Naval History of the Pacific (WW2HRT_35-02)

[Music] ian toll is the author of six frigates uh that was his first book which won 2007 samuel elliott morrison award which is the highest award that uh a naval historian can aspire to and and well earned uh and now as you've seen he is the uh the producer of a land mark trilogy on the pacific war um which he's going to be telling us about tonight uh he has uh spoken uh to numerous tv shows he's been published in every magazine plus uh several others that i have been published in widely seen on tv and commentating for the naval war college as well my understanding is from last night's conversation however that he may be heading into the world of fiction and leaving history behind and having slave for 12 years over my latest book i can sort of understand why he might want to be doing that so without further ado please uh join me in a war and welcome for ian tol [Applause] thank you very much john uh that was a very uh generous introduction i appreciate it um as as he said i um i came at this this project uh back in 2007 i'd just written my first book six frigates i had this idea that i would write a new history of the pacific war which is a kind of a bold idea in in the first place because of course every aspect of world war ii has been thoroughly covered but then i had the idea that i would do it in one volume which seems absolutely nuts in retrospect uh and i got a contract from my first publisher and uh and i had a deadline that was about three years out and two and a half years in i'd written 800 pages and that was good the specified length of the manuscript was about 500 so i was over the over the length but the story had advanced through the battle of midway which as many of you know is six months into a war that lasted 44 months so this was an emergency situation and i called my editor and i came clean i was afraid he would declare that he was canceling the contract but instead he agreed to uh to turn it into a trilogy and so a project that i had expected to spend four maybe five years on i ended up spending 12 years on and ended up with three books even so the third book ended up being the longest of the three and there were times when i wondered if maybe i had to call them again and see if we could turn it into a four book series or a five book series douglas adams who wrote the hitchhiker's guide to the trilogy hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy started out with the idea of writing a trilogy he wrote three of those books and then he wrote a fourth the subtitle of that was the fourth book in the inaccurately named hitchhikers trilogy and lenny wrote a fifth and the subtitle of the fifth was even better the fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named hitchhikers trilogy so why this big project this three volume history of the pacific war coming some 75 years after the war had been waged to join uh what is uh i think you know one way to say it is it's a crowded literature another more polite way to say it would be that it's a mature literature well there are a lot of different ways to answer that but one way is to say we're still seeing new books written about the battle of thermopylae in which the spartans held off the persians in a famous battle 2500 years ago new books will be written about world war ii a thousand years from now if we're so lucky to be here and some of those books will be worth reading there is a vast amount of data on this war much of it has really never been mined and as large as the world war ii literature is it is strikingly lopsided certain aspects of the great conflict have been worked over to the point of exhaustion while others have been surprisingly neglected the pacific war has always been in a sort of a strange way given its size a forgotten war a neglected war a war fought in the shadow of the war against hitler in europe we talk about world war ii in terms of theaters really the war in europe and the war in the pacific were separate wars uh fought against different enemies uh and uh and fought simultaneously but really they need to be understood as separate conflicts and someone could write 10 books on the war in europe and you would call that person a world war ii expert and it would be fair to call that person a world war ii expert and yet that person might know little or nothing about what happened in the pacific and the reverse is true as well um the within the pacific we've had this second what i would call a bias almost we've tended to think about the war in europe as a series of island battles and what really happened in the pacific was that we confronted on december 7 1941 an emergency in which our main fleet of battleships had been knocked out of action entirely and we had a japanese navy which was at that time in some ways the most formidable navy in the world with free run of the pacific destroying the japanese fleet was the principal strategic problem that we faced in the aftermath uh of the strike on pearl and um that i believe is the story uh at the heart of the broader story of the pacific war and so i uh have worked in writing this trilogy in the spirit that you should place the naval campaign at the heart of the narrative but to tell the whole story around it um and this requires a kind of an inversion of thinking we're a continental people uh we're different from the british we're different from the japanese in this respect it's not natural for us to think of naval warfare as being the primary kind of warfare the main plot for those island peoples i think that comes more naturally for hundreds of years the british have thought of their royal navy as being the principal arm of their national defense the japanese adopted that way of thinking as well uh for us from the very beginning our american revolution it's the army the army is is the heart of our national defense it's the oldest service it's the first service the service with the greatest claim uh to um to pro to to do the lion's share of the work uh of defending this country uh naval operations air operations these are supporting operations when you come to the pacific you you have to begin by inverting that kind of thinking think of the pacific first as a sea war in which uh fighting on land uh and air operations were the supporting operations the primary uh um driving uh part of this war is the sea war and i've worked in that spirit we have a series of bloody island battles uh fought in strange and exotic places in the pacific places like guadalcanal iwo jima okinawa and then you have macarthur of course looming very large the most famous at the time most revered military leader not just in the pacific but anywhere in the world american leader he returns to the philippines making good his promise and then we have