1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  The Roosevelt administration immediately ordered a military tribunal to try them, the first such body convened since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The evidence was overwhelming; six of the eight Germans were given the death penalty, and Dasch (who for some reason had been expecting a hero’s reward) and his accomplice received thirty years to life at hard labor and were lucky to get that. On August 8, 1942, the six German spies were shown into the death chamber at the Washington, D.C., jail, where they were escorted, one after the other, to the electric chair.*

  By now, halfway into the first year of war, Americans were learning to accommodate themselves to new realities. For the first part of the century nearly all middle-class families had at least a servant or two. Now virtually all the servants had gone off into war work or the military and the ladies of the house had to learn to cook their own suppers and make their own beds and wash their own dishes and clothes and answer their own doors. Owing to the fuel oil crisis brought on by the German submarine war along the East Coast, many families found themselves living in only two or three rooms and closing off the rest for lack of heating. The Roosevelt administration instituted daylight saving time “for the duration,” in order to conserve electricity and fuel. With rationing of heating fuels, many restaurants, bars, schools, department stores, and other businesses had to reduce their hours of operation, a further inconvenience.

  Colleges, high schools, even grade schools were undergoing dramatic changes in curriculum. Before the war elemental math problems were couched in terms such as, “If a man is running at such and such a speed, and stops to rest for fifteen minutes each five miles, how long does it take . . .?” or, “If a car is heading cross-country from Detroit to Denver at 50 mph ....?” Now questions were posed differently, such as, “If an airplane is flying at 200 mph with headwinds of SO mph, and uses 20 gallons of fuel a minute, how long would it take . . .?” Subjects such as trigonometry (used in calculating artillery firing tables), mechanical drawing, geometry, physics, chemistry, and other sciences useful to the war effort were emphasized. Boys were encouraged to enter technical training schools and take up such subjects as metallurgy and engine mechanics; girls were encouraged to go into nursing. Medical schools cut their graduation requirement for doctors from four years to three.

  Whereas in 1940 only 7 percent of American production had gone into making war materials, by mid-1942 nearly 50 percent did so.3 Immediately after Pearl Harbor the isolationists had shut up, at least most of them; and now instead of America First rallies in public arenas there were victory rallies, complete with orchestras and other entertainments, and of course the inevitable war-bond sales. Few people spoke of “defense”; they spoke instead of “victory.” So-called canteens began opening up all over the country, the most famous being the Stage Door Canteen in New York City, where servicemen could go and mingle with Broadway stars. The one in Los Angeles was even more sought after, since a soldier or sailor could visit in hopes of bumping into Hollywood stars such as Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, or Bette Davis serving sandwiches and hot coffee.

  There were “drives” for just about everything. Throughout the country women lugged their aluminum pots and pans down to fire stations and other designated collection points, since well-meaning authorities had announced that these things were needed in the construction of warplanes. And there it piled up because the type of aluminum used in cooking utensils is no good for making airplanes, and soon it was simply sold to scrap dealers, who sold it back to the pots-and-pans people, who sold it back to the women who had donated it in the first place. Rubber was another much sought after item in the drives, but its value to the war effort was real, since the Japanese, by taking Malaya, had cornered most of the world’s rubber supply. Women donated their rubber girdles and garters, Congress coughed up the rubber mats around its spittoons, and automobile owners forked over their rubber floor mats. A Hollywood studio even donated the giant rubber squid used in the hit underwater movie Reap the Wild Wind. All in all, a spirit of unity and determination predominated across the land.4

  Hollywood, however, was not quite sure what to make of the situation. Before the war, and during its first few months, the studios had released a number of passionate anti-Axis films that were generally well received. Many of these became known as “flag-wavers,” because at the end of such films there would be a cut to a big American flag with patriotic music playing in the background and, after Pearl Harbor, the ever-present pitch to buy war bonds. But when the reality of war began to sink in, Hollywood producers started to realize that what Americans really wanted were so-called escapist movies: musicals, comedies, and the like, and so began to make these, many of them with South American themes, featuring samba and rumba singers with a lot of fruit on their hats, such as Carmen Miranda. This was to encourage a sort of “hands across the sea” relationship with nations of the Southern Hemisphere, most of which had not yet declared their allegiances to one side or the other. One movie that filled both bills was the Academy Award—winning classic Yankee Doodle Dandy, featuring a stellar performance by James Cagney as the patriotic song composer George M. Cohan from the World War I era, with the hit songs “You’re a Grand Old Flag” and “Over There.” Another was the hit This Is the Army, featuring popular wartime numbers by Irving Berlin.

