PEARL HARBOR: SHOCKED AWAKE, PATROL WING 2 FIGHTS BACK

AMERICA IN

WWII
The War • The Home Front • The Peopl

SUB FULL OF
SECRETS
SAILORS RUSH TO SAVE
THE SINKING NAZI U-505

LIVE FROM LONDON

Edward R. Murrow
Brings the Blitz
To US Radios

BOMBING 101 April 2019

A B-24 PILOT TALKS SHOP

THE MAGIC THAT MOVED G.I. MAIL
Marauder in Shangri-La A Rosie’s Babysitter
Display until May 20, 2019

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 AM E RICA I N

WWII
The War • The Home Front • The People
April 2019, Volume Fourteen, Number Four

22 14 8

FEATURES
8 MAIL CALL!
Nothing made the GIs’ day like letters and packages from home. But how did the post office
ever manage all those deliveries all over the world? By Tom Harper Kelly

14 BEYOND BATTLESHIP ROW

Japan started a war by bombing the US Pacific Fleet. But there was more infamy that morning of December 7, 1941, as planes pummeled
Oahu’s air bases. Naval Air Station Pearl Harbor was shocked awake. By J. Michael Wenger, Robert J. Cressman, and John F. Di Virgilio

22 ONE MIC AGAINST THE REICH

CBS Radio newsman Edward R. Murrow brought the ugly truth about Nazi aggression
to America’s living rooms direct from burning London. By Roy Morris Jr.

28 THE SHARK-CATCHERS
Captain Daniel Gallery and his hunter-group were out to capture a Nazi submarine intact.
When U-505 popped to the surface, they pounced. By Phil Zimmer

2019 ANNUAL WWII TRAVEL PLANNER A Museums, Tours, and Events A Starting on Page 39

departments
2 KILROY 4 V-MAIL 6 HOME FRONT: Rosie’s Babysitter 7 PINUP: Simone Simon 37 WAR STORIES
51 I WAS THERE: A B-24 Pilot Talks Shop 58 BOOKS AND MEDIA 60 THEATER OF WAR: Alone We Fight and Air Strike
62 78 RPM: “He Wears a Pair of Silver Wings” 63 FLASHBACK 64 GIs: Welcome to Shangri-La
COVER SHOT: Catching a German U-boat was quite a feat, but hanging onto it required a miracle. That’s what Captain Daniel Gallery of Task Group
22.3 expected from the sailors who boarded U-505 off Africa on June 4, 1944. In this photo, boarders work to secure a towline while others try to
open the conning tower hatch. Safety lines were the only help against being washed overboard. US NAVY
 A
AM E RICA I N
KILROY

WWII
The War • The Home Front • The People
March-April 2019
WAS HERE

Is History History?
Volume Fourteen • Number Four
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IT TAKES SOME GUTS TO DECLARE “THE END OF HISTORY.” The political scientist Francis
PUBLISHER
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DISTRIBUTED BY CURTIS CIRCULATION COMPANY Editor, America in WWII

DAD AND HIS B-24 AT WEWAK
I ESPECIALLY APPRECIATED “Shooting Up
Wewak” in the August 2018 edition. While
the article’s primary focus was on the
August 17, 1943, Wewak raid, it men-
tioned the August 18 and later raids. My
father, US Army Air Forces Staff Sergeant
Floyd L. Ingold, was a B-24 Liberator right
waist gunner and aircraft engineer with the
90th Bomb Group’s 319th Squadron
“Asterperious” and participated in the
August 18 raid. Dad kept a daily diary and
below is his entry for that day and a partial
entry for August 19:
August 18
Wednesday
Flying time 6:30 [A.M.]
Boy we hit it hot today. Ack Ack and
Zero’s both [anti-aircraft fire and Japanese
fighters]. #3 engine had a 20mm hole in
the cowling big enough to stick your fist in.
A bullet busted the tire on the right landing
gear. We made it to the end of the runway
before it went completely flat. The right
wing was full of ack ack. We threw lead all
around the Zero’s. I didn’t get a shot at but
one Zero. I saw tracer all around his nose.
After supper we went to the show and saw
“Orchestra Wives” [the 1942 film musical
with band leader Glenn Miller].
P.S. We flew [the B-24] “Patches” today.
Wewak was the target.
August 19
Thursday
We officially got credit for knocking
down a Zero yesterday. Pollock, Cox, and
Barrineau all hit him. Lt. Manion gave him
to Pollock.”
Dad flew 30 missions between July 1943
and March 1944. He spent three months in
hospitals recovering from injuries received
in a September 6, 1943, crash-landing.
While hospitalized in Port Moresby, Dad
received his Purple Heart from Lieutenant
General George Kenney, commander of
Allied air forces in the Southwest Pacific
Area. My father’s medals included an Air
4 AMERICA IN WWII APRIL 2019
A
V-MAIL
Medal for shooting down a Ki-43 Oscar, or
Army Zero, on March 8, 1944.
After the war, my father worked in the
textile industry, rising from sewing-
machine fixer to plant manager. He had a
good life. He and Mom raised two children
and were married for 66 years until she
died in 2009. Dad passed away in 2012.
Both were fine examples of our greatest
generation.
Thanks so much for your magazine.
FLOYD L. INGOLD JR.
Burlington, North Carolina
WHERE IS MY MAGAZINE?
LAST YEAR I SUBSCRIBED to your magazine,
but to date I have received only one issue.
Additionally, I mailed a check for a copy of
your special Medal of Honor edition, but I
have not received that either.
JOE EVANS
Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey
I’VE BEEN AN America in WWII subscriber
for a few years. I’m writing to ask if you
can look into why I’m having a delivery
problem. I so enjoy your magazine, as it
holds articles not found in other military
and WWII publications. My father was a
WWII veteran, so your magazine also
brings up fond memories of his stories
when I was a little girl.
A NNE PACH
Chicago, Illinois
Publisher’s reply: Thank you, Joe and
Anne, for your kind and frank letters. These
are just two of the letters, emails, and phone
calls we’ve received over the past couple of
months asking about the December 2018
issue of America in WWII and about our
Medal of Honor special issue.
So, what’s going on? In a nutshell, we
hit a rough patch. We found ourselves
unable to print and distribute two issues
that we worked hard to complete: our
Medal of Honor special and America in
WWII’s December 2018 issue. We kept
expecting to be able to get them out the
door, and we kept telling you we thought
they’d be in the mail soon, but we couldn’t
make it happen.
Now, we’ve come out the other side—
thanks be to God! Medal of Honor will
soon be in the mail to everyone who
ordered it (if you haven’t ordered it, you
should; it’s spellbinding). We had to let go
of our December 2018 issue, though; it
was just too late, and we needed to focus
on moving forward. In fact, it got too late
to call the issue you’re holding February, so
it became the April issue.
We expect to be on our normal schedule
the rest of the year. All the fascinating con-
tent you would have read in December
2018 will appear in a future issue. And if
you’re a subscriber, rest assured that you’ll
receive the number of issues you paid for.
There’s no other magazine like America
in WWII. It’s the only publication that tells
the story of America’s people and their
experiences in World War II, at the front
and on the home front. As our tagline says,
this magazine is about “The War • The
Home Front • The People.” No other pub-
lication tackles that.
We’re doing everything we can to ensure
that America in WWII continues far into
the future, because people need to know
about our WWII Americans and the things
they did and endured in the conflict that
reshaped our world.
Thank you for your patience. We hope
you enjoy this issue, and many more to
come!
J IM KUSHLAN
publisher of America in WWII
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 editor@americainwwii.com.

Rosie’s Babysitter
R
OSIE IS FAMOUS for riveting, for work-
ing on WWII assembly lines, making
big bombers. The size of the war and
the urgent demand for fleets of warbirds
made for long work hours. That left little
free time outside the factory for the
300,000 women employed by the aviation
industry. And a good number of those
workers were mothers, with kids at home,
and husbands off at war. It didn’t take long
to figure out that Rosie the Riveter desper-
ately needed a babysitter.
Rosie was no mere aviation industry
assembly-line worker, of course; she was
and still is a symbol of all women workers
during World War II. Before the Pearl Har-
bor attack, some 13 million women had
been employed outside the home. Then, as
men vacated jobs of all sorts to head over-
seas with the military, and as manufactur-
ing geared up to supply the expanding
fighting forces, 6 million more women
joined the civilian workforce. Almost 4
million of the 19 million total were moth-
ers, and most of them needed help taking
care of what were soon dubbed “eight-
hour orphans.” Many of these Rosies even-
tually got help from Uncle Sam.
The term day care didn’t become com-
mon until during the war, but the concept
had been around for decades. The first day
care facility in the United States was a late-
1800s nonprofit in New York City. The
federal government’s first involvement in
that realm came during the Depression,
primarily in the form of funding for nurs-
ery schools—not so much to aid working
mothers as to create jobs for unemployed
teachers. The program enrolled 75,000
children at 1,900 schools.
Then came World War II. Besides creat-
ing a lot of job openings, the war also trig-
6 AMERICA IN WWII APRIL 2019
A
HOME
FRONT
by Carl Zebrowski
Government-backed day care centers
served 635 communities spread across
every state except New Mexico (which did-
PHOTO BY GORDON PARKS, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
n’t request funding). They peaked in 1944
with 3,000 facilities and 130,000 kids.
One in every four children in California
was enrolled at the war’s end. Still, during
the three years the centers were open, only
a fraction of all mothers who needed the
help received it.
Despite the program’s success, it had
many dissenters from the start. Mothers
A trained assistant serves lunch to kids had traditionally stayed home with their
in a federally funded day care while
kids, and most people believed that was
their mothers are at work.
best; as a National Federation of Day
gered a wedding and baby boom as couples Nurseries bulletin stated in the decade
hurried to marry—and honeymoon— before the war, “the day nursery ought to
before young men left home. This was be the last choice in the care of children.”
good news, but there were negative reper- FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover urged moms
cussions. Companies trying to meet war to stay home and halt “the drift of normal
production goals suffered from mothers youth toward immorality and crime.” A
calling in sick to stay home with their kids. 1943 Gallup poll showed that 56 percent
There were more serious problems, too, of mothers said they would not put their
such as those reported by Time magazine kids in a government day care center even
in July 1942: “The children of some if it was free.
woman have been found locked up in As the war ended, the program was
cars…or wandering the streets with door scheduled for shutdown in October 1945.
keys around their neck. Child delinquency But federal subsidies continued into Febru-
in the U.S. is up sharply….” ary 1946, by which time most servicemen
Congress responded in 1942 by passing had returned home. Most of the centers
an amendment to the 1941 Lanham Act then closed, with only California, New
that directed the government to contribute York City, and Philadelphia keeping some
to child care services. That amendment open with state and city money.
was soon interpreted as allowing the gov- With an eye to the future, a woman in
ernment to set up child care centers all over Philadelphia wrote to First Lady Eleanor
the county. Often housed in public school Roosevelt as the federally funded centers
buildings, centers began opening quickly in shut down: “…We have to face the fact that
1943. Local communities contributed part there are married women with young chil-
of the cost, while the federal government dren who have to go to work. In such cases,
covered the rest. Mothers were eligible as it would seem to be in the interests of the
long as they held jobs and paid at least the community to organize child care centers
cost of the food provided to their children. and see that they are properly run.” A
 AM E RICA I N
WWII PINUP
Simone Simon
NO FLOWER BLOOMS EVERYWHERE, as French-born Simone
Simon learned the hard way. Paris was fertile ground for
her. Discovered at a café at age 20, she abandoned aspira-
tions for a design career to take her chances on the
French big screen. A few years on, America came calling.
After a few weeks of English lessons, Simon began filming
in Hollywood. But due to her thick accent, weak singing
voice, and some unfortunate misunderstandings, she was
seen as difficult to cast and temperamental. She suffered
several firings, but then shined in Girls’ Dormitory (1936)
as a student infatuated with her principal. Still, she went
home, convinced Hollywood had failed her.
Simon returned to the States early in World War II and
made a bigger splash this time. While catching the attention
of British double agent Dusko Popov, the rumored inspira-
tion for James Bond, she starred in Faust-inspired The Devil
and Daniel Webster (1941) and Cat People (1942), the lat-
ter of which paid off with a sequel in 1944. Her last film in
the States was Johnny Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1944),
about a woman who rents an apartment from a marine
who’s off to war but whose friends keep coming around.
Back in France, Simon filled several landmark film roles.
She withdrew almost entirely from the cinema in the mid-
1950s, taking with her that indefinable quality that
French critics loved but that didn’t quite translate across
the Atlantic.
K AYLEE SCHOFIELD
editorial assistant
photo courtesy of www.doctormacro.com
 Mail Call!
Nothing made the GIs’ day like letters and packages from home.
But how did the post office ever manage all those deliveries all over the world?
by Tom Harper Kelly

S ECOND L IEUTENANT PAUL B OESCH WAS a long way

from home. More than 3,000 miles of saltwater
separated him from his Long Island stomping
grounds, his family, and his friends. In that summer
of 1944, the separation was starting to wear him down.
It had been two years and several months since Boesch had
walked away from his pro wrestling career to join the army. He
the demonstration that followed the distribution at that mail!”
Elsewhere, rifleman Homer Wagnon Jr. received a package from
home and years later remembered how “the new labels, the bright
colors, even the smell, the American stuff straight from Main Street
in our hometown brought back memories almost lost to us.” He
and his buddies would “settle back in our foxholes, in a time of
quiet solitude, and try to remember our homes, our streets, our
had completed Officer Candidate School and become a parents, our sisters and brothers, and our special girl-
lieutenant in the 8th Infantry Division’s 121st friends as we tried to forget the present situation.”
Infantry Regiment. Now here he was, fighting Infantryman Joe Windham of the 65th
in France’s embattled Brittany region. Eight Infantry Division noticed that the “full range
weeks into the battle, along came a sur- of human emotions” from “abject disap-
prise: mail call! Boesch didn’t bother. He pointment to the pinnacle of glee” were
was sure there would be nothing for him. on display at his rifle company’s mail call.
But to his surprise, a sergeant came by “Up front would be the men that their

and thrust a handful of letters into his
tent. Boesch was overcome. He “opened
the treasured letters eagerly, my hands
almost trembling, and drank in every
word…. It was such a happy experience,
this hearing from home…. Now nothing
could be too tough to take!”
Boesch was living proof of what Bill Mauldin,
beloved cartoonist for the GI newspaper Stars and
Stripes, observed about letters from home: “A soldier’s
life revolves around his mail.” The government knew this, and so
did the army. Mail from home was a crucial weapon in America’s
battle against the Axis powers. Consequently, steady streams of
letters and parcels flowed around the world to, and from,
America’s WWII military men and women.
The arrival of packages and letters at the front had the power to
resuscitate sagging morale. An official army report described the
reaction when mail finally reached troops in Gafsa, Tunisia, after
a two-month wait: “Only a war dance would have compared with
left: courtesy of 517th parachute regimental combat team. right: library of congress
wives or girlfriends wrote them every-
day,” he remembered. Then there were
“the ones that receive pictures of their
new born baby, that they have never seen.
They want everyone to look at it and you
feed their ego by telling them that it looks
exactly like him and he smiles.” But there
were also the GIs waiting in vain for their names
to be called. Windham referred to them as “neck
stretchers,” because they “stood in the crowd stretching
their necks, listening for their names to be called, because some-
one back home promised them they would write everyday. After
mail call they would walk by the mail clerk and ask them if that
was all, sometimes even picking up the mail bag and looking
inside to make sure their letter was not overlooked.”
Morris Dunn of the 84th Infantry Division knew the crushing
disappointment of not receiving mail. Fighting as a replacement
during the Battle of the Bulge, in the Belgian part of the frozen
Ardennes forest, Dunn bristled that while the “old boys” got let-

Above: “Mail call!” Men of the 517th Parachute Infantry, part of the 1st Airborne Task Force in August 1944’s Southern France invasion,
swarm a mail clerk, eager for letters from home. Opposite: The connection between loved ones in the States and servicemen overseas was a
not-so-secret weapon. Whether it came via surface, air, or, as seen in this poster, V-Mail, a letter from home could work wonders.

8 AMERICA IN WWII APRIL 2019

 Mail Call! by Tom Harper Kelly
ters, none of the replacements did. “My morale couldn’t have got-
ten any worse,” he admitted. “I hit bottom that day.” A simple
piece of mail could make the difference between hope and despair.
An officer in the 28th Infantry Division summed it up: “Mail from
home means a hell of a lot to the boys. They dream of letters from
their loved ones.”
Free Franking, Victory Mail, and Airmail
DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR, US service members had a
variety of options for sending and receiving mail. On March 27,
1942, Congress enacted legislation allowing all armed forces per-
sonnel, regardless of where they were stationed, to send letters by
first-class mail without charge by “free franking” them. The
sender simply wrote “FREE” in the upper right-hand corner of an
envelope, where a stamp would normally
go. During World War I, only US service-
men serving in the Allied Expeditionary
Force in Europe had enjoyed this privi-
lege. The WWII extension of free franking
to all US armed forces members every-
where created a virtual tidal wave of free
mail. In 1944, the US Post Office Depart-
ment estimated that each service member
was sending approximately six pieces of
free mail per week. At normal postage
rates, that much mail would have brought
the post office $100 million in added
annual revenues.
The sheer volume of wartime mail cre-
ated a crisis of shipping. Space was at a
premium on the ships, planes, trains, and
trucks carrying war materiel and person-
nel to and from combat areas. Limited
cargo space led to delays in delivering GI
mail. The problem brought the Post
Office, War, and Navy departments to-
gether in search of a solution. The result
was Victory Mail, more commonly
known as V-Mail. A pack of V-Mail forms promises “rush
photographic mail” to GIs. The forms, with
V -MAIL EMPLOYED special 8.5-
by-11-inch stationery, on which
space for a note, were photographed, sent
overseas on microfilm, printed, and delivered.
senders wrote their letters—notes, really, because the
space was tight, shared by address areas and a place for a censor’s
stamp. These letters were sorted based on their overseas destina-
tions and then microfilmed. As many as 1,700 letters were fit onto
one roll of film. Each roll was then sent to a processing center near
the overseas destination, where the letters were printed out and
delivered to the recipients. The V-Mail process reduced letters to
3 percent of their original size and weight. A Douglas C-54 cargo
plane, which could carry about 264,000 full-size letters, could fit
36 million V-Mails.
The post office was already in the advanced planning stages of
a microfilmed dispatch service when the December 1941 attack
on Pearl Harbor pulled the United States into the war. As a result,
V-Mail was ready to launch on June 15, 1942. By 1945, there
were three V-Mail microfilming stations, in New York, San
10 AMERICA IN WWII APRIL 2019
Francisco, and Chicago. They could process approximately
100,000 letters a day.
The post office estimated that more than a billion V-Mails were
sent between June 15, 1942, and November 1, 1945, and today V-
Mail is an icon of the American WWII experience. But despite V-
Mail’s virtues, including that it was free for service personnel, GIs
overseas most often turned to another form of postal service: air-
mail. Mail delivery could be erratic regardless of the method, but
airmail was generally much faster than V-Mail. As rifleman Tom
Bourne of the 100th Infantry “Century” Division put it, soldiers
had to use airmail “if we expected the recipients to get to see [our
mail] before the war was over.” Another Century Division soldier,
William Taylor, simply preferred airmail, even in cases when V-Mail
would arrive in roughly the same time. In January 1945 he wrote to
his parents, “T’ hell with V-Mail. I more or
less have to use it out here, but if they can’t
do better than that there is no reason why
you should use the stuff.” Centuryman
Raymond Bumgarner shared Taylor’s sen-
timents. He told his parents, “I shall only
use V-mail when I ain’t got t’other.” Keith
Winston, who served in a 100th Division
medical unit and sent hundreds of letters to
his wife in suburban Philadelphia, urged
her in March 1945 to “continue with air-
mail, by all means, despite government
propaganda to the contrary.”
Even the post office acknowledged that
V-Mail “was not always as practical as
had been anticipated,” that it often
arrived later than airmail and that service-
men felt the photographic reproductions
of letters were impersonal. Charles
library of congress
DiPietro of the 83rd Infantry Division
perhaps typified many soldiers when he
mentioned in a letter to his mother, “I
don’t like [V-Mail]. It doesn’t seem like a
letter and I don’t like to receive V-mail so
don’t use it. It isn’t much faster anyway.”
In contrast to free franking and V-Mail,
airmail cost something, even for members
of the armed forces. But just weeks after
the Pearl Harbor attack, the post office adopted a discounted flat
rate of six cents per half ounce for all airmail emanating from or
intended for servicemen outside the continental United States. This
fee reduction increased morale and it paid off handsomely for the
post office. It helped make airmail so popular with service person-
nel that in November 1943 the post office instructed its branches
to restrict requisitions for airmail envelopes for civilians. Within
several months, the entire production of embossed six-cent airmail
envelopes was allotted for the armed forces. To help speed up pro-
duction of more airmail envelopes, the post office removed the sig-
nature red-white-and-blue border late in the summer of 1944.
None of those efforts was enough. After July 25, 1944, 861
million envelopes were shipped overseas, and in March 1945, the
post office ended up substituting two-cent envelopes and even
commemorative envelopes from the early 1930s for normal air-
right: national archives. inset images: library of congress

mail envelopes. The substitutes were over-
stamped with “6¢ Air Mail.”
How much more popular was airmail
over V-Mail? It’s difficult to find an answer
that covers all units and locations, but the
chief postal officer in the Mediterranean reported
that in 1944, in his theater of operations, soldiers
sent 72,875,077 V-Mails and 164,746,950 air-
mail letters—more than twice as many of the
latter. Only 36,390,000 letters from the
Mediterranean theater went via surface mail
using free franking.
Packages from Home!
AS WELCOME AS LETTERS WERE, it was packages
from home that troops in combat areas especially
yearned for, and requested. But parcels were larger
than letters, and getting them to troop deployment
areas around the world was a bigger challenge. The
post office’s regulations on mailing packages to sol-
diers overseas went through a lot of revisions before
a workable solution evolved.
On January 8, 1943, because of military demands
on shipping space, the Post Office Department
announced, “No parcels shall be accepted for dispatch to APOs
(Army Post Offices) outside the continental United States unless
they contain such articles only as are being sent at the specific
us navy
written request of the addressee, approved by
the battalion or similar unit commander of the
address.” The post office amended that policy
slightly in March 1943, allowing Americans to
use first-class mail to send small parcels—con-
taining items such as eyeglasses, fountain pens,
and watches, and weighing no more than eight
ounces—without written requests from the
addressees.
The requirement that a soldier’s commander
approve each written request for a parcel
made few if any friends in the military. It was
a burdensome addition to the paperwork and
red tape that already afflicted overworked unit
commanders. Yank, the army’s weekly magazine,
devoted a full page in its issue of April 9, 1943, to
criticism of this and other postal policies affecting
APOs. A month later, the post office rescinded its
requirement. Instead, the sender simply went to the
post office and presented the soldier-addressee’s
written request along with the envelope in which it
had been mailed. A postal employee would mark
the request and envelope to prevent reuse.
A significant exception to this policy applied to Christmas and
Hanukkah packages. During the prescribed period for mailing
holiday packages to military personnel overseas (September 15 to
October 15 in 1943 and 1944), civilians rushed to post offices.