the atomic bombs and then we have the surrender the naval war is something of a black box i think in the popular recollection of the war um we know that uh and again i'm talking about a popular impression here we understand that the battle of midway was particularly important many many people i talked to who don't know much about the pacific war will say well we got them at midway we did something important in midway and then after that the naval war was essentially as good as as one well the battle of midways as john partial will tell you and he knows it better than anyone else and i think has brought a lot of attention to this battle um was an immensely important battle we sunk four of japan's first line aircraft carriers with all of their airplanes and we did this just six months after pearl harbor it was a devastating counter punch but it happened toward the beginning of the war and even after midway the japanese still were able to match us in most categories of deployed naval strength the struggle to overcome uh japan's power at sea would last for for years after midway and and midway as important as it is it's typical of the naval battles of that war in that it's difficult to visualize isn't it it's a carrier air war uh it's it's a battle in which you have airplanes from contending fleets of aircraft carriers attacking the ships of the enemy over the horizon uh the crews of the ships are not coming into direct sight uh of of the enemy ships and that was typical of many of the most important battles of this war these battles are spread out they're complicated they take place over a period of many many hours in some cases many many days even at the time the commanding officers at the top of these fleets they don't really understand what's happening they're feeling their way through the fog of war and it's taken uh decades for historians to piece together what actually happened in many cases midway is a good example there were important parts of that story that were not well understood for 30 or 40 years after the battle had been fought and so it's difficult to visualize what happened it's uh in the nature of naval war that you can't visit the battlefields or you can but you'll just see a ceaseless unchanging uh blue seascape there are no monuments um and and um and i think that also contributes to this this kind of um this zone of forgetfulness uh that surrounds the naval war the submarine campaign in the pacific was the most complete example uh in history of uh the way in which a fleet of submarines can be deployed to destroy an enemy's uh overseas shipping links and to essentially knock out uh the economic supports of his war effort and yet the battle of atlantic uh the atlantic in which the germans tried and ultimately failed to do what we did do uh in the pacific holds a much greater uh purchase on the popular imagination i think in part it's uh it's an issue of popular culture uh there have been no outstanding films on the naval war in the pacific there have been a number of films and uh i know that many of you are thinking of some of them right now but i would say that there hasn't been a single movie like saving private ryan for example that has kind of altered our public perceptions of this conflict and of course the nazis are endlessly fascinating uh a regime unique in history that in many ways represents a kind of distillation of evil uh in our in our memories um the japanese uh militarist regime by contrast has been poorly understood i think it's fair to say uh and this country in this country in particular uh as in actually many other nations in asia we took with us this sort of searing hatred of the japanese because of the way they had conducted themselves um but that hatred and the memory of that hatred which has in some ways lasted even to the present uh i think has in times obscured our ability to look clearly at what was happening in japan there's the language barrier the cultural barrier uh until recently the odd dynamics of that regime how it functioned how it made decisions uh the role of the emperor all of these things were poorly understood and that is i think a fruitful area for future scholarship both scholarship in japan which has been limited i think by the culture and by an inability to kind of do the important work of reconstructing that period objectively and also a work for western scholars of japan even those who have researched and written about the pacific war for decades and this is an example of what i'm talking about are surprised to learn the japanese military forces actually behaved with great discipline and even chivalry uh in the wars uh that preceded the second world war uh in their operations during the boxer rebellion when they operated alongside the troops of many western nations in the russo-japanese war of 1904-1905 and in the first world war in which the japanese admittedly had a limited role but in each of these conflicts uh the behavior of japanese troops on the battlefield was with the witness of western observers journalists in some cases red cross representatives it was clearly documented that the japanese forces were disciplined they were scrupulous in the way that they treated their prisoners of war and in many cases as in the russo-japanese war for example civilians in the battle zones had reason to be more fearful of the russians than of the japanese for reasons that are still debated by scholars there was this sudden turn uh toward a much more barbarous culture that occurred in the late 20s and the 1930s so that by the early 1930s the behavior of japanese forces in shanghai for example was already attracting international notoriety and by the second world war something had happened and they were behaving very differently so for a combination of reasons for the reasons that i've been talking about for the kind of singular fame and popularity of douglas macarthur who loomed so large as a figure who monopolized so much of the public relations and the press coverage that americans were seeing at home of this conflict the uh greater attention then and since uh to the war in europe over the war in the pacific uh the island campaign over the naval campaign produces the perverse result that the naval war in the pacific which was by an enormous margin the largest naval war ever waged uh remains somewhat obscure in our history the pacific was the pacific war was the only naval war that has ever been waged across the entire breadth and length of the pacific an ocean so large that you could fit all of the world's land masses into it and still have room to spare i it is a um uh it was the largest amphibious war in history amphibious war this specialized kind of warfare where you strike an enemy on land but you do it by way of sea it was the largest the