1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  Nevertheless, war or not, the old ways still gripped the southland. Senator John Bankhead, Alabama Democrat, wrote to U.S. Army chief of staff General Marshall: “Our people feel that the government is doing a disservice to the war effort by locating Negro troops in the South in immediate contact with white troops at a time when race feeling among the Negroes has been aroused and when all the energies of both the whites and blacks should be devoted to the war effort.” If, “as a result of political and social pressure,” black soldiers must be trained in the South, Bankhead continued, “can’t you place Southern Negro soldiers there, and place the Northern Negro soldiers in the North, where their presence is not likely to lead to race wars?”6

  Meantime, all kinds of “win the war quick” schemes were being hatched by inventors and innovative people far and wide. There was the inevitable so-called death ray, which had been proposed as far back as World War I. One man even got so far as to hold a demonstration of his death ray before a group of army officers in rural Maryland, where he proposed to kill a herd of sheep grazing on a hillside. The death ray was turned on, the sheep were unaffected, and the inventor packed up his death ray and went back to the drawing boards.

  A Pennsylvania dentist named Adams became convinced that bats could be used to carry small incendiary devices to ignite the paper-and-wood cities of Japan and persuaded President Roosevelt that this was feasible. Accordingly, Adams and a Harvard biologist named Griffin went to Carlsbad, New Mexico, wherein lived some ten million Mexican free-tailed bats and captured five hundred of them in nets. Unfortunately, it was found that these bats could not carry enough payload of incendiary bombs, and there the matter might have rested. But once government bureaucracy sets into motion it is, as proven time and again, hard to stop. Larger bats from Central America were tried, but they were temperamental and did not work well either. Not to be deterred, the Marine Corps leased four huge caves in California and four others in Texas to collect more bats, each site classified as top secret and manned by armed guards. In the end, the project was canceled, but not before the government spent some $2 million ($20 million in today’s dollars) on research and bat collection.

  One of the most curious schemes was the Dog Army, proposed by a Swiss citizen named William A. Prestre, a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico. He managed to persuade the Pentagon to lease an entire island, named, of all things, Cat Island, lying in the Mississippi Sound, just south of Gulfport and not far from New Orleans.* There Prestre, aided by hundreds of U.S. Army troops, hoped to train—just for starters—an army of 40,000 large attack dogs. (The government had already put out a call for 125,000 dogs, but Prestre estimated that with some sixteen million dogs available in the United States a much vaster army of up to two million dogs could be organized once the kinks were worked out.)

  Prestre’s underlying thesis was that, with the Japanese now holding so many Pacific islands, large forces of infantry would have to be employed to invade and eject them. But what about this: when the hundreds of landing craft began streaming into the beaches of one of these enemy islands, and their ramps flopped down, instead of disgorging thousands of marines or soldiers they would instead disgorge tens of thousands of vicious dogs, who would race across the beaches and attack the horrified Japanese at their machine guns and mortars.

  Prestre worked it all out carefully, as one Private Harold House, a former dog trainer, testified before an army board: “Each dog was to be trained to kill Japanese only. The greyhounds were to lead the attack because of their speed, followed by the wolfhounds, who would aid in the confusion, after which the Great Dane packs were sent out as the main killers. Chesapeake Bay Retrievers were to be trained for beach landings.” Bloodhounds and other tracking dogs would be used for mopping-up operations.

  The first problem encountered was how exactly to train a dog to kill only Japanese. Accordingly, discussions began within army circles of how to acquire Japanese persons, with their particular looks and scent, to be trained on as “bait.” Someone suggested using Japanese prisoners of war but, as we have seen, the Japanese did not surrender and thus there were no Japanese prisoners of war. Next, they considered using Japanese aliens, “preferably without families in this country.” But that too was rejected on grounds that it “might cause adverse public sentiment.” Finally it was decided that twenty-five Japanese-American enlisted men and three officers from a U.S. Army post in Wisconsin would be sent as “volunteers” to the Cat Island project.

