10 January 2017

Editor’s Note: The President is jetting off to Chicago to give what many are hoping is a glorious speech of farewell, accounting for his eight years in the Oval Office. I have come around to the idea that the Brits might have this better than we do. It was in the middle of his time in the White House that Mac and I got together at Willow to talk about his time at the forward Headquarters on Guam, and the way they lived life. I like grand strategy as much as the next guy, but what particularly interested me in all the interviews was what the texture of life was like before the marvels of our technological world. A questions about commuting while traveling with him to CAPT Bill Hatch’s funeral was a case in point- a horror of two lane roads from Leesburg to Fort Meade, for example. Or food. That is how we veered into Spam-land and Pear Pie. A Navy, like it’s Army brethren, moves on its stomach, after all. Still does. Have you had an MRE lately? Some things never change.

– Vic

Pear Pie

(A bad pie. Mac still hated the idea sixty years later).

“So what was it like when the Staff was directed to go forward?” I asked the Admiral. “Leaving Hawaii for the combat zone must have been quite a change.”

“Well, yes, of course it was, but Admiral Nimitz wanted to lead from the front. I got Eddie Layton, the Fleet Intelligence Officer, to let me pick the four best analysts at JICPOA and a Yeoman Chief Petty Officer and a First Class and that was the intelligence section at the HQ forward. We got to Guam in January of 1945 and stayed for the duration.”

“That isn’t much in the way of a staff. Were you the Deputy N2 or the J2?”

“Neither. We were just Fleet Intelligence, Estimates Section. The Navy didn’t start with the staff numbering system until after the war. The SeaBees had done a remarkable job is getting things set up. There was a nice Headquarters building on what we called CINCPAC Hill, and a messhall across the street.”

“So what did you do? I mean, what was your job like?”

“The first part of the staff day was the joint briefing. That was the one that Iron Pants Lemay from XX Air Force came to at 0900. I put it together based on the material that the Foreign Broadcast Intercept Service copied from unclassified Japanese media from their site on Saipan.”

“The briefings were all unclassified?”

(Chester Nimitz on Guam at CINCPAC Hill, later re-named in his honor).

“Yep, but that was the trick, to find the unclassified information that confirmed the classified material we got from FRUPAC. It was a sort of misdirection to keep the Japanese in the dark and still get high-quality intelligence to people who could use it without all the security bells-and-whistles. I still have copies of all the ones I gave in Guam. Admiral Nimitz did not travel much, but when he did we got him written copies and some of them have his initials on them. Never a comment, but he always signed off. YN1 Harry Truman would take dictation as fast as I could speak the words. He was quite incredible. Of course, even thought the briefings were unclassified, they were colored by the ULTRA traffic we got courtesy of Army Captain Chuck Kingston, the Special Security Officer. We also had a direct line to the Estimates Section back at FRUPAC in Hawaii where Jasper Holmes and his staff could do research for us. We used it as a chatter line, too.”

“That didn’t change,” I said. “We still had a teletype line to the other intelligence centers when I was in Hawaii, and I still remember the long keys and the springy feel to keyboard. The Operators hated us for having a way to talk to the world from the ship that they could not control. Where did you live?”

“I was billeted in a two-story Quonset hut. I shared it with another Lieutenant. It was comfortable. Beyond us were the Flag quarters. Admirals shared some places, and the Captains were there, too. We had a wine mess, too.”

“Was there a limit on alcohol?”

Mac shook his head. “No. Let your conscience be your guide was good enough. Plus, the officer’s club was on the point beyond that. When we were done with the compound we turned it over to Pan Am. They used it as a sort of R&R facility for lay-overs on the Clipper flights to the Far East once things got rolling again after the war.”

(C-rats).

“When I married Billie after the war was done, she asked me if there was anything she shouldn’t cook. She was pretty good in the kitchen, and after the days on Guam in 1945, I will tell you there was not a great deal I wouldn’t eat. I even liked that bulk Spam that cookie would cut up to look like pork chops and bread and fry them. But I drew the line at pear pie. That was my limit, and war or no war, I stuck to it.”

I glanced at the delicate pork spring rolls that came out of Tracy’s kitchen on the $5 neighborhood bar menu. I love those things, and with the spicy dipping sauce, treat them like a meal.

“In Hawaii, Spam was a delicacy. So were those canned sausages- what were they?”

“Vienna sausage. They used to serve them with chili, too. Anything with enough hot sauce to kill the taste. Nothing out forward could beat those Local plate lunches we could get down on Hotel Street in Honolulu. Red hot dogs with chili and 2 scoops of mac sal.”

“When we lived there, I used to fry up slices of Spam and serve with eggs and hot sauce,” I said. “That was when we were on shift work at PACFLT and the Soviets had ballistic missile subs continuously on patrol in EASTPAC.”

(Wartime production of canned Spam).

“Living on an island can yield some interesting culinary quirks,” said the Admiral, taking a sip of his Virgin Mary. I dipped a spring roll in the dark spicy sauce.

“Macaroni salad is usually just elbow macaroni and a heaping portion of mayonnaise, just like in the South.”

“On Guam, there wasn’t any mac sal. The CINCPAC Forward HQ dined on C-rats, exclusively.”

“What was it like?” I asked, thinking about eating out of cans for eight months.

“Well, specifically, the Type C ration was part of family of food types for the forces in the field. A-rations were fresh food. B-rations were packaged un-cooked food. C-rats were canned food that came in a monotonous variety of flavors. Meat and beans, vegetable stew, meat and spaghetti, ham-egg-and-potato. Pork and rice, franks and beans, which were just like Vienna sausage, and that awful ham and lima beans.”

“So when bulk food came in it was a big deal?”

“Oh, you bet. The problem was the fruit. Cookie didn’t have much in the way of desserts, so he settled on those cans of pears to fill his crusts of lard and flour.” Mac frowned. “They were as heavy as man-hole covers. He would make a pie out of those pears, and even sixty-five years later I can’t stomach the thought of it.”

I was going to ask the Admiral about how his unclassified briefings caused Iron Pants to mutiny against the Joint Target Board back in Washington and assign the 313th Bomber Wing to the Navy’s idea of targets, but I was having a hard time getting Peter’s attention to get another glass of chardonnay. The very thought of fried Vienna sausage with a side of mac sal was making me hungry.

copyright 2017 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com