Things They Buried by James Hornfischer

The Wall Street Journal
MAY 28, 2011

Things They Buried
By JAMES D. HORNFISCHER

Bob Hagen knew the worst of battle while serving on destroyers in the Pacific during World War II. He saw action at Guadalcanal. He was the gunnery officer on the USS Johnston when it was hit hard in the Battle Off Samar near the Philippines on October 25, 1944. For two hours he directed the ship’s main guns, firing gamely at an overwhelming enemy. A Japanese shell turned two officers standing on the flying bridge, 10 feet below his station, into a pink mist. When the order to abandon ship came across, Hagen found himself floating in shark-infested waters watching the Johnston sink. His best friend, the ship’s doctor, Robert Browne, was still aboard, refusing to seek safety until all the wounded had been evacuated. Hagen saw Browne re-entering the wardroom when a large shell from a Japanese warship followed him inside. At that moment, the war crystallized as a hard-to-discuss horror.

Hagen was a hard man, and proud. Even 60 years out, he was still a bit curmudgeonly talking about the dramatic naval history he had been part of. But recounting Browne’s death to me in 2001, a man who had fought heroically in a suicidal defense of a small U.S. carrier task unit supporting the invasion of Leyte could only swallow back his sadness. That look in his eye and break in his voice took me past the veneer of his ever-ready chagrin and bravado. They took me to the things that have never left him.

One of the last surviving officers of his martyred warship, Hagen had invited me to his San Antonio condominium for an in-depth interview. I was a young historian writing a book about the Battle Off Samar, and Hagen’s conversation was my entree into the USS Johnston’s wardroom. Knowing him enabled me to give a touch of life to the legend of men such as his commander, Ernest Evans, whose exploits in the battle earned him the Medal of Honor. In Hagen’s presence I felt the weight of history and of a desperate naval battle the likes of which would never take place again.

Bob Hagen died in 2009, and the rest of his generation is soon going where we all must go. About 1.8 million World War II veterans remain alive today. That’s less than half the number of 2003. When these voices go silent, those of us who write about the war will lose the benefit of living engagement. We will work as our Civil War colleagues do: from documents and recordings and nothing else. What will be gone when these are the sole primary sources is not the facts themselves but the spark that can bring them to life. Diaries and oral history transcripts can let us know a man’s thoughts and deeds. But truth is also revealed through tone, emotion and context?and it can be plumbed responsively in real time to discover what was most important.

For those of us who have never served in uniform, it’s easy to see World War II as a grand, sweeping drama, featuring actors large and small driven by a sense of overriding mission, all sins and failings vindicated by victory. Yet for the veterans I meet, the war is often about something else entirely. Any talk of it brings them back to a single, pervasive memory sequence: a moment of impossible decision or helplessness when, through their action or inaction, they believe, a comrade paid the eternal price. They can’t talk about the war without reliving their powerlessness to influence its predations, without revealing how it changed them.

Otto Schwarz served on the USS Houston in the early days of World War II. The heavy cruiser was sunk off Java on February 28, 1942, and Schwarz spent more than three years in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. When he returned to New Jersey in 1945 he was a different man than the one who had enlisted in January 1941 to escape an abusive home life. I met him in 2004; his eyes were blind, but he could still clearly see Penn Station on the day he came back. “It was the loneliest moment of my life. I absolutely didn’t know what to do. Even though I was going home to my family, I had just left my family that had kept each other alive for so long.”

A taxicab left Schwarz outside his house in Newark, and he stood on the nighttime street, watching the silhouette of his mother in a lighted window. He hesitated to knock on the door. The life that lay behind it was unrecognizable to him. It was a foreign country. Schwarz is gone now – he died in 2006 – but I won’t soon forget his sightless eyes projecting this vivid personal landscape.

For 10 years I’ve been asking men to relive such moments – the worst of their lives – and expose their nightmares to the light of day. First-person eyewitness testimony enables narrative history to rise above the rat-a-tat-tat chronology of an after-action report. The same information conveyed with the register of the speaker’s voice and the direction of his glance can allow a writer to reach for the transcendent, the universally human. When I began writing my first book, “The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors” (2004), I found that these intimate truths were my compass.

