of thousands, after spending the day together in war talks. Just after 5 P.M., FDR flipped the switch to turn on the red, white, and blue lights covering the 35-foot-tall National Christmas Tree. He offered some words, then Churchill stepped to the microphone to remind his audience that there was more to this season than global turmoil. “We may cast aside for this night at least the cares and dangers which beset us, and make for the children an evening of happiness in a world of storm…,” he said. “Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play.” A
A THE FUNNIES
Battling Hitler for the Hell of It by Arnold T. Blumberg
I
Despite heavy competition, the dark adventurer drew readers throughout the war years, going wherever, as the writers put it, the “Axis octopus rears its deadly head” and beyond until 1949. One of the series’ writers was a young Patricia Highsmith, who would go on to pen the novel Strangers on a Train, the basis for the 1951 Alfred Hitchcock classic film of the same name. Highsmith worked as a comic book writer for years, but later tried to conceal her involvement in the industry to avoid association with what was considered pedestrian cultural fare. Over the decades, a number of publishers revived the Black Terror character, occasionally taking huge liberties with the original concept. Most recently Moonstone Books introduced an African American revolutionary incarnation in 2011 called the Blackest Terror. He did fight Nazis, at least—Nazi robots. A DR. ARNOLD T. BLUMBERG is an educator and the author of books on comic books and other pop culture topics. He resides in Baltimore, Maryland.
One of the miracles of World War II–era chemistry was the transformation of pharmacist Bob Benton into the super-strong superhero Black Terror. The vaporous concoction that remade him also made him nearly invincible to bullets—useful in his new-found role fighting Axis military forces. 8 AMERICA IN WWII
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IMAGES COURTESY OF GEPPI'S ENTERTAINMENT MUSEUM, WWW.GEPPISMUSEUM.COM
T WAS THE “FORMIC ETHERS” that changed Bob Benton for good, an elixir of volatile liquids that he, a pharmacist, mixed up in his spare time. When he breathed in the vapors, they gave him super strength and, it turned out, made him nearly invulnerable to bullets. Black Terror became his name when he slipped into his dark tights with skull and crossbones emblazoned on the chest, put on his eye mask and red-and-blue cape, and headed out for his afterhours gig fighting Axis henchmen and homegrown crooks. What fueled this crusader’s desire to join efforts to wipe out the Axis and to tame the stateside criminal element? At a time when comics publishers were turning uncounted innocuous characters into dime-a-dozen superheroes, perhaps his motive was nothing more than a desire to slip into an identity-obscuring costume and, accompanied by a sidekick, go on exciting adventures combatting evil. So much for a compelling superhero origin story. The Terror Twins, as Benton and sidekick Tim Roland were known, cut a swath through several comic book series, including Black Terror’s own title and the anthology America’s Best Comics.
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AM E RICA I N
WWII PINUP
CaroleLandis
When Lupe Velez committed suicide in 1944, Carole Landis said she knew just how her fellow actress felt. “You go so far and then what have you got to face…? she told a friend during an ominous conversation. “There’s always the fear of being washed up…. You fear the future because there is only one way to go and that is down.” Like Velez, Landis had a promising start in prewar Hollywood. But despite obvious talent, the actress GIs called the Blonde Bomber was cast mostly as a superficial beauty. In September 1942, she took a break from filming to go on a five-month USO tour with three other women entertainers. She proved incredibly popular, brimming with good looks, charm, and dedication to the troops. Eventually, visiting exotic locales to boost GI morale took a toll: tropical illnesses she would contract on a later photo courtesy of www.doctormacro.com
Pacific tour would damage her health long-term. In 1943 Landis was asked to write a book about her USO travel experiences. She called it Four Jills in a Jeep and it was a smashing success. A movie version followed in 1944, but it didn’t compare. Despite that the film starred all four of the women who lived the previously wellreceived story—a seeming guarantee to draw crowds to theaters—it was a total flop. Struggles only continued. In 1948, weighed down by a fading career, multiple failed marriages, financial troubles, poor health, and the ending of an affair, Landis, just 29 years old, committed suicide by overdosing on drugs. E RICA M. ROBERTS editorial intern
A LANDINGS
Ike’s England by Mark D. Van Ells
A
STATUE OF General Dwight D. Eisenhower, hands on hips and wearing the trademark waist-cut jacket now known as the Eisenhower or Ike jacket, stands in front of the American embassy on Grosvenor Square in London. Ike spent a lot of time in this city and elsewhere in the southeastern stretches of England during World War II, and it was here that he pulled off his greatest accomplishment: the planning of the Operation Overlord invasion of Normandy, France. The statue is just one of several reminders of him that remain in South East England. When Eisenhower was appointed supreme Allied commander in December 1943, top Allied leaders operated out of Norfolk House at 31 St. James Square in London, an address subsequently rebranded Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF). Ike was already familiar with the place, as he had planned the 1942 invasion of North Africa here. Today, two plaques on the façade note the house’s WWII significance. One commemorates its roles in Torch and Overlord, the latter of which Eisenhower began planning here and finished later. The other, placed by the Eisenhower family in 1990, states that it was from this building that the commander “directed the Allied Expeditionary Forces against Fortress Europe, 6 June 1944.” But that’s not the whole story of Ike in England. Eisenhower disliked central London and sought, as he wrote, “a suitable site somewhere in the countryside” for his headquarters. He settled on Bushy Park, 10 miles southwest of Norfolk House. “There were protests,” Eisenhower wrote of his decision. But he got his way. Bushy Park was already the headquarters of the US Eighth Air Force, under the
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A bronze Ike stands watch with arms akimbo in front of the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, London, sporting his now-iconic “Eisenhower jacket.”
command of General Carl Spaatz. Named Camp Griffiss after the first American airman killed in the line of duty in Europe— Lieutenant Colonel Townsend Griffiss— the base expanded rapidly when SHAEF arrived in March 1944, eventually hosting 5,000 American and British personnel. It is now part of the Royal Parks system, free and open to the public and accessible from London in 30 minutes by rail. Barely a trace of the base exists today. Its old grounds, in the northeastern portion of the park, are open grassland punctuated with groves of trees. Scattered across the park are several memorials related to Americans. They are not immediately evident, but Royal Parks offers a walking-tour audio titled “The
Yanks Are Here!” to guide visitors to them; as a bonus, locals who lived through the war share memories of the “glamorous” GIs who transformed their neighborhood into America’s “49th state.” The tour covers 2.5 miles and has 10 stops. The tour helps visitors imagine the Bushy Park of the early 1940s. Stop 2, for example, is along Chestnut Avenue, a broad tree-lined road running through the center of the park. Though there is no sign of buildings here today, the audio points out that during the war, the trees sheltered row after row of barracks for US enlisted men. On a raised area along one pathway, Glenn Miller gave one of his last concerts before he mysteriously disappeared over the English Channel in 1944. Some of the memorials are easy to miss. Grass is swallowing up the marker at what was the building where Spaatz had his headquarters. Not far away is the SHAEF Gate, once the camp’s main entrance. Standing near a grove of trees is the US Army Air Forces Memorial, constructed by the British Royal Air Force for its American “comrades in arms.” A modest redbrick square with a star in the center marks the location of Eisenhower’s office, where the details of the most complex military operation in history were hammered out and finalized. As the Normandy invasion grew imminent, Eisenhower wanted to be closer to the troop embarkation ports. So on June 2 he moved into a tent camp in the countryside outside Portsmouth, a mile east of Southwick House, the Georgian-style mansion where British Admiral Bertram Ramsay made his headquarters. Ramsay was in charge of Operation Neptune, the seaborne component of Overlord.
all photos this article by Mark D. Van ells
Clockwise from top, left: the US Army Air Forces Memorial in London’s Bushy Park, wartime headquarters of the Eighth Air Force; Southwick House, where Dwight Eisenhower set the Normandy invasion for June 6, 1944; inside, the map of the invasion’s seaborne portion.
Ike originally had hoped to launch the invasion on June 5, but bad weather forced it to be postponed. In the early morning hours that day, he and his commanders met in the library of Southwick (pronounced SUTH-ick) House to decide their next move. If they couldn’t launch the invasion on the 6th, they would have to wait another two weeks for conditions to be favorable again. Perhaps no meteorologist in history was ever under more pressure than Group Captain J.M. Stagg of the Royal Air Force, who walked into the meeting to tell Eisenhower there would likely be a 36-hour break in the bad weather. “The consequences of [any further] delay justified great risk,” Eisenhower later wrote, “and I quickly announced the deci-
sion to go ahead with the attack on June 6,” known forever afterward as D-Day. Today Southwick House is open to the public, though anyone who drops in unannounced will be turned away. It is now the officer’s mess on an active British military base. Those wishing to visit must contact the base well in advance and be approved for entry. Southwick House is just a short walk from the base’s main gate. The most impressive feature of the building is the Map Room, where Ramsay installed a wall-size wooden map of the invasion area on which he worked out the complicated logistics of moving around thousands of ships and men. The map looks almost exactly as it did the day Ike pulled the trig-
IN A NUTSHELL
ger on Operation Overlord that fateful June morning. The house’s library, now known as the Eisenhower Room, has since been converted into a pub. Aside from the name, there is little to indicate the room’s historical significance. A plaque is affixed to the wall just above the spot where Ike made his famous decision. Another, placed by the Eisenhower family in 1990, contains the exact same wording as the plaque on Norfolk House back in London. Today, travelers flock to the D-Day invasion beaches of Normandy, but few give much thought to the planning that went into the operation. Though the planning-related historic sites in and around London are neither obvious nor well known, retracing Ike’s footsteps here offers a new perspective on one of the most critical moments of the Second World War. A
WHAT Grosvenor Square, Bushy Park, and Southwick House WHERE Hampton and Southwick, England WHY Stand in the room where Dwight Eisenhower decided to launch the Normandy invasion the following day • View the wall-size map used to plot the D-Day movements of thousands of ships and men • Walk a history trail commemorating the GIs who turned Bushy Park into the “49th state”
For more information about Bushy Park, visit its website at www.royalparks.org.uk/ parks/bushy-park. For Southwick House, contact the public affairs office of the British Army’s Defence School of Policing and Guarding at
[email protected].
M ARK D. VAN E LLS teaches history at Queensborough Community College in New York City and is the author of America and WWI: A Traveler’s Guide. TONY DOWLAND, a local historian in Westchester, and Brigadier General David Harrison, retired from the British Army, helped Van Ells with his South East England tour. D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 6 / J A N U A RY 2 0 1 7
AMERICA IN WWII 13
THE GOAT OF P
P EAR L HARBOR
Husband Kimmel, commander of the US Pacific Fleet, took the fall for the Japanese attack. But was that just a convenient way for the navy to pass the buck?
by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan
Who on the American side was at fault for the Japanese destruction of Battleship Row? The US Navy pointed the finger at Admiral Husband Kimmel. As commander of the US Pacific Fleet, he was in charge of Hawaii’s naval defenses. national archives
T H E G O AT O F P E A R L H A R B O R by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan
T
HERE WAS PLENTY OF BLAME to go around for Japan’s catching American forces off guard at Pearl Harbor. Navy and army commanders in Hawaii took the brunt of it. Husband Kimmel, commander of the US Pacific Fleet, should have known the attack was coming, his critics charged. He was removed from command. In the new book A Matter of Honor: Pearl Harbor, Betrayal, Blame, and a Family’s Quest for Justice, authors Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan show that most of the blame belonged in Washington. Senior officials there were responsible for intelligence failures and gross inefficiencies beginning months before the attack. In this adaptation from the book, the authors document how the ineptness of the US high command continued through the final hours before the surprise in Hawaii.
Above: Husband Kimmel was made commander of the US Pacific Fleet on February 2, 1941, with a ceremony aboard USS Pennsylvania. Amid criticism, President Franklin Roosevelt promoted him over 47 admirals with higher seniority. Opposite: The alert contained here, from US Army Chief of Staff George Marshall, is at the heart of the Kimmel–Pearl Harbor controversy: It arrived too late for Kimmel to act on it. 16 AMERICA IN WWII
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left & opposite: national archives
SOON AFTER 9:00 A.M. on December 7th, 1941, Colonel Rufus Bratton of US Army intelligence was handed an intercepted message from Tokyo ordering its envoys in Washington to deliver its rejection of America’s proposals, implying the severance of relations, at 1:00 P.M. Why the insistence on that precise time? From previous intercepts, the United States knew that Japan’s exchanges with the US government had for some time been deceitful, that Tokyo was working to a deadline. When the deadline eventually came, one of the intercepts had indicated that “something” was “automatically going to happen.” It was rational to think that the “something” was an attack somewhere in the Pacific. When Bratton saw this latest message, he would recall, he was “stunned into frenzied activity.” He tried to raise Army Chief of Staff George Marshall, only to be told the general had “gone horseback riding.” The minutes ticked by. Around 10:20 A.M., at navy headquarters on Constitution Avenue, Bratton’s naval counterpart, Lieutenant Commander Alwin
Kramer, also saw the intercept specifying that negotiations were to be ended at 1:00 P.M. Kramer, who had served in Hawaii and was familiar with the different time zones, rapidly calculated what 1:00 P.M. Washington time—by now less than three hours away—would equate to at relevant points in the Pacific. On the Kra Isthmus and in the Philippines, Kramer figured, it would be two or three hours before dawn. At Pearl Harbor, it would be 7:30 A.M. Kramer headed for the office of the chief of naval operations, Admiral Harold Stark. Of the several other officers present outside the office, one was the chief of the Far Eastern section of the Office of Naval Intelligence, Commander Arthur McCollum. Together, the two men studied a chart with time zones marked in blue, light blue, and pink. It showed that Kramer’s initial calculations were correct, so they shared the finding with ONI chief Theodore Wilkinson. Wilkinson and McCollum broached the matter with Admiral Stark. Stark “didn’t seem to be very much perturbed,” McCollum would recall. Wilkinson asked if the Pacific Fleet had been alerted, and Admiral Stark said it had. At about 11:00, when the head of the War Plans Division, Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, showed up, McCollum and Wilkinson tackled him in turn. “We asked again whether the Pacific Fleet had been warned,” McCollum recalled, “and I believe Captain Wilkinson suggested to Admiral Stark that he pick up the phone and call the commander of the US Pacific Fleet, Admiral Husband Kimmel. I thought he was going to do it, but apparently he changed his mind and tried to get through to the White House—and was told the President wasn’t available.” Meanwhile, the Japanese messages that had been intercepted during the night had reached the secretaries of state, war, and the navy, who were meeting in Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s office. Kramer made sure they understood the times in the Pacific that
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it would be just as well not to send it.” Had Marshall not phoned, the chief of naval operations would say much later, he himself would probably have sent no warning. As it turned out, Stark changed his mind. “I put the phone up and…in a matter of seconds, or certainly only a few minutes, thought, ‘Well, it can’t do any harm. There may be something unusual…. There might be something.’ And I turned back and picked up the phone—he [Marshall] had not yet sent the message—and I said, ‘Perhaps you are right. I think you had better go ahead.’” Stark asked Marshall to see that copies of the warning message also went to naval commanders in the Pacific. As sent, the final telegram read:
coincided with 1:00 P.M. Washington time. Hull, Secretary of War Henry Stimson would note in his journal, said he was “very certain that the Japs [were] planning some devilry.” The secretaries wondered—impotently—“where the blow will strike.” LL THIS TIME,
The Japanese are presenting at 1 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, today, what amounts to an ultimatum. Also they are under orders to destroy their code machine immediately. Just what significance the hour set may have we do not know, but be on alert accordingly. Inform naval authorities of this communication. Marshall.
above & top: national archives
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Chief of Staff Marshall had been trotting and cantering around on horseback, winding up his ride on open ground where the Pentagon now stands. Only when he was back home, taking a shower and preparing to go to the office, did he start to play a role in the day’s events. He got word at last that Bratton, frustrated in his earlier effort to reach the General, planned to come to his home with an “important message.” Marshall sent word that Bratton should stay where he was. He would be in the office shortly. Between 11:15 and 11:30 A.M.—according to the varying memories of witnesses, perhaps two hours after the chief of staff had first been telephoned—he reached his office and began to catch up. First, for long minutes, he read the Japanese messages that had been intercepted overnight—out loud. Army intelligence chief General Sherman Miles and Colonel Bratton, anxious to bring Marshall’s attention to the matter of most concern—to the intercept specifying that Tokyo’s message be delivered at 1:00 P.M.—tried in vain to interrupt him. When at last Marshall did take in the 1:00 P.M. message, the two officers got his full attention. “General Miles and I,” Bratton recalled, “both said that we were convinced that it meant Japanese hostile action against some American installation in the Pacific at or shortly after one that afternoon.” Miles urged that “the Philippines, Hawaii, Panama, and the West Coast be informed immediately…to be on the alert.” Other officers had by now entered the office, and no one demurred. “There was no doubt in the minds of those present, certainly not in my mind, that the ‘one o’clock’ had some very definite significance,” Marshall himself would recall. “Something was going to happen at one o’clock.” Taking pencil and paper, he there and then drafted a message for commanders in the Pacific. Before sending it, however, he called Admiral Stark at the Navy Department. “He said it would be a good thing to inform the people in the Pacific,” Stark would recall. “My first reaction was that we had sent so much out…that
by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan
The chief of staff’s use of the word “alert” was almost unique. It had not been used in any message to the Pacific since midsummer 1940, during what had turned out to be an exercise. This at last was a clear communication, impossible to misinterpret—and, by now, terribly, terribly urgent. By the time Marshall finished composing this dispatch it was 11:50 A.M.—just 70 minutes before Japan’s envoys had been instructed to cut off negotiations. Might the fastest way to get word to the Pacific have been to use the telephone—or radio? Testifying later, Marshall seemed unclear about that. Phoning in those days was a cumbersome business, he said, and not secure. Doing so was “not considered.” Had he been aware that the FBI had an efficient direct radio link to Hawaii? No. The navy had a fast link to Hawaii, too, but Marshall—according to Stark—declined an offer to use it. In the end, the army relied on its own message center. There was an initial delay because the staff could not read Marshall’s scribble. Bratton, who was able to make it out, then dictated the text to a clerk. The record indicates that it finally went for encryption and transmission at noon. How long, Marshall wanted to know, would the message take to reach addressees? He was told, “Within thirty minutes at the latest.”
