Clive Howard - One Damned Island After Another - The Saga of the Seventh Air Force in World War Two

First published by The University of North Carolina Press in 1946.

Copyright (c) Clive Howard and Joe Whitley.

This edition published in 2018.

ISBN -978-1724014436

Three years after the attack on pearl harbor, when the Seventh Air Force had molded victory from defeat, Corporal Earl Nelson, a newspaper reporter in civilian life, wrote an editorial which put into passionate words what many Pacific air force men had been thinking for a long time.

The editorial, called Heroes Dont Win Wars, was published in Brief Magazine, the official Seventh Air Force weekly magazine for which Nelson was a combat correspondent.

Nelsons editorial got off to a rather surprising start surprising because it survived both Army and Navy censorship by criticizing bitterly the newspapers, magazines, radio, and even Brief Magazine, for their coverage of the war. The press and radio, Nelson complained, were printing and broadcasting only the fantastic exploits of men who wore medals. The public heroes.

Why dont they talk about the guy who is just a soldier? Nelson demanded. Why doesnt anybody ever mention the poor bastard who got dragged into the Army, got stuck out here on one of these God-forsaken holes, and is doing nothing but his job?

Ninety or maybe ninety-nine percent of the guys in the Army never had anything happen to them.

Take, for example, a guy I know named Chuck who was on KP today. Nothing ever happened to him. He doesnt even get into trouble.

What does he do all day? He drives a truck. He goes back and forth over the island one hundred miles a day. He goes to a movie at night; probably a very bad and very old movie which he has already seen four of five times. He goes back to his tent and writes a gushy letter to some babe who has probably thrown him over a year ago. He lies in his slit trench at night during air raids. He goes on KP about every fifth day.

He sure as hell isnt going to get any medals or citations. He wont kill any Japs or knock down any Zeros. He wont do a damned thing to get his name in the papers. He wont even get a promotion.

There are a lot of guys like Chuck. Most of the guys out here on the islands are like Chuck.

Dont you think, Nelson asked, that those guys would like to see their names in print, saying that theyre fighting the war too?

Dont you think a mechanic down on the flight line believes what he is doing is just as important as what the pilot or the gunner is doing?

Heroes dont win wars; they just get their names in the papers.

The guys who win wars are the guys who lug reams of paper around, or open thousands of cans of C rations, or clean hundreds of pots and pans, or grease jeeps, or dig latrines, or do any of a thousand jobs that nobody ever heard of, except the poor bastard who has to do them.

The guys who are just serial numbers. The guys who say Yes Sir like automatons. The guys whose jobs have become so regulated and monotonous that they can do them while their minds are 10,000 miles away.

They are the real heroes of this war. They are the guys who are winning this war if it is really being won.

Few correspondents, GI or civilian, could have signed their names to such an editorial without drawing sharp criticism from both sides. Nelsons kind of hero, chary of Stateside and rear echelon observers who flew quick, comfortable tours of the Pacific and then made positive, all-embracing and usually asinine statements about what the average GI was thinking, would have rejected most self-appointed spokesmen. The pilots and gunners could have rendered Nelsons editorial pointless by challenging the authority of a man who had not experienced combat flying.

Nelson was a veteran of both kinds of war. In almost four years of Pacific soldiering, Nelson lived on forty-two islands. Probably that is a record. As a combat correspondent, and before that as a bored soldier who flew combat missions for a break in tedium, Nelson flew fifteen missions, one of them a B-29 strike over Japan.

The editorial, when it reached the Sevenths island outposts, caused a mild sensation and resulted in a heavy flow of letters to Brief. There were letters from average GIs saying they had clipped the editorial and mailed it home. There were a few letters from pilots saying they would gladly swap the privileges of rank and the hazards of one minute over an enemy target for three years of comparative safety as file clerks.

There were many letters from pilots and gunners giving overfull credit for the bombs they had dropped on enemy targets and the bullets they had fired into enemy aircraft, to the men nobody ever mentioned.

The pilots, the gunners, the navigators, the bombardiers, and combat aircrewmen who fought the enemy in the air from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo have had the Pacific victory dedicated to them in headlines, in military decorations, in public demonstrations which have taken many forms in many places.

But to the end of the war, and to this very day, nobody has found a way to tell the story of the men the ninety or ninety-nine percent of men to whom nothing ever happened.

The men who sat, day after endless day, on the scorched griddles of Pacific sand, where a soldier could, in ten minutes, walk to the end of his world. On the atolls where the only release from a monotony deadlier than enemy bombs was a mans diminishing ability to imagine himself somewhere else.

This narrative has attempted to show as much as possible the part they played in winning the war against Japan. But somehow, neither prose, nor poetry, nor photographs adequately tell their story.

To those men, then, this book is dedicated.

To the hungry men the thirsty men the lonely men. The forgotten men.

This narrative of the combat history of the Seventh Air Force from Pearl Harbor to the end of the war against Japan is the result of the war and peacetime work of many people. Civilians and soldiers, reporters, photographers and historians, the living and the dead, who collected the facts in photographs and texts, of the Pacific air war to them should go much of the credit for the final production of this work:

To Colonel Hans C. Adamson, whose foresight was responsible for the AAF program to record faithfully and accurately the deeds of the men and women of the AAF in World War II. He overcame countless serious problems to put his plan into operation-chief of which was the twenty-seven days he spent in an open life-raft in the Pacific with Captain Eddie Rickenbacker and six crewmen of a downed Flying Fortress.

To Lucien Hubbard, motion picture writer and producer, and Jack Kirkland, playwright and producer, who, forsaking commercial commitments, journeyed through the Pacific during the war as civilian representatives of the Personnel Narratives Division. But for their painstaking interviews with Air Forces survivors of Pearl Harbor and the men who participated in the early air actions at Wake, Midway, Guadalcanal, and in the Gilberts and Marshals, the human experiences of more than two years of the Sevenths history would have remained forever buried in cold and colorless operational statistics.

To the combat reporters and photographers of the Seventh, who at great personal risk and in complete anonymity, recorded with camera and typewriter the Sevenths war in the air and on the ground, should go full credit: