1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  Back on Bataan, command of the army had been turned over by MacArthur to his old friend General Wainwright, who had been told, “We’re alone, Jonathan, you know that as well as I. If I get through to Australia you know I’ll come back as soon as I can with as much as I can. In the meantime, you’ve got to hold.” As he left, MacArthur gave Wainwright a box of cigars and two large jars of shaving cream, and in thanking him Wainwright replied, “I’ll be here on Bataan if I’m alive.”34

  Skinny Wainwright was one of the most beloved soldiers in the army, and for good reason, as best expressed here by a young navy lieutenant who, without another job, had recently been selected to serve on Wainwright’s staff. One day during the height of a Japanese bombardment Wainwright decided to visit his front lines on Bataan. Japanese artillery shells were coming in at treetop level and exploding all around them and as soon as the jeep came to a halt the navy lieutenant and everybody else wisely dismounted and jumped into foxholes—all except for Wainwright, who had noticed a captain he had known back in Virginia.

  “He went over and took this captain by the arm and said, ‘How are you, Captain?’ and he sat on the sandbags with his back to the Japanese. We were all in the foxholes.” Wainwright sat there, patiently talking to the captain during the length of the Japanese bombardment, completely exposed to enemy shellfire. When it finally stopped, he got back into his jeep and set off for his headquarters.

  On the way back the navy lieutenant told him: “‘General, I am a lieutenant in the navy. I admit I do not understand your situation here. Do you realize sir, that you are loved by your men, you are in command here on Bataan, you are risking your life, and I don’t understand why? The men love you. They want you alive. Why do you expose yourself in the way you did a few minutes ago?’

  “He said, ‘Young man, you don’t understand what we have to give to our men. A general in the Army of the United States does his best to give his men arms and ammunition, food, medicine and recreation. We have none of those things. The men are starving. We are running out of ammunition. As you saw, they are dying. What can I give them? What can I do for my men? The only thing I can give them now is morale. My life is not worth as much as you think it is. I can give them morale and my presence on that front line is not the waste you think it is. When I sat on the sandbags, I did it deliberately. They want their general and they want to know he is here. I do that, and I do it for a good reason.”

  “I said, ‘Thank you, God bless you, I understand.’” So said the navy lieutenant, tears in his eyes.35

  Chapter Ten

  On the evening of February 23, 1942, just as President Roosevelt was about to broadcast one of his famous fireside chats, a large Japanese submarine appeared off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, and for about twenty minutes bombarded an oil field and refinery there. It was naturally big news on the West Coast, whose citizens expected an impending invasion, but for the rest of America the news had been so bad everywhere that the Santa Barbara shelling paled by comparison. Pearl Harbor was still fresh in everyone’s minds; since then the Japanese had taken Wake, Guam, Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, and Thailand and were successfully invading Burma, oil-and-rice-rich Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and New Guinea as well as hundreds of smaller islands in the southwest Pacific. The continent of Australia, which the Japanese had begun bombing the day of MacArthur’s arrival, seemed next on the list, in addition to New Zealand. The American situation in the Philippines seemed hopeless.

  On the other side of the world the German general Erwin Rommel was wreaking havoc on the British army in the North African deserts, and the Nazis, having occupied much of the Soviet Union, were poised on the doorsteps of Moscow and Leningrad and the tremendous battle for Stalingrad was about to begin.

  * * *

  Four days before the Japanese submarine shelled the California coast, President Roosevelt had signed an executive order, no. 9066, which subsequently came to be one of the most bitterly controversial orders ever issued by an American president, though it wasn’t considered at all controversial at the time. At the outbreak of war there were some five million people of German descent living in the United States, as well as five million of Italian lineage. Most of these were hardworking, law-abiding people, but some thousands (including numerous noncitizen aliens) were not, and these were rounded up as potential spies, saboteurs, and troublemakers and placed in internment camps.