  Reviving an old World War I custom, mothers were encouraged to stick colored tinsel stars on the windowpanes near their front doors: blue for sons who had joined the military services and, sadly, gold if they had been killed in action.

  By mid-1942 many well-known movie stars had joined the fighting forces, such as James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Clark Gable, Robert Cum-mings, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Robert Montgomery, and even Sabu, the Jungle Boy. Cowboy actor Wayne Morris became a pilot and was credited with downing six Japanese planes; Stewart left the air force as a colonel and Montgomery commanded a destroyer during the Normandy invasion. Even Gable flew at least one bombing mission before being put on troop entertainment duty. Hollywood women played their parts, too; in addition to USO and canteen duties they traveled the country appearing at war bond rallies, raising tens of millions of dollars. Carole Lombard, Gable’s wife, died in a plane crash returning from one of these rallies in 1942. Bob Hope got up an entertainment troupe to tour overseas. Many sports figures joined up as well, including baseball’s Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio and boxing’s champ Joe Louis. Professional football and baseball continued throughout the war but at a much-reduced quality of play.

  By this time the radio and recording industries had chipped in their two cents also, with such wartime favorites as “Yokohama Mama,” “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” “Pistol Packin’ Mama,” “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me),” “The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B,” as well as novelty songs such as “You’re a Sap Mr. Jap” and Spike Jones’s immortal “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” which sold a lot of records but was not airable at the time, owing to the song’s recommendation of what should be done in the Fuhrer’s face. Bandleader and composer Glenn Miller’s “American Patrol” became a great hit, especially after Miller, who had joined the U.S. Army Air Corps, was killed over the English Channel. But the greatest hit of all in 1942 was a tune from the musical comedy Holiday Inn, called “White Christmas,” sung by Bing Crosby.

  In the meantime, unpleasant things had begun to brew in the South Pacific. The Japanese army, despite their navy’s horrendous defeat at Midway in the central Pacific, still had designs on Australia and New Zealand, desiring to keep the Americans out of their newly won gains in the South Pacific area. To that end they decided to construct and fortify a series of air bases in the southern Solomon Islands from which they could bomb with land-based planes all U.S.-occupied territory and sea-lanes from Samoa to New Caledonia. This, coupled with the planned occupation of Port Moresby, New Guinea,* would give the Japanese control over the Coral Sea as well, and preface an invasion of Australia itself, as well as New Zealand. Clearly, this would de
prive the Americans and their allies of any staging base in the South Pacific from which they could plan to eject the Japanese from their recent conquests.

  The dire news about Japanese intentions in the Solomons was first conveyed to the Allied authorities in early May 1942 by Australian “coast watchers,” operating from the dark and dank interiors of the six-hundred-mile-long eerie and remote island chain.

  Guadalcanal was discovered in 1568 by the young Spanish explorer Mendana, who had set out from Peru on a quest for the fabled gold mines of King Solomon. When his fleet reached the islands he found no gold but instead throngs of ferocious cannibals and headhunters, who welcomed him with a shower of stones and spears to celebrate their being “discovered.” After chasing away most of these natives with his rudimentary European firearms, Mendana’s men replenished their stores by carrying off the natives’ pigs and other foodstuffs and burning their grass-hut villages before sailing away in disgust—but not before Mendana named the island chain the Solomon Islands, as a tribute, gold or no, to King Solomon, and one of his lieutenants christened the big island they had just left Guadalcanal, after his hometown in Valencia.

