by John Darnton
An alternate explanation for the secrecy is that the episode was embarrassing to the army and to the publicity-conscious MacArthur, especially coming at the start of his long-awaited island-hopping campaign. The general had a notorious proclivity for suppressing news that might reflect badly on him or his organization, and his staff justified this on the grounds that not to do so might be harmful to the war effort.
Just how important MacArthur’s reputation was to him emerged in the course of my own research. Documents turned up that showed that MacArthur had been worried about certain papers that were found among my father’s personal effects and that he’d ordered them destroyed.
This odd fact surfaced twice in the last few decades. Once was in December 1975, when Robert Sherrod wrote to Seymour Topping, then the Times’ assistant managing editor, bringing the episode to the paper’s attention. Perhaps he thought it worth a news story. In any event, the Times didn’t write one, and Topping sent the letter to me. Then a few years ago, Philip Weiss, a writer researching a novel, found the documents at the MacArthur Memorial Archives and Library in Norfolk, Virginia, and mentioned them in an article in the New York Observer.
The documents are an exchange of letters. One was to General MacArthur in Melbourne from George W. Cocheu, a colonel who had been his roommate at West Point. Cocheu, in charge of the Army Effects Bureau in Kansas City, Missouri, said he was “puzzled” as to what to do with two documents found in Barney Darnton’s possessions after his death. He warned, “I appreciate that these papers, if they fell into the hands of somebody not too friendly to you, might be used to your very great personal disadvantage. If you will let me have your views and what you want done with them, I will be governed accordingly.” MacArthur replied quickly, saying, “I … suggest that the documents because of their nature be destroyed.”
The exchange stirred my blood. Had I come across some long-buried scandal that had caused the pilfering of papers from my father’s personal effects? Alas, that proved not to be the case. The papers in question turned out to be two cablegrams from the Times directing Barney to approach the MacArthurs and offer them a substantial amount of money for their memoirs once the war was over. My father told the Times to submit the proposals through channels, directly to MacArthur’s aide, Colonel Diller. There’s no record if the Times did so, and in any case, the general didn’t accept such an offer. In his letter he struck a dignified posture, saying that he had referred all such offers—including a “dazzling” one of $500,000—to Colonel Diller with instructions to decline them. As was often the case, MacArthur’s truth was no one else’s. Mr. Sherrod contacted Diller in 1975, and Diller said that MacArthur had never instructed him to reject the offers.
The documents turned out not to be earthshaking, but they do provide a glimpse into the personality of the Pacific commander and his sensitivity about press coverage. The mere fact that such an offer from a newspaper could prove embarrassing shows how much the spirit of public service has changed in today’s military, in which generals serve a year or two in Iraq and then trot out their memoirs.
That story was not the only one about my father that the Times decided not to run. In 2006 I found an unpublished story from long ago stashed away in the Times archives. The story was written by Anthony Leviero, a Times reporter who had served as an intelligence officer in the war. The piece was datelined “Washington, March 9” and was filed, according to a handwritten scribble at the top, in 1947. The lead paragraph said:
Washington, March 9—Byron Darnton, war correspondent of The New York Times, was killed in a pitched battle between American ground and Air Forces late in 1942 in perhaps the first of a number of tragic incidents during the war in which American aircraft mistakenly attacked our own troops.
The story was based largely on an interview with Sheridan Fahnestock, the brother of Bruce, the lieutenant killed alongside Barney. Sheridan had investigated the attack in a visit to Pongani two days after it happened. The story blamed “a group of B25’s from General George V. Kenney’s Fifth Air Force,” saying that the ground forces had indeed informed the air forces of the troop movement—an assertion that the air forces denied—and also that the soldiers on the ship fired only after the first bomb had been dropped. Far from being an incidental minor accident, the bombing was part of a full-fledged battle between friendly forces that “got intense for a few minutes as the planes repeated their attack.” Leviero’s account was wrong in some respects—its assertion that more than one plane had been involved, for example—but it advanced the story of my father’s death. Without it, as far as any reader of the newspaper of record would know, he had simply perished in an accident. I asked myself why Leviero’s story never ran. The explanation came in a note from the managing editor, James: “The story was not used on the ground it would not do any good,” he wrote. Even with the war long over, instances of friendly fire remained controversial. As I was to see occasionally in my own career, when it comes to suppressing information, self-censorship by editors and reporters can top official censorship.