Top: Unbeknownst to Japan, US intelligence had broken the Japanese code Americans knew as Purple. This specially built typewriter-like machine allowed Americans to decode Purple quickly. Above: The US decryption of Japan’s so-called “one o’clock message.” Some US commanders believed that the “reply” mentioned in the text would coincide with a Japanese attack at 1 P.M. Washington time—8 A.M. in Hawaii. 18 AMERICA IN WWII
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naval history & heritage command naval history & heritage command
library of congress naval history & heritage command
Some of the major American players in the lead-up to the Pearl Harbor attack (clockwise from top left): US Army Chief of Staff George W. Marshall with Secretary of War Henry Stimson; US Navy Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark; Commander Arthur McCollum, chief of the Far Eastern section of the Office of Naval Intelligence; Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, head of the Department of the Navy War Plans Division.
Out in the Pacific, 230 miles due north of Pearl Harbor, the first wave of warplanes was already launching from the carriers of the Japanese strike force.
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HE REST IS BLACK FARCE. Messages to other Pacific commands, the Philippines, Panama, and San Francisco—the priority addressee was the Philippines—got through as intended. The warning to US Army Lieutenant General Walter Short in Hawaii, with a request that he inform “naval authori-
ties,” did not. When atmospheric conditions made a connection impossible, the colonel in the War Department message center in Washington resorted to more powerful commercial circuits. So it was that the dispatch to the only place that immediately mattered went, at 12:17 P.M. East Coast time, first to Western Union in Washington by teletype, then across the street by pneumatic tube to RCA, thence to San Francisco, and from there by radio to the RCA offices in Honolulu—but not yet to the army’s signal center, because the circuit was down. D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 6 / J A N U A RY 2 0 1 7
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national archives
plans to meet the new situation were It was now 7:33 A.M. in Hawaii, urgently devised. Foremost among already three minutes later than the them was a major operation to relieve time at which Tokyo had told its diplothe US garrison at Wake Island, some mats to deliver the final message to the 2,000 miles west of Hawaii, which State Department. The onslaught on had in turn come under prolonged the US fleet, the reason for the charade enemy attack. of which they were part, was only 20 Kimmel resisted outright a suggesminutes away. tion from headquarters that Pearl The bombs began falling at 7:55 Harbor was now barely serviceable as A.M. Hawaii time. Chaos reigned in a major base for US warships. Honolulu as an RCA messenger boy on Damaged but seaworthy ships, Washa motorbike, the dispatch designed to ington proposed, should be brought forewarn General Short and Admiral to the US West Coast. Pearl should Kimmel in his pouch, picked his way for the time being serve as a base only through a tangle of traffic. for submarines. Kimmel retorted that The message—at this stage not even Pearl was still viable. The repair yards marked “Priority”—did not reach the were functioning, and warships not army signal office until four hours after terminally damaged—and that was the start of the attack. It was almost most of them—could be put back into 3:00 P.M. by the time it was decoded service. Most important of all, US and at last passed to General Short. By carriers, cruisers, and destroyers were then, the Japanese airplanes were long still operational. gone. The navy and the army were An early report from Walter Short, commander of US Though Kimmel could not be sure counting their dead, succoring the Army operations in Hawaii, alerts Washington, DC, of it at the time, six of the nine battlewounded. According to an army capthat Japanese planes have attacked Pearl Harbor and ships struck by the Japanese on the tain present when Short received two of the US Army Air Forces’ bases in the islands. 7th were to be recovered and would Marshall’s message, he uncharacteristiThe extent of the damage is yet unknown, but the fight again. What was really needed cally swore like a sergeant. navy appears to have been hit hard. now, Kimmel made clear, was an infuAdmiral Kimmel’s copy of the warnsion of planes, anti-aircraft guns, and radar in the quantities Pearl ing dispatch reached him eight hours after the start of the attack. had long lacked. “Repeated strong representations in the past He balled it up and threw it into the trash. have only been partially heeded,” he wrote pointedly, “but stronger support may now be expected.” HE HORRENDOUS DAY , and the nights that followed, blurred All this over 14 pages, in a document remarkable for the fact into one at Pearl Harbor. So great was the stress that barethat it was composed amid the human loss and chaos that immely anyone could later recall details about the rush of events. diately followed December 7. Kimmel continued working tirelessAn officer who saw Kimmel at the height of the attack described ly, so tirelessly that his senior staff had to press him to rest. He his performance in command as having been “splendid.” was still, his chief of staff William “Poco” Smith recalled, filled For about 48 hours after the strike, meals were forgotten. No with “fight and determination.” “What distressed him more than one showered or changed clothes. On the first night, Kimmel’s anything,” assistant chief of staff Walter DeLany remembered, sole concession to the need for rest was to move for a while to an “was the loss of his personnel.” armchair. The admiral strove to bolster the morale of the thousands of his After nightfall on the 8th, Admiral “Bull” Halsey—returning to men who toiled on amid the wreckage. “We Americans can susPearl aboard the carrier Enterprise—found Kimmel and his staff tain hard blows but can deliver harder ones,” he told them days members “still wearing their Sunday uniforms, crumpled and spotafter the attack; “when we face the task that lies ahead with calm ted with mud. Their faces were haggard and unshaven but their chins determination and unflinching resolve, it is truly great to be an were up. Kimmel himself was a marvel of cool efficiency, although American…. Never have we been so proud as when we saw the hysteria that surged around him mounted by the minute.” Sunday’s magnificent response to the call of duty.” The admiral and many senior officers thought it more than posThe response of the fleet had been magnificent, and almost sible that the Japanese attack had been only the initial blow. In immediate. Later investigation would conclude that most anti-airWashington, too, Secretary of War Stimson feared Tokyo might craft guns aboard ships had opened up within five minutes or less. follow through by ordering an invasion of Hawaii. No invasion “So prompt,” Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, the Japanese strike materialized, but there were major command decisions to be made. force commander, wrote in his after-action report, “as to virtualShips, and what planes could be scrabbled together, would for ly nullify the advantage of surprise.” weeks to come conduct a prolonged search—in vain—for the The gallantry of one officer, in charge of an anti-aircraft battery enemy force that had struck on the 7th. Elements of the fleet were aboard the USS Nevada, would deservedly become legendary in already at sea, and Halsey headed out again almost at once. War
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The secretary of the navy, Frank Knox, carried Stark’s letter to Hawaii. He had resolved on making the trip rapidly, within hours of the attack, and President Franklin Roosevelt had approved. The secretary’s task was to assess the scale of the catastrophe and find out how the fleet could have been taken so totally by surprise. Knox was aware, too, that his own reputation was at serious risk. It was bad enough that, just hours before the Japanese strike, the press had reported him as boasting of the fleet’s competence. Worse, after it, at the White House and in the presence of senators and congressmen, he had been taunted over the fact that the navy—the navy for which he was responsible—had apparently been “asleep.”
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HERE WAS A PROSPECT,
Knox would recall, “of a nasty congressional investigation, and I made up my mind in a flash to go out there and get the actual facts.” He was right about the imminence of a furor in Congress. Before he even boarded his plane, members of the House and Senate were derid-
national archives
the navy. A 21-year-old fresh out of the US Naval Academy, Ensign Joseph Taussig went on directing fire after communications at the battery had been disabled. A missile passed through his thigh, and the leg would eventually be amputated. For his “exceptional courage, presence of mind, and devotion to duty,” he would be awarded the Navy Cross. There were many other stories of individual heroism—stories that tended to be obscured by the fog of loss and recrimination. Unaccompanied, often unannounced, Kimmel made it his business after the attack to visit not only ships that had been badly battered but those that had escaped virtually unscathed. “The Admiral stepped aboard without any entourage,” recalled an enlisted man who had served on the cruiser USS Honolulu. “He was in oil-stained, rumpled suntans [hot-weather uniforms, in military parlance]. No tie. No insignia. Bare-headed. I shall always remember his face, so strained, so full of agony, so tired.” The ordeal was taking a toll.
by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan
Hickham Airfield was the largest US air base in Hawaii. The Japanese made it a prime target, taking out aircraft and runways—a well-conceived strategy to prevent American planes from hunting down the attackers on the way home after the raid. Casualties here included 189 killed.
FROM WASHINGTON, on the 8th, Stark had written Kimmel a letter: Dear Admiral Kimmel, We are feeling for you just as hard as we can in just what you have gone through, biding our time until you can send us some details…. Hundreds of telegrams and messages are being received from the families…. We know that as soon as you can you will start sending us a list…. Very good wishes from us all. Sincerely, Harold R. Stark Admiral, U.S.N.
ing the navy, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and their army counterparts. One US senator would demand Knox’s resignation. There was a call, too, for five top navy and army commanders to be court-martialed, and Admiral Kimmel’s name headed the list. He should be tried, a House member said, “to determine his guilt or innocence in the failure of Hawaiian defenders to beat off the surprise air attack before serious damage could be done…. Hundreds of our boys have paid with their lives.” What would follow, then and for the 75 years that have since passed, would have little to do with justice. It was, rather, to be an absurdly prolonged exercise in damage control. A
The note was oddly formal, coming as it did from a friend who most often signed himself “Betty” and addressed Kimmel as “Mustapha.” Perhaps Stark sensed already that this was a time to be prudent, not to seem too close to the commander in chief Pacific.
ANTHONY SUMMERS and ROBBYN SWAN are the authors of 10 non-fiction books, including A Matter of Honor. Their 2011 book The Eleventh Day, about the 9/11 attacks, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History. D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 6 / J A N U A RY 2 0 1 7
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F4F-3 Wildcat fighters of marine fighter squadron VMF-211 lie broken on Wake Island after the Japanese capture of Wake Atoll on December 23, 1941. The plane in front, 211-F-11, inflicted serious damage on the Japanese on December 11, when Captain Henry T. Elrod bombed and sank the destroyer Kisaragi. national archives
DAY OF
INFAMY part two Smoke was still rising over Pearl Harbor as Japanese forces arrived at Wake Island to deliver more destruction. The American defenders weren’t about to make that easy.
by Drew Ames
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DAY OF INFAMY, PART TWO
by Drew Ames
WAKE ATOLL on the morning of December 8, 1941, was the pounding of heavy surf against the shore, a pounding loud enough to drown out everything else. Overhead, clouds took turns crowding out the sunlight over this lonely coral outcropping in the middle of the Western Pacific Ocean. ¶A few hundred souls lived on the remote atoll’s Wake Island—US military personnel manning an operation centered around an airfield. The field was home to US Marine Corps fighter planes meant to deter any empire-building misbehavior by the increasingly aggressive Japan. The base on Wake didn’t have radar, but four fighters were in the air on the morning of December 8, keeping watch over the island’s perimeter, as much as the morning’s scattered clouds permitted. HE ONLY SOUND ON
Above: Wake Island, sole US foothold in the mid-Western Pacific, was an ideal stop-off for Pan Am Clipper flying boats, whose routes circle the globe in this 1941 map. Opposite, top: The navy controlled Wake, the army used it to refuel bombers, and the marines based a fighter squadron and defense force there. This mosaic photo shows Wake on December 3, 1941, four days before Japanese bombers struck. Opposite, center: Wake’s ground defense fell to Major James Devereux. His 1st Marine Defense Battalion had plenty of guns but few men. 24 AMERICA IN WWII
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all photos this story (unless otherwise noted): national archives
tify the atoll’s location is to give its latitude and longitude coordinates—19 degrees 18 minutes north and 166 degrees 38 minutes east—because there are no nearby landmarks in that vast, empty region of the Pacific. The closest destination is Majuro in the Marshall Islands, 897 miles south-southeast of Wake. Yet Wake’s isolation ideally suited it to be a rest and refueling stop for ships and aircraft. It sits 1,182 miles southeast of Midway Island, 1,506 miles east-northeast of Guam, 1,993 miles southeast of Tokyo, 3,000 miles east of Manila in the Philippines, and 2,303 miles west of Honolulu. In fact, a line stretched between Manila and Honolulu would pass very near Wake Island. The United States annexed the unsettled atoll in 1899 as a possible coaling stop for navy ships traveling between newly annexed Hawaii and the territories seized during the Spanish-American war, including Guam and the Philippines. Wake was also considered a possible location for a telegraph cable station, though in the end Midway Island got the telegraph station and Wake was largely ignored until the 1930s. At that time, Pan American Airways was extending the reach of its Boeing 314 Clipper flying boats. The luxurious passenger craft needed a stopover between Midway and Guam on its trans-Pacific route from the US to China. Pan Am worked out an agreement with the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt whereby the US Navy had charge of the island and Pan Am had permission to build a seaplane base that used the lagoon as a runway. A hotel would be among the structures. A 1938 navy report recommended a base on Wake to serve as an advanced outpost for long-range patrol planes that could keep an eye on and, if necessary, interdict Japanese activities. Three years later, in early 1941, airfield construction began and soon there were more than 1,200 civilian contractors at work on Wake Island. That August, Major James P.S. Devereux arrived with part of the 1st Marine Defense Battalion and weapons for the island’s library of congress
Some 2,300 miles to the east, on the other side of the International Date Line, was Hawaii, where it was still December 7. That day, at Oahu, the bombs, torpedoes, and bullets of Japanese naval warplanes had rudely surprised the US Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor and ripped into the island’s American airfields and military bases. Just three hours after the bombs started falling on Pearl Harbor, trouble came to Wake Island. It was 11:58 A.M. when marines on the atoll noticed Japanese bombers overhead. The noisy surf had masked the rumble of engines, and clouds had hidden the planes from the island’s airborne sentinels. It was too late to beat back the bombers now, so they reached their targets and delivered their deadly payloads. The devastation was complete. Marine fighter squadron VMF-211 suffered the most. Of its 55 men, 23 were dead. Another 11 were wounded. Seven of VMF-211’s eight parked fighters were burned up, and the eighth was wrecked. The unit’s air-to-ground radio installation was damaged, and a 25,000gallon gas tank was set ablaze. Already undermanned and only partially ready for war, the base on Wake had just lost most of its air cover. But the beating Japan had planned for the atoll’s small but resolute American garrison was just beginning. In some ways, Wake Atoll seemed an unlikely place to be fought over. The wishbone-shaped coral accretion consists of three islands around a large central lagoon, surrounded by a coral reef. Wake Island, largest of the three, makes up the bulk of the wishbone and gives its name to the whole atoll. Peale Island stands to the north, and to the west is Wilkes Island. To the northwest, a reef stretches between Wilkes and Peale Islands, guarding the open end of the wishbone. Altogether, the atoll is four and a half miles long and two and a half wide. Its highest elevation is 21 feet. Wake’s appeal was its strategic value, entirely the result of its location. That may seem odd, considering that the best way to iden-
defense. The marines brought a half dozen 5inch guns removed from the USS Texas, a dozen 3-inch anti-aircraft guns, two dozen .50-caliber Browning machine guns, and 30 .30-caliber machine guns. It was an armament supply fit for a battalion of 850 men, as many of the guns required multi-man crews. But Devereux had only 388 men—373 enlisted and 15 officers. And 200 of those didn’t arrive until November 2; in a little more than a month, they would be under fire. Devereux would later chronicle his experiences on Wake in the 1947 book Wake Island: An Eyewitness Account by the Commanding Officer. He described the constraints under which he worked: In two of the 3-inch batteries, we were able to man only three of each battery’s four guns. We had nobody who could be spared from other duties to serve a single gun in the third 3-inch battery. In terms of lost firepower, our shortage of personnel amounted to this: we had a total of twelve 3-inch AA [anti-aircraft] guns and we could only man six of them…. We were able to man all our 5inch guns, but only one battery of any kind on Wake had its full training allowance. T HE CHAIN OF COMMAND ON WAKE wasn’t in Devereux’s favor, either. The construction contractors reported to a civilian general superintendent and a navy engineer who, in turn, reported directly to 14th Naval District headquarters in Pearl Harbor. The contractors came under the orders of the island’s commander only in an outright emergency. The contractors did help the marines set up defenses when they could, but constructing the airfield and base were higher priorities. That left the marines to do a lot of the work digging defenses themselves, by hand with picks and shovels. And
once the landing strip was ready, the marines were constantly called on to help fuel army B17 bombers on their way to the Philippines. Between chipping at the ground and refueling planes, the marines had little time left to train and prepare to defend the island. Overall command on Wake fell to the navy’s Commander Winfield Scott Cunningham, who arrived on November 28. In addition to Devereux’s defense battalion, Cunningham had 11 naval officers and 64 men, including hospital corpsmen and a medical officer attached to the marines. The island commander and his staff coordinated with the Pan Am staff and with four army radiomen assigned to the island in connection with the B-17s. Finally, on December 4, a dozen Grumman F4F-3 Wildcat single-seat fighters from Squadron VMF-211, a marine air unit, flew in from the carrier USS Enterprise (CV-6) to take up residence on Wake. (In US Navy code, V indicated heavierthan-air, M stood for marine, and F for fighter.) The squadron’s ground crew and headquarters staff, about 50 marines in all, arrived by sea in late November. VMF-211’s commanding officer was Major Paul A. Putnam, whom Devereux was happy to see. They had served together earlier in their careers. Like other facilities on the atoll, the airfield wasn’t fully ready. There were no revetments to protect the planes, parking was limited, and the runways were too narrow to allow two aircraft to take off at once. In a 1947 historical monograph for the marine corps titled “The Defense of Wake,” Lieutenant Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., summed up the sketchy situation on Wake on December 6, two days after VMF-211’s arrival: The ground defenses, embodying the complete artillery of a defense battalion, had by dint of unceasing 12-hour working days D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 6 / J A N U A RY 2 0 1 7
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been emplaced, and some protective sandbagging and camouflage accomplished…. Only one 3-inch battery (D) had its full allowance of fire-control equipment; Battery E had a director but no height finder, and was thereby forced to rely for target altitudedata upon telephoned information from Battery D…. Despite existing plans for its eventual provision, no radar, either fire-control or early warning, had reached Wake, and the searchlight battery did not have its sound-locators to pick up the noise of approaching aircraft. Only the 5-inch seacoast batteries were at or near authorized strengths, and even these, like all other units, were devilled by unending minor shortages of tools, spare parts and miscellaneous ordnance items…. Wake, intended primarily as a patrol-plane base for PBYs, “the eyes of the Fleet,” had no scouting aircraft, and only the most primitive facilities for any type of aircraft operations. A S DECEMBER 8 BEGAN, THE MEN ON WAKE got the news about what was happening in Hawaii. A 7 A.M. local time, one of Wake’s army signalmen got word that Hickam Field on Oahu was under attack and immediately told Devereux. Commander Cunningham got word shortly thereafter as he was leaving the mess hall at the contractors camp, Camp 2, in the northern wing of Wake Island, near Peale Island. The island went onto a war footing.
