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Overview
Look for The Pacific miniseries, now available to stream on Netflix!
Between America's retreat from China in late November 1941 and the moment General MacArthur's airplane touched down on the Japanese mainland in August of 1945, five men connected by happenstance fought the key battles of the war against Japan. From the debacle in Bataan, to the miracle at Midway and the relentless vortex of Guadalcanal, their solemn oaths to their country later led one to the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot and the others to the coral strongholds of Peleliu, the black terraces of Iwo Jima and the killing fields of Okinawa, until at last the survivors enjoyed a triumphant, yet uneasy, return home.
In The Pacific, Hugh Ambrose focuses on the real-life stories of five men who put their lives on the line for our country. To deepen the story revealed in the HBO® miniseries and go beyond it, the book dares to chart a great ocean of enmity known as the Pacific and the brave men who fought.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781101185841 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/02/2010 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 528 |
| Sales rank: | 148,342 |
| File size: | 23 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
First Lieutenant Austin Shofner woke up expecting enemy bombers to arrive overhead any second. Just after three a.m. his friend Hugh had burst into the cottage where he was sleeping on the floor and said, “Shof, Shof, wake up. I just got a message in from the CinCPAC saying that war with Japan is to be declared within the hour. I’ve gone through all the Officer of the Day’s instructions, and there isn’t a thing in there about what to do when war is declared.” With the enemy’s strike imminent, Lieutenant Shofner took the next logical step. “Go wake up the old man.”
“Oh,” Hugh replied, “I couldn’t do that.” Even groggy with sleep, Shofner understood his reluctance. The chain of command dictated that Lieutenant Hugh Nutter report to his battalion commander, not directly to the regimental commander. Speaking to a colonel in the Marine Corps was like speaking to God. The situation required it though. “You damn fool, get going, pass the buck up.” At this Hugh took off running into the darkness surrounding the navy base on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines.
Shofner followed quickly, running down to the docks, where the enlisted men were billeted in an old warehouse. He saw Hugh stumble into a hole and fall, but he didn’t stop to help. The whistle on the power station sounded. The sentry at the main gate began ringing the old ship’s bell. The men were already awake and shouting when Shofner ran into the barracks and ordered them to fall out. The bugler sounded the Call to Arms. Someone ordered the lights kept off, so as not to give the enemy’s planes a target.
His men needed a few minutes to get dressed and assembled. Shofner ran to find the cooks and get them preparing chow. Then he went to find his battalion commander. Beyond the run-down warehouse where his men bunked, away from the rows of tents pitched on the rifle range where others were billeted, stood the handsome fort built by the Spanish. Its graceful arches had long since been landscaped, so Shofner darted up the road lined by acacia trees to a pathway bordered by brilliant red hibiscus and gardenias. He found some of the senior officers of the Fourth Marine Regiment sitting together. They had received word from Admiral Hart’s headquarters sixty miles away in Manila that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Their calmness surprised him.
Shofner should not have been taken aback. Every man in the room had been expecting war with the Empire of Japan. They had thought the war would start somewhere else, most likely in China. Up until a week ago, their regiment had been based in Shanghai. They had watched the emperor’s troops steadily advance in China over the past few years as more and more divisions of the Imperial Japanese Army landed. The Japanese government had established a puppet government to rule a vast area in northern China it had renamed Manchukuo.
The Fourth Marines, well short of full strength at about eight hundred men, had been in no position to defend its quarter of Shanghai, much less protect U.S. interests in China. The situation had become so tense the marine officers concocted a plan in case of a sudden attack. They would fight their way toward an area of China not conquered by Japan. If the regiment was stopped, its men would be told essentially to “run for your life.” The officers around the table this morning were thankful the U.S. government finally had yielded to the empire’s dominance and pulled them out in late November 1941, at what now looked like the last possible moment.
Upon their arrival at Olongapo Naval Base on December 1, the Fourth Marines became part of Admiral Hart’s Asiatic Fleet, whose cruisers and destroyers were anchored in Manila Harbor, on the other side of the peninsula from where they were sitting. Along with the fleet, U.S. forces included General Douglas Macarthur’s 31,000 U.S. Army troops as well as the 120,000 officers and men of the Philippine National Army. Hart and MacArthur had been preparing for war with the Empire of Japan for years. The emperor must have been nuts to attack the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor. Now that he had, his ships and planes were sure to be on their way here, to the island of Luzon, which held the capital of the Philippine government and the headquarters of the U.S. forces. The enemy’s first strike against them, the officers agreed, would likely be by bombers flying off Formosa.
