Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings
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Fleet, commanded by Vice-Admiral Thomas Kinkaid—a motley gathering of cruisers, escort carriers and old battleships which operated under MacArthur’s orders in support of his land operations; and Nimitz’s heavy units, dominated by fast battleships and carriers. These were led alternately by William ‘Bull’ Halsey, whose belligerence had made him a popular legend, and Raymond Spruance, the cooler and cleverer hero of Midway. The rationale for this odd arrangement was that it was difficult to plan operations in the cramped conditions of a warship. Each admiral therefore took it in turns to work ashore at Pearl, preparing for the next phase, or to direct the task groups at sea. To increase confusion—not least among the Japanese—Halsey’s command was known as Third Fleet; when Spruance took over, the same ships became Fifth Fleet. Under either designation, this represented the greatest concentration of naval power in the history of the world.
For those who served at sea, spasms of intense action served only to emphasise the dreariness of life between. ‘The thrills were brief and far apart,’ wrote a crewman of the carrier Belleau Wood. Except for its flight crews,
day in and day out life at sea was pure monotony…Boilers, engines, bulkheads, decks, mess halls, offices and shops always look the same, no matter what goes on above. Every day was a duplicate of its predecessor and model for its successor: reveille in the dark to sit around battle stations for an hour until sunrise; launch aircraft for routine patrols which 90 per cent of the time saw nothing save air, clouds and water; land aircraft; launch aircraft; land aircraft; three meals a day; scrub bulkheads; swab decks; run boilers and engines; then fade out with another hour after sunset at battle stations. ‘Relieve the watch. On deck section three. Relieve the wheel and lookouts.’ Relieve the watch, relieve the watch, day after day, week after week. The sea and sky rolled endlessly by from one port period to the next; our eyes became ‘waterlogged’.
Many men chafed at their ignorance of the purposes of their ships’ activities, beyond the obvious ones of bombardment and defence against air attack. ‘You never know where you’re going from one island to the next,’ said Louis Irwin, a turret gunner on the cruiser Indianapolis. ‘My lasting regret was that I didn’t know what the hell was going on, where we fitted into the big picture,’ said Lt Ben Bradlee, a destroyer officer. Eugene Hardy served on the cruiser Astoria at Midway, but was unaware that he had taken part in a great battle until somebody told him afterwards. ‘Dear Mom and Dad,’ wrote a twenty-year-old to his family in New Jersey from the Pacific, ‘I really feel like writing a long letter because I have some time, but there isn’t much to write about.’
If routine often became oppressive, in many respects a naval rating’s life was preferable to that of a combat infantryman. Death at sea was horrible, but actuarially much less likely than for a man in a ‘sharp end’ role on land. Daily existence was softened by comforts unavailable to most ground troops. Yet in the Pacific, every seaman was prey to the unyielding heat. Temperatures above a hundred degrees were routinely recorded below decks. Ventilation was relatively crude and always inadequate. Senior ratings competed for prized bunk space near an air outlet. In rough weather, conditions grew much worse, for the blowers could not run. Heat rash was almost universal.
Many men slept on deck, so that warships at night were strewn with slumbering forms on gun positions and galleries, beneath the boats and in hammocks slung between rails on every corner of the superstructure. Prostrate figures crowded under the folded wings of aircraft on carrier flightdecks. Lifejackets served as pillows. Locked into the unchanging routine of four hours on, eight hours off, overlaid with dawn and dusk calls to ‘general quarters’, men learned to sleep in the most unpromising circumstances. James Fahey, a New Englander who served on the cruiser Montpelier, seldom occupied his bunk, instead lying down on the steel deck with his shoes for a pillow. If it rained, ‘you stand back under cover and hope it does not last very long’. Some sought space as far as possible from explosives or fuel, but on a warship almost any refuge was illusory.
