1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  After the war Doolittle, one of the most decorated officers in the U.S. military, was made a full general and later retired with Joe, his wife of forty years, to build their dream home in Pebble Beach, California, where he spent his days hunting and fly-fishing. Just before he died in 1993 at the age of ninety-six, Doolittle told a newsman, “There has never been a time when I’ve been completely satisfied with myself.”4

  After nearly a year of Soviet internment in the freezing wilds of Siberia, the B-24 crew of Doolittle’s Tokyo bombers that had landed in Russia finally got a response to their letter of complaint to old Joe Stalin. It was not a direct response (but neither was it a firing squad or the gulags, which some feared); instead the eight fliers were bundled up one night and herded onto a rickety train that started south to parts unknown. After days on this train, the crew finally arrived at a filthy and dust-choked town called Ashkhabad and were thrown into a squalid compound surrounded by dirt walls and containing a number of shacks of the outhouse variety. And almost as bad as the cold of Siberia, Ashkhabad, on the edge of the Great Persian Desert, was searing hot.

  The men were set to work at dull and tedious labor in an old aircraft factory that made small trainer planes. Soon they all contracted horrible dysentery and, as historian Craig Nelson tells us, “For toilet paper they used Pravda.” The prospect of sitting out the rest of the war in this hellhole was unacceptable—more so since their condition was being inflicted by our so-called ally, the Soviet Union—and so they contrived to escape.

  They managed to make contact with a character of dubious trustworthiness, but who seemed to know the territory. Of course he demanded money. Luckily, one of the crew had several hundred dollars in cash from a poker game their last night on the Hornet, and this was offered up to help get them across the heavily mined and guarded Russian border with British-occupied Persia (now Iran).

  Like Commander Smith and his party trying to escape from Shanghai, the B-25 crew had to place their lives in the hands of strange and shady natives who spoke no English. After tanking up on vodka, the men began a harrowing odyssey to freedom in May 1943 that involved, at various times, riding in a truck, walking, running, hiding, and finally crawling on their hands and knees until they were finally safe on the Persian side of the border.*

  The legendary pilot Charles Lindbergh was never forgiven by Roosevelt for siding with the isolationists and before Pearl Harbor had resigned his commission as a colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps, not wanting to embarrass his commander in chief by continuing as one of his officers while publicly opposing him. After war broke out Lindbergh asked friends to intercede in getting his rank back and placing him on active duty, but Roosevelt refused. So Lindbergh, then a high-ranking official with an aircraft manufacturer, went out on his own as an adviser, and soon found himself in the Solomon Islands where, among other things, he designed unique disposable beneath-the-wings fuel tanks that increased the range of fighter planes by several hundred miles. It was said that he even shot down a Japanese plane while on a “training mission.”

  The youthful marine private Robert Leckie, who had witnessed the crocodiles eating the bodies of dead Japanese on Guadalcanal, went on to become one of America’s leading military historians. Admiral William “Bull” Halsey continued commanding the U.S. fleet that fought its way across the Pacific for three more years, virtually annihilating the Japanese navy. From his base at Pearl Harbor Admiral Chester Nimitz made the plans and called the shots, and when the war was over these two overaged seadogs were retired and so passed into legend, long linked with their names.

  During the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, little Ernie Pyle, perhaps the most widely read of the war correspondents because he was a “soldiers’” newspaperman, was shot dead by a Japanese sniper.

