War Stories II: Heroism in the Pacific Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  CHAPTER 1 - WHO FIRED FIRST?

  PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII

  PACIFIC OCEAN

  ABOARD USS WARD

  ABOARD JAPANESE SPS I-24TOU

  USS MONAGHAN, DD-354

  CHAPTER 2 - THE FALL OF THE PHILIPPINES

  HQ ASIATIC FLEET

  AMERICAN FAR EAST COMMAND

  BATAAN PENINSULA

  GENERAL ED KING’S COMMAND POST

  JAPANESE POW COLUMN

  CHAPTER 3 - A HELL WORSE THAN WAR: THE BATAAN DEATH MARCH

  JAPANESE-HELD TERRITORY

  PHILIPPINE ISLANDS

  CHAPTER 4 - REVENGE FOR PEARL HARBOR: THE DOOLITTLE RAID

  ATLANTIC OCEAN

  HQ U.S. ARMY AIR CORPS

  USS HORNET

  USS HORNET

  USS HORNET

  DOOLITTLE RAID

  CHAPTER 5 - AN AWAKENED GIANT: THE BATTLE OF THE CORAL SEA

  HQ U.S. PACIFIC FLEET

  BATTLE OF THE CORAL SEA

  STATION HYPO

  CHAPTER 6 - TURNING POINT: THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY

  MIDWAY ATOLL

  STATION HYPO

  PEARL HARBOR SHIPYARDS

  STATION HYPO

  JNS YAMOTO, IMPERIAL COMBINED FLEET FLAGSHIP

  USS ENTERPRISE

  ABOARD USS YORKTOWN

  ABOARD USS ENTERPRISE

  CHAPTER 7 - THE FLYING TIGERS

  KUNMING AIR BASE

  CHAPTER 8 - THE FORGOTTEN FRONT

  BRITISH BASE AREA

  ALLIED AIR BASE

  AFTER ACTION REPORT

  CHAPTER 9 - DEATH BY INCHES: GUADALCANAL

  GUADALCANAL, SOLOMON ISLANDS

  HQ 1ST MARINE DIVISION

  IMPERIAL JAPANESE NAVY FLAGSHIP CHOKAI

  1ST MARINE DIVISION COMMAND POST

  BATTLE FOR THE EASTERN SOLOMONS

  1ST MARINE DIVISION FORWARD COMMAND POST

  BATTLE OF CAPE ESPERANCE

  1ST MARINE DIVISION FORWARD PERIMETER

  NORTHEAST OF SANTA CRUZ ISLAND

  NAVAL BATTLE OF GUADALCANAL

  NAVAL BATTLE OF GUADALCANAL

  CHAPTER 10 - THE BLACK SHEEP SQUADRON

  MARINE FIGHTER SQUADRON VMF-214

  MARINE FIGHTER SQUADRON VMF-214 READY TENT

  MARINE FIGHTER SQUADRON VMF-214

  CHAPTER 11 - BLOODY TARAWA

  USS MARYLAND, FLAGSHIP, U.S. 5TH AMPHIBIOUS FORCE

  U.S. 5TH AMPHIBIOUS FORCE

  HQ 2ND MARINE DIVISION

  2ND MARINE DIVISION

  2ND MARINE DIVISION COMMAND POST

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  CHAPTER 12 - ASSAULT ON THE MARIANAS

