The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  The USO, with fifty-one clubs in the islands, provided more wholesome entertainment. A-list celebrities such as Bob Hope and Artie Shaw hosted lavish musical variety shows, with a big band fronted by guest singers, and the songs interspersed with stand-up routines or dance performances. The USO hosted huge dances in which men typically outnumbered women by a ratio of twenty-five to one. The “USO girls” were “respectable”—many were daughters of socially prominent Hawaiian families—and each was under the watchful eye of a chaperone. With a hardy sense of duty and patriotism, they bestowed their smiles and good cheer to all men equally, regardless of rank, looks, or dancing proficiency. They danced for three to four hours a night, with short breaks. Cutting in was permitted every two and a half minutes, when a whistle blew through the loudspeaker.

  Left out of the USO events, and denied other perks available only to men in uniform, were the civilian defense workers. Young, unattached males, whose numbers swelled to 82,000 in 1944, were crowded into substandard housing complexes and stuck fast to the bottom of Oahu’s social pecking order. Their wages were about 30 percent higher than those paid on the mainland for similar jobs, but they found that the cost of living in Hawaii was about 60 percent higher. Many made themselves conspicuous by wearing garish Hawaiian “aloha” shirts untucked over trousers, a fashion traditionally disdained by other haole. Fairly or unfairly, the war workers earned a reputation as “Okies, interlopers, and draft dodgers”19—notorious miscreants, gamblers, and drunks, unsuitable for civilized society. Servicemen generally despised them, landlords refused to rent to them, policemen harassed them, and women of all races would not give them the time of day. A territorial health department report concluded that “groups of war workers in this community apparently contain a rather notable number of unstable, alcoholic, psychoneurotic or psychopathic individuals.”20

  Many newly arrived mainland whites, particularly those from the American South, were nonplussed by the tolerant racial attitudes prevailing in Hawaii. The islands’ many Asian and Pacific racial and ethnic groups coexisted on harmonious terms. Off-base housing, mass transit, and most retail establishments were largely desegregated (though African American servicemen still endured segregated barracks). Japanese Hawaiians, representing the single largest ethnic group in the territory, had feared persecution or worse after the attack on Pearl Harbor—but by mid-1943 it was evident that the overwhelming majority were loyal to the American cause. The extraordinary heroism in Italy of the all-nisei (second-generation Japanese American) 442nd Regimental Combat Team was publicized and celebrated in the Hawaiian press.

  Mainland whites who expected to be treated with deference and respect were amazed when it was not automatically forthcoming. “The defense worker received the jolt of his life,” observed a columnist in Paradise of the Pacific, “when he found that the other races had turned the tables on him and were eyeing him appraisingly, were calculating his probable social status, and were often ‘looking down their noses’ at him when he moved into their community.”21

  Given the radical gender imbalance in wartime Hawaii, interracial dating and marriage gained a social acceptance that would not reach the mainland until two or three generations later. In 1943 and 1944, according to territorial statistics, 32 percent of all marriages in Hawaii were between spouses of different races. Marriages between Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos were common. Almost one-half of all white men married a woman of another race, and 9 percent of all white women married a man of a different race. There were 189 marriages between a white man and an ethnic Japanese woman.22 Then again, Hawaii’s wartime divorce rate was 48 percent, almost three times higher than the rate on the mainland.23

  For thousands of American servicemen, a long interval in wartime Hawaii left them impatient to get on with the war. Bill Davis, a navy fighter pilot stranded on Maui for months on end, remarked that the period seemed like an extended vacation. His days were full of tennis, leisurely training flights, and lunches at an officers’ club. “This was all wonderful, but we were beginning to think our motto was that of John Paul Jones, when he said, ‘I have not yet begun to fight.’ ”24 Even Hawaii’s extraordinary natural beauty assumed a monotonous and oppressive aspect. Men who had been too long in the islands were said to be “rock happy” or “pineapple crazy.” The best remedy was to send them west, into battle. A reserve naval lieutenant, writing in a local paper, joked that “after three trips on a Honolulu bus, a 97-pound yeoman second class, armed with nothing weightier than a rolled copy of the Honolulu Advertiser, would joyously leap into a Jap pillbox.”25