With all this strategic talk, Shofner could see that no orders were in the offing, so he went back to his men. His headquarters company had assembled on the parade ground along with the men from the infantry companies. The word being passed around was succinct: “japs blew the hell out of Pearl Harbor.” He confirmed the news not with fear, but with some relish. Lieutenant Austin “Shifty” Shofner of Shelbyville, Tennessee, had always loved a good fight. Of medium height but robust of build, he loved football, wrestling, and gambling of any kind. He did not think much of the Japanese. He told his men that an attack was expected any moment. Live ammunition would be issued immediately. Next came a sly grin. “Our play days are now over and we can start earning our money.”
The marines waited on the parade ground until the battalion commander arrived to address them. All liberties were canceled. The regimental band was being dissolved, as was the small detachment of marines that manned the naval stationwhen the fourth Marines arrived. These men would be formed into rifle platoons, which would then be divided among the rifle companies. Every man was needed because they had to defend not only Olongapo Naval station, but another, smaller one at Mariveles, on the tip of the Bataan Peninsula. The 1st Battalion drew the job of protecting Mariveles. It would depart immediately.
The departure decreased the regiment by not quite half, leaving it the 2nd Battalion, Shofner’s headquarters and service company, and a unit of navy medical personnel. The riflemen got to work creating defensive positions. They dug foxholes, emplaced their cannons, and strung barbed wire to stop a beach assault. They located caches of ammunition in handy places and surrounded them with sandbags. Defending Olongapo also meant protecting the navy’s squadron of long-range scout planes, the PBYs. When not on patrol these flying boats swung at their anchors just off the dock. The marines positioned their machine guns to fire at attacking planes. Roadblocks were established around the base, although this was not much of a job since the only civilization nearby was the small town of Olongapo.
The men put their backs into the work. Every marine had seen the Japanese soldiers in action on the other side of street barricades in Shanghai. They had witnessed how brutal and violent they were to unarmed civilians. Most of them had heard what the Japanese had done to the people of Nanking. So they knew what to expect from a Japanese invasion. Shofner felt a twinge of embarrassment that these preparations had waited until now. The biggest exercise undertaken since their arrival had been a hike to a swimming beach. Shofner thought back to the day before, December 7, when he had spent the entire day looking for a spot to show movies. He let those thoughts go. His assignment was to create a bivouac for the battalion away from the naval station. The enemy’s bombers were sure to aim for the warehouses and the fort. As noon on the eighth approached, he moved with the alacrity for which he was known. He took his company across the golf course, forded a creek, and began setting up camp in a mangrove swamp.
On the other side of the International Date Line, the afternoon of December 7 found Ensign Vernon “Mike” Micheel of the United States Navy preparing to do battle with the Imperial Japanese Navy. He carried a sheaf of papers in his hands as he walked around the navy’s air station in San Diego, known as North Island. Despite the frenzy around him, Mike moved with deliberate haste. He stopped at the different departments on the base: the Time Keeper, the Storeroom Keeper, the Chief Flight Instructor, and so forth, endeavoring to get his paperwork in order. A few hours before he and the other pilots of his training group, officially known as the Advanced Carrier Training Unit (ACTU), had been told that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Their pilot training was being cut short. They would board USS Saratoga immediately and go to war.
The Sara, as her crew called her, could be seen from almost anywhere Mike walked. She was the navy’s largest aircraft carrier and towered over North Island, the collection of landing strips and aircraft hangars on the isthmus that formed San Diego Harbor. She was the center of attention, surrounded by cranes and gangways. Several squadrons, which included maintenance personnel as well as the pilots, gunners, and airplanes, were being loaded aboard. Most of these crews had been scheduled to board the Sara today. The big fleet carrier had been refitted in a shipyard up the coast and, strangely, arrived a few minutes before the declaration of war. But new guys like Mike had had no such expectation.
Micheel prepared himself for active duty without the burning desire for revenge on the sneaky enemy to which most everyone around him pledged themselves. He knew he wasn’t ready. He had not landed a plane on a carrier. Most of his flight time had been logged in biplanes. He had flown some hours in single-wing metal planes, but he had only just begun to fly the navy’s new combat aircraft. Even when the Sara’s torpedo defense alarm sounded and an attack appeared imminent, it was not in Mike’s nature to let anger or ego overwhelm his assessment.
