23 June 2010
 
Golden Gate in ‘48


(Seeing the Golden Gate was just about the same as seeing heaven for troops in the Pacific in 1945)

Sometimes things don’t work out quite the way you planned, and that goes equally to peace and war.
 
My younger son announced that he had to make a 0600 flight to Minneapolis to do a weekend job.
 
“Fine,” I said, since I am in favor of work. I did a quick calculation on what that would require in terms of getting our of bed and reached for my wallet. “Here is the money for a cab, and he said he preferred that I drive him. I did, but was up at three for the usual male reason and drifted off again.
 
He woke me with a call at the minute I was supposed to pick him up, asses, elbows and ignored signal lights and I had him at Dulles with a round trip record time of asleep to back at Big PInk in 63 minutes.
 
Just in time to get a call telling me that "DCA" did not mean "Dulles."
 
I agreed with him. I was so jazzed up in the darkness that I did not ask the required question before any flight: pull out the boarding pass and read the airport code. It is not like we all have not made the same mistake, so I should have ensured that he looked.
 
He will pay for a cab back and get a later flight out of Reagan National- or what we know as "DCA."
 
Dulles was a man, not an airport, when Bill McCullough’s cousin Hal was flying out of Isley Field on Saipan. The SeaBees had created the largest airport in the world on Tinian Island, and the six fields on Guam and adjacent Saipan were expected to be the hub of a bombing effort that would last for years.
 
The joke was that the pilots and aircrew would see the Golden Gate in San Francisco no sooner than 1948, three long years in the future, and planning for Operation DOWNFALL was nearly complete. The invasion was to have two parts: OLYMPIC and CORONET. Set to begin in October 1945, the former was intended to capture the southern third of Ky?sh?, while the former would assault the Kanto Plain and seize Tokyo.
 
Okinawa would the staging area, while the bomber streams would continue to flow north from the Marianas, pending completion of new massive airfields.
 
My pal the Admiral had moved forward to Guam at the time that Hal McCullough’s Crew 17 was more than half-way through their combat tour.
 
They had started with the strategic targets recommended by Washington: aircraft manufacturing plants. Things were not going that well. The tactics from Europe were not effective. Accuracy from aim points above 30,000 feet were poor, and the cost-benefit of operating at the outer limit of the Super Fort’s capabilities was not working out. Plus, the weather sucked.
 
The strong Pacific currents and bitter-cold winds from central Asia combined to cover the targets with clouds, the strong winds scattered the bombs on the long way down. Hal McCullough and his fellow bombardiers could not hit what they could not see, and even radar assistance did not make up for the inability to visually acquire the target.
 
The first incendiary missions went to Kobe and Nagoya, with promising levels of destruction. By the end of February, the first massive raid went to burn Toyko with over 200 Super Forts and 454 tons of fire bombs.
 
Bill McCullugh does not recall working on Sundays. I know that there was no pause in the war effort, since the plan was to have a B-24 Liberator over the Japanese airfield at Iwo Jima every hour until the island fell to the Marines.
 
But a little relaxation was necessary for morale, and the Admiral dropped me a note about the Big Leaguers who were playing in the Bomber League in the greatest series of games every played outside the United States.
 
He is biased toward the Navy teams, of course. He said that on Oahu, the Navy had, among others, Yankees Catcher Bill Dickey, who lived with him and two other officers in "little Makalapa" the housing area in the extinct volcanic crater above Pearl Harbor.
 
“Dickey had a brother- "Skeeter"- who played for the White Sox and he was on the island, too. We saw him occasionally.”
 
The admiral pointed out that there was a companion program that ran even longer than pro baseball in the military. “The Navy recruited Big Bands for troop entertainment,” he said. “They were all enlisted musicians, mostly 2nd class petty officers, and the leader was a Chief.  Just down the street from me lived Artie Shaw and his "Band of Renown."  Being enlisted men, they were restricted in purchasing liquor, so I rescued them.  I rented a piano from a Honolulu store, and parts of the band would come to me quarters for jam sessions as long as I'd provide them with beverages.”
 

(Chief Petty Officer Arty Shaw. Photo Getty Images)

The musicians were no fools. The Admiral’s eyes twinkled with the memories. “Artie Shaw with clarinet, Claude Thornhill on piano, Sam Donahue on sax. It did not get much better.”
 
I shook my head in wonder, not for the first time in hearing the first hand stories of men who had been there.
 
“Claude and Sam became band leaders in their own right after the war.  We also had Bob Crosby with band and singers, but I didn't get personally acquainted with them.  It all made for a grand variety and interesting nights.”
 
“I imagine that with the prospect of the war going on for another year or two people wanted some diversion.”
 
The Admiral nodded. “We did not know about the Big Secret. It looked like it was going to be hard and endless. I have to tell you that the baseball series in the Marianas might have been the most remarkable assortment of Big League talent ever assembled. It amounted to 27 All Star games in a row.”
 
“You know,” I said. “Bill McCullough said it was one of the things about the destruction of Imperial Japan he remembers best.”

(Enos “Country” Slaughter signs a ball for a fan on Tinian)

I made a note to tell you the story of that epic series tomorrow, when I have not been driving all over Arlington, Fairfax and Loudoun Counties before breakfast.

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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