Published: November 30, 2008 09:00 pm         

Historic heroism

BLUEFIELD — Two weeks after the June 4, 1942 Battle of Midway, Lloyd E. Moore, secretary of the Norfolk & Western Railway YMCA on Bluefield’s North Side received a letter from Captain N.A. Mitscher, U.S. Navy, that his son, Ensign Ulvert Mathew “Fuzzie” Moore was missing in action.

Mitscher expressed his sympathy to Moore’s parents. It was the first word of their son that the Moores had received in weeks, but they knew there would be times when he couldn’t write home. “I know what a sad blow it must have been to learn that your son, Ulvert, is missing in action,” Mitscher wrote. L.E. Moore brought the letter itself to the newspaper office on Bland Street.

“Apparently, Captain Mitscher assumed that Mr. and Mrs. Moore had received an official notice from the Navy department at the time he wrote the letter,” according to the Bluefield Daily Telegraph reporter who authored the June 19, 1942 article about Moore. “It came air mail and was postmarked San Francisco, Calif., but carried no date.”

“All of us on the (USS) Hornet were impressed with his fine character and all are filled with admiration for his glorious performance of duty,” Mitscher wrote. “His shipmates join me in deepest sympathy, the sense of personal loss and the prayer that he may yet be found.”

The local news reporter wrote that Moore, “is widely known in Bluefield where he had resided with his parents for a number of years and was a very popular young man.” His remains were never recovered from the Pacific Ocean after he made the supreme sacrifice in defense of American freedom.

The Battle of Midway was a major turning point of the war in the Pacific during World War II, yet it remains an enigmatic moment to historians. While it is one of the war’s most thoroughly covered military engagements, it is also one of the least understood. In his latest book, “A Dawn Like Thunder,” set for release today, Robert J. Mrazek removes the shroud of mystery that has clouded the understanding of the early months of the war in the Pacific. For many years, the truth of those early days were cloaked in a “darkness that closes in so tightly that it is almost suffocating,” quoting from Mrazek’s book. In masterful fashion, the book breathes new life into the fading glory of a special group of Navy fliers who stood tall and gave all that was asked of them.

“A Dawn Like Thunder,” (Little Brown and Company, 506 pages) presents a thoroughly researched and compelling account of Torpedo Squadron Eight, a torpedo squadron that was assigned to the USS Hornet in late May of 1942, but flew its final combat mission as part of the “Cactus Air Force” a little more than five months later from Henderson Field, a jungle landing strip on Guadalcanal. Mrazek’s historical opus tells a story of the incredible sacrifices and heroics of the small group of highly trained and disciplined Naval fliers who ignited a stunning blow against the Imperial Japanese Navy and started reversing the tide of the war in the Pacific at a critical moment in history. The squadron didn’t quit after suffering horrible losses at Midway, but continued to fly in the face of a determined enemy and eventually — when the last of their planes were lost — dug in with the Marines to fight off Japan’s most seasoned combat infantry troops.

Ensign Ulvert Moore was one of the fliers who died on June 4, 1942 during the opening attack on the Japanese fleet at the Battle of Midway. The good-looking Moore, known as “Fuzzie” to his friends because of his tight, curly hair that he kept cut short, graduated from Beaver High School in 1935, Bluefield College in 1938 and West Virginia University in 1940. He enlisted as an air cadet in the Navy in August of 1940, and received his commission as an ensign on June 6, 1941. Moore’s first and only assignment was with a torpedo plane squadron based in Norfolk, Va. When war broke out, Moore’s unit was one of the Navy’s best trained squadrons — Torpedo Squadron Eight, a squadron that was destined to become the most highly decorated air squadron of the war.

Mrazek introduces the reader to the fliers and crewmen of Torpedo Squadron Eight as well as their beloved “Skipper,” Lt. Commander John Waldron, a descendent of Oglala Sioux warriors on his mother’s side of the family, and the man who would lead a 15-plane squadron of antiquated Devastator torpedo planes in an attack on the pride of the Japanese fleet while the much faster Japanese Zeroes from the carrier Akagi cut them to shreds. At the end of the attack, 14 pilots and 14 crewmen were killed. Only Ensign G.H. “Tex” Gay survived the attack after his plane was shot out from under him.

Gay’s eyewitness account of the incredible sea battle that ensued ultimately became headline news, and while the Japanese Navy claimed initial success, the U.S. account of the battle indicated otherwise. Yet, in the days, months, years and decades that followed, the reports of the battle didn’t ring true. Some combatants who participated knew that the official record didn’t match their actual experiences, and many of the airmen who made a difference in the battle, endured hearing the boasts of others who never made it to where the action was taking place. Still, in June of 1942, the Navy was desperate for some kind of military success to start cleansing the bitter taste of Pearl Harbor from its palate. Midway helped the American public believe in itself again.

Mrazek. 63, a former U.S. congressman from Long Island, N.Y., who struck fictional gold with his Civil War era novel, “Stonewall’s Gold,” (St. Martin’s Press, 1999), became interested in the divergent accounts of the Midway battle, and charted a course that would lead him on an obsessive worldwide search for the true story of Torpedo Squadron Eight. His account of the squadron’s service starts on May. 31, 1942, four days before the USS Hornet left Pearl Harbor as part of a Navy task force that was sent to stop the anticipated invasion of Midway Island. Midway was a strategic point on Japan’s intended conquest of the U.S. mainland. Mrazek’s “Dawn,” lets the reader remain with Torpedo Eight from the days before Midway until the unit is decommissioned on Nov. 21, 1942.