  The Solomons were then forgotten for the next two hundred years; the British even erased them from their charts on the dubious theory that they never existed in the first place. A French expedition finally visited the islands in 1767 and the British twenty years later, but nobody could find any use for them and the various explorers sailed off in search of happier landings. But by the mid-nineteenth century a use had developed: coconut farming. The coconut was to the economy of the Pacific what the Shmoo was as illustrated in cartoonist Al Capp’s fabulous comic strips of the 1940s: it became almost all things to all men. Nothing was wasted; no less than fifty different products are derived from the coconut palm, from soap to oil to furniture wood, sandals, hats, butter, yarn, insulation, doormats, preservatives, vinegar, glycerin, rope, tea, fiberboard, charcoal, lamp shades, milk, medicines, dyes, fans, and brooms.

  The beauty of it was that the coconut grows naturally and quickly in the equatorial Pacific, requiring little or no tending, except to keep the jungle vines off it. The main drawback with establishing coconut plantations on Guadalcanal and the rest of the Solomons was the native people, who remained fiercely opposed to intrusions by white men (or anybody else, for that matter) and were ready to back it up. Many well-meaning missionaries and geological expeditioners were killed (and presumed eaten); in the 1850s a wealthy Australian entrepreneur who sailed to Guadalcanal in his private yacht with the idea of establishing his own nation for the purpose of coconut growing was attacked by the natives and roasted alive.

  At the turn of the nineteenth century Great Britain declared a protectorate over the Solomons and slowly established small outposts on coastal harbors, aided by England’s giant Lever Bros. Corporation, which went into the coconut plantation business for the coconut copra, used to make soap. The remaining cannibals and headhunters retired sullenly into the interior jungles to do their thing, and thus the Solomons remained, until the outbreak of World War II, when the Japanese arrived. The Japanese were not as benevolent as their white counterparts, who had been evacuated hastily back to Australia. They began by promising the islanders a share in their Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere but what the natives got instead was rude and brutal treatment from the Japanese soldiers, forced labor, and confiscation of their food and meager belongings whenever a Japanese wanted them.5

  Naturally this did not endear the Japanese to the Solomon Islanders, of which there were ten thousand to fourteen thousand on Guadalcanal alone, and they responded, at least some of them, by actively warring against their new oppressors. Of these, the natives who did the most good were those recruited by the aforementioned Australian coast watchers, as bold and persevering a band of fighters as have ever lived. The coast watcher system had been set up during World War I, using coconut planters, postmasters, district officers, and others to report any enemy activity in their areas. Problem was, communications were so primitive then that by the time the information reached Australian headquarters it was usually too late to be useful.

  By the time war broke out in the South Pacific in 1942, however, the coast watchers were equipped with powerful radio transmitters* so that intelligence could be reported almost instantaneously. Thus, the coast watchers and their native scouts operated all along the hundreds of miles of islands stretching from Bougainville in the north, through New Georgia and Santa Isabel southward, to Florida Island, Malaita, and Guadalcanal. From their jungle hiding places along the mountainous coasts, the coast watchers could report the number, type, and direction of Japanese war-planes or warships departing the big Japanese bases at Rabaul and the Shortlands, providing the Allies with vital, timely warning as to what the Japanese had in store for them, and when. The importance of this information with respect to the Battle of Guadalcanal cannot be overstated. Coast watchers, or their native scouts and bearers, if caught, were summarily executed by the Japanese.

  The first move the Japanese made, in May 1942, was to establish a seaplane scouting base at Tulagi, a tiny island about twenty miles northeast of Guadalcanal, separated by what became known as the Slot, a six-hundred-mile-long north-south patch of ocean dividing the two parallel chains of islands. Tulagi had been the British-Australian Solomon Islands commercial and administrative capital, consisting of a row of Chinese shops, a hotel, wharves and packaging plants, the district office, a cricket pitch, a golf course, soccer and rugby fields, and other things Anglophilic. On his way to the Battle of the Coral Sea Admiral Fletcher had sent planes to bomb the new Japanese installations at Tulagi but they did minimal damage. MacArthur from his headquarters in Australia sent B-17s but they fared little better.

