24 February 2007
Staff Work
I have a hard time keeping up with the Admiral. Last night was no exception. He was still ready to talk as the hands on the clock slid past eleven. He is 88, and I am only moderately beyond half of that. He has the life force: I don't know what it is, but you can see it in his merry eyes.
I look in the mirror and see only blear in mine.
It was past all our bedtimes, but he had escorted all of us at the dinner table to 1945, and being there with him it was hard to let it go. It can be a little disconcerting. Earlier in the evening we had visited 1955, jumping easily between the decades, and the creation of target folders for the SPAD drivers to study before launching against the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons.
It sounds preposterous now, but that was the case when the Admiral arrived at the FIRST Fleet and began to survey how training was being done to support the training mission for units going forward to the Western Pacific.
The Navy had fought hard to be included in the Single Integrated Operational Plan, the master scheme for the attack on the Evil Empire, should it have come to that. The SIOP (pronounced “sy-op”) was an esoteric and highly political document that purported to de-conflict Air Force and Navy strike operations in the event that the balloon went up. It required a lot of staff work.
The Admiral was disconcerted to find that there were no materials to assist the dauntless men in their flying machines on their way to Armageddon. He fixed the problem in his tour by establishing a new staff to prepare highly sensitive target folders. There were no satellite pictures to help, as there were in my day, but at least the pilots had some some way-points on the route to hell.
It is a magical thing, talking to someone else who was in the same very sensitive line of business a long, long time ago.
With the Admiral, it is as fresh as if it happened yesterday. The years fall away, and you can feel the presence of others, dead now, crowd around holding glasses of whiskey and nodding. The Admiral is their emissary, the guide between the worlds.
I could tell you where we were in the course of drinks and dinner, but mostly it was in 1945, since so much of our present rests on the foundation of what happened that year.
The Admiral recalls that the SPAD, the vaunted Douglas AD-1 Skyraider, was designed so that it's internal bomb-bay could accommodate the dimensions of the atomic bomb.
I scratched my head at that. The Bomb was one of the biggest secrets in the world at the time, and certainly it would not have been disclosed to the designers at their drawing tables at the Douglas Corporation. Or perhaps it was just a grim-faced staff officer in dress khakis who showed up one day after lunch, and spread his arms “just so,” and told them it had to be that way, “just shut up and do it, you have no need to know why.”
The Admiral was just a pup then, twenty-six and a Lieutenant on the staff, and filled with vinegar then as he is now. The war was moving west. Guam fell in early August, 1944. Nimitz arrived on the Indianapolis, and directed his staff relocate from Pearl to commence work there on the 15th.
The Lieutenant went forward with the battle staff to newly re-captured island of Guam. The Marines were still catching eighty or more of the former enemy a day. They were hungry out there in the jungle, and sometimes the Marines kill them in the night, as the hungry soldiers scavenged for American food. The staff officers would walk by the bodies on the way to work in the morning.
They were planning the end game of the war, as best they could conceive it. The over-arching plan was called DOWNFALL , and included two major landings in the Home Islands. One would be led by General MacArthur in Kyshu to the south, code-named OYLMPIC, and a second one under the command of Fleet Admiral Nimitz on the Kanto Plain near Tokyo called CORONET.
“Why two invasions,” you ask?
One for the Army, and one for the Navy, silly. They don't call it inter-service rivalry for nothing.
The Admiral was briefing events cribbed out of the Foreign Broadcast Intercept Service, which is called something a lot less ominous these days. That was really a cover, though, since his unclassified briefings were informed by highly secret decrypted intercepts of military and diplomatic communications.
If you are like me, history forms a jumble in the mental attic. For a lot of folks, amiable chowder-heads, it isn't even a jumble. It just doesn't exist. Here is what was happening that chaotic year of 1945, as the Admiral was briefing and planning:
Soldiers and Marines landed on Okinawa in March. President Roosevelt died on April 12th. The Nazis quit in May, and the troops were told to prepare for the invasion of Japan. The new fellow, Harry Truman, was informed that there was something being worked on, something big. Major combat operations were concluded on Okinawa in June, though scattered resistance continued.
The Scientists of the Manhattan District Project did not know if their bomb would really work, or if it would consume the atmosphere if it did. It was not tested until July 16th of 1945. The Fleet Gunnery Officer, CAPT Tom Hill, was sent to observe the event, and he brought a highly-classified film clip back to show Fleet Admiral Nimitz, for his eyes only.
Nimitz pursed his lips, and kept his own council at the news as his staff planned the end.
Truman sent a question through his Joint Chiefs, once he knew what they had. How many Americans were likely to die in the invasions?
It was a logical question, for a man who had options that others did not know about. In the Philippines and on Guam the planners paused in their deliberations and made calculations. MacArthur's people in Manila low-balled the estimate. Maybe a quarter million, they said, ignoring the evidence of the communications intercepts that stated plainly that the Japanese knew where the landings would be, and that everyone, man, woman and child would die to stop them.
The Admiral's team looked at the evidence from the defense of Okinawa, and calculated that it might take a million casualties to secure the capital.
The bombs fell on the 6th and 9th of August, and by the 2nd of September, the Allied Fleet was in Tokyo Bay to take the surrender.
Being so junior at the time, the Admiral stayed behind on Guam when Nimitz and four of his officers went to attend. He was there four days later, on a courier run, dispatched by his boss on an improvised mission to see what they had accomplished.
He landed in a seaplane next to a tender moored in the Sagami-wan in the late afternoon, and a jeep took him to Yokohama where MacArthur's staff was preparing the Occupation. For perhaps the only time in history, there was no traffic on Route 16 north from Yokosuka to Yokohama. There were crowds of Japanese on both sides of the road, looking at the jeep impassively as it passed.
He arrived in the dark, and handed over his briefcase. By the time he got back to Yoko, there was only time to trade a bottle of whiskey from the wine-mess on Guam to a Marine for a battle flag from the only Japanese ship that remained in the harbor, IJN Nagato. Then it was on a motor-whaleboat to the seaplane tender for the flight in the morning.
After they lifted out of the gray waters of the bay, the pilot did two long circles around the blasted capital before heading southeast for Guam. All the wooden buildings were ash, and only a few buildings stood in lonely isolation near the Imperial Palace.
The next week, the Staff moved back to Hawaii. It was all finished, mission complete, at least to the extent that things of that magnitude can be.
If you could see the light in the Admiral's eyes, you could tell that it is not over yet.
Tomorrow: Really, the Wizard of Silver Hill
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com