  On the West Coast, however, there arose a thorny problem: what to do about the large colony of Japanese, citizens and noncitizens alike. As we have seen, the FBI and the military counterintelligence services had been intercepting secret Japanese communiques regarding the use of Japanese civilians in espionage work. Since the West Coast ports were now the jump-off points for the whole Pacific war, it was disturbing to know that they could be (and probably were being) watched with impunity by any number of unfriendly Japanese.*

  Just after Pearl Harbor the FBI—as they had with certain Germans and Italians—rounded up several thousand Japanese on the West Coast and in Hawaii who were suspected of enemy activity and put them in internment camps, where they remained until the end of the war. But that still left more than 100,000 Japanese or people of Japanese ancestry and it was here that the problem became sticky. Sixty years ago, America as a whole was far less tolerant than it is now. Blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Orientals, as well as Italians, Germans, and Eastern Europeans were often targets of racial or nationalistic slurs. The Japanese came in for particular malediction because they did not assimilate well into American culture; they tended to isolate themselves, forming Japanese clubs and other social organizations, and a few, in one degree or other, remained loyal to their emperor and homeland. They therefore immediately became a target of suspicion when America was attacked and a movement began to have them ejected from the West Coast states.

  Few Americans objected to this; even the American Civil Liberties Union demurred when asked to intervene after Roosevelt signed his now-infamous presidential order. From San Diego to Seattle, West Coasters had the war jitters. Not only were there news stories of enemy aircraft and ships operating in the area, there were rumors of every imaginable stripe. The possibility of a Japanese invasion was given widespread credence and it was even suggested by some in the military that the U.S. main line of defense should be the Rocky Mountains. Japanese civilians were treated with iciness and contempt and were repeatedly attacked in the streets—mostly by Filipinos, who resented the Japanese attack on their own country. Many Chinese were observed with handwritten signs attached to their persons, stating: “Chinese—not Jap.” U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson recorded that “anti-Japanese feeling had reached a level which endangered the lives of all such individuals; incidents of extra-legal violence were increasingly frequent.”*

  The presidential order itself did not, as many still believe, mandate that the West Coast Japanese be rounded up and thrown into “concentration camps.” What it did was allow military authorities to instruct the Japanese that they must evacuate certain excluded areas of the West Coast, including the western parts of Washington, Oregon, Arizona, and all of California and Alaska. They were free to do this on their own, and some ten thousand Japanese did, moving east toward they knew not what. But the remainder, about a hundred thousand, did not comply with this order. Some simply did not know where to go, did not speak English, did not have the money, or had other good reasons, such as businesses or farms to attend. Further complications arose when Japanese who were voluntarily relocating themselves received less than enthusiastic welcomes in other parts of the country.

  Within the month it became apparent that the volunteer evacuation was not working, so further orders were given by the Justice Department to physically relocate the West Coast Japanese. These orders stated: “No military guards will be used except when absolutely necessary for the protection of the evacuees. You will, to the maximum, provide assistance. For those who do not relocate themselves comfortable transportation will be provided to tem
porary assembly centers. Families will not be separated, medical care, nutrition for children and food for adults will be provided.” Once assembled, the Japanese were parceled out to ten War Relocation Centers in various far-western states from where, if they wished, they could still relocate voluntarily anywhere in the United States except back to the West Coast exclusion areas (about a third—more than thirty thousand—chose this option). The man selected by Roosevelt to be in charge of all this was Milton Eisenhower, brother of General Dwight D. Eisenhower.*1

  If the West Coast was infected with rumors of invasion and bombs (with the exception of the reality of the shelling by the Japanese submarine), citizens of the East Coast were experiencing a real-life nightmare. The Nazis had been taken with complete surprise by Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and though Hitler responded promptly by declaring war on the United States, the German navy was not prepared. This, however, was remedied in short order by Admiral Karl Donitz, the ruthless fifty-year-old commander of German submarines who, contrary to all treaties, rules, and customs of the sea, had ordered his U-boat commanders to machine-gun any survivors of merchant ships they sank on the theory that these men could not then be put back to sea.†

  It took Donitz until the first of January 1942 to reposition his submarines off the American coasts, but soon freighters, tankers, and other cargo ships began exploding at an alarming rate from New York to the Gulf of Mexico. More alarming was the fact that the U.S. military was almost totally unprepared to defend against this menace. In the scramble since war broke out, military services were clamoring for men and materiel of all kinds, but the sorts of planes, ships, and guns needed for antisubmarine warfare were in woefully short supply.