bloodiest and most technically difficult amphibious war in history an amphibious war by its very nature forces the different services the different arms uh of the military to work together the army the navy the marines the air forces all of the logistical and support forces are forced uh in an amphibious war like that of the pacific to work together in sustained and intricate cooperation something that challenged the american military because our services really had not been accustomed to working together in fact they had existed largely apart from one another with almost no coordination in their planning in their training in their weapons acquisition in the developments of their various doctrines and so the emergency that was imposed by the sudden japanese attack on pearl harbor in december 1941 forced our military services very very quickly to find a way to begin working together effectively and that is a theme that i think is is right at the heart of this story uh and one that um that i've used to to try to as a template to try to uh tell each part of this conflict that unfolded over a little less than four years um in the in in japan too uh the rivalry between the army and the navy uh is at the heart of the decision to go to war uh in some fairly interesting and subtle ways the army and the navy had regarded one another in japan virtually as as enemies certainly as rivals and it was a military military-dominated uh society which means not only that the military has uh the power to direct the the fate of the country but also that the army and the navy were directly involved in the civilian administration of the state and so when you look at army and navy leaders in japan this is a subtle point but one that's often missed is that you don't evaluate them necessarily the same way you would evaluate the careers of military leaders in a country like the united states these were the leading politicians of their day and so someone like isa roku yamamoto most famous for having uh planned insisted upon carried out uh the strike on pearl harbor uh and then uh in in addition uh insisted upon the disastrous uh attempt to take a midway and to try to flush the american fleet out of pearl harbor resulting in one of the great defeats in naval history um isiroku yamamoto is remembered in japan not so much for for uh his role as an admiral in that war but uh for the influence that he had as a political leader in japan prior to the war and he was opposed to the decision uh to wage war in the united states he risked his life in arguing against that decision and in a sense the defeat of japan uh vindicated him uh in his uh in his death certain very conservative ideas have governed uh the way that history is written i remember a review of my first book six frigates and i don't remember where it ran exactly and the review was mostly positive about the book but the reviewer sounded one note of criticism he said that i had a bad habit of straying out of my lane and i absolutely loved that review because the moment i read that line and i thought yes this is this is what uh those who write military history should think about doing more more of we should get out of this idea of staying in your lane uh we should um tell these stories in a way that embraces the larger uh themes and the the and takes account of what's happening uh throughout the societies as these conflicts are are waged uh so i have to plead guilty i do stray out of my lane i do it quite a bit i like to do it and i intend to keep doing it i believe military history and i think especially naval history has suffered from this stay in your lane syndrome naval history i think is too important to be left to those who have traditionally called themselves naval historians and i don't want to start any feuds with any academic historians but in all candor i do believe the following that historically naval history has been the province of specialists who have drawn their mandate very narrowly to write about naval strategy operations tactics much of naval history has been written in the past not so much in the present i think this has changed but in the past uh naval history has been written by scholars uh who are directly affiliated with the navy in some cases employed by the u.s navy i think there's power in approaching a subject from the outside i have only the greatest respect for this institution but i am in no way beholden to it and i won't ever hesitate to puncture some of its myths academic history is generally written in the form of an argument you state a thesis you martial evidence uh archival evidence uh to support the thesis and then you restate the argument the thesis in light of the evidence that you have marshaled of course this is a very powerful way to get to the bottom of things uh and to change people's minds about history it is not the only way to write history narrative history is concerned first with telling the story of what happened and and then to to develop arguments and themes that you weave into the fabric of a narrative that is principally first of all a storytelling narrative some of the best history i have read borrows from the storytelling techniques of novelists or dare i say it even filmmakers many there are many different elements to this but above all i think the objective is to keep the reader in the moment uh to to impart to the reader uh a sense of what it was like to be there at the time to be in the room where the decisions are made to be on the deck of the ship as the battle was fought to be in the cockpit to be in the foxhole to see events through the eyes of those who saw them and to and to feel what they felt at the time to reconstruct the mental processes um and of course this is more than just storytelling it's more than just a kind of a highfalutin form of entertainment by bringing the reader closer to those who experience these events in the moment of course you're allowing the reader to understand better the context in which major decisions were made and so there is um in in the narrative history approach there is something about getting to the truth as well that may be missing from the more academic structure of history narrative history admittedly has some significant weaknesses as well as a form and i think most importantly narrative history storytelling history it tends to stumble over complexity and there's a lot of complexity in history and the storyteller would like to pretend that things are less complex than they are and perhaps to gloss over uh complexity in a way that ultimately does real damage to the reader's under ability to understand what's happening and in the worst cases i think popular or narrative historians and biographers will do that they'll write with a kind of insouciance to pretend that complexity and