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One Damned Island After Another The Sage of the Seventh by Clive Howard and Joe
One Damned Island After Another The Sage of the Seventh by Clive Howard and Joe Whitley
Soft Cover
351 pages
Copyright 2018
CONTENTS
PREFACE5
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS8
CHAPTER I: A QUIET SUNDAY MORNING10
CHAPTER II: RED SUNS ON THEIR WINGS16
CHAPTER III: "I NEVER WAS SO SCARED"28
CHAPTER IV: MONDAY IN PARADISE35
CHAPTER V: "DEFEND! DEFEND!"43
CHAPTER VI: A MISSION FOR MORALE49
CHAPTER VII: THE ATOLL CIRCUIT56
CHAPTER VIII: THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY69
CHAPTER X: "YOU NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD"92
CHAPTER XI: "THEY THREW THE BOOK AT US"99
CHAPTER XII: "HE WHO FIGHTS AND RUNS AWAY"120
CHAPTER XIII: OPERATION GALVANIC132
CHAPTER XIV: "SPITS OF SAND IN THE SUN"139
CHAPTER XV: THE MARSHALLS ARE OURS152
CHAPTER XVI: "I'LL NEVER GET OUT OF HERE ALIVE" 168
CHAPTER XVII: THE SEVEN-LEAGUE SEVENTH179
CHAPTER XVIII: THE MARIANAS195
CHAPTER XIX: "THE LITTLE GUYS"212
CHAPTER XX: FORGOTTEN CORNER228
CHAPTER XXI: "WHAT WONDERFUL PEOPLE"246
CHAPTER XXII: "I'M SORRY WE WRECKED YOUR PLANE, SERGEANT"257
CHAPTER XXII: ASSAULT ON IWO269
CHAPTER XXIV: BANZAI AT IWO295
CHAPTER XXV: THE MUSTANGS GET THOSE BASTARDS 304
CHAPTER XXVI: THE LAST DAMNED ISLAND312
CHAPTER XXVIII: THE SUN ALSO SETS341
A NOTE TO THE READER351
PREFACE
Three years after the attack on pearl harbor, when the Seventh Air Force had molded victory from defeat, Corporal Earl Nelson, a newspaper reporter in civilian life, wrote an editorial which put into passionate words what many Pacific air force men had been thinking for a long time.
The editorial, called "Heroes Don't Win Wars," was published in Brief Magazine, the official Seventh Air Force weekly magazine for which Nelson was a combat correspondent.
Nelson's editorial got off to a rather surprising start surprising because it survived both Army and Navy censorship by criticizing bitterly the newspapers, magazines, radio, and even Brief Magazine, for their coverage of the war. The press and radio, Nelson complained, were printing and broadcasting only the fantastic exploits of men who wore medals. The public heroes.
"Why don't they talk about the guy who is just a soldier?" Nelson demanded. "Why doesn't anybody ever mention the poor bastard who got dragged into the Army, got stuck out here on one of these God-forsaken holes, and is doing nothing but his job?
"Ninety or maybe ninety-nine percent of the guys in the Army never had anything happen to them.
"Take, for example, a guy I know named Chuck who was on KP today. Nothing ever happened to him. He doesn't even get into trouble.
"What does he do all day? He drives a truck. He goes back and forth over the island one hundred miles a day. He goes to a movie at night; probably a very bad and very old movie which he has already seen four of five times. He goes back to his tent and writes a gushy letter to some babe who has probably thrown him over a year ago. He lies in his slit trench at night during air raids. He goes on KP about every fifth day.
"He sure as hell isn't going to get any medals or citations. He won't kill any Japs or knock down any Zeros. He won't do a damned thing to get his name in the papers. He won't even get a promotion.
"There are a lot of guys like Chuck. Most of the guys out here on the islands are like Chuck.
"Don't you think," Nelson asked, "that those guys would like to see their names in print, saying that they're fighting the war too?
"Don't you think a mechanic down on the flight line believes what he is doing is just as important as what the pilot or the gunner is doing?
"Heroes don't win wars; they just get their names in the papers.
"The guys who win wars are the guys who lug reams of paper around, or open thousands of cans of C rations, or clean hundreds of pots and pans, or grease jeeps, or dig latrines, or do any of a thousand jobs that nobody ever heard of, except the poor bastard who has to do them.
"The guys who are just serial numbers. The guys who say 'Yes Sir' like automatons. The guys whose jobs have become so regulated and monotonous that they can do them while their minds are 10,000 miles away.
"They are the real heroes of this war. They are the guys who are winning this war if it is really being won."
Few correspondents, GI or civilian, could have signed their names to such an editorial without drawing sharp criticism from both sides. Nelson's kind of hero, chary of Stateside and rear echelon observers who flew quick, comfortable tours of the Pacific and then made positive, all-embracing and usually asinine statements about what the average GI was thinking, would have rejected most self-appointed spokesmen. The pilots and gunners could have rendered Nelson's editorial pointless by challenging the authority of a man who had not experienced combat flying.
Nelson was a veteran of both kinds of war. In almost four years of Pacific soldiering, Nelson lived on forty-two islands. Probably that is a record. As a combat correspondent, and before that as a bored soldier who flew combat missions for a break in tedium, Nelson flew fifteen missions, one of them a B-29 strike over Japan.
The editorial, when it reached the Seventh's island outposts, caused a mild sensation and resulted in a heavy flow of letters to Brief. There were letters from average GI's saying they had clipped the editorial and mailed it home. There were a few letters from pilots saying they would gladly swap the privileges of rank and the hazards of one minute over an enemy target for three years of comparative safety as file clerks.
There were many letters from pilots and gunners giving overfull credit for the bombs they had dropped on enemy targets and the bullets they had fired into enemy aircraft, to the men nobody ever mentioned.
The pilots, the gunners, the navigators, the bombardiers, and combat aircrewmen who fought the enemy in the air from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo have had the Pacific victory dedicated to them in headlines, in military decorations, in public demonstrations which have taken many forms in many places.
But to the end of the war, and to this very day, nobody has found a way to tell the story of the men the ninety or ninety-nine percent of men to whom nothing ever happened.
The men who sat, day after endless day, on the scorched griddles of Pacific sand, where a soldier could, in ten minutes, walk to the end of his world. On the atolls where the only release from a monotony deadlier than enemy bombs was a man's diminishing ability to imagine himself somewhere else.
This narrative has attempted to show as much as possible the part they played in winning the war against Japan. But somehow, neither prose, nor poetry, nor photographs adequately tell their story.
To those men, then, this book is dedicated.
To the hungry men ... the thirsty men ... the lonely men. The forgotten men.
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