1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls
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Kimmel and, 90, 92
Marshall and, 68
Pearl Harbor and, 169n
on prospect of war with Japan, 64
Roosevelt and, 66
on Wake Island, 108
war warning messages, 67, 92–93
war with Japan and, 65, 90
starvation. See Death Marches; food supply and starvation; prisoner of war (POW) camps
State Department, U.S., 39, 50
Stephenson, William, 247, 248
Stimson, Henry L., 41, 64, 159
Storey, Jerold B., 370, 402
submarines, 71–72
Suez Canal, 377–78
Sullivan brothers, 331
Sunda Strait, Battle of, 173
Sutherland, Richard, 129, 139, 316
Taivu Point, 307
Taiwan. See Formosa
Takagi, Takeo, 199–202
Talbot (destroyer), 271
Tanaka, Raizo (“Tanaka the Tenacious”), 334, 339–40
Task Force 107–10
Tenaru, Battle of the, 286
Tenaru River, 284, 307
terrorism, xiii–xiv
Teters, Dan, 249
Thailand, 114
Thomas, Francis, 81
Thorpe, Amy Elizabeth (“Cynthia”), 247, 252, 402
Tizard, Henry, 31
Togo, Shigenori, 23
Tojo, Hideki, 188–89
background and overview, 49
coming into power, 48–49
conviction and execution, 398
decision to go to war with U.S., 65
final words, 398
Kurusu and, 51
refusal to withdraw from China, 48
speech about “annihilating” the West, 83
Tokyo Express, 321, 334, 339
Tokyo raid. See under Doolittle
Tokyo Rose, 246, 399
Toland, John, 95, 115, 127
Tolstoy, Leo, 195
Tone (cruiser), 233
Torch, 347–49, 382
torpedo-bomber squadrons, 234–37
torpedo bombers, 90, 400
Torpedo Squadron 233–35
torture. See also Japanese, brutality methods of, 250–52
Toulon, 350
Toynbee, Arnold, 12
Tregaskis, Richard, 284
Truk, 321
Tsuji, Masanobu, 184, 399
Tsuneyoshi, Yoshi, 182
Tulagi, 269, 278
Tunis, 386
Tunisia, 377, 386, 394–95
Turner, Richmond Kelly, 264, 268, 275, 308, 315
Twain, Mark, xii
Tyler, Kermit, 74
U-boats, 373
“unconditional surrender,” demand for, 396–98
United States. See also specific topics
anti-Japanese propaganda, 55–56
declaration of war against Japan, 99
domestic problems and challenges, 214–15; 254–55, 295
economic problems, 54–55. See also Great Depression
expansionism, 26
soldiers, 164–65
war-related industries and materials, 255, 296
women in workplace, 164
U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance, 400
U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, 38
Utah (battleship), 77
Vandegrift, Alexander Archer, 322
background, 261
Clemens and, 280–81
Ghormley and, 303
Guadalcanal and, 279, 403
Kawaguchi and, 303
marines, 276, 328, 403
Maruyama and, 327
Tulagi and, 276
Turner and, 303, 315–16
Willis Lee and, 333
Versailles Peace Conference, 22
Versailles Treaty, 8, 12
Vichy French, 247–49, 349, 390
Vichy government, 42, 348
“victory disease,” 226
Vietnam, 42
Vincennes (cruiser), 274
Vouza, Jacob, 283, 405–6
Wainwright, Jonathan (“Skinny”)
after the war, 407
Homma and, 213
MacArthur and, 213
Philippines and, 136, 145, 148, 155, 206, 211
Philippines surrendered by, 212–13
Silver Stars awarded by, 208
Wake, U.S.S., (gunboat), 112, 249
Wake Island, 101–13. See also Marine Corps
Midway Island compared with, 223
Waldron, John, 233, 343
Walt, Lewis W., 277
war crimes, 396. See also under Japanese
war-crimes tribunals, 398–400, 402
War Department, 38, 93
War Plan 5, 45
War Plan Orange, 140, 142
War Powers Act, 54
War Relocation Centers, 160. See also internment camps
war warning messages, 65, 87, 92–94. See also Pearl Harbor attack, who to blame for
Ward (destroyer), 76
Ward Road prison, 368–69
warships, 22. See also specific ships
Washington (battleship), 333, 334
Wasp (aircraft carrier), 291–92
Water Tank Hill, 211
“water treatment,” 250–51
Wavell, Archibald, 126
Weinstein, Alfred, 183
West Virginia (battleship), 78
Westrick, Gerhard, 36
Wheeler, Burton K., 33
Whitney, Courtney, 139n
Wildcat fighter planes, 106–8, 291–93. See also Grumman F4F Wildcat
Wilkes (destroyer), 352
Willow Run, 163
Wilson, Woodrow, 10
“wizard war,” 15
Wohlstetter, Roberta, 93
Woolley, John B., 369–71, 402
World War I, 1–4, 10, 22
World War II, 413–16. See also specific topics
as defining event of twentieth century, ix
impact, xii
opposition to. See isolationism
Wright, Wesley A., 219
Yamada, Sadayoshi, 267
Yamaguchi, Tamon, 242
Yamamoto, Isoroku, 242, 321, 346
Akagi and, 239
military strategies, 47, 225–26
Aleutian Islands and, 219, 225
assassination, 400–401
attitudes toward war, 45–46
background and overview, 46
Doolittle raid and, 198
mid-Pacific operation instigated by, 198
on Pearl Harbor, 47
suicide mission against Pearl Harbor, 171
Yamashita, Tomoyuki, 124–27, 399
Yamato, 321
Yardley, Herbert O., 39
York, Edward J. (“Ski”), 192
Yorktown, 220, 199–205, 232, 240, 243
damage to, 219, 240–41
death of, 245
Yoshikawa, Takeo, 89
Zaragoza Bridge, battle at, 140–41
Zero fighters, 230, 263, 291, 339, 346
Zuikaku (aircraft carrier), 203, 205
*At that point, in fact, the Pentagon was the largest building in the world.