  One merchant seaman described the ordeal this way: “We was carrying fifty thousand barrels of Oklahoma crude and fifty thousand of high-test gasoline. It sure gives you a funny feeling. I thought we’d get it any minute. Man, those nights are killers! You sleep with your clothes on. Well, I don’t exactly mean sleep. You lie there in bed with your clothes on. All of a sudden the old engines slow down and your heart speeds up. Someone knocks on the door and you rise right up in your bed and seem to lie there in the air. So it turns out it’s only the watch. You settle down and try to light a cigarette if your hand don’t shake too much. Not that you’re scared of course. Oh nooooh!”2

  Soon beachgoers from Atlantic City to Miami were treated to the grisly souvenirs that washed ashore: oil slicks, clothing, bodies and parts of bodies. The press cried for solutions, but few were forthcoming. The military could muster only a handful of patrol planes, some of which were practically falling apart. The U-boats generally would lie by day on the ocean bottom outside such ports as Newark, New York, Norfolk, Jacksonville, Miami, or the mouth of the Mississippi River, then at night surface to conduct their grim work. Soon it became a massacre, of course, the merchant ships being unarmed. The Civil Air Patrol, a civilian group of airplane buffs, volunteered to run patrols but these generally were ineffective: their planes did not have the range to get out far and were not equipped to deal with a U-boat even if they spotted one. By the time word got back and military planes reached the area, the U-boat was long gone.

  The navy tried various measures to stop the slaughter but with limited success. It decreed that shipping would be suspended during daylight hours and the ships must come into harbors from the Chesapeake Bay to Jacksonville, Florida, and sail only at nighttime, when they would be harder to spot. With the days getting longer sometimes this was not possible, and the U-boats would surface brazenly in broad daylight and sink ships with little fear of being attacked themselves. A merchant sailor told his story of the sinking of the Empire, a Cities Service oil tanker, off Fort Pierce, Florida. “I was asleep when the torpedoes hit us—three of them. I rushed up on deck and helped get one of the lifeboats over the side. I saw our captain on a life raft. He and some of the other men were on it. The current was sucking them into the burning oil around the tanker. I saw the captain going into a sheet of orange flame. Some of the fellows said he screamed ... Monroe Reynolds was with me for a while. His eyes were burned. He was screaming that he was going blind. The last I saw of him he jumped into the fiery water. That was the finish of him, I guess.”3

  Hundreds of ships were being lost, many in plain view of shore where sunbathers from the Jersey Capes to Virginia Beach to Florida witnessed the horrifying spectacle of seeing large merchant ships explode before their very eyes. One of the most obvious defense measures was shamefully ignored until late spring of 1942. This was the dousing of shore lights, which would silhouette the merchant ships for the German submarines. Municipal and commercial interests from Atlantic City to Miami refused to turn off their glowing neon signs and waterfront lights on grounds that it would hurt their tourist business. The navy finally got around to ordering a total blackout in late April, but not before many ships were sunk and many sailors died. This was a puzzling attitude (many said flagrant selfishness) on the part of some Americans, who simply would not believe that the war could come directly to them.

