1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  That should have finished Yorktown then and there but it didn’t. The venerable carrier seemingly refused to sink and Captain Buckmaster, marveling at her resilience, prepared to send another damage-control party aboard next morning. But by first light of dawn it was obvious that the list had increased to the point of hopelessness. By six A.M., June 7, the destroyer escorts had backed away and lowered their colors to half-mast while everyone stood at attention, many old-timers with tears in their eyes, as the big ship finally rolled over with all her battle flags still flying and slipped beneath the ocean waves with a cacophonous and bone-chilling roar.

  It had been eventful elsewhere, too. The day after the Japanese carriers had been sunk big Catalina flying boats from Midway began combing the waters in the battle area looking for downed pilots. They rescued several, including the rookie Ensign George Gay, who had been floating around for forty-five hours after witnessing firsthand from his wave-top vantage point the destruction of three of the carriers. When asked by doctors what he did to care for the bullet wound in his arm, Gay told them he had used “the salt water treatment.”

  Not only that, but another Catalina flying boat spotted two big Japanese cruisers about ninety miles from the island, and Spruance, who had by now steamed back in the area to cover Midway, launched an attack against them. These ships were traveling slow because they were both seriously damaged, having accidentally collided the night before after spotting a U.S submarine. The Enterprise’s dive-bombers finished the job—or nearly did, anyway: one of the cruisers was sent to the bottom and the other so badly wrecked it would take more than a year in dry dock for repairs.

  After the death of the Yorktown the U.S. Pacific Fleet headed back to Hawaii to savor their victory and ponder the lessons learned in the battle. One of these was the futility of sending torpedo bombers without a proper fighter escort against an enemy force that has full air cover. Another was the crucial role played by the code breakers, without which there would have been no Battle of Midway, or not much of one, in any event. Yet they had won a resounding victory. In exchange for 307 American lives and the loss of the Yorktown and 147 airplanes and most of their crews, the U.S. fleet had destroyed four Japanese carriers, along with 332 planes, a cruiser, and three destroyers, and killed 4,899 Japanese sailors.*

  On June 6 (EST) Americans were treated to newspaper headlines describing the battle and got the uplift they so badly needed. Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations, gleefully pointed out that this was the first decisive Japanese naval defeat since 1592. (The only downside for the navy men was the galling fact that newspapers throughout the land, including the distinguished New York Times, led with headlines that screamed “Army Fliers Blasted Two Fleets Off Midway.”) The mood was equally high at the White House, where Roosevelt’s aide Harry Hopkins, in a letter to the U.S. ambassador to Russia, proclaimed that the victory “may change the whole strategy of the Pacific. After all,” he added, “it is quite fun to win a victory once in a while. Nothing that I know of quite takes its place.”24

  The Japanese, for their part, quickly draped a cloak of secrecy around the affair. Having first announced publicly that the Japanese navy had annihilated the entire American fleet (prompting the usual victory parades in Tokyo and gloating commentary from Tokyo Rose) their navy proceeded to isolate all survivors of the Midway battle, including Commander Fuchida, who, with his broken ankles, was confined to a base hospital and not allowed contact with his family. Even the emperor was kept in the dark for several weeks, despite Yamamoto’s stern declaration: “I am the only one who must apologize to His Majesty.”

  Admiral Nagumo, precisely two years to the day from the Battle of Midway, committed hara-kiri on the island of Saipan to keep from being captured by American troops after the remainder of his fleet was sunk by the U.S. Navy.25 The Japanese never did figure out that they had come to grief largely because the Americans had been deciphering their naval code, which, ill advisedly, they still considered unbreakable.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It is timely now to revisit our redoubtable spy “Cynthia” (Amy Elizabeth Thorpe), she with the “explosive sexual charms.” It will be remembered from chapter three that during the year before Pearl Harbor Cynthia, an American, joined the British counterintelligence agency in Washington D.C., being run by the British master spy William Stephenson. There, she had managed to obtain the Italian naval code by seducing the Italian naval attache at the embassy in Washington. Now, in mid-1942, when America was fully into the war, Cynthia was given an even trickier assignment: obtain the Vichy French naval code in preparation for the planned U.S. British landings in French North Africa later in the year.

