Editor’s Note: Confirmation hearings for the new Administration’s cabinet are supposed to start this week in the Senate. This should be interesting, and the name calling and Twitter Wars have already laid out some of the battle lines. I was clearing out the old year’s stack of magazines, and riffling through the cover art of the New Yorker, I decided to save the one o Hillary as a battered, but victorious boxer. It is on my refrigerator now. She is being encouraged to run for Mayor of New York, I understand, so I may be able to re-cycle all sorts of stuff. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose, you know?

– Vic

Nimitz Hill

(The View from Nimitz Hill, Guam. Photo Peter Kelsey 2009)

It had been a great evening, once the clouds and rain blew off to the east and left the Willow patio in peace.

Jasper the bartender had been excited to discover that Mac had spent time on Nimitz Hill on his home island of Guam. As a kid, he had often gone up to the site, which featured a fabulous view of the broad Pacific. He is proud of his homeland, and has adopted Mac as a sort of clan elder at Willow, and takes special care of him, always in motion.

Admiral Mac’s description of his close call with joining the crew of doomed USS Wahoo is a case in point, and it still had me a little agitated. That was a classic evening at the warm wood bar at Willow, and we talked about many things that brought the sacrifice of another time back to vivid life.

My time with the gypsy crew of the Midway Maru in the Yellow Sea makes it intensely personal in a way the policy wonks on the National Security Council apparently don’t get.

We talked about that at the bar. I said “We are being quite solicitous about our friends the Chinese these days,” while looking at the $5 items on Tracy’s Neighborhood Bar Menu. “Did you see that bi-annual report from the boys and girls at Treasury? It was delayed so as not to disrupt the G20 love-in last month. It popped out at the end of the news cycle last week, timed to pass into the summer weekend news cycle without a trace.”

The Admiral nodded and sipped from the straw in his Virgin Mary that emerged from the colossal olives and celery.

“The Chinese announced last month that they would allow the Renminbi- I thought it was the “Yuan!”- to float in value against the dollar. The Administration viewed it as a triumph at the time, and the float so far amounts to .08%.”

I snorted. “There is overwhelming evidence from a variety of sources that the Chinese government has systematically intervened in currency markets over years to keep the Renminbi undervalued by as much as 40 percent, so you can understand there is a little ways to go.”

Mac smiles, as one of the last remaining Asia Hands remaining outside of captivity, “We are walking on little cat’s feet, and don’t think that Asia isn’t looking on with a great deal of interest, just as China’s bad step-children the North Koreans run around putting torpedoes into things.”

“I understand that a big joint naval exercise intended to demonstrate US resolve about Pyongyang’s murderous conduct was scheduled to be conducted in the Yellow Sea with the USS George Washington Strike Group. Apparently we have meekly succumbed to Chinese sensibilities and moved it elsewhere to accommodate them.”

The Admiral and I take freedom of the seas personally, and that is something else that Asia is watching with great interest.

The generation that saw the last big change is fading away, and that is why drinks with Mac is so special, the last of the Secret warriors who remains to tell the stories of all of them who went. Dammit, their stories need to be told.

We took Saipan because CINCPAC Commander Chester Nimitz was told to seize the Marianas Islands. I asked Mac if he knew about the B-29 requirements. He said Admiral Nimitz might have been told about that, but as a junior officer, he just knew that there was an objective to be met, and he and his comrades were just engaged on whipping the Imperial Fleet and get it done.

What was happening was the joining of great currents of activity. Setting up a constant stream of the B-29 capability against the Home Islands was crucial, and Mac was part of the Navy, Marine and Army push to secure airfields for the Super Forts that could strike the home islands round the clock if necessary, lighting up the cities in flames. The submarine force was cruising the waters up close and personal to cut off imports of critical supplies of war materials, fuel and food.

There were plans and backup plans for everything. There was a back-up aircraft model in production, just in case the B-29 did not work out; there were multiple islands to be seized; MacArthur would be permitted to continue west to return to the Philippines.

The resolve demonstrated by the Allies forces was quite remarkable, and Asia was watching.

Guam, ringed by reefs, cliffs, and heavy surf, represented a formidable challenge. It was not fortified in the manner that Saipan and the other old German mandates in the Marianas chain were. Guam had been American until 1941, after all, but it would be a tough nut to crack.

On July 21, 1944, the Third Marines and the 1st Provisional landed on both sides of the Orote peninsula on the western side of Guam. Rain and thick jungle made conditions difficult and casualties high. The Japanese line collapsed after a sharp fight at Mount Barrigada two weeks later, and after August 4, the rest of the battle was a pursuit to the north.

As in other battles of the Pacific War, the Japanese refused to surrender, and in the apocalyptic climax to the conquest, hurled themselves from the rugged cliffs.

The Construction Battalions- the legendary SeaBees- commenced construction operations before the island was fully secured, which accounts for the unit motto: “First we dig ‘em, then we die in ‘em.” They started with two airfields and a new command center on the Fonte Plateau, a broad, rolling plateau that dominates the topography of the central island. It is the place that Japanese general Takashina Takeshi had his command post until he was killed on 28 July.

