The World Is My Home: A Memoir Page 3

  Toward the end of our zigzag journey, Richmond and I met one last time to discuss conditions aboard the Cape Horn. I asked: ‘What are we going to do about the money that’s being lost through fraud?’ and he replied: ‘No longer our worry. The food was important. The money? I used to think, when I was paid to check on clerks at the store, that money was made to be stolen—especially paper money in large amounts—by the bosses.’

  He wanted to discuss more important matters: ‘Prof, what kind of job can a man with your background do in the Navy?’ and I explained: ‘I’m to visit all the Navy air units to be sure they have the necessary manuals for the operation and maintenance of our airplanes, especially those on our carriers.’

  ‘A paper pusher?’

  ‘I’ve also been doing work on the secret reports that tell our pilots the structural limits of their planes. How fast and deep they can dive before their wings fall off.’

  ‘Very useful to know, I should think.’

  ‘And, very important, the capabilities of the Japanese airplane. My papers preach one doctrine over and over: “If you meet a Jap Zero one on one, turn around and scram like hell, because you’re outnumbered. He can turn on a dime and shoot you down every time.” In a dogfight those Jap planes are murder.’

  ‘Then why are we doing so well?’ he asked, and I told him about the other papers I had: ‘If we put two of our planes up there against two of theirs we win every time. We interweave, I protect your tail, you protect mine. And oh boy! Our planes, because they are so big and heavy, can carry armor plate protecting pilot and fuel tanks. The light maneuverable Jap planes have no such protection, so sooner or later, with our superior strategies, down they go.’

  He looked at me with respect: ‘You mean you’re sharp enough to conduct studies like that?’ and I said: ‘Hell no. Scientific geniuses make the studies. I just push the paper.’

  He was extremely interested when I explained my three peripheral jobs: ‘We spend a fortune trying to teach our airmen three things. Don’t walk into propellers, which spin so fast you can’t see them. Put your wheels down when landing. And if you lose your engine on takeoff, plow in straight ahead, no matter what lies there, because if you try to turn back to the airfield or the carrier, you’ll crash everytime. Torque will spin you in to port.’

  ‘You lose men that way?’

  ‘Scores. Brightest men in America. They walk into propellers, mince-meat. They land with their wheels still up, burn to death. They try to get back to base with no power, they buy the farm.’

  I’d talked enough, and when I asked him what duty he was headed for he told me of a military task about which I knew nothing: ‘Beach-master. Only a few of us. Terrific job, they station us carefully.’

  ‘What is the job?’

  ‘When there’s an amphibious landing, the admiral in charge commands while the troops are aboard his ships, the general when they’re on land. We’ve found at all the major landings that there’s a fearfully critical period when things are piling up on the beach: men, mobile guns, supplies, the whole crap of modern warfare. If you leave it to chance there’s total chaos. In those crucial minutes between the admiral letting go and the general taking over, the beachmaster takes charge. He understands the master plan, but he also knows that, in the crash of landing, things can go horribly wrong. Everything here, nothing over there. With a bullhorn and his nerve he sorts it out.’

  When Richmond described the beach he would be controlling while a barrage from the heavy guns of the offshore naval vessels flew overhead, sniper fire from the Japanese suicide squads smashed into Americans who had just waded in from the surf, and the incredible confusion of a snafued amphibious landing imperiled everything, I could visualize him at the center, .45 in hand, directing traffic and efficiently imposing order upon the chaos.

  ‘Sounds like a pretty dangerous job. If the Japs don’t get you, our own colonels will, if they think you’re pushing them around.’

  ‘No! Every officer has been warned: “In those first minutes the beach-master is in control.” ’

  ‘Will they believe it?’

  ‘When I say it they will.’ He said this without bravado, but I knew he meant it, for he added: ‘The beachmasters who lose their nerve don’t last long. They’re accident-prone. The tough ones, who know what they’re doing, they never let control slip away.’

  ‘But you can’t train for a job like that. We don’t have stateside areas set aside for American battleships blazing away and Jap snipers gunning at you, and the chaos.’

  ‘Oh yes, we can train, Prof. We listen to reports from men who’ve been there. We study photographs, even movies. And we imagine ourselves in the middle of it all.’ He paused in the tropic night and concluded: ‘No one is going to take my beach away from me. No one.’

  I never saw Richmond after we landed at Guadalcanal, nor did I ever hear from him or about him, but I have often wondered on what congested tropical beach he led the American forces ashore and staked out the vital areas and moved amid the chaos establishing order. I have prayed that he was one of the beachmasters who survived, and I believe he might have been, because he would have attacked the perilous job with every intention of doing so.

  The manner in which Bill Collins, Jay Hammen and I finished our trip across the Pacific in the Cape Horn was so incredible that I hope one of my former partners is still alive to verify what I am about to report, for the events of that final night changed the rest of my life.