Cunningham recalled a Pan Am Clipper that had departed for Guam 20 minutes earlier. When it arrived, Cunningham, the Pan Am pilot, and Putnam made plans to use the flying boat to scout for the enemy at 1:00 that afternoon with VMF-211 providing a fighter escort.
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OST VULNERABLE ON WAKE were the personnel, aircraft, and equipment of VMF-211. Major Putnam faced a difficult decision: he could disperse his planes away from the narrow parking area, but that would require moving them over rough ground that would likely damage them. His other option was to finish work on the revetments, which were due to be completed no later than 2:00 that afternoon. He decided to gamble on trying to finish the aircraft shelters. Just before noon, Putnam lost his gamble. The first attack of the Japanese bombers was devastating. In addition to the horrible losses suffered by VMF-211, the Pan Am hotel and seaplane facilities were badly damaged. Ten Chamorros (natives of Guam) employed by Pan Am were killed. Miraculously, the Pan Am Clipper had only a few bullet holes, and none of its fuel tanks had been hit. When the Pan Am pilots asked Cunningham for permission to evacuate the airline staff to Guam, the commander agreed. The only Pan Am staff left on Wake were the surviving Chamorros, who were barred
Above: Explosions, fires, muzzle flashes, and tracers light up the night sky over Wake on December 8, 1941, after a day of Japanese air attacks. In Hawaii it was still December 7. There, Pearl Harbor was in ruins after its own devastating raid. Opposite: VMF-211’s parked Wildcats were the first targets on Wake. Here, some of the unit’s F4F-3s fly stateside in November 1941, brand new, without weapons or final paint. 26 AMERICA IN WWII
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DAY OF INFAMY, PART TWO from boarding the plane. The Japanese planes returned on December 9 and 10, and the attack on the 9th was almost as devastating as the first. The atoll’s hospital burned to the ground while the corpsmen saved the patients and then the medical supplies. Some of Wake’s guns took hits, and the navy radio gear was almost completely destroyed. This time, however, the Japanese, too, paid a price. Wake Island’s anti-aircraft guns were more accurate, and VMF-211 was able to intercept the bombers with its remaining four Wildcats. On the 10th, the marine fighters again intercepted the bombers, but the Japanese still managed to score a devastating hit. One of their bombs found a 125-ton dump of construction dynamite on Wilkes Island. The resulting explosion set off 3-inch and 5-inch ammo in nearby batteries and damaged some of the guns’ equipment. Amazingly, casualties were only one man killed and four wounded. At 3:00 in the morning on December 11, lookouts on Wake spotted what looked like a large naval force in the distance. It was a Japanese invasion force, and it had traveled through rough weather and high seas to take Wake. The enemy force, part of Japan’s 4th Fleet, consisted of three light cruisers, six destroyers, two destroyer-transports, and two former merchant ships now serving as transports. Devereux ordered the island’s defenses to high alert. Many of the civilian contractors had volunteered to help support the gun crews as ammo bearers, and they stood nervously on call. Devereux, wanting to avoid being drawn into a long-range duel with bigger guns while awaiting the right moment to loose a surprise cannonade, issued strict orders not to fire on the enemy ships without orders. At 5 A.M. Yubari, the invasion fleet’s lead cruiser and flagship, turned west about 8,000 yards from Wake’s southern shore and opened fire, her initial salvoes igniting diesel fuel tanks near Camp 1, at the end of Wake Island near Wilkes Island. The force’s two other cruisers, Tatsuta and Tenryu, followed Yubari’s lead. Still the atoll’s defenders held their fire. Next, Yubari reversed course, moving closer to the shore and parallel to it, and headed southeast. As the ship neared Peacock Point at Wake Island’s extreme southeastern tip, the 5-inch battery there, Battery A, got orders to open fire. The guns blazed at Yubari, punching holes in her hull near the waterline. The cruiser started belching smoke, and the gun crews could see four hits in Yubari’s hull and one on a turret, which immediately fell silent. Another shot missed, instead smashing into the forecastle of a destroyer that was running in to lay down a smoke screen. Yubari returned fire at Battery A, but scored no hits. Meanwhile near Kuku Point on Wilkes Island, near the tip of the atoll’s western prong, 5-inch Battery L held its fire until the lead destroyer, Hayate, made a westward turn and came within about 4,000 yards, parallel to the shore. Then the battery erupted. Hayate exploded, broke in two, and sank. Battery L then focused
by Drew Ames
its sights on another destroyer, scoring at least one hit and forcing the destroyer to turn and get out of range. The artillery had the same effect on a troop transport. Finally, the battery shifted again and managed to strike the stern of a cruiser, either Tatsuta or Tenryu, at 10,000 yards, sending it away trailing smoke. The remaining Japanese destroyers steamed west toward Peale Island’s Toki Point, the tip of Wake Atoll’s northern prong. At 10,000 yards, 5-inch Battery B opened up on the lead destroyer. The destroyer returned fire, destroying the battery command post and cutting communications between the guns. But Battery B dropped a shell on the ship, setting her stern afire. Laying down a smokescreen, the destroyers turned away. It was now 7 A.M. and the Japanese commander, Admiral Sadamichi Kajioka, ordered a full retreat.
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T THIS POINT, VMF-211’s four operational Wildcats, which had been airborne during the surface action, struck the retreating Japanese ships. After each attack, the planes landed, refueled, rearmed, and headed back out. They scored hits on several ships and saw a destroyer (widely reported at the time to be a cruiser) explode and sink—probably the work of Captain Henry T. Elrod, who scored a bomb hit on the stern that likely set off depth charges stored on deck. VMF-211’s four hardworking Wildcats flew 10 sorties (individual plane flights) that day, dropped 20 bombs, and sprayed tens of thousands of .50-caliber bullets from their wing machine guns. Enemy flak took a toll, however. One damaged plane crash-landed on the shore. Another lost its oil cooler, which killed the engine, though the plane made it back to the airfield safely. No pilots were lost. Wake’s defenders had done the impossible. It was a stunning American victory. For the first time in the war, a Japanese amphibious landing force had been turned back. The two destroyers eliminated that day were the first enemy surface ships sunk by US forces during the war. American losses were light—four wounded marines—while, in contrast, the Japanese suffered the loss of all hands on the two sunken destroyers, along with additional killed and wounded on other ships. A postwar analysis by the US Marine Corps estimated that up to 700 Japanese were killed. The Americans had won the day’s first round, but the battle wasn’t over. The two remaining fighters soon took off again, anticipating the daily air raid that usually arrived between 10 A.M. and noon. Thirty Japanese bombers arrived right on time. The fighters shot down two and damaged another, while anti-aircraft fire destroyed one bomber and damaged three more. Most of the Japanese bombs that day were targeted at Battery D on Peale Island, but there were no American casualties. The air strikes continued almost daily and some days twice. A notable exception was December 13, which saw no enemy action, probably due to a stroke of luck that favored the Americans the D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 6 / J A N U A RY 2 0 1 7
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DAY OF INFAMY, PART TWO
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HE DAILY JAPANESE AIR STRIKES RESUMED after the reprieve of the 13th. On Wake, everyone pitched in to move the guns around, making it harder for the attacking aircraft to target the batteries. The atoll’s defenders were also able to keep two or three aircraft flying by cannibalizing the wrecks of the other Wildcats. But on December 21, things took a turn for the worse. The Japanese carriers Soryu and Hiryu, returning from the Pearl Harbor raid, churned toward Wake to add support to the attacks there. With the addition of the carriers’ planes, the pace of the air strikes increased. By the 22nd, only two Wildcats were still operable, and that day, Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighters shot them down after a spirited dogfight. Only one of the two American pilots survived. With no more planes available, the surviving pilots and ground crewmen of VMF-211 reported to Devereux to serve as infantry. The Americans’ situation was dire. A relief force was on its way, racing against time and the enemy’s ever-growing, smother-
in the Wake of the War
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HE JAPANESE GARRISON
on Wake Island surrendered to a detachment of marines on September 4, 1945. Since then, the island has remained a territory of the United States and continues its original mission as a bridge for trans-Pacific air traffic. Pan American Airways was quick to reestablish the presence it had before the war, this time with long-range conventional aircraft rather than the flying boats of the 1930s. The US military used the island as a refueling stop during the Korean War and an emergency airfield during the Vietnam War. In the spring of 1975, there was a temporary processing center for Vietnamese refugees. Today, Wake Island is the responsibility of the US Air Force. Four airmen and more than two dozen civilian contractors are based there to support the various flights that come through. Sometimes planes arrive unexpectedly, because the airfield is the only one for at least 1,000 miles in all directions. With its long beaches, a beautiful lagoon, and generally temperate weather, Wake might seem like a dream location for military duty. A 2015 air force news article, however, pointed out the downside. In “Meet the Airmen of Wake Island,” Staff Sergeant Alexander W. Riedel noted that mail arrives about twice a month, and online access is through a slow connection that harkens back “to the early days of the Internet.” 28 AMERICA IN WWII
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ing pressure on Wake’s defenders. As early as December 9, the US Navy had started assembling a relief force under Admiral Jack Fletcher built around the carrier Saratoga (CV-3), an oiler, a seaplane tender converted to carry troops and equipment (and to evacuate the civilian contractors), 3 heavy cruisers, and 10 destroyers. A similar force, centered by the carrier Lexington (CV2), was intended to strike the Japanese-held Marshall Islands, in the Central Pacific between Hawaii and the Philippines, as a diversion. Fletcher’s relief force left Pearl Harbor on December 15 (the 16th on Wake), and was scheduled to reach Wake on the 23rd (Wake time). The question was whether that would be too late. Unfortunately for the Americans on Wake, a fresh Japanese invasion force beat Fletcher to the atoll. On December 23, at roughly 2:00 in the morning, 1,000 Japanese Special Navy Landing Force troops started hitting the beaches at several points on the southern shores of Wake and Wilkes Islands. These Japanese troops came on fresh against the exhausted Americans. The invaders attacked in solid concentration across a relatively narrow front, with a nearly three-to-one manpower advantage. The too-few American defenders were stretched too thin. To the marines’ credit, however, it took 12 hours for the Japanese to take Wake Island. The hard-fighting leathernecks even managed to drive the enemy off of Wilkes Island completely. Wildcat pilot Henry Elrod of VMF-211, credited with blowing up one of the two Japanese destroyers sunk on December 11, was killed while helping repulse enemy attacks. He would receive the Medal of Honor posthumously for his valiant actions in air and ground combat. Overall, American casualties were still relatively light. But the
us air force / tech. sgt. shane a. cuomo
evening before. On the 12th, three Wildcats had been scheduled for the evening patrol, but the third had trouble starting its engine. Its pilot, Lieutenant David Kliewer, finally took off 15 minutes after the other two. As he climbed to join the rest of the flight, he saw a surfaced submarine about 25 miles southwest of Wake. Diving out of the sun, Kliewer confirmed it was an enemy sub, strafed it, and then dropped his two bombs. Kliewer pulled out of his dive so low that the bombs’ explosions put holes in his wings and tail. Both were near misses, but the submarine was damaged. Kliewer saw it submerge, leaving an oil slick in its trail. The lack of an enemy air strike the next day indicated that the sub had been serving as a radio beacon for the air strikes.
by Drew Ames
Wake’s 98 Rock honors 98 contractors the Japanese captured, forced to fix the airstrip, then killed. Squadron VMF-211 isn’t stuck at Wake these days, but it has been in commission steadily since its defense against the Japanese there, flying various carrier-capable aircraft. Redesignated VMA-211 (A for attack instead of F for fighter), the marine air squadron flew A-4 Skyhawk attack planes during the Vietnam War and has flown Harrier attack jets during the ongoing “war on terror.” In January 2009, eight VMA-211 Harriers and more than 60 squadron members, including the commander, visited Wake in a homecoming of sorts, to tour the squadron’s symbolic birthplace. VMA-211 has recently been redesignated VMFA211 (regaining the F) and is transitioning from Harriers to the new F-35B joint strike fighter, a stealth aircraft. DREW AMES
Above: Destroyer Hayate speeds along in 1925. Before Wake’s defenders surrendered, they exacted a severe toll, and Hayate was a victim. When US guns struck her on December 11 she broke in two and sank. Right: Pilot Captain Henry T. Elrod sank destroyer Kisaragi the same day. On the 23rd, he died fighting as infantry.
defenders were outnumbered, constantly forced to fall back in the face of enemy attacks. The Japanese cut communication lines whenever they found them, and by daybreak, Cunningham and Devereux were mostly in the dark about the battle’s progress. Eventually, Cunningham, given the information he had, decided to surrender. The navy’s relief flotilla never made it to Wake. Admiral William S. Pye, named acting commander of the US Pacific Fleet in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack, knew about the two Japanese carriers and their escorts near Wake Atoll. When he received word of the enemy troop landings, he debated with his staff and higher-ups in Washington, DC, whether Fletcher should attack. Pye ultimately decided the lack of any ship repair facilities for thousands of miles made the relief force too vulnerable—a damaged ship would be a lost ship, and there were no ships to spare. According to Colonel Heinl’s “The Defense of Wake,” 0811 [8:11 A.M.], Hawaiian time, some two and a half hours before Wake was to surrender, Task Force 14 was recalled…. Aboard the [ships of the relief force] reactions varied from astonishment to shame and anger. There were even some staff officers who counseled Admiral Fletcher to disregard orders and make a dash in to Wake. They did not now that at this very moment, some four enemy heavy cruisers (Cruiser Division 6) were patrolling east of Wake, separated from any Japanese carrier air support by hundreds of miles, a sitting target for the airmen of the Saratoga; nor did they know that the Japanese attack force was disposed about Wake with no apparent measures for security against surface attack. Had all this been known, the story of Wake might have been very different.
