Almost a Family

by John Darnton

  There was a solution and they took it: get closer to the war by going to New Guinea. In late April, they caught a B-17 to Port Moresby. They landed on a strip in a valley that was, as Barney noted, as deep as a part in a gigolo’s haircut. It started to rain and despite the muggy downpour a swarm of mosquitoes descended upon them. What was alarming was that the Royal Australian Air Force officer who signed in the pilot, naked to the waist, didn’t seem to notice them. A truck slithered along a muddy road past a row of gum trees and deposited them at a muddy gully leading to a large sagging tent and lean-to, the camp’s kitchen and mess hall. There they joined the line for round steak, peas, and carrots, ladled by a fat, toothless, and cheerful mess sergeant from a crude wood-burning stove. Seated on long wooden benches, they saw that the ceiling of the tent was so black with flies, the canvas didn’t show through. They listened in to the talk of the American fliers, young men, they noted, who a year ago had probably not ventured out of their states.

  “Was you in Suva?”

  “Yeah. The whole town stinks of coconut oil. The natives smear it on theirselves.”

  A bomber pilot asked his sergeant bombardier, “Did you get any beer tonight?”

  “No. But I got to watch an Aussie drink a bottle. I drooled for half an hour.”

  A major stood up and addressed the fliers. “You men got mosquito bars with you?” Dead silence. “Well, you better have.”

  A blond fighter pilot in flying overalls spoke up: “The mosquitoes were so thick on the inside of my mosquito bar last night that they had to fly a traffic pattern.”

  They interviewed pilots from Chicago and New York until the billeting officer came for them. They slept on canvas cots in a shed with other men, tossing and turning because they hadn’t tucked in their bars right and the mosquitoes were mauling them. An unknown voice whispered from across the room, “No use to fight ’em. First the little ones dive bomb your bar and open holes for the big ones.” The next morning they were up at 4:40 a.m., back in the mess hall, interviewing pilots and crewmen, who were waiting for life-restoring coffee after a sleepless night of their own, soon to go off to fight the Japanese.

  It was clear that Port Moresby was practically defenseless and that the Japanese could take it if they could just manage to get there. But very little of this pessimism found its way into Barney’s dispatches. He accentuated the upbeat and when he talked about hardships he did it with humor. He described the ferocity of the mosquitoes by quoting a gasoline truck attendant at an airdrome: “I put forty gallons of gas in one the other day before I realized it was a mosquito, not an Airacrobra.” Mostly he emphasized the spirit of his beloved aviators. YOUNG, STRONG, FEARLESS read the boldfaced headline of a two-thousand-word magazine piece. It began with the bomber pilots and navigators receiving mission instructions. It described their mood, what their downtime was like, where they got their news, and how they had found a swimming hole and took dips in the buff. It ended with a poker game in which a slow-talking southern boy, the winner of a Distinguished Flying Cross, kept up a chatter while examining and reexamining his hand and finally raised the bet. “He scared out everybody. Which should have won him the Distinguished Poker Cross—for he held two fours.”

  In early May Barney returned to Australia, to find the relationship between correspondents and MacArthur’s press officers had deteriorated even further as the war was heating up. He wrote about the Battle of the Coral Sea. Between news developments, he wrote features. He told about soldiers playing baseball on the Fourth of July, and how a shipment of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller records, played by a soldier in a music store, caused a traffic jam in the street outside. In a story about American nurses, he noted that Australian women overcame a shortage of nylons by painting imitation stockings on their legs. He interviewed pilots in hospital beds. One had been bitten by a snake that had somehow found its way into his cockpit. Another had single-handedly taken on forty-five Japanese Zeros and lived to tell about it. A third had devised a scheme to lure Zeros into high-speed chases that burned up their gas.

  In early June, Barney was back in Port Moresby. He wasn’t allowed to say that in his letters home because that would run afoul of the censors, so he simply called it “this place.” His letters were upbeat: Living in “this place” was tough, but there were compensations: turquoise seas, outrigger canoes, and odd characters like the stiff-upper-lip British plantation owner who treated them to a meal. The birds, however, were another matter. “You would not like them. I’m sure of that.… They perch in a tree above you and emit such things as ‘That’s lousy; throw it away.’ Or ‘Wasting cable tolls, wasting cable tolls.’ The other day we threw stones at them. No hits.” He sent home a piece of metal from a downed Zero.

  In mid-July, he returned to Australia, basing himself in Brisbane. He moved with a group of other reporters into a large two-story house surrounded by a veranda. For the first time, he lived in luxury. Oil portraits of royals lined the hallways. There was a library, a billiard table, a badminton court, a flowering garden, and three servants to tidy up. A sign out front—WAR CORRESPONDENTS’ CONVALESCENT HOME—mystified the locals. A sympathetic Australian neighbor sent over an offer of calf’s-foot jelly and then became puzzled when he noticed that the so-called disabled reporters were chasing one another around a badminton court, whooping it up. In July, MacArthur and his entire entourage moved to Brisbane, too. The general arrived in a maroon railroad car, guarded at both ends by American MPs toting tommy guns and wearing white belts and white gloves. The apparition gave the high command the nickname “the circus.”

  In August, Barney wrote about the battle over the Solomon Islands (the beginning of the Marines’ assault on Guadalcanal) and the abortive Japanese attempt to seize Milne Bay, on the eastern tip of New Guinea. His news stories were taking on a new, more ominous tone. The buildup of American forces was insufficient to meet the Japanese threat in New Guinea and the enemy had seized the initiative. They had begun a land drive from the northern coast over the Owen Stanley Mountains, following the treacherous Kokoda Trail, aimed at taking Port Moresby. MacArthur downplayed the Japanese move, claiming the mountains, which rose to thirteen thousand feet, were an insurmountable barrier. By September, the Japanese succeeded in crossing the mountains, reaching a plateau only thirty-two miles from Moresby—a fact that the American censors deleted.

  Barney decided it was time to return there. He arrived in Port Moresby in mid-September, to find the situation looking better close-up than it had at a distance. The Japanese were giving up their drive over the mountains. And finally, with new planes coming in, the Americans were winning the air war. The number of Zeros in the sky was dropping. His reports carried a tone of optimism. “Now we’re cooking with gas,” he quoted one army air forces officer as saying. “We have got sixty two Jap planes in the last four weeks to four that they got of ours.”

  Privately the Aussies seethed because MacArthur’s communiqués referred to the troops up against the Japanese as “our” troops or “Allied” troops, which gave the misimpression that the Yanks were the ones turning the tide. But Barney’s dispatches, written closer to the action, were careful to give credit where it was due. He always called the soldiers Australian, and the U.S. censors allowed it through. Barney became popular with the Aussie journalists and sometimes bunked down with them in their quarters seventeen miles out of town.

  In Port Moresby, Barney moved into the correspondents’ hut. With four rooms for cots draped in mosquito netting and an open veranda, the flimsy plasterboard cottage could accommodate a dozen or so newsmen. Food was an unending diet of corned beef, beans, crackers, and tea. On October 2 came a surprise. MacArthur and the “circus” breezed in for a whirlwind visit. He landed just before dusk in a B-17 bomber at the Seven Mile Drome, as the reporters stood on the bank of a revetment to watch. When the hand shaking and saluting was done, a soldier bellowed, “Time for chow.” Some of the newcomers misheard it as a warning of an air raid and quickly scattered.


  The next morning, MacArthur rode in a staff car toward the Kokoda Trail in a jeep with chains on all four wheels. He sat in the front, splattered with red mud and grasping the windshield so tightly, he couldn’t wave at the soldiers coming down. The men going up opened ranks to let him pass, unsmiling and sweating under their loads. At the end of the road, where the trail began by plunging into a gorge several hundred feet deep, he got out, made some observations, signed autographs, and took a cup of coffee from a cook called “Gestapo Gus.” Then he turned to leave. He was twenty-two miles from the Japanese line, the closest he would come. The reporters had shadowed him as best they could. Barney wrote 2,500 words—enough for about two and a half columns. Diller carried his and others’ copy back and warned that they wouldn’t be released for some time. When a British reporter arrived from Brisbane almost two weeks later, he said the dispatches had been badly cut and changed, because the censors deleted references to the general going as far as he could in the jeep.