  After the Americans carried the fighting northwestward across the Pacific, Guadalcanal returned to being something of a backwater, but not for long. The Solomon Islanders had seen too much of civilization. For a while after the war various groups began agitating for independance, but Britain had already decided to liquidate its empire and Guadalcanal soon became an active member of the new Solomon Islands nation. Henderson Field is still extant, now an international airport, and cruise ships from Australia sometimes call at the port where the U.S. Marines landed. Housing projects dot the hills, and eminences such as Bloody Ridge, where the fiercest fighting took place, and the Matanikau River, crocodiles and all, have become tourist attractions.5

  In August 1962, surviving members of the First Marine Division held a twentieth reunion of the Guadalcanal invasion, to which they invited Sergeant Major Jacob Vouza, the native Solomon Island scout who had been stabbed, beaten, and left for dead by the Japanese, but then collected himself and crawled back to marine lines to report the Japanese movement. Vouza sent them the following telegram in reply: “Tell them I love them all. Me old now, and me no look good no more. But me never forget.”6

  Claire “High Pockets” Phillips, after her arrest by the Japanese police, was thrown into a filthy prison and tortured and beaten for months on end. She admitted to sending letters, medicine, and food to the American POWs in the Cabanatuan camp, but her interrogators remained convinced that she had been aiding the guerrillas in the mountains. They gave her the usual Japanese treatment: beatings, burnings by cigarettes, starvation, and when she asked for water they gave her the “water treatment.” But High Pockets stuck to her guns and denied knowing any of the guerrillas or anybody else in her spy ring. After enduring more than eight months of this she and her fellow prisoners began to hear bombs exploding, which came increasingly nearer each day, and then there was shelling from artillery. Word got out that the Americans had landed.

  Then one day she looked out into the prison courtyard and “There stood ten of the tallest Yanks I had ever seen!” Phillips noted that she had dropped from her normal weight of 145 pounds to 95, her legs were covered with scars from cigarette burns, all of her teeth were loose, and when she tried to brush her hair it came out in great chunks. When she was finally reunited with her daughter, who had been taken by her nurse for safekeeping with an American guerrilla band, the child did not recognize her, and “refused to have anything to do with me.” The next day, “when I took her with me to select dresses and shoes from the discarded clothing left with the Red Cross, Dian thawed a little,” Phillips recalled. “‘Are you my mummy?’ she asked and when I replied she trustingly placed her thin little hand in mine.” In a few days Claire Phillips and her daughter Dian were standing at the rail of a military transport ship bound for San Francisco, watching the smoking ruins of Manila fade into a distant tropic twilight.*

  * * *

  By now, all but 514 of the original 10,000 American prisoners from the fighting on Bataan and Corregidor had either died of disease or maltreatment, been murdered by the Japanese, or been shipped off as slave labor to Manchuria or Japan. Of those sent across the sea thousands died en route, since the Japanese refused to mark their transports as prisoner-of-war ships and were thus fair game for U.S. planes and submarines. They became known as the Death Ships, where living conditions were far harsher than even the prison camps had been. Men were crammed into filthy holds with little food and no water; many became insane, had heart attacks, suffocated, died of heat stroke or thirst, or were trampled to death by their claustrophobic companions.

  Once in Japan or Manchuria, those who survived fared little better. They simply got to be beaten by a new set of sadistic guards and what food there was remained rotten. The American generals, from Wainwright on down, had been incarcerated since their capture, and who can forget the newsreel photographs of Wainwright’s emaciated figure in 1945 when, during the Japanese surrender on the deck of the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay, MacArthur called him forward and presented him with one of the ink pens the Japanese had been given to sign the surrender document. Not only that but Wainwright, who had believed he was probably going to be court-martialed for surrendering the Philippines, was pleasan
tly shocked to find that he had been awarded the Medal of Honor.

  It was the 514 Americans remaining behind at Cabanatuan that had the U.S. Army worried. Most had been left because they were too sick or weak to work in Japan U.S. intelligence had already learned of one ghastly incident in another part of the Philippines where a hundred and fifty American prisoners were thrown into pits and roasted alive by gasoline-throwing Japanese in the face of the oncoming U.S. invasion. U.S. officials were fairly certain that the Japanese were executing prisoners as the Americans advanced and determined to do something about it.*

  What they did was order a special mission for a select detachment of the Sixth Army’s Sixth Ranger Battalion: march twenty-five miles through enemy territory held by up to 8,000 Japanese troops and rescue the helpless American prisoners. This they did in a harrowing raid at the end of January 1945, when all 514 were snatched from the jaws of death by the brave and daring rangers.*