T HE STORY MIGHT INDEED have been different, but Wake’s surrender to the Japanese was probably inevitable at that point in the war. The atoll was far too isolated, too distant, and too close to Japanese-held islands to be successfully provisioned and garrisoned by US forces, especially that early in the war. But however inevitable Wake’s conquest was, it cost the Japanese dearly. Total American casualties in the atoll’s defense from December 8 to 23 were 171 killed or wounded. In contrast, Heinl estimated Japanese losses at 1,153 killed or wounded, along with 21 aircraft lost, 51 damaged by flak, 2 destroyers sunk, 8 additional ships damaged, and 1 sub damaged.
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AKE ’ S SURVIVING DEFENDERS —368
marines, 60 navy men, 5 army men, and 1,104 civilians—were taken prisoner after the atoll’s surrender. The Japanese kept 100 of the civilian contractors on Wake Island to construct facilities for the new garrison and sent the other captives to POW camps on other islands. Most survived to return home after the war. Once in enemy hands, Wake Atoll became a US target. The carrier Enterprise attacked Wake in February 1942, and the navy sent periodic carrier raids throughout the war. After one raid in October 1942, Japanese Rear Admiral Shigematsu Sakaibara ordered the execution of the island’s 98 surviving captive civilian contractors. For that, he would one day hang as a war criminal. Carrier planes sweeping overhead from time to time were all that Wake saw of US forces during the war. The atoll was never important enough to justify an invasion. Wake’s importance would lie not in its strategic usefulness, but in what it did for morale. Its defenders’ long resistance, inflicting damage on the enemy far out of proportion to their numbers, inspired American civilians and fighting men. It was a shining bright spot during the dark early days of war. A DREW AMES of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is a frequent contributor to America in WWII. D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 6 / J A N U A RY 2 0 1 7
AMERICA IN WWII 29
the birth of R OU N D-T H E -C LOC K N E WS No stor y was bigger than the Pearl Harbor attack. And no medium was better equipped than radio to spread it day and night.
by Ken Bush
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Harsch’s “incredible fact” was one of history’s most astonishing, meticulously planned surprise attacks: the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Many people found out what was happening the same way Harsch did—by listening to the radio. On that infamous day, radio made it possible for the people of Hawaii, of the US mainland, and of the wider world to know within minutes what had happened on Oahu. “It was from radio, which started interrupting routine programs and finally swung into 24-hour service, that most Americans first learned their country had been blitzed into war,” Newsweek reported eight days later. Radio information was sporadic during and after the attack, but it was information nonetheless, and it became the antidote for mass confusion. Even in Hawaii, eyewitnesses later recounted that they did not fully register that they were watching a real enemy attack until they heard radio bulletins confirming the shocking fact. Elizabeth Langlie Todd, a former resident of Marquette, Iowa, saw the attack firsthand, but it took a radio report to drive home for her what she was seeing. “I’m thankful that the shell I saw drop a short block away wasn’t nearer,” she wrote to her family. “Then when the black puffs came here and there, the reports blared over the radio—This is an air raid—and the real McCoy.
Opposite: On December 7, 1941, America and the world got the news about Pearl Harbor instantly, thanks to radio. CBS, based in New York City, got word of the attack at 2:25 P.M. and by 2:30 had swung into full coverage, with commentators weighing in from around the globe. 30 AMERICA IN WWII
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opposite: national archives
OSEPH C. H ARSCH HAD SEEN some astonishing things in his years as a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor. “He seemed to be everywhere, or at least everywhere something important was happening,” the Monitor later said of him. From 1939 through 1941, “everywhere” meant London, Rome, and Berlin, where Harsch witnessed the launch of the Nazis’ and Fascists’ conquest of Europe, and the sparks of a new global war. But in December 1941, he got a chance to take a break. He and his wife, Anne, were on their way to the Soviet Union by way of Asia for more reportage on the developing war. They stopped briefly in Hawaii to bask in paradise before continuing on to face the Russian winter. The couple was enjoying a leisurely Hawaiian morning on Sunday, December 7, when Harsch heard a familiar but unexpected sound in the air. “I awoke my wife and asked her if she wanted to know what an air raid sounded like in Europe,” he later wrote. “‘This,’ I remarked, ‘is a good imitation.’ We then proceeded to the beach for our morning swim, assuming with everyone else that it was just another practice maneuver by the Navy…. Only when the radio began telling the people what had happened could one grasp the incredible fact.”
the birth of ROUND-THE-CLOCK NEWS As each report came in, we all looked at each other just speechless…. This brutal thing whipped us awake.” In today’s communications landscape of text messages, tweets, and instantaneous satellite transmission, it’s hard to fathom how difficult it was in 1941 to alert millions of American citizens simultaneously that the United States was being attacked by a country assumed to be in good-faith negotiations in Washington. But back then, radio and its capabilities were still relatively new.
would have to scramble to change their front pages to cover the Pearl Harbor news, or wait until their evening editions, whose deadlines were at midday. Major weekly news magazines, which naturally always trailed other media about breaking news anyway, had already gone to press. Radio easily beat the print media to the punch. The Columbia Broadcasting System’s regular Sunday news digest, World News Today, went on the air every week at 2:30 P.M. But at 2:25 P.M. on December 7, the news tickers hammered out seven words: “White House says Japs attack Pearl Harbor.” In just four minutes, CBS managed to switch from its scheduled World News program to a war roundup with Bob Trout from London, Albert Warner from Washington, and Major George Fielding Eliot from New York. Writing about the events of December 7, 1941, in the 1942 book Radio Goes to War: The “Fourth Front, author and WWII war correspondent Charles Rolo recalled with precision that “at 2:26 P.M. that afternoon a New York radio station interrupted a broadcast of a football game to announce that Japanese planes and naval forces had attacked American forces. Within a few minutes, radio broadcasters were reporting the swiftly-shifting developments of the most momentous news event in the history of US radio to that time.” Time magazine later reported, “In Topeka, Kansas, citizens were listening to the radio program ‘The Spirit of ’41’ and napping on their sofas after a Sunday meal. In San Francisco, where it was not quite noon, they were listening to the news and ‘Strings in Swingtime.’ The nation was idly listening to the radio when the flash came that Japan had attacked Hawaii.” Radio newsmen everywhere had shifted into high gear, and by 3 P.M. all networks were in action, humming with the news. Not everyone appreciated the radio stations’ efforts. In Denver that Sunday morning, station KFEL canceled a religious hour to make room for the latest news of the attack. One listener called to ask whether management considered “the war news more important than the gospel.” And an announcer for WOR-Mutual in Newark, New Jersey, later recounted that when WOR started “cutting into its football broadcast for a half minute, a minute at a time,” the station “got furious telephone calls from people too excited about the game to become excited about anything else.” As with present-day breaking news, radio networks immediately began reporting on a 24-hour-a-day basis. Radio news staffs were in top form by late Sunday afternoon. NBC scooped them all,
“It was from radio…that most Americans first learned that their country had been blitzed into war,” Newsweek admitted. Top: Stations across the country—like WOI in Des Moines, Iowa—cut into normal programming to report on Pearl Harbor. Above: The NBC studio hums with activity on December 7. NBC’s Blue network carried live coverage of the raid, phoned in from Honolulu. Opposite: In an age when a radio was often a major piece of furniture, Americans spent Sunday afternoons listening. That put them in place to hear the news on December 7. 32 AMERICA IN WWII
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top and center: library of congress
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the Pearl Harbor attack, radio news broadcasting was a mere 20 years old. The first-ever radio news report had emanated from Detroit’s station 8MK on August 31, 1920. By 1941, radio news had come into its own. So, on December 7, radio was able to inform Americans coast to coast that an enemy had interrupted the slumber of a peaceful Sunday morning. Radios blared one bulletin after another as reporters gathered more information. The American people knew the story hours, in some cases even days, before the printed word could catch up. There was no way print media could compete with radio’s speed. The experience of journalist Elizabeth McIntosh was a case in point. “I got up early and put on the radio,” the reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin recalled. “It was the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. All of a sudden this man’s voice crackled over and said, ‘The islands are under attack. This is the real McCoy.’ Then the radio went off and I said, ‘Oh, more war games.’ The military was always doing all kinds of games.” It wasn’t until McIntosh reached the Star-Bulletin offices, which she described as “madness,” that the reality of the radio flash took shape. The whole newsroom toiled away—Oahu’s hometown paper hammering out on-site coverage of the event the whole world wanted to know about. But newspapers faced a formidable obstacle that radio didn’t. At the end of the day, when McIntosh attempted to send her stories by wire to the ScrippsHoward Newspapers syndicate, she couldn’t. She explained that the newsroom “found out that the [government] censorship has set in and you could not send anything by wire out of Honolulu.” On the US mainland, newspaper newsrooms were operating with their usual Sunday skeleton crews. Most staffs had already composed the pages of their December 8 morning editions, so they T THE TIME OF
by Ken Bush
the birth of ROUND-THE-CLOCK NEWS bringing in eyewitness accounts at 4 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, just a little more than 90 minutes after the initial news broke. A reporter for KGU, Honolulu’s NBC affiliate, climbed onto the roof of the downtown Honolulu Advertiser building and managed a phone call to the NBC Blue Network (forerunner of ABC, but at that time one of two NBC networks, Red and Blue). “This battle has been going on for nearly three hours,” he said. “It’s no joke. It’s a real war.” The live report ended after two and a half minutes, when a telephone operator took use of the line to connect an emergency call.
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report. (And the pact didn’t specifically require all its signatory nations to declare war together.) At the same time, Berlin broadcast a declaration of war on the United States by Manchukuo (a Japanese-controlled state in China and Mongolia). Costa Rica’s and Nicaragua’s state radio broadcast declarations of war on Japan, while stations in Cuba and Panama aired pledges of solidarity with the United States. The American public was understandably anxious at the news from Hawaii. Soon, government at every level began responding to keep people calm and to be ready for whatever might come next. Radio stations shifted from informing the public about the attack to announcing the civilian defense measures that were being taken in various cities. They urged gasoline stations to stay open all night to make it easier for military personnel to travel, encouraged young men to enlist, and warned factories to keep on the lookout for sabotage. The next day, citizens huddled in homes and businesses nationwide to listen as President Franklin D. Roosevelt took his place behind a microphone-covered rostrum and addressed a joint session of Congress in Washington, DC. His message was deliberate and somber: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan…. I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and
black and white and read all over
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ADIO WAS EASILY first to report on
the Japanese attack that hit Pearl Harbor at 12:55 P.M. Eastern Standard Time on December 7, 1941. But print media, especially newspapers, scrambled much the same to gather news that day. At 2:22 P.M. EST, White House Press Secretary Stephen Early telephoned the New York City headquarters of the three major wire services—the Associated Press, the United Press, and International News Service—with the message “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor!” Via teletype, the wire services instantly flashed this breaking news to newsrooms and bureaus throughout the US, Canada, and Latin America. Like radio reporters, newspaper staffers left Sunday dinners abruptly to go to work. International News Service claimed a first— an on-the-scene account from Honolulu, where a correspondent, awakened by the sound of explosions, hurried to the top of the Advertising Publishing Company building and telephoned an account of what he saw to San Francisco at 2:33 EST. 34 AMERICA IN WWII
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Newspapers couldn’t compete with radio for instant communication. But many rushed extra editions into print with the latest news. At 2:58 P.M. the UP wires carried a story by Frank Tremaine with firsthand news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field, Oahu’s main army airfield. As Tremaine watched the attack, his wife, who had established one of the few through telephone connections available during the chaos, relayed his story. At 3:05 Stephen Early issued a second statement with slightly more detail than his first. By 3:55 nearly 60 reporters crowded the White House press room, peppering Early with questions. As quickly as the news rolled in, large city newspapers were setting type to roll out extra editions. The Honolulu StarBulletin printed an extra that day, ahead
of nearly all papers on the US mainland. On the West Coast, the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Examiner, and San Francisco Chronicle each put out two extras over the course of Sunday afternoon and Monday. In Portland, the Oregon Journal published an ambitious five extras. In the country’s interior, the age-old quest to beat the competition to press with the latest developments was alive and well in Chicago, where the Sun (founded in 1941) hit the streets with Pearl Harbor coverage nearly an hour before the Tribune did. In Missouri, the Kansas City Journal and Kansas City Times printed special editions. So did the TimesPicayune in New Orleans. On the East Coast, the New York Enquirer was out first in New York City, followed by the morning tabloids. No extras, oddly, were printed in Boston. Magazine coverage trailed the news from Hawaii by about a week. Newsweek tackled the Pearl Harbor story in its December 15 issue, as did Time. Life didn’t go out until 15 days after the attack.
library of congress
S THE AFTERNOON WANED , the networks interrupted regular programs with more and more bulletins and flashes. CBS was picking up shortwave radio communications from Honolulu. Its shortwave listening post received a BBC signal that “during the attack on Oahu and Pearl Harbor several planes were shot down. Anti-aircraft guns went into action at Pearl Harbor, leaving clouds of smoke over the naval yard.” By 5:35 P.M. EST, the network reported that Japan had declared a state of war with the United States. Beyond US borders, radio spread the news to much of the rest of the world—and the world sprang into action. In Italy, Radio Roma declared that, in accordance with the 1940 Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy, and Japan, a state of war existed between the Axis powers and the United States. It later denied its own
by Ken Bush
national archives
The day after the Pearl Harbor attack, President Franklin Roosevelt addresses a joint session of Congress to pronounce December 7, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy”—and to announce that the United States is now at war with the Empire of Japan. Radio microphones crowd the president’s podium; the speech goes out live, allowing Americans across the nation to hear the news as it occurs.
dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.” America was at war, and nearly everyone in the United States became aware of this news at precisely the same instant: 12:30 P.M. EST, December 8, 1941. The following day, December 9, Roosevelt again went to the airwaves, in one of his fireside chats. He addressed war rumors, casualty numbers, and questions of sacrifice and duty. As before, the entire nation heard his words at the same moment via radio. When the initial 24-hour fervor somewhat subsided, Americans began assessing the impact the Pearl Harbor news was going to have on their lives. Radio commentators shared their thoughts. On December 22, Time reported the comments of Mutual radio’s Raymond Gram Swing, who had offered the most searching of the radio analyses broadcast in the week after the attack: “We have been the safest-minded people on the earth,” Swing said. “And we have indulged to the full the extravagance of understanding our opponents. There is, however, one mercy in this grievous situation, our defeat has come at the beginning. We can out-produce the Axis. And we can out-will the Axis.”
In that same issue of Time, Neville Miller, president of the National Association of Broadcasters, wrote about radio’s new role as the country’s first wave of war news and reflected on the responsibilities that went with that role. He warned that radio stations should “report war news calmly, slowly and deliberately so as to avoid horror, suspense and undue excitement.”
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HAT INFAMOUS early December Sunday morning 75 years ago continues to stand out as a monumental example of man’s inhumanity toward man. But it also stands out as a revolutionary breakthrough in the communication capabilities of the United States. Radio had proved itself to be a serious medium able to warn, alert, and inform the entire nation, almost at the very moment that news was made. As Americans adjusted to life at war, making ready for air raids and fitting their homes with blackout curtains to conceal their towns from enemy aircraft, they did so with an ear to the radio. A
KEN BUSH, a former television reporter, is a professor of communications at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont. D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 6 / J A N U A RY 2 0 1 7
AMERICA IN WWII 35
36 AMERICA IN WWII
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A SILENT NIGHT
TORPEDOED Viewed through a periscope soon after Pearl Harbor, Los Angelenos appeared arrogantly indif ferent to the Japanese threat. The insulted skipper of a lurking sub went on the attack, just before sunrise on Christmas eve.