  ADMIRAL NIMITZ, who ran the whole show in Hawaii, and whose monumental Allied theater command took in about a fifth of the earth’s surface, lived in a stately white house at the top of Makalapa Hill. The hill, actually the cone of an extinct volcano, was a serene district of green lawns and recently erected homes. Japanese gardeners tended to the newly planted trees and native vegetation, which had not yet grown to maturity and thus did not obstruct the panoramic western views of Pearl Harbor. Makalapa Hill provided quarters for the navy and marine brass—houses for admirals and generals, bungalows for captains and colonels. The prefabricated structures were evenly spaced and built to cookie-cutter architectural plans. Streets bore the names of historic American naval battles, including earlier battles of the war in progress. Lest the enemy attempt to decapitate the high command at one stroke, the neighborhood’s existence was held in strict secrecy: the name “Makalapa” was never permitted to appear in any public document or press communiqué.

  CINCPAC headquarters was about a quarter mile from Nimitz’s house. It was a plain two-story office building, built heavily of steel-reinforced concrete, purposely designed to draw no attention to itself. On a typical morning, Nimitz and his chief of staff, Raymond Ames Spruance, walked to work and arrived at their adjacent offices at the southwest corner of the second “deck” before 0800.

  At 0900, the staff section heads crowded into Nimitz’s office and sat in folding chairs for a daily morning conference. They received an intelligence briefing and reviewed incoming overnight communications. Discussions of forthcoming operations or other important subjects followed. As the fleet grew in 1943, the crowd at Nimitz’s daily “open house” for commanding officers of ships newly arrived at Pearl Harbor grew steadily larger. Nimitz seemed to enjoy these encounters, and he drew much useful information from his freewheeling interviews with the skippers. His flag lieutenant, Arthur Lamar, commented that Nimitz “enjoyed visiting just as much with a young lieutenant (jg) commanding an LST as with a senior captain with a brand new battleship. He loved people!”26

  In that respect Nimitz was similar to FDR, who had come to know the admiral well in 1940 and 1941, when he had served as the navy’s personnel chief in Washington, and who had handpicked Nimitz for command of the Pacific Fleet. The white-haired Texan was cheered and energized in his interactions with subordinates of all ranks, and led with a distinctively warm and personal touch. After returning a salute, he customarily extended his hand and introduced himself: “My name’s Nimitz.” He kept a fund of slightly off-color stories, funny but never profane; he often used them as a means to dispel tension after men had aired disagreements. Others were astonished by Nimitz’s capacity to remember old acquaintances and shipmates, officers and enlisted men—he rarely forgot faces and could often produce a man’s name and cite details of his subsequent service. It was not just a matter of keen memory. From early in his career, Nimitz had kept a file of index cards with names and other pertinent information. His staff was always expected to keep those files updated. “In making inspections of ships and islands,” recalled Lieutenant Lamar, “he always liked to call officers by name. We did this by means of cards which I made up before each visit, and I often coached the Admiral behind his back. All hands enjoyed this personal touch.”27

  The chief’s working day, recalled Ralph Parker, another member of the CINCPAC staff, was “just one c
onference after another, in varying degree and in varying scope.”28 It might be with one man, just returned from the theater of operations, or with a group that filled the room and occupied every chair so that junior officers were obliged to stand with their backs against the wall. Nimitz was content to listen at length and was tolerant of dissent. He did not emulate King’s iron-fist management style or MacArthur’s bad habit of surrounding himself with flatterers. Even when discussions grew heated, Nimitz remained imperturbable. He did not sign off on a decision until all objections had been aired and registered. As Ralph Parker observed, “The old idea of Napoleonic command, of being so far superior to all your subordinates that none of them dares say anything but ‘Aye Aye, Sir’—that idea no longer holds. It’s absolutely necessary to get the opinion of subordinates, particularly those who have to carry out an order.”29