nuance did not exist or that it can be sort of dismissed rather than confronted directly and i'm thinking specifically about some of the most renowned the most decorated historians in biographers i have found that these are inherent problems with the form but they are manageable they're manageable problems uh you can fold arguments into the narrative you can nod in the direction of complexity or nuance without going on at excessive length about it what i have the approach that i have taken is a kind of an episodic or discursive narrative which is really a series of deep dives so rather than flying over the landscape at medium altitude i think more in terms of shifting altitude frequently flying at 30 000 feet diving down flying at 4 000 feet and then going back up again that's the metaphor i always thought about as i was trying to structure these narratives show the reader the landscape from high altitude take the reader down where you can see detail on the ground but as i've thought about it i actually prefer a different metaphor think about what you do when you walk into a room where there's a complex three-dimensional object say at a sculpture gallery there's a piece of abstract sculpture how do you take that in well you step back right you look at it you look at the shape you walk around it you look at it from different angles you walk in close and you look at the detail on the surface of the object and there's no reason a historical narrative can't do the same thing that you would do in that sculpture gallery constantly look at the subject from different angles shift those angles come in close step back and look at the whole shape and so that's what i that's what i try to do um teddy roosevelt uh was among many other things no slouch as a historian or a biographer he wrote some of the best histories and biographies of his day he was a really gifted narrative non-fiction writer he wrote what is in some ways still the best single volume history of the naval war of 1812 called the naval war of 1812. uh and i don't know how he did this i would love to look at a scan of his brain or something he was just not an ordinary person he was 22 years old and he was enrolled at columbia law school and had a full load of classes and he researched this book by reading all of the original captain's letters to the secretary of the navy all of the british officers action reports as well sifting through them very carefully finding figuring out through detailed diagrams which he drew himself exactly what had happened in each of these ship battles and then writing a history which effectively rebutted many of the british historians and and he did all of this as i said at the ripe age of 22 while carrying a full load of classes at columbia law school well roosevelt among the many other great books that he wrote he once told a lecture hall full of historians the american society of historians that he thought perhaps the single most important trait for a historian was imagination imagination he said was the single most important trait i would have loved to be there so i could just look at the expressions on the faces of all of these august historians uh when this um who was by this time the ex-president of the united states told them this it's a controversial idea isn't it imagination for a historian someone writing non-fiction someone uh um who was chronicling and documenting the past you would think someone like that is supposed to keep their imagination in check you don't want your imagination to take over when you're charged with reporting and analyzing the facts as you found them in your research you would think that any historian should keep his imagination on a very short leash but i think tr was on to something because no matter how thorough your research how impeccable your sourcing it takes a feat of imagination uh to place yourself into the shoes into the skin uh of those who lived in the past to um to to place yourself into a different time in history and to and to do this uh this thing which i think is difficult which is to forget everything you know about what happened after the point in history uh that you're documenting at any one moment characters in in history could not see into the future it seems very trite to say that it seems blindingly obvious doesn't it but you have to remind yourself constantly as you're doing this not to take into account all the things that you know happened after that point in time in the realm of military history i think this is especially important it's especially important to keep this point in front of you commanders on the ground in the air at sea they were feeling their way through a fog of war and they were making decisions with imperfect information in many cases upon mistaken information the historian's mandate part of the historian's mandate of course is to dispel that fog and to explain exactly what was happening uh at any given moment at the same time you have to allow yourself to live in that fog as well um the very act of dispelling dispelling the fog of war through our marshaling of evidence and our analysis of events presents a dilemma because in a very literal sense while assessing those moment-to-moment action uh those those points of action those developments those decisions we know more than they do and we must always remind ourselves of that i think about the battle of leyte golf which was the largest naval battle in history this was a battle fought during our return to the philippines and it was an immensely confused battle taking place across an immense theater of operations essentially all around the philippines over a three-day period and as i uh document what happened in that battle i'm constantly reminded that at any one moment i know more i know more than the american commanders i know more than the japanese commanders i know more than admiral halsey more than admiral ozawa more than admiral kurita more than admiral kincaid i know more because i have the benefit of 75 years of history and hindsight and the work of historians who came before me and the ability to read the dispatches and to untangle what was happening moment by moment none of them had any of that and so for me to to explain what's happening i need to use that knowledge that i have at the same time i need to forget it so that i can place myself into the shoes of those who are making these immensely important life and death decisions under great pressure and of course as i said all of this is very intuitive perhaps even obvious when you lay it out the way i've laid it out here but i think many historians and writers find it difficult to perform these kinds of mental gymnastics so when tr says that imagination is an important trait for historians i think maybe that was what he was getting at