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UNITED STATES HAD BEEN AT WAR with Japan for 17 days, since the devastating surprise attack on US ships and military facilities in and around Pearl Harbor. So Christmas Eve 1941 was different from years past. Yet it was much the same. Americans went on with their usual holiday preparations, decorating their trees, listening to Christmas carols, and doing last-minute chores—even on the West Coast, where worrisome news had haunted those first two and a half weeks of war. There had been air raid alarms, blackouts, reports of unidentified planes overhead, and talk of submarine attacks. So far, it had all turned out to be false, cases of early-war jitters. West Coast revelers really had nothing to worry about—except, perhaps, the submarine attacks. Early on the morning of Christmas Eve, at 6:25, the lumber schooner Barbara Olson was steaming quietly toward San Diego when a violent explosion occurred about 100 feet off her seaward side. No one on board saw or knew what caused it, but the explosion was from a torpedo fired by Japanese submarine I-19, lurking about a mile offshore. Four miles away, the navy submarine chaser USS Amethyst (PYC-3), a 10-year-old, 147-foot converted yacht, was on patrol off the entrance to Los Angeles Harbor. Her lookouts heard the blast, and her captain sounded general quarters, bringing the crew to battle stations. The ship’s log records “at 0625 sighted an explosion that threw smoke and spray approximately 300 feet into the air. At 0626 sounded General Quarters and set condition Baker” (Condition Baker—Condition B, that is—required most watertight fixtures on a naval vessel to be closed; the closure would help prevent flooding and sinking if the vessel were damaged by enemy fire). When Amethyst reached the explosion area, there was no HE
right & opposite: library of congress
by Donald J. Young enemy sub in sight. But four hours later the sub chaser would get another chance to catch its prey. After failing to hit the Barbara Olson, the I-19’s skipper, Commander Shogo Narahara, moved his submarine to a new location off Point Fermin, where the hunting might be better. He was irritated, and not just because he had missed his target. Narahara resented what he considered an insultingly lackadaisical attitude on the part of the Americans. Since the I-19’s arrival off Los Angeles Harbor on December 18, he had twice sent messages to his squadron’s flag sub, I-15, off San Francisco, remarking on the Americans’ contemptuousness. In the first, Narahara told how, on the night the I-19 arrived, lights from automobiles, homes, and businesses on shore were so bright that he could have read a newspaper on deck. His second message, sent on Sunday night, December 21, told of a crowd of sunbathers with brightly colored umbrellas, arrogantly lining the beaches. Narahara despised the Americans for their failure to take the new Japanese threat seriously. Narahara was about to send the Americans a Christmas Eve wakeup call. At 10 A.M., entering the Catalina Channel some four miles north of I19, came the 5,700-ton McCormick Steamship Company freighter Absaroka, on her way to Los Angeles Harbor under Captain Louie Prindle and First Officer Alex Kusebauch with a heavy load of lumber. A little more than 423 feet long, she had sailed as USS Absaroka (ID-2518) in World War I, hauling cargo to US Army forces fighting in Europe. Now, as a civilian ship, she was in Narahara’s crosshairs. In a few minutes she would become I-19’s first kill of the young Pacific war and perhaps teach the careless Americans to turn out their lights and stay off their beaches. While I-19 moved in, the telephone rang at the US Coast Guard Station at the nearby port of San Pedro. It was local newspaper-
Opposite: Pedestrians fill the 700 block of Los Angeles’s South Hill Street on a sunny, chilly day in 1942. On December 7, 1941, Japan had pulled the US into war, attacking Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor. But LA life didn’t change much at first, and the skipper of a Japanese submarine offshore found that insulting. Above: Los Angelenos would soon learn to black out windows at night and to be on guard against the enemy. D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 6 / J A N U A RY 2 0 1 7
AMERICA IN WWII 37
A SILENT NIGHT
TORPEDOED
by Donald J. Young
Y 10:30, THE UNSUSPECTING Absaroka was abeam of Point Fermin, with its 80-year-old lighthouse clearly visible less than two miles away. At nearby Fort MacArthur, army Private Hershell Adams was tracking ship traffic from a camouflaged observation post above the point. As Absaroka trundled by, the young coast artilleryman saw disaster coming. “I was following the ship with my telescope when suddenly I saw what appeared to be the churning wake of a torpedo heading toward her,” Adams recalled. Adams wasn’t the only one to see it. Aboard Absaroka, seaman Joseph Scott was watching: “I was about to say ‘look over yonder, a whale,’ when I changed my mind and yelled, ‘There’s a God Damn Jap
B
up. “I knew it was going to miss us and broke into a grin,” he said, “but my grin froze because the second ‘fish’ that got us followed the first quicker than it takes to tell it.” That second fish slammed into Absaroka about 50 feet aft of the beam (behind the ship’s stem-to-stern midpoint), puncturing the No. 5 hold and knocking three of the four men checking the starboard deck load overboard. The fourth, Ryan, was staggered but managed to ride out the blast which, according to one observer, threw tons of lumber into the air “as if a man were throwing matchsticks around.” Manning an army machine-gun position on the point just below the Point Fermin Lighthouse, Sergeant James Hedwood and his crew were watching the Absaroka when the torpedo hit. “We were looking at the lumber schooner when suddenly we saw a fountain of water spout 100 feet into the air at the stern,” said Hedwood. “The force of the blow actually spun the ship around 220degrees, ending up with its stern to sea and its bow pointing toward land.” In the meantime, back on the Absaroka, a soaked Greenwald was already back on deck. As he had struggled to the surface, the rail that he’d just been blown over was, much to his surprise,
submarine!’ Then her periscope went up and she shot a torpedo. I’ve seen torpedoes coming at me before. ‘They’ve wasted that one,’ says I. Sure enough it went wide, but right behind on its heels came another. ‘Oh, oh, that’s bad,’ says I, because I could see this one was going to get us.” (Scott’s comment about having seen torpedoes “coming at me before” was no exaggeration. At sea since his early 20s, the 46-year-old veteran had no less than four merchant ships torpedoed out from under him on four consecutive voyages during World War I.) Absaroka crewmen Harry Greenwald, Marshall Mansfield, Herbert Stevens, and Joseph Ryan were on deck on the starboard side, conducting a routine check of the lashings that secured a particularly heavy load of lumber. Greenwald glanced up. “Torpedo!” he yelled, pointing toward the stern. Everyone looked
close enough for him to touch. “The deck heeled over so far from the explosion that her deck went underwater,” he explained. “I grabbed the rail as the ship shuddered and righted herself [and] was carried up as she swung back.” Mansfield, one of the other men tossed overboard, grabbed a dangling rope to pull himself back on board. The third man in the water was Stevens, who had injured his leg in the blast and subsequent fling into the sea. He began yelling for help. Heeding his call up on deck, Ryan dashed to the rail, picked up a coil of heavy mooring line, and tossed it toward Stevens’s bobbing head. Ryan started pulling Stevens toward the ship. But, unknown to Ryan, a 46-year veteran of merchant seafaring, the lashings anchoring the deck load of lumber behind him had snapped. As
man William Anderson, reporting from his home that he had just seen a submarine overlooking the channel. He said it had looked like a small fishing vessel but “seemed to be riding smoothly for the heavy sea that was running.” He went on to describe the vessel as a “submarine camouflaged like a fishing boat.” The coastguardsman who took Anderson’s call told him to “maintain watch and call back with a progress report”—not exactly the reaction of someone who believed what he’d just heard. But if Anderson caused a chuckle at the station, 15 minutes later it must have turned to a gulp of surprise.
national archives
inset, left: library of congress
38 AMERICA IN WWII
D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 6 / J A N U A RY 2 0 1 7
opposite: national archives
Top: Japanese subs were on the minds of US Navy authorities on the West Coast long before the Pearl Harbor attack. In 1940 or 1941, navy officials in Bremerton, Washington, asked artist Phil von Phul to design this poster warning merchant ships to reduce their visibility. Above: The danger was real. Submarine I-19 (seen in 1943) was lurking off Los Angeles Harbor on Christmas Eve 1941, looking for a ship to sink. Opposite: But mariners and LA herself (seen here in a 1932 aerial view centered on city hall) had their guard down.
national archives
The survivors of the Absaroka, the I-19’s Christmas Eve kill, give a thumbs-up at San Pedro’s coast guard station. One of the ship’s crew was dead. But the survivors would drown memories of the day’s terror in drink and misbehavior on San Pedro’s notorious Beacon Street.
he leaned over the rail while hauling Stevens to safety, a 10-foot wall of lumber teetered and then fell, striking him heavily on the back of the head and neck. Ryan’s lifeless body tumbled overboard with hundreds of board feet of lumber. Oiler James O’Brien, a little farther forward when the torpedo hit, said the blast “knocked me off my feet and made me goofy for a minute. Because the sub had the glare behind her, we couldn’t have had a chance for escape. She had a perfect target.” Down in the pantry, cook Thomas Watkins was basting a roast for the noonday meal when the torpedo struck. “The galley seemed to turn upside down and the last I saw of the roast it was hash,” he said. Although it wasn’t Sunday and Absaroka wasn’t due into port until later that afternoon, Watkins had been wearing his best Sunday suit under his cook’s whites all morning because, he said, “I had a hunch we might get the same thing that happened to the Montebello.” The fully laden oil tanker SS Montebello had been torpedoed and sunk by Japanese sub I-21 off California’s Estero Bay early the previous morning. Watkins later laughed at himself. He said, “I found myself out on deck worrying more about my good clothes, and remember saying to myself, ‘Thomas be careful and don’t get your suit wet.’” He didn’t. Down in the boiler room, meanwhile, one crewman was hurriedly wrapping the severely burned hands of seaman Frank Johnson before starting for the main deck. Johnson was just opening the 40 AMERICA IN WWII
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boilers when the torpedo hit. “The burners flared back and the fire poured out all over me,” he said. “I couldn’t tell what caused it.” By the time crewmen began lowering the lifeboats, Absaroka had settled in the water up to her main deck. Lifeboat No. 2 capsized with two men in it, but they were picked up by boat No. 1, which had to hold the whole crew. Help was on the way. The Amethyst had been racing full-speed toward the scene and arrived shortly after the torpedoed ship transmitted her distress call. Amethyst set to work dropping 32 depth charges in a pattern over the area where the sub had first been seen. No sub, no bubbles, no oil slick—there were no signs that the I-19 had been hit.
A
S THE DAY WORE ON,
7 of the Absaroka’s 33 crew members, including Captain Prindle, went back aboard their ship. Thanks to her buoyant cargo, the Absaroka was in no immediate danger of sinking. So a navy tugboat captained by Lieutenant Commander Hans B. Olsen strung a line to the old ship and gingerly towed her in, beaching her on a strip of sand just inside the harbor entrance until she could be hauled away for repairs. Except for Ryan—whose body was brought ashore for burial, the sixth US merchantman to die in a seven-day spree of Pacific Coast attacks by Japanese submarines—the crew had come through largely unharmed, by the standards of the era. For their trouble the McCormick Company gave the men a bonus of $50
A SILENT NIGHT
TORPEDOED
by Donald J. Young
library of congress
each and turned them loose on Beacon Street in San Pedro—at utes later Amethyst rounded the tip of Palos Verdes peninsula in that time one of the most notorious harbor-front streets in the time to see the planes diving and dropping bombs. Meanwhile, world—to help them forget the day’s trauma. back at the San Pedro section base, the navy transmitted the mesThe next day—Christmas Day—the attack on a merchant vessage “At 1640 periscope reported in our area, action imminent.” sel just offshore by a Japanese submarine was big news. It made The Amethyst’s log tells the rest of the story, beginning at 4:56 all the local papers. William Anderson, who had reported seeing and covering the next hour and 20 minutes: a submarine “camouflaged like a fishing boat,” got the last laugh on the coast guard. A headline in the San Francisco Chronicle At 1656 target designated by aircraft appeared to be periscope; blared, “Sub Uses Fishing Boat Camouflage.” opened fire [with three-inch deck gun], closing in. At 1702 But the news had impact beyond vindicating Anderson. Instantly, dropped depth charge. At 1703 ceased fire, no casualties. (puzzled spotters and lookouts up and down the Southern California coast at this point by the apparent lack of response from the enemy subwere diligently scouring the waves for signs of enemy submarines. marine despite the shelling, bombing and new depth charging). At And around 3:15 that afternoon, as most West Coasters sat down 1706 lowered boat to investigate target which proved to be roof to Christmas dinner, an army lookout atop rugged Palos Verdes off a small fishing vessel with galley chimney attached. At 1818 Peninsula, some 15 miles north of San Pedro, spotted what looked picked up boat and took target in tow. At 1845 tow carried away like a periscope in the water about two miles off the Redondo Beach in heavy weather. pier. Anchored within a few feet of the periscope was the old, decommissioned fourThe whole experience was as potentially masted barkentine schooner Kohala, which embarrassing as it was anticlimactic. for years had been used as a commercial fishFortunately for everyone involved, the only ing barge. Assuming the newly discovered newspaper that carried more than a few submarine was the same one that had torpelines on the story was Redondo Beach’s own doed the Absaroka the day before, military South Bay Daily Breeze. The day after authorities speculated that it had been damChristmas, under the headline “Submarine aged by the Amethyst’s depth-charge attack Scare Throws South Bay into Uproar,” an and was now seeking refuge behind the article quipped: Kohala as repairs were made. It would take the navy more than an hour Some South Bay residents accused their to arrive from San Pedro, so the army’s harChristmas Day drinks of carrying more walbor defense command at Fort MacArthur lop than usual. Others shouted earthquake dispatched a single 75mm howitzer to the and ran for their doors. Both type of people scene to sink the sub. Soon, a quarter of the were wrong, yesterday afternoon’s distur105th Field Artillery’s Battery F arrived. bance was nothing more than bombs being From the Redondo Pier, the artillerists sent dropped by vigilant Navy planes following 10 or so rounds in the enemy sub’s general an erroneous report that the fishing barge direction, until visibility deteriorated Kohala…had been a victim of a Japanese Uenough to make further firing impractical. boat attack. The battery would receive a commendation Hundreds of people were attracted to the A government poster warns Americans to for the action from harbor defense headocean front, most were calm. Only a handbe careful what they say, because the enemy quarters. ful were so upset as to claim “The Japs are could be listening. Some thought “a slip of The report of the enemy sub reached the landing!” The only casualties were the the lip” might have been to blame for AbsaAmethyst, patrolling off Long Beach, at Kohala, now completely split in two, and the roka’s sinking, but the culprit was early-war 3:40 P.M. According to the Amethyst’s lognerves of those who weren’t used to so much carelessness on the part of the navy. excitement, particularly on Christmas Day. book, her skipper, Lieutenant (junior grade) David Hienstedt, immediately ordered a beeline course to Redondo Beach to “destroy the enemy submarine.” OUTHERN C ALIFORNIA’ S FIRST BRUSH with Japanese subWhile the converted yacht got under way, word of the enemy marines—real and imagined—got national attention a sub somehow reached nearby Los Alamitos Naval Air Station. At month later in a January 1942 issue of Life magazine. the time, Los Alamitos was a training facility for navy diveActress Jane Russell was featured in the full-page Picture of the bomber pilots. Although they had neither the responsibility, trainWeek, standing inside the tremendous hole the Japanese torpedo ing, nor proper ordnance for the job, a handful of anxious young had created in Absaroka’s hull. In her hands was a poster that cadets took off a few minutes later, led by the only experienced warned “A Slip of the Lip May Sink a Ship.” But “May Sink a member of their group, a British Royal Air Force dive-bomber Ship” was crossed out. In its place was scrawled “May Have Sunk pilot assigned to instruct them in just such operations. this Ship.” A At 4:18 Amethyst received a message alerting her that the navy planes would “mark position of disabled submarine,” after which DONALD J. YOUNG of Vista, California, is the author of four books the sub chaser should “approach carefully and destroy.” Five minon the Pacific war.