  The Vichy French were on high alert since the Roosevelt government was openly hostile to them and the embassy itself was within a hairbreadth of being booted out of the United States. Cynthia, posing as a newspaper reporter, managed to attract the attentions of the French press attache, Captain Charles Brousse, while waiting to interview the Vichy French ambassador. An affair followed, as Cynthia worked on Brousse’s patriotism and hatred of the Vichy French president, the wicked Pierre Laval. Slowly Brousse began to give Cynthia secret information—by now she had confided to him that she was an intelligence agent—but when she finally got around to asking for the naval code he was startled, and replied that it could not be done since only two people were allowed access to the code room; Brousse was not one of them.

  Undaunted, the two concocted a plan that must go down in the annals of espionage as one of its most innovative and irregular schemes. They appeared late one night at the French embassy when only the night watchman was on duty. Brousse explained to him that it was impossible to find a hotel room in Washington during wartime and, besides, it would not do for the French press attaché to be seen going into a hotel in the first place. And so would it be possible for the two of them to spend some time on the couch in one of the embassy’s first-floor drawing rooms? Frenchmen being Frenchmen, the guard was sympathetic; a generous greasing of his palm with a tip didn’t hurt, either.

  They used this ruse time and again until the watchman became accustomed to it (and to his tip). Then one night, just as the Battle of Midway began, Cynthia and Brousse arrived at the embassy in gay spirits and with a bottle of champagne, from which they naturally offered the watchman a glass. Just as naturally the champagne they gave him was drugged and in due time the guard was hors de combat. No sooner was this done than their “taxi driver” appeared. He was actually a skilled locksmith and second-story man working for Stephenson, and within a few hours he had managed to pick his way into the code room and crack the safe with the priceless Vichy naval code in it. Problem was, there was no time to take the codes out, get them copied, and return them before the possibility of their all being caught. They would have to do the whole thing all over again.

  This time Cynthia was worried; she sensed that the watchman was becoming suspicious and didn’t think the drugged-champagne trick would work a second time. So she conjured up a new plan for a few nights later. This time, when the watchman looked in on them, Cynthia was fully nude on the divan; the watchman quickly shut the door in embarrassment, leaving them to whatever it was they were doing. It was not, of course, what he expected, for Cynthia and Brousse immediately threw open a window and let in their taxi driver, who, having cracked the safe once before, now did it again quickly. They removed the naval codes and gave them to another of Stephenson’s agents waiting beneath the open window. He took the codes to a nearby safe house, where they were photostated and, within an hour, returned to the safe in the embassy code room with nobody the wiser. Next day the Vichy naval codes were being pored over by intelligence officers in London, with very useful results when the British-American invasion of French North Africa began four months later.1

  Meantime, let us also revisit the travails of Commander Columbus Darwin Smith, captain of the U.S.S. Wake at Shanghai, China, the first American to be taken prisoner of war by the Japanese. F
or the first month or so Smith was treated well—while he was a prisoner of the navy. When he was turned over to the Japanese army, however, which was responsible for all prisoners, things quickly changed. Along with the two thousand or so prisoners who had just arrived from the Wake Island battle, Smith was shipped upriver from Shanghai to a dingy prisoner-of-war camp at Woosung. “I had been treated as an officer by the Japanese naval authorities,” Smith remembered, “but the Japanese army treated us all as pigs, except they didn’t bother to fatten us up. We were living in the midst of the finest farming land in the world, but we never were given vegetables.”

  The behavior of the Japanese soldiers paralleled that in the Philippines: clubbing, bayoneting, beatings, starvation; the weather was freezing and they had scant clothes, especially the men from Wake, who arrived in tropical dress. It wasn’t long before Smith began planning an escape. His coconspirators were Commander John B. Woolley of the British navy, Commander Winfield Scott Cunningham, who it will be remembered had been in charge of the Wake Island base, and big Dan Teters, the former University of Washington football star who had been supervisor of construction on Wake.