this ability to simultaneously use the knowledge that you have uh with power of retrospect uh at the same time to forget it uh and um so i think a little bit that's what tr meant um i want to leave time for for questions and discussion but i'll just close with this thought war is a force that has shaped our history all of history war is a test the title of the first volume is pacific crucible crucible is a kind of test uh we were tested in uh december 1941 when the japanese attacked us very suddenly and in a very devastating way a test is is like a kind of stress a stress test in the same way that an engineer will place a material under stress why does an engineer stress test something because you get information about it that you can't get otherwise war is a test of nations it's a test of systems of government of entire peoples of societies of cultures of military organizations and of individuals you place something under stress you find out more about its underlying nature war is like the stress test in history it's unique in that way perhaps not unique there are of course other kinds of tests we've gone through one with this pandemic but a crisis war i think is the best example a crisis uh will is like a test in the timeline of history that teaches you something that you wouldn't have learned otherwise that i think is the best argument for studying war for studying military history and one of the reasons i think it's really a shame that in the in the academy among uh professional historians at many universities the study of war is really out of vogue and uh there are many even leading universities in the country in which you have departments of history staffed with eminent historians none of whom have ever studied military history or the history of war i wrote much of this trilogy while living in san francisco and right near where i lived in uh the marina right by the on the san francisco side of the golden gate bridge there was a public exhibition of of a girder of the type used to build the bridge and this girder had been taken to the berkeley college of engineering and these berkeley engineers had put it into this immense machine that that placed some enormous amount of weight on this girder and i don't want to say how much because i i don't remember but this girder had bent and it hadn't broken and the point of course was that the golden gate bridge is engineered to withstand an absolutely enormous earthquake an earthquake of more than nine on the richter scale they're confident that that building will stand because of that kind of stress testing this is what happened to this country uh in world war ii it bent but it didn't break and um and so i'll stop there thank you very much for coming tonight and i'd be happy to entertain any questions ladies and gentlemen um all the way from new york city once again now let's hear up from mr ian tolin a wonderful presentation thank you so much all right now the uh kind of the fun portion of the evening we'll have ian join the uh the team up here as well i'd like to introduce our two special veterans that uh uh both served in the pacific in the united states navy very proudly in the united states navy um in the middle here with uh in in the beige in the center um to your uh to the left of uh henry over here i'd like to introduce mr james mcdougall and jim is that handsome devil up there was an aircraft ordinance man or an origin mate first class in vpb patrol bomber 52 better known as the black cats they sleep by day and they prowl by night and that's the the reason why they were were named for that jim was born in lamar's iowa and on december 7th when jim heard the news about pearl harbor he was he was washing his hair and he was he was cleaning up for the day and he heard about pearl harbor and the shock of it and just seven months after he graduated from high school he enlisted in the iowa um the iowa guard and at 19 years old he volunteered to join the united states navy he was trained at great lakes naval training camp also at camp dewey in wilmington tennessee and they took gunnery training at hollywood florida and uh and then thus went abroad oops i'm sorry there we go this one abroad to uh to australia where he joined the squadron and uh we'll uh we'll find out a little bit more about jim's escapades in the pacific but before we do that i would like to introduce the gentleman on his left this is henry gagna who is um born in mentor minnesota um henry was raised in a farm family a very very tough and hard-working family and um uh henry's when was in high school when uh december on december 7th when the japanese attacked in pearl harbor and so he enlisted and also was trained at great lakes naval air service in illinois and then eventually made it to camp shoemaker in california and he will also tell us his escapades of uh in the pacific and uh henry was assigned as a communications specialist aboard the uss wright and was involved in the leyte golf campaign as was was jim and we'll get to that here in a minute but before we do it let's welcome our two veterans to the stage right that's it so i'm going to i'm just going to kind of go back and forth here with the two gentlemen and uh i will um uh you know field some will field some questions at the end here but the first question goes out to jim and um uh let me just advance here a little bit uh for you you can see what a handsome devil he was and um this was uh this was jim's office that was the blister in a pby catalina actually a pby five catalina and this was the side blister where jim spent much of his time in patrol bombing squadron 52 this was a photo that was taken of him by an australian magazine called yank down under and gave a little caption of this young lad from lamar's iowa hanging out the side of the blister of a pby catalina also the the the catalina in that in that form was was equipped with a 30 caliber machine gun a c a flexible machine gun mount which jim was responsible for manning and this is the airplane that jim flew on this is a pby catalina and um there's a there's an old saying uh well the catalina at the onset of the war was was kind of outdated um there was an old saying that it took off at 100 miles an hour it flew at 100 miles an hour and it landed at 100 miles an hour and so but i'll tell you the it was a workhorse in the pacific and the countless uh lives that it saved uh jim will tell us here a little bit about that but just to give you an idea the black cats had their airplanes completely painted black they were painted flat black and here we see a crewman just obviously servicing the aircraft before a mission and you can kind of get an idea one of the things of note is you can see the 250 caliber machine guns that were operated uh by the pilot they could fire those machine