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AMERICA IN WWII 41
A WAR STORIES
A WWII Scrapbook J
A KID’S VIEW OF DECEMBER 7
ZIEBER WAS BORN in Honolulu on July 7, 1933, to Fred and Jennie Zieber. Her father worked with the US military. She was six years old when Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor and Oahu’s military bases on December 7, 1941. At the time, the Ziebers were living in a Honolulu hotel while a house they had bought was being readied. Debris from the attacking planes hit the hotel, killing a man. In the attack’s aftermath, uncertainty about whether the Japanese would follow up with an invasion led to the transfer of all military families to the US mainland. The Ziebers, except for Janet’s father, moved to Santa Rosa, California, where they lived until May 1943. Then they moved back to Honolulu. Janet always remembered the confusion and fear she felt as a child on the day, 75 years ago, when war came to Hawaii. Late in life, she told her early-war story like this: We had just transferred [houses], living in a hotel while we waited for the painters to come and paint. A friend watched my brother Dick and me (we were 6 and 8) while my mother returned to the hotel— when the bomb fell down the street. Mom took us to the house in the valley, since the next-door neighbor had a bomb shelter. On the way, we saw a dogfight [between US and Japanese planes]. All the men disappeared after settling their families. They were putting barbed wire along the beaches and coming back. We stayed with friends above Pearl Harbor and watched the ships burning. The next day, it was hot as the entire city lined up for shots, gas masks—we were told not to be without them, even though they weighed a ton—and identification cards for all. Things settled down, and women and children left for the mainland on a 24-hour flight. It was a huge plane with all the seats removed and sleeping bags on the floor. We landed in San Francisco [and continued ANET
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COURTESY OF JONI ROBERTS
42 AMERICA IN WWII
Janet Zieber of Honolulu, seen here in a 1942 Christmas picture, witnessed the 1941 Pearl Harbor raid. After the attack, she got an ID card—and a gas mask.
our trip to Santa Rosa]. Four children lived in a log cabin across the lane from [where we lived with] our cousins. Then [we moved] to an apartment in town where we could walk to school. We stayed on the mainland until after the Battle of Midway [in June 1942]—for two years. Janet’s father saw the incidents of the December 7 through adult eyes, and remembered them a little differently. He conveyed some of that in a letter he sent Janet and Dick in December 15, 1942. You were very sweet to send me your letters, but now it is almost a month since you have written, so I hope you write again soon.
I have a surprise for both of you. Do you remember a year ago when we went to our new house to look at it? Do you remember the first bomb that fell near us and Janet ran to the corner while Dick ran to the basement? And we could not find Janet when we heard the second one whistling? Do you remember how angry we were at the Japanese for doing such a mean thing? Just so that you will always remember to love your own home, your mother and father, and not to do mean things to other people, I am sending each of you a War Bond. These are special bonds, as they were bought on Dec. 7, just one year after Pearl Harbor was bombed, and they have a special “Remember Pearl Harbor” stamp on them. Hope you have a lovely Xmas and get all the things you want. With love, Daddy J ONI ROBERTS daughter-in-law of JANET ZIEBER ROBERTS, now deceased, child witness of Pearl Harbor raid Atlanta, Georgia
I
CHRISTMAS ON SAIPAN
DECEMBER the last organized band of Jap holdouts surrendered. They were not in our area. They said that there were still a few holding out in the jungle. As Christmas approached, a tall coniferlike tree appeared in the center of camp. It was decorated with “chaff,” long aluminum strips that had been dropped by aircraft to confuse radar. I thought it was a sickly reminder and the most lonesome Christmas I have ever had, but somebody tried. The band was still attached, and one day I was contacted by one of the members N EARLY
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who told me they would like to prepare a Christmas program and would I like to join the band…? Boy would I! I was a trumpet player. About that time I would have been willing to play a duet or tour the island and play Christmas carols. But…I never heard from anyone again and there was no concert. …It was New Year’s Eve. I sat in the message center passing the time until lights out at 2200 [10 P.M.]. Next door, in the communication center, I had heard some men talking and laughing for some time. I turned off the light and was going to bed when someone called, “Hey, Church, ya wanna drink?” So I went next door and found a half dozen or so guys drinking beer and celebrating the imminence of the coming new year. I guess that for a couple of hours we had a good time, and the later it became, the gooder it got. I do not know where they got the beer, and as a good guest I did not ask. What I do know is that they had a weapons carrier with what must have been a dozen or more cases in it the last time I looked. The problem was it was warm. It must have been about midnight when someone suggested that we go up to the officers club…. The next day, well, I don’t even want to think about it.
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ARTHUR S. CHURCH wartime army message center chief, Headquarters Company, 23rd Replacement Depot, Saipan formerly of Ukiah, California; deceased
AM E RICA I N
WWII
L ingo! 1940s GI and civilian patter Hindy ho!: A mocking GI version of Hände hoch!—“Hands up!” in German gedunk: Stuff a gedunkaroo serves at the gedunk bar: snacks, ice cream— stuff you don’t get in the ship’s mess TNT: When yelled at a slow, footdragging sad sack, “Today, not tomorrow!”
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AMERICA IN WWII 43
A I WAS THERE
Don’s Inferno by Donald Stratton with Ken Gire Reprinted from All the Gallant Men by Donald Stratton with Ken Gire, with permission from William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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EAMAN F IRST C LASS Donald Stratton found himself in the middle of an inferno just after 8 A.M. on December 7, 1941. About 15 minutes into Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, a million pounds of explosives had detonated beneath his battle station aboard the battleship USS Arizona. Near death and burned over two-thirds of his body, the 19-year-old from Nebraska struggled to haul himself hand over hand across a rope tethered to a neighboring vessel. Forty-five feet below, flaming, oil-slicked water boiled with enemy bullets. In this excerpt from the new memoir All the Gallant Men: The First Memoir by a USS Arizona Survivor, 94-year-old Don Stratton begins his story of bravery and survival at Pearl Harbor shortly before the big explosion.
WE
ALL RAN TO OUR BATTLE STATION . I sped up steel ladders, my hands flying over the polished handrails that led to the sightsetter in the port anti-aircraft director, which was my station. A Japanese Zero skimmed the surface of the water like a dragonfly, just 20 feet from the water, and he dropped its torpedo, then pulled up sharply. Pearl was a shallow harbor, varying in depth somewhere between 40–50 feet, but standard torpedoes plunge to a depth of 150 feet before rising to attack depth. The Japanese knew if they used a standard torpedo, it would dolphin, so to speak, or hit the surface and arc downward before it stabilized its trajectory in a straight line toward its target. This would result in the torpedo hitting the muddy bottom and becoming embedded in it. Because of this, they modified it, adding wooden fins that acted
Smoke pours from USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, after her forward magazine exploded from a Japanese torpedo hit. Seaman First Class Donald Stratton was on the battleship when it happened. Only 334 of the 1,511 sailors and marines aboard would survive. 44 AMERICA IN WWII
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A AMERICA IN WWII FLASHBACK
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AMERICA IN WWII COLLECTION
GENERAL MOTORS
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1945 D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 6 / J A N U A RY 2 0 1 7
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I WAS THERE
courtesy of donald stratton
46 AMERICA IN WWII
A
courtesy of donald stratton
as aerodynamic stabilizers, which were shed once the torpedo hit the water. Their engineers got it right: as I was running, I felt a wallop on the ship’s hull, followed by a muffled explosion deep in its bowels. The torpedo shook me, but didn’t slow my pace. I raced up the ladder to the radio shack, from there up another ladder to the signal bridge, up a third ladder to the Bridge, and finally up a fourth ladder to the Sky Control Platform. I looked over my shoulder to take in the sweep of the harbor, which was in chaos. A Zero bore down on us, strafing our sailors and splintering our deck. It flew so low I could see the pilot in his leather helmet and goggles taunting me with a smirk and a wave as he passed, like a grinning devil. The Air Defense Alarm sounded, sending the top gunners to their stations. Shortly after that, General Quarters sounded: “Attention! Attention! Attention! Man your battle stations! This is no drill! This is no drill!” The deck was a frenzy of sailors running every which way. The band members, like the rest of the crew, ran to their battle station, in the ammunition hold several decks below. They would have gone to their assigned places, loading shells and bags of powder onto hoists that took them to the main guns on No. 1 and No. 2 turrets. The hoists were electrically operated, and it was the job of the band members to stand on either side of the hoists to ensure that the bags of powder didn’t become dislodged, jammed, or snagged as they rode up the hoists. If they did, the black powder could spill out of them and create a hazard if a spark were to ignite the powder. As Lauren Bruner raced up the same ladder I had taken, a Zero fixed its sights on him. A blast from its guns, and bullets bit metal. One of those bullets struck flesh, hitting the back of Lauren’s lower leg. He limped into the director, a trail of blood following him. The others of our team came spilling in—Harold Kuhn, Russell Lott, Earl Riner, George Hollowell, Alvin Dvorak, Fred Zimmerman, and Frank Lomax. I was frantically setting the dials in the director that engaged the gears to set the sights of the anti-aircraft guns. Behind each of them was a ready box of ammunition, which only held 25 rounds. We immediately loaded the ammo and started firing at the dive bombers. But they were flying so low we risked hitting the repair ship Vestal
Don Stratton posing in uniform in happier days before the disaster on Battleship Row: in his official US Navy enlistment photo and alongside a couple of fellow fledgling sailors (he’s on the right).
on one side of us and our own men on Ford Island on the other. We turned our sights on the high-altitude bombers, firing at a 90 degree angle. When the crewmen loaded the guns, the gunnery officer peered through a portal and set the range and path of the target. I cranked the gauge in front of him and yelled the coordinates to the gun below. We sent volley after volley of anti-air-
craft fire their way, the shells filling the sky with puffs of black smoke. Anti-aircraft shells didn’t explode on impact like other shells. They had fuses inside them, and the fuses would be set by a fuse pot loader, where, with a turn of a crank, you could set the shell to explode, say, 15 seconds after it left the muzzle of the gun. If you found the shells were exploding too low, you adjusted the next ones to go off 20 or 25 seconds after they were shot from the gun. Whatever adjustments we made, though, the bombers were too high, and our shells just couldn’t reach them. It was like fighting an opponent whose reach was twice what yours was. No matter how many time you swung or how hard, you could never hit back. All the while, you were getting pummeled. The beating we took, it was brutal. We took so many hits, and not just our ship…. There were hatches in the anti-aircraft director that you could unbolt to see out, and from that hatch I watched torpedo planes flying over the sub base, circling, then coming straight down Battleship Row. I saw the Tennessee take hits, the West Virginia. I witnessed the Oklahoma lurch to one side, then roll over and capsize. I saw a fireball in the dry dock where the Pennsylvania was. The entire Fleet was being destroyed before my eyes. Bombs going off everywhere. Great billows of smoke eating up the blue sky and turning it black. Torpedoes slamming against our hulls, spewing geysers of water into the air. Ships taking on water, listing, capsizing. And from those ruptured ships spilled oil that congealed when it hit the water and caught fire. It seemed the whole harbor was in flames, a spreading lake of fire…. And the noise, it was deafening. One explosion after another, and after each one, twisted metal writhing in the most wretched-sounding pain. The whine of plane engines crisscrossing around you. As soon as one plane dropped its torpedo, it pulled up sharply or winged off to one side, while another plane swooped down to strafe us. Machine gun bullets ricocheted off metal. The screams of our men, their bodies engulfed in flames. And the fury of our own anti-aircraft guns, reverberating inside our metal cubicle so loudly I felt my ear drums were going to burst. With each bomb that hit us, the ship shuddered. One hit No. 3 turret, but it didn’t
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explode, careening instead into the sea. Lucky for us. Another penetrated the aft deck, but it didn’t explode either. Another stroke of luck, or so I thought until a burst of machine gun fire hammered the metal encasement on the starboard side, where Hollowell sat slumped in his chair, part of his skull blown away. The whistling of another bomb, and we braced for impact. But it hit the Vestal instead. It seemed to catch much of the fury that had been aimed at the Arizona. The repair ship was in flames, and its crew was furiously trying to extinguish them. As it burned, a bomb went through our aft, near the propeller, but it didn’t explode. Another stroke of luck. But I knew our luck was running out. Another bomb came whistling down, and we felt a hard smack against the aft. The bomb penetrated the deck, exploding in a meat locker. We were sitting ducks. Not just the Arizona. Every ship in the harbor. And there was nothing we could do about it. The dive bombers were too low, the horizontal bombers too high. At 10,000 feet, the Japanese bombers were just too high for our
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guns. And with few exceptions, our planes, which the Japanese strategically hit first, never got a chance to get off the ground. We couldn’t even make a run for it into open waters, because it took two-and-a-half hours for the boilers of a battleship to fire up enough so the engines could move it. And so we threw our shells into the sky. As many as we could. Hoping the shrapnel might shatter a cockpit, rupture a fuel line, clip a propeller. Something, anything. It’s all we could do. Shoot and hope. But almost out of ammo, we had little left to shoot. And with each burst that fell short, we lost a little more hope. We were only a few minutes into the fight, but the pounding we took was relentless. The entire fleet was reeling from the blows.... One of our port guns fell silent. Out of ammo. Then another. Ensign Lomax, the officer in charge, made a run to go below deck to get more. That was the last time I saw him.
Zeros strafed the ship, their bullets ripping up the deck and shredding any sailors who were on it. With each pass, the pilot smiled or waved or made some other mocking gesture. The smug bastards. The whole lot of them, cowards and murderers. Without a declaration of war, they waged war on us. Without warning. Without mercy. Without conscience. They shot at us as if we were ducks in a barrel, enjoying it as school boys would an arcade game at the circus. We took another hit, which thundered through the ship. It hit the starboard side, right beside the No. 2 turret, but it didn’t explode. At the same time, I saw two torpedo wakes heading right toward us. I braced for the impact. Which never came. Another lucky break, I thought. Until seconds later…. 8:10 A.M. A GREAT SUCKING SOUND, like a Whoosh, rocked the ship and everyone in it with concussive force. A 1,760-pound, armorpiercing bomb had penetrated four steel decks to the ammunition magazine. The blast blew the No. 1 turret into the air, where it came crashing back onto the deck. A plume of black smoke spewed out of the forward smoke stack, and an expanding
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fireball shot 500–600 feet into the air, engulfing those of us in the director…. The explosion gutted the forward decks, and the turrets and conning tower sank 30 feet into the resulting crater, drawing the mast and the funnel forward. Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, who had taken a position on the signal bridge, was killed in the explosion. So was Captain Franklin Van Valkenburgh, who had been on the navigation bridge, trying to establish telephone communications with other parts of the ship. As was the Arizona’s 21-man band. And over a thousand sailors and Marines who were at their battle stations, defending her. The blast blew across Ford Island, knocking people off their feet. It threw dozens of men off the Nevada into the harbor…. The force of the blast showered the decks of the Tennessee with tons of twisted metal, including the twisted parts of our men who, in one searing moment, had their souls torn from them. In fact, debris from the Arizona that rained down on the Tennessee caused more damage than the two bombs dropped on her by the Japanese. The carnage rained onto other ships, onto Ford Island, onto our own ship….
USS Arizona (center of photo) was just one of the battleship casualties at Pearl Harbor. West Virginia (far left) and Tennessee were also hit hard by the Japanese bombardment.
The flames swallowed the foremast where we were. As they shot through the two openings of the enclosure, we shielded ourselves by taking shelter under some of the equipment, our hands covering our mouths and eyes. But the flames found us, catching us all on fire, burning off our clothes, our hair, our skin….
Men stumbled around on the deck like human torches, each collapsing into a flaming pile of flesh. Others jumped into the water. When they did, you could hear them sizzle…. While that horrific scene was unfolding below us, black, acrid billows of smoke pushed into where we were, stinging our eyes, filling our nostrils, our
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throats, our lungs. We stumbled to our feet, coughing out smoke, unable to catch our breaths because the fire had also burned off our oxygen. The compartment we were in suddenly became claustrophobic, and two of the men bolted out the door to escape. Whether they jumped off the platform or were knocked off, I didn’t know. I couldn’t see them—and I would never again. As we felt our way along the metal walls, the heat scorched our palms. Before he stumbled out of the director, Lott grabbed a nearby blanket and wrapped it around himself, which kept his skin from getting scorched. By now, the metal floor was so hot we could feel the heat through the soles of our shoes. Lott hopped on one foot, then the other. Soon we all were shifting our weight. Once on the outer platform, we moved toward the ladder. But flames from the inferno below leapt up the metal steps and barred our escape. There was no way down, and the metal platform we were standing on was growing hotter by the second. If we didn’t get off it, and soon, we would be cooked. Below us, where the flames were coming from, was a mixture of horror and heroism….
