JERSEY’s BOMBER BEACH A FDR’s MOB-BUSTING ELECTION FOE
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FLYING TURKEY The Unlovable, Unhateable Avenger Torpedo Bomber
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June 2016, Volume Twelve, Number One
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FEATURES
12 CLINGING TO LIFE ON A LIFE RAFT Fifty miles seemed close enough to New Orleans not to fear a U-boat attack. Yet there was Heredia sinking, and Ray Downs struggling to save his eight-year-old son. By Michael J. Tougias and Alison O’Leary
18 RISING STAR, FALLING STAR No one so young had ever made full general. But Mark Clark, who chose the glory of capturing Rome instead of destroying a German army, didn’t deserve it, critics said. By William Floyd, Jr.
24 EXTRA INNINGS Pro baseball had to answer a pressing question in 1942: Should we be playing games while the nation fights a war? The president and an anxious citizenry replied: Play ball! America in WWII Photo Essay
32 THE FLYING TURKEY Hunting Japanese warships, the Avenger torpedo bomber was rigid rather than graceful, reliable rather than remarkable. Few pilots loved it. But none hated it. And most survived in it. By Robert F. Dorr
2016 WWII AIR SHOWS A Special Events Section A Starting on Page 41
departments 2 KILROY 4 V-MAIL 6 HOME FRONT: Tom Dewey Runs for President 8 PINUP: Julie London 10 LANDINGS: Southern Jersey’s Bomber Beach 45 FLASHBACK 46 WAR STORIES 48 I WAS THERE: Keeping the Big Bombers Flying 57 BOOKS AND MEDIA 58 THEATER OF WAR: Desperate Journey 61 78 RPM: The Airborne Symphony 63 WWII EVENTS 64 GIs: Piccadilly Willy’s Bombardier COVER SHOT: Lieutenant General Mark Clark drew promotion—and criticism—like few other generals. Here, he approaches Anzio, Italy, aboard a PT boat on January 25, 1944. Three days earlier his Fifth Army’s VI Corps landed there only to get trapped in its beachhead. Praise came in May when Clark’s army helped the corps break out. But critics boiled when he then marched to Rome, letting a German army escape. NATIONAL ARCHIVES
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I ATE A GOOD NUMBER of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in my youth. They weren’t my favorite, but they were usually better than the alternative. I attended a Catholic grade school that didn’t have the luxury of a cafeteria, so my classmates and I had to bring our own lunches (typically in lunchboxes featuring Scooby-Doo or the Brady Bunch or some other pop culture icon). Our lunchboxes were groovy, but they weren’t insulated, and after they sat in a closet until noon, the food inside didn’t come out so well. I liked ham and cheese as much as any other boy, but I wasn’t keen on cheese melted by ambient warmth. That regular occurrence, considered together with the black-soot-belching exhaust pipe of our school bus, might explain why I felt queasy during too many rides home. To avoid the spontaneously-grilled-cheese effect, I often opted for PB&Js—Skippy or Jif, Welch’s Concord grape jelly (I didn’t know there was any other kind), and Stroehmann white (my mother’s preferred brand of the Wonder-style fluffy, flavorless bread). It became my go-to lunch. When I recently stumbled onto the factoid that GIs practicing maneuvers on stateside bases invented the PB&J, I felt an instant personal connection to the Americans of World War II. I decided to write the Home Front department for this issue on that subject. Then, early in the research process, I hit a snag. A source claimed that GIs, bored with the same old victuals, made quick meals of three of the elements in their rations: peanut butter, jelly, and bread. Hmm. Did GIs receive field rations during maneuvers? Did rations have all three of those ingredients? Did no one ever combine those before the war? Before I got too far in finding the answers to all those questions, I found a reader comment on a website that sent my would-be article to the digital trash can. The writer, identified only as Joyce, wanted to correct what she said was widespread misinformation about the origin of the sandwich in question. She recalled growing up in Berkeley, California, during the Depression: “I can tell you with certainty we ate pb+j a lot.” Peanut butter was a cheap protein, and that was an obvious selling point to Joyce’s parents and to many other families she knew: “We were not the only kids to have pb+j in our lunch boxes.” At least Joyce didn’t shoot down everything in my aborted story. “There is no doubt that the GIs mixed their peanut butter with jelly or jam whenever possible—[peanut] butter in those days really stuck to the roof of your mouth,” she wrote. “The fruit— whatever it was, eased that problem and besides it tasted good.” Peanut butter sales did soar after the war, which makes sense if hundreds of thousands of GIs were continuing to feed a habit they’d developed while in uniform. Not all the sources I consulted raised suspicions. One stated that by age 18, the average American eats 1,500 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I have no problem believing that one. But for myself I’d nudge that tally a little higher.
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A V-MAIL
A P.O.W. WELL PAST WAR’S END I WAS PARTICULARLY interested in the article “Uncle Sam’s Nazi Reform School” by Melissa Amateis Marsh [April 2016]. I lived in Germany for five years in the late sixties and early seventies, working for the German subsidiary of a US company. The German press would occasionally run an article about the horrible conditions in the North Vietnamese POW camps and the brutal treatment of US soldiers. It was not unusual for a coworker, or even a total stranger, to condemn what was happening there and then recount about their capture [during World War II] and how well they were treated. One of the coworkers, however, did not look back on his POW days so benignly. He had been a commander in an SS Panzer Group and wound up in a denazification camp (his term) in New York. When, as Ms. Marsh reports, the War Department announced that all POWs would be returned to Europe, the camp commandant called a meeting of all POWs and announced that they were no longer POWs. Needless to say, there was much cheering and rejoicing. Then, however, the second shoe dropped: “You have been reclassified as internees.” After another year or so (I don’t recall the time span), the American press realized we still had German prisoners and called for their return. Hence, another meeting, another announcement: “You are no longer internees of the US government.” Understandably, the cheering this time was less boisterous than before. Sure enough, the second shoe dropped again: “We’re turning you over to the British.” So he spent two more years in a British POW camp before finally being repatriated to Germany. C.H. RUTLEDGE received via e-mail
FIRST ALL-INSTRUMENT FLIGHT IN THE article “Dawn of the Night Fighters” by Drew Ames [April 2016], the author states, “In 1929, using these new instru4 AMERICA IN WWII
JUNE 2016
ments, Doolittle became the first pilot to take off, fly, and land without having any view outside his aircraft.” I do not believe this is correct. Charles Lindbergh made his trip to France completely on instrument flying and that was in 1927! JAY M. LENNY received via e-mail
Drew Ames responds: Charles Lindbergh had not only a periscope on the Spirit of St. Louis, but also a side window that he used during takeoffs and landings. Doolittle had neither. 400 MPH PIONEERS ON PAGE 10 of the October 2015 Landings “Where Warbirds Buzz the Beach” by Robert Gabrick, the paragraph “Of the WWII US Navy planes in the year’s show, the crowd favorite was the museum’s Goodyear FG-1D Corsair built under license from Vought Aircraft Company. The first American fighter to exceed 400 mph.…” The Corsair was not the first American fighter to exceed 400 mph. That honor belongs to the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, which it did a year before the Corsair flew. However, the Corsair was the first singleengine American fighter to fly faster than 400 mph. C HRIS WEBER Garfield Heights (Cleveland), Ohio
Robert Gabrick responds: In my research, I encountered numerous conflicting accounts. Each aircraft has its partisans. Each flew in excess of 400 mph when operational. No one disputes that, as Vought Aircraft proudly claimed, an XF4U-1 achieved a speed of over 400 mph on October 1, 1940, on a flight from Stratford to Hartford, Connecticut. Other accounts assert that during January and February 1939, a P-38 was the first US fighter to fly faster than 400 mph. The problem is a lack of clearly documented speed measurements for these initial P-38 flights. As one source put it, speeds
“would appear to be between 394 and 403 mph.” Tommy H. Thomason offers this perspective: “Although the P-38 appears to be the first US fighter capable of 400 mph in level flight, Vought might have been correct with respect to the XF4U being the first to actually do it.” Given the comparative level of documentation, I favor the Corsair. However, a compromise of sorts benefits both. As you and others argue, the Corsair was the first single-engine American fighter to fly faster than 400 mph, while the P-38 Lightning was the first twin-engine fighter to do so. BEST WWII MOVIES, PART 3 R EADERS CONTINUE to add to the list of essential WWII movies we published two issues ago in response to a request by reader Dana Jensen of Everett, Washington. New suggestions include: The Enemy Below (1957), Tora! Tora! Tora (1970), the 1943 version of Sahara (all these from Bruce Campbell of Staten Island, New York), and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) (suggested by Carol Urness via e-mail). BAND OF BROTHERS PHOTO IN OUR SPRING 2015 special issue, The Band of Brothers from D-Day to Victory, on page 65, we inadvertently used a privately owned image of First Lieutenant Ronald C. Speirs without permission. We apologize to Robert Speirs (Ronald Speirs’s son) and www.ronaldspeirs.com for this unintentional unauthorized use. GREMLINS April 2016: “Dawn of the Night Fighters” —The phrase “stalling the engines” on page 20 under “The Problem of Flying by Night” was introduced during the article’s editing process; the stall was rather an aerodynamic stall, when the airflow over a wing is disturbed and the wing loses lift. Send us your comments and reactions— especially the favorable ones! Mail them to V-Mail, America in WWII, 4711 Queen Avenue, Suite 202, Harrisburg, PA 17109, or e-mail them to [emailprotected].
A HOME FRONT
Dewey Defeats by Carl Zebrowski
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6 AMERICA IN WWII
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national archives
T WAS A GIVEN that Franklin Roosevelt would win the 1944 presidential election. Americans had already voted him to an unprecedented three terms. Then he led the nation to the brink of victory in the world war. Thomas Dewey wasn’t convinced. From his vantage point as a Republican politician, governor of New York, Roosevelt looked vulnerable. Dewey believed the war would already be over if Roosevelt weren’t deliberately prolonging it until after the election, for fear the US economy would tank once deprived of military spending. If America’s longest-sitting president could have been defeated, Dewey may have had as good a chance as anyone of becoming the vanquisher. He succeeded in just about everything he did. Building on a Columbia law degree followed by some solid experience in high-profile court cases, he was elected Manhattan district attorney in 1937 and earned a reputation as a mob-buster. Among his 72 victories in 73 cases was sending Charles “Lucky” Luciano, the (god)father of modern organized crime, to jail with a 30–50-year sentence. In 1942, Dewey rode his resume to the governor’s mansion. As the 1944 presidential election approached, the Republican party didn’t have much to offer to contest Roosevelt’s reign. The 42-year-old Dewey showed up in June for the Chicago convention without making much noise about the nomination. Then he proceeded to maneuver behind the scenes. Party leaders had little hope that any other man with a hat in the ring could defeat FDR, so they backed Dewey. It wasn’t that Republicans loved Dewey. He wasn’t easy to warm up to, at least not one on one. But he had that impressive resume. He could also move a crowd, possessed of movie star looks and a chesty baritone that commanded attention. Such pleasant superficialities rarely hurt a politician’s chances of wooing voters.
New York Governor Thomas Dewey could inspire a crowd, and delegates got behind him at the 1944 GOP convention. But FDR would be tough to beat.
The newly minted Republican candidate departed for a cross-country campaign tour. “With almost metronomic precision, the Dewey train clacked West,” Time magazine reported. “Tom Dewey was meticulously groomed, changing suits daily— brown, blue grey pinstriped, always singlebreasted.” His routine was set in stone: he offered some words to the crowd at each station, a 25-car motorcade drove him to the best hotel in town, he held a half-hour press conference, and he met with a few local leaders for exactly 30 minutes each. Dewey attacked Roosevelt for failing to wrap up the war and take care of business at home. His people repeated the slogan “Clear it with Sidney,” implying that the White House was in the pocket of unions, Communists even—namely labor leader Sidney Hillman. Dewey said the FDR White House “has been the most wasteful, extravagant and incompetent Administration in the history of the nation….” The most biting attack was the accusation that FDR knew about the Pearl
Harbor raid in advance. Having found out the secret that the United States had broken the Japanese code, Dewey deducted that intercepted messages related to the assault must have been deciphered and their narrative assembled. While the conclusion was conjecture, the broken code was real, and US Army Chief of Staff George Marshall pleaded with Dewey to keep quiet about it so the Japanese wouldn’t find out. Dewey did. By late October, Dewey’s offensive strategy was working, and he was rising in the polls. But FDR the master campaigner shot back, addressing Dewey’s charges as well as the Democrats’ biggest worries: low voter turnout and his own failing health. FDR rebutted the latter by riding through Washington in the back seat of an open convertible for four hours as a chilly October rain poured down. He smiled at spectators all the way. As election results came in on November 7, the popular vote showed Dewey posing a serious challenge. But it’s the electoral vote that ultimately matters, and the man who could have become the youngest president in US history lost that in a rout: 432 to 99. “At 3:25 A.M.,” the New York Times reported, “Governor Dewey conceded Mr. Roosevelt’s re-election, sending his best wishes by radio, to which the President quickly responded with an appreciative telegram.” FDR sat down with an aide in a quieted White House and remarked, “I still think he’s an s.o.b.” It was a major defeat for a man accustomed to winning. Four years later, Dewey would suffer another thrashing—at the hands of FDR’s final vice president. Dewey’s dreams of taking the Oval Office collided with reality on Election Day 1948 as loudly as the Chicago Daily Tribune’s infamously premature banner headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.” A
AM E RICA I N
WWII PINUP
Julie London
JULIE LONDON WAS BORN TO PERFORM. The daughter of two vaudeville players, she was singing on their radio show at age 3, in 1929. As a 15-year-old, she took to the stage with a big band in a club—until her underage status was discovered and she was forced to quit. She soon left school and worked as an elevator operator in a Los Angeles department store, where ex-actress and Hollywood talent agent Sue Carol discovered her. London started out in the movie business playing a lost orphan guarded by a gorilla in 1944’s Nabonga, and she quickly became a GI-favorite pinup. In the mid-1950s, she began an additional career as a jazz and pop singer, launched by her recording of “Cry Me a River.” Sales of that single and the album that featured it, Julie Is Her Name, exceeded three million. Billboard magazine named her Most Popular Female Vocalist three years running from 1955 to 1957. Behind the famous face and the sultry image, London was private, shy, and self-conscious. In a BBC biography that aired in 2006, six years after her death, she remarked that she wasn’t “a good singer at all.” She was, in spite of all her time in the public eye, “strictly the housewife, mother type.” E RICA M. ROBERTS editorial intern photo courtesy of www.doctormacro.com
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A LANDINGS
Bomber Beach by Robert Gabrick
A
TONDELAYO, THE beautifully restored North American B-25 went airborne, the opening line of “High Flight,” a poem by US pilot John Gillespie, went through my mind: “Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth.” Nestled in one of the two jump seats behind and below the pilots, separated from the roaring engines only by an uninsulated fuselage wall and a few feet of space, I experienced the same sounds and vibrations as did the men who took to the skies on the missions of World War II. I crawled through a passageway into the glass nose as the Mitchell medium bomber traced a route along the southern New Jersey shore, and I enjoyed the panoramic view, without having to keep an eye out for enemy aircraft as WWII crewmen did. Ever mindful of the machine gun close by, I thought about those men who risked, and too often sacrificed, their lives. The B-25 is most famous for its role in the Tokyo Raid led by Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle in April 1942. America’s disastrous earlier efforts to thwart the advance of the Japanese in the Pacific had prompted the US brass to plan a bombing mission with 16 carrier-based B-25s. The raid proved Japan’s home islands were not immune to attack and forced the Japanese to reallocate military resources. It also boosted American morale. My flight experience was part of the Collings Foundation Wings of Freedom Tour, which has made 3,043 stops since its founding in 1989. At the 19th annual AirFest on Labor Day weekend of 2015, visitors to the Naval Air Station Wildwood Aviation Museum near Cape May, New Jersey, could purchase a 30-minute flight S
10 AMERICA IN WWII
JUNE 2016
The author captured this view from his seat in the nose of a B-25 Mitchell during his flight along the Jersey Shore.
on one of Collings’s three iconic WWII planes: a B-17 Flying Fortress, a B-24 Liberator, or a B-25 Mitchell. Visitors willing to spend $2,200 could get a half hour at one set of controls in the co*ckpit of the world’s only full-dual-control North American P-51 Mustang. The museum’s bucolic setting belies the dangerous situation that led to creation of US Naval Air Station Wildwood. As Nazi Germany pushed Europe toward war, the United States began to upgrade its defenses. The Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938 authorized the establishment of military airports, and 86 of them were opened. Wildwood’s mission was to serve as a training facility for aircraft carrier–based operations. Divebomber training was conducted from June 1943 until January 1945, when training in Vought F4U Corsair fighter-bombers began. Operations peaked in October 1944 with 16,994 takeoffs and landings. After the war, in 1946, the US War Assets Administration acquired the station.
