Thomas McKelvey Cleaver - I Will Run Wild: The Pacific War from Pearl Harbor to Midway

Contents

This is a terrific book, fast-moving and loaded with facts. I have read a number of books about World War II in the Pacific. Most go from Pearl Harbor to Coral Sea to Midway and on to Guadalcanal. I Will Run Wild brings you to all the places in between and then covers the big ones we heard about. I really had little knowledge about the air battles in the South Pacific near Australia other than Coral Sea and Midway. The author has really done his homework! He covers in great detail the thinking and actions of the great young heroes as well as the key players, with great background detail as to how the two navies viewed each other for the twenty years before the war, as well as the development of the weapons used by both sides. Of particular note is the political detail provided I really knew nothing about the history of Thailand and I suspect many others will find this highly interesting. As a former combat aviator myself, I was impressed with how little flight time many of the young aviators had when they went into battle, and how they met the challenges they faced regardless. No punches are pulled in this book. Both sides made mistakes and at times showed poor judgement. The author treats General MacArthur with candor. Java, Dutch Borneo, Darwin and many places you might never have heard of are integrated into this fast-paced historical work. There are many lessons in this book, but the most important is how people rose to challenges they would never have believed they would face until the events were upon them, and how they gave it everything they had. This is a story for our times. It is a great read for young and old.

RADM H. Denny Wisely USN (Ret.)
Former commander, USS John F. Kennedy
Author of Green Ink: Memoirs of a Fighter Pilot

When I was in junior high school, I discovered that my home room teacher, Mr. Dennis Main, was a veteran of the early part of the Pacific War, having been a radioman in the 19th Bomb Group during the fighting in the Philippines and during the first year of the war in the South Pacific. He saw I was sincerely interested, and consented to answer my many questions, thus becoming the first World War II veteran I ever interviewed. I remember that Mr. Main was bitter about the way the war he had fought was viewed in America. Ive always remembered him telling me, Everyone thinks it was just a time of losing, but the truth is it was the foundation of victory. From that, I found myself always interested in that period of the war that so many think of as the dark days of defeat. This book is the result of that long-ago interest on the part of a budding historian.

When he received orders in November 1941 to execute the planned attack on Pearl Harbor, Imperial Navy Combined Fleet commander Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto informed his superiors, I will run wild for six months. After that, I can promise nothing. He missed his prediction by three days: the Japanese did indeed run wild, from December 7, 1941, when aircraft from six carriers sank or severely damaged the battle fleet of the United States Pacific Fleet, to June 4, 1942, when aircraft from two American carrier aircraft sank three of the four Japanese carriers in six deadly minutes, with the fourth sent to the bottom several hours later at the Battle of Midway. The loss cut the heart out of Japanese naval aviation.

The first six months of the Pacific War were indeed a period of almost unrelieved catastrophe upon catastrophe for the United States and its allies, as the wages of hubris and underestimation of the enemy were paid. Most Americans who read about this period focus only on the initial attack, the revenge of the Doolittle Raid four months later, followed by the battles of the Coral Sea the next month and Midway the month following. As General George S. Patton Jr. once observed, Americans love a winner and will not tolerate losing.

Many wartime myths were created during these months: Captain Colin P. Kelly, the bomber pilot who sank a battleship; Marines fighting a Pacific Alamo at Wake Island; the battling bastards of Bataan; the doctors and nurses in Malinta Tunnel on the rock at Corregidor who refused evacuation; General MacArthurs miraculous escape aboard PT-boats. When General Wainwright messaged President Franklin Roosevelt that he must surrender his forces to the Japanese enemy, the President replied, You and your devoted followers have become the living symbol of our war aims and the guarantee of victory.

Indeed they had, but not quite in the way wartime propaganda portrayed those events. To this day, the Encyclopedia Britannica states that Colin P. Kelly sank a battleship and doesnt even cite the correct date for the event. Kelly was indeed a hero who sacrificed his own life to save his crew; he just didnt do what the wartime mythology said he did. The Marines at Wake did indeed fight outnumbered against an overwhelming enemy; they never said Send us more Japs that was padding in a message in which the commander informed his superiors that they were outnumbered, running out of supplies and ammunition, and would have to surrender in a matter of days if they did not receive reinforcements, reinforcements that were ordered to turn back at the last minute; the officers commanding the force made their admiral leave the room with their vehement refusal of orders, admonishing them he would not hear talk of mutiny. The battling bastards of Bataan would have been better served had their commander, Douglas MacArthur, not deluded himself in the six months before the war that he could stop the enemy at the beaches and made certain that the supplies they would need to make a stand on Bataan were there for their use. The doctors and nurses at Corregidor really did refuse evacuation.

That the stories were not accurate does nothing to diminish actual bravery in the face of overwhelming odds. Indeed, there are many stories throughout the period of Americans, members of the Commonwealth, and the Dutch, who made their stands regardless of the opposition. Most of these accounts are almost unknown today. Its my hope that gathering and telling the stories that I have will lead the reader to look for further information.

I was very fortunate in 1999 to meet Lieutenant Colonel Lamar Gillet, when he came to speak at the Planes of Fame Air Museum in Chino, California. From that meeting, I was able to conduct several interviews with him, which provided a unique and previously unknown personal perspective on the fall of the Philippines, and his later survival of the Bataan Death March, and three years as a prisoner of the Emperor in Japan. I first told Lamars amazing story in Flight Journal , a magazine for which I was a contributing editor, in 2002. It is also a privilege to finally set the historical record straight as to who exactly was the only P-35 flyer to shoot down a Zero, an accomplishment that has long been credited to the wrong pilot due to a mix-up at the time as to who did what, with the incorrect story being told by those who escaped to Australia while Lamar endured his years of captivity.

I was privileged during the last ten years of his life to know and be friends with the remarkable Richard Halsey Best, Jr., the naval aviator whose actions at Pearl Harbor and Midway bookend this account. Educated and erudite, a man of true integrity, Dick Best to me epitomizes the best of America. Hearing the accounts of his experiences led me to look further into the history of this period. His oath made at Pearl Harbor to make the bastards pay was made good over the Japanese fleet six months later, ending Admiral Yamamotos wild run. He is a hero whose actions are not well known today; I hope this book changes that.