  HQ CENTRAL PACIFIC

  USS INDIANAPOLIS, 5TH FLEET FLAGSHIP

  4TH MARINE DIVISION

  U.S. NAVY 5TH FLEET

  CHAPTER 13 - FORGOTTEN PELELIU

  HQ U.S. PACIFIC COMMAND

  HQ 1ST MARINE DIVISION, AFLOAT

  OPERATION STALEMATE

  OPERATION STALEMATE

  OPERATION STALEMATE

  OPERATION STALEMATE

  CHAPTER 14 - “I HAVE RETURNED”: THE BATTLE OF LEYTE

  U.S. 7TH FLEET

  HQ 6TH RANGERS ASSAULT

  ABOARD USS NASHVILLE

  JAPANESE FIRST STRIKING FORCE

  JAPANESE CENTER FORCE

  BATTLE OF THE SIBUYAN SEA

  USS NEW JERSEY

  BATTLE OF SURIGAO STRAIT

  TASK UNIT TAFFY 3

  USS NEW JERSEY

  HQ PACIFIC FLEET COMMAND

  HQ 24TH INFANTRY DIVISION

  CHAPTER 15 - THE DARING RESCUE OF THE GHOSTS OF BATAAN

  HQ 6TH ARMY

  6TH RANGER BATTALION

  6TH RANGER BATTALION

  6TH RANGER BATTALION

  6TH RANGER BATTALION

  ARMY EVAC HOSPITAL

  CHAPTER 16 - IWO JIMA: THE BLOODIEST BATTLE OF WORLD WAR II

  U.S. JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF

  HQ 5TH AMPHIBIOUS FORCE

  5TH AMPHIBIOUS FORCE, AFLOAT

  HQ 3RD MARINE DIVISION

  U.S. MARINE ASSAULT FORCE

  U.S. MARINE ASSAULT FORCE

  U.S. MARINE ASSAULT FORCE

  U.S. MARINE ASSAULT FORCE

  CHAPTER 17 - OKINAWA: THE LAST BATTLE

  U.S. MARINE ASSAULT FORCE

  U.S. MARINE ASSAULT FORCE

  10TH ARMY ASSAULT FORCE

  10TH ARMY ASSAULT FORCE

  10TH ARMY ASSAULT FORCE

  10TH ARMY ASSAULT FORCE

  CHAPTER 18 - MACARTHUR AND WAR’S END

  OFFICE OF THE U.S. JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF

  U.S. SOUTHWEST PACIFIC COMMAND

  U.S. 20TH ARMY AIR CORPS

  U.S. 20TH ARMY AIR CORPS

  IMPERIAL PALACE

  ABOARD USS MISSOURI

  EPILOGUE

  TIMELINE OF WORLD WAR II IN THE PACIFIC

  GLOSSARY

  Acknowledgments

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  To those who serve now…

  With gratitude to those who served then…

  That we all might live in freedom tomorrow.

  PREFACE

  PRELUDE TO THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC

  (1930-1941 )

  PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII

  SUNDAY, 21 MARCH 2004

  0800 HOURS LOCAL

  For Americans, World War II began here on a Sunday morning not much different from this one. The air is clear and crisp. Puffy white clouds punctuate the blue sky, and the sun, still low on the horizon, is already bright. A bugle sounds the notes for colors, and ashore, off in the distance, a church bell summons people to worship. This morning, here on the waters of Pearl Harbor, naval ensigns flutter from their halyards in a light breeze as sailors go about their duties on the decks of haze-gray Navy hulls. These are sights and sounds that would have been impossible to see or hear at this hour on 7 December 1941.

  Every time I have visited Pearl Harbor I have tried to imagine what it must have been like at 0755 that Sabbath morn as 183 Japanese planes, led by Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, came roaring in on the first wave of the surprise attack. Even though the USS Ward, an aging World War I–era destroyer, had fired upon and sunk a two-man midget submarine just outside the harbor an hour before the air assault began, the Japanese pilots approached unchallenged. The dive-bombers struck first, taking out most of the land-based aircraft on Ford Island, as well as Ewa, Wheeler, Bellows, Kaneohe, and Hickam Fields. Two minutes later, torpedo bombers swept in low and fast—the first wave hit every outboard capital vessel tethered on Battleship Row. The venerable USS Arizona, tied up beside the USS Vestal, a repair ship, had already been struck by aerial torpedoes when a Japanese bomb plunged into the forward fourteen-inch powder magazine. The resulting explosion sent the ship and 1,102 men to the bottom before the attack was five minutes old.

  By 0945, when the second wave of Japanese attackers finished spewing death and destruction from bombs, torpedoes, machine guns, and 20 mm cannon fire, 2,403 Americans—military and civilian—were dead or dying, and 1,178 others had been wounded. Of the ninety-six warships at Pearl Harbor, eighteen had been sunk or severely damaged. Five of the eight Pacific Fleet battleships, the U.S. Navy’s primary strike force, were on the bottom or out of commission. Of the 388 Army, Navy, and Marine aircraft based in Hawaii, 199 had been damaged or destroyed and fewer than a hundred were left usable. As the Americans tended the wounded, fought fires, rescued shipmates, and tried to salvage sinking vessels, six Japanese carriers 200 miles north of Oa
hu recovered their aircraft and turned back west—escaping unscathed. Only twenty-nine of Fuchida’s pilots failed to return.