Interestingly, historical reconstructions seem to turn up an interconnectedness among people and events that was not apparent at the time. When Gen. Robert L. Eichelberger, who had taken command when American forces bogged down at Buna, sought a collaborator to write his war memoirs, Our Jungle Road to Tokyo, he turned to Milton MacKaye, Barney’s best friend. MacKaye ensured that Barney received his due. In one section Eichelberger recalled a session with reporters who briefed him when he first arrived in Australia.
Byron Darnton, a great reporter from The New York Times, was the unofficial but acknowledged dean of the American correspondents, and “Barney” arranged that unusual conference. I went to dinner at the press house which the correspondents shared. After a little preliminary wassail and an excellent meal, coffee was brought in, and tunics were loosed at the neck. Barney acted as an informal chairman, wise, balanced, humorous, as I began the cross-examination of my hosts.… No military textbook with which I am familiar suggests the questioning of correspondents as a method by which a commander may inform himself. But around the dinner table that night—with everything off the record and no holds barred—I received from a group of intelligent newspapermen a first-rate orientation course. When they finished I had a pretty clear idea about the currents of the waters in which it was my unchosen destiny to swim.
Already, so early in the war, my friend Barney Darnton was gone. Many gallant newspapermen died subsequently in posts of danger, and many people forget—because the newspapermen were not soldiers—that all of them came to posts of danger voluntarily.
At the same time, a top aide to Harding, the general whom Eichelberger replaced, was E. J. Kahn, Jr., a young writer for The New Yorker. He wrote an article for The Saturday Evening Post about war correspondents, called “The Men Behind the By-Lines.” He began it:
Ask almost any war correspondent stationed in the Southwest Pacific whom he regards as tops in his field, and he will tell you that the man was Byron Darnton of The New York Times. Barney Darnton isn’t top man any more because he was killed last fall when a bomb fragment struck him in the head.… If so irreverent a corps of foreign representatives as the foreign correspondents in Australia and New Guinea could be said to have had a dean, Darnton was it. He could not only beat most of his colleagues at English billiards but he was unanimously accepted by them as the unofficial leader of their lively gang. People who knew him were inclined to the belief that he might have been the inspiration for the old story of the butler who, announcing seven journalistic callers to his mistress, said, “Madame, there are six reporters here and a gentleman from the Times.”
In an attempt to find accounts of the bombing, I cast a wide net. I managed to get notices in a newsletter put out by an organization called the American WWII Orphans Network and in the Red Arrow News of the 32nd Division. I also wrote an article for the Smithsonian magazine that mentioned my research. That brought a message from a retired seventy-five-
year-old surgeon, David C. Marshall. He said that his father and my father were on the same troopship to the Pacific. He mentioned that he had some diaries and photos to share with me, so I drove down to visit him and his wife, Helen, in their redbrick Federal house on a winding suburban street in Pennington, New Jersey. They gave me a friendly welcome. A quiet-spoken, refined man, he explained that he was on “a quest” to document and write about the wartime exploits of his father, also a surgeon, Lt. Col. John Hugh Marshall. Colonel Marshall had set up the giant 153rd Station Hospital in Queensland and then moved up to Port Moresby to open a field hospital. The small frontline hospitals were the forerunners of the MASH units in the Korean War.
