Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings
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Harbor he was enlisted direct into the fire room of the battleship Wisconsin and served three years before being released to attend boot camp. It was there that a young officer, a Southerner named Betts, made a remark that impressed him: ‘Carlos, a lack of formal education is not an impediment if a man can read and will read. Books can take you anywhere you want to go.’ Oliveira said later that the war turned people like himself into real Americans.
Through his years at sea Emory Jernigan, a twenty-one-year-old farmboy from a desperately poor home in Florida, missed more than anything the chance of a walk in the woods. He ate better as a sailor than as a child, but missed grits. At his battle station in a destroyer’s forward engine room, as Jernigan and his comrades heard the concussions of battle overhead, they never forgot that if steam lines fractured, they would cook in seconds. At high speed, propeller shafts shrieked in protest, ‘a warping sound as if they wanted to leave the mounts. The rudders and hydraulic lines would moan in their labors, and underwater explosions would hit the hull just outside.’ After months of combat, nerves became frayed to the limits, ‘so that when a big pipe wrench fell very noisily on a grating behind me, it scared me half to death’. They emerged after hours of such ordeals covered in stinking salt sweat. One of Jernigan’s comrades, after experience of action below, jammed into an ammunition-handling room, successfully begged a station topside.
Some men found small-ship life intolerably uncomfortable and sought transfers, especially after experience of typhoons—three US destroyers foundered with heavy loss of life in the great Pacific blow of December 1944. Conversely, however, life aboard escorts and submarines possessed an intimacy impossible to achieve on a big ship with a crew of up to 3,000, where no one man ever visited every compartment. ‘Each ship is like a city, large or small,’ wrote Emory Jernigan. ‘Even a tugboat is a little town all of its own.’ Personal relationships fluctuated dramatically among men living month upon month in enforced proximity: ‘You’d be playing checkers with a friend one day, and the next you couldn’t stand him.’
The quality and quantity of seamen’s rations seemed to army personnel infinitely enviable. The official Navy Cookbook of the period included such gems as: ‘The following words…are defined for the benefit of those who may not be familiar with some of the terms used in cooking: CANAPE (KA-NA-PA) a slice of bread fried in butter, on which anchovies or mushrooms are served. CAVIAR (KAV-I-AR) prepared or salted roe of the sturgeon or other large fish, used as a relish.’ Everything in big ships’ galleys was on a heroic scale. The recipe for canned codfish cakes began: ‘Take 40 pounds of potatoes and 15 pounds of codfish…’ And for beef chop suey: ‘30 pounds of beef, 30 pounds of cabbage, one pint Worcestershire sauce…’
A sample menu in the 1945 USN Cookbook ran: ‘Breakfast—grapefruit juice, cornflakes, grilled sausages, french toast, maple syrup, butter, milk, coffee. Lunch: cream of vegetable soup, roast beef, brown gravy, buttered potatoes, harvard beets, carrot and celery salad, ice cream, rolls, butter, coffee. Supper: lamb fricassee, mashed potatoes, tossed green salad, french dressing, coconut jelly doughnuts, bread, butter, tea.’ ‘Tin can’ sailors in destroyers never fed in such a fashion, but larger vessels offered astonishing fare save in combat, heavy weather or when operations delayed rendezvous with ‘reefers’—refrigerated ships. Messdeck menus then became reduced to Spam and beans.
Almost every human and mechanical need had to be met by shipment across thousands of miles of ocean. The south-west Pacific was known as the ‘goat and cabbage circuit’, because so much unwelcome food came from Australia. The scale of logistics was staggering. In the five months from 1 September 1944, for instance, fleet tankers delivered to the fast carrier force alone 81/4 million barrels of fuel oil, 121/4 million gallons of aviation gas. In addition, they shifted thousands of drums of lubricating oil in fourteen grades, compressed gases, oxygen, spare belly tanks, mail, personnel and food. Fresh water was a constant issue. The heat caused tanks to become contaminated with bacteria, which necessitated draining them for cleaning. So desperate were some seamen for a serious drink that they built stills or drained alcohol from torpedo propulsion systems. The latter practice may have raised morale, but drastically shortened the torpedoes’ range.