guns and uh those were mounted in the nose of the pby and then lastly uh this is a squadron of uh the uh black cats in formation over the jungles of the south pacific so let's uh let's ask jim about um you know the the the pby describe it as i mentioned you operated um and i shall say this you operated um you were kind of on the night shift so to speak weren't you and jim was kind enough to bring a visual aid as you can see up here a model of the pby and we had an interesting conversation because i think everybody's familiar with the high altitude bombing campaign say of uh in europe with the 8th and the 15th air force bombing from altitudes or precision bombing from altitudes of say 25 000 to up to 35 000 feet in altitude but that wasn't the case for you jim right in europe they were using a flying fortress and dropping from approximately 30 to 40 000 feet in here and when you compare what we were we were doing to that it's totally different what we were doing was taking was taking off and we flew every third night but we would take off at approximately six six o'clock in the evening we would fly approximately uh 350 miles up to the bismarck archipelago which is uh an area where the japanese were almost compelled to to run their supply lines in order to get it to a ball when the supplies got reball they would take them out to these various islands that they had captured at the beginning of the war to supply their troops out there we would take off in the evening like i say about uh excuse me six o'clock and fly up there fly through a a straight between uh new britain and new ireland called st george channel and then we're in the bismarck archipelago in a bismarck archipelago we used our radar we had search radar and homing radar also we had the assistance of the navy who had broken broken the japanese information radio system that they communicated with they would give us the information on any ships that they thought were would be in that area so we would go up use our our radar system which was uh search and homing we would put it on search until we found this blip uh we would then turn the aircraft towards the blip and and just fly until we could see the wake of that vessel and then we would fly down about mass tight and drop four bombs the bombs uh were carried underneath the wings there were a 500 a thousand a thousand 500 in bomb racks underneath the wing we had the ability with the intervalometer to drop the bomb in the order that we wanted to and the distance that we wanted to so when we dropped we would drop the 500 first on the left the heavy bomb on the right then over to the uh heavy bomb on the left and back over to the uh light bomb on the right which was a 500-pound bomb um these bombs were unique in the fact that they had a fuse which after it hit the plant hit the ship would take four seconds before it would go off and generally that allowed it time to go through the deck down to the bottom of the ship where it would go off and do the most damage after we dropped our bombs i mean i have seen the first the first ship that we hit uh was the freighter about 8 000 ton freighter and those bombs had gone down and blowing the bottom of that ship out and what it went down within about five minutes and we just we watched as uh as the shipship went down we circled and then without when the bombs were gone we headed back home but normally if we did not see any ships we would return about approximately eight o'clock in the morning henry as i mentioned you i went through camp schumacher in california and then you went on a troop transport ship and you left on the 4th of july 1944 heading westward on the uss howell with about 7 000 additional troops and tell us about that wonderful cruise i mean you had you had maid service and a comfortable bed and no seriously um tell us about that voyage oh that was a good trip anyway we yeah we left uh on the fourth of july and i remember uh crossing underneath the bridge and uh we were hidden heading west and uh there was a bump that was over our heads and helped us out for about three days but it wasn't very far out when we weren't very far out when i got kind of sick and sick to my stomach and and i kind of kind of stayed close to the to my quarters and stuff like that and so we were we were going and we were going about three days and then there's the blimp kind of went back home back to the shore but that uh we were on our way over to where we were gonna go we were zigzagging back and forth so that nobody you know we were trying to avoid any anything that was trying to follow us and we were on the water for 22 days and we landed on new caledonia the french free island out there not too far from australia we then we debarked there and we were we were there about a week and uh then we just kind of like just waited and to see what was going to happen to us anyway they after we had been there for about a week we got on uh there was some lcis they were just they were landing infantry and they were knowing now they were all getting ready for that invasion of a lady and uh anyway they they got us on there and they they shipped us across to some of the islands where we were supposed to be replacements and uh lots of lots a lot of places we were just not we were not equipped to be you know very good because we we had just i just had gotten out of this out of high school and didn't know anything i mean and so what are they going to do with somebody don't know anybody anything but anyway we we we got off a couple on some couple of islands and we were there a few days and they'd they'd they'd scared us out of there they'd send us back uh back on that they say we don't need your hair you just keep on going and we must have done that for about five or six islands and the last island they finally uh we were there about like i said three four days and they finally they said uh get all your stuff all your gear and meet us and get to the airport there was kind of a makeshift airport uh it wasn't exactly an airport it was just a strip a ship that had carved out of the coral and anyway after about a couple of days a plane came in it was c-47 plane they flew us to townsville australia and we stayed there was an army camp there we stayed there for a little bit and then they then uh i think after a day or two days they they flew us to uh brisbane and then when we got there there that's where we eventually aborted the ship i was assigned to let's leave it right there henry and we'll come back to that we'll pick up the story but uh let's turn it back to uh to uh jim here um one of the fascinating stories he told me about was there was quite a character in patrol bombing squadron 52 and this is the gentleman that's pictured on the screen by the name of uh bill uh i'm going to say