Seventy-nine of the 126 structures the military had built were sold and relocated, and the federal government gave the remaining property to Cape May County in 1947 for use as an airport. Only 12 of the original structures remain. The museum was founded in 1997, housed in a gigantic, 92,000-square-foot wooden hangar restored to its WWII appearance. It’s possible to imagine the space inside filled with WWII aircraft, abuzz with flight crews and a host of maintenance and support personnel, all part of the training for carrier-based flight operations. Today, a selection of aircraft and an array of exhibits and displays, focused mainly on World War II and the 1940s, vie for visitors’ attention. From the hangar’s main floor, visitors can climb stairs to enter an air traffic control tower for a bird’s-eye view of the entire interior. With ample room to spare, the hangar floor showcases restored aircraft that include a 1940 Stearman biplane trainer and a WWII-era Vultee BT-13 Valiant trainer (nicknamed the Vibrator, likely due to the violent shaking as it approached stall speed). The pride of the museum’s WWII fleet is arguably the Grumman TBM Avenger, a representative of a torpedo-bomber model commonly flown at Wildwood. The Avenger featured a 14-cylinder, 1,700horsepower radial air-cooled engine and was capable of a top speed of 271 mph. Designed with foldup wings to save space while in storage on an aircraft carrier, Avengers first saw action in the June 1942 Battle of Midway. In addition to aviation, ground transportation is covered here too. Among the
all photos this article by robert gabrick
Upper left: The Collings Foundation’s B-17 Flying Fortress cruises down a runway at the Naval Air Station Wildwood Aviation Museum. Lower left: This vintage beauty is the museum’s 1941 Ford Fordor navy staff car, with its original light-blue paint. Above, right: Able to reach speeds of 271 mph and featuring foldaway wings for compact storage aboard carriers, this TBM Avenger is the pride of the museum.
automobiles is a sleek 1941 Ford Fordor sedan that served as a navy staff car during the war. It still has its original light-blue paint. Parked nearby, in sharp contrast, is an olive drab Willys jeep, the ubiquitous, ruggedly utilitarian military mainstay. Not everything at Wildwood was as serious as flight training, base operations, and military protocol. Several displays play up the lighter side of Wildwood’s wartime days. One tells of the decidedly nonregulation practice of “flat-hatting”—flying extremely low along the shoreline, as though to flatten the hats of people below, to get a closer look at women sunbathing. Another delves into the rivalry among the various military installations in southern New Jersey. On occasion, the competitiveness manifested as mock strafing runs on
unsuspecting personnel in rival camps. Wartime music gets fair airing in the museum. GIs of all military branches listened to radios in their barracks and attended visiting USO troupe shows, which boosted morale and kept them culturally connected to their civilian peers. Displays here include sheet music from the era and photographs of dances and other performances by popular entertainers. Big band favorites play over the sound system, an appropriate soundtrack for a visit. Wildwood had its own baseball team during the war. Intended to lift spirits, teams like this one often included professional athletes who had been drafted or enlisted and were at the base for training. The Wildwood team played against teams from nearby bases and against some col-
IN A NUTSHELL WHAT Naval Air Station Wildwood Aviation Museum WHERE Rio Grande, New Jersey WHY Explore a 92,000-square-foot hangar restored to its WWII appearance and filled with aircraft, equipment, and other artifacts • See a Grumman TBM Avenger torpedo bomber up close • Compare a restored WWII-era Vultee BT-13 and 1940 Stearman biplane trainer
For more information on the museum, call 609-886-8787 or visit www.usnasw.org. For more on the Collings Foundation and its WWII plane flights, call 800-568-8924 or visit www.collingsfoundation.org
lege clubs. Photographs along with a vintage uniform shirt and a primitive fielder’s glove highlight the exhibit here. In a nod to wartime life beyond the boundaries of the base, a 1940s room features a collection of artifacts that gives visitors a feel for the WWII home front. There are a stove, a refrigerator, a washing machine, an upright piano, table and floormodel radios, and a variety of pots and pans, utensils, and knick-knacks. In a departure from the up-close-and-personal approach that pervades most of the museum, a barrier limits close inspection of this room’s antiques. By the time the war ended and the urgent need for new dive-bomber and torpedo-bomber pilots passed, US Naval Air Station Wildwood had trained thousands of young men to fly in over-water combat. And dangerous training it was. There were 129 serious accidents here during the war, and 42 navy personnel were killed in them. Their story, and the story of all the other navy personnel at Wildwood, is worth knowing. The museum tells it well. A ROBERT GABRICK is a contributing editor of America in WWII and writes frequently for the magazine. JUNE 2016
AMERICA IN WWII 11
CLINGING TO LIFE ON A LIFE RAFT Fifty miles seemed close enough to New Orleans not to fear a U-boat attack. Yet there was Heredia sinking, and Ray Downs struggling to save his eight-year-old son.
by Michael J. Tougias and Alison O’Leary
T
R
SONNY DOWNS found themselves clinging to a four-foot-square balsa wood life raft along with ship’s Captain Edwin Colburn and civilian George Conyea. It was 2 A.M, with just a sliver of a moon, and the swells were large but gentle. The group could still see the U-boat’s searchlight illuminating the bow of the Heredia that rose out of the ocean in a precarious angle. At any minute they expected disaster to strike in the form of bullets from the submarine, an explosion from the Heredia’s boiler, or a whirlpool of suction if the ship suddenly went down. Bits of debris floated all around them, but not a single other survivor could be seen. AY AND
Conyea started to say something, but Ray suddenly yelled, “I can hear my wife shouting! I’m going back!” “You can’t go back,” hollered Captain Colburn. “You’ll never make it!” Conyea too shouted at Ray, “The ship is going to sink any minute! The sub is still there, I can see its light!” “I don’t care,” boomed Ray, “I heard Ina!” “You can’t be sure it was her!” pleaded the captain. Sonny was terrified that his father would leave him and never make it back. He watched in fear as his dad moved from the middle of the raft to the outer edge. Conyea positioned himself next to Ray, grabbing Ray’s life jacket. “Your son needs you here!” Ray swatted Conyea’s arm away, then looked back at Sonny. He was torn between keeping his son alive and making a dash for the voice that he was sure was Ina’s. “Let’s listen,” reasoned Captain Colburn, “and see if we hear another shout.” Ray moved back toward Sonny. The four survivors didn’t speak as the raft drifted farther from the death throes of the Heredia, which continued to emit loud bubbling and gurgling noises as it settled lower in the water. Finally the captain broke the silence. “The sub has moved off. I can’t see its light.” “Can anyone see the ship?” asked Conyea. Without the light from the sub, none of the survivors could see the vessel, nor could they hear the noises it had made just minutes earlier. Ray tried to put Ina out of his mind and focus on saving his son. “We can sit on the edge of the raft,” said Ray to the others, “but we gotta spread out.” The balsa raft was hollow in the middle, like a box with no bottom. Conyea took two strokes and perched on the edge opposite Ray, while the captain, his face in a tense grimace because he didn’t
Opposite: The mood was light and hopeful when the Downs family moved to South America in early 1941 with intentions of settling there awhile; the kids, Sonny and Lucille, are shown here during the voyage. Pearl Harbor changed the family’s plans. Above: A US government poster suggests the threat the family faced on its return home to San Antonio in 1942 via the port of New Orleans. 12 AMERICA IN WWII
JUNE 2016
CENTER: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. OPPOSITE: COURTESY OF THE DOWNS FAMILY
AMERICAN FREIGHTER HEREDIA was just 50 miles from safe harbor at New Orleans when Captain Erich Würdemann and his submarine U-506 caught up to her on May 19, 1942. Along with 1,500 tons of bananas and coffee from Guatemala, there were 62 people aboard the United Fruit Company ship as it steamed through the Gulf of Mexico. Most of them were merchant seamen, but there was also a handful of civilians. Among those was the Downs family: Ray and his wife, Ina, and their two children, 8-year-old Sonny and 11-year-old Lucille, of San Antonio, Texas. Ray and Ina had moved their family to South America in 1941 for Ray to take a railroad job, but after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, they decided to return home. Once there, Ray was to join the marine corps. After a few months of searching for transportation, they found accommodations on Heredia. Fast asleep in their berths on May 19, the Downses had no idea that two U-boat torpedoes were heading their way. In a moment, Heredia exploded. Ina and Lucille were separated from Ray and Sonny in the chaos. Three minutes later, the ship sank. HE
COURTESY OF MICHAEL J. TOUGIAS
know how to swim, slowly inched to the side just to the right of Ray and carefully pulled himself up. Sonny, who fortunately had just learned to swim in Costa Rica, went to the side of the square to the left of his father, pulling himself up and into a sitting position. Because Sonny only weighed a third as much as the men, his side of the raft rode out of the water, while the captain’s end rode so low that the water almost reached his neck. “This won’t do!” bellowed Ray. “One wave and we’re going over. Mr. Conyea, you and I gotta scoot over closer to Sonny’s side.” This simple move helped balance the raft. However the weight of the three men plus Sonny was enough to submerge the raft a few inches, so that from the waist down the survivors’ bodies were underwater. It was a delicate balancing act, but at least they had their upper torsos relatively dry, which would help ward off hypothermia. Ray glanced at Sonny, worried sick that the boy would be the first victim of the ocean because of his small size. “Are you cold, son?” “I’m okay, Dad.” “Well, if you get really cold, just tell me, and you can sit on my lap and I’ll wrap my arms around you.” The air temperature was in the upper 60s and the water temperature about 75 degrees Fahrenheit. The relatively warm temperature of the ocean may not sound dangerous, but it is far short of the 98.6-degree optimal body temperature; and, making matters worse, water draws off a person’s heat about twenty-five times faster than
the same air temperature. If Sonny’s core temperature dropped to 95 degrees, he’d start shivering, and soon his extremities would start to feel numb, as the blood vessels constricted. That is the body’s way of minimizing the amount of cold blood that would flow to the vital organs. Layers of fat would also slow the cooling of the blood, but eight-year-old Sonny was as thin as a sapling. Ray vowed to himself that he’d do whatever it took to keep the boy warm, even if it meant hoisting him out of the water and somehow putting him on his shoulders. In the darkness, Ray could faintly see Sonny’s shape but not the features of his face because high thin clouds blocked out most of the light from the stars and moon. Ray stared toward Sonny and thought this is all my fault. I should have known the full danger when they made me sign the release papers before we boarded the ship. He shook his head, realizing this kind of thinking was torture. Stop. Just focus on Sonny. A minute later Sonny, as if reading his father’s thoughts, asked, “Will Mom and Lucille be all right?” “They should be fine,” lied Ray. “They are probably floating on a raft just like us.” “That’s right,” said Captain Colburn, “the ship had three rafts.” “Where were we when the ship was torpedoed? How far from port?” asked Conyea of the captain. “About forty miles out from New Orleans. To the southwest.” Ray turned his head in the direction of the captain and asked, “When do you think help will come?”
Opposite, upper: By the time German Captain Erich Würdemann and his submarine U-506 returned to Europe from the Gulf of Mexico, they had sunk seven ships. Opposite, lower: On May 19, 1942, Würdemann sighted the United Fruit Company freighter Heredia, the ship on which the Downs family was returning to the States. Würdemann gave the order to fire, and two torpedoes hit their target. Three minutes later Heredia sank. Father Ray, mother Ina, and young Sonny and Lucille were separated and scrambling for life rafts. 14 AMERICA IN WWII
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CLINGING TO LIFE ON A LIFE RAFT
the flimsy raft. They were lucky indeed to be in gentle swells rather than breaking waves. However, they had no flares should a plane or patrol boat appear on the horizon. After days of sailing from South America, Ray had an appreciation for the vastness of the ocean, and he felt the little raft was like the proverbial needle in a haystack: it was going to be difficult to find. And a person in the water without a raft would be damn near impossible to locate. Ray said a silent prayer that Ina and Lucille were together on a raft and not alone in the endless void of the sea.
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ROUND FOUR IN THE MORNING ,
Sonny was shivering slightly. He could hardly believe how slowly the night was passing, as it seemed like it had been days ago that the Heredia was torpedoed. He knew he was supposed to tell his father if he was cold, but he thought it best not to say anything for a while. The grown-ups had stopped talking, but every now and then Sonny’s dad would ask how he was doing. “Sonny, it will be dawn soon, and we’ll all get a chance to warm up in the sun.” “Yes, Dad, I, I…know.” Ray picked up the hesitation in the boy’s voice and he could tell Sonny was shaking. “Mr. Conyea, I mean George,” said Ray, “I’m going to have Sonny come sit with me, so you may need to shift position slightly.” “Okay, it will be good to move. My back is as stiff as can be.” Ray slid down to the end of his side of the
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Captain Colburn hesitated before answering, concerned about saying anything negative in front of Sonny. “Just tell us the truth,” said Ray. “We’re going to be fine no matter how long we have to sit on this raft.” “Okay,” said Colburn. “We were operating on radio silence, but that doesn’t really matter because I think the section of the ship where the radio was took a direct hit from one of the torpedoes. So the authorities on shore only know that we were scheduled to reach New Orleans about 6 A.M. I’m guessing that by 8 A.M. they will become concerned. One of the patrol planes will start looking for us.” Conyea, who was from New Orleans, added, “and we might get lucky. There are probably several Coast Guard and shrimp boats in the area, and one of them may find us at dawn.” “You’re right, Mr. Conyea,” said Ray, “just gotta sit here patiently until the sun comes up.” “Call me George,” said Conyea. Ray nodded. Then each survivor settled in for a long night, lost in his own thoughts. Ray tried to make an honest assessment of their situation. They had no food or water. Once the sun came up, their thirst would increase, and dehydration would wear them down with each passing hour. The weather was calm, with just a light breeze, and for that Ray was thankful. If the seas had been up like the day before none of the four survivors would have been able to hang on to
by Michael J. Tougias and Alison O’Leary
JUNE 2016
AMERICA IN WWII 15
CLINGING TO LIFE ON A LIFE RAFT raft closest to Sonny’s side, and then said, “Sonny, you can scoot over to me, now.” The boy had no trouble sliding to his father. It was wonderful to feel his dad’s muscular arm pull him in tight so that he was leaning into his dad’s chest. Sonny could feel himself relax, and began to examine the luminescent light where the gentle swells swirled around the raft. On board the ship, his father had called the eerie light phosphorescence, and Sonny was fascinated by the glowing plankton that shimmered in the night. Feeling secure in his father’s embrace, the boy closed his eyes for the first time since the ship was torpedoed. He must have dozed for a few minutes, but was awakened by a commotion. “I’ve got it,” said Captain Colburn. Sonny could see that the captain had something large in his hands but had no idea what it was. “What’s happening, Dad?” “We saw a board floating on the water, and the Captain was able to grab it. Might come in handy in the morning. Maybe use it as a paddle.”
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allowed the redhaired captain to better see his bleak surroundings. The grey canvascovered raft seemed minuscule and so flimsy that he wondered how long it would take for the fabric to rip and the balsa wood to float free. He glanced at his shipwrecked mates. George Conyea appeared exhausted, and he had said very little during the course of the night. The boy Sonny hadn’t cried once, but he looked so small and skinny that the captain knew he must be extremely cold. His father Ray had calmed down since he thought he heard his wife shouting, and he was now holding the boy close to his chest. It crossed the captain’s mind that the four of them might be the only survivors of the ship; and if that were true, his own survival might become a lifelong burden and source of shame rather than a blessing. He could just imagine what the newspapers would say and what other mariners would think when they learned that of the entire list of working crewmembers on the Heredia, he, the captain, was the only one that lived. That would mean forty-eight of his crew had perished, six of the Navy Armed Guard [US Navy personnel who manned guns aboard merchant ships in wartime], and five out of the eight passengers had perished—all on his ship, on his watch, during his leadership. He knew the notion that the captain should go down with the ship was still a strong one. But, he thought, at least these three civilians on the raft with me can testify that we were the very last ones off the ship. It didn’t ease his anguish, but it was something…. FAINT HINT OF DAWN
by Michael J. Tougias and Alison O’Leary
COURTESY OF THE DOWNS FAMILY
Colburn had also been thinking about sharks on and off all night, doing his best to put the predators out of his mind. But when Ray Downs shifted positions slightly, the captain’s eyes widened. In the gloom he saw a dark smudge on Ray Downs’s knee. “Is that blood or oil on your leg?” asked the captain. “Blood,” said Ray. “I cut myself trying to break through the window.” “Let me help you cover the wound. I can rip a piece of my shirt off.” “I can get it,” answered Ray. “We’ve got the raft pretty well balanced, and the less moving around, the better.” Ray wore only a sleeveless T-shirt and his boxer shorts. He ripped a small patch of cloth from his T-shirt to tie around the cut. Sonny watched his father’s hands work. The gash looked deep and, even after more than three hours in the ocean, it was still trickling blood. “How bad does it hurt, Dad?” “Can barely feel it. Salt water stings a bit. This bulky life jacket bothers me as much as the cut, the way it’s rubbing against my skin. I’ll bet your life jacket is doing the same.” “I don’t mind. I’m sure glad I had it on when we were climbing up the stairway from our cabin. I felt like I was being dragged to the bottom of the sea.” “Me, too,” said Ray. “I tried to hold on to you, but the water just yanked you away.” “Did you try and grab my leg?” “Don’t remember, everything happened so fast.” “Something grabbed my leg and scared me so I kicked at it. Hope it wasn’t you. Hope it wasn’t Mom or Lucille.” Ray winced. The thought of Ina and Lucille being pulled to the depths was more than he could bear. He had never been religious like his wife, but now he said a silent prayer. He thought it was a miracle that he had escaped the sinking ship, and maybe God did have a hand in his survival so he could be here with his son. Mixed with these thoughts of God was a brooding anger that bubbled to his consciousness periodically. His most intense fury was directed at the Germans on the submarine who had crossed an entire ocean and most of the Gulf to hunt down and torpedo a ship that wasn’t even part of the military. They will pay for this, he thought; nobody hurts my family and gets away with it. While the adrenaline prompted by thoughts of revenge coursed through his veins, he also felt rage toward another group: the nameless bureaucrats sitting safely in Corpus Christi who wouldn’t let his family leave the Heredia when anchored outside the bay. He wondered if the captain had really made a strong effort to persuade those same authorities to let the family de-
Above: Brother and sister Sonny and Lucille Downs are reunited after surviving the Heredia attack. Split up after the ship exploded, they floated in the Gulf of Mexico for hours on different life rafts—Sonny with their dad, and Lucille and their mom each on her own— before rescuers spotted them. Opposite: The whole family somehow came through the disaster with little more than some bumps and bruises. 16 AMERICA IN WWII
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COURTESY OF THE DOWNS FAMILY
board. Now, sitting on this floating sandbox just four feet from the captain, it took a supreme effort not to tell him exactly what he was thinking. Ray looked down at the top of his son’s head and held him tighter. As much for himself as for Sonny, Ray corralled his emotions and said, “Your mom and Lucille are probably floating with a bunch of the ship’s sailors. They might even have been rescued by now.” With the innocence of an eight-year-old, Sonny believed his father. Lucille is probably having breakfast on board a rescue boat and she’s worried about me. And Mom’s likely right by her side, just the way Dad is with me. But a few minutes later, Sonny remembered that his Dad thought he had heard his mother shouting when they were still near the sinking ship. Maybe they are not with sailors or rescued. He was about to say something, to remind his father about his mother shouting for help, but decided it was best to let it go. Don’t upset him. Sonny wanted his father to be proud of what he said and did while on the raft. Now that the boy could actually see the vastness of the ocean and their own insignificance, he felt a sense of fear and dread almost equal to when he had been washed from his father’s grip when the ship lurched. He didn’t want his father to know that the only thing keeping him from crying was his dad’s presence. Captain Colburn admired the way the boy and his father interacted. He wasn’t so sure about how he and Ray would sort things out when and if a major decision needed to be made on the raft.