  The American soldiers who returned from the war were affected by it in many different ways. Those who had seen heavy combat or spent years in prison camps, particularly Japanese prison camps, were profoundly affected.†

  Private Robert Brown had survived the fighting on Bataan, the Death March, Camp O’Donnell, and the horror of Cabanatuan before being sent to Manchuria on one of the Japanese Death Ships. When he was finally freed in 1945, Brown was both physically and emotionally unstable. He had endured it all: the constant hunger, beatings, murders, deprivation, and humiliation that not even the poorest American citizen had ever known. By his own admission, Brown was not an educated man; like so many other GIs he’d been raised in a small town, in his case one in northern California. When the troopship bringing him home docked in San Francisco there were few people waiting to greet them, and Brown was ordered into the base hospital for observation and quarantine. When he had left home to join the army in 1939 his parents didn’t even have a telephone but now, seven years later, he looked in the phone book and, sure enough, their number was listed. He called and asked if they would come and get him and they arrived next day. Brown had not ridden in a car for nearly four years and the experience of driving home on the California expressways with cars whizzing by “petrified” him.

  During his leave he rediscovered whiskey and began to drink. At night after his parents saw him off to bed he found he could not sleep on a mattress and morning would find him curled up on the hard floor in the living room. He became a bundle of nerves and “couldn’t talk to anyone.” With all the servicemen now returning from Europe and the Pacific, “there were no jobs,” Brown remembered. “I was uneducated, for all purposes, I knew I could survive in the prisoner-of-war camp, but what else could I do?” All the previously valued things in his life had become reduced to basics: adequate food, his health, and clothing, especially clothing, for when he was in the POW camp at Mukden, in northern Manchuria, it had been so bitterly cold, and his clothes had been only rags.

  Finally Private Brown went back up to San Francisco to get his discharge from the army. When he got into the discharge line he was told to turn in his uniform. “I didn’t have any civilian clothing,” Brown remembered, “all I had was the uniform that was on my back.” When it came his turn, “I saw all these discarded uniforms piled up and having been a prisoner I just automatically thought, ‘Well, Jesus Christ, I’d like to have some of those.’ So I asked this guy, ‘What do you do with all those clothes?’ and he said ‘You want something?’ and I said ‘God Yeah!’”

  Brown almost frantically began to gather up everything he could, uniform blouses, pants, socks, jackets, when some fool second lieutenant came up. “What are you doing?” the lieutenant demanded, and when Brown told him the officer made him put the clothes back and then began to bawl him out. Brown remembered that he “about fell to pieces.” Standing at attention his knees began to shake and he felt tears beginning to come—just some old clothes they were going to throw away anyhow. He took the bawling out as long as he could, then just did a smart about-face and marched across the parade ground to the office of General Albert M. Jones. Jones had been a corps commander under Wainwright on Bataan and in the same Manchurian POW camp as Private Brown.

  “I went straight up to General Jones’ headquarters. I steamed in and here’s an old bald-headed major sitting there. He looked at me like ‘What the hell are you?’ I said ‘I’m Brown and I want to see General Jones.’

  “He says, ‘What for?’ and I said I was in prison camp with him at Mukden and I have to see him.”

  Jones had overheard the conversation through the door and came out and ushered Brown into his office. As Brown locked himself at attention he was still shaking and red-faced and the general could see he had been crying.

  “What’s the trouble?” Jones asked. Brown tried to explain about taking the clothes and about the lieutenant “jumping all over me,” and the words just tumbled out, along with the tears, until he finally said, “I didn’t know what to do, Sir, so I came to see you.”

  General Jones stood looking at him. He understood; if anyone could ever have truly understood it would be General Jones because he, too, had known being nearly frozen and starved to death in Manchuria with rags for clothes during those long bitter years, and he must have felt his own anger rising.