  But by then, Barney had other concerns. For he had gotten the okay to go on the trip with the 32nd Division and was preparing to fly to Wanigela for his trip to Pongani. He wrote his story comparing the role of correspondents in the two wars and soaked his feet in water to break in his new boots and wrote his final letter to our mother.

  At this point Barney was no longer working in tandem with Carleton Kent. Kent later heard about what happened at Pongani, about what went wrong, and then did some reporting to verify it. He recounted it this way:

  Someone fired Barney with enthusiasm over the story possibilities of such a trip, and he easily wangled a spot aboard the ship. Possibly it was the enthusiasm of Lt. Bruce Fahnestock, who had cruised those waters for years on schooners in various scientific expeditions, which sold him the idea.

  That same night a signal was wirelessed back to Air Corps headquarters, warning that an American ship would be in the waters below Buna, and for God’s sake don’t bomb it. Barney, Bruce, the ship’s small crew, and a contingent of 32nd Division men and officers took off on the dangerous, but not foolhardy, mission.

  Something had happened, however, to communications between Wanigela and Air Corps headquarters. The warning signal wasn’t received in time to advise pilots assigned to early bombing missions in the Buna area. Soon after sunrise, some of our B-25’s came over the ship.

  Kent’s reporting was accurate.

  Those words my father hastily scribbled in his notebook—“Plane across course. Jap or our?”—were prophetic. For the plane that bombed the King John was an American B-25. It had taken off from Port Moresby early that morning on an armed reconnaissance mission and was returning to base when it spotted the two ships.

  As Meyer Berger was to write years later: “It turned out, bitterly enough, that one of Barney’s beloved ‘high school kids’ had made a grievous error; he had mistaken the King John for a Japanese craft because it was so far forward of any previous American position.”

  I don’t know precisely when my mother heard that my father had been killed by friendly fire, but the news was not totally surprising. General MacArthur’s initial statement had called his death “accidental.” There followed a period of confusion and censorship as MacArthur’s press officers scrambled to find out what had happened and released information to the Times in dribs and drabs. My mother saved all the messages. The first one came on October 20 in compressed, urgent cablese:

  DARNTON KILLED FRONTLINE NEWGUINEA STOP PUBLICATION FORBIDDEN PENDING ANNOUNCEMENT EXHEADQUARTERS

  Two days later came a curt message, apparently in response to a query from the Times:

  CIRCUMSTANCES UNAVAILABLE YET

  And five days after that, Colonel Diller sent another:

  SHRAPNEL WOUND LEFT SIDE OF HEAD KILLED DARNTON INSTANTLY STOP DETAILS NOT YET KNOWN

  And five days after that, still another:

  WHILE ON SMALL BOAT RECONNOITERING OFF NORTH COAST NEWGUINEA DARNTON KILLED BY AIRBOMB STOP SINCE WOULD GIVE VALUABLE INFORMATION DETAILS PRESENCE BOAT OFF COAST SHOULDN’T REVEALED STOP

  No one seemed eager to press hard to find out the cause of the miscommunication. In his letter, Kent wrote:

  I know you feel as I do, and as do all his friends—that there’s no use trying to find out who is to blame. The young pilot, lacking the warning, simply did his duty. None of Barney’s friends tried to find out why the all-important signal was delayed. I hope the army did, to avoid a second such tragedy. I want you to feel certain of this: that Barney would have never gone on the trip if he had thought the chances were against him.… He always played it safe. He always meant to come back to you and the kids, and said so. He was very brave, but he never was a fool about it. Posing against the skyline of a war didn’t appeal to him. He took his bombing and strafing raids in a slit trench, because he knew that was the only way. His death occurred in spite of all his sensible precautions. It was surely an act of God. So I’m not interested in why that signal was delayed. My quarrel is with God.

