Dispatches from the Pacific

The World War II Reporting of Robert L. Sherrod

Ray E. Boomhower

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780253029607
• eBook ISBN: 9780253029935
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Journalist Biographies

In the fall of 1943, armed with only his notebooks and pencils, Time and Life correspondent Robert L. Sherrod leapt from the safety of a landing craft and waded through neck-deep water and a hail of bullets to reach the shores of the Tarawa Atoll with the US Marine Corps. Living shoulder to shoulder with the marines, Sherrod chronicled combat and the marines' day-to-day struggles as they leapfrogged across the Central Pacific, battling the Japanese on Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. While the marines courageously and doggedly confronted an enemy that at times seemed invincible, those left behind on the American home front desperately scanned Sherrod's columns for news of their loved ones. Following his death in 1994, the Washington Post heralded Sherrod's reporting as "some of the most vivid accounts of men at war ever produced by an American journalist." Now, for the first time, author Ray E. Boomhower tells the story of the journalist in Dispatches from the Pacific: The World War II Reporting of Robert L. Sherrod, an intimate account of the war efforts on the Pacific front.

chapter four

WAR IN THE FOG AND ATOLLS: THE ALEUTIANS AND BEYOND

In May 1942 Harold E. Van Antwerp of Franklin, Indiana, while stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia, received a letter from a college friend, Norman H. Vandivier. A pilot of a Douglas SBD Dauntless dive-bomber with Bombing Squadron 6 aboard the USS Enterprise, an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, Vandivier shared in his letter to Van Antwerp stories about his tangles with Japanese aircraft, giving little details about his exploits but indicating he could claim “a few in the old game bag. It’s even more fun, and much more interesting than shooting rabbits, cause these little rascals can shoot back at you.” He and his fellow Dauntless pilots had discovered, wrote Vandivier, that the enemy were “nothing to be sneezed at, but they are really not very good shots. But even knowing that the guy is a poor shot, you still get nervous when the party lasts too long.”¹

On May 30, Vandivier and the rest of Bombing Squadron 6 had another opportunity to test their skills in combat when the Enterprise, along with the carriers Yorktown and Hornet, responded to a threat from the Imperial Japanese Navy against Midway Island, an American possession located about a thousand miles northwest of Honolulu, Hawaii. On June 4 pilots from the Enterprise found the Japanese fleet and screamed down to drop their bombs onto the Japanese carrier Kaga while a smaller group targeted the flagship for the Pearl Harbor attack, the Akagi. American fighter pilot Jimmy Thach described the sight as looking “like a beautiful silver waterfall, those dive-bombers coming down. … I’d never seen such superb dive bombing.” Although Vandivier never returned from his mission, other Dauntless pilots from the Enterprise turned the Japanese carriers into flaming wrecks while dive-bombers from the Yorktown hit a third carrier, the Soryu, dooming it as well. Later in the day, aircraft from the Enterprise and Yorktown found and crippled a fourth enemy carrier, the Hiryu, while the American fleet had lost only the carrier Yorktown and a destroyer, the USS Hammann. Japan had finally been put on the defensive in the Pacific, and the “Americans had avenged Pearl Harbor,” noted a Japanese government official.²

Not everything went wrong for Japan’s Midway operation. On June 6 and 7 the Japanese, hoping to draw away a portion of the US Navy from Midway, invaded and captured Kiska and Attu islands, both part of the 1,200-mile-long Aleutian Islands chain extending west from the Alaska Peninsula and toward the Soviet Union’s Kamchatka Peninsula. The approximately 300 islands in the Aleutians had belonged to the United States since 1867, when the American government, urged by Secretary of State William Seward, purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire. The Japanese had taken Kiska and Attu because they feared that the Aleutians might be used by the Americans to invade their homeland via the Kuril Islands and Hokkaido Island. It took the US military nearly a year, however, to send a force to recapture Attu and reclaim the first American soil occupied by a foreign army since the War of 1812. Codenamed Operation Landcrab, the mission, planned to be over in as fast as three days, dragged on for two and a half weeks. The approximately 11,000 American troops of the Seventh Infantry Division, originally designated for motorized service in the deserts of North Africa, were hampered in their attempt to win back the treeless, volcanic island by inadequate clothing, perpetual pea-soup fog, icy rain, blinding snow, sudden gale-force winds (called williwaws), and boggy terrain. A sergeant with the Seventh Infantry Division remembered that while fighting in Attu’s mountainous terrain, conditions were so severe that, even when unconscious, wounded men’s bodies “trembled violently from the cold.” Soldiers used empty shell cases, ration boxes, and anything else that could burn, he added, to heat their last packages of coffee or to warm their stiff fingers if only for a moment. Whether they manned the ships taking troops to the islands, fought hand-to-hand against the approximately 2,600 Japanese on Attu, or flew bombing missions with the Eleventh Air Force from airfields on Adak or Amchitka, those Americans unlucky enough to be assigned to the Aleutians regarded their service in the region as “little better than penal servitude,” noted naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison.³