  The Japanese-Americans performed splendidly; the dogs did not. Wearing big padded suits and hockey gloves, the Japanese subjected themselves to being sicced on, over and again. An army report stated that “although their part in the entire project is distasteful,” and while “several of them have been bitten severely ... [they] continue the training without complaint.”

  The problem, though, was the dogs themselves—and Prestre himself, too, who, according to Private House’s testimony, “did not know dogs or how to handle them.” (Prestre had decided to use large French horns to incite the dogs to charge across the beaches, but these seemed only to confuse them.) It was also discovered that shellfire terrified most of the dogs, with the result that they became uncontrollable. Others were, well, just docile. In the event, after millions of dollars had been wasted, the Dog Army idea was abandoned as being incompatible with reality and Prestre returned to Santa Fe, but not before a “K-9 Corps Marching Song” was composed by the dog editor of the New York Sun.”*7

  While MacArthur’s army was beginning the fight for its life on Bataan, a daring and uplifting enterprise was gathering shape in Washington. It became the stuff that myths are made of.

  Ever since Pearl Harbor, everyone and his brother had been wracking his brain trying to come up with some plan that would provide the Japanese a setback. But every idea had been nixed for one reason or another, and the Japanese octopus continued to crawl all over the Pacific. One bright and potentially successful idea had been to put big U.S. B-17s in Vladivostok, in the Soviet Union, only six hundred miles from Tokyo, and bomb Japan from there. When Roosevelt asked Stalin for permission, however, he was rebuffed—“Uncle Joe” was already deep in war with Germany and didn’t want to provoke Japan, too. Then one cold January day a month after the war began, as brilliant ideas so often do, a lightbulb clicked on over the head of a certain navy captain named Francis “Frog” Low, who was in Norfolk to report on the navy’s newest carrier, Hornet, which had just undergone her sea trials.

  Low was waiting on the runway for his plane to take him back to Washington when he looked out the window and noticed that on an adjacent runway the outline of a huge aircraft carrier flight deck was painted on the surface. This was so that navy carrier pilots-in-training could practice-land there without the possibility of wrecking the deck of a real carrier. As Low’s plane took off he suddenly saw two big army bombers coming in on the runway with the carrier deck painted on it. For Low it was like the tale of Isaac Newton conjuring up the law of gravity after being hit on the head by a falling apple.

  A carrier operation against the Japanese mainland had been contemplated and dismissed because, unlike the Americans at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were sure now to be on full alert and, with the types of smaller planes the carriers bore, they could never get close enough—not enough fuel range, not enough bomb power—to do any damage. But bombers, Captain Low suddenly wondered—army bombers, with their big payloads and fuel capacity ... It had never been done, but it might just work.

  When he got back to Washington Frog Low went to see his boss, Vice Admiral Ernest J. King, who had replaced Admiral Stark as chief of naval operations and commander of the U.S. fleet.* King, a hard-drinking, hard-boiled, no-nonsense sailor, “more feared than loved,” was receptive to the notion. “That might be a good idea,” he told Low, adding that he should study it further and get back to him.

  The carrier people were skeptical. Bombers, they said, might take off from a carrier but they could not return because of too-fast la
nding speeds, among many other problems. Large bombers had wingspans too great to fit on a carrier or needed too much takeoff footage. Then, after studying the specs, somebody came up with a plane—the B-25. It was possible, just possible, and the beauty of it was that the B-25s could be launched beyond the range of Japanese fighter-bombers to retaliate. When Low informed Admiral King of this, King said, “Go see General Arnold about it, and if he agrees with you, ask him to get in touch with me. But don’t mention this to another soul.”8

  General “Hap” Arnold—so known because of his smiling disposition—was the nation’s chief air officer; only a month earlier he had recalled from civilian life one of America’s most famous pilots—right up there with Lindbergh and Eddie Rickenbacker. His name was James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle, a man who, so far, had led a charmed life. Arnold had promoted him to colonel and made him his troubleshooter, and when Low and his team approached the commanding general with their proposal for a joint army-navy attack on Japan, Arnold immediately sent for Doolittle. It was a brilliant decision, for Doolittle was the epitome of a can-do man and the very idea of the ubiquitous interservice rivalries was anathema to him. They got down to planning right away, cloaked in a dense fog of secrecy.