  Nimitz and Spruance often left the office together when the sun was still high in the sky. The two shared a compulsive need for strenuous outdoor exercise, and they often hiked to the top of Makalapa Crater, easily outpacing the much younger officers who joined them. Nimitz’s competitive streak came out on the tennis court, where he ran Lamar around and never let the younger man take a set, and on the horseshoe court outside his quarters, where he could beat Spruance pitching with either hand. When the fleet surgeon told him that target shooting was an effective therapy for stress, Nimitz had a shooting range constructed outside his office and invited officers to join him in firing .22 and .45 target pistols, with wagers limited to a dime. “He quickly became an enthusiastic marksman,” said Lamar, “and every day we used to fire several hundred rounds. I suppose by the time the surrender took place at Tokyo Bay, we must have fired at least half a million shots!”30

  On Sunday afternoons, Nimitz, Spruance, and a party of other officers might head over the mountains to a secluded beach on Oahu’s north coast, a place they nicknamed “Prostate Rest.” Their regular routine was a two-mile hike down the beach, followed by a long swim. One weekend in the summer of 1943, Nimitz invited a few key intelligence officers to join the expedition. Tom Dyer, one of the cryptanalysts who had broken the Japanese naval codes before the Battle of Midway, was surprised to be invited. He borrowed a swimsuit to make the trip and rode in the backseat, wedged between the two admirals. Nimitz, having sustained an injury, announced that he would sit on the beach rather than hike and swim, as was his usual custom. “I was perfectly willing to sit in the sun with him,” said Dyer, who was no athlete and worked long hours in a windowless basement, “but Spruance suggested we take a walk down the beach. . . . It wasn’t a walk, it was practically a marathon. He was putting one foot in front of the other at a very rapid pace.” On the return swim, Dyer lasted about a quarter of a mile. He staggered back down the beach, badly sunburned and with the swimsuit chafing his thighs, and declared that he had “been injured in the line of duty.”31

  Nimitz did not relish publicity, but as wartime CINCPAC he was a public figure with duties akin to those of a civilian elected official. He often appeared at public functions and receptions, in white uniform and gloves. He dined regularly at the governor’s palace. Newspaper photographers caught him touring ships, pinning medals to chests, dancing with a hula girl at an enlisted men’s recreation center, or inspecting carrots at a Victory Garden Show in Honolulu while wearing a lei “made of tiny vegetables.”32 He attended dinner parties given by Hawaii’s civilian upper crust, where women wore evening gowns and white-clad stewards served drinks on trays. Nimitz was always accompanied by his marine guards, men selected for height and appearance who dressed in rigidly starched uniforms. His car, a large gray sedan, flew a four-star flag and was always waxed to a gleaming luster. In January 1944, he was the guest of honor at a “Texas Round-Up” picnic in Moana Park, an event attended by 40,000 Texan servicemen. The smiling admiral was photographed pitching horseshoes with sailors and holding the corner of a Texas flag.33

  At home in the evenings, he and Spruance relaxed over weak cocktails—an old-fashioned or a scotch and soda mixed in a tall glass, with a thimble of liquor and lots of ice. The two admirals often ended the evening sitting in armchairs at 37 Makalapa Drive, listening to a classical symphony on a phonograph. Their Filipino steward turned off the lights, opened the blackout shades, and let the night air into the house. Occasionally they discussed the war, but more often they sat in silence. By the summer of 1943, near the end of Spruance’s fourteen-month stint as CINCPAC chief of staff—a period in which the two men had lived in the same house, worked in adjoining offices, and hiked for miles together most afternoons—each usually knew what was in the other’s mind. They carried the weight of responsibility for hundreds of thousands of lives, and for the casualties that would inevitably escalate as the war moved closer to the enemy’s homeland. As Nimitz’s most trusted subordinate, Spruance would soon be rewarded with the navy’s top seagoing command and would lead the bloody campaign westward across the heart of the Pacific.

  Two decades later, following Nimitz’s death, Spruance told a reporter that fear was a near-universal human trait, a condition that even the bravest men labored to keep in check. But Nimitz was out of the ordinary: “He was one of the few people I knew who never knew what it meant to be afraid of anything.”34

  ON JUNE 1, 1943, the first of a new class of 27,100-ton aircraft carriers crept into Pearl Harbor and inched into a berth north of Ford Island, directly flanking the still-capsized hull of the battleship Utah. The arrival of the Essex (CV-9) had been keenly anticipated. A navy band and a larger-than-usual complement of hula dancers waited on the pier. Up on Makalapa Hill, on the top “deck” of the CINCPAC headquarters, a crowd of officers passed around a pair of binoculars.