With the grace and prosodic cadence of a novelist, Mrazek has set a new standard for historical non-fiction writing through personal interviews with Torpedo Eight survivors, their family and friends, the discovery of obscure, albeit detail-rich historical source materials and a fresh look at the standing records. Mrazek’s comfortable, reader-friendly narrative and the use of new interviews mixed with personal letters and published accounts to create believable dialogue from the complex and large group of characters who people the book. The vivid imagery of Mrazek’s prose, and the sheer volume of research, combine to help readers understand the complex personal and real life motives that continue to vex people who seek the truth of this important moment in time.

Mrazek doesn’t pull any punches in “A Dawn Like Thunder.” In his first appendix, Mrazek explains with front page news clarity of how he established a relationship with Bowen Weisheit early in his quest to learn more about Torpedo Squadron Eight. Weisheit, a trial lawyer from Bel Aire, Md., came upon an annotated “short snorter” $10-bill that a PBY rescue pilot received when he rescued one of the pilots from the USS Hornet’s air group. The pilot ran out of fuel and ditched in the Pacific following the attack, but he had not engaged the enemy. By tradition, downed pilots who are rescued at sea give their rescuer the largest denomination of currency they have on them.

Weisheit, a navigation instructor for the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II, examined the coordinates the PBY pilot wrote on the currency, and concluded that they didn’t mesh with the coordinates he had seen from the Hornet’s after action report. When he plotted the coordinates on the short snorter, they proved to be 200 miles to the east of where the Hornet’s after action report indicated the ditching had taken place. Weisheit was a fraternity brother of Ensign Mark Kelly, one of the Hornet Air Group pilots who died at Midway and the divergent documentation was enough to ignite his personal journey for the truth that culminated, for him, with a self-published book, “The Last Flight of Ensign C. Markland Kelly, Junior, USNR.”

Mrazek’s book amplifies Weisheit’s illumination of the post-battle machinations, and — with the infusion of information gleaned from a wealth of other resource materials — transforms “A Dawn Like Thunder,” from a yearbook-esque biopic of a collection of aerial warriors into a serious examination of some flawed critical judgments in an otherwise acknowledged success story that might have been far less costly if some command decisions had either not been made, or had been a little more flexible.

Still, at the time, America was involved in a major war against a seasoned and experienced enemy that did not think its adversary — America — had the mettle to commit what it took to win a total war. At Midway, Torpedo Squadron Eight proved it was equal to the challenge. “As he was looking at the metal shrapnel from the big (artillery) round that had smashed the plane to pieces, Pete (Peterkin, a member of the flight crew) noticed something unusual,” Mrazek wrote, as the ground assessed the damage following the Oct. 13, 1942 bombardment of Henderson Field. “Several rounds had been made up of iron radiator caps, some of them clearly identified with the markings of their American manufacturer. It was the end product of the United States having sold so much scrap iron to Japan before the war.” Peterkin was the last member of Torpedo Squadron Eight to leave Guadalcanal.

To think of “A Dawn Like Thunder” as simply another story about the Midway battle would be short-changing the important historical work that the book really is. After Midway and the death of the Skipper John Waldron, the squadron reformed with Lt. Commander Swede Larsen in command. While Waldron was loved for his patient intensity and instinctive leadership qualities, Larsen incited fear in the men he commanded and pushed his fliers, flight crews as well as their new and faster Avenger aircraft on a mission of vengeance to atone for the sacrifices of Waldron’s squad at Midway.

Swede Larsen’s defiant determination during the withering Japanese assault on Guadalcanal played a significant part in repelling the Japanese counter-offensive to re-take Henderson Field. When the squadron ran out of planes to attack the Japanese, Larsen ordered his fliers as well as his flight and ground crewmen to pick up Springfield rifles and take up defensive positions in foxholes beside the Marines.

“More than one of the pilots wasn’t thrilled with the idea of fighting the Japanese from foxholes. Their job was to fly airplanes,” Mrazek wrote. “They had already begun to question why Swede was keeping them there when there had been only one plane to fly.”

“A Dawn Like Thunder” represents a thorough, yet accessible glimpse into the world of these brave young Naval fliers, who sacrificed so much at the precise moment in history when they were most needed. There is a lull in the book’s action-packed pace when the fliers transitioned from carrier service, to the air field at Espiritu Santo for two weeks before they joined the Cactus Air Force on Guadalcanal. During that period, some of the daily log-style entries, no doubt enriched by Jack Stark’s war diary of the squadron, seemed one-dimensional, but taken in the context of the combat the squadron served in, that lull brought greater realism to the action.

Readers of Mrazek’s previous works will no doubt find the explanatory appendixes of “A Dawn Like Thunder” to be cut from the same literary cloth that he used to build the fictional case he employed as a devise in “Stonewall’s Gold.” That technique is similar to the literary device Daniel Defoe used in “Robinson Crusoe.” But unlike his previous fiction, Mrazek’s examination of this pivotal moment in the history of World War II in the Pacific is not a work to be taken lightly. It rather begs the reader to engage in the moment-by-moment drama in the lives of a group of Americans from various parts of the country who toed a very dangerous line and by so doing, made a difference in the history of the world. “A Dawn Like Thunder” is an excellent book in the tradition of the great non-fiction works of the 21st Century.

– Contact Bill Archer at barcher@bdtonline.com

     

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