  The U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines in Hawaii were not the only Americans to fight the Empire of Japan on this “day of infamy.” That evening, the Japanese struck our bases and facilities on Guam, on Wake Island, and in the Philippines. British and Dutch forces were assaulted in Hong Kong and Malaya. And on 8 December, while Congress debated a resolution to declare war, the Imperial Navy attacked Midway. These coordinated attacks, part of a master plan reluctantly devised by Fleet Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet, were deemed in Tokyo to be a stunning military success.

  But Pearl Harbor became something else that the emperor and most of his ambitious generals and admirals could not foresee as they celebrated their short-lived victory. Until the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay on 14 August 1945, Americans from every walk of life and every ethnic background would be motivated to serve in uniform, work harder, eat less, volunteer more, and buy war bonds—all with the rallying cry “Remember Pearl Harbor!”

  As a boy I had read about that “day of infamy,” seen the pictures and newsreels, and later studied it at the Naval Academy. Then I visited this hallowed place while commuting to and from other wars. But it wasn’t until I began interviewing those who were young men and women on 7 December 1941 that I began to grasp what that day was really like and what it meant to a generation of Americans. More than six decades after the event, every one of these warriors and their contemporaries, no matter where they were at the time, can recall exactly what they were doing and who they were with when they learned about the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

  Many of them didn’t even know where this Hawaiian naval base was when they first heard about the raid. But everyone knew what it meant: America was now in the war that most had hoped to avoid.

  In the days after the attack, newspapers, magazines, and newsreels at local movie theaters quickly educated the American people about the geography of Hawaii—and the damage that had been done to America’s Pacific Fleet. That same “Remember Pearl Harbor!” rallying cry became a call to battle for the legions of young men showing up at recruiting and induction centers.

  It was a slogan that stuck, all the way across the broad expanse of ocean and the bloody battles of what came to be called the Pacific theater of war. Newspapers printed full-page maps of the region, and families tacked them up on kitchen and living room walls so that sweethearts, wives, parents, and siblings could keep track of where their loved ones were serving in the far reaches of that vast ocean. Tiny dots on those maps and locations with unpronounceable names became places to pray about in churches and weep over in the privacy of bedrooms.

  The ocean that spanned those maps was anything but pacific during World War II. From the opening shots fired here at Pearl Harbor to the armistice signed in Tokyo Bay three years, eight months, and twenty-four days later, this body of water and its islands were the venue for the biggest air and naval engagements in history and some of bloodiest land battles ever fought.

  The enemy that America was pitted against in the Pacific proved to be an implacable foe. Unlike our European adversaries—the Vichy French, Mussolini’s Italian Legions, or the German Wehrmacht—no Japanese Imperial Army unit ever surrendered until the armistice was signed on the deck of the USS Missouri on 2 September 1945. The Japanese literally fought to the death.

  Whether they served on air, land, or sea, the young Americans sent off to contend with the Japanese army, navy, and air force proved to be a remarkable lot. They are men and women often described in superlatives. Most were born in the aftermath of The War to End All Wars, were toddlers in the Roaring Twenties, and came of age during the Great Depression. Though few were unaffected by these events and the global economic catastrophe that began in America with the stock market crash of 1929, nearly all I’ve known have possessed a remarkable sense of optimism.

  This generation grew up in an America that was still overwhelmingly rural. Their sources of information on current events were newsreels at neighborhood movie theaters, hometown newspapers, radio, and discussions over the family kitchen table. They matured in the harsh reality of “hard times:” devastating droughts in our agricultural heartland, massive Depression-induced unemployment, and increasing uncertainty as Bolshevism swept across Russia and Fascism took hold in Italy, Japan, Spain, and Germany.

  Though most of those I interviewed for our War Stories documentaries and this book were just teenagers as war clouds gathered and broke over Asia and Europe in the 1930s, nearly all were familiar with the intrigues and events leading up to the conflagration. Yet few of them expected that America would be plunged into that awful cauldron. Most believed, as did their parents, that the broad, blue waters of the Atlantic and the Pacific insulated them from the troubles in faraway lands. Many cited the promises made by politicians of every persuasion who assured the American people that what was happening “over there” wasn’t our fight.