  They were soon to find out, however—and in more ways than one. Many of the ships being sunk had cargoes of oil from the Texas and Oklahoma fields bound for the great refineries of New Jersey, or had come from South America or the Caribbean carrying sugar, coffee, or bauxite ore (used to make aluminum). Within a few months gas would be limited to fewer than five gallons per week, per family—hardly enough for a Sunday drive. Sugar and coffee were severely rationed and the supply of aluminum electric toasters, garbage cans, and pots and pans quickly dried up. During the six months from January of 1942 until July, some 380 merchant ships were sent to the bottom and several thousand seamen were lost. Clearly something had to be done.*

  Meantime, American life was changing so dramatically that people were stunned. Ten million men either enlisted or were inducted into the military. Businesses had to be sold or shut down because there was no one to run them. Dairy farms went out of business because there was no one to milk the cows. Circuses closed, HELP WANTED signs were posted everywhere but generally went unheeded. The most popular ditty of the day was:

  You’re in the army now;

  You’re not behind a plow;

  You’ll never get rich, you son-of-a-bitch

  You’re in the army now!

  Almost overnight manufacturing firms that had been turning out electric fans, bicycles, ovens, automobiles, zippers, eyeglasses, and the like, were converted to make guns, planes, tanks, trucks, jeeps, field glasses, canteens, and so on. Some twenty thousand industries were so converted. Others were begun from scratch, one being the giant Willow Run aircraft production plant near Detroit, Michigan, which was run by the Ford Motor Company. The Willow Run building was more than a mile long and a quarter mile wide and was expected at its peak to turn out a thousand B-24 medium bombers a day.† Fifty thousand people worked there, including a small army of midgets, many rounded up from circuses or Hollywood, who were useful in putting the finishing touches on hard-to-get-at places within the fuselages.

  Women flocked into the workplace in unprecedented numbers. By 1942 millions had left rural farming or mining communities to seek high-paying employment in munitions plants, shipyards, aircraft factories, or other war-related enterprises. “Rosie the Riveter” became a staple image for posters extolling the virtues of defense work. A concomitant problem quickly became how to house all these newcomers. Home owners took up some slack, living in one or two rooms and renting out the rest. The federal government tried to build dormitories and even some shabby types of houses,* but they lagged far behind and people shared what sleeping quarters they could find by working and sleeping in shifts or living in cars, tents, and trailers. Blacks were especially hard put, for white owners would generally not rent to them under any circumstances. By this time, though, the Rosie the Riveters were making more money than they had ever imagined possible; they met and married servicemen from every state in the Union and soon enough it was becoming clea
r that the face of America was changing forever.

  At army and navy training posts the atmosphere was chaotic. On paper there was now a huge American army, but it was training with broomsticks for rifles and stovepipes for mortars and stumbling all over itself on the drill fields. Many officers were simply deadwood—the old “brown shoe army”—and others were green and barely trained themselves. A stark reminder of the Great Depression was that 40 percent of the men who went before their draft boards were rejected for physical reasons: hernias, tuberculosis, dropsy, venereal disease, lack of teeth, flat feet, sight problems. Two million were rejected by psychiatrists. The building of military camps and bases was often scandalous, marked by contractors’ shoddy work, price gouging, and fraud. Residents of towns nearby were frequently disagreeable, putting signs in storefronts such as “No Dogs or Soldiers Allowed.” Beer halls and nightclub strips sprang up almost overnight, as if by wicked magic. Also, not all the women who joined the war effort went to work in munitions factories. “Girlie Trailers” filled with prostitutes quickly appeared on the scene. In Norfolk, Virginia, the police chief demanded that the federal government provide him with “a concentration camp large enough to handle two or three thousand women.”4

  Especially in the South, where Jim Crow laws were in effect, there was tension between white and black soldiers. Because of the milder climate, many of the new military bases had been built there, but when northern black soldiers arrived in southern states they found that they were segregated into separate units and usually given menial tasks. Their mess halls were separate and they even heard via the Negro press that the Red Cross was segregating black and white blood. There were rumors of lynchings and various incidents such as the black MP who was shot by a white civilian policeman. And it wasn’t just in the South, either; riots broke out at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and people were killed. Japanese propagandists were quick to seize on this strife; shortly after a Mississippi lynch mob burned to death a black man, the Japanese were broadcasting the news worldwide in an attempt to disaffect black Americans from whites.5