Mike did not consider himself a natural pilot. He had not grown up making paper planes and following the exploits of pioneers like Charles Lindbergh. In 1940, the twenty-four-year-old dairy farmer went down to the draft board and discovered that he would be drafted in early 1941. If he enlisted, he could choose his service. His experiences in the ROTC, which had helped pay for college, had instilled in him a strong desire to avoid sleeping in a pup tent and eating cold rations. On a tip from a friend, he sought out a navy recruiter. The recruiter assured him that life in the navy was a whole lot better than in the infantry, but then he noticed Mike’s college degree. “You know, we’ve got another place that you would fit, and that would be in the navy air corps. . . . It’s the same thing as being on the ship with the regular navy people, but you get paid more.”
“Well, that sounds good,” Mike replied without enthusiasm. He had ridden on a plane once. “It was all right. But I wasn’t thrilled about it.” The recruiter, like all good recruiters, promised, “Well, you can get a chance to try it. If you don’t like it, you can always switch back to the regular navy.”
More than a year later, Mike arrived at North Island with a mission that placed him at the forefront of modern naval warfare. When civilians noticed the gold wings on his dress uniform, they usually assumed that he was a fighter pilot. The nation’s memories of World War I were laced with the stories of fighter pilots dueling with the enemy across the heavens at hundreds of miles an hour. That heady mix of glam¬our and prestige also had fired the imaginations of the men with whom Mike had gone through flight training. Each cadet strove to be the best because only the best pilots became fighter pilots. When they graduated from the Naval Flight School at Pensacola, the new ensigns listed their preferred duty.
Though he had graduated in the top quarter of his class, and been offered the chance to become an instructor, Ensign Micheel listed dive-bomber as his top choice. While few had heard of it before their training, the dive-bomber was also a carrier-based plane. It served on the front line of America’s armed forces. Instead of knock¬ing down the enemy’s planes, its mission was to find the enemy’s ships and sink them. Mike wanted to fly from a carrier. In his usual quiet way he figured out that the surest way for him to become a carrier pilot was to become a dive-bomber. Many of his fellow classmates had listed fighter pilot as their first choice. Most of them would later find themselves behind the yoke of a four-engine bomber. Although of¬ficially ordered to a scouting squadron, he essentially received his first choice. Scouts and bombers flew the same plane and shared the same mission. Mike came to North Island to improve his navigation enough to be a great scout, but also to learn the art of destroying ships, especially enemy carriers.
Now he filed his paperwork and walked to the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters to pack his bags without once having attempted the difficult maneuver of dive-bombing. As the sun set, a blackout order added to the confusion and tension. Men who had been on liberty or on leave continued to arrive, full of questions. Micheel and the other new pilots headed for the Sara and the moment they had been work¬ing toward. They boarded an aircraft carrier for the first time. Every space was being crammed with every pilot, mechanic, airplane, bullet, and bomb that could be had. Rumors ran wild. The new pilots found their way to officer country, the deck where officers’ staterooms were located.
The loading went on through the night, without outside lights. Then dawn broke. The Sara stood out from North Island just before ten a.m. on December 8. The clang of the ship’s general quarters alarm sounded minutes later. Before she departed, however, calmer heads had prevailed. Micheel and the other trainees had been ordered off. As the great ship headed for open sea, those watching her from the dock would have assumed the Sara and her escort of three destroyers were headed straight into combat.
Monday’s newspapers carried the story of the “Jap attack on Pearl Harbor” as well as warnings from military and civilian leaders that an attack on the West Coast was likely. It fell to the servicemen of North Island to defend San Diego. The detachment of marines on the base began digging foxholes, setting up their guns, and protecting key buildings with stacks of sandbags. The airmen hardly knew how to prepare. The Sara had taken all of the combat planes assigned to Mike’s training unit. All they had to fly were the ancient “Brewster Buffalo” and the SNJ, nicknamed the “Yellow Peril” because of its bright color and the inexperienced students who flew it.
Interviews
The Pacific: An Opinionated History
By Hugh Ambrose
The Pacific presents the Pacific War, from America's first battle with the Japanese to the final shot. It blends eyewitness accounts into a larger perspective on the course of the war. However, this larger perspective is not solely provided by the historian, but also by the veterans. Put another way, instead of layering some oral histories onto a historical framework, I follow the lives of five veterans who, between them, experienced most of the key moments of the war. By walking with these men through their respective wars, the reader comes to see The Pacific as a whole.
The result of this approach is, I think, unusually powerful. The war comes at the reader with speed and power and meaning. The veterans, moreover, were not historians calmly researching and reporting all the facts. Their very definite opinions about people and events, as expressed in the book, must be understood in that light. Although historians may contest some of their judgments, I think they are valuable. It's not just that veterans have a right to their own opinions-they certainly earned it-it's that their passion is infectious. Reading this book, you will always care about what happens and why.