  The escape problem was daunting: they would have to crawl through three hundred yards of sharp gravel to get through a barbed-wire fence electrified with 22,000 volts. They set about scrounging to make knee pads and stole a shovel with which to dig under the electric fence. They told no one else of their plan. On the night of March 10, 1942, they were ready. The men sneaked out of their barracks and past the Japanese guards, crossed the gravel, and reached the fence. Woolley with the shovel began scooping out a shallow hole under the wire and soon announced, “Here I go, boys.”

  “He lay flat and inched himself under the wire,” Smith remembered. “If even a button of his shirt touched that wire there would be a blinding flash and Woolley would be burned to a crisp.” The others followed, with only a two-inch clearance between them and instant incineration. The plan, as devised by Smith, who had lived in Shanghai for fourteen years and spoke Japanese, and Woolley, was to make their way to the Yangtze River, steal a sampan, and oar ten miles downriver to free Chinese territory. But when they neared the river, they met with what Smith declared was “the greatest enemy a seafaring man can ever meet. Fog!” It was so thick, Smith said, “that we could reach out a grab a handful of it.”

  After an hour of aimless floundering in the fog they finally reached the river, only to hear the voices of Japanese soldiers; they backed away about a hundred yards until they stumbled into a small abandoned outhouse, in which they decided to hide until the fog lifted. All night they stayed there, fog as heavy as ever, until about nine next morning when it finally lifted. They had decided to remain in the outhouse until nightfall, then continue with their plan, but this was not to be. A party of Chinese puppet soldiers, in Japanese employ, found them and at gunpoint marched them away. They had been told many times that the penalty for escape was beheading.

  Next day, after questioning, they were taken back to the POW camp and forced to reenact their escape, including crawling again under the deadly electric wire. Following this, they were trucked down to Shanghai to a torture chamber, where they would await their fate. Smith, fifty-one years old, was jammed into a ten-by-ten-foot cell that contained thirteen other prisoners, some of whom he knew, including the director of Standard Oil of China and the American president of the Shanghai National City Bank.

  “These men were as filthy as human beings could be,” Smith later recalled. “We were only given enough food to sustain life” and were forced to sit cross-legged on the floor all day without support for the back; “any man caught standing was beaten.” A man who became one of Smith’s best friends during this enforced-yoga ordeal was a Chinese murderer named Wang Lee, who took tender care of another cell mate, a man who stank horribly and lived under a blanket all day, moaning and picking chunks of flesh from his feet and sticking them onto the stone wall. He was a leper.

  Many of Smith’s cell mates were given the “water treatment,” a time-honored Japanese torture that often resulted in death. Smith described it this way: “They would roll up a bath towel into the form of a cone and place it firmly around his mouth and nose. Meanwhile they’d be filling a five-gallon can with water. They would add kerosene and urine to the water. They would pour this through the opening at the top of the cone and the victim had either to swallow or strangle. His belly would swell and then the guards would strike him sharply across the stomach with a light steel rod. Usually the man would lose consciousness. They had a sort of hoist and tackle in the rooms they used for giving the water treatment. They would hoist the man up by his heels and allow the water to drain out of him. As soon as he recovered consciousness they would repeat the dose. Sometimes they would hit him too hard with the steel rods and the stomach would burst. Two men who had been given the water treatment were thrown back into our cells. In each case the man was dead.”

  Every day Smith was stripped naked and taken to his Japanese inquisitors. They kept asking him over and over who had helped him escape; when he truthfully told them it was no one, his ordeal was prolonged. Smith was not given the water treatment himself but instead was given the “balance treatment,” that is, being forced to kneel for hours at a time on a steel plate in front of the interrogator with arms folded tight. If he lost his balance and put his hands out to catch himself, he was beaten, or used as a human ashtray. “The guards stood on either side of me, smoking,” Smith remembered. “While a man was being questioned the guards would put out their cigarettes on the man’s naked body when they had finished them. I have met and talked to forty-five prisoners who had to endure that. They averaged 200 to 400 burns each. The Japs never considered it torture, and were amazed when I told them I thought it a pretty awful thing to do.”