V-Mail was good but hard to love. Sergeant Joseph Donnelly of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, illustrates V-Mail’s virtue (top): 3,200 bulky letters
fit on two microfilm reels. That saved space on crowded planes. And, as the poster says, V-Mail was “easy to use.” On the downside, it was
cramped, often slow, and arrived printed in grimy black and white (seen in negative form on the screen of a V-Mail inspector in the circle
above). GIs preferred air mail (stamp, above) for longer, normal-size letters that felt like letters and arrived fast.

APRIL 2019 AMERICA IN WWII 11

 Mail Call! by Tom Harper Kelly
During the 1943 holiday season, they mailed more than 20 mil- through the war. Everybody seems to be a victim of this. When
lion parcels. The next year’s total was 82–85 million; more than someone gets a package everyone gathers around and watches
61 million of those were for army personnel. To handle this tidal him open it. Then we howl as they drag out soap, shaving cream,
wave of packages, the army had to construct additional buildings shoeshine kits, bathing suits, and God knows what else.”
at the New York and San Francisco ports of embarkation, the two A survey of letters sent home by 13 soldiers of the 100th
principle distribution points for overseas mail to APOs. Division provides insight into the average infantryman’s wants
Because holiday packages weren’t sent in response to specific and needs. Each of the men requested food items. In fact, nearly
requests, many soldiers were surprised—and not always pleasant- three-quarters of all their requests were for various foodstuffs,
ly—by what they found inside. Frank Graham, serving in the from cans of evaporated milk to candy bars. Yes, food from home
34th Infantry Division in Tunisia, recalled that when a seems to have been the universal yearning of America’s
Christmas package from his aunt finally reached WWII fighting men. Franklin Gurley of the 399th
him in March 1943, the package was “very Infantry Regiment wrote home voicing disap-
welcome except it contained only twelve pointment with a package that contained
rolls of Life Savers, the same thing came in handkerchiefs and shoe laces because
the C ration cans.” Writing from Italy in “there was simply no way we could eat
1943, war correspondent Ernie Pyle those handkerchiefs and shoe laces. I told
explained to his readers that “nearly the boys how sorry I was that there was
every soldier’s package had in it at least no food in the package.”
one ironic item” and that some soldiers Whenever a GI ripped open a package
“actually got cans of Spam. Others got and found food from home, he could
fancy straw house slippers, and some got count on having plenty of help eating the
black silk socks—as though the boys were coveted treats. Shortly after Christmas
likely to put on full dress and spend an 1944, Theodore Strong of the 84th Infantry
evening in a night club.” When Dale Noble, Division still hadn’t received his packages
fighting with the 100th Infantry Division in and confided to his parents, “I feel a bit
northeastern France, received “a fine pair ashamed at present ’cause I’ve been eating
of bedroom slippers” from his wife, he Despite limits on parcels for military per- food from all the other fellows boxes, and
filled them with Alsatian mud and mailed sonnel overseas, gifts and goodies found as yet have been unable to give them any-
them back. Bedroom slippers appear to their way into grateful hands, especially thing in return.” He noted that “the food in
have been a popular gift for servicemen in around Christmas. These kids in Italy those boxes sure hits the spot as a snack
1944; another Century Division soldier are helping a GI enjoy his just-arrived before you go on guard or as a supplement
received five pairs, each sent in different holiday package. to a K-ration….”
boxes, in a single day. It wasn’t just any food that the men
Robert K. Adair, a 94th Infantry Division rifleman, wrote to his wanted. They wanted food unlike what the military gave them.
parents in December 1944, “I wonder just why everyone sends Unless an army or marine unit was in a position stable enough to
soap, shaving cream, etc. we get so much from the government allow setting up camp and a kitchen complete with a supply of
that we can’t use it all. At present I have enough shaving cream fresh foods, the men had to live on C- or K-rations. C-rations were
(about 5 tubes) and enough soap (about ten bars) to last me canned, precooked rations for one man for one day; K-rations

Booze in a Box
M AILING ALCOHOL WAS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN by the post office. But
the threat of fines or imprisonment didn’t stop the folks at
home from trying to send bottles of spirits overseas.
It’s unclear how many illicit parcels of alcohol the post office
confiscated and destroyed, but war correspondent Ernie Pyle
believed the meanest trick he ever saw played on a soldier
involved the interception of multiple bottles of whiskey. “The
first bottle tasted fine to the cold kids at the front,” Pyle
recalled, “but when the second and third ones came the boys
found they had been opened and drained along the way, then
carefully resealed and continued on their journey. Of course,
mailing them in the first place was illegal, but that’s beside the
point. The point is that somewhere in the world there is a louse
of a man with two quarts of whisky inside him who should have
his neck wrung off.”
To avoid detection, senders disguised bottles of alcohol as
benign items. When a soldier in the 2nd Infantry Division
received a Christmas fruitcake so hard it was inedible, he cursed
and threw it against a wall in disgust. But as the cake hit the
wall, there was a sound of breaking glass, and when the soldier
examined the remnants, he found a Jack Daniel’s label. A witness
recalled that “real tears came to his eyes as he saw his pint of
Christmas bourbon soak slowly into the flooring.”
Sometimes these ruses to disguise alcohol were successful.
Robert Kreuger, a 99th Infantry Division soldier, received a fifth
of whiskey that had been shipped in a square tin with popcorn
as packing. Although the bottle arrived broken, the popcorn had
soaked up the alcohol. Krueger and his buddies sucked on the
popcorn and “didn’t waste any!”
TOM HARPER KELLY

12 AMERICA IN WWII APRIL 2019

opposite & right: national archives

Parcels reached addressees even under difficult circumstances. These infantrymen are engaged in the grueling
Battle of Hürtgen Forest, Germany—and yet they’ve just received early-bird Christmas boxes, on November 14, 1944.
No sign here of bedroom slippers, a common inappropriate gift.

were boxed temporary rations for one man, with an incomplete
nutritional spectrum that made them unsuitable for long-term use.
A 10th Mountain Division veteran spoke for all GIs when he
explained that he constantly requested food from home not
because he was hungry, per se, but because every soldier “cher-
ished the package from home—particularly when he had been
subjected for too many days to the theoretically balanced diet of
straight C-ration or, worse, straight K.”
When a food package arrived, it did not go to waste. After not
receiving mail for more than six months due to several hospital-
izations, 30th Division soldier Russel Albrecht received a
Christmas package containing fudge that was “so moldy you
couldn’t tell it was fudge.” Undeterred, he and his buddies
devoured every single piece.
If the letters of these 13 men from the Century Division are
any indication, the items GIs requested most often, after food,
were writing supplies such as envelopes, stamps, stationery, small
I N THE END, WHAT SEEMS CLEAR is that, for troops overseas,
bottles of ink, and candles, which served as the infantryman’s pri-
mary source of light, and even heat. Of course, having entered
combat in November 1944 and fought continuously through the
winter of 1945, the Centurymen also requested warm clothing
such as socks, scarves, and gloves. In late November 1944,
Private Thomas B. Harper III, fighting with the 100th Division in
France’s Vosges Mountains, sent his parents a detailed list:
“Please send me chocolate bars, jam, cake (fruit[cake] keeps,
yours should too), pastry, nuts, saltines, canned fruit, canned
food (pork & beans—sardines, etc.), socks (heavy wool), han-
kies, stationary & airmail envelopes, candy and a scarf….”
Perhaps Harper’s request was more comprehensive than most
because, as he mentions in the same letter, “I haven’t received any
packages yet and I’m anxious like mad!” Some of the more inter-
esting items in the Centurymen’s letters were a “bingo game” and
“vitamin tablets.” The most interesting item received in response
was a “six pack of Cola-Cola.”
letters or packages from home were more than just a way
to stay in contact with loved ones or break up the monot-
ony of army rations. They were poignant reminders of the lives
that they had lived before entering the service and that they hoped
to return to after the war. A
TOM HARPER KELLY, an intellectual property and technology
lawyer in Philadelphia, is a member of the Men of the Century, a
reenactment unit preserving the history of the 100th Infantry
Division.

APRIL 2019 AMERICA IN WWII 13

 BEYOND
B A T T L E S H I P R OW
Japan star ted a war by bombing the US Pacific Fleet.
But there was more infamy that morning of December 7, 1941, as planes pummeled
Oahu’s air bases. Naval Air Station Pearl Harbor was shocked awake.
by J. Michael Wenger, Robert J. Cressman, and John F. Di Virgilio
A
S A SERENE DAWN BROKE on Oahu’s eastern horizon on
December 7, 1941, there was little hint that anything
other than a pleasant tropical morning would greet the
enlisted men of Naval Air Station Pearl Harbor on Ford
Island. For now, most of them were still in bed, many having spent
the night out in Honolulu, finally free after the end of a week-long
alert prompted by a war warning from Washington.
Officers were recuperating, too. Rear Admiral Patrick Bellinger,
commander of Patrol Wing 2 and its four squadrons of Consoli-
dated PBY patrol planes, was in bed in his quarters on Ford
Island, in the middle of Pearl Harbor, recovering from the flu. His
operations officer, Commander Logan C. Ramsey, had endured
a strenuous week covering for him through the week on
alert. He was sleeping in late after a dinner party.
US Coast Guard Lieutenant Frank Erickson was
officer of the day, functioning as the station’s
gatekeeper, authorizing personnel to arrive
or depart from Ford Island. He was in the
administration building, his overnight shift
nearing its end and his thoughts turning to
the day’s activities that he had planned for
his family at Waikiki.
North of Hawaii, all was not well. A for-
mation of 183 Japanese aircraft led by Com-
mander Fuchida Mitsuo had entered Hawaiian
airspace and deployed for attacks against the US
Pacific Fleet warships moored at Ford Island—
along what would soon be known infamously as Bat-
tleship Row—and against Oahu’s airfields. Just over half of
national archives
the enemy planes were to target the airfields, including a power-
ful group of 51 dive-bombers that separated from the main forma-
tion and passed southeast down the center of Oahu. Half of these
bombers, under Lieutenant Sakamoto Akira, spiraled down into
the US Army’s Wheeler Field, while the rest, under Lieutenant
Commander Takahashi Kakuichi, continued down the island’s
central plain, heading for the US Army Air Forces’ Hickam Field
and for Naval Air Station Pearl Harbor.
Pearl Harbor itself was not totally unprepared to meet the day,
but neither was it in top fighting shape. Portions of the Pacific
Fleet’s shipboard anti-aircraft batteries were manned and ammu-
Above: Ford Island, in the middle of Pearl Harbor, two months before the Japanese surprise attack of December 7, 1941.
The now-infamous Battleship Row is at upper right, sparsely populated at the time the photographer snapped this photo.
14 AMERICA IN WWII APRIL 2019
nition was readily available, though not in sufficient quantity to
blunt a sudden, massive air strike. The US Navy patrol planes that
might have warned of the approaching Japanese carrier strike force
were either on the ground or out of position. A relatively fresh VP-
21 Patrol Squadron was on the way to Midway and Wake Islands,
while the dozen PBY-3 flying boats of VP-22 had returned from
there to rejoin Hawaii’s patrol force, but they were run down and
required overhaul. The only patrol planes airborne from Oahu,
apart from three aircraft patrolling south of the island, were four
PBY-5s of VP-24 training with the submarine Gudgeon (SS-211)
off the coast of Maui; all the rest were on the ground undergoing
maintenance or were in various states of readiness.
At about 7:30 A.M. Lieutenant Richard R. “Dick”
Ballinger, communications officer and staff duty
officer of Patrol Wing 2, picked up his telephone
and dialed 661. The call awakened Ramsey at
his residence on the northeast end of Ford
Island. Ballinger related that he received a
message from 14-P-1 (the dawn patrol PBY
flown by Ensign William P. Tanner), then
scouring the restricted area south of Oahu.
Transmitted at 7:15, the message stated
that the aircraft had bombed and sunk a
submerged submarine one mile off the Pearl
Harbor entrance channel. Shaking off the
effects of being roused suddenly from slumber,
Ramsey considered the possibility that the PBY
might inadvertently have transmitted “a drill message
of some variety.” He asked Ballinger if he had authenticated
the message. “No,” Ballinger replied, “it was in plain English.”
Ramsey ordered Ballinger to request an authentication of the mes-
sage at once. Neither man was aware that 14-P-1 had sent a coded
message earlier, at 6:42, or that 54 minutes had elapsed since the
initial notification from the aircraft. “All right,” Ramsey said.
“I’ll be down immediately!”
At 7:35 Ramsey telephoned Commander Vincent R. Murphy,
staff duty officer at Pacific Fleet headquarters, who, after several
frustrating and unsuccessful attempts to contact Rear Admiral
Claude C. Bloch, commandant of the 14th Naval District, regard-
ing a similar report from the destroyer Ward (DD-139), arrived at
burdette

nprc, st. louis

nprc, st. louis

nprc, st. louis

Top: This is the message that alerted Pearl Harbor’s defenses to the Japanese raid. Since previous messages had pertained
to drills, this one made clear the attack was real. Above, left to right (all shown in the mid-1930s): Logan Ramsey was in
charge of Naval Air Station Pearl Harbor’s Patrol Wing 2, filling in for its sick commander; Frank Erickson was the sta-
tion’s officer of the day, manning the gate, in charge of comings and goings; communications officer Dick Ballinger had
earlier received the first report of Japanese activity nearby—a patrol plane sank a sub a mile out.

his office just in time to hear the telephone ringing.
Ramsey relayed the content of the PBY’s transmis-
sion, also saying that he had requested verifica-
tion. “That’s funny,” Murphy replied. “We got the
same sort of message from one of the destroyers on
the inshore patrol.” After Murphy explained that
he had been unable to obtain further details,
Ramsey said: “Well, you had better get going, and
I’ll be down at my Operations Center soon.”
Ramsey threw on an aloha shirt and slacks,
hopped into his 1939 Oldsmobile, and began the
short drive to the north parking lot of the admin-
istration building. Although at the time he did not
think the message referred to an enemy presence,
the bombing of any target so close to the entrance
channel was a serious matter. Should Lieutenant
Ballinger authenticate the message from 14-P-1,
the incident certainly justified changing the exist-
ing patrols.
Ramsey parked his car and hurried to his office
on the second floor in the north corner of the
building, directly across from Rear Admiral Bel-
linger’s office and asked for the text of the mes-
sage from 14-P-1. After reading it he judged it to
be “apparently authentic.”
Although he decided to await authentication
before taking further action, Ramsey left his office
and strode to his wing’s plotting and chart room,
several doors down on the left, and began work on
a modified search plan at about 7:52. The new plan needed to take
into account not only the existing morning security patrols but also
the four aircraft from VP-24 then engaged in “inter-type tactics” with
the Gudgeon in Operating Area C5. Ramsey based the search area on
extensive discussions with the staff that took into account “prevailing
wind conditions and the presence of outlying islands and other fac-
tors.” The best estimate indicated that the northwest sector would be
the most likely avenue of approach by the Japanese. Quickly, Ramsey
drafted an order for the PBYs to conduct a search northwest of Oahu
in a pie-shaped, 90-degree sector from 270 to 0 degrees.
16 AMERICA IN WWII APRIL 2019
national archives
After writing up the order, Ramsey descended
the stairs, went to the radio room at the end of
the hall, and handed the order to one of the
radiomen, instructing him to code it and stand by
goldstein
to transmit it. There was still no certainty that
transmission would be necessary, as Ramsey was
awaiting confirmation of the earlier dispatch
from 14-P-1. He stayed in the radio room briefly
before returning upstairs.
Meanwhile, in the office of the officer on duty
on the east side of the lobby at the administration
building’s north entrance, Lieutenant Erickson
noted at 7:53 that the marine color guard had
posted for colors and doubled-checked that his
assistant officer of the day stood ready to play the
colors recording over the loudspeaker system.
Seaman Second Class Glennon J. Ryan had
maru
mustered with about 100 of his shipmates at 7:45
in front of the administration building’s northeast
entrance, having drawn maintenance and cleanup
duty in one of the chief petty officer quarters.
Ryan and the other men waited for the marines
standing nearby to raise the Stars and Stripes,
then began answering the roll call at 7:55.
Minutes earlier, after Lieutenant Commander
Takahashi had released 17 Type 99 dive-bombers
to attack Hickam Field, the remaining nine under
kamada
his personal command, having already traversed
the Aiea plantation sugar fields north of Pearl
Harbor, turned hard to starboard upon approaching the
Aliamanu Crater. Holding fast at about 12,000 feet, Takahashi’s
new course cut a path across Pearl Harbor from the northeast.
Banking right, the dive-bomber commander and the crews who
followed beheld the sunlit panorama of Pearl Harbor and the sea-
plane facilities on the southern tip of Ford Island. The American
fleet lay sleeping in the morning light, and enemy interceptors
were nowhere to be seen; the sky was completely clear of anti-air-
craft fire. The Japanese had achieved total tactical surprise.
Takahashi led his column west by southwest over the east chan-
 BEYOND Battleship Row by J. Michael Wenger, Robert J. Cressman, and John F. Di Virgilio
nel, paralleling the southeast shore of Ford Island, and then logs, action reports, and war diaries compiled subsequent to the
banked again to starboard over the seaplane hangars, keeping the Japanese air raid, only one individual noted Takahashi’s eastward
target area visible over his right shoulder. After the nine Type 99s passage north of the harbor. From the destroyer Allen (DD-66) in
circled clockwise toward Pearl City Peninsula and the western berth X-5 northeast of Battleship Row, Boatswain’s Mate Second
edge of the sugarcane fields of Aiea, the planes began their dives Class Elliot R. Milliken noticed 20 to 25 aircraft circling off to the
one after the other. They dove in three-plane sections, with each north but, “in view of frequent Air Attack Drills,” attached “no
succeeding aircraft circling slightly farther east before pushing importance…to their presence.”
over into the target area.