*A great story, apocryphal or not, was once told by Mark Twain, recounting how he went down the Mississippi River just after the Civil War had ended and arrived at a fashionable party on a plantation near New Orleans as a full silver moon came rising up against the live oaks and magnolias. Twain remarked, offhand, to one of the black serving women on how lovely and full the moon was that night. Her response, handing him a mint julep, was, “Oh yessir it shore is, but you ought to have seen that moon befo’ de war!”
*As many have recently remarked, Pearl Harbor has eerie parallels to the events of September 11, 2001.
*It has been argued, though not conclusively proven, that the German government intentionally printed money to devalue its own mark and thus avoid paying the hated war reparations. In other words, if the German mark became almost valueless, then the amount previously designated to be pa
id to the victors under the Versailles Treaty would be nearly valueless also.
*The swastika consists of two interlocking Greek crosses, thought by the ancient Germans to bring good luck.
*For instance, in order to avoid international reaction to the building of a formal air force, the Germans organized presumably harmless civilian “flying clubs” in which young men were secretly taught by World War I flying veterans all the techniques of aerial combat.
*Led by German-American academics and writers, and their associates, this soon resulted in what became known in scholarly politics as the “textbook wars.”
*If in fact the U.S. Congress had ratified the League of Nations treaty and put its considerable teeth behind it, things could have turned out differently. But by then the United States, in the throes of the Great Depression, had dismantled its “considerable teeth,” like most of the Allied nations, and its armed forces by the early 1930s ranked behind even the country of Portugal.
*After Chamberlain left Munich, Hitler privately referred to him as “a worm.”
*The attack on Poland opened with a typical Hitler sneak. Earlier, he had sent a battleship, the Schleswig-Holstein, on a “courtesy visit” to the city of Danzig, which Germany had lost under the Versailles Treaty following World War I . Without warning or a declaration of war, on the morning of September 1, 1939, this great naval behemoth opened a devastating barrage on Danzig, which was also the signal for thousands of German soldiers who had entered Poland dressed as tourists to go into action.
*At this point in Japan’s history the emperor was merely a figurehead. The shogun, a military governor, actually ruled the country.
*Each of the sixteen Great White Fleet battleships fired a twenty-one-gun salute.
*This last part of the treaty—the American concession not to build up its naval bases in the Pacific—is now seen by many military strategists as the equivalent of allowing Japan to build a dozen or more unsinkable aircraft carriers, since the many islands it inherited following World War I as mandates would soon be developed with airstrips from which Japanese warplanes swarmed by the thousands.
*Japan was not being treated with scorn but with suspicion. Her actions in the Far East had alarmed the other members of the conference, the Western powers of France, England, and the United States, who saw a rising militarism and no concomitant interest in joining in their own mutual interests.
*The Japanese islands are approximately the size of California but the population density—340 people to the square mile—was ten times greater. The average Japanese farm just prior to the war was a mere one-quarter acre. Not only that, but in the twenty years between the Australian prime minister’s remarks and the beginning of World War II the Japanese population had grown by another ten million people.
*A perfect example of the isolationist mood in America; when the issue came up a year later of whether or not to extend the draft, it passed by just a single vote.
*The person who enlightened Sengier to the dire possibilities of uranium was none other than the noted British scientist Sir Henry Tizard, who told him five months before war broke out that the British government would like to buy his entire supply of this radioactive element. The deal did not get done, but Sengier remembered the conversation, which ended with these parting words by Tizard: “Be careful, and never forget that you have in your hands something which may mean a catastrophe to your country and mine if it were to fall in the hands of a possible enemy.”
†There were not many volunteer enlistees in those days. The salary of a private in the U.S. Army was $31 per month. In the months that contained thirty-one days, he was making a dollar a day.
*Ford had also been America’s best-known pacifist during the First World War.
*Many people subsequently interpreted Lindbergh’s remarks as demonstrating that he was an arch anti-Semite. In fact, he was probably no more so than most people of his time. He felt genuinely for the plight of Jews in Germany and voiced concerned predictions that if America entered the war the Jews would suffer even more horribly than they had already—a forecast that proved all too true.