The mood of every ship was different, and strongly influenced by the personality of its captain. Some were admired, ever thoughtful for the welfare of their men. Others were not. The captain of Franklin once bawled out his stewards over the carrier’s broadcast system: ‘You black messmen are the sloppiest bunch of mess attendants I have ever seen.’ A disgusted crewman said: ‘He…sounded just like a Georgia redneck—in front of 3,000 men. It was not right.’ Another carrier captain was described as ‘one of the most irascible and unstable officers ever to earn a fourth stripe, but a man with a slide-rule brain’. Yet another was judged by a fellow officer ‘emotionally unstable, evil-tempered…He drank too much too often; had a capacity for insulting behavior, especially when drunk.’ A destroyer officer’s diary recorded dismay about his skipper: ‘The old man is getting nastier all the time. There is something wrong with that guy mentally. The poor, pitiable old fool told us last night that none of us were any good and that professionally we stink.’ Doctrinal procedures standardised throughout the fleet did something, but not enough, to iron out unhappinesses created by mad or bad captains. Big ships were invariably commanded by regular officers. To run a cruiser or carrier, it was thought essential to possess at least six years’ sea time. Many smaller vessels, however, were committed to the hands of reservists.
Ben Bradlee suggests that some reserve officers, civilians in uniform, performed better than their career counterparts: ‘We hadn’t spent years learning all the stuff about how things worked, we simply knew what they did.’ One of Bradlee’s own captains, a professional navy man, was notoriously inept at mooring ship, often causing lines to snap. Once he turned in disgust to a reservist lieutenant on the bridge and said: ‘Goddamn it, I can’t stop this son-of-a-bitch. You do it.’ Because amateur sailors knew so little, navy manuals detailed the minutest aspects of each man’s duties. The November 1944 Organisation and Regulations for US Pacific Fleet decreed, for instance: ‘Messmen shall keep themselves meticulously clean…cooks, bakers and butchers on duty shall wear the “chef’s cap”. Naked personnel will not be permitted in galleys or messing spaces…The use of profane and obscene language is prohibited.’
Morale was much influenced by the frequency of letters from home. Cheers and whistles rang through a ship when mail call was piped. Emory Jernigan was ashamed to be summoned by his captain and rebuked for failing to write to his mother, who had complained. Rumour, scuttlebutt, was the breath of life: the Japs were ready to quit; the ship was headed for refit; the next target was Okinawa, or Leyte, or Peleliu. Good commanding officers broadcast frequently, telling their crews everything they knew about what the ship and the fleet were doing. This was especially important in action, to hundreds of men imprisoned in steel compartments far below decks. For their very sanity, they needed to know what a huge, unseen detonation meant; whether their team seemed to be winning; sometimes, whether damage to their own ship was as grievous as concussions, screams, smoke pulsing through ventilators made it seem.
By late 1944, even the biggest ships were overcrowded: with gunners for additional batteries of anti-aircraft guns, crammed onto upper decks; up to 10 per cent surplus personnel to compensate for those who habitually ‘missed ship’ on sailing for the combat zone; and staff officers. Experts on one new specialisation or another—flak or human torpedoes or mine counter-measures—were shoehorned into messdecks, to the chagrin of those who had to make space. Commodore Arleigh Burke observed wryly that visitors left an aircraft carrier with an impression that ‘the most important thing was the battle for food and living room’. Nor was overcrowding confined to men. Far more technology was now available than ships could readily carry. ‘Top hamper’, excess weight on superstructures, threatened stability. A staff officer said ruefully: ‘Every time we bring out something new they [ships’ captains] will not give up what they have on board, they want the new item also. We have got to saturation point now, so you can’t put the stuff on.’
Men yearned for a chance to stretch legs ashore, but this meant only a glimpse of some thankless strip of coral and palms. On Mongong atoll, for instance—‘Mog Mog island’, as sailors knew it—the genial Commodore ‘Scrappy’ Kessing, an elderly