Takahashi plummeted in a steep 55-degree dive toward the sea-
plane hangars, his two wingmen trailing astern in echelon left.
Following at close intervals, the two trailing sections under
Lieutenant Hira Kunikiyo aimed for targets slightly to the north-
east, up the rungs of the “stepladder” to be set in place by the
impact of their chief’s bomb. While steadying his aircraft,
Takahashi reached forward with his left hand and pushed a long,
thin metal rod through a hole in the windscreen to remove the pro-
tective wind cap that covered the tubular navy Type 95 bombsight
mounted through the Plexiglas. He leaned forward, peered into the
bks, nagai collection
O
NLY AFTER TAKAHASHI’S BOMBERS TURNED southwest did
observers take notice in appreciable numbers. The war
diary for NAS Pearl Harbor noted that at 7:50, aircraft
approached the station from the direction of Merry Point and
Hickam Field, possibly observing the clockwise spiral of the planes
over the harbor. Northwest of Ford Island, signalmen on board the
high-speed minesweeper Zane (DMS-14), moored in berth D-7,
witnessed aircraft making a “long gliding approach from
Northward.” On board the light cruiser St. Louis (CL-49), moored
portside to the light cruiser Honolulu (CL-48) in berth B-21 in the

grid-lined aiming lens, and moved his left hand to the bomb release
lever. From the rear seat, Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Koizumi Seizo
monitored the bomber’s steadily decreasing altitude, calling out
each 600-yard interval through the voice tube. At about 1,800 feet,
just prior to release, Koizumi yelled, “Yoi!” (Ready!), and then at
about 1,200 feet, “Te!” (Release!). The Type 99 jolted as the
bomb-release cradle arm swung downward, throwing the 550-
pound Type 98 high-explosive land bomb—fused for extra pene-
tration with a 0.1-second delay—from the bomber’s underside.
The gathering engine noise was so in keeping with the norm
near the base that few individuals in the harbor noted the arrival
of Japanese aircraft to the north. Moreover, the carrier Enterprise
(CV-6) and her air group had been absent since November 28, and
although few at Pearl were privy to her secret mission to Wake
Island, the air group’s arrival during the weekend would not have
been unexpected. Thus, it is not surprising that, in all the deck
repair basin, Gunner Wilfred G. Wallace, junior officer of the
watch, “observed a large number of dark colored planes heading
in the direction of Ford Island from Aiea.” As Takahashi’s unit
passed through the layer of broken clouds and descended on the
station, observers on board the battleship Pennsylvania (BB-38) in
dry dock number one thought they saw the nine aircraft plummet-
ing in single file through the clouds directly over Ford Island.
At least two astute observers recognized the aircraft as Japanese
just prior to the bombing. On board the light cruiser Helena (CL-
50), Signalman First Class Charles A. Flood was ready to go
below after chatting with shipmates on the signal bridge when he
heard someone comment regarding the planes high over Ford
Island—not at all usual for a Sunday morning. “I picked up a pair
of binoculars,” he wrote later, “and looked them over.” Although
he could see no markings at that altitude, something in their
approach struck him as unusual but familiar. In early 1932 Flood

Opposite, top: The “Air Raid Pearl Harbor” message was sent from the radio room of the naval air station’s administration building, far left,
first floor. Above: The attack began with torpedo bombers hitting the battleship Utah at far left, PBY-3 flying boats near the air station’s
hangar 6 (under the plume of smoke), and the light cruiser Helena at center right. Opposite, portraits, top to bottom: Takahashi Kakuichi
commanded the dive-bombers attacking the air station; Hira Kunikiyo led two of Kakuichi’s groups, bombing in his commander’s wake;
radioman Koizumi Seizo called out the order to drop the first bomb.

APRIL 2019 AMERICA IN WWII 17

 BEYOND Battleship Row by J. Michael Wenger, Robert J. Cressman, and John F. Di Virgilio
had served in a landing force during the Sino-Japanese hostilities
at Shanghai, China, and remembered the Japanese “bombing
technique, which was a form of glide-bombing. The planes over
Ford Island were approaching in the same manner.” Flood quick-
ly bellowed down to the men on the main deck: “Japanese planes
bombing Ford Island!” His shouting attracted the attention of
Ensign William W. Jones, the officer of the deck. In a display of
“initiative and prompt action,” Jones instantly passed the word:
“All hands to General Quarters—break out service ammunition.”
bomb and the appearance of more aircraft left no doubt in Ramsey’s
mind. “Never mind!” he shouted at Ballinger. “It’s a Jap!”
Ramsey hurried across the hall and dialed 663 to reach Rear
Admiral Bellinger’s private phone. Bellinger was still in bed, but he
had heard the noise of an aircraft that sounded as if it were in a
dive and then the thud of a bomb. In a “very brief” conversation,
Ramsey informed his chief that planes were bombing the hangars.
Bellinger responded with the incredulous retort, “You wouldn’t kid
about a thing like that?” Assured that Ramsey was not joking,
Bellinger said, “Well, let’s get going. I’ll be right down.”

E
NSIGN HENRY D. DAVISON on board the battleship Arizona
(BB-39) had just sent a messenger to deliver the 8:00 reports
to Captain Franklin Van Valkenburgh when dive-bombers
passing directly overhead attracted his attention. Putting a spy-
glass on the aircraft, Davison saw red dots on the wings, though
he still entertained second thoughts regarding the machines’
provenance until he saw the bombs falling.
Commander Ramsey, now in the wing’s plotting room, glanced
out the window at the color guard moving into place in front of the
illustration by john f. di virgilio
Ramsey threw down the phone, ran across the hall to the com-
munications room, and raised Radioman Second Class David T.
Montgomery of the Patrol Wing 2 flag unit on the voice tube.
Perhaps remembering Rear Admiral Bloch’s previous alert mes-
sages that all began with the word “Drill,” Ramsey instructed
Montgomery to “broadcast on all wave-lengths and over all
means of communication,” in plain English, “Air Raid Pearl
Harbor X This Is No Drill.” Ramsey then scurried back to the
plotting room to modify the search plan and messages to the two

bks, SHÕKAKU action report

Above, left: The deployment of Takahashi Kakuishi’s dive-bombers over Pearl Harbor. His nine planes circled clockwise and set up
their runs toward Hickam Field and Naval Air Station Pearl Harbor from the northeast. Above, right: An interpretation of the dive-bombing
attack that was included in the Japanese post-action report. The placement of the aircraft around hangar 6 at center is approximately correct,
but the number of hits on the building marked as successful is fanciful at best.
administration building. Just then, aircraft noise distracted him, groups of PBYs then on patrol. The time was 7:58.
leading him to conclude that a “flat-hatting” aviator was buzzing the Even as explosions rocked the foot of Ford Island, Gunner
station. Ramsey crossed the corridor to the window left of the stair- Wallace on board the St. Louis continued to watch the events
way and saw a plane zooming away, pulling out of its dive, low over unfolding to the west. He experienced the curious phenomenon of
the seaplane hangars to the south. Although he strained to determine “acoustic shadows” experienced so frequently during artillery
the offending machine’s side number—thinking that the pilot had bombardments of the American Civil War—though he saw planes
broken any number of the station’s flight restrictions—he was a attacking, their missiles “caused flame but no sound.”
moment too late. The aircraft sped into the distance too quickly to Takahashi’s bomb, the first to fall into Pearl Harbor, detonated
allow identification. Calling out to Lieutenant Ballinger, whose win- at the water’s edge along the southeastern portion of ramp 4,
dow afforded a better vantage point, Ramsey inquired tartly, “Dick, sending an immense column of water, mud, and concrete shards
did you get his number?” Ballinger missed the number too but said, hurtling skyward and partially disabling the ramp where the
“No, but I think it was a squadron commander’s aircraft because I explosion upended a slab of concrete. Takahashi’s two wingmen,
saw a band of red on it.” The aircraft, emblazoned with Takahashi’s Petty Officer First Class Shinohara Kazuo and Petty Officer
red hikotaicho (air group commander) stripes, pulled out of its dive, Second Class Fukuhara Jun, targeted VP-22’s PBY-3s on the
and an explosion and red flash in the distance prompted Ramsey to apron, scoring solid hits among the aircraft south of hangar 6.
wonder whether blasting was underway somewhere in the harbor or Next in line and leading the six aircraft of the 3rd Chutai,
whether the “reckless” pilot had crashed. The explosion of a second Lieutenant Hira, the squadron’s junior division officer, shifted his

18 AMERICA IN WWII APRIL 2019

national archives
A torpedo bomber at upper right banks hard near the southern tip of Ford Island after targeting Helena. At lower right, shadows cast
by smoke from explosions obscure the naval air station’s hangar 6. Two PBYs sit outside hangar 54 at lower right center.
aim farther northeast and targeted hangar 6, followed by his two
wingmen, Petty Officer Second Class Nakadokoro Shuhei and
Seaman First Class Harashima Masayoshi. Although he reported
that his section scored three direct hits on the hangar, Hira in fact
overshot; his bomb landed midway between the building and the
shore. The bombs that his wingmen dropped landed close to the
eastern face of the hangar, one of them opening a crater 20 feet
across and 7 feet deep. The other bomb struck the small-arms mag-
azine on the northeast corner of hangar 6 and broke apart, igniting
the hangar itself along with the contents of the offices in the lean-to
along the building’s east face. The bomb failed to detonate “but
burst asunder” from the impact, scattering its explosive charge of
picric acid—“a bright yellow granular powder”—on aircraft and
lockers inside the hangar. Flying splinters and concrete shards
rained down among the buildings and nearby aircraft, puncturing
and igniting the fuel cells of the planes on the apron and elsewhere.
Among them was a new Dutch PBY-5 in the hangar that was to be
flown to Java after re-instrumentation but was “pretty well demol-
ished” by the debris. Within moments the tip of Ford Island erupted
in flames, as did the northeast corner of hangar 6.
The tactical orders for Takahashi’s dive-bomber crews directed
them to fire their machine guns as soon as they released their bombs
so as to “thoroughly destroy the enemy and maximize damage.”
Then they were to clear the area to “avoid being a hindrance” to
the fighters. Hence, it might have been the machine-gun fire that
first alerted some of the men on the ground, particularly those at the
station. The chatter of both fixed and flexible 7.7mm machine guns
blended with the din of exploding bombs while the dive-bombers
headed straight away from the station at full throttle. The pilots
attempted no evasive maneuvers aside from disrupting the defend-
ers’ aim by blending into the ground cover at low altitude.
Behind Hira’s trio of bombers, meanwhile, with a towering col-
umn of smoke already obscuring the target area, the trailing sec-
tion under Warrant Officer Kokubu Toyomi entered the fray in
APRIL 2019 AMERICA IN WWII 19
In this December 8 view, debris covers the roof of hangar 38 at the top right corner following the dive-bomber attacks.
Skylights are missing, almost certainly carried away by the blast deflected upward from a bomb detonation just beyond
the building or by partial detonation of the bomb that passed through the roof near this location.
right & opposite: national archives
BEYOND Battleship Row by J. Michael Wenger, Robert J. Cressman, and John F. Di Virgilio
Sailors at the naval air station look on as the destroyer USS Shaw explodes in the distance after being hit by three bombs. This view
shows the PBY ramp, with assorted US aircraft scattered among the debris.
echelon left. Conforming to the stepladder tactics, Kokubu’s pilot,
Petty Officer Second Class Suzuki Toshio, shifted to the northeast,
targeting either other hangars or the Vought OS2U floatplanes
and other aircraft parked close by. His bomb burst among aircraft
near the west corner of hangar 38, carrying away a substantial
portion of that structure’s side window lights. A great shower of
fragments and debris rained on VP-24’s ready airplane nearby,
which “suffered a severed wing spar from a large flying missile.”
Nearby patrol and scout planes went up in flames as well.
Kokubu’s first wingman, Petty Officer Third Class Kitamura
Fusao, released a bomb that failed to detonate. The missile pene-
trated the roof of hangar 38, broke apart, and imbedded itself into
the concrete floor of the staff repair shop in the building’s west
corner. Except for the impact holes in the roof and floor, and the
yellowish powdered explosive scattered about the hangar, the
bomb did little damage.
A
T THE END OF TAKAHASHI’S STRING of nine carrier bombers,
Seaman First Class Seki Masao concluded the bombing
attack. On the ground at that moment, after taking a few
steps outside hangar 54 to investigate the detonations at hangar 6,
Seaman Second Class James S. Layman looked up and saw Seki’s
carrier bomber heading his way over the water tower. Because the
markings on the plane left “no doubt as to the nationality,”
Layman immediately turned to run away from hangar 6. At that
instant, Seki released his bomb. Layman quickened his pace, not-
ing later that his “strides took on greater proportions.”
Although Seki claimed he dropped his bomb among the aircraft
close by hangar 6, it actually fell far short of that objective and
detonated in the street immediately south of the old assembly and
repair building number two. The explosion showered the fleeing
sailors with concrete shards and cinders, opened up a large crater,
and damaged OS2Us and Curtiss SOC observation planes parked
between hangar 38 and the engine and aircraft overhaul shop.
According to Seaman First Class Houston James, there was a loud
thud at impact but no audible explosion, and the ground lifted up
in front of him. Closer to the impact, the force of the partial det-
onation threw a group of sailors against the exterior of the assem-
bly and repair building, injuring one of them.
Lieutenant Shiga Yoshio, commanding the carrier Kaga’s fighters
and flying top cover at about 15,000 feet over the harbor, saw
Takahashi’s bomb explode in a white flash in the shallow water off
the southernmost seaplane ramp. A scarlet fireball erupted, fol-
lowed by a plume of smoke that climbed to the southwest and was
carried away by the prevailing winds. The methodical pounding
administered by the carrier Shokaku’s bombers impressed Shiga:
“Flash after flash. Being the best bombers, they had been trained to
hit moving targets, so they didn’t miss these stationary targets at all.
In a matter of a few seconds, the calm in the harbor was shattered.”
Shiga and a number of other Japanese aviators appreciated that
beautiful Oahu would never be the same. Some even regretted their
actions at the time, thinking, “I wondered whether we should even
drop the bombs.” They could not, however, envisage the ferocity
of the coming conflict—a merciless, grinding war of attrition that
would conclude only with the dropping of two atomic bombs. For
the Americans, although “Air Raid Pearl Harbor X This Is No
Drill” was hardly the stuff of a battle cry, the words reflected well
the shock and horror of the unexpected attack and fed a resolve to
“remember Pearl Harbor” and emerge victorious. A
J. MICHAEL WENGER, ROBERT J. CRESSMAN, and JOHN F. DI
VIRGILIO are the authors of This Is No Drill: NAS Kaneohe Bay
and the Japanese Attack of 7 December 1941, the new book from
the Naval Institute Press from which this article was adapted.
APRIL 2019 AMERICA IN WWII 21
 one mic against the reich
CBS Radio newsman Edward R. Murrow brought the ugly truth
about Nazi aggression to America’s living rooms
direct from burning London.
by Roy Morris Jr.

E DWARD R. M URROW, CBS Radio’s London bureau

chief, drove out to a plateau overlooking England’s
Thames River estuary on the morning of September
7, 1940, together with Ben Robertson of New York
City’s PM newspaper and Vincent Sheean of the North American
News Alliance. The three journalists wanted to see a pair of oil
tankers that had been set ablaze the night before. The men got out
of the car, walked to the edge of a turnip field, and were watching
smoke rise from the burning ships when a sickly wail
arose: air-raid sirens! The trio looked up to see wave
after wave of German bombers racing overhead in
tight V-formations of 20–25 planes each. The
bombers swept upriver straight toward London as
black clouds of flak from thudding anti-aircraft
guns exploded in the sky. The Blitz—Nazi Ger-
many’s all-out, months-long air campaign against
British cities—had begun.
On that first day of the Blitz, bombs fell on
London for 12 straight hours. When it was over,
the East End was in flames and 3,000 citizens
were dead or injured. Murrow returned to the
city and took it all in, then made his way to the
BBC Broadcasting House. From Studio B4 in the building’s
basement, he conveyed the scene to CBS listeners across the
opposite & right: courtesy of tufts university archives
from the British Broadcasting Corporation headquarters in the tony
West End. Just 29 years old at the time, Murrow was fresh from a
two-year stint as “director of talks” for CBS in New York City. In
that role, he had been responsible for bringing in experts and pub-
lic figures to discuss issues in the news. But then network executives
decided to replace longtime London bureau chief César Saerchinger,
a pretentious music critic, with a more experienced newsman. The
execs wanted to expand their coverage beyond Saerchinger’s fawn-
ing puff pieces on the British royal family, fancy-dress horse races,
and society promenades. Murrow, a tenacious reporter with
an instinctive grasp of political realities,
seemed to fit the bill. No one, not even he him-
self, knew just how well. War was in the air;
soon Murrow would put it on the air.
In Vienna, a Prelude to War
I T HAD BEEN A LONG JOURNEY for Murrow from
the lumber town of Blanchard, Washington, to
London’s West End. The youngest of three boys
born to Quaker parents, he excelled academically
and athletically, leading his Edison High School bas-
ketball team to the county championship. He spent
his summers working as a lumberjack to earn enough
to put himself through Washington State College in

Atlantic. “There are no words to describe the thing that is happen-
ing,” he began. He went on to paint vivid, indelible word pictures
of the carnage. “A row of automobiles with stretchers racked on
the roofs like skis, standing outside of bombed buildings. A man
pinned under wreckage where a broken gas main sears his arms
and face. The courage of the people, the flash and roar of the guns
rolling down streets, the stench of air-raid shelters in the poor dis-
tricts.” By the time his on-the-spot report from war-ravaged
London ended, Murrow had become a broadcasting legend.
Back in the spring of 1937, a few months before the tramping of
Nazi jackboots echoed across Europe, Murrow and his wife, Janet,
had settled into an expensive apartment in London, four blocks
Pullman. There, too, he excelled, becoming student body presi-
dent, starring in campus theater productions, joining the Kappa
Sigma fraternity, and honing his speaking skills as two-time pres-
ident of the National Student Federation of America. After col-
lege, he parlayed his experience into a full-time job with the fed-
eration in New York City, spearheading the organization’s Uni-
versity of the Air, a popular talk show that featured such celebrated
guests as Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, and various Ameri-
can and European political leaders. In 1935, CBS hired Murrow.
Despite all his broadcasting experience in New York City, when
Murrow arrived in London he had no intention of putting himself
on the air. Instead, he assembled a world-class group of reporters

Opposite: Looking like a film noir character, CBS Radio newsman Edward R. Murrow taps out a script for This Is London, his daily war
report from the British capital. He’s wearing an army uniform for war correspondents in this 1943 publicity shot. Above: A 1941 storefront
placard in Dayton, Ohio, plugs Murrow’s program. His descriptive, on-the-scene reporting and dramatic delivery made him a news icon.