  There was also the “electric treatment,” consisting of applying electrically charged rods to a prisoner’s body and private parts, and the “hoist treatment” in which the prisoners were hoisted up until “their own weight wrenched their arms out of their sockets.” One of the Japanese interrogators Smith remembered as “the most vicious, cruelest man I have ever met. He had lived in America—had, in fact, graduated from Notre Dame. He had married a Japanese woman who was an American citizen. Their two daughters had attended the University of Southern California.”

  One day Smith and his companions were rounded up, stripped naked, handcuffed, and taken into a courtroom where their trial was to be conducted—on the ridiculous charge of “deserting from the Japanese army,” generally a capital offense.

  The military judge was a Japanese brigadier general. They were given a defense counsel who could not speak English, and when they complained they were provided with an interpreter, “but he knew no English either.” The verdict was a foregone conclusion; so, apparently, was the sentence, which with some relief surprised the three men: “Ten years of penal servitude.”

  Next morning they were taken to Shanghai’s Ward Road Jail, which with its 9,300 inmates was the largest prison in the world at the time and was reserved for the most dangerous and degenerate felons. No one had been known to escape from the Ward Road Jail, but Smith and his companions were about to give it a try. They arrived on June 8, 1942, the day after the Battle of Midway ended, and almost precisely the same time as the seductive Cynthia was writhing naked on her couch at the French embassy in Washington, half a world away.*2

  Cynthia wasn’t the only espionage agent at work in America. The week after the Midway battle a German submarine surfaced off the Long Island village of Amagansett, which is now part of the fashionable Hamptons, and disgorged four English-speaking German spies and saboteurs in a rubber boat. These men rowed to the beach, stripped off their uniforms,† and buried them in the sand along with half a dozen boxes of high explosives. Their mission was to blow up hydroelectric dams at Niagara Falls, several ALCOA aluminum plants, and the locks on the Ohio River near Cincinnati. A few days later a second German U-boat landed four more s
aboteurs at the now exclusive golfing community of Ponte Vedra, Florida, near Jacksonville. They were to bomb the Pennsylvania Railroad station at Newark and other important railroad connections and poison the water supply system for New York City. Then both teams were to meet up and continue bombing Jewish stores and public transportation terminals. It was the Nazis’ notion that this would spread fear and panic among the American population.

  From the beginning, the German sabotage plan began to unravel. First, the sub off Long Island was grounded on a sandbar. Next, as the saboteurs were burying their clothes and explosives, a young U.S. Coast Guardsman walking the beach noticed them and inquired what they were doing. The German headman informed him they were sailors whose ship had been sunk, but the Coast Guardsman was suspicious. The German, who was carrying more than $80,000 in U.S. cash, offered him a bribe and the young man took it. But instead of keeping quiet he reported the entire encounter to his superiors, who quickly returned to the spot and discovered the Germans’ cache. They in turn reported this to the FBI, which began a frantic manhunt for the fugitives, who by then had caught a train to New York.

  There, the team leader, one John Dasch, thirty-nine, who had grown up in America, got cold feet. He assumed that the Coast Guardsman had not fallen for his story and that if and when the FBI caught up with them they would be executed as spies. He was not far wrong. Dasch fretted over the situation for a few days, confiding to one fellow saboteur that he thought he should turn them all in and ask for mercy. The teammate agreed and Dasch caught a train to Washington and marched into FBI headquarters. At first nobody would believe his story until he produced the $80,000 in U.S. bills. After interrogation Dasch spilled the beans on the other members of his team and they were quickly rounded up by the authorities. He was also able to lead the FBI to the four members of the Florida team of saboteurs by offering up a contact list that was written in invisible ink on his handkerchief. They, too, soon found themselves in custody and it was only then that the would-be saboteurs’ presence in the United States was revealed to the media.