He was still smarting from the exchange with Ray when they were launching the raft, how the man had poked him in the chest and shouted he’d have to learn to swim real fast. He wasn’t about to start a fight earlier with the Heredia in the process of sinking, but now adrift on the raft, where minutes felt like hours, he wondered if they’d have another disagreement. His ship might be at the bottom of the ocean, but he was still the captain….
R
AY, HIS SON ,
CONYEA, and the captain drifted in the gulf for several more hours. Much of that time, seven six-foot sharks circled, coming so close as to brush against Ray’s legs. At dusk, just when all hope seemed lost, a US Coast Guard plane flew over. The pilot alerted a nearby shrimp boat, which rescued the foursome. Miraculously, Ina and Lucille also made it to safety. A total of 26 people survived. Erich Würdemann and U-506 went on to send a total of seven ships to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico before running low on fuel and returning across the Atlantic to base in Nazi-occupied France. A
This article, based in part on recent interviews with Sonny Downs and on published interviews with his dad, is adapted from the new book So Close to Home: A True Story of an American Family’s Fight for Survival during World War II by bestselling author MICHAEL J. TOUGIAS and journalist ALISON O’LEARY. The book tells the full story of the Downses’ struggles to survive after the U506 attack. A video of Sonny and more photos of those involved in the story can be found at www.michaeltougias.com. JUNE 2016
AMERICA IN WWII 17
RISING STAR,
FALLING STAR
No one so young had ever made full general. But Mark Clark, who chose the glor y of capturing Rome instead of destroying a German army, didn’t deser ve it, critics said.
by William Floyd, Jr.
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Born for Army Life A RMY HERITAGE RAN IN CLARK’S BLOOD. He was a third-generation soldier. Born May 1, 1896, at Madison Barracks in Sackets Harbor, New York, he was descended from Revolutionary War hero Brigadier General George Rogers Clark. Mark Clark’s father,
a career army officer, was stationed at Fort Sheridan in northwest Illinois, and Clark spent much of his youth in that area. When Clark was just 17 years old he was appointed to the US Military Academy at West Point (where a knack for smuggling sweets won him the nickname Contraband). Graduating in April 1917, 110th in a class of 139, Clark was commissioned a second lieutenant of infantry. The Great War was in full swing in Europe, and the army needed combat officers, so Clark advanced quickly, making first lieutenant in May and captain by August. In April 1918 he headed to Europe with the 11th Infantry Regiment, joining the 5th Division in the thick of the fighting in France the next month. Clark was wounded early on, in France’s Vosges Mountains. When he recovered he joined the First Army’s general staff headquarters and participated in the Battle of Saint Mihiel (September 12–16) and the Meuse–Argonne Offensive (September 26– November 11). After the Nazi surrender, he performed occupation duty in Germany and in Belgium. Back in the States in 1919, Clark filled various posts, including a stint in the office of the assistant secretary of war and three years at the Presidio in San Francisco. He also attended the US Army Command and General Staff School in 1935 and US Army War College in 1937. But soon German and Japanese imperial aspirations threatened renewed global conflict. US military leaders knew they were inevitably headed into this new war, and preparations began. For Clark, this brought rapid advancement. On August 4, 1941, he jumped from lieutenant colonel to brigadier general, skipping the rank of colonel. It was Japan’s December 1941 attack on Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor that finally pushed the United States into World War II. Clark,
Above: West Point’s 1917–18 yearbook said Mark W. Clark went by Opie, but he had another nickname: Contraband, for smuggling treats into the barracks. Clark graduated in time to fight in the Great War. He rose rapidly in rank and when World War II ended he was the youngest full general in US history. Opposite: One reason was his friendship with General Dwight Eisenhower (right), seen with Clark at a mine-clearing demonstration in North Africa. Eisenhower, who became supreme Allied commander in Europe, called Clark “the American Eagle.” 18 AMERICA IN WWII
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ALL PHOTOS THIS STORY: nATIOnAL ARcHIveS
AMERICAN EAGLE was going on a secret mission. If it worked, lives would be saved. But it was a risky assignment for a general, involving travel by plane, submarine, and canoe to enemy-controlled Algeria. There, on a night in October 1942, he would try to convince Axis French officers to accept an Allied invasion of North Africa. This was the sort of mission from which a man might not return. Major General Mark Wayne Clark—dubbed the American Eagle by Lieutenant General Dwight Eisenhower, his friend and supreme commander of the North Africa invasion force—understood the danger. So, before his plane took off, he wrote to his wife, Maurine, perhaps for the last time: “Darling Sweetheart, I am leaving in twenty minutes on a mission which I volunteered to do when it was suggested that a general officer do it. If I succeed and return I will have done a fine deed for my country and the Allied cause. Of course you will know my life is dedicated to military service and now that my opportunity has come for that service I go forward proud of the opportunity which has been given me….” This secret mission, Operation Flagpole, would prove to be only the first of many opportunities in World War II for Clark to take center stage. It was a bold move in a career full of bold moves, a career at once distinguished and controversial—one that would make him America’s youngest full general. HE MAN SOME CALLED THE
groomed for greater responsibility, became assistant chief of staff of the US Army Ground Forces by January 1942. In May he rose to chief, then sailed to London in June to command the army’s II Corps. Things continued to happen fast for Clark. By July 1942 he commanded all US Army forces in Europe. A month later, he pinned on a second star as major general—leapfrogging more senior officers—and became Eisenhower’s deputy commander in chief in the North African theater. It fell to Clark to help organize Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa. The Eagle Visits Africa B RITISH COMMONWEALTH TROOPS HAD BATTLED German and Italian forces in Egypt and Libya since late 1940. In northwest Africa, however, the ground, air, and sea forces of France’s Axiscoddling Vichy government ruled. The Allied brass wondered whether these Vichy forces might consider turning against Germany. After all, the Nazis had occupied France; wouldn’t the 20 AMERICA IN WWII
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Vichy French prefer to see them defeated and ousted? Perhaps if the Allies could demonstrate an ability to beat Germans on the battlefield, the Vichy officers might agree. Such a demonstration came in July 1942, when Lieutenant General Sir Bernard Montgomery defeated Germans and Italians at El Alamein, Egypt. Clark and his fellow invasion planners thought Montgomery’s triumph might be enough to secure Vichy French cooperation with the coming Allied assault of North Africa. So did General Charles Emmanuel Mast, chief of staff of the Vichy French XIX Corps in Algeria, a pro-Allied officer. But the planners had to be sure, and that led to Clark’s secret mission in October 1942. If Clark succeeded in his clandestine meeting with Vichy officers in Algeria, the Allies would “gain entry practically without firing a shot,” Mast promised. As Clark prepared to depart for Operation Flagpole, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself encouraged him: “You can always keep in mind Clark, that we’ll back you up in what-
RISING STAR, FALLING STAR ever you do.” Clark wrote to his wife and then flew to Gibraltar with four staff officers. There they boarded the British submarine HMS Seraph, which took them and a few British commandos to a pre-arranged point in the Mediterranean Sea, off Algeria. Clark’s party went ashore in four canvas canoes, entered the fishing village of Cherchell west of Algiers, and located a building where a lamp with a white blanket behind it shone in a window. Mast and other Vichy officers were waiting there. The arrival of French police temporarily interrupted the meeting, forcing Clark and his companions to hide in the wine cellar. At dawn the next day, the Americans made it safely back to the Seraph and returned to Gibraltar. From the submarine, Clark sent this message to Eisenhower in London: “Eisenhower eyes only. All questions were settled satisfactorily except for the time the French would assume supreme command. Anticipate that the bulk of the French army and air forces will offer little resistance. Initial resistance by French navy and coastal defenses indicated by naval information which also indicates that this resistance will fall off rapidly as our forces land.” The mission’s positive outcome helped pave the way for success in Operation Torch. It also brought Clark his first taste of criticism, for dealing with the Vichy French, who were Nazi collaborators. Carrying the Torch Forward O PERATION TORCH WOULD BE the war’s first massive commitment of US forces. The invasion force comprised 300 warships and 400 other vessels carrying more than 105,000 troops, threequarters of them American. There were nine landing sites, each expected to offer a different intensity of resistance. The invasion would test and strengthen the US-British alliance ahead of an eventual invasion of Axis-occupied Europe. D-day was set for November 8, 1942. Clark’s final order was twofold. If the Vichy French appeared to be resisting, the invaders would implement Plan A (Advance Alexis). This called for the 503rd Parachute Infantry’s 2nd Battalion to take off from England at 5 P.M., fly some 1,500 miles, jump into North Africa before dawn, and seize two airfields near Oran, Algeria. If the French appeared not to be resisting, the Allies would use Plan B (Advance Napoleon), with the paratroopers taking off four hours later, at 9:00, and landing in daylight. In London, Eisenhower and Clark weren’t paying sufficient attention to conflicting reports from Algeria that predicted how the French would react. So London signaled the advance to begin, even though some Vichy units, especially the navy, had not agreed to cooperate. When the paratroopers took off four hours later, hardly anything went according to plan. Bad weather forced some aircraft as far as 50 miles off course. Some planes that reached the
by William Floyd, Jr.
target jump zones were greeted by Vichy anti-aircraft fire. Others landed on a dry lake bed, and their paratroopers advanced to the airfields on foot. Despite the chaos that greeted the paratroopers and the amphibious forces, Vichy resistance was light and short-lived. By day’s end the Allies had nearly surrounded Oran and put thousands of men ashore with only light casualties. Clark got much of the credit. Three days later he was promoted to lieutenant general.
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RRIVING IN A LGIERS BY PLANE after the landings, Clark placed French Admiral Jean Francois Darlan in protective custody. Darlan was a Vichy cabinet minister and commander in chief of all Vichy forces. Clark persuaded him to repudiate the Vichy regime and order all French forces in northwest and west Africa to stop resisting the Americans and British. The agreement greatly helped Allied efforts against the Germans in North Africa.
Onward to the Boot IN JANUARY 1943, CLARK TOOK COMMAND of the newly created Fifth Army, the first American army that would see active duty in Europe. He spent the next seven months preparing this force (which included the British X Corps) for Operation Avalanche, the invasion of Germany’s Axis ally, Italy. By mid-August, US and British armies had secured Sicily, the large island off the toe of the boot-shaped Italian peninsula. Clark’s troops took the next step, invading mainland Italy on September 9, 1943. The US 36th Division and the British 46th and 56th Divisions spearheaded the assault, striking Italy’s west coast along the Gulf of Salerno, just above the ankle of the boot. Montgomery’s British Eighth Army, which crossed from Sicily to Calabria (the boot’s toe) earlier in September, was on its way to connect with Clark’s forces. Almost immediately, Clark’s troops came under fierce German resistance, confining them to a shallow beachhead that kept other Fifth Army divisions from landing. The Eighth was on its way, but at a crawl; Montgomery halted his forces for several days’ rest. Conditions at Salerno got so desperate that Clark ordered contingency plans drawn up in case evacuation became necessary. But with steady Allied pressure and the eventual approach of Montgomery’s forces, the Germans—units of Colonel General Heinrich von Vietinghoff’s 10th Army—began falling back in mid-September to avoid being flanked by the British. Montgomery claimed credit, but British General Sir Harold Alexander, Clark’s superior as commander of the Allied 15th Army Group, later stated that Clark had “won the battle before Eighth Army got up.”
Opposite: Clark leads Fifth Army troops out of Italy’s Anzio beachhead to meet relief forces on May 25, 1944. At Anzio, as at Salerno, the Germans trapped Clark’s men in a shallow beachhead for months. Above: After breaking out at Anzio, Clark marched on Rome instead of pressing an attack to destroy the German army. Another year of battle would be the price. Here, Clark watches his troops occupy the Eternal City. JUNE 2016
AMERICA IN WWII 21
RISING STAR, FALLING STAR
by William Floyd, Jr.
On October 1 Clark’s Fifth Army captured Naples, some 34 miles up Italy’s west coast from Salerno. Farther north, the army’s VI Corps made a fresh amphibious assault on January 22, 1944, at the seaside resorts of Anzio and Nettuno, about 30 miles south of Rome. As happened at Salerno, the Americans and British of Clark’s VI Corps got stuck in a shallow, vulnerable beachhead, unable to break out for about four months. Clark had expected trouble at Anzio. “I felt that I had a pistol pointed at my head,” he later wrote. “I had been told to make an end run to Anzio, but now I was told that it would have to be done without sufficient craft and that virtually all those craft would be withdrawn a few days after we hit the beaches with two divisions. Since it would obviously take much longer than that for the beachhead troops to join up with the balance of the Fifth Army, I would have two divisions left high and dry at the end of a long limb.”
made the most controversial decision of his career. Instead of pursuing the German 10th Army and destroying it—as the plan approved by Alexander dictated—he advanced on Rome. His Fifth Army captured the Eternal City on June 4, 1944, making it the first Axis capital to fall (even though Italy’s Fascist government was already defeated). But the German 10th Army escaped to fight on. Because of Clark’s decision, the Allies would have to fight all the way up the Italian peninsula, where the Germans dug in along the mountainous, heavily fortified Gothic Line. Breaking that line would occupy Allied forces in Italy through the beginning of March 1945, costing thousands of lives.
While fighting dragged on at Anzio, other portions of the Fifth Army battled endlessly to break the Germans’ so-called Winter Line at Monte Cassino, home of an abbey founded by Saint Benedict in the 500s. On February 15, 1944, Clark—against his will and under direct orders from Alexander—ordered a massive aerial bombardment that reduced the historic abbey to rubble. Still the Winter Line endured. Not until May 18 did the Allies break through.
succeeded Alexander as 15th Army Group commander at the end of 1944. In March 1945, just months shy of his 49th birthday, Clark became a full general, the youngest American ever to wear four stars to this day. In April Clark and his 15th Army Group began the final push into Northern Italy’s Po Valley. The campaign brought a German surrender on May 2, a week before Germany’s Third Reich collapsed. Clark reflected with pride on his men’s accomplishment: “One of the most complete and decisive victories in military history has been recorded by their two armies in a period of approximately three weeks. Approximately 145,000 prisoners have been taken, and the Ligurian Army, consisting of two German and two Italian divisions is hopelessly pinned in the Turin
M
EANWHILE , AT
ANZIO, as at Salerno, the British Eighth Army arrived from the south. After weeks of intense fighting, the combined armies broke the Germans’ Caesar Line, forcing an enemy withdrawal on June 2. At this moment, Clark
Continued Advancement DESPITE SOME BRITISH AND AMERICAN generals’ ill will over Clark’s decision to capture Rome instead of halting the Germans, Clark
Above: Two days before the Anzio breakout, Clark visits a war-ravaged village northwest of Naples, Italy. He is with the portion of his Fifth Army advancing to relieve the VI Corps at Anzio. Opposite: Clark tours Rome by jeep on June 5, 1944, the day before other Allied forces assaulted Normandy, France. In a private audience on June 8, Pope Pius XII thanked Clark for food sent to help Rome’s desperate residents. 22 AMERICA IN WWII
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area with all exits to the north blocked…. Troops of the Fifteenth Army Group will have so smashed the German Armies in Italy that they have been virtually eliminated as a military force….”