APRIL 2019 AMERICA IN WWII 23

 one mic against the reich
to cover the rapidly worsening political climate in Europe. His
first hire may have been his best. In August 1937, he had dinner at
Berlin’s luxurious Adlon Hotel with William L. Shirer. Slight and
bespectacled, Shirer looked for all the world like a pipe-smoking
English professor from a small Midwestern university, but the Chi-
cago native was in fact a savvy, experienced journalist who had
spent more than a decade covering hard news from Paris to Afghan-
istan. Among the luminaries Shirer had interviewed while working
for William Randolph Heart’s Universal Service were Mahatma
Gandhi, Charles Lindbergh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Isadora Duncan,
and the menacing new chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler. Shirer
spoke fluent German, a skill that would soon pay dividends.
Universal had let Shirer go in a belt-tightening move a few
months earlier, and he was preparing to return to the United States
to look for work when Murrow got in touch with him out of the
blue. The two men bonded over their dinner, and Murrow
retained Shirer to continue reporting from Berlin. When network
executives complained that Shirer sounded more like a bookkeep-
er than a broadcaster, Murrow held firm. He needed Shirer for his
insights and expertise, not his vocal chords. CBS came around,
and the most influential journalistic pairing of the era began.
As both Murrow and Shirer knew—and as the rest
of the world would soon find out—Germany was
ground zero for a looming European catastro-
phe. In March 1938, while in Vienna to
arrange a broadcast of the city’s famed boys’
choir, Shirer got a firsthand view of
Germany’s takeover of Austria, Hitler’s
home country. He watched Nazi airplanes
drop propaganda pamphlets from the sky
while mobs of swastika-wearing thugs
stomped through the streets below, chant-
ing, “Ein Reich! Ein Volk! Ein Führer!”—
one country, one people, one leader. Shirer
knew immediately what leader they meant.
Turned away by bayonet-wielding Nazis
when he arrived at Vienna’s state-run radio sta-
tion, where he had hoped to broadcast a live report,
Shirer contacted Murrow, who ordered him to fly to London
and broadcast his scoop from there. Meanwhile, Murrow flew to
imperial war museum
Vienna to organize coverage of Hitler’s triumphant arrival in the
city as he marshaled a team of correspondents to report reactions
in Paris, Rome, Berlin, and other European capitals.
Once in Vienna, Murrow searched for someone to go on the air
with the news. Failing to find anyone on such short notice, he
took to the airwaves himself. It was the first live broadcast of his
career. Contrasting the festive mood of Viennese Nazis with the
depressed reaction of the city’s Jewish residents, Murrow sounded
a cautionary tone. “It was called a bloodless conquest, and in
some ways it was,” he reported. “But I’d like to be able to forget
the haunted looks on the faces of those long lines of people out-
side the banks and travel offices. People trying to get away. I’d like
to forget the tired, futile look of the Austrian army officers, and
the thud of hobnail boots and the crash of light tanks in the early
hours of the morning in the Ringstrasse. I’d like to forget the
sound of the smashing glass as the Jewish shop streets were raid-
ed, the hoots and jeers at those forced to scrub the sidewalk.” One
24 AMERICA IN WWII APRIL 2019
by Roy Morris Jr.
night, he personally witnessed a young Jewish man in a bar cut his
own throat with a straight razor.
Murrow’s Boys—and Girl
R ETURNING TO LONDON, Murrow coordinated local coverage. He
noted that Londoners seemed to be preparing for the worst.
“Trucks loaded with sandbags and gas masks were to be seen,” he
said. “The surface calm of London remains, but I think I notice a
change in people’s faces. There seems to be a tight, strained look
about the eyes.”
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned to the
capital city on September 30, 1938, after meeting with Hitler in
Munich and notoriously waved a scrap of paper above his head,
claiming it was a written guarantee from Hitler assuring “peace in
our time.” Others were not so sure. British opposition leader
Winston Churchill bluntly told Chamberlain, “You were given the
choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you
will have war.”
That’s what Murrow thought, too. He convinced CBS to let
him hire more European correspondents—the beginning of the
crack news team that would become known as Murrow’s
Boys. These included Thomas Grandin, a Yale-edu-
cated academic whom Murrow dispatched to
Paris along with a 26-year-old assistant from
North Dakota named Eric Sevareid. Also
hired were Mary Marvin Breckinridge, an
old college friend of Murrow’s who
became the team’s only woman; Cecil
Brown, a journalist and former mer-
chant mariner; Larry LeSueur of United
Press; Winston Burdett of the Brooklyn
Eagle; Charles Collingwood, a recent
graduate of Cornell; and Howard K.
Smith, a champion hurdler from Tulane.
While Shirer continued reporting from Ber-
lin, the others fanned out across the Continent
to keep a weather eye on the storm clouds gather-
ing above their heads.
Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, launch-
ing the second European war in two decades. For the first several
months after the invasion, the conflict seemed to be at a standstill,
and the Allied nations dubbed it the Phony War. But on May 10,
1940, the Nazis launched simultaneous invasions of France,
Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Murrow’s Boys were
in place to cover and report this blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” as
the Germans called it. Sevareid, returning to Paris, saw German
artillery flashes in the near-distance. It was, he told CBS Radio lis-
teners, “truly a lightning war, a war of sudden sounds and flash-
ing machines. It comes and is gone before you can move, and the
men you rarely see.”
American families gathered around their radio consoles to lis-
ten to the ominous reports coming out of Europe from Murrow’s
team. As the German army rolled relentlessly westward toward
Paris, Breckinridge reported on the steady stream of civilian
refugees attempting to flee. She told listeners about “baby car-
riages full of quilts, and bicycles with boxes tied over them with
bits of string…. One little girl carried a black cat, and several fam-
courtesy of tufts university archives & cbs photo archive
ilies brought their dogs with them. One woman, who arrived
alone and looked less tired than the rest, was questioned by the
others: ‘What happened to my town? Was my home bombed?’”
The woman couldn’t say.
Sevareid drove down a deserted Champs-Élysées, normally
Paris’s busiest street, and saw a lone café customer sitting at a
table finishing his wine while a waiter, with true Parisian savoir
faire, hovered patiently in the background. Meanwhile, streams
of refugees poured out of Paris in cars and trucks, on bicycles, in
wagons—anything that would roll. Others trudged by on foot,
said Sevareid, “like a stream of lava flowing past, the unstop-
pable river which came from the unimaginable eruption some-
where to the north.” Sevareid barely made it out of Paris ahead
of the Nazis.
I
N LONDON, Murrow observed the calm if somber mood of
the British citizens. “I saw more grave, solemn faces today
than I have ever seen in London before,” he told American
listeners. “Fashionable tea rooms were almost deserted; the shops
in Bond Street were doing very little business; people read their
newspapers as they walked slowly down the streets. I saw one
woman standing in line for a bus begin to cry, very quietly. She
didn’t bother to wipe the tears away.” After Shirer reported from
Paris that the French had surrendered to Hitler in the same rail-
road carriage in which the Germans had surrendered to the
French in World War I, Murrow called newly installed British
Prime Minister Winston Churchill to get a reaction. Churchill
refused to believe the news; his government had received no prior
Opposite: Shepherded by air wardens, Londoners find safety in the Underground, their city’s subway, during a raid. Murrow witnessed
the Blitz, Germany’s air war against England, from its outset, and his coverage made him a legend. Above: Murrow headed a network of
journalists in Europe. Here he stands with other CBS staff in London in 1942 (from left): Murrow, Frank Greco, John Daly, and Robert Trout.
warning from the French government. But it was true. After-
wards, Hitler had the infamous railway car dragged to Berlin and
put on display.
The Blitz and British Resolve
ENGLAND BRACED FOR an imminent German invasion that never
came. Instead, for six weeks in the late summer of 1940, young
British Royal Air Force pilots—21 years old on average—slugged
it out with German warplanes in the skies over England. Despite
staggering losses, the RAF held its own, mainly through the sheer
pluck and bravery of fighter pilots who flew as many as six sor-
ties a day in their Hawker Hurricanes and Supermarine Spitfires.
Churchill rallied the nation and much of the free world with his
own eloquent radio broadcasts. “Never in the field of human con-
flict was so much owed by so many to so few,” he said of the RAF
fighters. As for England, he said, “We will never surrender.”
With the start of the Blitz on September 7, Hitler shifted his
focus from British pilots to British civilians, and Murrow was on
hand to report it to his fellow Americans. For the next 56 days, as
Nazi bombers mercilessly pounded London in the Blitz, Murrow
tirelessly patrolled the rubble-strewn streets, painting what he
called “pictures in the air” for American listeners. He began each
broadcast with a dramatic, half-second pause between his opening
words: “This…is London.” It became his catchphrase.
Like the blue-collar American he was, Murrow sensed instinc-
tively that his listeners would identify with their British counter-
parts, the average men and women on the street, who were
undergoing an extraordinary trial by fire. Chain-smoking Camel
APRIL 2019 AMERICA IN WWII 25
 Beyond the Blitz
national archives
Murrow witnessed the Holocaust at the Buchenwald camp,
whose ovens were still full of bones when he arrived.
R eporting the London Blitz was the highlight of Edward R.
Murrow’s WWII career, but he also ventured occasionally
into the battle zones of North Africa and Europe, covering
the American campaign in Tunisia and flying on 25 bombing
sorties over Europe. On June 6, 1944—D-Day for the Allied
invasion of Normandy, France—Murrow read to America’s
radio listeners the order that General Dwight Eisenhower had
issued to his soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Allied
Expeditionary Force the evening before the massive assault.
“We will accept nothing less than full victory,” he read.
“Good luck. And let us beseech the blessing of almighty God
upon this great and noble undertaking.”
Undoubtedly, the most horrifying sight that Murrow, or
anyone, saw was the Buchenwald concentration camp outside
Weimar, Germany, liberated on April 11, 1945, by the 6th
Armored Division of Lieutenant General George S. Patton’s US
Third Army. More than two years earlier, Murrow had been
one of the first newsmen to broadcast rumors of the Nazis’
infamous Final Solution, but nothing could have prepared him
for what he saw at the death camp. “If you are at lunch, or if
you have no appetite to hear what the Germans have done,
now is a good time to switch off the radio,” he warned on
April 15, 1945, “for I propose to tell you of Buchenwald.” It
had taken him three days to process the experience.
“There surged around me an evil-smelling horde,” Murrow
told listeners. “Men and boys reached to touch me, and they
were in rags and the remnants of uniform. Death had already
marked many of them, but they were smiling with their eyes. As
I walked down to the end of the barracks, there was applause
from the men too weak to get out of bed. It sounded like the
hand-clapping of babies. As we walked out into the courtyard, a
man fell dead. Two others—they must have been over 60—were
crawling toward the latrine. I saw it but will not describe it.”
Inside a small garage, Murrow saw “two rows of bodies
stacked up like cordwood. They were thin and very white.
Some of the bodies were terribly bruised, though there seemed
to be little flesh to bruise. Some had been shot through the
head, but they bled very little. All except two were naked. I
tried to count them as best as I could and arrived at the conclu-
sion that all that was mortal of more than 500 men and boys
lay there in two neat piles.”
He concluded his broadcast simply but memorably: “I have
reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most
of it I have no words. If I’ve offended you by this rather mild
account of Buchenwald, I’m not in the least bit sorry.”
ROY MORRIS JR.
26 AMERICA IN WWII APRIL 2019
cigarettes—three packs a day—and drinking endless cups of cof-
fee, avoiding underground bomb shelters in favor of exposed
rooftops where he could view the action more closely, Murrow
sped down blacked-out London streets in his Sunbeam-Talbot
convertible along with his daredevil sidekick LeSueur in search of
telling vignettes for the people back home.
“One becomes accustomed to rattling windows and the distant
sound of bombs, and then there comes a silence that can be felt,”
Murrow reported. “You know the sound will return—you wait,
and then it starts again. The waiting is bad. It gives you a chance
to imagine things.” In front of a smashed grocery store, he said,
“I heard a dripping inside. It was the only sound in all London.
Two cans of peaches had been drilled clean through by flying
glass, and the juice was dripping onto the floor.” Going to buy a
hat, Murrow observed that “my favorite shop had gone, blown to
bits. The windows of my shoe store were blown out. I decided to
have a haircut; the windows of the barbershop were gone, but the
Italian barber was still doing business.” Another storekeeper
assured a doubtful Murrow that he would be open all winter. “Of
course we’ll be here,” the man said. “We’ve been in business here
for 150 years.” Murrow saw hand-lettered signs on other shops
that read “Shattered But Not Shuttered” and “Knocked But Not
Locked.” The dauntless English spirit remained high.
Murrow did anything he could to bring the war directly into
America’s living rooms. He broadcast from ground level, holding
his microphone down to the street to catch the sound of bombs
hitting the pavement and the unhurried footsteps of London resi-
dents walking—not running—to underground shelters. “There
was no bravado, no loud voices, only a quiet acceptance of the sit-
uation,” he recounted admiringly. “To me those people were
incredibly brave and calm.”
His on-the-scene broadcasts were the first to transmit ambient,
live-action sounds of war across the airwaves. One night, on the
roof of Broadcasting House, Murrow remained on the air during
a Nazi bombing run. “The searchlights now are feeling almost
directly overhead,” he said. “Now you’ll hear two bursts a little
nearer in a moment. There they are! That hard, stony sound, that
faint-red, angry snap of anti-aircraft blasts against the steel-blue
sky, the sound of guns going off in the distance very faintly, like
someone kicking a tub.” Those homespun details made the war
seem real to American listeners in a way that dozens of high-flown
political speeches could not.
Sometimes the bombs fell dangerously close to Murrow. Once,
one flew through the seventh-floor window of Broadcasting
House and crashed into the music library. It didn’t explode, but it
was a delay-action bomb, and an hour later it went off. Murrow,
in the basement at the time, was unharmed, but four men and
three women were killed or wounded. Murrow continued his
broadcast. Another night, as he and Janet were returning home,
he wanted to stop in at the Devonshire Arms for a nightcap. Janet
persuaded him to keep walking. A moment later, “a tearing,
whooshing shriek” seemed to come down on top of them, throw-
ing them against a wall. A bomb had made a direct hit on the pub
behind them, killing 30 people inside.
Airwaves that Made a Difference
GRADUALLY, THE GERMAN BOMBING of London subsided. By then,
Murrow’s broadcasts were legendary. He paired his “This…is
 one mic against the reich by Roy Morris Jr.

courtesy of tufts university archives & cbs photo archive

By vividly reporting the Blitz, and the British people’s defiance of the Nazis, Murrow (catching a cab in
London) connected Americans to the war across the Atlantic. Soon Yanks and Brits would fight side by side.

London” opening with a closing that intentionally echoed a catch- with the memories of friends who died in the streets where they
phrase used by plucky Londoners saying farewell to one another now walk.” He made a pilgrimage back to his old apartment at
during the Blitz: “Good night, and good luck.” For the rest of his 84 Hallam Street, where he remembered, “Your best friend was
career, Murrow would conclude each broadcast with those words. killed on the next corner. You pass a water tank and recall, almost
Murrow’s reporting on the Blitz was the high point in a distin- with a start, that there used to be a pub, hit with a two-thousand-
guished career that would extend into the early 1960s. No less an pounder one night, thirty people killed.” He concluded simply:
expert than Churchill credited Murrow with personally rallying “Six years is a long time. I have observed today that people have
American public opinion behind the British war effort. In very little to say. There are no words.”
November 1941, Murrow returned to New York, where 1,100 But Murrow had found the words, and the American public
well-wishers feted him at the Waldorf Astoria. Poet Archibald back home had heard them. Perhaps his most cherished honor was
MacLeish put Murrow’s service into context: “You laid the dead one he received from BBC engineers in London, who gave him the
of London at our doors, and we knew that the dead were our microphone he had used during the war. It was inscribed, “This
dead. You have destroyed the superstition that what is done microphone, taken from studio B4 of the Broadcasting House,
beyond three thousand miles of water is not really done at all. London, is presented to Edward R. Murrow, who used it with such
There were some people in this country who did not want the peo- distinction for some many broadcasts to CBS New York during the
ple of America to hear the things you had to say.” At the end of war years 1939 to 1945.” In his hands during the height of the
the evening, Murrow received a standing ovation. Blitz, that microphone had proved every bit as effective a weapon

F
against Nazi aggression as any rifle, pistol, bayonet, hand grenade
ITTINGLY, MURROW WAS BACK in London for V-E Day— or bomb. Like Churchill’s England, it never surrendered. A
the official declaration of Allied victory in Europe, on
May 8, 1945. With his quick eye for detail, he noted that ROY MORRIS JR. is the author of eight books on American history
many people on the street were strangely quiet. “They appear not and literature. His ninth book, Gertrude Stein Has Arrived: The
to be part of the celebration,” he said. “Their minds must be filled Homecoming of a Literary Legend, will be published this fall.

APRIL 2019 AMERICA IN WWII 27

 the
SHARK-CATCHERS
Captain Daniel Galler y and his hunter-group were out to capture a Nazi submarine intact.
When U-505 popped to the sur face, they pounced.
by Phil Zimmer

A HANDFUL OF AMERICAN SAILORS scrambled down the

hatch of a foundering, wave-tossed German submarine
and disappeared inside. Not since the War of 1812 had
the US Navy captured an enemy warship on the high seas. Now
the American boarding party worked frantically to keep this rare
prize, the U-505, from slipping beneath the waves and taking its
secrets to the bottom of the sea.
U-505 was the prize of Captain Daniel V. Gallery’s Task Group
22.3. A dedicated hunter-killer group, TG 22.3 had standing
orders to destroy every German U-boat it could find. (U-boat is an
Anglicized shortening of unterseeboot, “undersea
boat”—a submarine.) But when one of the
group’s destroyer escorts forced U-505 to the sur-
face some 150 miles off Africa’s west coast on
June 4, 1944, Gallery decided not to destroy his
prey, but to capture it. Instead of becoming TG
22.3’s third kill of the war, U-505 would become
a treasure trove of inside knowledge about Nazi
Germany’s navy, its U-boats, and its top-secret
communication code.
Gallery didn’t make his decision on impulse. He
had been thinking about attempting a capture
since April 9, when his hunter-killer group sank
the German sub U-515. Hounded by TG 22.3’s
aircraft and ships, the sub had surfaced, and the
Americans hit it with everything they had, includ-
ing the armor-piercing shells of the destroyer
escorts’ large-caliber guns. As it slipped beneath
the waves to a watery grave, Gallery realized he
might have been able to capture it along with its valuable contents
if he had taken a different approach. Aircraft from TG 22.3 sank
all photos this story: us navy
intention if it resorted to new tactics and different weapons. “The
action in which U-515 was sunk on our previous cruise had con-
vinced us that when a sub surfaces during an attack it is highly
probable that he has no intention of fighting and his main objec-
tive is to save his hide,” he explained. “We therefore determined,
in case opportunity arose in this cruise, to assist and expedite the
evacuation of the U-boat by concentrating anti-personnel
weapons on it, to hold back with weapons that could sink the sub,
and to attempt to board it as soon as possible.”
In essence, the task group planned to overwhelm the next sub
it blew to the surface, engulfing the target in a
clatter of machine-gun fire from the destroyer
escorts and from carrier planes flying overhead.
Gallery believed this would cause the German
crew to panic and abandon ship, leaving the sub
free for his sailors to seize—along with its codes,
logbooks, and other secrets.
At least on paper, TG 22.3 had the right equip-
ment for the job. At the group’s core was the air-
craft carrier USS Guadalcanal (CVE-60), with
Gallery as her skipper. She was a 512-foot long
Casablanca-class escort carrier, smaller than a
full-size carrier (almost 40 percent shorter than an
Essex-class carrier, for instance) and therefore
dubbed a “baby flattop” or “jeep carrier.” Guad-
alcanal could carry a total of 27 Grumman F4F
Wildcat fighter planes, each armed with six
machine guns and capable of ranging far and wide
in search of prey. Surrounding, protecting, and col-
laborating with the Guadalcanal were five Edsell-class destroyer
escorts (fast destroyer-sized ships designed to escort cargo convoys).

another German sub, U-68, the next night. As Gallery and his
group returned to home base at Norfolk, Virginia, he resolved
that on the next cruise he would be ready to attempt a capture.
The task group launched its second excursion on May 15. As
Gallery wrote in a later report, “Task Group 22.3 sailed from
Norfolk on this cruise with the avowed intention of capturing an
enemy submarine.” Gallery believed his group could fulfill that
A Man with a Mission
T HE KAISER SHIPYARDS in Vancouver, Washington, had launched
Guadalcanal on June 5, 1943, almost exactly one year before the
carrier’s coming encounter with U-505. Built on a repurposed
freighter hull, she was one of 50 escort carriers produced in 21
months at the Vancouver Kaiser yard, a facility renowned for its

Opposite: Old Glory tops the flagstaff of U-505, the only German sub captured in World War II, and the first vessel the US Navy had captured
at sea since 1815. Captain Daniel Gallery, who claimed this rare prize, stands on her conning tower flanked by men who kept her from sinking.
Lieutenant Junior Grade Albert David (right) led the gutsy boarding party that clambered onto the sub and closed water inlets. Commander
Earl Trosino (left), a naval engineer, stabilized her and got her home. Above: Securing the sub required removal of a damaged torpedo.

