18 August 2007

Accidental Hero




I had dinner with the Admiral last night at a nice place out in Great Falls. We drove out the Dulles Access Road, antiseptic as it slashes through the glass boxed operating units of the defense contractors. We bailed out just past the toll plaza and took Route 7, which is an old road that has its own name.

The vegetation was lush around the old mill on Colvin Run, and when we rolled in the little town off the Leesburg Pike was silent, almost eerie. August vacation time had emptied the place out, and it was easy to imagine it was another time, when the crickets were louder than the traffic out on the Pike, and not everyone was driving like they were nuts.

The restaurant was located in an old Victorian mansion, and catered to the local landowners who have transformed the old farm town into an exclusive enclave on the south bank of the Potomac. It specializes in Northern Italian cuisine, and succumbed to temptation and had the scaloppini with crab meat and a nice salad.

The Admiral has become accustomed to taking care of himself in the years since his wife started down the hard road of becoming a prisoner in her own body. That is part of the pain of being the sole survivor of a long marriage. He is used to having a single course meal, and ordered the lasagna.

We talked about the global financial melt-down, and the Federal Reserve's decision to cut an esoteric interest rate in the hopes of avoiding a full-blown recession. He takes a certain detached amusement with the situation that I cannot, being leveraged in the real estate market that is crashing down around us.

Consequently, I was happy to get off the topic of the present and get to something safely in the past.

Not that it seemed safe at the time.

The Admiral is the sole survivor of his generation of Navy Spooks, the last man standing of two generations. He is not the last man who talked to Chester Nimitz, though possibly he is the only one remaining lwho had to hurry to catch up to the Commander of the Pacific Fleet as walked he walked to work at the Headquarters on Guam.

He also is not the last man to have had a drink with Rear Admiral Sir H. B. Rawlings, who had been commander of the British   Pacific Fleet in 1945. It is certain that he is the last one to have actually had a whiskey with the Admiral when he was attired in only his skivvey shorts, summoned from the flag cabin on HMS King George V when the news came that the Japanese had thrown in the towel.

The traditions of the Royal Navy are useful in victory.

It had been a long way across the Pacific.

My friend was a young man when they unraveled the riddles of the Japanese Naval Code, which in the jargon of the codebreakers was called JN-25. In 1942, the rosy confidence that later generations would associate with the winning of the Last Just War did not exist. The struggle was desperate, and communications intelligence indicated Japanese were intent on expanding east of the Marshall Islands.

References to a place designated by the di-graph "AF" began appearing in partially decoded messages. In March of 1943, Japanese seaplanes, refueled from a submarine at French Frigate Shoals, Territory of Hawaii, conducted a small armed reconnaissance mission over Oahu. In April, Commander of the Combined Fleet Isoruku Yamamoto convinced the Imperial General Staff to agree to a plan to seize Midway atoll, with a daring deception operation targeting the Aleutian Islands in the North Pacific.

In Yamamoto's view, the capture of Midway Island would allow Japan to pursue its Asian policies behind an impregnable eastern shield of defenses in the Central Pacific.

On 19 May, Commander Joe Rochefort and Fleet Intelligence Officer Eddie Layton identified Midway and Dutch Harbor as the specific Japanese objectives from COMINT decrypts. They managed to convince Admiral Nimitz that their analysis was correct, and two task forces were dispatched to meet the Imperial Fleet.

The waiter was solicitous, and brought a nice Pino Grigio to the table as we talked. It was dry without being impertinent. The trees danced in the breeze outside as the shadows lengthened.

The Admiral was enjoying his lasagna and grew increasingly animated. Everyone knows what happened when the fleets collided, just where Joe and Eddie had predicted, but it was still a matter of luck. Douglas "Devastator" torpedo bombers from three squadrons attacked the four Japanese carriers. Although nearly wiped out by the defending Japanese fighters and antiaircraft fire, they drew off enemy fighters, leaving the skies open for dive bombers from Enterprise and Yorktown, which fatally damaged carriers Kaga, Akagi and Kaga. Hiryu, last of the four Imperial carriers, was sunk the next day.

Admiral Yamamoto was compelled to abandon his Midway invasion plans, and the Japanese Fleet began to retire westward. It was a retreat that did not stop until the matter was ended, burned against the sky.

I speared some endive lettuce and mentioned that I had met Ensign George Gay at the big civil aviation fly-in at Oshkosh, Wisconsin years ago. George was the sole survivor of Torpedo Squadron 8, which had lined up at low level to make their runs at the IJN carriers. All the airplanes were shot down, even as they drew the Zeros on Combat Air Patrol down to the wave-tops and left the skies open to the American dive-bombers

George was selling his book about it, which he called “Sole Survivor.” I bought the book, of course, and chatted with him about the rest of his life, which included thirty years of commercial flying. Nothing ever compared with the drama he recounted, there in the water in the midst of the burning Japanese Fleet.

He was in the water for 30 hours and the story in his book was that his left eye was burned shut and he had to pry it open to witness the great victory.
 
The admiral snorted. He said PACFLT knew from COMINT that the Japanese had lost the carriers by reading the messages from the flagship. The problem was that the information was so sensitive that they could not disclose it. A great victory had been won, but there was no way to talk about it. It was not until George was plucked from the water by a PBY that they had a "secret" level source to attribute the information to.

Secret information could immediately be declassified, and that is how the news was released to an American public starved for good news.

The Admiral said that George had his head under his life raft, and was thirty miles away from the strike by the time the units had maneuvered around in the attack. All he could really see was smoke on the horizon. In that moment, though, he was a necessary hero, and no one ever corrected the record.

We finished the dinner and relaxed over coffee.

George passed away in 1994, and the famous photographer Joe Rosenthal left this year. He took the most famous picture of the age at the summit of Mt. Suribachi, featuring a few Marines and a Navy Corpsman who happened to be on the summit. The men might have been posed in that awesome symmetry, and it might have been the second flag erected on the summit, but there is no question but that it is an image for the ages.

All combat pictures had to be routed through Public Affairs prior to release, so the first place they went from Iwo Jima was O'ahu. The Admiral was called over to examine them and ensure that nothing of intelligence value inadvertently appeared in the papers. He flipped through the stack of glossies and stopped abruptly when he saw the one of the flag raising. He looked up at the PAO and gestured at it, saying, "This is going to be one of the most famous pictures of the War."

I had to agree. Staged or not, he was right. But as he said at the bar later, it didn't have to be.

He could have said it was classified, and taken it back to the vault. There, he could have pinned it on the wall, and it never would have been seen. The Marines would have had to find another theme for their memorial here in Washington.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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