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ISENHOWER , TOO , WAS PROUD —of
Clark, his American Eagle. “In a way of course, I feel a slightly proprietary interest in you,” he wrote to Clark. “This is always the case when anyone does extremely well and so I am just voicing a sentiment that probably a thousand others are doing this minute…. Your accomplishments, since you landed at Salerno, are among the notable ones of the war and I realize more keenly than most, how difficult your task has often been.” At war’s end, Clark stood with Eisenhower, George S. Patton, and Omar N. Bradley as a leading American commander in the European theatre. He had his detractors, though, including Patton, who wrote in his diary, “It makes my flesh creep to be with him.” Patton later remarked, “Anyone who serves under Clark is always in danger.” Several British officers disliked Clark but were reluctant to speak against him without American support. That support rarely appeared because Clark’s friendship with Ike made American officers wary.
Navigating a New World Order AFTER THE ALLIED VICTORY came the occupation of former enemy territory. Clark served in Austria, essentially as American viceroy, a post for which he seemed well suited, until May 4, 1947. Returning home, he took up stateside duty for the first time in seven years, commanding the Sixth Army from San Francisco’s Presidio. Two years later he became chief of Army Field Forces. On April 30, 1952, Clark headed back overseas, this time to Tokyo as commander in chief of the US Far East Command, which administered the occupation of Japan. Along with this came the title of commander in chief, United Nations Command in Korea. Since 1940 war had raged between Korea’s communist north and republican south and their powerful allies—China and the Soviet Union for the north, and the United States and United Nations for the south. When Clark arrived in Tokyo, the Korean War was at a stalemate along the 38th parallel. Dealing with that, he later wrote, “capped my career, but it was a cap without a feather.” Like the military conflict, armistice negotiations with the North Koreans and their Chinese allies were also at a standstill. Clark’s first instinct was to launch an offensive, including strikes on enemy bases across the Yalu River, North Korea’s border with China. Such action which would have widened the war, and Clark’s superiors turned it down. But Clark saw an opportunity to get around that resistance in December 1952, when his friend Eisenhower, now president-elect of the United States, visited Korea. Clark prepared his plan, which he believed would win the
war, but never got a chance to present it. Eisenhower, after taking office in 1953, pursued a negotiated peace. Early in 1953, Clark did get the go-ahead to bomb Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, pressuring the Communists to sign a treaty on terms set forth by the United Nations. An agreement was finally struck on July 27, 1953, and it fell to Clark to sign it. He believed he was the first US commander to agree to an armistice without achieving victory. He signed the documents but commented, “I cannot find it in me to exalt at this hour.” He left the Far East Command on October 7, 1953, and retired from the army at the end of that month. Laurels and Thorns OUT OF THE ARMY FOR THE FIRST TIME in three and a half decades, Clark didn’t stray far. In October 1953 he became president of the Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, in Charleston. During his tenure he improved the school’s finances and raised professors’ salaries. He also used his prestigious position to further his political views, espousing Senator Joseph McCarthy’s claim that Communists had penetrated many areas of American life. Clark went so far as to claim the United Nations was a forum for the Soviets to spread propaganda. In the mid-1950s, Clark headed what became known as the Clark Task Force, created to study federal intelligence activities and make recommendations. The committee was set up by the second Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government (known as the Hoover Commission because ex-president Herbert Hoover chaired it). A report based on the study came out about six months after the Senate’s December 1954 censure of McCarthy. As a result, Clark’s ideas were rejected.
C
LARK WROTE TWO MEMOIRS ,
Calculated Risk in 1950 and From the Danube to the Yalu in 1954. But his outspoken views—for instance, claiming Communists were fostering “intermarriages of the races,” which he viewed as abhorrent—alienated many Americans. Negative perceptions eclipsed the memory of his accomplishments. Clark died on April 17, 1984, and was buried at the Citadel. In his army career, which spanned three wars, some had questioned his performance, but never his devotion to duty. Many of his critics were fellow generals, each with his own critics. Few men who rise to prominence and power do so without inspiring detractors. A WILLIAM FLOYD, JR., is retired from the City of Norfolk, Virginia, with over 40 years of service. He has written a number of articles for various magazines mostly on the Civil War and World War II. JUNE 2016
AMERICA IN WWII 23
EXTRA I Pro baseball had to answer a pressing question in 1942: Should we be playing games while the nation fights a war? The president and an anxious citizenr y replied: Play ball!
AM E RICA I N
WWII P H O T O E S S AY
INNINGS Joe DiMaggio was baseball’s biggest star as America went to war. Here, in August 1942, the New York Yankees centerfielder signs autographs for GIs and others at the US Army’s Fort Dix in New Jersey. A few months later, DiMaggio himself was a GI, in the US Army Air Forces. national archives
EXTRA INNINGS
top & center: library of congress. opposite: national archives
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941 WAS A BIG YEAR FOR JOE DIMAGGIO and the New York Yankees. The heir to Lou Gehrig got at least one hit in each of 56 straight games, a record that still stands 75 years later. DiMaggio and his teammates rode that high all the way to the World Series. In five games, the Bronx Bombers defeated their crosstown rivals the Brooklyn Dodgers. By the end of October 6, Joltin’ Joe, shortstop Phil Rizzuto, pitcher Lefty Gomez, and the rest of the boys were the world champions of baseball. Two months later, different bombers were making headlines, the Japanese bombers that attacked Pearl Harbor and pulled the United States into the world war. Young men, pro ballplayers included, were handed guns, trained to fight, and sent overseas. Before long, the entire starting lineup of the recently crowned champs had gone off to war. How could baseball continue? Should baseball continue? The voice of conventional wisdom whispered, “We can’t concern ourselves with a frivolous game while our boys are all over the world getting shot at and killed.” The Major League Baseball commissioner with the monumental name Kenesaw Mountain Landis told President Franklin Roosevelt in early 1942 that he would defer to the White House on whether the nation’s ballyards should be closed up for the war’s duration. “Never!” the president responded. Americans would be working hard and under great stress, he reasoned. They’d need diversion, and baseball would give them some.
Keeping the game going proved harder than simply making the decision to continue. When most of the big-name players traded in their diamond duds for khaki, pro ball was left largely in the hands of men deemed physically unfit for military duty. Bert Shepard, who returned from war early without one leg, pitched a few innings for the Washington Senators. Pete Gray, missing a forearm since age six, played outfield for the St. Louis Browns, alternately wearing and removing his glove as necessary to catch and throw. There were fat guys and skinny guys. The game endured but it wasn’t the same. Chicago Cubs owner Philip Wrigley turned MLB’s troubles into opportunity. Figuring that, with the men away, maybe women could fill the entertainment void, he scoured the ranks of the nation’s semipro softball leagues and offered players a raise to take the field with his new All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Emphasis was on the Girls part of that name, and the recruits were warned against emulating the worst habits of their male counterparts, such as cussing and spitting. They were to act like ladies before the crowds. The year after the war ended, Americans were really ready for the return of the professional baseball they knew and loved. DiMaggio, whose most significant military role was as a ringer in army baseball games that were played for morale and propaganda purposes, returned to the Yankees in the spring of 1946. No doubt he had looked fine in khaki. But all but the most ardent Yankee hater had to admit it was good to see him back in navy pinstripes. A
The Brooklyn Dodgers (a wartime souvenir pennant is shown at top) lost to the Yankees in the last prewar World Series. Many starters from both clubs, like New York’s Joe DiMaggio, soon left for the military. Opposite: Displaying the sort of athleticism that was often missing from the star-depleted wartime game, St. Louis Cardinals second baseman Lou Klein leaps to avoid a takeout slide during the 1943 World Series. Above, center: Other differences in the wartime game were less obvious, like the makeup of the official ball. Since rubber was scarce, the cork core was coated instead with a substance derived from South American bully trees. 26 AMERICA IN WWII
JUNE 2016
EXTRA INNINGS
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Exhibition contests to benefit war charities were common. Here, Yankee legend Babe Ruth headlined a roster of retired stars that helped pack Yankee Stadium on August 23, 1942. Their old-timers game, sandwiched between halves of a Yankees–Washington Senators doubleheader, raised $80,000 for the Army-Navy Relief Fund to aid war veterans. The 47-year-old home run king knocked two pitches from Hall of Famer Walter Johnson out of the park. Right, center: Ticket sales for a preseason exhibition featuring all three New York teams brought in $75,000 for the Civilian Defense Volunteer Office, an organization tasked with protecting civilians in case of emergency. Spectators watched the Dodgers defeat the Yankees and then the Giants. Right, top: Baseball’s popularity held up through the war, with many fans following the sport closely to escape from wartime realities. The 1942 film The Pride of the Yankees (a promotional poster is shown here) lost money at the box office, possibly because the subject matter—the story of Lou Gehrig, who died from the neuromuscular condition commonly known today as “Lou Gehrig’s disease”—may have been too depressing for wartime audiences. Right, bottom: With so many Major Leaguers having gone to war before the 1942 World Series, this program featured numerous players who until recently had been stuck in the minors.
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AMERICA IN WWII 29
natio nal ar ch
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EXTRA INNINGS
national archives. opposite: coUrtesy of the national baseball hall of faMe library, cooperstoWn, ny
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The loss of pro players to the military meant new opportunities for some. Pete Gray (opposite) joined the outfield of the St. Louis Browns for the 1945 season. He’d lost his right arm in a childhood accident and became the first and only one-armed player in Major League history. Above, upper left: Sophie Kurys was among the former softball players who took the field for the 1943 inaugural season of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. By the time she retired from Wisconsin’s Racine Belles two years before the league’s 1954 demise, she had stolen a record 1,000 bases. Above, upper right: Pete Modica (left) was a career minor-leaguer who became staff ace of the Fort Custer army training facility team. Here he talks pitching with Cleveland Indians hurlers Mel Harder and Jim Bagby, Jr., on the Michigan fort’s field. Above: In the end, pro baseball survived for the fans. In this case, that meant for Americans contributing to the war effort, like these GIs at Fort Hanco*ck, New Jersey, listening to a 1944 World Series game between the St. Louis Cardinals and St. Louis Browns. JUNE 2016
AMERICA IN WWII 31
THE
Y E K R U T G N I Y L F r the Avenge , s ip h rs a panese w r than Hunting Ja rigid rathe s a w r e b . m remarkable torpedo bo n a h t r e h t liable ra it. graceful, re none hated t u B . it d e lov Few pilots vived in it. r u s t s o m And
F. Dor r by Rober t
A TBM Avenger soars above the US fleet anchored off rocky Iwo Jima, south of Japan. Far below is the island’s highest point, crater-topped Mount Suribachi, visible at right. Avengers were the US Navy’s workhorse torpedo bombers, helping send Imperial Japan’s once powerful armada to the bottom of the sea. US NAVY PHOTO. NATiONAl ArcHiVeS
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T H E F LY I N G T U R K E Y by Robert F. Dorr TBM-3E AVENGER TORPEDO BOMBER, Lieutenant (junior grade) Eugene Overley watched Japanese sailors scrambling on the deck of the light carrier Zuiho. The warship’s anti-aircraft guns blazed as he rushed toward them, their muzzle flashes lighting up the ship’s wet gray sides.
OOKING OVER THE NOSE OF HIS
Big, Blue, and Reliable T HERE’S AN EASY WAY TO INTRODUCE the Avenger to people who aren’t aircraft experts: tell them President George H.W. Bush flew it. Or perhaps they’ve heard the story of Flight 19, the aerial formation of five Avengers that disappeared mysteriously over the Bermuda Triangle on December 5, 1945. The Avenger was designed to be the US Navy’s standard torpedo bomber, carrying out the perilous task of attacking Japanese warships while approaching at a low altitude—flying straight at the enemy’s gun muzzles. It was drawn up and developed by Grumman, long the designer of the most successful carrierbased combat planes. The company made aircraft so sturdy and tough that sailors called it Grumman Iron Works. The Avenger’s story began on March 25, 1939, when the US Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics invited aircraft companies to submit proposals for a new torpedo bomber to replace aging, fabric-covered biplanes. Grumman proposed the Avenger, a tailwheel-equipped, lowwing monoplane similar to most tactical aircraft of World War II. It was unremarkable in appearance, with ample square-tipped wings that folded backward, parallel to the fuselage, for stowage aboard a carrier. The engine experienced early developmental problems, but they were resolved very early during flight tests. The head of the Avenger engineering team was the brilliant William T. Schwendler, one of Grumman’s founders. Test pilot Bob Hall, also an engineer, took the prototype TBF-1 for its first flight at the Grumman facility at Bethpage, New York, on August 7, 1941. Less than two hours of flying revealed center-of-gravity problems and that the engine needed to be farther forward. The tail was redesigned to add a dorsal fin for stability, and thus the size and shape of all future Avengers was decided. In early 1942, the navy needed a fighter to take on the vaunted Japanese Zero and instructed Grumman to prioritize the F6F
Above: TBMs prepare for takeoff on the flight deck of USS Yorktown (CV-10) in June 1944, heading out to strafe and fire rockets at Japanese positions on Iwo Jima and Chichi Jima in the Bonin Islands. Opposite: A pilot from a Yorktown squadron stands by his TBM Avenger in his flight gear, ready to go. Avenger pilots appreciated the reliability of the sturdy blue plane sailors jokingly called the Turkey. 34 AMERICA IN WWII
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lefT: NATiONAl ArcHiVeS. OPPOSiTe: US NAVY PHOTO. NATiONAl ArcHiVeS
Two American carrier air groups were swarming over Admiral Soemu Toyoda’s Japanese fleet on October 25, 1944, during the titanic Battle of Leyte Gulf, off the Philippines. Flying metal filled the sky. Cannon shells shaped like bright orange golf balls whipped past the navy planes. Machine-gun rounds kicked up geysers in the roiling, gray-blue water, disrupting the shadow of Overley’s plane as he came in just 20 feet above the wave caps to press his attack. “As soon as I had that lady flattened out at low level, I opened the bay doors,” said Overley, who always called the Avenger a lady. “I was carrying our usual load, which was one Mark 13 aerial torpedo. I hit the toggle and our ‘tin fish’ left the plane and headed for the ship. I lowered the nose, pulled power and got out of there fast.” The Zuiho, whose name meant “fortunate phoenix,” would not live up to her name that day. She was burning and listing at 23 degrees when her captain ordered abandon ship. Just 16 minutes later, she slipped beneath the waves. With dozens of carrier-based navy warplanes engaging dozens of Japanese warships, it’s impossible to know whether Overley’s torpedo found its mark. But Overley thinks it may have. He credits his big blue Avenger with doing her job and getting him and his two aircrewmen, Jon Peters and Robert Gorsen, safely back to their aircraft carrier, the USS Ticonderoga (CVA-14). The Avenger isn’t usually remembered as one of the great planes of World War II—think Flying Fortress, Spitfire, Hellcat, or Mustang—but Overley’s “lady” is somewhere near the top of any list of near-greats. Not every pilot or crew member loved the Avenger, but none hated it. As Overley put it, “The Avenger had good flying characteristics but you had to resist the urge to pretend she was a fighter and try to fling her around the sky. The Avenger was an extremely predictable and honest aircraft, although somewhat cumbersome. I felt that if I treated this lady right, she would treat me right.”
T H E F LY I N G T U R K E Y by Robert F. Dorr A 1,900-horsepower Wright R-2600-20 Cyclone 14-cylinder radial engine pulled the TBF or TBM through the air. Whether carrying 2,000 pounds of bombs or a single aerial torpedo, the Avenger could reach a speed of 271 mph. An Avenger crew consisted of a pilot up front plus two enlisted men—a gunner in a distinctive power turret behind the pilot and a radioman-gunner in the ventral, or “tunnel,” position. The three crew members had no access to one another while in flight. The pilot sat fairly far forward, almost perfectly aligned with the wings’ leading edge. Despite the plane’s high nose, the pilot enjoyed excellent visibility even when taxiing. The co*ckpit was spacious and for the most part the instrument layout was comfortable and sensibly designed. The gunner sat in line with the pilot, but some distance behind
the Turkey for its awkward appearance—it was a vast improvement over the Douglas TBD Devastator, which fought at Midway in June 1942 but was actually obsolete before the war began. The Devastator didn’t do much devastating, but the Avenger performed well, treated pilots forgivingly, and lived up to its name (even though the name was chosen in October 1941, before there was a Pearl Harbor attack to avenge). The Avenger was a TBD Devastator on steroids.
him, in an electrically operated Type 150SE ball turret designed by Grumman’s Oscar Olsen. This was a self-contained unit with gun, gunner, controls, and ammunition that was mounted at the rear of the “greenhouse,” as the plane’s extensive canopy was called. The third crew member, a radioman-gunner, sat in the tunnel in the plane’s belly. The tunnel was a noisy, enclosed capsule with extremely limited visibility. After a few missions, it reeked of engine oil and hydraulic fluids. It was the most difficult crew position to escape from in a bailout or when ditching into the water. Radioman-gunner Robert J. Dorr (no relation to this article’s author) wrote to family members saying, “The radioman/gunner sat on a narrow bench most of the time. His job was to keep the radio in commission although the pilot performed the actual operation of the radio. He had a .30-caliber machine gun with a lim-
Avengers Inside and Out O NE WAY TO LOOK AT THE AVENGER is to scrutinize it from outside, like a pilot doing a preflight walk-around. Anyone who does so is invariably surprised by the plane’s size. It has a wingspan of 54 feet, 2 inches and a typical takeoff weight of 17,893 pounds.