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Lieutenant Commander Samuel Fuqua stayed onboard until the very end. He directed his men to fight the flames with CO2 fire extinguishers, and he worked tirelessly to get his men off the ship and into the launches. He helped at least 70 into those small craft. He didn’t shelter himself from the strafing, but was on deck with his men, helping up those who had fallen. He was a picture of strength, unruffled by the chaos surrounding him, and his example inspired others. When Fuqua ordered Earl Pecotte, the gunner’s mate, to abandon ship, the man asked, “When are you leaving, sir?” Fuqua answered, “Not until the Japs leave.” …Up where we were, there was no one directing us, no way of escape, and no hope. I looked at myself, surveying the damage the blast had inflicted. My T-shirt had caught fire, burning my arms and my back. My legs were burned from my ankles
to my thighs. My face was seared. The hair on my head had been singed off, and part of my ear was gone. I stood in a stupor and would have continued to stand there were it not for a breeze that parted the smoke, revealing a sailor from the Vestal. It was Joe George. He had been following orders to cut the lines that tethered his ship to the Arizona so they could head to open waters. Since there was no one on the Arizona to help on our end, he was taking a fire axe and cutting the lines on his. We called to Joe through a seam in the smoke, motioning for him to throw us a monkey’s fist, which was a lightweight heaving line knotted around a metal ball and attached to a thicker rope. It was a long shot, but our desperate idea was that if we could secure a rope between the two ships, then perhaps we could make it to the Vestal. As Joe rummaged for the ball, I looked at my arms. A sheath of skin from each had peeled off and was draping them. I tore off one length of skin and threw it on the floor of the platform. Then the other. The remaining tissue was a web-work of pink and white and red, some of it black, all of it throbbing.
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barked an order, but George stood defiant, glaring at him. The officer turned and left. Joe George waved Kuhn over. As he made his way across the rope, it started to sag. We all recoiled at the sight. It was difficult enough making the trip with a taut line. With a sagging one, it would be even
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But that didn’t matter. My focus narrowed on Joe George and the ball in his hand. He threw it, but it fell short. He gathered up the line, and lobbed it again. Short once more. Joe was perhaps the strongest man in the harbor, an All-Navy boxer who I describe as an “ox.” He was the only man with a prayer of getting that line to us—if he couldn’t do it, then it was impossible. The reality started to sink in. We were going to burn alive. Joe collected the rope once more. For a third time, he tossed it with all his strength. It sailed from one wounded ship to another, across flames, smoke, and carnage. I tracked it all the way and caught it in the air, pulling the smaller line until I felt the main rope. I tied the rope to the railing, cinching it tight, and Joe secured his end. The rope stretched 70 feet to span the water below us, which was 45 feet down, slicked with fuel that had caught fire. Our only hope was to make it to the Vestal, hand over hand across the rope. But the flesh had been burned off all of our hands, and using those raw fingers and palms to get us across the chasm that separated us would be, at best, excruciating; most likely, impossible. I looked through the smoke at the Vestal, my burning eyes straining to see. Joe and his captain were engaged in some kind of debate. A heated one, from the looks of it. The order had been given to cut loose from the Arizona and head for open water. Before Joe sent a line our way, he had been following those instructions, using his axe to cut the mooring lines. When the Vestal’s captain saw the rope that tethered his ship to ours, he looked at us. We were a grotesque gathering of hellish creatures. Nearly naked, our bodies were smudges of black, patches of white, slashes of red. Stumbling into each other on the platform. Patting out the flames on our clothes. Peeling skin from our arms. We were the walking dead, and we didn’t have a chance, or so it seemed to the captain. The first in line was Kuhn, right before me. He was first because he wasn’t as badly injured as the rest of us, and so he would test the rope to see if it would hold. For a breathless moment, we looked down at the flames that swept through the gap that separated the two ships. Then we looked at the captain and Joe George on the other side of the chasm. The officer
The USS Vestal (the larger vessel shown here days after Pearl Harbor) was the last hope for Don Stratton and the five sailors trapped alongside him on the burning Arizona. A rope strung between Vestal and Arizona was their lifeline.
more difficult because it meant the descent would be steeper and we’d have to go uphill at the end. It might even be impossible. If Kuhn couldn’t make it, strong as he was, how could we in our weakened condition? Joe called to him, and the rest of us echoed the encouragement…. He made it! Kuhn made it! At that moment a Japanese Zero caught sight of us and veered our way. When we saw it bearing down on us, we all ran into the director to take cover. A spray of machine gun bullets clanged off the metal, but none of them hit us—this time. Surely the Zero would be circling back. Meanwhile the inferno below licked the tower; the rising smoke engulfed us. Our time was up. I started hand over hand across the line, feeling a surge of adrenalin as I went. The first half was okay, and I made it to the midpoint in good time. But then the rope curved upward, and I had to go hand over hand, my full weight pulling against me. I could feel the heat from the burning oil spill below me. The exposed tissue on my legs and arms felt the heat. The pain was excruciating. My hands, raw as they were,
kept going. Somehow they kept going, one hand over another over another. I refused to let go. Maybe I felt I would be letting down the men if I did. They were all rooting for me. Or perhaps I kept going because if I let go, the rest might not make the attempt for fear of following my fate. I knew they had to get off that platform or the heat would overcome them. A hand and a hearty encouragement from Joe as he snatched me from the flames. I was safe, for now, but I was exhausted. As I was catching my breath, another Zero dropped from the sky, heading straight for us. When it strafed us, we all took cover again as the sharp staccato of shells rang off the metal in rapid succession. Again, none of them hit home. One by one, each of us miraculously made it to the other side. We hadn’t fallen. And we hadn’t been hit by machine-gun fire. There wasn’t enough adrenalin in us to get us through that ordeal. We had help from the good Lord, I’m sure of that. One thing is for certain: Had Joe George not stood up for us—had he not been a rebel and refused to cut the line connecting the Vestal to the Arizona—we would have been cooked to death on that platform. If anyone deserved a Medal of Honor that day, in my opinion, it was him. And I know at least five others who would second that. After the Arizona sank and the smoke cleared and the numbers were finally counted up, Stratton and the five others who made it safely across the rope were among just 334 survivors of the attack that killed 1,177 of their navy and marine shipmates—approximately half of all the American fatalities at Pearl Harbor. Sent to military hospitals for a year, Stratton refused doctors’ advice to have his limbs amputated, and he fought to relearn how to walk. The US Navy gave him a medical discharge, believing he would never again be fit for service. But in June 1944, he sailed back into the teeth of the Pacific war aboard a destroyer destined for combat in the crucial battles of Leyte Gulf, Luzon, and finally Okinawa. By the end of it all, Stratton had earned the distinction of being on the scene for the war’s opening shots and for its last major battle. A DONALD STRATTON is a great-grandfather of five and one of five living survivors of the USS Arizona.
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Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days to the Attack by Steve Twomey, Simon and Schuster, $30
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EVENTY-FIVE YEARS after the fact, Pearl Harbor still fascinates us, like the bitter memory of a car wreck or a bully’s beatdown. The attack was barely over when investigations into the causes began, and they continue to this day. Steve Twomey’s new book focuses on the 12 days preceding the attack, tracing the stories of key players in the escalating crisis. Countdown to Pearl Harbor is a memorable, well-written account of an unstoppable drive to war, an account whose willful inexorability evokes Barbara Tuchman’s WWI study The Guns of August. Twomey’s cast is wide, varied, and covers both sides of the Pacific. His profiles are vivid, memorable, and well crafted. From the Japanese, we see attack architect Isoroku Yamamoto, aviation maven Minoru Genda, Tokyo ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura, and clandestine “attaché” Takeo Yoshikawa, among others. The US bench is deeper, and includes two codebreakers, the president, and the secretary of state. The most significant American here is Admiral Husband Kimmel, Pearl Harbor commander and inevitable scape-
goat for the disaster. History has not generally been kind to Kimmel. After the attack, he was swiftly replaced by Chester Nimitz and soon became a non-person in navy circles. Yet he could hardly be faulted alone, since his superiors had declined to send him critical intelligence, such as the discovery of extreme Japanese interest in the harbor’s warship dispositions. Moreover, because no one in fact knew Japanese intentions, there was scant intelligence to share. As a result, if naval chief Ernest King himself had been minding the shop at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, it is unlikely he would have fared much better. Kimmel was far from a clueless chump. Like most military commanders, he believed war was imminent and had instituted aggressive preparations, from better training to improved ship maintenance. He even rearranged berthing to provide better fields of defensive fire. Along with such tactical considerations, he planned strategically, exploring the possibility of building up Wake Island 2,300 miles west of Honolulu to lure the Japanese navy there. He had tasked his staff with preparing “steps to take” to bring the Japanese fleet to battle as quickly as possible. Unlike most other writers on this subject, Twomey portrays a man full of spirit, thinking
strategically about how to handle imminent Japanese actions. Concurring with him is Admiral Harold Stark, who wrote in admiration of Kimmel’s cool judgment, courage, and imagination. Few winners emerge in this book, particularly on the American side. From the president all the way down, US forces were caught flat-footed, despite being able to read Tokyo’s diplomatic traffic even sooner than the Japanese could. Perhaps the only exception for Twomey is Captain William Outerbridge. Newly appointed skipper of the destroyer USS Ward, he was on his first patrol at Pearl Harbor in the early dawn of December 7, 1941, when a periscope was spotted. Outerbridge promptly ordered an attack with guns and depth charges, scoring the war’s first kill against Japanese forces. Yet his story is a lonely one. One of the most interesting aspects of this book is an astonishing assertion made in passing. Citing a US government investigation from 1946, Twomey mentions that the secret of broken Japanese codes almost got out, and in a most circuitous way: the Germans told Japan’s ambassador in Berlin that the Americans were reading Japanese diplomatic codes (apparently the Germans discovered this secret after the Soviet ambassador to the United States inferred it D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 6 / J A N U A RY 2 0 1 7
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A from a conversation with Secretary of State Sumner Wells). Yet the Japanese could not conceive that their Purple code could ever have been cracked, and they continued to use it, to their lasting loss. Of course, paradoxically, for the Pearl Harbor attack, the American cryptographic ability was absolutely insignificant. Twomey’s book weighs in at a respectable 384 pages, so he cannot be faulted for skimping on details. Even so, a richer background would have been welcome. The story of the attack is briskly told, but it is difficult to discern that the Japanese launched two separate attack waves against Pearl Harbor and had originally envisioned a third. The strong resistance that the US Navy offered—for which Kimmel should be given due credit—was crucial to dissuading Japanese commander Chuichi Nagumo from launching the third wave, which spared American oil storage, repair facilities, and dockyards. These were indispensable to subsequent American naval efforts in the Pacific. Countdown to Pearl Harbor is easy, pleasant reading, and it is likely to have new insight even for veteran students of the attack. That said, it is primarily a story of human drama rather than politico-military catastrophe. Twomey’s final sentence, “Assumption fathered defeat,” hints at a world of interpretation, more of which would have been valuable. Yet what’s here is solid and interesting. T HOMAS MULLEN Flemington, New Jersey
Into the Lion’s Mouth: The True Story of Dusko Popov: World War II Spy, Patriot, and the Real-Life Inspiration for James Bond by Larry Loftis, Berkeley, 384 pages, $27
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USKO P OPOV WAS perhaps the most famous spy of World War II. The British, the Americans, and the Germans all employed him—often at the same time! Throughout the war, he succeeded in maintaining the persona of a well-off highroller and in feeding intelligence to the Allies about German intentions while giving the Axis disinformation. Yet the Allies repeatedly subjected him to hostile interrogations and only reluctantly trusted him, making it all the more impressive that he,
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unlike many spies, survived the war and beyond. In Into the Lion’s Mouth, author Larry Loftis recounts Popov’s career, arguing that his style and exploits were the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Though Popov became a British double agent early in the war, it was his American sojourn that yielded perhaps his most famous exploit. The Abwehr, Germany’s intelligence organization, sent him to the United States in 1941 to establish a network. There he tried to work with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, but agents responded with distrust and half-hearted support, which prevented him from accomplishing much. Perhaps his most significant feat was forwarding to his American handlers an extremely detailed German query for information on the defenses and layout of Pearl Harbor in the summer of 1941. This was clearly preparation for an attack, but the intelligence was squandered. Hoover seems to have dismissed the implicit threat and avoided referring to it in communications with his peers and superiors. The query discovery could have been a breakthrough, but to argue that it had major historical significance is to risk overrating a single piece of evidence. In fact, there were many clues related to the impending Japanese aggression. Washington received much intelligence about it, including deciphered diplomatic transmissions. The challenge was not in receiving information but in weighing and interpreting it. In early December 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt realized the Japanese would move for war, but it was very difficult to know where, because Tokyo had so many options throughout the Pacific. More important, the German query showed a detailed interest in Pearl Harbor, but not the time, nature, and direction of any attack, meaning that even if Roosevelt had read, accepted, and acted on the basis of this intelligence, he could have done little except order heightened defenses (which had already in fact been done). Further, some historians, such as Gerhard Weinberg, have argued that the losses suffered at Pearl Harbor were far
from being the worst possible outcome. Had Washington taken further action on the Popov intelligence and sallied forth to meet Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo (if his fleet could have been located), that would have created problems of its own. In the end, far fewer ships might have been salvaged and far more men lost. As it was, right after the strike on Pearl Harbor ended, salvage and repair work began. So, paradoxical though it may seem, inaction in response to Popov’s report may have produced the least catastrophic outcome. The most mystifying aspect of Into the Lion’s Mouth is its central claim that Dusko Popov was the prototype for James Bond. As Loftis notes, it has been reported since the early 1960s that Ian Fleming took inspiration for 007 from Popov’s exploits, so the thesis is neither new nor surprising. But numerous appendices are offered to buttress this claim, and Loftis goes too far, seeking to hammer home his point beyond what’s required, as in describing Popov’s 19-year-old girlfriend as “a stunning blonde worthy in every respect to the girls of Bond.” For a point made generations ago, much of the evidence detailed in notes and citations is superfluous. Similarly oversold is Popov’s involvement in Operation Fortitude, the disinformation effort mounted to distract the German defenders of France from the invasion at Normandy. Fortitude was a brilliant example of a sustained, intricate wartime disinformation effort. Popov’s part in it was only one of many. Here too the book oversells, arguing that without DDay, Berlin would have won the war; by mid-1944 the Germans had already lost the war, on the Russian front. Despite all of this, Loftis has written a book with many attractions. His prose is stylish and supple, with fine character renderings and qualities befitting a novel. His research is amazing, providing material as obscure as high society notes from foreign newspapers, images of food trays used to smuggle messages, and copies of period government files. The descriptions of period tradecraft are absolutely fascinating. Novelistic though the style may be, the book rests on a rock-solid foundation of research and is a perfect weekend read. T HOMAS MULLEN Flemington, New Jersey
The Big Break: The Greatest American WWII POW Escape Story Never Told by Stephen Dando-Collins, St. Martin’s Press, 230 pages, $26.99
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HADN ’ T READ A BOOK ON the prisoner of war experience in World War II prior to The Big Break: The Greatest American WWII POW Escape Story Never Told, but I’ve seen several movies on the subject— The Great Escape, Stalag 17, and Unbroken—and I’ve interviewed a dozen ex-POWs. So, although my reading on this subject is limited and I can’t compare this book to memoirs of POWs and other histories, I can emphatically state that Stephen Dando-Collins’s book really held my interest. But is The Big Break the greatest American POW escape story never told? Yes and no. There is some truth to the hyperbole in the subtitle, but the “big break” is not what I expected it to be. The book is a thorough look at a single camp and the POWs incarcerated there, includ-
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ing their experiences beyond the wire. Though not the largest or most famous of Germany’s many stalags, the former reform school at Schubin in western Poland housed a multinational group of Allies over the length of the war before being reopened for its prewar use after hostilities ended. Schubin, first known as
Offizierslager XXI-B and later as Oflag 64, is surrounded by a wealth of lore. The better stories are those of its residents and involve determination, fortitude, faith, honor and friendship, qualities men display in times of stress and desperation. Beyond survival, there was one activity on which the prisoners focused their energies: escape. Much of this book is devoted to this aspect of the Schubin POWs’ lives.
A THEATER OF WAR The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress Directed by William Wyler, written by Jerome Chodorov, Lester Koenig, and William Wyler, 1944, 45 minutes, color, not rated. Memphis Belle Directed by Michael Caton-Jones, written by Monte Merrick, starring Matthew Modine, Eric Stoltz, Tate Donovan, D.B. Sweeney, Billy Zane, Shawn Astin, Harry Connick, Jr., John Lithgow, David Strathairn, 1990, 107 minutes, color, rated PG-13.
