1942

Winston Groom, “1942: The Year That Tried Men’s Souls” Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005, 416 pp

Author Groom, historian and novelist (A Storm in Flanders; Forrest Gump) thoroughly documents the U.S. war efforts in the pivotal and extremely perilous year of 1942 beginning with the Japanese December 7, 1941 attack.
It is close to criminal how unprepared for war the U.S. was in 1941 and the price for this was paid in the first six months of 1942. An example of the “studied cruelty” of the Japanese is illustrated by the infamous sixty-five mile Bataan Death March and the notorious Camp O’Donnell. Ten thousand Americans died on the Death march alone. (Did you know that some Japanese army officers believed in eating the livers of the defeated, and did so?).

In the Atlantic, German U-Boats sank 380 merchant ships between January and June 1942. Rommel was pushing the British all the way to Egypt; the Russians were pushed to Moscow and to Stalingrad. In June 1942 came Midway: Against Yamamoto’s eight aircraft carriers, eleven battleships, sixteen cruisers, and forty-nine destroyers, the U.S. fleet had three aircraft carriers, eight cruisers, fourteen destroyers, and zero battleships--eighty-four ships to twenty-five yet they sank four Japanese carriers while only losing one. The tide had turned although it was not especially evident at the time.

My notes:
Pg. 25: The increasingly disastrous Japanese foreign policy was made possible by what was then a time-honored Japanese tradition: government by assassination. In the period between WWI and WWII no less than three Japanese premiers and a wide assortment of other high government officials met their deaths at the hands of the militarists. Voices of moderation were silenced by murder or other means and by 1937 the army effectively ran the government.

Pg. 47: Admiral Yamamoto’s original plan for attacking Pearl Harbor was a suicide mission. He planned to launch torpedo and dive-bombers about five hundred miles from Pearl Harbor, well out of range of American retaliation. The carriers would then immediately turn for home, leaving the pilots to crash into the ocean after the bombing, their fate sealed, since this distance would be twice beyond their airplanes fuel capacity to return to the ships.

Pg 54: In 1941 about two-thirds of all Americans were in some form of the middle class, earning from $1,000 to $3,000 a year (about $15,000 to $40,000 in 2005 terms). Fewer than 50,000 Americans’ earned more than $25,000 a year (about $325,000 in 2005).

Pg. 81: Of the ninety-four warships in Pearl Harbor before the attack, eighteen of them, most importantly the great battleships, were either sunk or wrecked and on fire. 2,340 military personnel were killed, as well as sixty civilians. 347 airplanes had been wiped out on their runways, parked wing-tip to wing-tip to better thwart sabotage. But the Carriers were luckily at sea and it would soon become evident that Carriers were much more important than Battleships.

Pg. 137: Bataan was about fifty miles across Manila Bay from the capital city. It was approximately twenty-five miles long, north to south, and twenty miles wide. War Plan Orange had predetermined that defending forces could hold out on the peninsula for at least six months, by which time American forces, fighting their way across ocean, would have destroyed the Japanese fleet and with following troopships, could retake the Philippines. But War Plan Orange had been abandoned with MacArthur’s somewhat grandiose strategy of forming his mighty 150,000 man American-Filipino army to hurl the Japanese back into the sea at the beaches. MacArthur judged the Japanese attack would not occur before April 1942 by which time all the needed supplies and training would be accomplished. With the abandonment of War Plan Orange, MacArthur did not take the necessary early steps to ensure that Bataan was adequately stocked with provisions. When they evacuated to Bataan, someone forgot the food.

Pg. 339: The importance of the Battle of Guadalcanal can hardly be overstated. First it stopped the huge Japanese Pacific offensive in its tracks. It helped make Australia safe from Japanese air attacks on its sea-lanes of communication and supply. It sucked up Japanese troops destined for the New Guinea campaign. It gave the Allies a solid, strategic forward base from which to launch the long and bloody war across the Pacific to Tokyo.

Pg. 398: The two atomic bombs produced had different uranium ignition systems: one used uranium and the other plutonium; they were not sure which, if either, would work.

Pg. 400: It was nearly two years into the war before the American torpedo fiasco was finally straightened out by the U.S. navy. Until then, the navy continued to blame the lack of Japanese ship sinking’s on bad marksmanship by U.S. submarines and destroyers. Finally one U.S Navy sub skipper turned in a report that got the attention of somebody in navy headquarters. He recorded that in July 1943 he had fired four torpedoes at a Japanese tanker at a range of 1,000 yards—sitting duck range. None exploded. In frustration, he then fired the remainder of his entire arsenal at the enemy tanker—twelve more torpedoes—and found that all were duds. Investigation determined two things. First, the firing mechanisms were oversensitive and, if the missile hit an enemy ship head on, it most often would mash into itself and not explode. Second, many other torpedoes had been equipped with a state-of-the-art magnetic field detonator, which was supposed to make the thing blow up whenever it entered the magnetic field of a ship. Unfortunately no-one thought to consider that near the equator—where so much of the Japanese shipping was concentrated—the magnetic field of ships is quite different than it would be in , say, the North Atlantic or deep in the South Pacific and thus most American torpedoes were running harmlessly about eleven feet beneath the enemy ships. (In today’s dollars a torpedo cost $100,000, much too expensive to fully test).

Pg. 413: Many nations waited to see who would win the war before taking a side. In 1945 Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Chile, Venezuela, Turkey, Uruguay, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Finland, and Argentina finally declared on the side of the Allies. Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland, among others, remained neutral.