APRIL 2019 AMERICA IN WWII 29

 the Shark-Catchers
ability to turn out a Liberty or cargo ship in as few as 90 days.
The baby or jeep carriers were so lightly armored that some
sailors wisecracked that CVE stood for combustible, vulnerable,
and expendable (C actually indicated carrier, V was the navy des-
ignation for aircraft, and E meant escort). Other wags called the
lightly armored carriers “two-torpedo ships,” joking that the sec-
ond torpedo would pass over the flight deck as the vessel sank.
But the little carriers could travel at a fast 19 knots (22 mph), and
with their planes and destroyer escorts they packed a formidable
punch, making them useful for protecting convoys and taking the
fight to the enemy.
Taking the fight to the enemy was exactly what Gallery had in
mind. He was an aggressive commander, a lifelong achiever, a man
of action. After graduating from the US Naval Academy (where he
had arrived as a 16-year-old) a year ahead of schedule in 1920, he
became a naval aviator, earning his wings during the pioneering
days of carrier air operations. During the Guadalcanal’s shake-
down cruise after her commissioning, he became the first pilot to
take off from and land on her flight deck.
Gallery encouraged and trained his pilots to master taking off
and landing at night—a challenging feat under the best circum-
stances that was made more difficult by the Guadalcanal’s rela-
tively short and narrow deck. Nighttime carrier operations were a
novel idea at that time, and there were mishaps that resulted in the
loss of a few planes. But being able to put planes in the air at night
allowed TG 22.3 to sustain a sort of around-the-clock whack-a-
mole game. No matter where a battery-depleted U-boat and its
oxygen-starved crew attempted to surface in the task group’s wide
coverage area, there was an American ship or plane waiting to
clobber it. For the task group’s May 1944 cruise, with the goal of
capturing a U-boat intact, Gallery made sure his men were pre-
pared to subdue and seize any U-boat his planes or destroyers
caught on the surface or blew there with depth charges. Volunteer
boarding parties aboard each ship were drilled in getting inside a
surfaced submarine and take command.
Gallery’s ships headed out to sea eager for action, but for two
straight weeks not a single U-boat crossed their path. Fuel started
to run low, but Gallery continued his search, setting a course for
30 AMERICA IN WWII APRIL 2019
by Phil Zimmer
West Africa and its coastal refueling stations. Then, on June 4,
1944, some 150 miles off French West Africa’s Cape Blanco, the
destroyer escort USS Chatelain (DE-149) spotted a German sub.
Wheeling around to face the U-boat head-on, Chatelain fired a
salvo of 20 hedgehog depth charges. (Launched all at once from a
bristly-looking bow-mounted battery, hedgehog charges were
designed to explode on contact with the hard surface of a U-boat.)
There was no explosion. Had the depth charges missed? Had
Chatelain’s lookouts only imagined a sub?
O THER DESTROYER ESCORTS prowled nearby, probing with
sonar and ready to pounce. Suddenly, two Wildcats cir-
cling overhead started firing their .50-caliber machine
guns into the sea, about 100 yards from where the hedgehogs had
hit the water. The Chatelain wheeled again and fired a spread of 12
600-pound depth charges with fuses set to explode at a shallow
depth. The ocean behind the Chatelain seemed to boil as a dozen
geysers spouted up from the underwater explosions. “You’ve
struck oil, Frenchy,” one of the Wildcat pilots reported, calling
Chatelain by her nickname. “The sub is surfacing!” It seemed as
though Gallery’s chance to seize a German submarine had come.
‘I Want that Ship’
THE CHATELAIN, the Wildcats, and every other ship within range
opened fire on U-505 as she surfaced—but not with their big
guns, only with machine guns, as Gallery had ordered. Suddenly,
U-505’s commander, Oberleutnant Harald Lange, apparently
believing his vessel had been badly damaged (perhaps because the
depth charges had caused spraying leaks in the engine room),
ordered his crew to abandon ship. The German submariners hur-
ried out of the U-boat and into the sea, where they bobbed in gen-
tle swells, awaiting rescue—and capture—in relative safety.
Lieutenant Albert David of the USS Pillsbury (DE-133) and his
small boarding party were the first Americans to reach U-505. The
sub was moving in a clockwise circle, slowly, due to a jammed rud-
der, and was quickly taking on water, but they clambered aboard
and made their way into the narrow confines. Heavily armed, they
moved cautiously, not knowing what to expect. None of them had
ever set foot aboard a submarine, let alone an enemy submarine.
Not all of them knew how to swim, and one later said he was wor-
ried because he had torn his Mae West—his flotation vest—on the
sub’s conning tower while clambering aboard, and if the sub went
down he would have had no way to save himself. Adding to the
tension were the questions of whether the German crew had set
demolition charges to blow the sub apart or whether enemy sailors
waited in ambush somewhere inside its unfamiliar interior.
Fortunately for the boarding party, all the Germans were gone,
and there were no sudden explosions to rip the sub apart. The truth
was, the enemy sailors had scurried overboard so quickly they had-
n’t had time to set the demolition charges. But the enemy crew had
opened seacocks—valves on the hull designed to let water in or
out—in an effort to sink their sub. The Americans scrambled to close
the seacocks, but a stream of water six to eight inches in diameter
continued to gush through the sea strainer, an opening that filtered
seawater flowing into the engine’s cooling system. The flow had to
be stopped, but the strainer’s cover was nowhere in sight.
Miraculously, one of the boarders found it in a corner of the control
room and managed to force it into place. It was a close call. Had the
Germans thrown the cover into the bilges (the sub’s bottommost
compartments) or tossed it overboard, the boarding party likely
would not have been able to stem the inflow of water and U-505
would have gone to the bottom along with its would-be salvagers.
Even with the sea strainer problem solved, David and his men
were all alone aboard a “runaway enemy ship with machinery
humming all around them, surrounded by a bewildering array of
pipes, valves, levers and instruments with German labels on

Opposite: Lieutenant David’s boarding and salvage crew sets to work on U-505. The abandoned sub is dangerously low in the water, and the
peril to the Americans is immense. If the swamped U-boat suddenly sinks to the bottom, anyone inside is going with her. Above: From a gun
tub aboard the escort carrier USS Guadalcanal (CVE-60), Captain Gallery’s flagship, sailors and officers watch U-505 riding behind their ship
under tow. A tugboat would soon take over the job of hauling the U-boat nearly 2,000 miles from a spot off the West African coast to Bermuda.

APRIL 2019 AMERICA IN WWII 31

 the Shark-Catchers
them,” Gallery wrote in his memoir. The U-boat and its secrets
were all theirs, as long as they didn’t move the wrong lever, valve,
or gizmo and blow up or sink the vessel. David ordered two men
forward to the radio room, where they smashed open a few lock-
ers, located the precious codebooks, and quickly passed them to
men on deck. That ensured that the venture would have some-
thing of value to show even if the U-boat sank.
By this time U-505 was so low in the water that swells were
breaking across her topsides and beginning to wash into the con-
ning tower hatch. David ordered the one man who was still on deck
to close the hatch while the others worked below. The sub, with its
rudder still jammed, was traveling in circles at about six knots.
That’s when Gallery summoned Commander Earl Trosino, the
Guadalcanal’s chief engineer, to the bridge. “Trosino,” Gallery said,
“I want that ship. Take the men and get aboard. I want that ship.”
Enter the Engineer
TROSINO AND HIS MEN got a rude welcome to U-505. A large swell
picked up their boat and dropped it unceremoniously on the sub’s
deck, spilling them across the top of the sub. Collecting himself,
Trosino scrambled up the conning tower, only to discover the
by Phil Zimmer
lition charges that intelligence reports said would be at various
spots along the hull. They found 13, and none of them had been
set. But where was number 14? It was a worrisome question that
would go unanswered for three weeks before the charge turned up
deep in U-505’s bowels.
When U-505 was moving forward, she rode about 10 degrees
down at the stern, Trosino reported to Gallery. When she slowed
down, she lost lift in her stern diving planes and settled into a
steeper angle that submerged the conning tower hatch. Clearly,
towing would be the only way for Gallery to get his prize home
safely. None of the task group’s five destroyer escorts had towing
capacity, however, and the job had to be done right. Earlier, when
the Pillsbury had first brought U-505 alongside, the sub’s port
bow flipper had sliced a long gash in the destroyer escort’s hull
below the waterline. Two main compartments flooded, forcing
Pillsbury to cut the sub free and back off to tend its own wounds.
In the end it seemed the job of hauling Junior, as the seamen
nicknamed the captured U-boat, would fall to the Guadalcanal.
But towing an uncooperative sub with its rudder jammed far to
starboard presented challenges to Gallery, who also had to deal
with getting four Wildcats back on board. Further complicating

Above, left: Commander Trosino oversaw a thorough study of U-505. The sub, which had sunk eight Allied ships, packed hefty
firepower. Here are forward torpedo tubes 1, 2, 3, and 4, photographed by Trosino’s crew. Above, right: U-505’s sonar and radio center.
The hydrophone—sound sensors on the sub’s exterior—failed on the day of Captain Gallery’s attack, giving the Americans the advantage
of surprise. Opposite: As for U-505’s crewmen, they became prisoners aboard Guadalcanal. Here, a sailor hoses them down with
saltwater to give them relief from the day’s heat.

hatch wouldn’t open. The resourceful Americans snatched a Ger-
man bobbing in the water who showed them how to use a small
valve to let air into the pressure hull, equalizing the pressures
inside and allowing the hatch to be opened. Trosino thanked the
German, who was then shoved by crewmen back into the water
to await capture.
Once inside the U-boat, Trosino, who had worked as a chief
engineer aboard Sunoco tankers before the war, was in his ele-
ment. But although he knew his way around a standard engine
room, he, like David and his men, had never been aboard a sub-
marine. He quickly set to work figuring out how U-505 worked,
crawling around under the floor plates, in the bilges, tracing
pipelines. Somehow, he managed to close all the right valves and
didn’t open any of the wrong ones.
While Trosino worked his engineering magic, the other men
went through U-505 searching for the 14 five-pound TNT demo-
things, the carrier was low on fuel. In the end, Gallery detached
the fleet tugboat USS Abnaki (ATF-96) to haul U-505 to Ber-
muda. Meanwhile, the oiler USS Kennebec (AO-36) arrived with
the much-needed fuel.
O N THE WAY TO B ERMUDA , Trosino kept up his work
(despite the unnerving possibility that there was still an
undiscovered demolition charge on board). U-505 was
one of Germany’s Type IXC submarines, capable of traveling an
estimated 13,450 miles (moving on the surface at 10 knots)
between fuel fill-ups. Like most submarines of the day, U-505 was
basically a diesel-powered surface vessel capable of running sub-
merged for short periods on battery-powered electric motors.
Trosino determined that by disengaging the clutch to U-505’s
diesel engines and letting the propeller spin freely as the sub was
towed, he could recharge the vessel’s batteries and get the lights

32 AMERICA IN WWII APRIL 2019

and entire electrical system working. That, in turn, enabled him to
get U-505’s pumps running, which leveled the vessel in the water.
Soon, things were operating so well that Trosino suggested he
could get the sub to Bermuda under its own power. Gallery
scotched that idea, unwilling to risk losing his prize.
Opening a Secret Treasure
ON JUNE 19, after a voyage of some 1,960 miles, the Abnaki
pulled U-505 into Port Royal Bay, Bermuda. At last, the time had
come for a thorough study of Gallery’s one-of-a-kind catch. U-
505 proved to be a treasure trove of useful intelligence for the US
Navy, with an impact that would continue even after the war, as
US submarine designs incorporated some of the findings.
By June 20, the code-related materials from the U-505 arrived
at the Bletchley Park estate in Buckinghamshire, England, home of
Great Britain’s Government Code and Cypher School and its
decryption unit. The new material saved considerable time in
cracking the ever-changing German naval codes. U-505’s code-
books and related tables made it easier to read German messages,
and that helped Allied naval forces find and sink numerous U-
boats. The newly gleaned information also enabled the Allies to
reroute vital convoys away from lurking U-boat wolf packs.
Another important find aboard U-505 was its pair of G7es/T5
Zaunkönig (“Wren”) acoustic torpedoes. These sophisticated
weapons homed in on sound generated by passing ships.
Extensive analysis of the torpedoes yielded ideas to better protect
Allied transatlantic convoys and their naval escorts. Although the
Americans didn’t realize it at first, the G7es/T5s were tempera-
mental; at sea, mechanics had to service them daily or moisture
could detonate their complicated electrical fuses.
The U-505 capture would have made headlines on both sides of
the Atlantic, but instead, mum was the word. If the Kriegsmarine,
Nazi Germany’s navy, were to learn that a U-boat had been seized,
codebooks and all, the German code would change immediately,
and the Allies would be back to square one when trying to read
encrypted messages. So the US Navy did everything possible to
make U-505 invisible, beginning with repainting it to look like an
American sub and renaming it USS Nemo. The military also kept
the 59 surviving U-505 sailors (one man had died in the seizure)
apart from other POWs at Camp Ruston, Louisiana, and denied
the Red Cross access to them. It was a flagrant violation of the
Geneva Conventions, but the segregation helped conceal U-505’s
capture. The Germans eventually concluded that the sub and its
crew had been lost at sea.
At Camp Ruston, the U-boat men worked clearing forests and
picking cotton on nearby farms, impressing many farmers with
their work ethic. To the Germans, picking cotton could be “odi-
ous,” recalled POW Hans Goebeler. Snakes dropped from trees
and large wasps—nicknamed Stukas after the Junkers Ju 87 dive-
bomber aircraft—were everywhere. Goebeler noted that a farmer
offered to adopt him as a son after the war, promising he would
eventually inherit the farm.
Once the war in Europe ended, Goebeler and his crewmates
were free to write letters to their families to assure them they had
survived. On their way home, however, the men were diverted to
Scotland, where they worked two years in forced labor before
being released in late 1947.
The U-505 Legacy
GALLERY WAS VERY PROUD of TG 23.3’s historic capture of U-505
and the benefits that came from it. The hunter-killer “reception
committees” that the Allies arranged as a result, Gallery wrote
after the war, had a crippling effect on Germany’s U-boat wolf
packs in the Atlantic. The Kriegsmarine lost a total of 370 subs
between January 1944 and the end of the war in Europe in May
1945. That amounts to a startling 48 percent of the 765 lost dur-
APRIL 2019 AMERICA IN WWII 33
 The GERMAN Side of the Story
J
UNE 4, 1944, WAS “the worst day of my life,” said U-505
crewman Hans Goebeler. That day, after the capture of his
sub, he and other crew members were prisoners, locked
inside a steel cage aboard the USS Guadalcanal as “searing heat
from the ship’s engines turned the already stifling tropical air in
the cage into a virtual blast furnace.” It was all the worse when
they learned their efforts to scuttle their sub had failed. U-505
was being towed “like some wounded gray wolf being dragged
into captivity.”
It was an inglorious end for a submarine that had been raid-
ing since January 1941 and had sunk eight Allied cargo ships. But
U-505 had seen her share of troubles. She had frequently cut her
patrols short due to mechanical problems, many seemingly the
result of sabotage by French workers at her home base, Lorient,
France. Oberleutnant zur See (“Senior Lieutenant at Sea”)
Harald Lange, U-505’s skipper, had assumed command on
November 18, 1943, after the morale-crushing suicide of his
predecessor, who shot himself while the sub was submerged and
under a severe depth-charge attack. The tragedy added to U-
505’s growing reputation as a hard-luck vessel. It fell
to Lange to turn things around.
The 40-year-old Lange was U-505’s eldest
crew member and the oldest captain of a
battle-ready U-boat. He had been a mer-
chant mariner until 1939, when he was
activated as a member of Germany’s
naval reserve. Serving several years on
surface vessels before being assigned
to U-boats, he would lead U-505 on
her 11th and 12th missions.
U-505 left Brest, France, on her 12th
mission on March 16, 1944. At one point,
the outer hatch to torpedo tube number
two wouldn’t close completely, rendering
the sub incapable of diving below 65 feet.
That made her particularly vulnerable, espe-
cially to Allied planes. Just as bad, an undet-
onated and moisture-sensitive acoustic tor- After abandoning ship, rescue meant cap-
pedo was trapped in the tube. Goebeler ture for the men of U-505. These sailors
remarked that the sub was “stranded near from the sub’s 60-man crew are climbing
the surface like a sitting duck with a time climb aboard Guadalcanal from a lifeboat
bomb stuck in our rear.” Eventually, crew that also bears the body of their shipmate,
members donned breathing devices, swam the only German killed in the attack.
out, and after 20 hours’ work, fixed the
cover, allowing the torpedo to be pulled inside and serviced.
Sunday, June 4, began like any other day, except that U-505
was low on oxygen, so men not on duty were confined to their
bunks to conserve air. Goebeler quietly whispered prayers from
the small Bible his mother had given him and by late morning
was back on duty. That’s when the hydrophone man reported
faint propeller noises. Lange ordered the periscope up and
immediately shouted, “Destroyer!”
Lange had time to identify three enemy destroyers, planes
overhead, and another ship, probably an aircraft carrier. Clearly,
the U-boat’s underwater sound equipment had failed, because a
hunter-killer task force was nearly on top of them. Firing a tor-
pedo as a distraction, Lange ordered a dive. Hedgehog depth
charges from one of the destroyers missed, but then the U-boat
men heard a puzzling metallic clinking from above. Most said it
34 AMERICA IN WWII APRIL 2019
sounded like a heavy chain being dragged across the sub. A chill
ran up Goebeler’s spine; he feared the sub had snagged the
mooring chain of a mine, and he expected an explosion at any
time. The sound was actually bullets from American planes,
pinging off the hull. The planes were marking the sub’s location
for the destroyers.
U-505 was running at about 200 feet when 600-pound depth
charges exploded around her, knocking her crewmen off their
feet. The lights went out and, although the emergency lights
came on, electrical devices were inoperable. The aft torpedo
room was flooding. Lange ordered it evacuated and the water-
tight hatch closed. The main rudder was jammed, and because
the auxiliary rudder control was inaccessible in the flooded torpe-
do room, the sub was forced to turn in a tight circle, starboard.
Lange ordered U-505 to the surface. American bullets
slammed against the conning tower. Lange did his duty, being
the first man to step out into the firestorm to determine
whether to fight or abandon ship. Cut down by shrapnel, he
crawled back to the conning tower and ordered the men to
scuttle and abandon the sub. First watch officer Ober-
leutnant zur See Paul Meyer followed Lange out,
as procedure dictated; he, too, was wounded,
depriving U-505 of her second-in-command.
Chief engineer Joseph Hauser, the only
man left aboard who could set the sub’s
demolition charges, then decided to
scamper. Acting on his own initiative, ma-
chinist Alfred-Karl Holdenried opened
the valves on the diving cells to flood
them, but the valves jammed only part-
way open. Goebeler opened the sea
strainer, six to eight inches in diameter.
That might have scuttled the boat had the
diving-cell valves not jammed or had the
American boarders hesitated just a bit
longer before clambering aboard.
Goebeler later wrote about his experi-
ence aboard U-505 and his captivity. Once
released, he was excited to rejoin his family
in the now-divided Germany, but he bris-
tled at the de-Nazification program the
Allies required. He managed to jump off a
train just before it reached the German bor-
der and relied on “sympathetic smugglers”
to get him across before making his way home to Bettendorf,
thus avoiding the re-education process.
Later, upon learning that U-505 was being installed as a muse-
um exhibit in Chicago, he began to think about seeing her again.
In retirement, he and his wife moved to Chicago and organized
reunions of the Americans and Germans involved in the capture
of his beloved submarine. At a 1982 reunion, Goebeler, then 59,
had an opportunity to raise a stein of beer and toast Earl Trosino,
then 75, who as the USS Guadalcanal’s chief engineer had played
a crucial role in saving U-505 nearly four decades earlier.
Goebeler, who died in the late 1990s, openly admitted sur-
prise that the Americans were able to save U-505. “We couldn’t
believe it,” he said. “We thought that no one would be brave
enough to board that sinking ship.”
PHIL ZIMMER
 the Shark-Catchers
Above: The tug Abnaki hauls U-505, with a large US flag flying over it, toward Bermuda. Below: Commander Trosino got U-505
into working order, but Captain Gallery, seen aboard Guadalcanal wearing the German skipper’s hat, wouldn’t untether his prize.
ing the entire war, and that excludes subs scuttled
at the war’s end.
Gallery was also proud of the fact that the nearly
3,000 American sailors in his task group remained
silent about the U-505 seizure. That helped keep
the Germans in the dark about the sub’s fate.
The navy honored the men involved in the cap-
ture. David, who daringly led the initial boarding
party, received the Medal of Honor, the only one
bestowed on an Atlantic fleet sailor in World War II.
Torpedoman’s Mate Third Class Arthur Knispel and
Radioman Second Class Stanley Wdowiak received
the Navy Cross; they were the first two men aboard
U-505 after David. Boarding-party member Seaman
First Class Earnest Beaver received the Silver Star.
Gallery, for his role in conceiving and executing the
plan to capture a U-boat, received the Navy
Distinguished Service Medal, and Trosino received
the Legion of Merit. The entire task group received
a Presidential Unit Citation.
G ALLERY WENT ON to a distinguished naval
career, despite participating in the so-called Revolt of
the Admirals starting in 1949, an outcry by top navy
commanders against the government’s postwar plans to gut the
navy and other conventional forces and rely almost exclusively on
airborne nuclear weapons. He retired in 1960 as a rear admiral.
Trosino also rose to rear admiral prior to his retirement, in 1959.
As for U-505, at war’s end the submarine at the center of
by Phil Zimmer
Gallery’s success was deteriorating at Maine’s
Portsmouth Navy Yard (named for its proximity to
Portsmouth, New Hampshire). Finally, in 1946,
the navy designated the sub to become a target for
naval gunnery practice. When Gallery found out,
he contacted his brother John, a Catholic priest in
Chicago who had served as a WWII navy chaplain,
to ask him to lead a preservation effort. John
approached Chicago’s Museum of Science and
Industry about acquiring the sub as an exhibit.
The museum was interested, and in 1954, after
Chicago residents donated $250,000 for trans-
portation costs, US Coast Guard vessels wended
their way through the Great Lakes to deliver the
captured artifact.
After extensive restoration, the U-boat credited
with sending eight Allied ships totaling nearly
46,000 tons to the bottom of the sea went on dis-
play outside the museum. Fresh renovations came
in 2004–2005, when U-505 was moved indoors to
a special exhibit area. There, visitors can safely tour
the war prize so boldly captured by Gallery and his
men on the high seas. A
PHIL ZIMMER, a Vietnam-era staff sergeant with the US Army Re-
serve, has written extensively on World War II for various national
periodicals. For more about the U-505 exhibit in Chicago, see the
Landings article “A Nazi Sub Resurfaces in Chicago” by Joe Razes
in the June 2007 issue of America in WWII.
APRIL 2019 AMERICA IN WWII 35