Above: Not all Avengers were TBMs, only those built by General Motors’ Eastern Division. Those built by Grumman, like the Avenger in this official photo, were TBFs. Opposite: Lieutenant (junior grade) George H.W. Bush, the future US president, mans the co*ckpit of Barbara III, his third Avenger of the war. He ditched Barbara at sea, and Barbara II was hit by enemy fire and destroyed, leaving Bush the sole survivor. 36 AMERICA IN WWII
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Hellcat. So, to supplement and eventually replace Grumman as builder of the Avenger, the navy turned to the Eastern Aircraft Division of General Motors Corporation. The first TBM-1 assembled by GM in Trenton, New Jersey, was delivered on November 12, 1942 (Grumman-made Avengers were labeled TBF, while GM’s identical aircraft were TBM). GM turned out TBMs fast; in March 1945 the Trenton factory managed to deliver 400. By war’s end, Grumman had built 2,293 TBFs while GM completed 7,546 TBMs. The definitive production version was the TBM-3, built exclusively by GM. Different letter suffixes were used for varying TBM-3 models, such as the TBM-3E, which had a slightly lengthened fuselage and the capability to carry AN/APS4 search radar mounted in a canister beneath the starboard wing. Whatever else the Avenger was—sailors affectionately called it
cOUrTeSY Of THe geOrge H.w. bUSH PreSideNTiAl librArY ANd mUSeUm
ited field of fire below and behind the aircraft. It was dark, loud, and cramped down there.” Aboard Avengers that were in service with the British Royal Air Force (where the plane was briefly dubbed the Tarpon), both the enlisted crewmen were called telegraphist air gunners, or TAGs. One TAG, Leading Aircraftsman Fred Shirmer, was credited with an unusual aerial victory on July 9, 1944, when a German V-1 flying bomb approached and began to overtake his Avenger Mk.II. Shirmer opened fire from his turret from a distance of 700 yards and destroyed the much faster V-1.
torpedo bombers and in a series of furious attacks shot down five of them. Ensign Albert K. “Bert” Earnest realized that he couldn’t reach the Japanese carriers, so he launched a torpedo at a cruiser, then broke away with a pair of Zeros in pursuit. Seaman First Class Jay D. Manning, operating the gun turret behind Earnest, was killed during the attack. Earnest’s third crewman, Radioman Third Class Harrier H. Ferrier, was wounded. Earnest and Ferrier were the only Avenger survivors of that great battle, in which Devastator torpedo bombers were also badly battered but Dauntless dive-bombers turned the tide.
Into the Carrier War OVERALL, THE AVENGER JOINED THE FLEET with few teething troubles, though early in the war, the navy experienced a scandal with the design and deployment of its torpedoes and couldn’t provide enough to arm all Avenger squadrons. Opportunities were lost when Avenger crews had to use bombs rather than torpedoes to fight Japanese warships. The Avenger’s actual baptism of fire, during the pivotal Battle of Midway on June 4, 1942, was a debacle. As the battle approached, just six Avengers were available. They were new planes, Grumman-built TBF-1s, that arrived at Midway Island three days before the fight, with Lieutenant Langdon K. Fieberling’s detachment from Torpedo Squadron Eight (VT-8). Fieberling’s aviators were so inexperienced that some had never flown out of sight of land. The six new Avengers found the Japanese fleet at 7:10 A.M., went down to wave-top level, and attacked the enemy aircraft carriers. Mitsubishi Zero fighters swarmed around the vulnerable
for Avengers. Eugene Overley flew his Avenger with Torpedo Squadron Eighty (VT-80). The squadron was at Oceana, Virginia, in 1944, when it began operating from the deck of the Ticonderoga, its new home. Overley loved the big, portly Avenger. “I was impressed with this aircraft from my first experience in training,” he said. “The Avenger was burly and it was a brute. Preparing to go to battle while in training on the home front, I figured the power behind that engine and the stability of the air frame would bring me through.” Overley would fly late-war air-to-ground missions, strafing and firing rockets at Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and Japan. Before that, however, he made at least four torpedo attacks, including ones on the carrier Zuiho and the light cruiser Kiso. “We were full of our ourselves,” he reflected, “so we thought we were superior to our buddies who flew dive-bombers like the SBD Dauntless and the SB2C Helldiver. To the dive-bomber pilots, a warship was a very narrow, or thin, target and they didn’t have a lot of leeway as to when and how you drop their bomb. When we made a torpedo run, we
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T H E F LY I N G T U R K E Y by Robert F. Dorr had a broadside view of our target for as much as a minute. Of course, that also meant they could see us. Some of their gunners were very accurate.” Bush’s Avenger War AVENGER PILOT AND FUTURE PRESIDENT George H.W. Bush flew with Torpedo Squadron Fifty-One (VT-51) aboard the light aircraft carrier USS San Jacinto (CVL-30). On June 17, 1944, a loss of oil pressure forced him to make an emergency landing, ditching his first plane, Barbara, at sea (unlike some aircraft, the Avenger was considered pretty safe to put down in the water). Hours later, Bush, gunner Leo Nadeau, and radioman-gunner John L. Delaney were picked up by a US warship.
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USH TOOK PART IN 13 MORE AIR STRIKES in the summer of 1944. On September 2, he flew a mission against a Japanese radar station at Chichi Jima in the Bonin Islands. Replacing his usual gunner, Nadeau, was Lieutenant (junior grade) William Gardner “Ted” White, who was closely connected to the Bush family. Delaney, Bush’s regular radioman, was also aboard. Bush’s 1980 presidential campaign biography described the action this way: “On a run toward the island, Bush’s plane”—called Barbara II—“was struck by Japanese antiaircraft shells. One of his two crewmen was killed instantly and the aircraft was set on fire. Bush was able to score hits on the enemy installations with a couple of five-hundred pound bombs before he wriggled out of the smoking co*ckpit and floated towards the water. The other crewman [White] also bailed out but died almost immediately thereafter because, as the fighter pilot behind Bush’s plane [actually a torpedo bomber pilot] was later to report his parachute failed to open properly. Bush’s own parachute became momentarily fouled on the tail of the plane after he hit the water.” The submarine USS Finback (SS-230) rescued Bush (an event recorded on film), and Bush received the Distinguished Flying Cross. Differing accounts of the Chichi Jima action have been published, and critics argue that Bush could have ditched in the ocean rather than taking to his parachute. One Avenger veteran, for instance, told the author of this article that he was skeptical about the future president’s decision to hit the silk. But historian Barrett Tillman, interviewed for this article, said, “Bush had no choice. The Avenger was afire from the trailing edge of the wing on back.” Tillman said the VT-51 after-action report confirms the plane was in flames.
Above: A female riveter, name unknown, works on a TBF-1 Avenger at Grumman’s plant in Bethpage, Long Island. At GM’s plant in North Tarrytown, New York, riveter Rose Bonavita gained media exposure as a real Rosie the Riveter after she and her partner set a one-shift drilling and riveting record on a TBM. Opposite: Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi is clearly visible in this March 1945 photo of the same TBM pictured on this article’s opening spread. 38 AMERICA IN WWII
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A footnote: for decades, the 41st president was believed to have been the youngest US naval aviator of World War II. Recently it was learned, and Bush now acknowledges, that this distinction belongs to retired Captain Charles “Chuck” Downey of La Salle, Illinois, who piloted an SB2C-4 Helldiver dive-bomber. Though the two men never met during the war, they have become fast friends late in life. Avengers at Home T HE AVENGER MADE ITS BIGGEST IMPACT in the Pacific carrier war, but it also affected the American home front, requiring manpower to assemble planes at a time when men—who in that era normally filled nearly all factory jobs—were away at war. Women— more than 18 million of them, most of whom had never held a job outside the home—rose to fill the void, and excelled. Women did much of the work in an aircraft industry that turned out almost 100,000 planes in 1944 alone. At the Eastern Aircraft Division of General Motors, Rosie Bonavita (later Hicker) impressed her coworkers with the record number of rivets she could drive while assembling wings for TBM Avengers. After May 29, 1943, when Norman Rockwell’s painting of the archetypal female defense worker, Rosie the Riveter, appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, reporters discovered Bonavita and gave her a moment of national fame as a real-life Rosie. There were men working on Avengers on the home front too, men with skills important to the war production effort. One was Edward Hindman, an engineering test pilot at Grumman’s Bethpage facility. “Some planes are right from the start,” Hindman said. “Our F6F Hellcat fighter was like that. The Avenger required a lot of tweaking, all of it done very early, but long before it became operational it was right, too. All of the feedback I heard later from Navy pilots was positive.” Avengers to the Very End THE AVENGER FOUGHT ON through war’s end. Number crunchers later said the torpedo bomber flew 28,730 combat sorties. Avenger gunners were credited with shooting down 83 Japanese planes (probably an exaggerated figure). Avengers participated in seven attacks on Japanese fleet carriers, including two that were sunk primarily by torpedoes. Avengers participated in the massive flyover at the surrender ceremony aboard the battleship USS Missouri (BB-63) in Tokyo Bay, September 2, 1945. “We felt we deserved to be there,” said Overley. By then, pilots and crewmen had come to feel the portly blue Avenger had earned its place. A ROBERT F. DORR, a US Air Force veteran, retired senior US diplomat, and author of some 70 books and numerous magazine articles, mostly on aviation and air force topics, is a frequent contributor to America in WWII.
SPECIAL EVENTS SECTION
AMERICA IN
WWII The War • The Home Front • The People
2016 WWII AIR SHOWS Go where engines rumble and warbirds roar across the sky...
GO TO A WORLD WAR II AIR SHOW! And tell ’em you heard about it in AMERICA IN WWII. Check websites or call to confirm details before planning your travel.
PLANES OF FAME AIRSHOW April 29–May 1 • Chino, CA Commemorates 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor this year. More than 40 WWII-era aircraft including Zeros, B-25s, P-47s, and P-51s, plus modern aircraft. Panel discussion with veterans. Admission: adults, $25; children 11 or younger, free. Hosted by the Planes of Fame Air Museum. 909-597-3722. www.planesoffame.org WORLD WAR II HERITAGE DAYS April 30–May 1 • Peachtree, GA WWII aircraft, period vehicles, educational displays, guest speakers, demonstrations, mock battles between Allied and Axis reenactors, “Keep ’em Flying” WWII-themed hangar dance, and warbird rides. Actors and singers impersonate 1940s celebrities and perform period musical hits throughout the weekend. Admission: adults $10; uniformed military, children under 5, free. Hosted by the Commemorative Air Force Dixie Wing. Atlanta Regional Airport–Falcon Field. www.wwiidays.org 2016 CENTRAL TEXAS AIRSHOW May 6–8 • Temple, TX Aerobatic pilot Matt Younkin headlines this year’s show. Admission: Check website closer to event dates. Draughton-Miller Central Texas Regional Airport. www.centraltexasairshow.com SPIRIT OF ST LOUIS AIR SHOW May 14–15 • Chesterfield, MO WWII warbirds, modern civilian and military aircraft on display. Air show featuring US Navy Blue Angels. Admission: $15 before May 1, $25 at the gate; children 6 and younger free; military (with ID) free. Spirit of St Louis Airport. 314-529-1963. [emailprotected]. www.spirit-airshow.com WARBIRDS OVER THE BEACH AIR SHOW May 20–22 • Virginia Beach, VA Numerous Allied and Axis WWII fighters, trainers, bombers, and liaison planes. WWII aircraft in flight, warbird rides, reenactors, hangar dance, live music. Admission: adults, $25; youth, $12. Hosted by the Military Aviation Museum. Virginia Beach Airport, 1341 Princess Anne Road. 757-721-7767. www.vbairshow.com MID-ATLANTIC AIR MUSEUM’S 26TH ANNUAL WWII WEEKEND June 3–5 • Reading, PA Many WWII aircraft flying and on display, 200-some military vehicles, more than 1,700 reenactors, ground combat simulations, living history encampments, WWII flea market and vendors, 1940s entertainment, and hangar dance. Americans in Wartime Museum will be present to gather oral histories. Admission: adults, $26 in advance,
$28 at gate; ages 6–12, $10 in advance, $12 at gate; ages 5 and younger, free; three-day pass, $71 in advance, $78 at gate. Mid-Atlantic Air Museum. Reading Regional Airport. 610-372-7333. www.maam.org/maamwii.html DISCOVER AVIATION DAYS June 4–5 • Blaine, MN WWII fighters, trainers, and bombers flying and on display, plus civilian and modern aircraft. Veterans, historical displays, aircraft and helicopter rides, educational center, hangar dance with 1940s swing band. Admission: Free. Anoka County Airport. Info@Discover AviationDays.org. 763-568-6072. www.discoveraviationdays.org VECTREN DAYTON AIR SHOW June 18–19 • Vandalia, OH “Tora! Tora! Tora!” Pearl Harbor reenactment, plus US Navy Blue Angels and US Marine Corps C-130 Fat Albert. Vintage and modern aircraft on display. Admission: adults, $21 online, $25 at the gate; seniors ages 60 and older, $16 online and at the gate; youth ages 6–11, $16 online and at the gate; children ages 5 and younger free. Online prices end June 19. 937-898-5901. www.daytonairshow.com WINGS OVER NORTHERN MICHIGAN June 18–19 • Gaylord, MI Jets and vintage warbirds in the air and on display. Modern and historic military vehicles. Big-band-themed hangar dance both nights. Admission: adults, $12 in advance, $15 at the event; children 6–12 $5; children 5 and younger free. Gaylord Regional Airport. 989-732-4218. wingsovernorthernmichigan.org QUAD CITY AIR SHOW June 25–26 • Davenport, IA Flight demonstrations, WWII-vintage aircraft on display. Admission: Check website closer to event dates. Davenport Municipal Airport. (563) 322-7469. www.quadcityairshow.com FLYING LEGENDS AIRSHOW 2016 July 9–10 • Duxford, Cambridge (UK) Features internationally famous Flying Legends Airshow, ending with warbirds in flight; vintage live music, large-scale model warbirds, and Sit in a Spitfire Experience. Admission: adults, £34.50; seniors (ages 60 and older), £27; children ages 5–15, £18.15; children ages 5 or younger free. Imperial War Museum Duxford. +44 (0) 1223 835 000. www.flyinglegends.com AIREXPO 2016 July 16–17 • Eden Prairie, MN WWII aircraft include a rare Fairey Gannet XT752, Mustangs, FG1D Corsair, B-17, B-25, TBM Avenger, trainers, B-13 Valiant, T-50 JUNE 2016
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2016 WWII AIR SHOWS Bobcat, and more. Admission: adult tickets, $15; children 8–12, $5; children 7 and younger, free. Wings of the North, Flying Cloud Airport. 952-746-6100. wotn.org/airexpo EAA AIRVENTURE OSHKOSH 2016 July 25–31 • Oshkosh WI Rides aboard B-17 Aluminum Overcast, 75th anniversary celebration of Grasshopper liaison planes (“L-birds”), plus Rockwell Collins Night Air Show (aerobatics with pyrotechnics). WWII warbirds on display. Admission: adult, $47 online, $45 at the gate; students ages 6–18, $26 online and at the gate; children 5 and younger free. EAA Aviation Center. 920-426-4800. www.eaa.org/en/airventure
WARBIRD ROUNDUP August 27–28 • Nampa, ID Features aircraft demonstrations and walk-arounds with WWII and Vietnam-era aircraft. Admission: Check website closer to event dates. Warhawk Air Museum. 208-465-6232. www.warhawkairmuseum.org LAKE OF THE OZARKS AIR SHOW September 10 • Camdenton, MO WWII B-25J Mitchell, P-51 Mustang, and modern airplanes on display and in flight and aerobatics demonstrations. Admission: Check website closer to event dates. Camdenton Memorial Airport. [emailprotected]. 573-346-2227. www.lakeoftheozarksairshow.com
GREENWOOD LAKE AIR SHOW August 12–14 • West Milford, NJ Features Aeroshell Aerobatic Team, night shows, and the VIP Performer Pavilion Experience, where show-goers meet aerial performers. Aircraft demonstrations, WWII warbird displays, living history, veterans, the Army Air Forces Historical Association, and aircraft from the American Airpower Museum. Admission: Check website closer to event dates. [emailprotected]. 973-728-7721. www.greenwoodlakeairshow.com
HEART OF TEXAS AIRSHOW September 17–18 • Waco, TX Vintage aircraft including P-51 Mustang, modern aircraft, and flights aboard B-17 Texas Raiders and B-25 Devil Dog. Admission: adults, $20 online, $25 at the gate; children ages 6–12, seniors ages 65, older, and military with ID, $10 online and at the gate. TSTC Campus Airport. [emailprotected]. www.heartoftexasairshow.com
COMMEMORATIVE AIR FORCE AIRSHO August 27–28 • Midland, TX Many WWII-vintage bombers, fighters, liaison planes, cargo planes, and trainers on display and in flight. Admission: Check website closer to event dates. Midland International Airport. [emailprotected]. www.airsho.org
MCAS MIRAMAR AIR SHOW September 23–25 • San Diego, CA Numerous modern and warbird aircraft on display and in flight. Features US Navy Blue Angels. Admission: Check website closer to event dates. Marine Corps Air Station Miramar. [emailprotected]. www.miramarairshow.com
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2016 WWII AIR SHOWS LEESBURG AIRSHOW September 24 • Leesburg, VA Warbirds and vintage planes flying and on display, aerobatic demonstrations, and skydivers. Admission: free. Leesburg Executive Airport. www.leesburgairshow.com 2016 ATLANTA WARBIRD WEEKEND September 24–25 • Chamblee, GA Flying Tigers 75th anniversary, P-40 gathering, dozens of warbirds. Rides, demonstrations, vendors. Commemorative Air Force Dixie Wing. Dekalb Peachtree Airport. www.atlantawarbirdweekend.com WINGS AND WHEELS 2016— A GEORGETOWN FALL FESTIVAL September 30–October 1 • Georgetown, DE Warbirds, reenactments, living history program, and B-25 Mitchell flight experiences (check website for details closer to event). Admission: free. Sussex County Airport. www.wings-wheels.com THE VIRGINIA FESTIVAL OF FLIGHT October 8 • Suffolk, VA Warbirds on display and in flight, rides aboard T-6 Texan trainer. Airshow held in conjunction with Suffolk Peanut Fest. Admission: free, but $15 parking fee. Suffolk Executive Airport. 757-514-4411. virginiafestivalofflight.wordpress.com WINGS AND WHEELS EXPO 2016 October 10 • Hagerstown, MD Historic and modern aircraft plus classic vehicles and historic military vehicles. History demonstrations. Admission: free. Donations to the Hagerstown Regional Airport welcome. info@hagers townaviationmuseum.org. www.wingsandwheelsexpo.com
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WINGS OVER HOUSTON AIRSHOW October 22–23 • Houston, TX Commemorative Air Force WWII warbirds, modern aircraft, “Tora! Tora! Tora!” Pearl Harbor reenactment, and US Navy Blue Angels. Admission: adult, $17.50 online until May 30 and $30 at the gate; child (ages 6–11), $4 online until September 30, $5 at the gate; children 5 and younger free. Ellington Airport. 713-266-4492. www.wingsoverhouston.com WINGS OVER NORTH GEORGIA AIRSHOW October 29–30 • Rome, GA WWII warbirds on display. Features US Air Force Thunderbirds. Admission: adults, $31.25 Saturday, $25 Sunday; youth (ages 6–17), $25 Saturday, $18.75 Sunday; military, fire, and police personnel, $25 Saturday, $18.75 Sunday; children 5 or younger, free. Richard B Russell Regional Airport. 706-291-0030. www.wingsovernorthgeorgia.com STUART AIR SHOW 2016 November 4–6 • Stuart, FL WWII and modern planes flying and on display, rides, WWII reenactment and weapons demonstration. Admission: Check website closer to event dates. Witham Field. [emailprotected]. 772-781-4882. www.stuartairshow.com NAS PENSACOLA OPEN HOUSE AND BLUE ANGELS HOMECOMING AIR SHOW November 11–12 • Pensacola, FL Features US Navy Blue Angels. WWII warbirds, military and civilian aircraft on display. Admission: Check website closer to event dates. Naval Air Station Pensacola. 850-452-3806. [emailprotected]. www.naspensacolaairshow.com
A AMERICA IN WWII FLASHBACK
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AMERICA IN WWII COLLECTION
C O L U M B I A B R E W I N G C O M PA N Y
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1944 JUNE 2016
AMERICA IN WWII 45
A WAR STORIES
A WWII Scrapbook
national archives
LSTs like the one Weldon Buckalew crewed stand agape in Italy during practice for 1944’s Southern France invasion.