this right lahadni right yup lahodny so bill was an um i guess an adventurous man kind of a a person to uh come up with new ideas and he thought that it would be a fantastic idea to take a 75 millimeter cannon that you can see in the picture this so happens to be on a b-25 mitchell and you can see in that lower diagram how large that cannon is and put that into a pby catalina i'm going to let jim tell about that we were we were operating with the fifth air force and they were using b-25s which had a cannon mounted in the nose and uh rodney uh discovered that and really fascinated him and he came back from this meeting with the fifth air force guys and he said you know we ought to do that with a b b with a pb1 and he i think visualized you know of using it like a fighter pilot when he would come down and aim the plane of what we want what he wanted to shoot at and uh the idea was it was something that he'd uh re-relished so there we had an old uh relic there and uh on the on the beach at palm island it's one of the places we were at when we were trying to go up north and uh so they got it um 75 millimeter and the guys mounted it in the nose of the of the soul of a rally so it was quite a deal when the day came when it was completed in there and they were gonna fire it so they they fired the 70 that 75 millimeter cannon and went right out through the tails i'm going to move forward to henry again and um so he is in uh he's in australia he's had a luxurious 22-day trip across the the blue pacific and uh finally he is finally assigned well i'll give it away he said that he didn't know anything well actually he did henry just was discovered knew how to type and was a very good good typist and so they needed typis and so he was assigned to this beautiful ship the ussr wright which was named in honor of the wright brothers and if you look at the caption i think below that um you can see it scribbled um i think this this this photo was taken in about in the uh in the mid 1920s so the air the ship was very dated oh it had air conditioning and all that stuff right henry it was just a just a luxurious place to to live right the um so the uh so your assignment henry as a as a communications specialist tell the folks um kind of what what you did aboard the uss right everything during the war was coded and decoded of course so that nobody could find out what we were doing and what we were talking about uh and but um that and and we were we we like i say we were that was our that was my job that i was assigned to because i you know like mark said i was i had learned to type one year when i was a sophomore and i had forgotten about a lot about typing anyway but you know you go out and you do it eight hours a a day for maybe 12 hours a day for a while you either learn it or you you you don't but that's right anyway anyway i got better at it and uh we we continued doing that until the war was ended well he uh he downplays in in a very modest fashion um let's think about that as as ian said put your put your uh the place and time and the messages that came across to henry um you you might you might be very modest in your actions but uh what you did to code and decode messages probably some of those messages change the course of the war henry so it's uh don't don't be so modest well i hope that's true it's true and this one goes out to uh to connie harris in our drive over here tonight and uh the uh skillfully written round tablet that i hope you picked up and if you haven't there's a copies available about um the the uh the ready availability to the us navy and to uh so you know in the pacific and so forth was um ice cream i mean think about it what's better than a nice ice you know thing of ice cream and also uh something to to remind them of home and uh um it uh it was it was kind of an interesting discussion at lunch today as well and so on the drive over i said henry you can answer this did the uss right have an ice cream maker yeah it's a dad so connie very very very well researched you're correct and it was uh it was pretty relative relatively available wasn't it it was one of the best things they had there yes indeed um let's go back to october 5th through the 8th of 1944 and as ian mentioned jonathan will certainly agree and anybody that's studied the pacific war in great detail was a battle of the leyte gulf there was a there was an alteration in plans and the new battle plan had to be transported so let's call it uh everybody was on the same page think about this this change in tactics in this in this major battle that they know is coming up and jim's aircraft and his crew were assigned to take those change in battle plans and and deliver them well you tell the story jim about the uh about the the plans for the leyte gulf i was uh uh flying with the captain and and any of you familiar know that when there's some exotic me uh fight that comes up if the pilot is generally the captain is the one that takes it and we had been flying a cover for for [Music] ships that were moving in a convoy were moving to the west for in an anticipation of the uh of the invasion and uh we were told to report to uh macarthur's headquarters which was on a lake right north of atlantia and uh and uh a fresh it was a fresh water like uh we went there and uh we found that eight uh 17 bags of mail all the capital ships in a third fleet they each got a bag right like that i said they each got a bag they each got a bag which it contained all the changes right that were made in the in the plan the macarthur thought that they should be invading at that tip of of the philippines and uh the navy decided that that wouldn't be a wise place to to make the landing and they said they should make the landing at leite therefore these uh plans for the invasion were put together at macarthur's headquarters he macarthur agreed that possibly this would be a better place right so they decided to change and they called us in to this lake where at macarthur's headquarters gave us the 17 bags and we flew out to uh palau to give it to the uh uh third fleet and uh on the way out we had uh we had an escort of f6fs and we they were not too impres impressed by our speed i'm sure and uh the one one of the one of the pilots i think it was probably the captain of the squad flew up next to us and uh put his canopy back and looked over at us and he went but he scared me back and went back on thank you jim that's a great story very well done thank you uh so at this point i think it'd be an opportune time maybe to open up the floor for any questions does anybody have any questions to either the vets or to ian there's been books um the german war in particular with nicholas uh stargardt about life inside of germany for the people who lived there during the war years you don't