VETERANS DAY: REMEMBERING IRON BOTTOM SOUND
Back in 1942, between Nov. 12 and 15, United States forces in the South Pacific turned the tide of the war by blocking Japanese reinforcement of their forces on the island of Guadalcanal.
The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal capped a half year of fierce combat on land, on the sea, and in the air, during which the Armed Forces, at least, realized that all those cartoons about dwarfish Japs with bad eyesight were pure fiction. Japanese fighter pilots trained for spotting enemy planes by looking for the star Sirius during the daytime. At sea, Japanese naval commanders had far better binoculars than their Americans counterparts. Today’s official military history of that period puts it this way: “Inside and just outside Iron Bottom Sound, five significant surface battles and several skirmishes convincingly proved just how superior Japan's navy then was in night gunfire and torpedo combat
The Solomon Islands, of which Guadalcanal was one, run in two roughly parallel lines, and the seas between those lines became known as The Slot. It was like certain bars: if you wanted a fight, that was where you went. John F. Kennedy’s heroic actions after his torpedo boat went down resulted in a medal, and gave him a boost toward a career that included writing “Profiles in Courage”—a title that could have been applied to many during the time when, as “Tales of the South Pacific” put it, the Americans had to fight destroyers with PT boats, cruisers with destroyers, and battleships with cruisers.
James Michener’s “Tales,” which led to the musical “South Pacific,” should be mentioned in the same breath as Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead” and James Jones’ “The Thin Red Line,” both of which also evoke the war against Japan. Michener’s book is unlike his later bloated epics, a set of linked stories filled with unforgettable characters, vivid depictions, and sharp symbolism. I recommend it to those who are, like me, fascinated by the period; it is not tightly gripping as Audie Murphy’s ghostwritten “To Hell and Back,” one of our unheralded classics, and doesn’t have the scope of Anton Myrer’s “Once an Eagle” (who incidentally fought three years in the Pacific Theater as a Marine) but to my mind it deserves major literary status.
The Americans also learned to respect their native scouts, especially Guadalcanal’s Jacob Vouza, who brought a downed American pilot through the Japanese lines then agreed to be a scout. He was captured while in Japanese territory, tied to a tree, and bayoneted in the arms, shoulder, throat, face and stomach to make his tell what he knew about the Americans—he said nothing—then left him to died. He freed himself, kept going through miles of jungle to the America base, and warned them about an impending Japanese attack, which led to the key American victory at the Battle of the Tenaru River.
Elsewhere in the South Pacific, the Allies went to Fiji to see if the men there would be good scouts. They set up an exercise during which the they would guard the base’s buildings during the night, and the Fijians would try to sneak up and mark the buildings with white chalk X’s.
They waited and they watched and no Fijians appeared. Lazy natives, they’re like children, you have to watch them all the time, why did we think they might make good scouts. Then, as a new day dawned, they began to see the white X’s: on doors, on equipment, and on each other’s backs.
This Veteran’s Day, I think of the men and women who fought and often died on and under and around Iron Bottom Sound, but also I think of the Japanese who died for their country, and of the natives, and of the Australian coastwatchers who reported Japanese movements up and down The Slot “Good luck,” they would say, “and good hunting.” Too often their luck was to become the hunted themselves and to die, sometimes very painfully.
World War II was the Olympics of warfare, a time when all nationalities showed that they were courageous and capable of great sacrifices, and should have gained each other’s respect. Much more than a big war, that era’s great cataclysm mixed what had been separate, and the flash of the atomic bomb fused together everyone’s fates. Now, as we go on pretending that we are better than the Iraqis and Afghanis, and creating bigger and stronger backlashes the harder we push, I’m glad my father, who flew in B-24’s as one of the Flying Tigers in China, doesn’t have to watch so many lessons from that time being washed away by waves of sentimental patriotism and silenced by the noisy cheerleaders of reflexive chauvinism. Allah help us all.
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