Naval forces often kept station in a given area for days on end, steaming circular courses rather than dropping anchor. Machinery was never silent, never still. There were always watches to be kept and duties to be filled; echoing broadcast announcements; hurrying feet on ladders; eyes and ears watching and listening at dials, screens, headphones. Everybody was tired almost all the time, yet so effective had this navy become that ‘there weren’t many fuck-ups’, in the words of a young reservist. ‘It was an exhausting life that discouraged reflection, introspection, or anything more intellectual than reading.’ A destroyer officer observed pityingly that two of his comrades, junior-grade lieutenants, were geriatrics of twenty-seven, ‘too old for the duty they had…The hours were too long and the physical demands too great. That’s when I learned that war is for kids.’ Louis Irwin, a beer salesman’s son from Tennessee, had joined the navy at seventeen in 1942, ‘for lack of anything better to do. I wanted a bunk to sleep in and not a foxhole.’ Irwin found himself most apprehensive not in combat, but on refuelling duty in heavy seas, facing the peril of being washed overboard.
During bombardment missions in the island battles, the big ships’ guns fired hour upon hour, day after day, as long as forward observers pointed targets and ammunition held out. A novice sailor on the battleship Pennsylvania fell asleep under one of its vast gun turrets, then remained oblivious through general quarters and a piped warning that the main batteries were about to fire. Concussion almost killed him. A shipmate recorded: ‘Everyone had a new respect for the fourteen-inch guns after that.’ All 45,000 tons of a battleship shook when its main armament fired. Recoil thrust the vessel aside. Far below in the engine spaces, ‘it felt like being taken apart in the boiler rooms of hell. You could see motor mounts jump and steam lines move.’ Consequences became even more dramatic aboard smaller ships. Repeated concussions from the destroyer Howorth’s five-inch guns caused all the urinals in the heads to break free from their bulkheads.
Off-duty, in quiet times there might be a movie show, but mostly there was nothing to do save sleep and play cards. Machinist’s mate Emory Jernigan saw $20,000 on the table in a messroom poker game. Men played high, because they had nothing else to spend money on. Jernigan reckoned that 20 per cent of the ship’s gamblers ended up with 80 per cent of the players’ money. Ben Bradlee’s commanding officer learned that the torpedo officer on their destroyer owed him $4,000 in card money. The captain ordered Bradlee to play his debtor double or quits until he lost.
Whereas ashore a combat officer’s life was little better than that of an enlisted man, afloat those with commissions were privileged. Few ordinary sailors enjoyed war service, but some officers like Bradlee did, especially if they were fortunate enough to be able to use their brains, serving in small ships, less vulnerable to ‘brass and bullshit’ than battleships and carriers. ‘I had such a wonderful time in the war,’ wrote Bradlee later. ‘I just plain loved it. Loved the excitement, even loved being a little bit scared. Loved the sense of achievement, even if it was only getting from Point A to Point B, loved the camaraderie…I found that I liked making decisions.’
Emory Jernigan, by contrast, with none of the privileges of rank, wrote that ‘time and distance, plus loneliness, make a tasteless soup, hard to stomach for long periods of time, and ours was a long, long time’. James Fahey wrote in his diary: ‘You want to be free again and do what you want to do and go where you want to go, without someone always ordering you around.’ It was a sore point in the navy, that officers received a disproportionate share of medals—they accounted for less than 10 per cent of personnel, but received almost two-thirds of all decorations. They were the ones in the spotlight if a ship was deemed to have done something good, while their men remained ‘bit players’. On the destroyer Schroeder, for instance, seaman Robert Schwartz dived into heavy seas one day to save a comrade who had fallen overboard—and received no recognition. Emory Jernigan hated seeing fried eggs being carried to the officers’ quarters, while he and his messmates breakfasted off the powdered variety, always watery, together with powdered lemonade: ‘It was a constant, nagging reminder that we were first-class citizens caught in a third-class situation.’ One of the ship’s black mess stewards revenged himself on a bullying captain by spitting or urinating in the wardroom coffee before serving it.
Some men, however, found the experience of naval service deeply rewarding. Carlos