Dr. Marshall had converted his second-floor study into a World War II research library. He told me that his father was killed in a train wreck. In November 1951, the surgeon was returning from a meeting of the American College of Surgeons in San Francisco when his train stalled in a blizzard in the Rockies and was struck from behind by another train. “I began to realize he’d been through an awful lot of things in the war I wanted to know about.” Years later, visiting his mother in Ohio, he learned there was a footlocker in the attic. “I went up there one afternoon in winter. It was cold. When I opened the trunk, I couldn’t believe it. Old photographs, diaries, movies. I sat up there cross-legged, freezing, looking at all this stuff. I read it all over the next few days. Everything I had wondered about was there.” But it was not enough. So he made a pilgrimage to Australia and New Guinea, looking for the hospitals, which had disappeared. He walked through the Bomana War Cemetery, twelve miles north of Port Moresby, the one where my father had been temporarily buried, and he described his feelings on seeing the rows upon rows of white crosses and other markers. “It looked to me like most of the interred were Australian, mostly airmen,” he said haltingly. “The two native guides I had with me were very good.… They’d stop and point.…” His throat tightened and he could not go on. Helen walked over and put an arm around his shoulders. We talked some more and had lunch and then I left, carrying with me a copy of his father’s wartime diary.
The first entry was the day before Pearl Harbor. I read Dr. Marshall’s small, neat handwriting and followed him through the early stages of the war. My heart raced as I came to October. He recounted bombing raids in Moresby, chitchat, details of daily life. Then, on Monday, October 19, he stopped off at the small hillside hospital called Koki. “I had the first shock of the war. My good friend Mr. Darnton of The New York Times, a former classmate in Ann Arbor lit school and correspondent who came over on the transport with me, was here dead, killed by the Japs at Buna.” Fahnestock’s corpse was there, too. “I viewed the bodies. Within an hour we received 8 more wounded by plane.”
Early on, one of my first questions was what kind of protective gear had my father worn. I had come across an old article in Newsweek, written after his death, that said, “Darnton was the type of reporter who always turned up where things were hottest,” and described a telling incident.
His friends like to tell about the time a newly arrived photographer wanted to photograph a Port Moresby airdrome the Japs had been bombing with clocklike regularity. All the reporters had shunned the spot for weeks, but Darnton took the greenhorn in tow. They arrived simultaneously with a squadron of Jap bombers, whose bombs hit as if aimed for the pair. The camera in the photographer’s hands was smashed, his tin hat torn by flaying metal. Darnton, without a tin hat because he disliked them, was unscratched.
Dr. Marshall’s diary answered my question. He wrote, “I have Barney Darnton’s helmet with the bullet hole through the filler. I am afraid he did not have on his steel helmet.” The surgeon’s supposition was wrong in one respect—the hole he saw was not caused by a bullet, but by a piece of shrapnel. Yet his account was the first confirmation of something I had suspected—that when my father stood at the wheelhouse door, guiding the pilot to avoid the plumes where the bombs were falling, his head was unprotected. He was wearing only the sun-resistant cellulose lining.
In addition to the diary, I brought home from that visit copies of films the doctor had taken while stationed in Australia and New Guinea. And there, after shaky views of pitched tents, scrub brush, and dirt roads, was the only film footage of my father I’d ever seen. A group of correspondents are standing around a jeep. Suddenly, Barney appears in a close-up, leaning against the jeep, smiling under his mustache, his eyes twinkling. His head is bare, his widow’s peak clearly visible. He has apparently just made a joke of some kind. The camera focuses on him for less than two seconds, but it took my breath away. I recognized him instantly. The next holiday, my brother and his family and my family gathered around the TV and I put the tape in. There was a collective gasp. A niece muttered, “My God!” I looked over at my brother. His eyes misted over and, for what seemed like quite a while, he couldn’t speak.
CHAPTER 22
After the deaths of their husbands, my mother became friends with Bruce Fahnestock’s widow. Mom sent her a telegram saying, “Because they were together I feel we are close now. I know you must feel as deeply as I do that it is important to take up the future with the same spirit and purpose that was theirs.”
I don’t know if my mother ever learned what I was to find out years later—that the two adventurous brothers were more than naturalists and ethnographers. They were American spies. They were using their maritime expedition to collect important information for the U.S. military, at the behest of President Roosevelt. Because of their knowledge of the Pacific, they were well equipped for an undercover role. The sons of an inventor and boat designer, they grew up sailing on Long Island Sound. Sheridan, age twenty-one, yearned to undertake an expedition to the South Seas and enlisted his older brother Bruce. They salvaged and renovated a sixty-five-foot schooner, Director, assembled a crew of four other young men, and set sail in 1935. Their mother joined them in Panama. The expedition lasted three years. They collected flora and fauna and three chestloads of artifacts for the American Museum of Natural History, wrote books, and gave lectures about their adventures with kava-drinking island chiefs, grass-skirted native women, twenty-foot-long sharks, and feasts of roasted pig.