A WWII Scrapbook
‘SHRAPNEL WAS
WHIZZING BY US’
I WILL TELL YOU in my own words what I
saw in taking the island of Betio, one of
the Tarawa islands, situated in the Gilberts.
All of this started on November 20, 1943.
We had joined a task force, the largest I had
ever seen.
It was about 4:30 in the morning and we
were approaching the islands. We were
about eight miles out when the battleships
started pumping 16-inch shells into Betio,
one of the heaviest-fortified islands of
Tarawa—the Jap air base was here (but the
army had bombed it for four or five days,
then the navy bombed it for three days
before we got there). All the time the Japs
were doing rapid fire at the whole fleet.
After the battleships quit firing, we
headed in to sweep a channel through, a
distance of about six miles. We were to
clear the mined waters so the ships could
get in, and also to direct the barges loaded
with marines and tanks to their places. The
water was shallow and full of coral. We
had to find a channel of water deep enough
for big ships to get in.
After we got inside the harbor, it was get-
ting light, and the island seemed to be going
up in smoke. The Japs were rapidly firing at
the task force, which had started to move in
behind us. We were behind a smoke screen
at this time and they could not see us. Then
we cleared the smoke and there we were,
right in front of the Japs like a lame duck.
Now, our ship was not built for this kind of
fighting—it was a mine-sweeper—but we
had three-inch guns, and they did all right.
We sank three ships and poured lead at the
fourth, and the Japs evacuated it. All the
A
WAR
STORIES
national archives
The fighting on Betio in the Battle of
Tarawa was some of the war’s fiercest.
Here, a US marine wields a flamethrower.
time, the shells and shrapnel were whizzing
around us and it sure was noisy. By that
time it was daylight and our bombers
swarmed the sky.
The island was covered with coconut
trees so thick it was impossible to see
through. The place seemed pretty dead, so
the first wave of marines [of the US 2nd
Marine Division] came up to our ship in
landing barges. Each barge had one small
amphibious tank and about 20 marines. As
we gave them their orders, they headed for
the beach, all laughing and talking. At this
hour it looked like we had won the battle,
it was so quiet.
The barges were swarming toward the
beach but ran into trouble. The Japs had
built a wall of coral and sticks under the
water, and the barges hit that. So they
opened the ends and started the tanks out,
but they dropped into deep water and were
gone. The marines waded in and when they
hit the beach, the Japs mowed them off
with machine guns. Some got through,
however. Then we sent the second wave in,
and in the meantime a destroyer had come
in and shelled the wall so the barges could
get the tanks in. A good share of the sec-
ond wave was killed.
In the afternoon, they started to bring
wounded marines aboard our ship, and
they soon covered the decks. Some were
dead before they got there. I helped wrap
some of them for sea burial and helped
care for the wounded ones. Some told us
the place was just a solid machine-gun
nest. Two said they were the only two left
of their complete wave.
During the second day, our planes
bombed all day long and the Japs were still
pretty strong. These were Japan’s best
fighters, called the Imperial Marines. They
were big guys, six feet and over. Some tried
to wade in shallow water to the next
island, but we had a destroyer sitting there
machine-gunning them as fast as they came
out. During the second night, the hand-
fighting continued and the marines began
using flamethrowers.
The marines captured 15 prisoners the
third day. They brought one up to our ship.
He was a sniper and said he killed 60 of our
marines. The snipers came out at night and
got up in the trees, so after dark the ships
shot lots of shrapnel through the treetops.
By this time the marines were using bull-
dozers to clear the airfield of bodies. Some
of the natives came to our ship and told of
the Japs making slaves out of them. They
said that the Japs knew two weeks before
we got there that we were coming and
moved the natives to safer places on the
other islands.
The marines were busy taking in sup-
plies on the fourth day. Japan claimed we
lost 2 battleships, 2 carriers, 16 destroyers,
and also 200 planes. All we really lost was
1 carrier and 1 plane in Tarawa.
A few nights after the island was secured,
APRIL 2019 AMERICA IN WWII 37
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 A
WAR
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Jap high-altitude planes came in and made

three runs across the island, each time drop-
ping six bombs, setting oil dumps on fire.
Two bombs just missed our ship. The
searchlights on the island showed the planes
pretty clear high up, and our shells were
bursting with a flash way below them. The
anti-aircraft was sure pretty at night, just
AM E RICA I N like so many fireworks on a Fourth of July.
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We stayed a couple of weeks and the
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STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP,
a diehard pessimist
MANAGEMENT, and CIRCULATION
1. Publication Title: America in WWII. 2. Publication Number: 1554-5296. 3. Filing Date: 10/29/2018. 4.
dad: the group member
Issue Frequency this period: December, February, May, June, August, October. Number of Issues Published with the grayest hair
Annually: Six. 6. Annual Subscription Price: $41.94. 7. Complete Mailing Address of Known Office of
Publication: 310 Publishing LLC, 4711 Queen Ave., Ste. 202, Harrisburg, Dauphin County, PA 17109-3125.
Contact Person: Heidi Kushlan. Telephone: 717-977-3926. 8. Complete Mailing Address of Headquarters the smell was awful, so I was glad to get
or General Business Office of Publisher: Same as above. 9. Full Names and Complete Mailing Addresses
of Publisher, Editor, and Managing Editor: Publisher, James P. Kushlan, 4711 Queen Ave., Ste. 202, going. The only time I really got scared
Harrisburg, Dauphin County, PA 17109-3125; Editor, Carl Zebrowski, 4711 Queen Ave., Ste. 202, [during all the fighting on Betio] was when
Harrisburg, Dauphin County, PA 17109-3125; Managing Editor, none. 10. Owner: 310 Publishing, LLC, 4711
Queen Ave., Ste. 202, Harrisburg, Dauphin County, PA 17109-3125; Heidi T. & James P. Kushlan, 4711 the shrapnel was whizzing by us and a big
Queen Ave., Ste. 202, Harrisburg, Dauphin County, PA 17109-3125; Kathryn & Richard Szarko, 4711 Queen piece came close to my head. Our ship was
Ave., Ste. 202, Harrisburg, Dauphin County, PA 17109-3125; Christine & Paul Smith, 4711 Queen Ave., Ste.
202, Harrisburg, Dauphin County, PA 17109-3125; Concetta R. Futchko, 4711 Queen Ave., Ste. 202, full of dents and our decks full of shrapnel.
Harrisburg, Dauphin County, PA 17109-3125; Paul & Donna Miller, 4711 Queen Ave., Ste. 202, Harrisburg, If those Japs had been on their toes with
Dauphin County, PA 17109-3125; Beverly Fowler-Conner, 4711 Queen Ave., Ste. 202, Harrisburg, Dauphin
County, PA 17109-3125. 11. Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and other Security Holders Owning or those big guns, they could have blown us
Holding 1 Percent or More of Total Amount of Bonds, Mortgages, or Other Securities: None. 13. Publication clear out of the water. We were loaded with
Title: America in WWII. 14. Issue Date for Circulation Data Below: 10/01/2018. 15. Extent and Nature of
Circulation: Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months/Nearest Single Issue. 15.a. Total 25 tons of TNT, 60,000 gallons of fuel oil,
Number of Print Copies: 23,033/22,000. 15.b. Paid Circulation (By Mail and Outside the Mail). (1) Mailed and a full load of ammunition, so all we
Outside-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541: 14,276/13,447. (3) Paid Distribution Outside
the Mails Including Sales Through Dealers and Carriers, Street Vendors, Counter Sales and Other Paid needed was one good hit.
Distribution Outside USPS: 3,013/2,825. (4) Paid Distribution by Other Classes of Mail Through the USPS:
118/113. 15.c. Total Paid Print Distribution: 17,407/16,385. 15.d. Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (By E VERETT C. HUBBY
Mail and Outside the Mail). (1) Free or Nominal Rate Outside-County Copies included on PS Form 3541: US Navy
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Nominal Rate Distribution Outside the Mail: 12/5. 15.e. Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution: 110/110.
15.f. Total Print Distribution: 17,517/16,495. 15.g. Copies Not Distributed: 5,516/5,505. 15.h. Total Print his brother-in-law, Wes Lindahl
Copies: 23,033/22,000. 15.i. Percent Paid: 99.4%/99.3%. 16. Electronic Copy Circulation. 16.a. Paid
Electronic Copies: 2,509/2,471. 16.b. Total Paid Print Copies + Paid Electronic Copies: 19,916/18,856. Send your War Stories submission, with
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certify that all information on this form is true and complete. Signature and Title of Editor, Publisher, Avenue, Suite 202, Harrisburg, PA 17109,
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that started from Nova Scotia and drove
all the way across Canada to Vancouver,
stopping at certain points. You got on at
one end of the train as a Canadian air force
trainee, were processed out of the RCAF,
and in the middle of the train were
processed into the US Army Air Corps [US
Army Air Forces]. For a brief period of
time you were neither, but you couldn’t get
off the train.
I entered the air corps as an aviation
cadet, got my wings in Moultrie, Georgia,
5 August 1942 and was ready to fly fight-
ers. I wound up flying bombers, first the B-
17, in training, which I didn’t particularly
care for and still don’t. Then they trans-
ferred us out to Tucson, Arizona, to learn
to fly B-24 Liberators [heavy bombers]. I
walked around that thing looking for a
door to get in before I found out that you
had to get in through the bomb bay—the
On leave from Canada, Larkin spent Christmas Eve 1941 in New York City, posing here with
fellow RCAF airman Perry Cartwright and a woman identified only as “Honey Bee.”
B-17 had a door; the B-24 didn’t.
It took us a long time to learn how to fly
the airplane. From [the time I earned] my
wings in August 1942, I didn’t leave the
States until the end of February 1943. Just
about the time you got word you were
shipping out, you had a little soul search-
ing: do I really have it? Up to that point
nobody had come back yet to tell us what
was going on over there (they were still
over there or they were dead). We heard
about the suicidal tendencies of the
Japanese pilots—they’d ram you. What
happens if I’m eyeball to eyeball with a
Japanese fighter? Who’s going to budge? I
wasn’t sure. I found out later that I was so
damn busy flying my airplane, I could care
less what he did.
52 AMERICA IN WWII APRIL 2019
A a return on his investment. I loved it up in
I WAS THERE
What planes did you train in?
In Canada I started with a Tiger Moth [a
training biplane manufactured by De
Havilland Canada Aircraft], a great little
airplane. I love it! That was at what they
called Elementary School No. 10 at Hamil-
ton, Ontario. You put in about 90 hours
there, including 10 hours of night flying,
which was unusual, and 10 hours of instru-
ments. We were doing instrument takeoffs
on skis in Tiger Moths. That was just to
give us confidence. Nobody was ever going
to fly a Tiger Moth on instruments.
We finished that course and went to No.
6 Service Flying Training School at Dun-
ville, Ontario, which was the second and
final school before you got your wings.
The schools were part of what was
called the British Commonwealth Air
Training Plan. I trained with Australians,
New Zealanders, South Africans, English,
and RCAF, which were half Americans
anyway—half of them were from Texas,
and some of them were insufferable. I did-
n’t quite finish. I wanted to, but they said,
if you guys are going back, you got to meet
that train in Toronto in a couple of weeks.
I was just about two or three weeks from
getting my wings in Canada when I had to
go back. And the only reason I went back
was that the US Army Air Corps offered a
$10,000 war-risk insurance. Don’t forget:
if I buy the farm, my old man’s entitled to
Canada. They ran a tight ship and you had
old sergeants who knew their business.
They were real pros.
The Harvard, which we flew at Dun-
ville, was the same airplane as the [North
American Aviation] AT-6. They now call
them T-6s, and they were used in American
training. They flew the same airplane in a
different way, and this got me into a lot of
trouble. In fact I was up for washout two
weeks after I’d been in the air corps. I got
all clanked up. I didn’t know how to
march. I didn’t know how to pick up a
rifle. Americans carried it with the narrow
edge on the right shoulder; the British, the
flat side on the left shoulder. Everything
was different.
I had a plan in case I did wash out. I
called it Plan Baker. I still had my Cana-
dian uniform hanging on the rack. I hadn’t
been paid. I didn’t owe the US air forces
anything. They owed me! And if those so-
and-sos were going to wash me out, I was
going to wait until the weekend, hang up
everything that belonged to the US on the
rack, not take a thing, get in that Canadian
uniform, and walk out the front gate—they
wouldn’t bother me—and hitchhike back
to Canada. I planned to borrow my bro-
ther’s birth certificate and rejoin the RCAF.
But I didn’t have to do it, the way it
worked out. The first step in a washout
was to change flight instructors (part of my
problem was that I didn’t get along with
mine). I lucked out and got an instructor
who had been an officer in the RCAF. He
said to me, “I know what they’re doing to
you. They did it to me. Get in and fly it the
way you’re used to.”
So I got in and flew it and didn’t do too
well. He said, “I’m going to have to agree
with them.” So he wrote me up as contin-
uing with the washout process.
For three days I sat around. I went to the
flight line with the other cadets, [with]
everybody getting away from you [in case]
this washout business might be catching.
And I drank Cokes. I don’t know where I
got the money. I hadn’t been paid. I can’t
stand a Coke to this day! For three days I
sat, went to the line with them, marched
back, did everything except fly.
Then one afternoon my instructor, the
ex-Canadian, came in. He said, “You
heard anything yet?” I said no. He said,
“I’ve got a sick cadet. I’ve got an hour to
 A
I WAS THERE

Prepared for Takeoff

William T. Larkin • interviewed by Carol Auslander
ly
fa
it la
the w l a
u te y of
oted co e
othe
y u let th
ll photo

W
ILLIAM T. LARKIN WAS ONE OF those young Americans
who wanted to fly planes in combat before the United
States joined World War II. So, in mid-1941, at 20
years old, he left his native Wood-Ridge, New Jersey, and traveled
north to enlist in Canada, which had officially been at war with
Nazi Germany since 1939. Canada was desperate for pilots.
Larkin didn’t remain on the far side of the border for long. He
was an American, after all, and his native country was soon pulled
into the war by the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.
The US military now needed pilots, and he returned home, with
some misgiving.
The following interview with Larkin was conducted by Carol
Auslander of the Army Air Forces Historical Association on No-
vember 15, 1992. Due to the length of the transcript, we’re pub-
lishing it in two parts (each edited a bit for length). The second
segment will run in our next issue.
When did you join the air force?
I started in the Royal Canadian Air Force. I joined the RCAF in
August of 1941 as an AC-2, which is the Canadian equivalent of
a buck private. Then, in May of 1942, they said, “If you Amer-
icans want to go back, you better do it now.” They had a train

Above, left: William Larkin wanted to fly combat missions, but America wasn’t part of the war yet, so he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Here he is in October 1941, an RCAF enlistee. Above, right: A few months after Pearl Harbor, he returned to the States to become a pilot
in the US Army Air Forces. Here he poses (rear, center) with crewmen.