hear a lot about what life was like inside of japan during those years um i wonder if you can mr toll if you could talk about that a little bit oh sure yeah that is a subject that has always interested me a lot how was the war experienced by ordinary people in japan and uh fortunately there's actually a lot available uh because so many original uh sources letters diaries oral histories excerpts from japanese newspapers you know we had a branch of our naval intelligence communications uh was just hoovering up all of these radio broadcasts not radio tokyo propaganda english language broadcast to our troops but just domestic radio broadcasts we actually had a department uh that uh was recording those things and then providing transcripts uh and so all that stuff's at the national archives anyway it's a long-winded way of saying there there are a lot of ways uh to try to get a sense of what life was like for ordinary japanese it's a theme that i um go into in significant length in this trilogy um you know uh without going on too long i would say there are two themes that really stand out one is uh deprivation uh the population became immiserated um and they were verging really on they'd been hungry throughout the war they were verging really on famine toward the end and one of the interesting counter factuals is if if we hadn't had the atomic bomb what would have happened well uh clearly by even late 1945 you would have had famine uh in urban areas in japan which might have led to a destabilization of the regime so tremendous deprivation for ordinary japanese and then the second theme is the is that just the extent to which the japanese government lied to their own people and insisted on telling them that they were winning when they weren't uh and you know really they had complete control this regime of all information sources it was really the most orwellian regime you know even comparing it to say the soviet union or nazi germany total control of information and the japanese people didn't really know what was happening they began to suspect that they might be losing the war uh and yet it was a deferential society and many of them continued to believe that they might actually be able to win and to a remarkable degree even right at the end of the war uh people were shocked when the emperor said we're surrendering because they did not realize how bad things had gotten so uh systematic uh deceit keeping uh the people in the dark uh and um and then that that really began to play into the dynamics that the regime their final decision to surrender i think was delayed um partly because uh they feared uh what would happen if the amer if the japanese people suddenly became aware of the extent to which the military-dominated regime had been lying to them very good another question thank you ian yeah same question basically have you spent a lot of time in japan researching this book um yeah i did travel in japan uh while i was researching the book um and uh had the chance to meet many of the leading japanese scholars uh of the second world war also met a number of their personnel in their in the japanese navy uh they're not allowed to call in the navy it's a maritime self-defense force it's the second largest asian navy now after the chinese navy and i traveled around and saw a number of the sites a number of the historical sites um and all of that was was useful uh i also lived in japan as a child between the ages of 11 and 14. so in some ways i think of it as a sort of a second home i'm fond of japan for that reason those ages 11 to 14 those are formative years you think about it uh and so um but i i'm not a japan scholar i don't read the language i don't really speak very much of it certainly not enough to do an interview uh and so i uh have been uh forced to rely really on english translated accounts um i acknowledge that's limiting uh but the good news is that so much more is available about the japanese experience of the war both military operations and also the political dimension uh then was available even say 25 years ago there's much much more available now and a lot of very good work has been done both by japanese scholars uh and their work has been translated and by western scholars of japan very good so we're getting there there's a lot more work to be done a lot more fruitful scholarship on the subject which i think will be done very good thank you so much for joining us here it's it's a special night and uh uh we really appreciate your year in attendance so um i'll leave it at this uh and that's to the uh yes um i'll leave it at this and the last thought for the evening um and that's one word um that uh i think can encapsulate um evenings like that and that's the word hero anybody catch the uh the game last night with the red sox kiki hernandez it's in the bottom of the ninth he knocked a sacrifice fly bringing in i think it was um danny santana to win the game and the red sox won and okay and they're jumping up and down on each other and all this and that and they came over and kiki hernandez i mean he's he's a stud he's he's an incredible ball player but uh what i what i found that was uh i guess disturbing in a way was after the uh after they'd stopped pouring gatorade on one another and the celebration had calmed down they got kiki hernandez on camera and he said all the normal sports cliches and all the rest of it and they turned it back and said um that he really had a heck of a series and i wish him all the success continuing on but uh he said there he is here in anastasia hero of the game and i kind of sat there and i went the heck you mean a hero a hero this guy's a multi-multi-million dollar baseball player that's that throws a ball catches a ball and hits a ball for our entertainment that's not a hero that's not what that word means it's uh it's better said for two gentlemen that sit on stage tonight that answer the call to their nation they serve their country and uh they rid the world of the worst tyranny that humankind has ever seen if you want to know what a hero is it's two those two gentlemen right over there and i want to thank you very much for being here and a great thanks to ian toll came a long way from new york city it's been a wonderful evening everyone thank you so much for coming and uh we'll see you up at the fire support for this program provided by viewers like you thank you additional support provided through the katherine b anderson fund of the st paul foundation upcoming roundtable topics can be found at www.mn-ww2 roundtable dot g production services provided by barrows productions [Music] so you

Channel: World War II History Round Table

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Length: 74min 44sec (4484 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021