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A SAILOR’S WHILRWIND WAR
on November 5, 1942, went to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station [near North Chicago, Illinois], and then to Indianapolis, Indiana, for radio school. Then I went to Philadelphia for amphibious training, to Fort Pierce, Florida, for more training, and Camp Bradford, Virginia [a training center for crewmen of LSTs—landing ships, tank]. After that, I caught the Queen Mary [a British ocean liner serving as a troop transport] to NAAB [the Navy Advanced Amphibious Base] in Plymouth, England. At NAATSB [Naval Amphibious Training Sub-Base] in Cornwall, England, I was put on the LST-492. LST-492 made the Normandy invasion at Utah Beach [June 1944]. Next we made a landing in Southern France [August 1944] and then went around to the Mediterranean and made an unopposed landing [Livorno, Italy, October 1944]. ENLISTED IN THE NAVY
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From there we went back to New York [after stops in Corsica, Italy, Tunisia, Sardinia, and Algeria]. In the States, we had a leave. Then we went through the Panama Canal to Hawaii. We stayed a while, then headed north. Along the way, we stopped at several islands and landed the ship like we were making a landing. We were a few hundred miles from Japan when they dropped the atomic bombs. We stayed in Japan a while [occupation duty until December 1945], then headed to San Francisco. I stayed there a few and then went back to Great Lakes, where I was discharged on February 12, 1946. It was quite an experience—especially since I was only 16 years old when I went in! W ELDON BUCKALEW wartime LST sailor in European, Mediterranean, and Pacific operations deceased; formerly of Kokomo, Indiana
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CHECK, PLEASE!
y husband was drafted, leaving me alone with two children. He was wounded in Metz, France, and flown to Birmingham, England, for surgery. He was wounded in the shoulder. He told me he only had seven stitches. What he didn’t tell me was that there was an inch and a half between each stitch! While recuperating, he was given a weekend pass but didn’t have any money, so he went into a bank— Midland, I think. The person at the bank said, “Write me a check and I’ll cash it.” “But I don’t have a check.” “So find a piece of paper and write the information on it.” He was so excited he didn’t spell “First” right (as in First National Bank of Sandy Spring). He scratched it out to write it again, and they cashed it for $40. Back home, meanwhile, the president of our bank came to me and said I didn’t have the
money in the bank because I’d put it in a special checking account. Today, the handwritten check is hanging in the FDR Living Museum in Sandy Spring, Maryland, and I’m playing Eleanor Roosevelt at WWII events. MARY LADELIA BECRAFT wartime civilian Silver Spring, Maryland
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THE BEGINNING OF THE END
t was August 10, 1945. We were settling down for the night in our nice new barracks and watching the green lizards crawling around in the rafters. Their little bug eyes seemed to be watching our every move, while at the same time they were chirping at us, apparently thinking they were birds. Who knows? Perhaps they were definite proof of old Charlie Darwin’s theory. I had sprayed the barracks with an aerosol sprayer containing something that probably caused cancer in laboratory rats, and once in a while I leveled a little fog at a smirking lizard just to make sure it knew who was boss. Lights out was at 2200 [10 P.M.] or whenever the air raid alarm sounded. Some snores had already commenced, but I still remember lying there thinking about Japan. As I relaxed on my sack, the screen door crashed open and several men ran into the barracks calling my name.... They
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L ingo! 1940s GI and civilian patter donkey’s breakfast: otherwise known as a mattress, this sack of straw looked more like a feed sack sack time: what a GI was hoping for when he flopped down on the donkey’s breakfast pup tent: a straw bed indoors still beat this tiny shelter. It took two pups to make a normal tent!
said there was a rumor going around that Japan wanted to surrender, and they wanted to know what I knew about it. My position at the message center supposedly would make me the first to know, but I hadn’t heard from Tojo since his friends called upon us at Pearl Harbor. So I offered to check on the latest poop and skinny to see what I could find. Hastily I pulled on my pants and stuck my feet into my boots and took off on the double for the message center, which must have been about 100 yards or so away, but all downhill. Arriving at the message center, I found it empty. The teletype was quiet, but I found remaining in the machine a duplicate of the message just received. I ripped it off and read: All stations memo 10 August 1945. Picked up at 96.5 megacycles the following: The Japanese government advises the Swedish government that it is willing to accept the Allied surrender ultimatum at Potsdam provided they can keep their emperor. The Jap government asked that this news be transmitted to the United States, Great Britain, China, and the Soviet Union. Note: No Allied confirmation. That is all. It wasn’t easy running back up the hill, what with my boot straps and laces whipping about my ankles, threatening to pitch me onto my face at any moment. When I arrived back at the barracks, everyone was up, plus a few more troops from the other barracks. Out of breath, I still managed to read the message to them. The cheer must have awakened everyone else in camp. Everywhere lights came on as the news was passed along. It was probably another hour before lights began going off again. A RTHUR S. CHURCH wartime navy message center chief and technician fourth grade, Headquarters Company, 23rd Replacement Depot, Saipan, Mariana Islands Ukiah, California
Send your War Stories submission, with a relevant photo if possible, to WAR STORIES, America in WWII, 4711 Queen Avenue, Suite 202, Harrisburg, PA 17109, or to [emailprotected]. By sending stories and photos, you give us permission to publish and republish them.
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Keeping the Big Bombers Flying William A. “Bill” Robinson • interviewed by Garnette Helvey Bane
all ph o to s this sto ry cour tesy of william n
a bill robinso
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A. “BILL” ROBINSON had always admired his uncle for serving in the First World War. So as he turned 18 at the end of December 1943—in the midst of a new world war and with a year and a half of ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) experience under his belt—he was drawn to military service like iron to a magnet. He left college and volunteered for the US Army Air Forces. Studying at Clemson College in his native South Carolina had given Robinson a taste of regimented military life. Later the school would be a civilian, coeducational university, but at that time it was an all-male, all-white military school. Everything Robinson read about the war in Europe whetted his appetite even more. So, on December 31, 1943, coaxed by friends who were enlisting, he drove about 20 miles from his home in Easley, South Carolina, to Greenville, home of Greenville Army Air Base (later Donaldson Air Force Base and now Donaldson Center Airport). There he passed a written test and lifted his right hand to be sworn in as a member of the air forces. ILLIAM
Robinson’s heart was set on flight training and, perhaps, becoming a pilot. After more testing, however, Uncle Sam decided Robinson’s talents would be better used elsewhere. He would end up working with one of America’s newest and most secret weapons of the war. I ENJOYED MY TIME as an ROTC cadet at Clemson College and, like many 18-year-olds, thought I knew it all. After all, I marched to breakfast each day, had drill, inspections, and parades on Saturdays. I thought I knew all about everything military, but after volunteering, I realized I didn’t know much at all. When I finished basic training, I felt like I had aged 10 years. I had read a lot about warplanes and knew if I had my choice, I wanted to be a pilot in the US Army Air Corps. [That name persisted, but the US Army’s 1942 reorganization had replaced the US Army Air Corps with the US Army Air Forces which, along with the US Army Ground Forces and the Services of Supply, formed the army’s three basic forces.] Like all the other volunteers, I didn’t know
Above, left: A ground crewman identified only as “June Bug” paints another bomb on God’s Will, a B-29 Superfortress bomber operating against Japan’s home islands. The bomb signifies another completed mission. In the pilot’s seat is Bill Robinson, the bomber’s crew chief and head mechanic of the 9th Bomb Group’s 1st Squadron. Above, right: Robinson works on Engine No. 1 of God’s Will on Iwo Jima in September 1945. 48 AMERICA IN WWII
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where I would be stationed or what I would be doing after I finished basic. I wanted to be a fighter pilot, but envisioned myself a French interpreter in Paris because of my four years studying the French language. When I was called to active duty in 1943, I was sent to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and then Miami Beach, Florida, for basic training. The base, I thought, was a former hotel that had been transformed into a military base [the Miami Beach Training Center housed trainees in leased apartment buildings and hotels]. It was located right on the Atlantic Ocean and had a swimming pool, so I felt like we were spending a few weeks at a country club. The only difference was that while stationed there, I learned what military life was really like. We were put through rigorous physical exams, drills, inspections, and physical fitness training. We often hiked 14 miles one way until we ran out of town or out of steam. Near the end of basic, we were given aptitude tests to determine the best job and placement for each of us. While I did not score well on the test for flight training, I did extremely well on the mechanical aptitude test. I was a pretty good mechanic in
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my youth and enjoyed working on everything from lawn mowers to automobiles. I was lucky that I had done well in tests relating to mechanics, because those who didn’t make flight training or the mechanics group were assigned to the infantry at Fort Benning [in Georgia]. After basic, I received orders to report to Ardmore Army Airfield in Ardmore, Oklahoma. While there, I became a mechanic on the new B-29 [Boeing’s Superfortress heavy bomber], which was the Army Air Corps’s greatest weapon against the enemy. The runways were a couple of miles long and extremely flat, which was ideal for the aircraft to quickly pick up speed needed to gain altitude. I recall thinking they were the biggest [aircraft] I had ever seen. I was the youngest man in the squadron, and a fellow by the name of “Red” Higgins
was the crew chief and the oldest, probably about 35. He had served in the military at Pearl Harbor. He was one brilliant mechanic. He could take an airplane apart by himself and put it back together without ever blinking an eye. I remember another soldier by the name of Vincent [from] Chicago. He was quite the cut-up among those of us who shared the same barracks. Even though he had been promoted above private, his antics cost him his rank, and he was eventually demoted back to private. We often laughed and said, “What has Vince done now?” A Wartime Secret Mission F OR REASONS ONLY the army could determine, I was reassigned from Ardmore to McCook army air base in Nebraska, to the 9th Bomb Group, 1st Bomb Squadron. I soon learned that I was to fill a basic manpower quota there, but did not know I would become part of a secret mission until a year after I volunteered. Robinson would be working with the B29 Superfortress bomber, which was indeed secret business. When Boeing began building the B-29 in 1938, the plane was a
carefully guarded secret. As a high-altitude, long-distance bomber able to carry a very large bomb load, the Superfortress would become the United States’ most powerful engine of war in World War II. The aircraft went into service in early 1944, when training also began for the 9th Bomb Group at McCook Army Airfield. When it was definite that I would be working exclusively on the B-29s, the military sent the FBI to my hometown of Easley to check out my background. Every wouldbe B-29 mechanic or pilot underwent special clearance before being assigned to a group that was scheduled to work exclusively on B29s because the aircraft remained the United States’ top-secret weapon. I remember my
Robinson received this secret B-29 maintenance manual upon arriving in the Pacific.
father telling me that his friends wanted to know “what Bill has done now” when the FBI asked confidential questions about me and my character. After my personal investigation had been concluded, I was sent to McCook. The military wanted a nice, flat field for takeoffs and landings, and that base filled the bill. In the spring of 1945, little more than a year after I joined the group, it was diverted to the Okinawa campaign, attacking Japanese airfields that were used against American invasion forces. There, I received additional instruction in maintenance of the huge bomber and received my personal Engine Change Manual on the B-29, which I still treasure some 70 years later. It is a leather-bound book with complete instructions and illustrations for repairing every engine part. JUNE 2016
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Inside, on the fly page, it states, “Designed by Boeing Aircraft Company,” along with the disclaimer: “This document contains information affecting the national defense of the United States within the meaning of the Espionage Act, 50 U.S.C., 31 and 32, as amended. Its transmission or the revelation of its contents in any manner to any unauthorized person is prohibited by law.” Obviously, the military did not want the information contained therein to fall in enemy hands. If someone leaked such information, they would have been guilty of treason as outlined by the act. My personal manual also contained a photocopied insert titled “313th Bombardment Wing Supply and Maintenance Section for the B-29 Carburetor and Idle Adjustment,” dated 15 May 1945. Congress passed the Espionage Act, on which the B-29 manual’s disclaimer was based, at President Woodrow Wilson’s request in 1917. Amendments were made a year later, and others have been made periodically since then. Today the act’s provisions are part of the US Code’s Title 18 rather than the original Title 50. In 2013 the US Department of Justice cited the
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Espionage Act as the basis for charges against fugitive Edward Snowden, who allegedly leaked secret information from the National Security Administration. The Espionage Act criminalized obtaining and sharing information important to national defense and security in ways that could help enemies of the United States. Such sensitive information included “code books, signal books, sketches, photographs, photographic negatives, and blue prints.” Certainly, Boeing’s B-29 engine change manual fell into that category. Under the Espionage Act, sharing such information with the enemy could result in fines as high as $10,000, prison for 20 years, or both. Taking the Big Birds to War BEFORE ROBINSON JOINED the 9th Bomb Group, it was using B-17s for training because B-29s weren’t yet available. A B-
29 test flight on December 30, 1942, had resulted in an engine fire. A similar fire on a second prototype in Seattle on February 18, 1943, brought a plane crashing down, killing 11 men on board and 21 people on the ground. Boeing and the Army Air Forces immediately launched a program to resolve the problem and other issues by modifying existing B-29s and new ones that were rolling off production lines. But all these modified B-29s went to US advance bases in China and India to fulfill a promise President Franklin D. Roosevelt had made to the Chinese government. As a result, the 9th Bomb Group, like other Superfortress groups, had to wait for its planes. The men in my group and I received our first training on B-29s July 13, 1944—the 313th Wing, 9th Bomb Group (VHB) [Very Heavy Bombardment], 1st Squadron. I was not among the earlier squadron that received four months of extensive training before deployment overseas. When that [deployment] happened, the ground echelon, to which I was assigned, left McCook for Seattle, which was the port of embarka-
tion. Four months later we traveled by the troopship SS Cape Henlopen to Tinian [in the North Pacific’s Mariana Islands]. The trip took 30 days and we debarked at Tinian Island on December 28, 1944. The US had constructed airfields on Saipan and Tinian where B-29s were based to conduct strategic bombing missions against the Japanese mainland until the end of World War II. After the US took the Mariana Islands— Tinian, Guam, and Saipan—the Japanese soldiers located there weren’t ready to surrender. My group [of ground crewmen] joined others already in Tinian as the advance party before the planes arrived. These men left the troopships and loaded into ducks [DUKW amphibious trucks] to ride to the campsite, where they spent several weeks in tents while our plywood barracks, mess halls, and other buildings were under construction. The 9th Bomb Group’s aircraft and aircrews began their progress toward Tinian in January 1944. The combat crews moved to Herington Army Airfield in Kansas for three weeks, and there they received 37
The Spearhead’s nose wears the 5th Marine “Spearhead” Division’s logo depicting the Iwo Jima flag-raising. The B-29’s tail bears the 9th Bomb Group’s X. Robinson was crew chief.
brand new B-29s. The first bombers took off on their trans-Pacific journey on January 15 from Mather Army Airfield in California. By way of Hickam Field, Hawaii, and Kwajalein (a mid-Pacific atoll), they arrived at North Field on Tinian. From late January through early February 1945, the group flew training missions against the Japanese-held Maug Islands in the North Marianas. The B-29s flew their first combat mission on February 9, with 30 aircraft bombing a Japanese naval airfield on the island of Moen in Truk (now Chuuk State, a Micronesian island cluster).