After being out of action since his return to the United States in August 1942, Robert Sherrod asked his Time editors to send him back to cover the war, and the magazine responded by assigning him to report on the Aleutian campaign and the recapture of Attu—only the third amphibious operation conducted by the US military at that time, the other two being Guadalcanal and North Africa. During his time in the Aleutians, from May to August 1943, Sherrod accompanied the Alaska Scouts, a crack reconnaissance outfit, on a three-day mission to see if there were enemy troops on Agattu Island (none were found); reported on a patrol boat’s frantic skirmish with a Japanese submarine it finally rammed and sank; and accompanied a US–Canadian task force primed to battle the enemy on Kiska, only to find the island abandoned by the Japanese garrison under the cover of fog, leaving behind just a few mongrel dogs. “We dropped 100,000 propaganda leaflets on Kiska, but those dogs couldn’t read,” said an American pilot. Sherrod managed to acquaint Time readers with how soldiers referred to the mess on Kiska as Operation JANFU—Joint Army-Navy Foul Up—but had his report of deaths due to friendly fire excised by censors. The remoteness of the Aleutians made reporting these stories difficult, as military authorities limited Sherrod to sending, by wire, only twenty-five words a week. Instead, he arranged to airmail his copy to Mark Sullivan, a Time stringer correspondent in Seattle, Washington, who then wired Sherrod’s dispatches to the magazine’s New York office.⁴

Sherrod was one of a handful of American correspondents and photographers to cover the fighting to retake Attu—an effort that won praise from the commander of the North Pacific Force for their “stories that were the result of firsthand information secured under fire and not concocted in the safety of some rear area.” Attu was no “taxicab war,” said Sherrod. “The only way to get to the battle lines was to walk over mountains where a mile an hour was fair speed. Most of the fighting was done by the soldiers of the Seventeenth and Thirty-Second Infantry Regiments on snow-covered mountain peaks a thousand feet or more straight up. Some reporters did not take their shoes off for days and the icy Aleutian winds numbed an ungloved hand so quickly that taking notes outdoors was all but impossible. The wind was worse than the Japs[’] bullets whistling overhead—you got used to the bullets.” Because there was no way to transport the journalists’ best friend—a typewriter—over the mountains to the front, Sherrod, to write his articles, had to tramp from the battle lines all the way back to the landing beach, board a ship offshore, and borrow a typewriter. Once he completed a story, he had to return to Attu and walk an hour or more to G-2 (intelligence) headquarters for the first round of censoring. Reporters’ dispatches were placed on either a ship or an airplane and sent to “another Aleutian island, where they were censored by the Navy,” noted Sherrod. Then they were flown by airmail to the continental United States. “One to two weeks later,” he said, “the dispatches presumably appeared in print. The lag between the event and the publication was almost as painful as the sore feet, the ‘Aleutian knees,’ and the unceasing cold wind.”⁵