  The forty-five-year-old Doolittle was an old man relative to the young men who would serve as his flight crews. But few U.S. Army Air Corps officers had anything like Doolittle’s experience. He grew up in a somewhat impoverished broken home in Alaska and—at only five feet, four inches—gained an almost impeccable record in his youth as a professional boxer. Always mechanically minded, Doolittle entered the University of California in hopes of becoming a mining engineer, but World War I interrupted and he found himself in the fledgling army air corps piloting fighter planes. Planes soon became his passion—not just flying them but everything about them. He earned master’s and doctorate degrees in aeronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and applied his knowledge to achieve a number of firsts in aviation. He was the first, in 1927, to perform the dangerous—and then deemed impossible—“outside loop.” Two years later he became the first pilot ever to “fly blind,” using only instruments from takeoff to landing, wearing a bag over his head. This experiment basically defeated the problem of flying in fog, which had killed so many pilots. Not only that, Doolittle was celebrated worldwide as a famous racing pilot, holding several transcontinental records. Hap Arnold had described him as “absolutely fearless.”9

  In 1930 Doolittle resigned from the army and, during the Great Depression, made a small fortune as an official of the Shell Oil Company’s aviation section. That was where Hap Arnold found him a few days after Pearl Harbor and asked him to return to duty. At an age when most people are looking forward to retirement, little did the former bantamweight boxer realize that before it was over he would find himself commanding three major U.S. air forces—in North Africa, Italy, England, and the Pacific—win the Congressional Medal of Honor, and be promoted to full general. But first came the famed Tokyo Raid, renowned in books and movies.

  The strategy that evolved would utilize two aircraft carriers, the Hornet for the bombers and the Enterprise to provide fighter cover in case the Japanese discovered them. They would sneak across the Pacific using essentially the same northern route the Japanese had taken on their way to Pearl Harbor five months earlier. About five hundred miles off the coast of Japan, the bombers would launch and, barreling in right on the deck, bomb military installations, oil refineries, and factories in Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, and Kobe. Meantime, the carriers, after launching, would come about and steam full speed back toward Pearl Harbor, while the bombers would continue southwestward across the China Sea to airstrips in the Nationalist part of China, which would have been prepared for them in advance. It was, in effect, a variation on Yamamoto’s original suicide mission against Pearl Harbor, without the suicide part of the plan.

  April 18, 1942, was selected as launch date; data from U.S. submarines operating off Japan, specially equipped for weather observations, indicated this would be the ideal date as clear skies were expected over Tokyo. Only sixteen bombers could fit on the Hornet, and these had to be lashed to the flight deck because they were too big to fit on the hangar-deck elevators. The planes would have to be specially modified for the mission, most importantly to conserve fuel. The takeoff would be on Saturday evening; Doolittle would lead the raid, or so he thought, dropping incendiaries over Tokyo in order to guide the following bombers in.

  There wasn’t much time for gathering and training crews. Finding them was a problem in itself. After much consideration it was determined that the men and planes of the Seventeenth Bombardment Group in Pendleton, Oregon, were the most suitable for the mission because of their flying experience—especially over water. They were told only that “volunteers were needed for an extremely hazardous mission.” Almost to a man, the Seventeenth Bombardment volunteered and were told to report to Eglin Field, a navy flying facility in the Florida panhandle that met Doolittle’s specifications for isolation and secrecy. When they got there, the eighty men were assembled by Doolittle and told again that they would be volunteering for an exceptionally dangerous mission and that anyone could drop out “for whatever reason and nothing would ever be said about it.”* No one did, “but one young man raised his hand and asked if I would give them more information. I told them they might guess why they were doing certain things, but the entire operation was top secret and they were not even to discuss their guesses among themselves.”10