The second mission was a pre-invasion bombing of Iwo Jima on February 12. Once the planes arrived, I returned to being an aircraft mechanic, responsible for everything that needed to be done to the left engine of the four-engine, propellerdriven plane. It was the largest aircraft of World War II and, therefore, nicknamed the Superfortress. It weighed 20,000 pounds when fully loaded with bombs. It had a target range of 2,667 miles with speeds of up to 400 mph and could reach an altitude of nearly 32,000 feet. It had
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! EW N
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three gunner’s doors, and up front there were the navigation and radio units that operated electronically. The master gunner controlled the switches to various guns. I had the good fortune to fly once with a combat crew from Iwo Jima to Japan for a combat mission during my military career. Attached to a fighter unit on Iwo Jima, there were six of us who worked on the [B29] aircraft known as God’s Will. I have no idea how it got its name, when the others had female names and attractive girls painted on the side. I was responsible for making sure the left engine was working properly. We understood how the plane responded depending largely upon the weather. It was important that we keep an eye on the weather at all times, as we did not want to run the risk of flying it [God’s Will] in bad weather such as a typhoon. When God’s Will returned from a mission, sometimes as long as 16 hours in the air, we were charged with checking the pilot’s and copilot’s logs. If an engine sputtered for any reason, they documented the problem. If, for any reason, it wasn’t working properly, we had to address the issue, even if it was something as simple as a different sound or an air vent that wasn’t functioning quite right. If a piston failed, we checked all the pistons. We removed and replaced bolts if they were loose. If it was something more serious with an engine and we could not take it apart and repair it, we replaced the entire engine. Even after the planes underwent a 50-hour inspection, they still had maintenance issues and still required repairs. After two years working on the Superfortress, I had risen to sergeant and was promoted to crew chief on God’s Will, which made me the head mechanic in the squadron. Bombing Japan WHEN THE PLYWOOD barracks at the north end of the island were completed, we moved into them to be close to where the aircraft were located. Everyone in my group referred to the Japanese who inhabited the southern end of the island as “gooks.” Neither the military men nor the gooks ever interacted and, as a result, we guarded the B-29s at night with live ammunition, just in case. The gooks were probably civilians from Okinawa or Korea. We
A I WAS THERE
didn’t know and did not contact them to find out. Although the flight crew had flown the B-29 on four other missions, the first mission to the Japanese home islands was the 9th’s fifth mission, flown on February 25, 1944. It was a day mission flown at high altitude with the target the Port Facilities of Tokyo. On day missions, the seven- to eight-hour flying time from the Marianas to Japan usually resulted in nighttime takeoffs. B-29s took off from Tinian’s multiple runways to shorten group launch times. On those missions, when the aircraft was heaviest [loaded with bombs], the bombers flew at low altitude to conserve
At 75, Robinson wears a WWII uniform with a Twentieth Air Force patch. His bomb group was in the Twentieth’s 313th Bombardment Wing.
fuel and engine stress. Only in the last hour prior to taking action did they rise higher. Starting March 9, 1945, the B-29s’ tactics changed. By order of Major General Curtis Le May, head of the XXI Bomber Command that governed all US air units operating against Japan from the Marianas, the B-29s began flying loweraltitude firebombing missions against Tokyo and other Japanese population centers. From then on, bombing altitudes were rarely more than 20,000 feet. The new tactic was easier on the big planes. They didn’t need to climb as high
before assembling and dropping their incendiary bombs, and that helped stretch fuel and prolong engine life. On night firebombing missions, the planes operated independently, not assembling in formations before approaching their targets. In such cases, altitudes were very low, usually 8,000 feet or lower. Late in March, the 9th Bomb Group went to work helping shut down all approaches to Japan’s harbors to cut off any movement of supplies and personnel to and from the island nation. To accomplish this, the B-29s flew in by night and dropped acoustic and magnetic mines into the waterways. As the war dragged on, Japanese desperation gave rise to air and sea suicide attacks on Allied aircraft carriers and other warships. In mid-April, the 9th Bomb Group began three weeks of daylight attacks to destroy airfields on Japan’s island of Kyushu, where waves of kamikaze (“divine wind”) aerial suicide attackers were taking off to strike US Navy ships operating off Okinawa. I am so lucky that I received the assignment I did working on the B-29. It is the greatest aircraft ever built, and I would have liked to have worked on the Enola Gay [the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb, on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945]. When I received my discharge March 4, 1946, I had enough benefits from the GI Bill to return to Clemson to complete my undergraduate work and go on to law school. World War II was an interesting time in our history, and I am fortunate to have been a part of it—and survived. No doubt about it, the army made a man out of me. I went in as a boy and came out as a man. Bill Robinson and his wife, Mary, whom he married in 1953, had three sons and a daughter. He and his wife still reside in Easley, which is not the same small town it was when he left to join the US Army Air Forces in 1943. Now in his 90s, he is semiretired from a law career. A GARNETTE HELVEY BANE, principal of a marketing and advertising agency in Greenville, South Carolina, frequently interviews veterans for our I Was There department. She met Bill Robinson at the gym where they both work out and interviewed him in late 2014. JUNE 2016
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A BOOKS AND MEDIA
Eisenhower’s Guerillas: The Jedburghs, the Maquis, and the Liberation of France by Benjamin F. Jones, Oxford University Press, 384 pages, $29.95
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N THE SPRING of 1944, Allied leaders were putting the final touches on plans for Operation Overlord, the D-Day invasion into France that would be the first step toward breaking the stranglehold the German army had on Western Europe. A key part of those plans were Jedburghs, three-man special operations teams—one British or American officer, one French officer, and one radioman of one of those three nationalities—that would parachute behind enemy lines to function mainly as liaisons with the French Resistance. They would also arm, train, and provide supplies to the Maquis, Resistance fighting groups that would support Allied troops after the advance into the German-held interior. The British and Americans had never tested a coordinated guerrilla effort such as this in support of a larger military campaign before. The Maquis were skilled saboteurs and a successful guerrilla fighting force, but they were often disorganized, poorly sup-
plied, and politically disjointed, so Eisenhower needed the Jedburghs to work with them. But it wasn’t as simple as that—it never is, due to politics. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had a chilly relationship with Free French leader Charles de Gaulle, who was poised to resume control of France after Germany’s defeat. De Gaulle’s planners were coordinating with Eisenhower prior to D-Day, but Roosevelt didn’t support De Gaulle’s provisional government. Because of that, Allied commanders did not “offer unqualified support for the French resistance forces and could not tell them the timing, location, and other key details regarding Overlord,” writes Benjamin Jones, author of Eisenhower’s Guerillas. He explains that American and British political and military leaders viewed France as territory to regain, while for De Gaulle, and for all the French, France was their country. Jones writes that the purpose of his book is to examine how Jedburgh operations were affected by the politics of liberating France and how Eisenhower dealt with the resulting problems. For Eisenhower, the inability to provide specifics to an ally in the field as an invasion unfolded hurt his
ability to cultivate trust and was a huge setback in his effort to wrest France from German control. Jones, with both goals in sight, deftly points out the crux of his tale, which is as old as warfare itself: the impact of diplomacy and leadership on the soldier. Fortunately for the Allies, Eisenhower once again proved his instinct for leadership. While Allied political leaders wrangled, he brought French guerrilla commander General Pierre Koenig into the fold of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force and “treated him as one of his field commanders” on par with such heavyweights as Generals Omar Bradley and Carl Spaatz. He knew he needed to do this for the Maquis to have meaningful impact on the liberation of France—important because the Maquis were made up of and spread among the French citizenry, whose support was critical. The first Jedburgh team, Team Hugh, parachuted into the French darkness in the predawn hours of June 6, 1944, with the task of keeping rail lines near the small town of Saint-Gaultier cut to prevent units such as the 2nd SS Panzer Division from moving north. The local population was enthusiastic, but there was a downside to that: Maquis groups were doubling in size JUNE 2016
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A every two days, making it possible that traitors and other undesirables could be slipping into their ranks. In all, 93 Jedburgh teams deployed into occupied France, and while many things went awry, including missing drop zones, communications failures, and a lack of supplies, many things went well. The Maquis, aided by the Jedburghs, succeeded in hampering German movements, disrupting their communications, and reducing the damage done by their retreating lines. As usual, Eisenhower shines as a commander who rises above combative personalities to create solutions to problems that bring about the outcome desired by all. Drawing from an armory of sources, Jones does an admirable job of describing and explaining Eisenhower’s leadership dexterity as it related to the little-known cadres of covert operatives behind enemy lines. A LLYSON PATTON Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
A THEATER OF WAR Desperate Journey Directed by Raoul Walsh, written by Arthur T. Horman, starring Errol Flynn, Ronald Reagan, Nancy Coleman, Raymond Massey, Alan Hale, Arthur Kennedy, Ronald Sinclair, Charles Irwin, 1942, 107 minutes, black and white, not rated.
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World War II have lasted as long as it did when the Allies had Errol Flynn on their side? That’s the obvious question posed after viewing Desperate Journey, in which Flynn, shot down over Germany, not only manages to make his way back to England, but also damages the Nazi war machine along the way. Silly as it may seem now, the movie must have raised spirits in 1942, when the real war effort wasn’t going so well. The film deals with an international flight crew. Devil-may-care Terrence Forbes (Flynn) is Australian, breezy Johnny Hammond (Ronald Reagan) is American, and serious-minded Jed Forrest (Arthur Kennedy) is Canadian. For OW COULD
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Defenseless under the Night: The Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland Security by Matthew Dallek, Oxford University Press, 336 pages, $29.95
mitting men and resources to fight in another foreign conflict. Almost no one, however, considered that the clouds of war in Europe and Asia could reach the United States itself. In Defenseless under the Night, Matthew Dallek, assistant professor of political
I
N THE MID-1930S, America was absorbed in the New Deal, the economic and social recovery programs that formed the backbone of efforts by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the federal government to reverse the devastating effects of the Great Depression. Few Americans at that time focused on the growing threat the German and Italian fascist regimes were making to worldwide political stability. In the wake of the United States’ involvement in World War I, Americans strongly opposed com-
some reason, they are serving with the British Royal Air Force, but fly an American airplane of unknown vintage. (It appears to belong to some branch of the B-17 family.) Rounding out the crew is the by-the-book captain (Charles Irwin), prankster Edwards (Alan Hale), and wet-behind-the-ears Hollis (Ronald Sinclair). There are also some gunners, who are not fated to survive long. On a mission to bomb an important railway junction, Forbes grumbles when the captain won’t descend below the cloud cover to attack, but he’s able to do things his way after a Messerschmitt attack leaves the captain incapacitated. Forbes’s daring, though, comes with consequences. The plane crashes on the far side of Germany and the surviving crew members end up in the clutches of a monocle-wearing Nazi named Baumeister (Raymond Massey). But fear not. When asked to explain the workings of their superchargers, Hammond dazzles the Nazi with doubletalk (“The amsometer on the side prenulates the kinutaspel hepulace”) and then knocks him out. The crew members then manage to escape with some vital information
about German war production. They use whatever means necessary to cross Germany—subduing Nazi soldiers to take their uniforms for use as disguises, sneaking aboard the private railroad car of Adolf Hitler’s deputy Hermann Göring for a trip to Berlin, and generally dealing in the kind of derring-do that requires some willing suspension of disbelief from the audience. Only Forrest, an accountant in training, can’t get into the spirit of things. When Forbes suggests the little band make a detour to destroy a Nazi chemical factory, Forrest argues that it’s more important that they get their information to Allied authorities. But Forbes is played by Errol Flynn, so he manages to do both—and pitch some woo at the daughter (Nancy Coleman) of a doctor they recruit to help young Hollis when he gets shot. Hollis doesn’t survive his surgery, and the airmen have to flee the Gestapo
management at George Washington University, cites an action that brought the threat of aerial attack home to the United States. It wasn’t the bombing of cities in Spain, Ethiopia, and China in the 1930s that sounded the alarm for a majority of Americans, according to Dallek, but a radio broadcast. On the night of October 30, 1938, a live performance of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds put on by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater had all the signs of breaking news—news that aliens were landing in spaceships in a New Jersey town, right in the middle of the populous Northeast. While most Americans were entertained, a number of listeners around the country took the broadcast seriously. Panic, confusion, and even injuries followed. It was a wakeup call for the nation’s leaders: if Americans panicked over a fake Martian landing, what might be their reaction to a real bombing by nations intent on harming America?
when another patient overhears some English and reports them. Time and again it looks like curtains for our valiant band, but the fliers escape, steal another car, and get in a high-speed chase across Holland. When they run out of gas, they happen to be right next to a Nazi air base, where a captured American plane is being readied for an attack on England. Desperate Journey is certainly not a realistic wartime drama; it’s more an Indiana Jones adventure. When director Raoul Walsh took on the project, he set out to create a Three Musketeers vibe. “Frankly, they don’t think they have a Chinaman’s chance of ever escaping,” he wrote of the heroes, “so they are going to have a ‘Roman’ holiday, and they do all the damage they can, blow up all the military equipment they can lay their hands on.” Which is what they do. And most of them live to fight another day. Then, as Forbes says in the movie’s closing line, “Now for Australia and a crack at those Japs!” The Japanese won’t know what hit them. TOM HUNTINGTON Camp Hill, Pennsylvania
The press had been ratcheting up sensational accounts of Nazi airpower for months before the broadcast, while FDR and his supporters pushed against isolationist sentiment in Congress and elsewhere in the country. The threat of bombing on US soil was a small corollary to the president’s main effort: to prepare Americans for supporting Western European democracies in the struggle against Adolph Hitler’s growing empire. Two very prominent New Dealers focused on the country’s domestic security as the world plunged toward war: Eleanor Roosevelt, the first lady, and Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York City. Both had enormous energy and intellect, and had access to the president, but their styles and priorities were very different. Dallek devotes a large portion of his book explaining how and why the two developed starkly different agendas, leading up to and during their brief leadership of the Office of Civilian Defense (OCD). La Guardia, who had been a WWI fighter pilot, believed United States cities would be bombed from the air and, using New York as his laboratory, prioritized discipline and early-warning systems to protect Americans in cities. His alarmist approach was controversial but effective, especially after London was bombed in 1940. Eleanor Roosevelt believed social defense—developing a healthy, well-fed, and motivated population—was the answer to defending America. Her oft-repeated theme was that by helping people meet basic needs, the US government would show the country and its enemies that democracy was worth fighting for. Despite these clashes of culture and ideology, as well as the challenge of organization and administration choices constantly being judged by an opinionated press, the OCD amassed the largest-ever force of volunteer civilians dedicated to America’s national security. Dallek cites many examples of actions and people involved in a chronological progression of events before and after US soil was bombed on December 7, 1941, when OCD efforts went into high gear. His book at times resembles a college professor’s lecture, with points restated too often, but looking past this, the information included is too good to pass up.