Historians have long been vexed by the problem of eyewitness testimony, so enticing but also so fraught. Any recollection of a traumatic event will have emotional and psychological complexities that can destroy its value as a measure of historical fact. Yet evaluating an eyewitness source boils down to simple common sense. What did the observer say and what was his basis for saying it? Did he directly witness the events he describes? Was he equipped to understand what he saw? Did his memory accurately preserve his perceptions when it was finally tapped, years down the road? Can his memories be corroborated by others who were there?

Though some historians are more comfortable with the reliability of documents produced contemporaneously with events, it is just as healthy to be suspicious of the agendas that can underlie them. Is an after-action report written by an ambitious officer looking to justify a mistake inherently more reliable than the recollection of an event, a trauma or a grudge many years later by a man for whom that one thing is among the most consequential of his life?

In his book “Remembering Survival” (2010), the historian Christopher Browning noted how some Holocaust survivors – possibly influenced by postwar books, articles and documentary films – convinced themselves that they had personally experienced events such as the concentration-camp selection process administered by the notorious Josef Mengele, even though records proved they had not. Nonetheless, Mr. Browning laments the idea that historians should be like courts and demand that memories be “perfect.” He cautiously accepts the value of flawed or biased testimony by differentiating its “authenticity” from its factual accuracy. Though he recognizes the many ways that memory can diverge from experience, he believes that the historian can be a responsible judge of reliability, thanks to the “highly subjective intuition” that comes “from prolonged immersion in materials.”

One of the most powerful interviews I ever did lasted about three hours with a man who began by saying that he was not willing to talk to me. James F. “Bud” Comet had harbored bitter grudges for six decades.

He was a 19-year-old enlisted sailor on the USS Samuel B. Roberts when it was sunk in battle in 1944?in the same engagement that claimed Bob Hagen’s USS Johnston. Death came for the Roberts in the form of a 1,500-pound shell from a Japanese battleship. It opened a hole in her side large enough to fit a tractor-trailer, and the surviving crew piled into life rafts. Mr. Comet’s raft was a few hundred yards from the ship when he turned and saw a surviving crewman stuck in the jagged wreckage of the ship’s cavernous open wound.

The young officer who had seniority in the raft refused to return and save the man. But Mr. Comet aggressively pressed his case and prevailed on the group. They paddled back to the sinking ship, and Mr. Comet entered the hold to make the rescue. Heroic though his actions were, they seemed to upset his captain. Mr. Comet, after all, had breached the chain of command. The skipper offered him a medal but declined to acknowledge the dramatic particulars that underlay it. Mr. Comet felt his commanding officer didn’t like the thought that his crew was less than perfect. “We weren’t a perfect crew,” he told me, “but we were a good crew.” Mr. Comet refused the medal. He wanted something more valuable still: simple recognition by his skipper of what had happened. He never got that, and it kept him from attending reunions for years.

Mr. Comet described all of this at a level of detail and with a degree of certitude that never could have been so powerfully evident to me without direct interaction with the living man. The former sailor held the sour memories close for decades, but then they poured out in our talk in a manner that made their authenticity and accuracy undoubtable. When Mr. Comet told me he still wondered whether his deceased father, somewhere in the beyond, was pleased with the way he’d conducted himself that day in 1944, I knew he deserved to have the last words in my first book.

It is easy to be swept away in talking with veterans, and a historian has to be careful. At the reunions and memorial services I’ve attended over the years, I’ve learned to be wary of the testimony of the “scholars” – veterans who have improved their memories through wide reading and who will tell you what an admiral they’ve never met was thinking. I’m leery, too, of the garrulous. It is easy to be drawn their way. But stories oft-told can improve with age, and sociable natures sometimes reflect an expansive approach to wartime memories: If you share the same stories with friends often enough, you can honestly convince yourself that you, too, were there.

Those veterans who stand away from the crowd or shun the opportunity to speak are of special interest to me. The distance in their eyes shows that they’re still in the grip of what they’ve seen. While talking to them can be like trying to squeeze water from a stone, if you stay with it you can tap something deeply revealing. “The thing that comes out of it is, if you survive, there’s a purpose,” Bud Comet told me. “You see why you survived. I feel like maybe God had other purposes for me.” There was nothing trite in the manner of his expression. This was the considered conclusion of years, the product of the horror of survival at sea.