(FADM Nimitz, center in combination cover, greets a CoDel arriving on Guam, 1945. The Admiral is in shorts. Navy Photo)

They call it Nimitz Hill now, a lingering testament to the resolve of the CINCPAC Commander to take back and liberate what the Japanese had usurped.

“There were still Japanese soldiers holding out, and they ambushed a patrol as late as December 8th and killed three Marines. That is when we were packing or seabags to go forward,” said Mac quietly. “It wasn’t over on the island. Not for a while. In the mornings after we deployed, there would be corpses laid out by the supply dumps where fugitive Japanese troops tried to get food.”

The CINCPAC staff was moving forward by increments from Pearl to stay close to the diminishing front lines around Japan. Mac could have stayed in Pearl, but he went to his boss, Captain Eddie Layton, and volunteered to go to Guam.

Eddie said he would be pleased to have him, on the condition that he convince and bring along the best Air, Naval, and Ground geographic analysts at the Joint Intelligence Center- Pacific Ocean Area (JICPOA). Mac took the challenge to heart and convinced his first draft choices to volunteer, along with a remarkable Yeoman First who could type as fast as you can talk.

The Yeoman’s name was Harry Truman, of all things, so at the end of things, it was Truman-to-Truman for the Nimitz Hill chain of command.

(SeaBees put the fields up fast. A company street at Isley Field, 1944. Air Force Photo.)

Mac told me that they arrived on Guam in January 1945. The campaign was not going well. Washington was directing the tactics and targets, based on their European campaign against the Germans. The thinking behind the strategy was that high-altitude precision strikes against key nodes in the manufacturing infrastructure were the keys to immobilizing the enemy.

The thousand plane raid on Schweinfurt-Regensberg in 1943 was the template. What the Mighty 8th Air Force called “Mission No. 84” was intended to take out the German aircraft production capability based on the destruction of strategic components like ball-bearings.

It did nothing of the sort, but that would not be revealed until the completion of the Strategic Bombing Survey chartered by FDR in 1944 was done after the war and based on ground truth.
Mission 84 also resulted in catastrophic losses to the Mighty 8th, with sixty bombers and their crews lost and many more that limped home with casualties, damaged beyond repair. The Air Corps was unable to reconstitute a follow-on strike, which tells you just how devastating the losses had been, and how erroneous the assumptions were that drove the strategy.
Targets for the campaign against Japan were directed by the Joint Target Group in Washington. The JTG was following the European plan against a completely different set of circumstances. Super Fort crews of the XX Air Force were sent against aircraft engine factories, at high altitude, in swirling weather conditions at the very edge of the envelope.

The situation was far more difficult than Washington could imagine. Mac told me about the way the SeaBees constructed the fields to wring every ounce of performance out of the fire-prone Wright R-3350-23 engines. “The runways were peaked to allow the rain to run off, and had a long down-grade to help the Super Forts gain altitude. The end of the runways on Guam led to the cliffs that the Japs committed hara-kiri from.”

He looked off past Peter, who was delivering a little plate of Tracy’s custom deviled eggs to the side of my long-stemmed wine glass. Polyface Farms provides the ingredients, and they never fail to satisfy.

“I had a jeep assigned to me, and we would take the forty-five minute drive from CINCPAC Hill to Anderson Field to watch the raids depart in the evening. The end of the strip had a little upslope that was supposed to act like a ramp. The Super Forts would get to the end of the runway and then pop up and disappear behind the cliffs. They actually settled down a few hundred feet as they gained speed and cleaned up the gear and flaps and started to gain altitude again. We would not see them against until they were a mile or two beyond the cliffs.”

Down on Isley Field, the bomber crews were flying with extra tanks of highly volatile fuel in the bomb bay to extend range. The Super Forts were subject to fires on the best of days, and loaded with bombs and AvGas, they were torches waiting to be lit. Not all of the Forts made it off the ground and into the air. Iron Pants LeMay knew the tactics needed to be changed in the final struggle against the stubborn Japanese, and that is where the Estimates Section on Nimitz Hill came into the picture.

There is a certain relevance to all the recollections of some old warriors. The bones of bold submarine skipper “Mush” Morton and tens of thousands of their comrades remain where they fell. Their sacrifice and triumph was long remembered in Asia, but memory does fade. To sit and listen to stories spun phlegmatically by one whose bones should have been with them is an out-of-body experience.

New generations are watching current events in the modern South China Sea with interest, including the value of currency and the freedom of the seas. There is a solid core of resolve beyond the waters of the Pacific. After all, the last Japanese hold-out on Guam was Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi, who was discovered by hunters on January 24, 1972.

He had lived alone in a cave for 27 years, true to his Emperor.

I wondered if we can be true to the sacrifice of our fathers. If our warriors must defer to the wishes of others about where and when we pass on the world’s ocean, I imagine Mush Morton and the crew of his Yahoo are rolling in their watery grave.

(Last known picture of the crew of the USS Wahoo, 1943. They are still on patrol).

Copyright 2017 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com