  “Okay,” the general said with an even smile, “you go back down there and you take whatever you want, I’ll see to it.” Then he told Private Brown to sit for a few minutes and they had “a nice chat about our days at Mukden.”7

  Today on Guadalcanal and New Guinea there are rusted relics of the battles: tanks, wrecked parts of planes, trucks, artillery pieces, and other accoutrements of war. In the depths beneath Ironbottom Sound still lie the hulks of the big ships, dozens of them, in a wavy, algae-covered perpetual silence. Not long ago the famed underwater explorer Robert Ballard, who found the wreck of the Titanic, took one of his deepwater submersibles to the Solomons and photographed some of these wrecks. One almost wishes he hadn’t; they seem so pitiful there on the seafloor, reduced from their dignity as once great fighting ships. At Pearl Harbor a shrine has been made out of the wreck of the battleship Arizona, seen by thousands of tourists every year, who can peer down at it from a glass-bottomed observation platform.

  Out on the North African deserts there are relics, too, much better preserved in the rarefied desert air, but most of them long since stripped by Arabs for sale as scrap. For more than twenty years the British had been in the process of clearing the hundreds of thousands of land mines from the battles in Libya when, in the 1970s, Libya’s new dictator Colonel Muammar Gadhafi seized power and closed the borders.

  It is almost a military axiom that wars are generally fought in unpleasant places, and this certainly went for the year 1942: scorching deserts, pestilent jungles, endless mud fields, freezing mountain terrain, or the brutal cold landscapes of Russia, and in those days most of the men who died were buried near to where they’d fallen. Today on both sides of the oceans remain the military cemeteries with their neat white “crosses, row on row” that mark the places, cared for in perpetuity by the Allies’ graves commissions.

  The great admirals and generals are all gone now, and the youthful soldiers, sailors, and marines who fought this long-ago war are going fast themselves. It had taken a full seven years of war to corner Hitler, who shot himself, and Mussolini, who was finally killed by his own people and strung up on a meat hook, and Tojo, who swung at the end of an American rope. But the world at last became rid of these misguided creatures and their cronies and henchmen, and this was accomplished, in some fine measure, because of the extraordinary sacrifices of those raw, untried, and wondering men who served and fought, and died, in 1942.

  Afterword

  Of course the Allied successes were not due alone simply to the men on the fighting fronts. All of America, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain and her commonwealth and colonies pitched in, men, women, and children. Later, other countries joined the fray, but in 1942 it was basically
these two great powers that fought the war on the razor’s edge against the Axis cabal.* The older men who served as air-raid wardens or in the beach patrols, the women who worked midnight shifts in the armanents factories—the Rosie the Riveters—the “dollar-a-year” businessmen who volunteered to go to Washington or elsewhere and lend their expertise to the war effort, the millions of families who grew victory gardens, the children who donated their metal toys to be melted down or purchased ten- and tweny-five-cent war bond stamps from their allowances—all these people contributed what they could.

  The Allied successes at Midway, Guadalcanal, and New Guinea had halted Japanese expansion and, beyond relieving the Japanese threat to Australia, Hawaii, and the U.S. lifeline to the Pacific, had the additional effect of confirming to the American public that the Japanese could indeed be defeated, a notion that had remained in question for much of the year. Soon after Guadalcanal had been conquered, the Americans began to move northward, sweeping the emperor’s armies and navies from the Pacific Ocean. In the Solomons Americans invaded New Georgia and Bougainville, and were about to launch a great invasion of Rabaul itself, with its tens of thousands of Japanese troops, when somebody sensibly figured out that by building airfields on these two newly conquered islands they could simply bottle up the huge Japanese garrison with U.S. air- and seapower and leave Rabaul to wither on the vine. Thus the navy forces sailed on, with Rabaul behind them, remaining in effect a large POW camp. This new strategy was employed time and again throughout the long march across the Pacific during 1943, ’44, and ’45, saving countless American lives. It became famously known as General MacArthur’s island-hopping strategy, and though he did not think it up himself, MacArthur embraced it wholeheartedly and, typically, took credit for it in the end.