APRIL 2019 AMERICA IN WWII 51

spare. Why don’t we go fly?”
I got into the airplane. I had already
signed out of the US air corps, psychologi-
cally. He said, “Take me over to the auxil-
iary field, join the pattern, and land.”
Now, see, I had over 100 hours in that air-
plane in Canada, [but] they weren’t about
to solo me down here, so there was a prob-
lem. I fired it up, taxied out, took off and
flew to the auxiliary field, joined the pat-
tern, and landed. “Pretty good landing,”
he said. “Do it again.” I did it. He said,
“Once more.” I did it.
He said, “Take me over to the stage
house” (where instructors and cadets
would wait to practice). “I want a
smoke…. Take it up and shoot a few land-
ings. Watch me. I’ll wave when I want you
in.” So I soloed, and that seemed to break
the mental block I had. After that I had no
more problem.
We went from single-engine cadet school
to four-engine. I couldn’t even reach the
wing of the damn thing, and it made me
very disgusted because I was a born fighter
pilot (like most bomber pilots believe).
When I got through learning how to fly
that B-17, I went out to Tucson, Arizona,
and learned to fly B-24s. That’s where I
first picked up my crew.
They gave me a piece of paper with
names on it, one of which was mine, and
barracks numbers, and [it] said, “Go find
’em. They’re your crew.” Well, I rooted
them out and found out that we were going
to be there for about a week and then go
on to Alamogordo, New Mexico.
My crew all owed money to everybody
because we were leaving before payday. I
was the only one with money. I had about
150 bucks in travel funds and had to bail
half of them out. Being nice guys, I never
lost a penny, got it all back.
Alamogordo was a hellhole. It was made
for the RAF [British Royal Air Force]. The
RAF took one look at it and said, ”We
don’t want it!” (The RAF did a lot of train-
ing over here because the weather was better
and the Jerrys [Germans] weren’t strafing
their airfields.) There were no windows
in the barracks, just wooden shutters. The
heat was practically nonexistent. You had
to walk to the latrines and showers
through about six inches of dust so that by
the time you got through with your show-
er and got back, why bother?
We were there about three or four

APRIL 2019 AMERICA IN WWII 53

weeks, then went up to Topeka, Kansas,
which was a civilized base. There we fin-
ished our training and went overseas. We
picked up our airplane about the middle of
January and trained with it until the end of
February, when we departed.
They didn’t tell us where we were going.
We took off on sealed orders to be opened
when we were an hour in the air. However,
I already knew that we were going to India.
Even though our destination was classified,
it was no secret how they were fixing the
airplane we were taking. I walked up to the
engineering officer and said, “Hey, what
are you setting up for?” “Oh, this one’s
going to India.” So I knew we were going
to India. It was sooo secret! We left the
States through Florida and flew down
through South America, into Africa, and
on to India.
We were assigned to the [Tenth Air
Force’s] 7th Bomb Group, 9th Squadron,
who were at a little town called Pandaves-
war. We really didn’t know where it was
because they couldn’t give us any maps.
The maps we had were 100 miles south of
the course. We flew 100 miles south so we
would be on the map until we got approx-
imately where we thought it would be and
turned in on what the navigators call a
“landfall.”
When you got to Pandaveswar did you
go right into combat?
We landed on March 15 and I flew my
first mission on the 19th. In between, we
had one flight with the squadron com-
mander to check us out.
Was combat like you expected it to be?
It’s unreal at first. You’ve seen so many
movies, and you see the Nips [Japanese]
whipping by, flak banging around you.
You can’t believe this can hurt. You don’t
hear the noise that Hollywood puts in, the
fighter sounds. No, the airplane sounded
just like it did in Topeka.
[But there are] little things out there that
could be dangerous, and I really didn’t find
that out until my second mission. We got
intercepted. I was number three in the sec-
ond element, which was the left wing of the
lead (and the number two was on the right
side). He [the lead] got into trouble. He got
hit, started to burn, and fell out of forma-
tion. After he left I couldn’t see him. Then
it came to me suddenly: somebody could
54 AMERICA IN WWII APRIL 2019
A which might bring down a bird, and a
I WAS THERE
get killed doing this.
He went down, and 40 years later I saw
him again. We thought they were dead. We
heard nothing back from the Japanese. But
most of the crew bailed out and were
POWs. We had a reunion in 1990, and I
ran into Owen Baggett, the copilot. He
said, “Tell me about it.” I said, “Well,
you’ll have to ask my copilot. I only saw
After US Army Air Forces flight training, Larkin received his pilot’s wings in August 1942.
Here, that December, he’s a second lieutenant in a B-24 in Topeka, Kansas.
you from the time it started to burn. You
tell me!”
It was quite a story. They weren’t treat-
ed well in prison camp. Our ops [opera-
tions] officer, Bill Wright, was shot down
on December 1, 1943, and we never got
word back. They [Wright and his crew]
disappeared and were dead as far as we
knew, but Bill died in prison camp as a
result of a beating because he found a cig-
arette butt, picked it up, and hid it. The
guard challenged him and he got the rifle-
butt treatment.
We had our own adjustments to that.
You decided that if you could, you were
not going to surrender. You were going to
run. They might not get you. There was no
support as developed later on in the war, in
terms of air-sea rescue, or any kind of res-
cue, or even rescue equipment. You had a
musette bag between the seats that had 20
rounds of ammunition for a .45 and 20
rounds of .45-caliber scatter ammunition,
mosquito net, some malaria pills, and
things like that. You figured your own way
out of it.
This sounds sort of Hollywoodish, but
you have to have some sort of plan. I knew
railroads, and I knew that the local people
of Burma thought that evil spirits were out
at night, so you were to travel at night
only. I planned to follow the railroads and
then make my way across the mountains to
India.
We had pictures of Japanese fighter
cockpits, and if I got near a Japanese air-
field, I was going to try to steal an air-
plane. I wouldn’t attempt to start one up
because everything is in a foreign lan-
guage. Japanese throttles, I found out later,
you pulled them on; you didn’t push them
on. That was important. If I ever got near
a Japanese airfield without being detected,
I would have dug a hole, stayed in it—time
was the only thing I had working for me,
before I starved to death—[and] I would
have waited until someone fired up an air-
plane for a preflight. Then I was going to
try to take it. Stay low, stay under our
radar, and as soon as you get into safe
country, belly it in. Don’t try to land at an
airfield. I never had to do that, but I did
find out where the altimeter was, where
the air speed was, and what was impor-
tant—where the brakes were.
We were not considered eligible to be
prisoners of war by the Japanese. They took
the legal fiction that since Burma had not
declared war, we were bombing a neutral
country and were war criminals and not
entitled to POW status. So, you see, there
was not much sense in trying to surrender. I
never had to try my scheme, thank God.
What was the typical procedure for a
day with a mission?
Missions were posted the night before.
Early in my tour they briefed us the night
before and then you had all night to worry
about where you were going, which didn’t
help your sleep too much. But then they
found out that the enemy was getting prior
information, so they changed the briefing
to early morning. Just the names and air-
plane assignments were posted the night
before at [the] operations [office], which
was under guard. You knew you were up.
If you didn’t know, somebody would tell
you.
We had to take off before the sun came
up, in the morning twilight, because five
minutes after the sun was up, it got hot.
When you’ve got hot temperatures, the air-
plane takes longer to get off, and we were
using all the runway we had. If takeoff was
delayed, they usually canceled the mission.
You fired up and taxied by just bare
light, but by the time you got into position,
you could see well. You took off at one-
minute intervals. The airplanes were very
heavy, almost overloaded. You had to go
fast to get off, but then, with the hot tem-
peratures, you were liable to blow your
tires. So you were sort of dancing on a
string.
Once you got off, you didn’t do a thing
to the plane. You just waited until it accel-
erated; you’re afraid whatever you might
do would interfere with its picking up
speed. You’re only about a foot or two off
the ground, and the ground was sometimes
rolling terrain.
Twenty seconds past the end of the run-
way was touch and go, but you sort of
inched it up to about 20 feet or so and then
held it until you reached good air speed,
then you started to climb. In that critical
period if you start hitting the wash of the
airplane [the turbulence created by the pro-
pellers of the plane in front of you]—they
call it propwash now—you got your heart
in your throat a few times. But once you
reached your speed, no problem.
Then you turn on course and climb and
climb and climb, and then level off,
depending on the mission and the defenses,
anywhere from 18,000 feet. I had a bomb
run that was 23,000 feet. That was over
Rangoon [in Burma], which was heavily
defended with fighters and flak. But we’ve
bombed from 500 feet too, taking out
undefended bridges. Most of the bombing
was high-level.
The missions averaged anywhere from 6
to 8 hours, sometimes 10, and I had one
that was 12 hours and 30 minutes. So
you’d see the sun come up and almost see
it go down again.
When we first arrived over there in the
spring, they said, “Oh, when the monsoon
comes, you guys won’t have to fly. The
weather’s so lousy nobody flies!” What a
lie! When the monsoon came, we flew any-
way and hoped you got through. You’d
wiggle your way through the weather. You
generally could get to a target in the morn-
ing. We had to climb over mountains 8,000
to 10,000 feet high, which was where the
Himalayas turned down in northern
Burma to become the Naga Hills. That’s
where the headhunters were.
The cloud buildup would start in the
morning, thunderclouds in the making. By
the heat of the day, three or four o’clock,
APRIL 2019 AMERICA IN WWII 55
they were thunderstorms and you avoided
them like the plague. They were like a wall.
You flew around them or over them, not
through them, if possible.
Most of the time the targets were wide
open, but trying to get back through that
weather meant trying to find a thin spot in
the cloud cover, poking your nose in and
peeking your head in. You might get
through. Well, we did. But we never had an
airplane that flew into that weather on
three engines that came out. For whatever
reason, it happened that way—unbalanced
power, turbulence, and inexperienced
pilots.
We didn’t have much experience. When
we landed there [in India], none of us had
much airtime. What you didn’t know
might get you killed, but it didn’t scare you
too much.
In missions, weather was a big problem
until about October, then it tapered off.
The bulk of the missions were flown under
horrible weather conditions. Sometimes
we’d go down to lower altitudes, penetrate
over the water anywhere from 50 feet up.
If you see spray blowing off the water,
you’re too low. You have to go up. Your
altimeter wasn’t very accurate because of
the pressure changes with the weather over
there. The difference between what you set
your altimeter at for takeoff and what you
had two hours later over the water could
be off as much as 100 or 200 feet.
We didn’t get any weather briefings
because we didn’t have any weather sta-
tions. We were just told, “We know the
weather’s going to be lousy. Set your
altimeter and bomb.” See, it was like fight-
ing with tomahawks!
When you went out on a mission, how
many planes went out at a time?
We had squadron missions where the
targets were softer, in a sense. I’ve been on
missions where they’ve sent six airplanes,
and then the planes start to fall out of for-
mation—this one had a bad engine, this
one had no generator—and you wind up
with three or four. But we were not to go
on to any target with less than three.
Usually we’d go on group missions. We
had four squadrons in the group: 9th,
436th, 492nd, 493rd. On our airdrome,
Pandaveswar (we called it Panda for short),
we had two squadrons and the group head-
quarters, with one squadron at each end of
56 AMERICA IN WWII APRIL 2019
A with the names, airplanes, and timing—
I WAS THERE
the field. The squadron areas were separat-
ed, and we rarely got over there because
nobody had anything to drive. If you were
a wheel [big wheel, or big shot], you had a
jeep or a staff car or something. The rest of
us had to walk everywhere, though they
took us out in a truck to the airplanes.
In Burma, Larkin and his group bombed
infrastructure critical to the Japanese.
Bridges like this were standard targets.
Most of our exercise was walking from the
quarters to the mess to the club and back,
or out to the truck to get on a mission. So
we led a rather dull existence.
What was a briefing like?
A briefing was pretty informal, because
you didn’t have to put on a parade. It wasn’t
the way Hollywood portrays it. Sure, when
the colonel walked in, you stood up. You’d
do that anyway. But he generally wasn’t
there; he had four squadrons. The squad-
ron commander would be there if he was
going on the mission, and he flew one out
of three, because he was a valuable man.
Some of them wanted to fly more, but they
had their orders: stay on the ground; that’s
not what they’re paying you for!
The briefings were generally conducted
by the operations officer. You and your
crew would walk in. There’d be an infor-
mal, “Your crew all here?” “Yeah.” Then
they’d give you the basic target and air-
plane assignments. They’d post a chart
engine start time, taxi time, takeoff time.
You knew your takeoff time by counting
the airplanes in front of you and adding a
minute for each one from the first takeoff
time that was posted. He’d give you the
mission and the tactics—high-level, low-
level, formation, individual; the type of
bombing; who was leading—“The 493rd is
leading today”; and what other squadrons
were involved. You get off behind them, fly
your route, pick up the other two
squadrons, and climb to base altitude.
We’d stack down for bombing, not up,
because by stacking down you could see the
other aircraft. The lead squadron sets the
bombing altitude, and the next squadron
comes in 500 feet below them. Therefore
each airplane in the formation had the same
vertical separation. Flights and groups
stack up; squadrons stack down.
They had a good-size area map on a tri-
pod. It had the bomb line and turning points
drawn on it on acetate [a clear overlay].
These were important because it gave us an
idea of the area. They had headhunters over
there—you get in the wrong place, you’re
liable to come home without it.
Once you crossed the bomb line, you
could test-fire your guns and put your
bombs on “armed,” which meant that
somebody went back into the bomb bay and
pulled the pins. The bombs had a safety
wire that went through the fuse. When the
bombardier put the switch to armed, that
locked the wires so that when the bombs
went out, the wires were pulled out of the
fuses and they were ready to do the job.
The next man to brief us was the intelli-
gence officer. He’d give us the target signif-
icance and the enemy aircraft defenses that
he knew of, then he’d assign airplane re-
connaissance tasks. You always did recon-
naissance of your own—anything you saw.
The gunners would say, “I see a boat down
there,” and the navigator would note the
time and location. He’d put a note in his log
and you’d report that when you got back.
Boats were a high priority. Anything with a
motor, you figure the Japanese had—the
local people went around in sailing ves-
sels—so if it had a motor, you blew it up.
After the intelligence officer was
through, they’d break up and the squadron
navigator would take the navigators aside
and give them a fill-in on specific problems
of navigation, give them a hack time (syn-
chronizing watches), things like that. And
the squadron bombardier would take the
bombardiers aside and give them the latest
information he may have: type of fusing
(we got that too), kind of bomb delay. The
whole briefing never took more than 20
minutes. Unlike the movies, it was not
done from memory. They read the infor-
mation off from a clipboard, because you
couldn’t afford any mistakes.
On the way out to the planes, you’d stop
and turn in anything you had on you to the
intelligence clerk. The only things you were
permitted to take were your dog tags and
one picture, maybe. They had to allow that
picture because people would do that any-
way, but no letters, nothing like that.
Name, rank, serial number was the name
of the game.
For each flight, you were issued a canvas
belt, which served as an escape kit. It was
locally made and contained 100 silver
rupees minted in 1942, before the Japanese
went into Burma. After 1942 the British
changed the mintage from silver to some
base metal, and the silver ones were all
withdrawn. The rupees in our belts were
special dispensation from the Raj [the
Looking like a star in a Hollywood promo
shot, a dapper Larkin poses with a cigarette
in Calcutta, India, in mid-1943.
British sovereign on the Indian subconti-
nent]. If we tried to buy off a native with
the current rupees, he wouldn’t take it,
because if he was picked up with them in
his hand, the Japanese would kill him. So
we had to have our issue of silver rupees—
[and] our escape chart and what were
called blood chits, cards in local dialects
identifying us as American military person-
nel and offering reward for our safe return.
There are about 50 different dialects over
there, so if one card in the pack didn’t
work, you tried others and hoped the guy
you were dealing with could read and that
you had his dialect. These cards were num-
bered, and all the escape gear remained
sewn into the belt, which was turned in
after each flight.
Before we left the chaplain would say,
“I’ll be in the ops office if anyone wants to
see me.” Some did, but most were a bunch
of heathens.
To be continued, with Larkin’s stories of
bombing missions in the China-Burma-
India theater, in the next issue of America
in WWII. A
CAROL AUSLANDER is an original member
of the Army Air Forces Historical Associ-
ation and directed its oral history project.
This interview is part of the project’s col-
lection. For more information visit www.
aafha.org. WILLIAM T. LARKIN reached the
rank of major in the US Army Air Forces
during World War II and, after service in
the Korean and Vietnam Wars, retired as a
lieutenant colonel. He died on Christmas
Day 2008.
APRIL 2019 AMERICA IN WWII 57

The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill,
Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance
that Won World War II
by Winston Groom, National
Geographic, 463 pages, $30
T
HE TITLE OF prolific, best-selling author
Winston Groom’s new book says it
all, or at least a lot of it. In this thick
tome, The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill,
Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance that Won
World War II, Groom draws together the
histories of the three most influential and
powerful men of their time: President
Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier
Joseph Stalin.
Groom begins the book with the 1943
Tehran Conference, held in the Soviet em-
bassy in Iran. It was the first time the Big
Three Allied war leaders all met together in
person. They discussed, among other things,
opening a second front in Western Europe,
a strategy Stalin had been advocating to
draw Wehrmacht forces away from Ger-
many’s invasion of the Soviet Union. They
also took this opportunity to look ahead
toward what would follow after the war.
Although Groom uses the conference to
set the stage for his book, it is actually the
culminating event. From there, he works
backward, alternating the background sto-
ries of each of the three leaders, which
58 AMERICA IN WWII APRIL 2019
A
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AND MEDIA
unfold in chronological parallel. Some-
times the similarities between Roosevelt
and Churchill are striking. They both had
tortured relationships with their mothers;
they both experienced a privileged upbring-
ing, with ready access to heads of state;
and they both attended private schools,
where they experienced loneliness and iso-
lation. Both served as heads of their nations’
governments, of course, and Churchill had
served as first lord of the admiralty in 1911
and again in 1939, while Roosevelt had
been unanimously confirmed as assistant
secretary of the navy in 1913.
As for Stalin, who came from more mod-
est origins, Groom says, “Compared with
Churchill and Roosevelt, Stalin probably
had more in common with German Chan-
cellor Adolf Hitler, who had once aspired to
be an artist; Stalin in his youth sought to
compose romantic poetry. But both instead
became revolutionary dictators who mur-
dered vast populations of their own coun-
tries—of other countries as well.”
Groom moves methodically through
each of their lives: Roosevelt began his first
term as president in 1933 as Stalin ascended
the Soviet ranks and Churchill’s political
career soared and then wavered. Their
political lives collided when Hitler invaded
Austria in 1938, a move expressly forbid-
den by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Hitler
followed up by invading Czechoslovakia’s
Sudetenland, resulting in the Munich
Agreement of 1938, which allowed Hitler
to keep this territory. Europe, weary from
World War I, looked the other way as
Churchill delivered “eloquent harangues”
to shake Great Britain out of its apathy. As
Neville Chamberlain, Britain’s prime min-
ister at the time, turned a blind eye (along
with the rest of Europe) and promised
“peace in our time,” Churchill’s words
proved prophetic in 1939, when Hitler
took Prague and gained access to the
impressive Skoda armaments works. As
Britain suddenly faced the possibility of
German invasion in 1940, Churchill was
appointed prime minister. Stalin, mean-
while, addressed his own concerns about a
Nazi invasion by signing the German-
Soviet Nonaggression Pact in 1939. But
that lasted only until Germany broke it by
invading the Soviet Union two years later.
World war, then, brought Roosevelt,
Churchill, and Stalin together, and together
they strategized, bickered, and ultimately
oversaw Hitler’s downfall. Sometimes they
accomplished this with stunning courage,
as on June 18, 1940, when Churchill deliv-
ered a 36-minute speech to the House of
Commons, telling his countrymen that
later generations would call this time
“their finest hour.” Sometimes they accom-
plished this with brutal force, as when
Stalin routinely sent untrained soldiers to
face skilled veteran German troops ad-
vancing on Moscow. He would wear down
the Germans by sacrificing his army and
then send in fresh troops, of which he had
an unlimited supply.
Inexplicably, Roosevelt found Stalin
engaging. Churchill disagreed. He didn’t
trust Stalin and didn’t want interference
with the relationship that he had cultivated
with FDR. The iconic photograph of the
three men taken at the Tehran Conference
perfectly reveals the tension in their rela-
tionship. Churchill and Stalin sit at oppo-
site ends, with Roosevelt bridging the mid-
dle ground. His body language shows sup-
port for both. Churchill broods with his
eyes fixed on the ground, while Stalin
looks straight at the camera—direct, arro-
gant, and challenging.
Groom offers no real new information
in The Allies, but he repackages and paral-
lels the personal histories of Churchill,
Roosevelt, and Stalin in an interesting way.
The book is a well-researched, easy read
about three fascinating individuals and
their outsize impact on a crucial period of
world history. As Groom says, “For better
or for worse, none of the Allies ever
seemed destined for a lesser fate.”
A LLYSON PATTON
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
Kangaroo Squadron:
American Courage in the
Darkest Days of World War II
by Bruce Gamble, Da Capo Press,
416 pages, $28
T
HE MEANING OF the word luck varies
according to perspective. Regarding
WWII military service, one person
might say a man was lucky because,
although he was in an infantry company
for several years, he never saw substantial
combat. Another might say he was unlucky
in that same situation because his lack of
battle experience denied him the sort of
comradeship and glory only combat can
provide.
During the first 11 months of the war in
the Pacific, any questions about a man’s
military experience being lucky or unlucky
were somewhat moot, since very few
Americans were integral to the fighting in
more than one location. There was one
unit, however, the US Army Air Force
Squadron, eventually designated the 435th
Bombardment Squadron and more com-
monly known as the Kangaroo Squadron,
that seemed to be everywhere. The
squadron’s courage and tenacity helped lay
the foundation for the eventual massive
American and Allied buildup in the South-
western Pacific. The new book Kangaroo
Squadron: American Courage in the
Darkest Days of World War II by the mil-
itary historian Bruce Gamble is the first
published study of this unique squadron.
In telling the story, Gamble draws on US
veterans’ diaries, memoirs, and letters—
and a footlocker from his “Uncle Johnny”
—as well as on Japanese accounts.
During 1940 and 1941, President Frank-
lin Roosevelt and senior US military offi-
cers were well aware of Japanese aggres-
sion in Asia and the Pacific. They knew
that the United States’ territories there,
including its commonwealth in the Philip-
pines, were extremely vulnerable to Japa-
nese attack. They also knew that military
procurement decisions during the mid-
1930s had created a new generation of air-
craft, including the Boeing B-17, and at the
very start of December 1941, they ordered
a squadron of these newly built and tested
heavy bombers to Clark Field in the Philip-
pines for a two-year deployment. Finally, it
appeared that America was taking decisive
preparatory action in the Pacific.
The logistics of delivering the planes to
the Philippines were a major challenge. The
US Army Air Forces eventually decided
that the squadron’s crews would fly their
planes individually from the Bay Area in
California to the Philippines. Essentially,
the aircraft would island-hop for refueling
all the way to Clark Field. This was a long
and difficult flight under normal condi-
tions. The first stop was the army’s Hick-
am Field in Hawaii.
The B-17s heading to the Philippines
soon discovered that normal conditions no
longer existed. Indeed, several of the
bombers were arriving in Hawaii at the
exact time of the Japanese raid on Pearl
Harbor. They had been disarmed to reduce
weight and save fuel, and some of them,
defenseless, were damaged in the attack.
Following the Japanese attacks in
Hawaii and the Philippines, the squadron
received new orders to report to Towns-
ville, Australia. Their island-hopping route
modified, 11 B-17Es reached their destina-
tion by February 20, 1942. Before long, the
unit was dubbed the Kangaroo Squadron.
The Kangaroo Squadron’s initial mis-
sions were to reconnoiter and bomb Japa-
nese forces in Rabaul, New Guinea. It was
a long, grueling, and dangerous flight from
Townsville to Rabaul. Although the bomb-
ings had limited success, they represented a
rare Allied offensive action at this stage of
the war. The squadron did help delay or
halt several Japanese attempts to capture
Port Moresby, 500 miles from Rabaul.
The squadron also succeeded in perilous
extraction missions to the Philippines. As
the conditions of the American and Filip-
ino forces fighting the Japanese on Bataan
and Corregidor continued to deteriorate,
Roosevelt ordered General Douglas Mac-
Arthur out of the islands. The squadron
was selected to rescue the general, his fam-
ily, and some top advisors. Several B-17s
flew from Australia to Del Monte Field in
Mindanao in the Southern Philippines. The
mission was dangerous but proved un-
eventful. After that, the squadron flew mis-
sions from Australia to the Philippines to
rescue the commonwealth’s President Man-
uel Quezon and Vice President Sergio
Osmeña.
Another success for the squadron was
little-known strikes against targets in the
Philippines shortly after American and
Filipino forces surrendered on Bataan in
April 1942. The raids, labeled the Royce
Special Mission, originated in Australia
and attacked unsuspecting Japanese forces
in Davao, Cebu City, and Manila. Unlike
the B-17s in the April 18 Doolittle Raid on
Tokyo, these returned to their home base
and continued to fly military sorties.
The final success of the squadron was
reconnaissance missions prior to and dur-
ing the US Marine Corps’s landing on
Guadalcanal in August. Its intelligence
proved invaluable to the US Navy ships
and the amphibious landing forces.
By November 11, 1942, the Kangaroo
Squadron had completed its last mission in
the Southwest Pacific. Its members were
amazed by the size, scope, and quickness of
the Allies’ Pacific expansion. The days of
jury-rigging airplane repairs as standard
practice were over. The airmen were
ordered back to the United States to serve
APRIL 2019 AMERICA IN WWII 59