To combat the forbidding climate, the reporters and cameramen on Attu dressed in one to three sets of underwear, a field jacket, a parka, sweaters, a woolen cap beneath their helmet, two or more pairs of woolen socks, shoepacs (special cold-weather footwear) or leather boots, and a raincoat. “Yet, we always seemed to be cold,” Sherrod recalled. “More than once we had to sleep on the wet, cold earth in our clothes.” Uncomfortable, to be sure, he said, but “looking at the suffering infantrymen and the supply carriers who had to take loads up steep mountains and the little carriers who had to bear the wounded down [from the mountains], we could not feel very put out.” Many of those fighting in the snow-covered mountain peaks became “so cold and miserable,” he said, “they didn’t give a damn whether they lived or died.” Although temperatures hovered around thirty-five to forty degrees, the fierce winds made it more uncomfortable than subzero weather, Sherrod recalled. “The frigid blasts feel like something blown off an ice cake by a million horsepower rain,” he noted. “It is always wet. When it is not a chill rain it is melting snow, which runs into the foxholes.” One soldier told Sherrod that he had been cold for so long he no longer believed “there is any warmth left in the world. I have not been able to wiggle my toes for more than ten days.” Correspondents could honestly write in their dispatches, Sherrod noted, that not “since Valley Forge have American troops suffered so much” and finally mean it, and they could view their colleagues in London, Algiers, Melbourne, and even Moscow as “sissies.” Those who did the fighting on Attu appreciated the correspondents’ efforts at documenting their plight. “They [earned the] respect of all the officers and men,” said Lieutenant Colonel Robert G. Fergusson, the chief of intelligence on Attu. “[They] shared the hardships in some measure with combatants, which I believe contributed in some small measure to the realism of their writing.”⁶

On Attu, just thirty-five miles long and fifteen miles wide, the Seventh Infantry Division came up against a fanatical Japanese resistance that saw the last remaining enemy troops under the command of Colonel Yasuyo Yamazaki commit suicide by blowing themselves to bits with hand grenades rather than surrender after one of the largest banzai charges of the Pacific War. Yamazaki’s troops screamed bloody oaths as they charged into the unsuspecting Americans. The US soldiers of the Seventh Infantry came up with oaths of their own while wiping out the last remnants of the enemy on Attu, Sherrod reported. As they pulled the pins from their grenades and flung them into caves on the island, they yelled lustily, “Count your men, Tojo!” Before the enemy’s final counterattack, Sherrod, who had escaped the frenzied Japanese charge by sheer chance, had spent five days near the front lines, most of them on Buffalo Nose, where the Americans’ attempt to capture the position had been repulsed three times. He never forgot the time he spent examining the bodies of US soldiers to determine the cause of their deaths, nor the sight of chaplains, in the rain, bareheaded, singing “Rock of Ages” over the common graves of khaki-wrapped bodies. “I have found that there is not much time for reflection during a battle,” Sherrod recalled after the fighting on Attu. “But the scenes during battle sear themselves on men’s minds.”⁷

Sherrod arrived on Attu on May 25, 1943, fourteen days after the Seventh Infantry Division had made its initial landings, and had been “amazed to learn that the battle was not over by any means.” Plans for the American invasion of Attu called for separate landings, one west of Holtz Bay on the island’s northeast region and the other on Massacre Bay on the southeast. The forces hoped to link up at the island’s center, the passes of Massacre Valley, turn east, and push the Japanese out of the mountains and capture Chichagof Harbor. According to Sherrod, the early stages of the battle were “not well handled,” thanks in no small part to the inadequate maps of Attu’s tough terrain and the terrible weather conditions on the island. Poor weather restricted visibility at times to a hundred feet, he noted, and “air support was out of the question during nearly all the first ten days of fighting.” The boggy soil meant that vehicles sank to their axles in the mire and supplies had to be either carried by hand or pulled by sled up steep mountain slopes by groups of six to eight men. In contrast to the Americans, Japanese soldiers had the advantage of fighting from prepared positions on high ground. “Their foxholes were large and dry, and were well supplied with food, clothing, bedding and ammunition,” said Russell Annabel, one of Sherrod’s colleagues. “In some cases they had dug underground chambers large enough for a dozen or more men.” In addition, each Japanese machine-gun nest was “a master of camouflage,” reported Sherrod, “well protected on all sides by individual snipers who protect the machine gunners.” The enemy, he estimated, expected to stay on Attu for a long time. Trench foot, exposure, and other non-battle injuries incapacitated 2,100 US soldiers, and the slow progress on Attu cost the Seventh Infantry Division’s commander, Major General Albert E. Brown, his job, as he was replaced b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• One The War Correspondent
• Two Learning the Trade
• Three Somewhere in Australia
• Four War in the Fog and Atolls: The Aleutians and Beyond
• Five Betio: Red Beach Two
• Six Saipan: Smith versus Smith
• Seven Uncommon Valor: Iwo Jima and the Flag Raising
• Eight Okinawa: The Final Battle
• Nine “Taps”
• Selected Bibliography
• Index