  Late in summer 1941—with Hitler dominating Europe and on the march toward Moscow, with Japanese forces controlling most of the Chinese coast and occupying Indochina, and with Britain being bombed daily—Congress began deliberations on the Selective Service Extension Act. The bill, authorizing the movement of American military personnel overseas and extending their term of service, was considered by opponents to be “jingoistic,” “warlike,” and too “provocative” for a “neutral nation.” The hotly contested debate reflected the ambivalence of the American people on the issue of our involvement in “someone else’s war.” On 12 August 1941, the law passed the House of Representatives by a single vote.

  Fewer than four months later, the attack on Pearl Harbor erased those uncertainties. For the young Americans already in service—and those now called up by the millions—it soon became obvious that while the war in Europe would be an Allied effort, the fight in the Pacific theater would be a predominantly American affair. They also quickly learned that they would face years of separation from those they loved, and they confronted the terrible prospect of death in a strange-sounding spot in the middle of an ocean most had never seen.

  This book is about them. This isn’t a book about war—it’s about warriors. It isn’t really a history book. It’s about those who made history—the young Americans from every walk of life, from every part of this great nation, who came to serve with the words “Remember Pearl Harbor!” ringing in their ears.

  Their self-effacing modest words are offered here as a memorial to heroic sacrifice in the crucible of dramatic and often deadly events that began with the attack on Pearl Harbor and ended with Japan’s surrender in Tokyo Bay. Theirs is a war story that deserves to be told.

  CHAPTER 1

  WHO FIRED FIRST?

  (7–8 DECEMBER 1941)

  PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII

  SUNDAY, 7 DECEMBER 1941

  0755 HOURS LOCAL

  The first planes came in high, well above the ships and their sleeping crews in the anchorage. Some of the few sailors who were on deck actually waved, marveling at the sight of so many warplanes in the air that early on a Sunday. Then, across the water, came the sounds of explosions and firing from Ford Island and Hickam Field.

  Just two minutes later, more aircraft, coming in low and fast, headed straight for the rows of battleships alongside Ford Island. The planes pulled up just in time to clear the masts of the assembled armada, but not before dropping aerial torpedoes from their bellies. The wakes of the torpedoes pointed like fingers toward the largest vessels of America’s Pacific Fleet. As the 550-pound warheads detonated against the hulls beneath the water, those on deck could see the bright insignia on the wings of the green and silver aircraft as they swept overhead: a red circle representing the rising sun of Japan. Many of those sleeping or working below decks never even knew who killed them.

  Within minutes of the first bombs and torpedoes, radio operators at shore stations and a
board several of the ships under attack sent out the message “AIR RAID PEARL HARBOR THIS IS NO DRILL.” Weeks later, intelligence officers found a recording of another radio transmission. At 0753 hours that morning, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, leader of the airborne assault, had sent a coded signal to Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, commander in chief of the Japanese navy’s First Carrier Strike Force and the forty-nine Kate bombers, forty Kate torpedo bombers, fifty-one Val dive-bombers, and forty-three “Zeke” fighter attack planes accompanying him on the first wave of the raid. The message confirming that they had achieved complete surprise was one word, repeated three times: “TORA, TORA, TORA!”

  Mitsuo Fuchida led the air attack on Pearl Harbor. After the war he was converted to Christianity by Jake DeShazer, one of the Doolittle Raiders and a former POW.

  Fuchida’s message was accurate. The Japanese air attack caught the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marines in Hawaii incredibly unprepared. By 0945, a second wave of 167 attack aircraft had added to the devastation, then wheeled north to return to their six carriers: the Akagi, the Kaga, the Soryu, the Zuikaku, the Hiryu, and the Shokaku. Pearl Harbor, the largest naval anchorage in the Pacific, was littered with sunken and burning American warships; the best dry-dock and ship repair facilities west of California were in shambles; only 25 percent of the aircraft based in Hawaii were still in operation; and there were 3,581 American casualties.

  It was a disaster of historic proportions. Yet it failed in its principal goal: keeping the U.S. Navy from launching a westward offensive against Japan until the emperor’s armed forces had seized sufficient territory to secure the Home Islands and their “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”