  We finally dropped anchor off the southern end of Espiritu Santo, the big, brutal island southeast of Guadalcanal, and by an odd chance I spent my first night in the South Pacific on a ship anchored not far from the dock that served the copra plantation of the Frenchman Aubert Ratard, whom I would come to know so favorably in the long months ahead. He had among his Tonkinese workers a tough, conniving woman who bore the surprising name of Bloody Mary, and I would often surmise in years to come: ‘She must have been in her hut that night, staring out at the Cape Horn while I was aboard staring through the night in her direction. If so, it was a spiritual meeting that would bear wondrous fruit.’

  Our long trip was ended, but since none of us had yet seen either our captain or our troop commander, Collins, Hammen and I strolled toward their quarters to bid them an insolent farewell, because we did want to see what kind of men would allow a bunch of civilian draftees to take their ship away from them and make no complaint about it. But even this last visit was frustrated, becuase the officers did not show, nor could we ascertain where they might be.

  Collins, as a major participant in a civilian business operation in Los Angeles, was so disgusted with this unprofessional behavior that he forced his way into the captain’s office, and there the three of us lounged, recalling events of the tedious voyage. And as Bill listened to one of my reports on how Richmond had behaved with the cooks, his hands idly shuffled some papers on the captain’s desk and he came upon a form on which orders sending naval personnel to their next assignments were written. Without giving it much thought he said: ‘Michener, in our conversations you’ve often mentioned how you love to travel. I’m going to see to it that you get your chance.’

  He then typed out a set of orders for me that gave me authorization to travel pretty much as I wished throughout the military zones of the South Pacific on what he designated as ‘tours of inspection.’ He then rummaged about some more, found a stamp that looked official, hammered it onto my new orders and signed them ‘Admiral Collins.’

  It was those orders, augmented later by a battery of more legitimate ones, that enabled me to get started on my exhaustive exploration of the South Pacific. I used Bill’s authorization to get to exotic places like Norfolk Island, where remnants of the Bounty mutineers settled when they fled Pitcairn, and wild Pentecost, where daring black men dived from the tops of extremely tall trees, stout vines tied about their ankles to break their fall just as their heads were about to crash, and mysterious Malakula of the headhunters. But mostly I used
it in the early days to travel those ominous islands of The Slot where the great night sea battles were fought between an aggressive Japanese force and a defensive American Navy striving to hold its own after the debacle at Pearl Harbor. Rarely has a forged document been put to livelier use.

  Years later, during a visit to Los Angeles, I met Collins again. Once more he was at Merrill Lynch. Once more he was the free-and-easy gentleman noted for his relaxed manner and his fondness for Southern Comfort. We laughed about the disgraceful Cape Horn and thought of Jay Hammen back in Detroit at his old stand. As we parted, Bill said: ‘You certainly used those papers we fixed up for you that night,’ and I thanked him again.

  In my thirties I was a man of middle height, middle weight and so average in all respects that wherever I went through the years I would come upon other men who looked exactly like me. The confusion caused by such resemblance was sometimes embarrassing. Friends would say: ‘I saw you the other day in Omaha. How come?’ and I would not have been there in years. Occasionally I would come upon one of those doubles and would be astonished to see how identical his appearance was to mine. It was uncanny, but it also prevented me from ever thinking I was anything special.

  Up to this time I had done nothing out of the ordinary. I’d held several jobs, had always retained the good opinion of my employers, had never so far as I could recall ever caused anyone any trouble. I paid my taxes regularly and always voted, Republican at first because everyone in my rural Pennsylvania hometown voted that way, then Democratic when I moved out to the more liberated political climate of Colorado. When I sailed on the Cape Horn I didn’t realize that I was on my way to a divorce, my wife having joined the Army when I went into the Navy. The prolonged separation that followed as we served in vastly different parts of the world had altered us so radically that when peace finally arrived, reunion was impossible, for we scarcely knew each other.

  I was in general soft-spoken but prone to get overexcited by any important social issue and as a result I’d had my nose broken three times by butting in where I was not wanted. As a friend explained: ‘Jim sometimes gets caught speaking when he should be listening.’ Although I participated in numerous fights, I cannot recall any that I won.

  When a basic principle was involved, as in the case of the shameful conditions aboard the Cape Horn, I would dig in, and long after others had surrendered the fight I would still be there flailing away. At such times I could become rather irresponsible, unwilling to quit or even to see the damage I might be doing myself. I did not surrender easily, but that characteristic, which manifested itself on numerous occasions, was not a sign of my moral courage; it was more an innate desire to see the thing that someone else might have started brought to a sensible conclusion. I was never afraid to be humiliated or loath to bear the consequences of my stubbornness or stupidity.

  Such behavior was not likely to produce many friends, nor did I ever have any close ones. Men chose me on their side when teams were being put together more for my stability than for any dazzling quality of leadership. I was content to work alone, study alone, travel alone, and think alone, but those choosing sides realized that I could also be a very strong team player. I did cherish the camaraderie that came with battles well fought or exciting adventures shared, and I think those who worked with me discovered early that I enjoyed talking about shared experiences and organizing in my oral reports what happened to whom and why. I did not make myself the hero of these narratives, but focused rather on the group experiences.