as aviation trainers, sharing the lessons
they’d learned. Most Americans would
consider their incredible experience lucky.
DENNIS EDWARD FLAKE
Hummelstown, Pennsylvania
Under a Darkening Sky: The American
Experience in Nazi Europe 1939–1941
by Robert Lyman, Pegasus Books,
332 pages, $27.95
T
HE FIRST AMERICANS in Europe during
World War II were not the liberators
of Sicily or Italy or France. Rather,
they were journalists, diplomats, attachés,
writers, and businessmen, often embedded
and always observant of a continent lurch
ing into war. In Under a Darkening Sky,
Robert Lyman recounts their experiences
watching invasion approach as they be
came refugees and sought in vain to draw
their own nation into the struggle against
Nazism. Lyman grounds his history in excel
lent accounts of Austria and Czechoslovaia
succumbing to Nazi invasion, abandoned
by the rest of Nazi appeasing Europe, and
A THEATER OF WAR
Alone We Fight
and Air Strike
M
OVIE TITLES, slogans, and adver-
tising copy are usually devel-
oped with a great deal of care,
but there are times when a title or de-
scription can create false anticipation.
Of course, not all text is literal. Night-
mare in a title usually denotes horror,
but it may also be appropriate for a psy-
chological drama. Two WWII films just
released for DVD and streaming mar-
kets might not be what they first appear.
Alone We Fight (2018) opens with a
prologue about the fighting in Hürtgen
Forest and ends with an Ernest Hem-
mingway quote on the subject. The No-
vember 1944 action, widely known as
the Battle of the Bulge, was difficult and
deadly for the inexperienced 28th Infan-
try Division. The film supplies the ap-
propriate frigid setting in a large forest,
but it otherwise could have been set just
about anywhere that Americans fought.
Sergeant Falcone (Aidan Bristow) and
60 AMERICA IN WWII APRIL 2019
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BOOKS
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in the widely varying responses of their
populations, from grudging acquiescence
to frenzied cheering to improvised escapes.
As Germany’s luckless eastern neighbors
succumbed, Britain fretted in panic at the
failure of placating Adolf Hitler, loath to
rearm and acknowledge the failure of its
principle-driven appeasement. The inevi-
table outbreak of war with England and
France seems peculiarly understated: in
Berlin the studiously nonchalant British
embassy staffers speak of their dogs, while
incredulous Germans vow that they will
not be the ones to fire the first shot and
then watch their tax rates rise to 50 per-
cent. When British Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain resigned, Germans cheered at
rumors of peace. This was not war the way
anyone on either side had expected.
Though Lyman covers all the early, un-
two of his US Army Ranger squad sur-
vive a confrontation with vicious Ger-
man soldiers by overpowering and
killing them. They make their way to an
aid station, where two female medics
patch them up. Vowing revenge, Falcone
and the two other rangers go on a mis-
sion to destroy a German fuel dump.
Due to design or to budget limitation,
the production never accedes to the big-
ger picture of the battle. The orders for
Colonel Bradley Armstrong, who turns
up briefly, played by veteran actor
Corbin Bernsen, describe only the local
situation. There is some compelling bat-
tle action as Falcone and trusted com-
rade Private “Boston” O’Reilly (Mat-
thew James McCarthy) raid a fuel dump
and fight their way out, but most of the
scenes are filled with slow-paced, cliché-
laden dialogue. Bristow and McCarthy
are effective, but beyond showcasing
their talents, there is not much to recom-
mend about Alone We Fight.
On the opposite side of the war, and
of the production budget scale, is Air
Strike (2018), a film that does deliver
what its title promises. The focus is on
willing adversaries of Germany, he has a
special insight about the French. Long
before the first bombs fell, the Germans
had won the mind game against the French.
One American observer discovered that the
French people, though at war, were squab-
bling not about tactics and strategy, but
about governance, a curious preoccupa-
tion. Mobilized troops were sullen and apa-
thetic. Leftists sowed a servile defeatism. In
Paris, jewelry sales were brisk and cultural
life surged as the citizens waited for Hitler’s
next move. In CBS correspondent Eric
Sevareid’s account of the first night of the
war, isolated events formed a mosaic of
the intense Japanese bombing of the
Nationalist Chinese headquarters city of
Chongqing (Chunking). Although Bruce
Willis is prominently featured in adver-
tising and plays a significant role, and
other Hollywood personalities were
involved, this Chinese-made film feels
like it was created for Chinese audi-
ences. Willis plays Jack, a US Army Air
Corps officer advising the Chinese air
force on battling the Japanese. It’s an
unfair fight, but the Chinese, in their
outdated aircraft, make valiant efforts
under Jack’s encouragement and tute-
lage as they await a delivery of Amer-
ican fighters.
Then there are the parallel stories. In
one, a downed Chinese pilot is given a
mission to truck a vital decoder over open
ground to the capital. Along the way he
picks up a young woman who was caring
for orphans. In another, relatives of the
fliers and others in Chongqing endure
mayhem as German forces surged toward
the futile Maginot Line of defenses built by
France in the 1930s and as the civilian pop-
ulation abandoned the border regions.
Sevareid further recounted the universal
chaos of panicked civilians and conflicting
accounts as the Germans drove toward the
English Channel, impervious to French
defenses and British counterattacks.
The German forces seem unfamiliar to us.
A fleeing journalist, no admirer of theirs,
admits that they showed a level of profes-
sionalism far superior to their adversaries.
There was no class division between their
officers and men, who ate together. Free
constant Japanese bombings while they
prepare for a major mahjong tournament.
Air Strike has plenty of problems.
There are too many story lines and char-
acters, and not enough time to develop
them all. Adrien Brody is wasted as Steve,
a welfare worker seen in occasional cut-
away action. Willis does a good job
relating to his men, but his role is dilut-
ed by the film’s constantly cutting from
one storyline to another. A lot of money
was spent on some terrific bombing and
flying scenes, but the plane animation
has a videogame look in spots where it’s
not carefully edited. The script is often
melodramatic and the Chinese actors,
though talented, turn many scenes into
soap opera fare. This, along with the
gratuitous appearance of several kung
fu fights, are telltale signs of a film not
geared to American audiences.
J AY WERTZ
Phillips Ranch, California
postal services allowed them to stay in
touch with families. When not remorseless-
ly strafing civilians, they advised refugees
to return to Paris, because otherwise they
were inadvertently fleeing straight toward
the next planned battlefield.
Perversely, the French leadership sought
to make lemonade from the abundant
lemons. The US ambassador reported to
President Franklin Roosevelt that the
French leaders were so defeated morally
and broken physically that they completely
accepted their fate as a German province;
their hope was to be the favorite among
Berlin’s colonies. Alas, their fate was other-
wise, and Lyman describes the slow atro-
phy of exchange rates, caloric intake,
social graces, individual liberties, and per-
sonal property under occupation, for the
French and expatriates alike. Back in
Berlin, citizens enjoyed a materially superi-
or lifestyle as imported goods, beneficial
exchange rates, and care packages sent
home from men at the front introduced
them to new luxuries (though this ended by
the winter of 1941).
While some in Europe lay supine, others
stood tall. Lyman includes memorable
accounts from Yanks in the British Royal
Air Force regarding British preparations to
resist German attack and invasion. The
resilient citizens of London, indeed all the
British, withstood the Blitz of 1940 and
1941 alone and waited for the rest of the
world to come to its senses.
Under a Darkening Sky sometimes strays,
or leaps, into bombast: “That Hitlerism
was ever able to so dominate European
and global politics to the extent that it did
for twelve hellish years, sending the world
screeching into a cataclysmic war from
which it only escaped by the skin of its
teeth, battered, bloodied, and changed for-
ever, is no mystery now.” Whew! But Ly-
man is not alone in this rhetorical excess;
many of the writers he quotes exhibit sim-
ilarly enthusiastic prose styles. As early as
the second page we read, “Surrounding
him [Hitler] is his camarilla of braves: the
murderous, fat Goering, a vain but able
man; the satanic devil’s advocate,
Goebbels.” The book seldom slows down!
Breathless as the prose is, it becomes one
of the book’s pleasures. During the late
1930s, some of America’s great 20th-cen-
tury foreign observers were expatriates
such as George Keenan, Eric Sevareid, and
William Shirer, and they watched and wrote
about the transforming German state.
These are memorable accounts of historic
experiences. They write vivid portraits of a
continent in decline. And while Lyman’s his-
tory is occasionally over-written, it is often
illuminating, and definitely satisfying.
T OM MULLEN
Flemington, New Jersey
Ghost Riders: When US and German
Soldiers Fought Together to Save
the World’s Most Beautiful Horses
in the Last Days of World War II
by Mark Felton, Da Capo Press,
304 Pages, $27
P
UBLISHING BOOKS two years apart on
the same subject is a somewhat unusu-
al practice, unless the later one has
something different to say, employs a dif-
ferent thesis or format, or incorporates
newly discovered sources and information.
The last on that list turns out to be the case
with author Mark Felton’s Ghost Riders,
about the preservation of some of the most
famous horseflesh on the planet, the Lipiz-
zaners, known for their elegant appearance
and precise execution of classic dressage.
The difference between Ghost Riders and
Elizabeth Letts’s 2016 book The Perfect
Horse is that Felton excerpts considerable
dialogue from his personal interviews with
eyewitnesses and their family members,
private diaries, and other written sources
to create a rather personal type of you-are-
there storytelling. Letts, meanwhile, devot-
ed more space to the Nazis’ breeding pro-
grams as part of an effort to create a mas-
ter horse race (bloodlines always being a
focus of the National Socialist agenda).
Much of the American public was intro-
duced to the Lipizzaners in Patton. The
1970 film depicts the elite breed trapped at
their farm and training school near Vienna,
Austria—caught in the crosshairs between
German forces and their onrushing Soviet
foes, either of whom might have turned the
horses into beasts of burden, or even eaten
them. The Allied bombing campaign against
Vienna also put the horses in danger.
Felton’s telling of the story includes the
perspectives of participants ranging from
the horse-loving, one-time cavalrymen of
the now-mechanized US Army, to German
overseers who wanted nothing more than
APRIL 2019 AMERICA IN WWII 61

to save the magnificent steeds for posterity,
to the Nazi SS, to German soldiers who
considered any concession to the Allies
defeatism. It was the last two of those
groups that found themselves most at odds,
which begins to explain the book’s subtitle.
After the equine facilities were surrendered
to the Americans, German workers at the
stud farm armed themselves, with the per-
mission of US soldiers, and helped some
Allied POWs on the scene defend against an
attack on the site by SS troops.
Mix in the Soviet forces, in whose zone
of occupation the facilities were located,
and one can imagine the immediate and
delicate political nature of the horse-saving
effort brought up by the subtitle. Even the
surrender negotiations between the Ger-
mans and Americans at the farm had been
fraught with uncertainty and delicacy, with
the former refusing to give up without sat-
isfying their honor first in a face-saving
gesture of firing a shot in defense. Further
complicating the rescue operation, which
A
BOOKS
AND MEDIA
also aided other European thoroughbreds
and racehorses at the Vienna site, was a lack
of transport for the many mares in the process
of foaling. At least one was foaled aboard a
US Army truck as a caravan proceeded
from Czechoslovakia into Bavaria. Being
behind German lines didn’t help matters.
In the end, the horses were saved. Some
of the Lipizzaners were dispatched to the
United States, some of those purchased by
a few of the soldiers who had helped rescue
them. In a postwar gesture of gratitude, the
Royal Lipizzaner Stallions touring group
came to America to perform their impres-
sive dressage maneuvers for appreciative
American audiences. Felton’s epilogue
details the postwar fates of many of the
rescued horses, most of which lived to old
age and some of which are still alive today.
Requisite with publications of this sort
is a photograph section. Most of what
appears here comes from personal collec-
tions of veterans and of the author and
from a museum dedicated to military
equine heritage. They show the rescuers,
locations, and some of the saved horses.
If there is any criticism to be made, it
would be that there are no maps. One that
could have been included would show the
location of the primary stud farm in Vienna
and the facilities in Czechoslovakia. Ano-
ther would show the route taken to safety
in Bavaria. As it is, the reader will have to
consult an atlas for that information. For-
tunately, Felton has provided the modern-
day spellings of town names.
Otherwise, this is a well-written account
and an opportunity to learn more about a
unique humanitarian operation that took
place amid ubiquitous death and destruc-
tion.
S TUART MCCLUNG
Hagerstown, Maryland

A 78 RPM
An Ordinary Fellow with Silver Wings

A
S ANY FAN OF THE 1980 S MOVIE Top Gun knows, the
crackerjack pilot gets the girl, the girl who has purpose-
fully sought out this prime-of-life male with the superior
intellect and physical prowess. That’s primal truth, it seems, not
invented yesterday, just updated for the times.
World War II was the heyday of American pilots making
girls on the ground swoon. Thanks to the sprawling
war, there was a glut of military pilots, and of
girls all over the nation involved in romantic
relationships with them. He was “an ordinary
fellow in a uniform I love,” says the female
narrator of the wartime song “He Wears a
Pair of Silver Wings,” and she waited anx-
iously for him to come home from the war.
It wasn’t a simple situation to live out: “But
when I’m left alone and we’re far apart,” the
lyric continues, “I sometimes wonder what
tomorrow brings.” Hostile fire was one fear,
friendly women another.
“He Wears a Pair of Silver Wings” was one of those
uncommon wartime songs that crossed the Atlantic Ocean from
east to west. Its lyric about the pilot and his admiring girl came
from Englishman Eric Maschwitz, a professional writer whose
connection to the war was more substantial than just this pop
song. Beginning in 1939, he served with British intelligence, pen-
ning propaganda for morale-draining leaflets that were dropped
on the enemy. In 1941, he created an annotated fake map of
Nazi territory in Latin America that made it into the hands of
President Franklin Roosevelt and, despite its dubiousness, may
have awakened the US government to the enemy threat south of
the border.
The next creative work by Maschwitz to reach the United
States was “He Wears a Pair of Silver Wings.” The song
arrived in 1942, after debuting the previous year in
Britain. A handful of performers recorded it in the
States, collectively keeping it on the Billboard
charts for weeks. Kay Kyser and His Orches-
tra took it to number one, as American lis-
teners presumed the hero was one of their
own, even though he was actually a flier for
the British Royal Air Force (a fact not men-
tioned in the lyrics).
Maschwitz was not an airman, but like the
pilot in his wartime hit, he was sometimes a
bit of a hero and sometimes just an ordinary fel-
low. “He has written a few songs that people sing,
a few plays that are still occasionally performed,” he
later wrote about himself. “He has had great happiness from
women and made several good women unhappy, seen men die
beside him in a war, worked hard at too many things, honoured
his father and mother and in general done his damnest (which is
perhaps a poor substitute for his best).”
C ARL ZEBROWSKI
editor of America in WWII

62 AMERICA IN WWII APRIL 2019

 A AMERICA IN WWII FLASHBACK A

COMING SOON

A quiet barracks—before any soldiers

showed up to disturb the peace.

THE F-WORD
GI Joe was a clean-shaven church-
goer who loved his mother.
He also swore like a sailor
(whether he was one or not).

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H A S T I N G S M A N U FAC T U R I N G C O. • 1942 APRIL 2019 AMERICA IN WWII 63
 A
GIs
Welcome to Shangri-La
y rizzo
courtesy of Jimm
Left: Jimmy Rizzo served with Merrill’s Marauders in the China-Burma-India theater.
Right: The unit’s commander, Frank Merrill (holding the maps), in the Burmese jungle.
J AMES RIZZO GREW UP NEAR the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Maybe
that had nothing to do with his wartime fate, but when he was
drafted into the military in 1942, at age 20, he landed in the army.
After basic training at Camp Crowder in Neosho, Missouri, Jim-
my Rizzo and a band of wilderness-savvy Louisiana boys were
assigned to the Fifth Army’s 96th Infantry Division. Little did they
know that, as Rizzo later quipped, they were headed to Shangri-La.
In 1943 the men boarded a Liberty ship for Algeria and there
were transferred to the British transports Banfour and Oriana,
referred to by some as “coffin corners” due to their vulnerability
to enemy planes. The nickname proved darkly appropriate when
a German bomb sank the Oriana in the Mediterranean. Rizzo,
luckily, was on the Banfour, which was spared.
After further travels, and a Christmas dinner of bread and
cheese during which Rizzo “had to pluck out the weevils in the
cheese,” the boys of the 96th finally arrived at their post along the
Burma Road. They reported to General Joseph Stillwell to serve
alongside Chinese and Burmese soldiers. Rizzo worked as a ware-
houseman with the special operations group known as Merrill’s
Send your GIs photo and story to editor@americainwwii.com or to GIs, America in WWII, 4711 Queen Ave., Ste. 202, Harrisburg, PA 17109
64 AMERICA IN WWII APRIL 2019
nation
al arch
ives
Marauders. His main job was to fix electrical equipment and
deliver generators and other supplies.
The Burmese jungle gave the 96th its share of challenges: mon-
soons, unbearable heat, harsh terrain, impure drinking water, and
the constant torment of leeches and scorpions. Supplies were often
airdropped into the jungle, but Japanese air raids made retrieving
them dangerous. Many men became so hungry that they ate their
own pack mules. These stories rarely made it back to the States,
because no one was on location to report them. “American
reporters didn’t go there,” Rizzo said. “No one wanted to go there.”
By war’s end, Rizzo had been promoted to corporal and then to
sergeant. He returned home after 18 months in the jungle weighing
135 pounds—and his mother immediately started cooking. Though
he readjusted to civilian life without serious difficulty, every morn-
ing for years afterward he checked inside his shoes for pests. A
Submitted by ROSE MIELLO WARREN of Plainedge, New York.
JIMMY RIZZO, who is now 96 years old, is a friend of her daughter’s
mother-in-law.