As the tide of the war changed in the Allies’ favor, the OCD’s impact diminished. Dallek suggests there was little carryover into the next significant incarnation of civilian defense, during the Cold War era, which he views as largely ineffective in preparing America for possible nuclear attack. He also makes little direct correlation between the OCD program of World War II and steps taken as a result of the September 11 attacks, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions on whether anything about homeland security was learned from the WWII era. At odds with power and policy developed by a presidential spouse who championed social programs, women, and minorities was a boisterous and charismatic New Yorker railing against foreign threats to America’s national security and calling for drastic responses. Are we talking about 1940 or 2016? Reading this book may demonstrate how often history repeats. J AY WERTZ Phillips Ranch, California
The Heart of Hell: The Untold Story of Courage and Sacrifice in the Shadow of Iwo Jima by Mitch Weiss, Berkley Caliber, 413 pages, $28
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HE H EART OF H ELL by Mitch Weiss covers the story of a single US Navy vessel and its crew and their loved ones from May 1944 to the fateful day of February 17, 1945. Based in large part on more than 130 personal interviews and 1,500 wartime letters, the book manages the intimacy and detail of a personal memoir even as it encompasses dozens of people. The vessel, LCI(G)-449, was small enough not to have a name (and was therefore called by its designation and number), yet it and its crew played a very important role in multiple operations during the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific. In the book’s introduction, readers get to know many of the crewmen and come to care about their fates as the ship is hit during preinvasion reconnaissance at Iwo Jima. After the November 1943 invasion of Tarawa, where aerial reconnaissance failed to disclose the natural reefs that blocked even shallow-draft craft from reaching the shore, the navy had formed underwater JUNE 2016
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A demolition teams of specially trained swimmers to map the beach and destroy obstacles prior to future invasions. The swimmers needed covering fire from ships near the shore to make it more difficult for Japanese defenders to interfere with their work. While destroyers and destroyer escorts could provide accurate fire, they could not get close enough to the shore. The navy decided to convert some landing craft into gunboats for the job. A landing craft, infantry (LCI) is a type of seagoing vessel designed to land up to 200 troops at a time after initial invasion waves had secured a beachhead. They were slightly over 158 feet long and 23 feet wide, and they had a very shallow draft so they could get right onto a beach to discharge their cargoes. The conversion to a gunboat involved adding 2 40mm cannons and 10 rocket launchers. Converted ships got the “(G)” added to their designation. Converted gunboats required additional crewmen to operate the new guns and rockets, and at Tarawa LCI(G)-449 had 70 men on board, 6 officers and 65 enlisted. Amazingly, The Heart of Hell brings to life 27 of those officers and crewmen. Aided by the interviews and letters mentioned earlier, Weiss provides a narrative that reads almost like a novel. He introduces the officers and crewmen with enough background detail that readers get to know their hopes and fears and attitudes toward the war, their loved ones, and one another. He follows the men through multiple operations during the invasions of Saipan, Guam, and Tinian from June into August 1944, through the long gap after those campaigns, and then during the run-up to the February 1945 invasion of Iwo Jima. Weiss does an excellent job presenting the historical context of the events in the book, and his description of LCI(G)-449’s engagements are clear and exciting. He does all this while maintaining a focus on the men, taking time in his story for conversations between them and for the letters they sent to and received from friends and relatives back home. He shows friendships forming and long-distance romances blooming. Through it all, readers get a real taste of what life was like for these men from all over the nation who were randomly thrown together. There are a lot of char60 AMERICA IN WWII
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acters for readers to track, but Weiss brings out their individual quirks and personalities so they’re relatively easy to tell apart and keep straight. Helping matters is a list of characters with brief descriptions of the men and women featured. LCI(G)-449 gets hit during the pre-invasion reconnaissance of Iwo Jima on February 17, 1945. Weiss does a great job of not ruining the climax of the story by foretelling the fates of the men involved. There is real tension as the reader nears the end of the book with no idea of how badly the ship will be damaged, who might be injured, and who might die. Many of the men do heroic things that save lives. Whatever each man’s fate is that day, the reader will feel it deeply. The action off the shores of Iwo Jima had a lasting effect on the survivors and their families. The Heart of Hell concludes with a very touching summary of the postwar lives of some of the survivors. Not surprisingly, many suffered for years with what we now recognize as post-traumatic stress disorder. Focusing on a small ship that was a small part of much larger battles, The Heart of Hell makes the war more personal and reminds us that the sacrifices of the men of World War II and their families did not end with the combat. D REW AMES Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
1941: Fighting the Shadow War— A Divided America in a World at War by Marc Wortman, Atlantic Monthly Press, 416 pages, $27
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EW HISTORIANS pay heed to losers. Yet in 1941 Marc Wortman succeeds with this most unpromising material, surveying the evolution of isolationist thinking in America from the late 1930s to Pearl Harbor and President Franklin Roosevelt’s subtle, surprising maneuvering against it. He presents a variety of unexpected opponents of US intervention into the world war. Some are famous and remain wellregarded, such as Charles Lindbergh.
Others were infamous, such as Nazi apologist Philip Johnson, who enthused about a need for American fascism. Nationwide, organizations formed to oppose joining the war. Even members of the extended Roosevelt clan, including Teddy Roosevelt, Jr., disagreed with Franklin’s maneuverings to support Britain and undercut Germany. 1941 is thus a shock for anyone who thinks the nation was united against the Axis before December 7, 1941. Of the isolationist activists, Lindbergh is the best known, and he justly receives the most discussion. Already famous for his solo flight across the Atlantic, Lindbergh did not see a clear preference among France, Britain, and Germany as they bickered in the late 1930s. As a guest of Berlin, he was extremely impressed by Germany’s aviation industry and new aircraft and its military potential. He saw no compelling American interest in another European war so soon after World War I, and he claimed FDR was overly influenced by Jewish interests. History has not regarded him sympathetically. The America First Committee, with which Lindbergh frequently cooperated, was formed in September 1940 and was the largest of the isolationist groups. Antiwar rather than pacifist, it advocated strong national defense while opposing European entanglements and all military aid to foreign countries. Before Pearl Harbor, America First enjoyed wide support, easily filling venues such as Madison Square Garden, even after the 1940 elections. America First attracted supporters for various reasons. Many harbored bitter memories of World War I, once spun as “the war to end war.” Others doubted the United States could make a difference and thought it would sacrifice blood and treasure in vain. Some believed that domestic reform and social justice should be the national priority. Some disliked the British or, like Lindbergh, viewed Roosevelt as a tool of Zionist groups. War in general, especially on other continents, found few enthusiasts. Even during the worst nights of Germany’s September 1940–May 1941 Blitz bombing campaign over London, Americans, though horrified, were unwilling to get involved. Against the broad isolationist coalition,
Roosevelt stealthily navigated America toward incremental cooperation with Great Britain. Early on, American vessels shadowed German ships, radioing greetings that served to alert the British navy. In time, the involvement expanded to the establishment of zones where American naval vessels would escort shipping convoys and to the famous Lend-Lease agreement to supply war materiel to Allied nations. This longterm strategic effort culminated with the August 1941 meeting of Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Newfoundland, when the historic Atlantic Charter was announced. It was not a binding treaty, and Churchill later described it as “not a law but a star,” yet it became the foundation for all subsequent wartime cooperation. Though often faulted for clandestine machinations, Roosevelt proved to be a visionary of historical trends. While Germany inevitably dominated
discussions of strategic cooperation with Britain, Japan too was a threat. Washington’s efforts against Tokyo took the form of American airmen joining China’s air force as private individuals—Claire Chennault and his famed Flying Tigers. Roosevelt also froze Japanese assets and cut Japan’s access to American raw materials and oil in an effort to temper rabid aggression in China. Until the attacks on Pearl Harbor, however, the American people were even more reluctant to intervene in Asia than in Europe. Indeed, when Japanese naval aircraft sank the American gunboat Panay in 1937, Washington’s response was muted. Of course, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the paradigm instantly shifted. America First shuttered its doors and many former isolationists promptly volunteered for the military. Lindbergh was rejected for enlistment by the scornful president but worked with the aviation industry. Teddy
Roosevelt, Jr., re-entered the army and led troops ashore at Omaha Beach on D-Day. Other America Firsters were less successful. Philip Johnson failed to demonstrate reliability and was tasked with cleaning latrines; few denied that justice was served. Some sections of 1941 seem to have been inserted more for drama than for illuminating isolationist movements. These include passages on espionage efforts based in the Japanese consulate in Honolulu as well as on the attack on Pearl Harbor, the latter of which focuses inexplicably on the misfortunes of the battleship USS Utah. Even so, Wortman has written a fascinating book that reclaims the complexity of the prewar period and demonstrates yet again FDR’s political virtuosity and strategic vision. Any student of US history and America’s entry into World War II will savor it. T HOMAS MULLEN Flemington, New Jersey
A 78 RPM
Fanfare for the Airborne Man
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BLITZSTEIN brought impressive credentials when he joined the military. He had studied with piano maestros Nadia Boulanger and Arnold Schoenberg, graduated from his native Philadelphia’s exclusive Curtis Music School, and composed concertos, sonatas, and other works through the 1920s and 1930s. These weren’t the sort of credentials that usually mattered in military life, but they convinced the brass to create an unprecedented role for him: composer of an official US Army Air Forces symphony. Blitzstein enlisted in the air forces in August 1942 at age 37 and headed to London in October, attached to the Eighth Air Force. With the blessing of the Eighth’s command, he became musical director of the London branch of the Office of War Information, the US government’s propaganda arm. “Music no less than machine guns has a part to play, and can be a weapon in the battle for a free world,” he wrote. Blitzstein’s primary assignment was to write music and scripts for radio and film propaganda. Meanwhile, he began thinking about a grand composition dedicated to the air forces. In early 1943, he pitched his idea to superiors and got the OK. An early outline showed a prelude followed by four movements, inspired by Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony (Leningrad). Shostakovich’s work, “representing courage in the ARC
face of withering fire and destruction, was responsible for an immense worldwide wave of enthusiasm and admiration for the people of the USSR and their fighting forces,” Blitzstein wrote. “Music was on the map as a positive weapon in winning the war.” Blitzstein finished The Airborne Symphony in time for its planned premiere in 1944, but it was postponed due to shifting priorities in the European war. It featured three movements with orchestra, chorus, and narration. The first focused on the history of flight; the second, the war and the Axis; and the third, US and Allied airmen. Rooted in American musical idiom and popular culture, complete with a barbershopstyle chorus and a Broadway-like section, the piece ended with a victory celebration followed by a cautious transition to peacetime with the narrator urging, “Warning, warning, warning.” The Airborne Symphony finally premiered in April 1946 in New York City, performed by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Symphony Orchestra with Orson Welles narrating. It was too late to influence the global fight, but it did give Blitzstein a public forum for promoting the US air forces and his political beliefs about freedom, democracy, and equal rights. He wrapped up his military career feeling that the service had provided him with just what he’d asked for: “the chance to do my own work, fused into the stream of the most terrifying events of our time, and right at the field of operations!” C ARL ZEBROWSKI editor of America in WWII
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THE
WRIGHT
MUSEUM OF WORLD WAR II Special Exhibits 2016:
Norman Rockwell & Pearl Harbor “A Unique Family Experience”
www.WrightMuseum.org Wolfeboro, New Hampshire 603-569-1212 A Open May1–Oct.31
AM E RICA I N
WWII
BACK ISSUES and
SPECIAL ISSUES
www.AmericaInWWII.com/ back-issues
62 AMERICA IN WWII
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COMING SOON
WWII EVENTS courtesy of nick cariello
CALIFORNIA • May 30, Palm Springs: Memorial Day Flower Drop and Air Fair. B-25 flyover and drop of red and white carnations to honor all fallen soldiers. Fair includes WWII reenactors, flight exhibitions. Palm Springs Air Museum. 706-778-6262. www.psam.org CONNECTICUT • May 28–30, Danbury: Open Turret Days. Visitors can enter period military vehicles housed in the museum. Event occurs one weekend each month. US Military Museum. 203-790-9277. www.usmilitarymuseum.org ILLINOIS • June 11–12, South Elgin: “Rails to Victory” WWII living history reenactment. Featuring trolley tours into “occupied France,” army medical demonstrations, and period bicycle parade and trail ride. Free admission, tickets required for trolley ride. Fox River Trolley Museum. 847-697-4676. www.railstovictory.com LOUISIANA • Beginning June 1, New Orleans: The Victory Belles present “Songs that Won the War.” Victory Belles vocal group performs WWII-era songs live. Every Wednesday until August 24. 11:45 A.M.–2 P.M. BB’s Stage Door Canteen. National WWII Museum. 504-528-1944. www.nationalww2museum.org June 21, New Orleans: Meet the Author: Stephen Harding. Reception, presentation, and book signing for The Castaway’s War: One Man’s Battle against Imperial Japan. 5–7:30 P.M. Free admission, RSVP required. US Freedom Pavilion: The Boeing Center. National WWII Museum. 504-528-1944. www.nationalww2museum.org MASSACHUSETTS • June 11, Fall River: Submarine Day. Special guided tours and programs from submarine veterans, focusing on WWII Balao-class sub USS Lionfish (SS-298). Battleship Cove. 508-678-1100. www.battleshipcove.org
ONE MARINE’S
WAR Nick Cariello fought in some of the Pacific’s bloodiest battles. Follow him to Guadalcanal, Tulagi, and other far-flung places—his full story, in his own words. Look for our next exciting issue on print & digital newsstands June 21.
More Online! www.AmericaInWWII.com Join us on Facebook and Twitter.
MINNESOTA • May 21–22, Dundas: 7th annual Armed Forces Day—Military Timeline Weekend. Includes Tuskegee Airmen lectures (given by reenactors), performances by a 1940s brass band, the Selby Avenue Syncopaters band, and more. ricecountywwii.yolasite.com NEW HAMPSHIRE • June 14, Wolfeboro: Margaret Bourke-White, Courageous Photographer. Presentation by actress Sally Matson. Wright Museum of World War II. 603-569-1212. www.wrightmuseum.org NORTH CAROLINA • May 28, Wilmington: Battleship Alive! WWII living history interpreters reenact daily battleship duties and drills. 8 A.M.–5 P.M. Battleship North Carolina. 910-251-5797. www.battleshipnc.com OHIO • May 6 and 13, Dayton: Behind-the-scenes tour of museum aircraft restoration area. Currently restoring the B-17F Memphis Belle, the B-17D-BO The Swoose, and other aircraft. 12:15 P.M. Registration required. National Museum of the US Air Force (Wright-Patterson Air Force Base). 937-255-3286. www.nationalmuseum.af.mil OREGON • June 4, Tillamook: Inside WWII Blimp Hangar B: Behind the Scenes Tour. 11 A.M. the first Saturday of every month. More than 15 aircraft on display. Aircraft trainers to try, free theater featuring aviation history. Naval Air Station Tillamook Museum. 503-842-1130. www.tillamookair.com PENNSYLVANIA • June 3–5, Reading: World War II Weekend: A Gathering of Warbirds. Airshow, reenactments, B-29 Superfortress Fifi flies, Victory Theatre featuring authentic WWII shorts and cartoons, big band music and dances. Mid-Atlantic Air Museum. Reading Regional Airport. 610-372-7333. www.maam.org TEXAS • May 20, Fredericksburg: Talk and tour with Dr. Michael Scheibach, visiting curator of the exhibit “Alert Today, Alive Tomorrow: Living with the Atomic Bomb 1945–1965.” Special presentation at 4 P.M. followed by light refreshments. National Museum of the Pacific War. 830-997-8600. www.pacificwarmuseum.org Please call the numbers provided or visit websites to check on dates, times, locations, and other information before planning trips.
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A GIs
Piccadilly Willy’s Bombardier
IvEs AL ARCH NATION
FAMILY OF NATHAN “B OB ACKERM AN
Bob Ackerman (right, in the nose of B-26 Piccadilly Willy) wanted to be a pilot, but gladly served as a bombardier. He bombed a Normandy beach on D-Day, flying in a B-26 formation like this one (left).
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ATHAN R OBERT “B OB ” A CKERMAN was 26 years old when he volunteered to be a US Army Air Forces pilot, but he washed out of pilot training because he couldn’t keep his plane still while awaiting takeoff. He was disappointed, but when a chance to fly as a bombardier opened up, he took it. Ackerman became the bombardier on Piccadilly Willy, a Martin B-26 Marauder with the 494th Bomb Squadron of the Ninth Air Force’s 344th Bomb Group. The twin-engine medium bomber stood out among its peers for its nose art: a stork with a loaded sling hanging from its beak—but instead of a baby, the load was a bomb. The 344th began its operations in Stansted, England, in early 1944, then moved to Cormeilles-en-Vexin, France, and then Juzaine, Belgium. It earned a collective Distinguished Unit Citation for bombing troop concentrations, supply dumps, and bridges between July 24 and 26, 1944, in support of ground operations in Saint-Lô, Normandy. From March 1944 through the
war’s end, Ackerman flew 66 missions, including a bombing run over Normandy’s Utah Beach on D-Day. When the 344th disbanded on March 31, 1946, Ackerman was the only member from the Washington, DC, area who made it home alive. He received a Purple Heart and numerous medals for his service. He was proud of having taken the fight to Adolf Hitler, a fight that, as a Jewish American, he considered personal. After the war, Ackerman settled back in Chevy Chase, Maryland, opened an auto parts business in 1949, and raised a family. He remained healthy and sharp well into old age and was often mistaken for a man 20 or 30 years his junior. He died in January 2016 at age 100. A Submitted by NATHAN ROBERT “BOB” ACKERMAN’s great-niece, ERICA M. ROBERTS, editorial intern at America in WWII and student at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
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JUNE 2016