  I realized that I had been allowed a much wider involvement in various forms of human activity than other men my age, having run the gamut from extreme poverty to the widest possible academic travel, and this had meant hard work in a variety of jobs, deep study of the arts, and intense involvement in education. I had attended eight universities and colleges and had successfully taught at almost every level, from first grade to postdoctorate classes at Harvard.

  But I was far from a pedant and had enjoyed comparable positive results in American business to which, when my wartime duties ended, I fully expected to return. I also supposed that I would spend the rest of my life doing nothing spectacular both before and after my retirement at age sixty-five.

  I was, in short, an average American male whose personality and intellectual assets and liabilities evened out, some favorable, some not. Had things gone wrong in our mutiny and had I been incarcerated for a long term, few would have noted or regretted the fact, and those who did would properly have said: ‘It’s a shame, but he was probably headed that way from the beginning, because he never really fitted in. Not much was lost.’

  A note on financial assets and liabilities: at age forty I had accumulated savings of only eight hundred dollars, with little prospect of ever increasing that amount significantly. All the personal property I had accumulated prior to the war had been stolen from me by vultures who prowled New York City in the 1940s buying up the household goods of men and women who were being drafted, and then refusing to pay even one penny because they knew that the owners, now in uniform on far-off battlefields, would not be able to track them down or enforce payment. In this despicable way I had stolen from me a splendid set of plain oak furniture made by one of the finest firms in North Carolina, and my collection of eighteen treasured Baedeker guidebooks, two losses that rankle to this day. I was not at age forty what you would call an all-time winner, and I had revealed no aptitude for writing other than academic jargon.

  II

  Tour

  When I am asked what I did during my stint in the Navy in World War II I have several options. If a gang of veterans is sitting around lying about their heroics, I can chip in a few real-life accounts of night missions or daytime flying through that incredible semipermanent front that hung between Guadalcanal and Espiritu Santo, surviving plane crashes and a few other goodies. But if I want to relate precisely what it was like, I prefer to tell of a duty tour I took during the later stages of the war.

  Admiral William Halsey had been directed by Washington to look into a curious affair on the easternmost edge of his South Pacific command, and he, aware of my knowledge of the islands, had bucked the problem along to his much loved Uncle Billy Calhoun, admiral in charge of ‘the train,’ a military term referring to the vital supply line that ran from Detroit to San Francisco to Hawaii to Noumea to the battlefront. Those of us who worked for Uncle Billy believed that he had played a major role in smothering the Japanese with matériel, and the fighting admirals agreed.

  When Calhoun summoned me he said: ‘They tell me, Michener, that you know the islands. I want you to take a swing and find out what’s happening on Bora Bora. We’re having a lot of trouble with the enlisted men.’

  Being somewhat familiar with problems like this, I said: ‘When they’ve been on an island for a long time and think we’ve forgotten them, they get restless and want to get back home.’

  ‘No,’ Calhoun said. ‘Trouble with this crowd is, they don’t want to go home, and when we try to send them, they raise merry hell.’

  ‘Never heard of such a thing.’

  ‘Nor anybody. Now get out there and find out.’

  I was then passed along to one of his aides, Commodore Richard Glass, nephew of Carter Glass, the distinguished Virginia senator, and one of the few commodores in our Navy. In this century the time-honored rank of commodore, equal to brigadier general in the Army, had fallen into disuse but had been revived so that a naval officer who had to share an island or command post with the Army, Marine or foreign brigadier could have rank equal to that of his opposite number.

  Glass was almost an archetype of the ideal Navy man: tall, thin, handsome, with an easy manner and a strong reputation for getting things done. When he heard about my mission, he added one additional job before passing me along to his aides: ‘We’ve had several reports from the queen of Tonga saying that things are getting a bit out of hand on her island. She wants our help in cleaning up. Drop by and see what’s the matter.’r />
  Commodore Glass’s staff had three other jobs for me, and the executing of these would carry me pretty well around the eastern theater of the Pacific war, the part that was now quiescent. ‘When there was danger of invasion, we had no problems,’ the staff said. ‘Now that everything’s relaxed, there’s hell all over the place.’

  One aide said that on Samoa, which was then British, there was an American general who was giving a bit of trouble. It seemed that he was building a road across the island without permission from either the British government or our own authorities: ‘Road doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Cloudy picture. Tell us what’s going on.’

  There was also the problem of the American official in Papeete, the capital of Tahiti, about whom there had been negative reports: ‘But these are so ridiculous we won’t prejudice your own investigation by letting you see them. But do look into this matter of the top-secret code books.’

  The final mission was a humanitarian one: ‘On the remote atoll of Pukapuka, far from Tahiti, there’s a beachcombing American writer, broken-down chap, married an island girl and all that—three kids, maybe five or six. Natives have reported by radio he’s been using the needle and is dying. Fly up there and see what’s to be done.’