  The Essex was much easier to handle than the older fleet carriers, but Captain Donald Duncan was relieved to have a pilot aboard to conn the big ship into the congested harbor.35 The Essex was 872 feet long, and her beam at the flight deck was 147 feet. She had been designed to squeeze through the Panama Canal, but only just—in order to accommodate her passage two weeks earlier, several lighting towers and pilothouses along the top of the locks had been removed or cut down to size. “It was a very necessary thing,” said Duncan, “because I well remember in going through the locks of the Canal, if you stretched a little bit, you could reach out and touch the edge of the roof from the wing of the navigation bridge, which was right along the same line as the side of the ship.”36

  Duncan had last seen Pearl Harbor in March 1942, when the devastation of the Japanese attack had been evident throughout the area. Fifteen months later, it appeared “that some tremendous effort had been made to get it straightened out and cleaned up and rebuilt. . . . [T]he Navy Yard was going strong, all damages being repaired; and the appearance of the place was one of being busy and confident and very much on the job.”37

  Many more aircraft carriers, large and small, would steam down the Pearl Harbor entrance channel in the ensuing six months. The new Yorktown and Lexington, named for the flattops lost at Coral Sea and Midway the previous year, were built on identical lines to the Essex. They arrived from the mainland in July and August. The fourth-in-class, the new Hornet, would follow by the end of the year. The navy planned to build and commission twenty-four of these huge first-line carriers by 1945. The 11,000-ton light carrier Independence (CVL-22), converted from a hull originally intended as a light cruiser, arrived in July and was soon followed by her sisters Princeton and Belleau Wood. Several diminutive escort or “jeep” carriers (CVEs) joined the fleet that fall. Though too slow to operate with the new fast carrier task forces, CVEs were valuable in transporting and resupplying aircraft and in providing air cover to amphibious operations.

  The new fast battleships of the Iowa class would not reach the Pacific until 1944, but the Colorado and Maryland (Colorado-class battleships armed with 16-inch guns) were in port to be outfitted with new radar systems and additional antiaircraft mounts. Cruisers, destroyers, destroyer escorts, transports, fleet oilers, mi
nesweepers, minelayers, mobile dry docks, hospital ships, and many other types of combatant and auxiliary ships squeezed into the harbor. A billion-dollar crash-building program in 1942 had produced more than a quarter of a million tons of amphibious landing craft, in a variety of types ranging from small Higgins boats to 300-foot-long tank-landing ships (LSTs). As the fleet grew, it became evident to anyone with a view of Pearl Harbor that a big offensive was in preparation.

  The Essex-class carriers had been designed with all of the shortcomings of the earlier fleet carriers in mind, and were superior in every respect to their predecessors. They carried a complement of ninety-six planes and tore through the sea at 33 knots. Much of the design work had been coordinated by veteran aviator Jim Russell (who would eventually achieve four-star rank) during a tour of duty in the Bureau of Aeronautics before the war. Russell, who had served in carriers in many capacities for many years, pushed for new catapults and arresting gear, more and better firefighting equipment, and new maintenance and storage facilities. He placed the three aircraft elevators as far as practicable from the centerline of the ship, to create more elbow room in the hangar and allow for more rapid and flexible cycling of aircraft. More controversially, Russell designed a very large flight deck that retained its width and rectangular shape all the way to the forecastle. Engineers warned that the overhanging forward corners of the flight deck, weakly supported by two steel I-beams, would be vulnerable to collapse in heavy weather. Russell acknowledged the point but maintained that it was worth risking storm damage in order to construct “a proper flying field.”38 (Both were right: some of the Essex-class flight decks did suffer in extreme weather, but the damage was easily repaired and the trade-off deemed satisfactory.)

  The Essex carriers were designed to be as light as possible within the necessary strength tolerances. As a result, said Captain Duncan, they were much more responsive to their helms: “When you gave [them] the gun, those ships really jumped. It was quite different than some of the older, heavier ships. That I think was an indication of what can be done with very detailed care to things of that kind.”39