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ILLIAM W YLER WAS ONE of many filmmakers who joined America’s armed forces to document World War II. Given the job of organizing a unit to make technical training films for the Eighth Air Force, Wyler sat around London waiting for orders. (He was in England in March 1943 when he learned that his film Mrs. Miniver won the Academy Award for best picture.) Finally he received permission to film a B-17 Flying
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Fortress crew on a mission over Germany. Wyler took off with pilot Robert Morgan of the 91st Bomb Group in the B-17 Jersey Bounce (Morgan’s regular plane, Memphis Belle, was undergoing repairs). This was the first of a handful of missions Wyler and his team flew aboard Memphis Belle and other B-17s to capture the experiences of the bomber crews. “What a way to make a living,” said Memphis Belle navigator Charles Leighton. “Coming along with us just for pictures? The guy had guts.” Wyler went to work combining footage from the various flights to craft a simulation of Morgan and his crew’s 25th and final mission, aboard the Memphis Belle. Because it had been too loud aboard the planes to record sound, Wyler had the Belle’s crew, now back in the States on a morale-building tour, record realistic intercom dialogue in Los Angeles. As Wyler painstakingly assem-
bled his movie there, army brass got increasingly irritated by his delays. The film was finally released on April 15, 1944. The New York Times said it was “a perfect example of what can be properly done by competent film reporters to visualize the war for people back home.” The 1990 fictional film based on Wyler’s work is not nearly so successful. It, too, tells the story of the titular B-17’s 25th mission, but it resorts to war film clichés. Each crew member (names have been changed, perhaps to protect the innocent) possesses a single character trait. Pilot Dennis (Matthew Modine) is decent but uncomfortable in command; copilot Luke (Tate Donovan) is cocky, and resentful of Dennis; bombardier Val (Billy Zane) lies to everyone that he graduated from medical school; tail gunner Clay (Harry Connick, Jr.) is a laconic country boy (and he can sing!); Danny (Eric Stoltz) is the Irish kid; and so forth.
The population of the Schubin camp followed the progression of Germany’s European conquests. First, Polish filled the barracks, then French and Soviets. In a few years the Polish and French were transferred, and the camp was being stocked with British and Commonwealth flyers, all officers. The Russians remained in a separate part of the camp. Soon American airmen began to arrive. It is about this time, in March 1943, that this book begins, with preparations for the first big tunneling escape. Here are the intricate details of an escape—not the single man making a break for the perimeter, but the organized team efforts that defined most Allied POW escape attempts during the war. The British prisoners had something called X Organization to run the show, with diggers, engineers, forgers, and so on. Their tunnel extended more than 150 feet and began in the sump below the prisoners’ main toilet, so the excavation was nasty business.
The movie seems self-aware about all this. In the beginning, cynical army public relations officer Derringer (John Lithgow) introduces the crew in a voiceover, remarking, “There’s always a religious one” and “There’s always one from Cleveland.” Lithgow plays the obnoxious character who’s there to be taken down a peg, which happens when stoic base commander Harriman (David Strathairn) makes him read letters sent by family members who have lost loved ones. The film, co-produced by Wyler’s daughter, does the best it can with the obviously limited number of B-17s on hand, although the shots of the fake ones don’t stand up to today’s computer-generated imagery. The screenplay doesn’t really stand up, either. The crew deals with a familiar string of threats (bandits, flak, cloud cover, engine loss), learns some lessons, and manages to get a recalcitrant wheel down just in time for landing. In the real war, every bombing mission started with a checklist. It seems the production of Memphis Belle did, too. TOM HUNTINGTON Camp Hill, Pennsylvania
On March 5, 1943, thirty-three men went into the tunnel and came out beyond the wire. But within days, all but two were recaptured and those two never made it to freedom. The Schubin escape was the largest Allied POW break to that time and resulted in the censure of the commandant and temporary shutdown of the facility. But this is not the big break of the book’s title. That would come later, after the camp reopened to accept captured US Army officers. The Americans too had an effective escape hierarchy. Like the Brits, they dug tunnels, but they also tried other methods. Two enterprising Americans made a plan to leave by the front gate, but they never got the chance to test it. It’s not just the escape techniques, but also the relationships of the POWs with guards, townspeople, and one another that make this book interesting. Thanks to research into the “Schubinites,” as DandoCollins calls them, dozens of individuals become familiar characters. Some were even considered celebrities at the time, including General George Patton’s son-in-law and a young aide of Dwight D. Eisenhower. The big break came when the camp was being evacuated. As the Soviets swept through Poland, POWs were relocated to the German interior. Starting from the moment they were assembled to march to the train that would take them into Germany, Schubin POWs began to disappear. Along the way, more men fell out of rank in the loosely guarded column. Of more than 1,400 Americans present when Schubin was evacuated, the 247 leaving during the march made this “escape” the largest in the war. Finding the surroundings hostile, many Schubinites drifted back to the camp to join hospitalized POWs and wait for the Russians. But the story doesn’t end there. The march continued and after the Schubin POWs reached their new camp in Bavaria, a Third Army force made a failed rescue attempt. The fates of others who headed east, as well as some of the POWs’ postwar epilogues, are also covered. My one regret is that this book lacks a visual element. A few photographs would help readers identify with these men whose gritty and fascinating stories are so eloquently told. J AY WERTZ Phillips Ranch, California
Cartoons for Victory by Warren Bernard, Fantagraphics Books, 256 pages, $34.99
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N MUCH OF THE WORK I do in the world of comics history as educator and writer, I lecture often about the years before, during, and after World War II and about the role comics characters played in the great conflict. Perhaps at no other time in the life of the nation did the icons of American pop culture rally in such a unified way to comfort young and old alike while giving civilians newfound purpose through calls to purchase war bonds, support the Red Cross, plant Victory gardens, or collect scrap metal. From the pages of comic books and newspaper funnies sections, superheroes, anthropomorphic animals, and all kinds of cartoon stars helped guide America through a time of incalculable turmoil as their creators chronicled an era through the use of deft line work, witty gags, and high adventure. In Cartoons for Victory, author Warren Bernard takes readers on a journey back in time, first by expertly establishing the setting with a look at the demographic and environmental differences someone younger than the WWII generation would notice if placed in the United States of 1943 (for my part, just the idea that coffee was hard to find sent a shiver down my spine). He then presents a superb and varied collection of classic comics and cartoons—the vast majority of which have never been reprinted before—arranged in thematic categories from blackouts and rationing to protecting war secrets and the roles of women and minorities in galvanizing the war effort. It’s not easy to find a volume that so seamlessly presents contributions from political cartoonists, comic book creators, newspaper-strip artists, magazine gag panelists, advertising designers, and US government propaganda poster and pamphlet makers. Too often the history of these various threads of the visual arts are segregated and their cousins dismissed with a shrug (“That’s a story for another time” or “That deserves its own book”). Here, Bernard lets us see all of it together and in context, giving us one of the most complete pictures available of the use of cartoons and comics in leading America through its darkest night to its most triumphant day. There are D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 6 / J A N U A RY 2 0 1 7
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A pieces by the likes of Milton Caniff, Dr. Seuss, Charles Addams, George McManus, and Al Capp, among many others. Extensive biographies are also presented at the end of the book, in special sections devoted to the works of Bill Mauldin, Hank Ketcham, Harvey Kurtzman, Al Jaffee, Robert Osborn, and Will Eisner. As Bernard points out, these works didn’t just entertain; they were crafted to shape public behavior, to reinforce the war effort in the mind of every individual American, and they combined escapism with education, delight with determination, and the horrors of war with the hope of a growing nation finding its footing as an emerging world power. And all that with a guy in a cape or a squawking duck in a sailor suit! There are also wonderful tidbits of historical knowledge for anyone who isn’t already thoroughly steeped in the era, including a look at how Winston Churchill’s V-for-victory hand sign led to the use of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on US war-
BOOKS AND MEDIA
related radio broadcasts, how the letter designations were determined for various classifications of gas rationing and how ration tokens were coded by color, and how the Walt Disney company designed more than 1,000 combat insignia for use by every one of the branches of the US military and by other Allies too. It’s worth noting that by today’s standards, many of the characterizations on display in the book, especially of the Japanese, are racist and offensive. But we shouldn’t be afraid to take a look at illuminating illustrations that throw a spotlight on American sensibilities during the war and that also demonstrate how far we’ve come since then. In fact, in two of the book’s most extensive chapter introductions, Bernard discusses the shameful
A 78 RPM
An Everlasting Light for Dark Days
I
T WAS AN AGE WHEN December 25 invariably included a trip to church for the faithful to celebrate the birth of Christ some 2000 years ago in humble surroundings in Bethlehem. All over the Christian world, Protestants and Catholics filed into their chosen houses of worship. At Foundry Methodist Church in Washington, DC, in 1941, one of the faithful happened to be British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. He was visiting at the White House in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor to work out war plans with Franklin Roosevelt. “The President and I went to church together on Christmas Day,” Churchill wrote. “…Certainly there was much to fortify the faith of all who believe in the moral governance of the universe.” The music, led by the church choir, struck Churchill as particularly noteworthy, especially one song. He wrote that he “enjoyed singing the well-known hymns, and one, ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem,’ I have never heard before.” His lack of familiarity was understandable. “O Little Town” was an American piece, hardly known in Europe. The carol traced back to the December after America’s Civil War ended, when Episcopal minister Phillips Brooks made a pilgrimage to Bethlehem. He and his travel companions were in the
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internment of Japanese Americans and the troubling treatment of African Americans in compelling detail. Some of the material presented in these sections is particularly eye-opening, revealing that even in a time often seen as one of the nation’s proudest, the United States was nevertheless guilty of losing sight of the value and dignity of many of its own citizens. With predictably stunning production by Fantagraphics Books, from the beautifully printed and textured hardcover to the satisfyingly weighty interior paper stock, everything about this book proclaims its respect for the history it contains and demands that same respect from any reader lucky enough to obtain a copy. Cartoons for Victory celebrates the cartoons and comics of World War II with style and integrity. It’s a must-have volume for any aficionado of wartime or comics history or of American culture. A RNOLD T. BLUMBERG Baltimore, Maryland
holy city on Christmas Eve. “Before dark we rode out of town to the field where they say the shepherds saw the star,” he wrote. Back at the Philadelphia church where Brooks was pastor, he turned his memories of the stirring ride into a poem. It shaped up into four eight-line stanzas, and the latter half of the first stanza would coincidentally prove to be particularly appropriate for Christmas 1941: “Yet in thy dark streets shineth / The everlasting Light. / The hopes and fears of all the years / Are met in thee tonight.” The poem wasn’t made a song until 1868. As Christmas services approached that year, Brooks decided to give his scribbled lines to church organist Lewis Redner: “Lewis, why not write a new tune for my poem?” Redner accepted the task, but felt uninspired as the holy day neared. Then one night he awoke with a melody in his head. On December 27, in front of the congregation, six Sunday school teachers and thirty-six children sang Brooks’s words to Redner’s melody over organ accompaniment. Brooks named the tune “St. Louis”—with a wink toward Lewis—but most people called it “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Generations since have sung it enthusiastically, as Churchill did that morning in the Washington church, reading glasses on and hymnal in hand. More than one writer back then described his singing as more spirited and loud than good. Perhaps just right for a Christmas carol. C ARL ZEBROWSKI editor of America in WWII
THE
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www.WrightMuseum.org Wolfeboro, New Hampshire 603-569-1212 A Open May1–Oct.31
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DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA • Jan. 7, Washington: Battle of Bataan 75th Anniversary Commemoration at the WWII Memorial. Ceremony at the National World War II Memorial on the National Mall. 202-675-2017. www.wwiimemorialfriends.org Jan. 18, Washington: The Ghost Army. Talk by Rick Beyer, producer, writer, and director of the 2013 documentary The Ghost Army and co-author of the 2015 book The Ghost Army of World War II. 6:45–8:45 P.M. Smithsonian Institution, S. Dillon Ripley Center. www.smithsonianassociates.org KANSAS • Through Jan. 22, Montezuma: Infamy: December 7, 1941, and We Remember: Images from the National WWII Museum. Photo exhibits. Infamy features 62 panels with images of the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941. We Remember features 75 photos of World War II. Stauth Memorial Museum. 620-846-2527. www.stauthmemorialmuseum.org LOUISIANA • Dec. 21, New Orleans: Operation Market Garden. Lunchbox Lecture with Captain Rick Jacobs on the September 1944 Allied campaign in the Netherlands. Noon–1 P.M., H. Mortimer Favrot Orientation Center, National WWII Museum. 504-528-1944, ext. 463. www.nationalww2museum.org Through Dec. 26, New Orleans: A Vintage Christmas. Musical stage show by the Victory Belles, featuring WWII-era Christmas songs. Lunch and dinner performances, 11:45 A.M. and 6 P.M. See website for performance dates. BB’s Stage Door Canteen, National WWII Museum. 504-528-1943. www.nationalww2museum.org NEW YORK • Through Dec. 18, Fishkill: A WWII Radio Christmas. Holiday stage show simulating a WWII Christmas Eve radio show broadcast. Clove Creek Dinner Theater. 845-202-7778. www.clovecreekdinnertheater.com OREGON • Jan. 28–Sept. 4, Bend: WWII: The High Desert Home Front. Exhibit on wartime facilities and activities in the West’s sparsely populated High Desert, including military training; Civilian Public Service camps for conscientious objectors; Japanese American internment camps; farming with labor from internees, POWs, and volunteers; and nuclear weapons testing and production. High Desert Museum. 541-382-4754. www.highdesertmuseum.org PENNSYLVANIA • Jan. 25–29, Annville: Battle of the Bulge Living History Commemoration. Large-scale reenactment and living history event. Living history, vendors, and reenactment open to the public noon–5 P.M. on Saturday, January 28. Fort Indiantown Gap. Sponsored by World War II Historical Association.
[email protected]. www.wwiiha.org/new/index.php/fig TEXAS • Through Jan. 13, Fredericksburg: Norman Rockwell in the 1940s: A View of the Homefront. Traveling exhibit of Norman Rockwell’s WWII artwork. National Museum of the Pacific War. 830-997-8600. www.pacificwarmuseum.org VIRGINIA • Dec. 9–11, Bedford: Flames of Memory. Nighttime outdoor memorial illumination with luminaria honoring the 4,413 men killed on D-Day in Normandy, France, June 6, 1944. National D-Day Memorial. 800-351-DDAY. www.dday.org
national archives
CALIFORNIA • Jan. 26, Palm Desert: A British Teenager’s WWII Experience. Talk by Mick Dawson, a teen on England’s WWII home front who worked as an apprentice electrician for an American bombardment group. 7:30–9 A.M. during a meeting of the Old Bold Pilots organization. Clubhouse, Desert Willow Golf Resort. www.oldboldpilots.com/meetings The USS Bunker Hill, kamikaze target.
SUICIDE BOMBED Early on May 11, 1945, a Zero veiled by low clouds dove through Bunker Hill’s flight deck. Then came another. Look for our next exciting issue on print & digital newsstands February 7, 2017.
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A GIs
Witness to theWar’s End
phot o s c ourtes y of t he fAM ILy of co nrAd kIng
Connie King experienced the tragedy of war. He also experienced victory, and brought home souvenirs to prove it: a US Navy card vouching that he’d witnessed Japan’s surrender, and a flag he captured when the Japanese battleship Nagato surrendered (he’s the sailor at right in that photo).
“W
E REMEMBER P EARL H ARBOR ,” recalled Conrad “Connie” King. “It was like a load on our shoulders.” The load remained as he earned his diploma from Lake High School in western New York State and, in January 1943, Uncle Sam came calling. “When a letter appeared drafting a young man into the war, it was as if the Grim Reaper had placed a mark on their back,” he said. “War is the Reaper’s playground.” King hoped to have a say in how he served. “I told them I didn’t want to be in the army,” he remembered. “I didn’t want to be paddling around in the mud. I’d rather be on the ocean.” The government obliged, putting him in the navy and sending him to the Pacific aboard the battleship South Dakota (BB-57). Yeoman King suffered his most unforgettable experience of the war during the Battle of the Philippine Sea. On June 19, 1944, a Japanese bomb dropped into the middle of a 40mm gun station manned by King and seven others and exploded. “I remember looking up and then to my side,” King said. “All seven were dead,
except me…. I didn’t even have a scratch.” After another year of war, and the dropping of two atomic bombs, Japan gave up. The official surrender ceremony was held aboard the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945. South Dakota was tied up alongside her, giving King prime seating for the historic event. King was discharged from the navy in January 1946. Back home, he married his high school friend Betty, and they eventually had four sons. He went into the heating and sheet metal business with his father, running it until he retired and his sons took over. A Submitted by ABBY BLINN, a graduate student in Southern New Hampshire University’s military history program and a former intern at the Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, New York, where she worked with the veterans’ aid project Defenders of Freedom. A video interview of Connie King, who died at age 91 on February 19, 2016, can be viewed at www.defendersoffreedom.us.
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