  Then in July 1942, coast watchers reported the Japanese landing troops on Guadalcanal itself, followed shortly by more troops, heavy construction equipment, and laborers, who began hacking an airfield out of the coconut plantations on the island’s north shore.*6 They came with bulldozers and trucks and even built a small narrow-gauge rail line for hauling fill and coral to be crushed for the runway’s surface. This news alarmed the U.S. Pacific Fleet back at Pearl Harbor, because it was evident that if the Japanese got the air base up and running, all shipping in the area would be in constant peril. So at the beginning of July of ’42, Nimitz ordered Vice Admiral Robert L. Ghormley, commander of the South Pacific Area, to draw up plans for an invasion and occupation of Guadalcanal, Tulagi, and the Santa Cruz Islands. This was named Operation Watchtower, a prelude to taking back all of the Solomons and the Bismarck Archipelago, including the vast Japanese staging area at Rabaul. It would be America’s first offensive of the war, and the first of the Pacific island-hopping stepping-stones to Japan itself.

  Ghormley selected as his task force commander Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, fresh from his victory at Midway, and to command the amphibious landings on Guadalcanal he chose Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, a hard-nosed and profane sailor of the old school. The task force would consist of three carriers: the Enterprise, the Saratoga, and the recently arrived Wasp, as well as the new battleship North Carolina and a number of cruisers, destroyers, transports, cargo carriers, and miscellaneous other ships. The ground forces selected for the invasion itself were the 17,000 men of the First Marine Division, most still on their way to the South Pacific from the West Coast, and their commanding officer, Major General Alexander Archer Vandegrift.

  Vandegrift was born to an old Virginia family in 1887 at Charlottesville, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. After two years at the University of Virginia, he took the exams to secure a commission in the Marine Corps and became a second lieutenant in 1909. He served, as did most of the marines of his day, in the boiling Central American and Caribbean military conflicts: Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Veracruz, Mexico, as well as in China, “quickly working his way up through the ranks”—it took him thirty-two years in the Marine Corps before making general. Vandegrift receive
d his second star on March 23,1942, and took over the First Marine Division, then based at Quantico, Virginia.

  Almost from the start, things began to go wrong. For one thing, Admiral Ghormley didn’t much like the plan, which was not a good thing when so many lives were at stake. Neither, for that matter, did MacArthur, who had conceived his own strategy not only for taking the Solomons but for invading the great Japanese base at Rabaul itself. By now he had with him in Australia three full infantry divisions but would need the amphibious expertise of the navy’s marine division plus its warships. But the navy was very reluctant to put its marines, carriers, and other precious warships under command of an army man. Finally it was settled that the navy would be in charge of the Solomons campaign, but it still didn’t sit well with MacArthur, who fumed that this was all part of a vast conspiracy “for the complete absorption of the national defense function by the Navy.”7 And poor General Vandegrift; imagine his surprise when—after having been promised by the highest authorities in Washington that his marines would not be expected to see combat until the following January—he was summarily informed upon arrival in New Zealand that he had exactly one month to get his men ready to launch a major invasion.

  The marines themselves appeared to be a questionable force. To get the division hurriedly up to strength, raw recruits right out of boot camp were thrown into the mix. And old leatherneck marines were yanked from their duties on posts and bases far and wide and sent to the First Marine Division. Listen to the wonderful description according to then Lieutenant Colonel Samuel B. Griffith II, who was there: “They were a motley bunch. Inveterate gamblers and accomplished scroungers, who drank hair tonic in preference to post exchange beer (’horse piss’), cursed with wonderful fluency, and never went to chapel (’the God-box’) unless forced to. Many dipped snuff, smoked rank cigars or chewed tobacco (cigarettes were for women and children). They had little use for libraries or organized athletics and would not have known what to do with a career counselor if they met one. They could live on jerked goat, the strong black coffee they called ‘boiler compound,’ and hash cooked in a tin hat.”8 On second thought, maybe they wouldn’t be so bad after all.