  For these young pilots, the training they were put through was both startling and difficult. The normal takeoff speed of a B-2S was around a hundred miles per hour on a mile-long runway. Now they were being asked to jerk the thing off the ground in less than five hundred feet at fifty miles per hour—near stalling speed—which, Doolittle observed, “took some courage and was very much against their natural instincts.” The crews had barely a month to train, practicing takeoffs, gunnery, and low-level bombing. With only two weeks to go, Doolittle himself got a scare when he discovered that Hap Arnold had not expected him to lead the mission, only to organize it. In Washington to give General Arnold a progress report, Doolittle “launched into a rapid-fire sales pitch” about why he should be in charge of the raid. Finally Arnold seemed to give in. “All right Jim. It’s all right with me if it’s all right with Miff [Brigadier General Millard F. Harmon, Arnold’s chief of staff].

  “I smelled a rat so I saluted, about faced, and ran down the corridor to Miffs office,” Doolittle said.

  “‘Miff,’ I said breathlessly, ‘I’ve just been to see Hap about the project I’ve been working on and said I wanted to lead the mission. Hap said it was okay with him if it’s okay with you.’”

  “Miff was caught flat-footed, which is what I intended. He replied, ‘Well, whatever is all right with Hap is certainly all right with me.’”

  Doolittle closed the door just in time to hear Arnold’s voice on Harmon’s intercom. “But Hap,” Harmon said plaintively, “I just told him he could go.”11

  On April Fools’ Day, the planes and crews arrived in San Francisco after hedge-hopping across the country. Gigantic cranes swung out and loaded the big army bombers onto the flight deck of the Hornet, where the astonished and uninformed sailors began lashing them down. At noon, April 2, 1942, the Hornet task force, Doolittle included, cruisers and destroyers first, then the Hornet herself, steamed westward out of San Francisco Bay. By late afternoon, when they were out of sight of land, the skipper, Captain Marc Mitscher, sent a signal to all ships: “This force is bound for Tokyo.” Within moments great cheers began to rise toward the darkening Pacific skies.12

  Chapter Eleven

  While Doolittle was still training his fliers back in Florida, one of the worst sea disasters thus far in history befell the Allies in the southwest Pacific.

  When the American admiral Thomas Hart took his small Asiatic Fleet south to avoid destruction in the Philippines, he linked up with forces of the Dutch, Br
itish, and Australian navies. You could hardly call a fleet of nine cruisers and eleven destroyers ragtag but, considering that they had never trained together, the language problems involved, and that the Japanese had a fleet of six aircraft carriers and superior numbers of cruisers and destroyers operating in the region, it was not the ideal striking force, either. But strike it did.

  In what would come to be known as the Battle of the Java Sea, and its sequel the Battle of Sunda Strait, practically all of this combined Allied force ended up at the bottom of the ocean with a terrific loss of life, including its commanding officer, Rear Admiral K.W.F.M. Doorman, Royal Netherlands Navy. This also signified a dismal end to the U.S. Asiatic Fleet and her flagship, U.S.S. Houston, which went down with 632 men. All these ships fought with inspiring bravery against bad odds. The Houston certainly went down fighting; it took four to six torpedo hits, three full salvo hits, eleven individual shell hits, and various other damage to sink her, but not before the Houston’s crew had fired up “every bit of ammunition they had, even starshell, until it was expended,” her skipper was killed, and the entire engine-room crew scalded to death by steam.1

  What had caused this awful misadventure? First, one would have to suggest, was the almost total Japanese control of the air over the Java Sea. Japanese scout planes not only located the Allied ships and forewarned their fleets, but those fleets could send aircraft to bomb and torpedo the Allies. Second was the Japanese supremacy in surface-ship torpedo warfare. In the period between the wars the Japanese had developed a destroyer-launched, oxygen-powered torpedo that was twenty nine and a half feet long and two feet around with a 1,250-pound explosive charge; it ran at fifty miles per hour and was accurate at more than a mile.* It was called the Long Lance. Moreover, the Japanese navy had for years generously expended live torpedoes in maneuvers and on practice targets and had worked out all the kinks.