  Two days after the death, General Harding wrote a letter to Gen. Richard Sutherland, MacArthur’s chief of staff, saying that “everyone hereabouts is distressed over the death of Darnton and Fahnestock.” He added:

  I knew Darnton quite well (he stayed a couple of weeks with us when the Division was at Adelaide), and consider him one damn good correspondent and a swell guy. He was hot to be on the spot for the first contact between American Army ground troops with the Japs. I told him that this would probably be it and gave him permission to go.

  There’s no disposition hereabouts to try to hang the blame for the accidental bombing on any one person or group. The pilot might have done more to make sure that he wasn’t dropping his bombs on his own people, but I don’t believe that he had been advised of the possibility of friendly craft being in that vicinity. The Air Corps staff might have warned their pilots of that possibility since they knew that we contemplated the move by water. And certainly we should have informed the Air Corps to be on the lookout for two ships the morning they were to arrive. I guess we will just have to chalk it up to one of those things that happen in a war, and remember the lesson we learned at a price.

  CHAPTER 4

  Mom didn’t talk much about the period right after Barney died, but years later she acknowledged how painful it was. Being busy helped at first. There were the obligations and trappings of widowhood—arrangements to be made, letters to write. Condolences poured in from Barney’s extensive family in Michigan and from newspaper colleagues and others. Friends clipped obits from papers around the country and sent them to her. Death necessitated a surprising amount of paperwork. She received a dunning letter from a member of the Times accounting department, asking if she could account for a five-thousand-dollar advance provided for his assignment. Her reply was straightforward—unfortunately, she had no receipts on hand, she explained—in a tone so neutral, it’s hard to tell if she was being sarcastic; she sent a copy of both letters to the managing editor, Edwin L. James, and the problem disappeared overnight.

  She corresponded with the New York Daily News correspondent in the Pacific, Jack Turcott, whom the army appointed as Barney’s executor. He collected some of Barney’s belongings and sent them back—his passport, correspondent’s insignia, army uniform, and some photographs—but following what Turcott called “a horrible Australian custom,” Barney’s typewriter and many other items had been auctioned off among the Australian reporters. “The men who bought the things refused to part with them, despite my urgent pleas and offers to refund the money.” He added that he had burned her letters, which Barney had kept carefully tucked away, to spare her the sorrow of seeing them again. In doing this, he said he was following the counsel of another correspondent, who was a woman and therefore presumably knew about such things. “She said you’d be sure to read them over and over again, which was just the thing you shouldn’t do.” I doubt my mother appreciated the preemptive solicitousness.

  Once these arrangements were out of
the way, she encountered a sudden void. After the flurry of obligations and commiserations, for which she steeled herself, not much happened. Communications from New Guinea tapered off. The letters of condolence came less frequently, then stopped altogether. The war went on. Buna, after a bloody campaign that lasted months instead of the one week that had been anticipated, was eventually taken. The American counteroffensive moved on, island by island. At some point Barney’s body would be transferred back to the States, but there was no word when. The reality of his death hit home.

  After several months, she packed up and moved us to Washington, D.C. She got a job there as an “information specialist” in the publications section of the Office of War Information, the agency set up in June 1942 to handle war news at home and propaganda abroad. Under the former CBS newsman Elmer Davis, the OWI was a sprawling bureaucracy that cleared everything that was for public consumption. It vetted posters warning of spies and saboteurs and critiqued newsreels of the fighting and approved radio series such as “This Is Our Enemy,” which portrayed Hitler’s perfidy and Mussolini’s buffoonery. Exactly how she obtained this position, I never learned, though I know she felt strongly about participating in the war effort. Her background was in the professional world of New York City—before giving up her career for motherhood, she had been an advertising copywriter and magazine editor—so she was well qualified. Perhaps an old friend of Barney’s, Milton MacKaye, a magazine writer who also joined the OWI, recommended her. In any case, as someone who could string words into a decent sentence and was a war widow, she was a natural choice.