The voyage was so successful the family wanted an encore. In 1940 they set their sights on the Dutch East Indies, specifically to help preserve rapidly disappearing native music. A Manhattan socialite donated a three-masted schooner, Director II, which was loaded with elaborate devices for recording music and birds. But anthropological and ornithological pursuits were not the only mission. FDR had called the Fahnestock brothers to the White House for a chat. He listened to their starry-eyed ambitions and then asked if they would be willing to engage in a little espionage. He wanted them to report on a number of developments in the South Pacific, particularly on Japanese infiltration and defense preparedness in the Dutch colony. The brothers readily agreed and, at the suggestion of the Office of Naval Intelligence, decided to keep their cover as civilians. Privately, they called themselves “the President’s men.” As Sheridan wrote in a later letter to Roosevelt, “So, we went to the Indies as two young men whose only purpose was to collect primitive music and enjoy life.”
The brothers were also supposed to reconnoiter harbors. “We had a Piper Cub in a crate on board and we were supposed to fly along the coasts and take photographs,” recalled Philip Farley, aged eighty-nine, sipping a vodka tonic at a Lexington Avenue bar nearly seven decades later. He had been the ship’s navigator. “From the air, you could spot the natural channels between the coral reefs. That way, we’d locate the entry to the harbors for refuge. We were on our way to Tahiti when Paris fell, and the Vichy government there made us take the plane off.” Farley sailed with the Fahnestocks for eight months and left the Director II shortly before the yacht ran aground and sank in an unmarked channel on the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland, Australia.
In the spring of 1942, the Fahnestocks returned to the Pacific as part of an operation called “Mission X,”
a group of specialists in logistics and communications. In Australia, their job was to scour the ports and requisition small craft for troops and supplies. The fleet eventually became known as the U.S. Army Small Ships Section. Again, Philip Farley was part of the group. “One of the first ships I found was the King John—she was a big old trawler with a problem in reverse gear,” he said. “I remember panicking because I had to shut off engines in midstream—I was just floating, at the mercy of the current—until I could shift it and go backward.” Farley got to know the Fahnestock brothers well, rubbing elbows in tight shipboard quarters. He seemed more impressed with Sheridan than with Bruce. “Sher was bright, hardworking, steady. He was the reliable one. Bruce, the older, was excitable. He was a wild character.” My ears picked up. I had an image of Bruce leaping up and manning the machine gun, and I wondered if he had been the one to fire first.
I asked: “Wild how?”
Farley didn’t skip a beat. “He’s the type of guy who’d jump up and fire a machine gun.”
“Is that what you think happened?”
“Sure. We all thought it.”
I remembered an account of the bombing in a letter my mother had written to one of Barney’s brothers. I went home and dug it out. She described the plane flying over Pongani and then returning “for another look.” To the pilot and crew the ships must have looked Japanese, she wrote. “Now evidently Bruce Fahnestock opened fire—the correspondents were bitter about this and I never told his mother. They thought it was stupid and fed the pilot’s distrust. At any rate, he began to drop bombs. Barney, standing by the captain, called the way they were dropping and the captain zigzagged out of their way.”
I found a letter to Mom from Bruce’s mother, Mary Fahnestock, in the same file. She was grateful that Mom had supplied her with information about the attack because it “cleared up” so many things. “I feared Bruce had been struck in the face and had suffered. Also, the plane at 3,000 feet clears another point. I thought all along (from your silence on that point) that Bruce had manned the gun (also he was a marvelous shot) and now I know that no one could know the identity of the other at that distance and neither could take the chance to wait. He died as he lived, finished every job he started in a big way! … I would like [his child] to know that his daddy died behind a gun.”