A careful reader will of course discern a great many of my conclusions about the war. I choose these particular men out of hundreds of possibilities for a reason. You will notice, for instance, that the US Army receives scant notice. I recognize that there were more army divisions serving in the Pacific than Marine Corps divisions. I admit that in fighting their way through the South Pacific, the soldiers won battles every bit as harrowing as those fought by the Leathernecks. As a historian, though, I believe that the drive through the South Pacific was secondary. Had the US only been able to sustain one drive, it would have been the one through the Central Pacific. In order to keep my book to manageable length, I focused on the US Navy and its Marine Corps.
Although the book focuses on Marines, specifically the story of the First Marine Division, it also includes the life of one aircraft carrier pilot. The Pacific War was a carrier war as no war has ever been. Few men saw as much of the carrier war as Vernon "Mike" Micheel. To see Mike fly a dive bomber at the Battle of Midway and later at the Philippine Sea is to simultaneously appreciate these critical turning points; to understand them within the context of the war; and to witness the profound change in circumstances which occurred between them.
Mike Micheel served with two of the carrier war's most important figures: Captain Miles Browning and Admiral J.J. "Jocko" Clark. Through Mike, we do not come to understand them in their totality, as their biographies provide. We see them in action and as viewed by someone who served under them. Mike did not care for Browning, who is revered by some historians, because Browning "short decked" his squadrons-as captain of the carrier USS Yorktown, he failed to ensure his pilots had enough open deck and enough headwind with which to take off. Conversely, Admiral Clark, who once accused Mike of skipping work to go drinking in the bars, comes off better than Browning. Clark's personality could be as abrasive as Browning's, but his motivations were sound. Mike understood that Clark wanted his ship to be the best. Every sailor on board Yorktown believed that their Admiral worked hard to achieve that goal.
Watching Mike's experiences with these men, we understand why he judged them so. Part of his information about them came from hearsay or, as its known in the navy, scuttlebutt. Scuttlebutt is notoriously inaccurate. Mike knew that and tried not to be influenced by it, but he still was. The importance of gossip in the life of a man in combat is often stated by historians, but The Pacific endeavors to allow the reader to experience a man's struggle to understand, to survive.
Each of the millions of men under arms in WWII experienced his own unique war. Each man within a company or a squadron comprehended his reality differently than his comrades. Can five men, with their own set of idiosyncratic experiences, represent this vast and complex war sufficiently to warrant the book's all-encompassing title? I think so. By choosing these particular five men, I have written a history that simultaneously describes the individual experience and illuminates the general truths of that vast ocean of enmity we call The Pacific.
Introduction
Attempting to tell the story of individuals is fraught with perils. Sources contradict one another. The fog of war leaves mistaken impressions. The fog of time increases these misapprehensions. The documents are incomplete, sometimes inaccurate, and always more revealing of the aggregate experience than that of the individual. Relying on the letters, reports, and journals written during thewar, though, solves most of these problems.
History books relate what happened. This work focuses on what the men thought was going to happen, what they endured or witnessed, and what they believed had happened. Determining what someone thought at a particular time, before their understanding was shaped later by new information, is highly problematical. Contemporaneous accounts remain the best source. These accounts form the basis of this book. For reasons that will become obvious, I chose not to distinguish between remarks made at the time and those made many years later. Instead, I took great care to prevent the rosy glow of memory from obscuring the facts. The diaries, letters, and reports of Austin Shofner, Sid's friend John "Deacon" Tatum, John Basilone, and Eugene Sledge are new to the war's scholarship. They are rare and extremely valuable documents. They have made possible the vivid and unrelenting stories told herein. They also offer new insights and new information on key events and important individuals, as the avid military historians will discern.
The basis of research for four of the individuals whose lives appear in this book (Sidney Phillips, Austin Shofner, Vernon Micheel, and Eugene Sledge) amounts to a core group of documents: their respective military records, letters, journals, memoirs, memoirs of friends, photos, and interviews. Since this book intends to tell the story of these men in their words as much as possible, these sources are quoted and paraphrased liberally (except in the case of Eugene Sledge's memoir). In order to make the endnotes of this book less cumbersome, these sources will be cited in the first endnote of each story, in a "super endnote." The additional material used will be cited in the text as necessary. The story of the fifth veteran, on the other hand, could not be handled in this manner. John Basilone's story was pulled together from a hundred different sources, none of which offers more than a piece of the whole.
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