*Vidkun Quisling (1887–1945) was a Norwegian fascist who set up a puppet Nazi government in his native country after Hitler invaded it. After the war the Norwegians hanged him.
*Two years after publishing The American Black Chamber Yardley decided again to capitalize on his inside knowledge of U.S. code breaking with a new book, Japanese Diplomatic Secrets, but this time he was stopped, literally, by an act of Congress, which hastily made it a criminal offense to reveal cryptology secrets.
*Including the intercepts of the Japanese civilian espionage activities on the West Coast.
*Indonesian hostility toward the Dutch and other European colonists was touched off by a cataclysmic event nearly sixty years earlier. In 1883 the giant volcano Krakatoa, in the straits between Java and Sumatra, exploded with such force that it was felt worldwide and killed some 30,000 natives in the islands. Islamic mullahs who had migrated from the Arabian peninsula years earlier used the tragedy to persuade their converts that Allah was against Western infidels and had blown up the volcano to show his displeasure. This prompted a wave of radical Islam, which to this day remains vexatious in what has since become the nation of Indonesia.
*The two had met briefly in 1918 at a banquet in England when Roosevelt was a young assistant secretary of the navy and Churchill was Great Britain’s minister of munitions. Churchill did not remember the encounter.
*The main U.S. Pacific bases were the Hawaiian Islands, Midway and Wake Islands, Guam, and the Philippines. The Japanese controlled the Marshall and Gilbert Island chains, which they obtained control over following Germany’s surrender in World War I.
†Interestingly, this was also in fact the strategic plan of the U.S. Navy, not including of course the part about being sunk by the Japanese.
*There are numerous versions and translations of this remark, but the one given in Dr. Morison’s The Rising Sun in the Pacific seems to hold up as well as any.
*Hull actually had a lisp, but it made him no less brusque.
*When the U.S. Eighth Army occupied Japan after the war, its commander, Lieutenant General Robert L. Eichelberger, went looking all over Tokyo for the emperor’s white horse so he could give it to MacArthur as a present. He never found it.
*For example, there were at that time some 20,000 U.S. troops, including artillery and tanks, waiting on the docks at San Francisco for ship transportation to the Philippines.
*The Germans were far more circumspect and hid their atrocities; the world would not see extensive pictures of them until after the war.
*Even General Douglas MacArthur, commanding the U.S. Far East forces during the fall of the Philippines, subscribed to this notion. After witnessing the skill of Japanese fighter pilots during the Battle of Manila, he concluded that the planes must have been flown by Germans or other Europeans—not ignorant, nearsighted Japanese. Interestingly, Winston Churchill agreed with this assessment.
*These small islands would soon enough become all too well known to U.S. soldiers, sailors, and marines. Among them: Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Bougainville, Peleliu, New Georgia, Saipan, I wo Jima, and Okinawa, to name a few.
†Mitchell was a flamboyant U.S. Army Air Corps brigadier general and airpower advocate who in the 1920s, after sinking a leftover German World War I battleship in a demonstration of what aerial bombing could accomplish, got himself court-martialed for being too vociferous on the matter.
*The Japanese foreign minister later declared that “breaking off negotiations was clearly a cessation of peace, that is to say, a resort to war.” A formal declaration of war in this note, he said, “would merely reiterate the obvious.” The Americans, however, did not see it quite that way.
*The carriers were Akagi (Red Castle), Hiryu (Flying Dragon), Kaga (Increased Joy), Soryu (Green Dragon), Shokaku (Soaring Crane), and Zuikaku (Happy Crane). Before the war ended, all would lie at the bottom of the
ocean—the first four within the next six months—as would all but one of their escort fleet, a lone destroyer.
*The Hawaiian Islands had been discovered in 1778 by the English explorer Captain James Cook, who named them the Sandwich Islands after a patron, the Earl of Sandwich. Cook returned the following year but, while ashore, the Hawaiians clubbed and stabbed him to death in plain view of his ship, and later dismembered him and returned some of his body parts to his crew. America annexed the islands in 1898 and in 1906 established the Pearl Harbor naval base. In 1940, with the rising tensions between Japan and the United States, President Roosevelt ordered the U.S. Pacific Fleet moved from its West Coast base and permanently stationed at Pearl as a “deterrent” to Japanese aggression. The then fleet commander, Admiral James O. Richardson, objected because of logistics and morale (“too few white women; shopkeepers gypped the sailors”), but when he complained to the president he was fired and replaced by Admiral Husband E. Kimmel.
*Snafu was a naval term that came into use during the war. It stood for “Situation normal, all fouled up.”
*American battleships were named for U.S. states, cruisers for U.S. cities; destroyers were named for influential or heroic people. In those days U.S. aircraft carriers were named for Revolutionary War battles—Lexington, Saratoga, Yorktown—or stinging insects—Hornet, Wasp—and there were also the Enterprise and the Ranger.