Robert Graff, another reluctant witness, was a young officer on the light cruiser USS Atlanta when it was sunk in action off Guadalcanal on November 13, 1942. Mr. Graff had never spoken of his experiences outside of his family. He had been urged into a silence of 65 years by the trauma of the Atlanta’s destruction, which claimed a much-beloved commander, Rear Adm. Norman Scott, along with most everyone else on the bridge where Mr. Graff was stationed.

In 2007, referred by one of his friends, I called Mr. Graff and talked to him about the battle. Not long afterward, I visited him at his home in Far Hills, N.J., where he spoke in great detail about his wartime memories – an opening-up experience that seemed to be cathartic for him. Later that year he appeared at a symposium at the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas. Before an audience of several hundred, he saluted his lost shipmates and recited the eulogy he had delivered on a 1998 trip to the waters above his sunken ship off Guadalcanal:

“Those of us on deck today have come across half the world to be near to you in this anointed spot. On one horizon today, sharp, verdant peaks of Guadalcanal pierce the sky. From the waters surrounding us, millions of javelins, reflected rays of the sun, blind us with your memory and pierce our hearts.”

Mr. Graff has declined to make more such appearances. He is back to tending to his broad, rolling garden, content to have let the window open briefly and close again. Yet he changed the way I understand war by soberly revealing its persistent pain.

The USS Atlanta was part of a 13-ship task force led by a revered naval hero, Rear Adm. Daniel J. Callaghan. His flagship, the USS San Francisco, was heavily hit in that battle. One of the last veterans still alive who witnessed Callaghan’s words and actions is Eugene Tarrant, a black cook who worked virtually invisibly in the San Francisco’s wardroom. As Mr. Tarrant told me in a 2007 interview, he heard, through a dumbwaiter door to the galley, Callaghan speaking in low, grave tones about the battle plan he would use that night off Guadalcanal. The task force’s prospects against the powerful enemy squadron sounded grim, and Mr. Tarrant ventured to ask Callaghan whether the coming fight really was, as the admiral had said, suicide. “Yes, it may be that,” replied Callaghan, who would die in action, “but we are going in.”

Such details are manna for the narrative historian. Daniel J. Callaghan was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his leadership in a costly victory, but until I spoke with Mr. Tarrant, I had found little evidence of the admiral’s state of mind going into battle. What Mr. Tarrant told me succinctly captured Callaghan’s stoic heroism.

After the San Francisco was struck by Japanese fire, Mr. Tarrant helped carry corpses on litters from below decks, making his way through one of the abattoirs of history, a dark place that was soon enough sanitized and eased into legend. The sober grace with which he described his experiences told me a lot about how time can enable healing.

Bud Comet was one of five Samuel B. Roberts veterans attending a reunion in Fredericksburg, Texas, in December 2009, along with about 30 family members and friends. He gave an impromptu and loving tribute to a shipmate, Tom Stevenson, for the way he always quietly did what was right. Watching the men converse, I saw then who they really were. To me they were gray elders. To each other, they would always be terrified kids: 18-year-old sailors and 23-year-old lieutenants caught in war’s cruel vortex. I understood that though they grew old in time, they remained young in each other’s eyes.

That weekend was the last time the men of the Roberts got together. Other groups carry on. In Houston, several survivors of the USS Houston form the nucleus of a large annual gathering of sons and daughters and other admirers. In San Francisco, the local chapter of the Naval Order of the United States tends to the memory of Rear Adm. Callaghan’s flagship – a part of whose bridge is installed as a memorial overlooking the indifferent Pacific.

I cherish the memory of the reunions, the echoes of conversations, the ring of eulogies, encomiums and memorials, the lewd jokes, the banquet-podium banalities, door-prize drawings, plates of dry chicken, the endearing trivia of the enlisted man’s life, the prayers and songs, the small moments that grow larger thanks to a spirit that was almost evident enough to inhale.

Some time in the far 2030s, when the World War II generation is gone altogether, the veterans will be available to us only at a certain distance – via the finite record they left in life. Whatever materials the museums and libraries hold will offer a pale semblance of the energy that attended their living presence. At that point, we will all be in the shoes of Otto Schwarz, the USS Houston survivor, standing on the curb outside his house at night, looking in. So close, but unable to go home.

—Mr. Hornfischer is the author of three works of World War II history: “The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors,” “Ship of Ghosts” and, most recently, “Neptune’s Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal