W. W. II: Up Front and Back Home

By R.Z. Sheppard, LANCE MORROW

LONELY VIGIL: COASTWATCHERS OF THE SOLOMONS by WALTER LORD 322 pages. Viking. $12.50.

Walter Lord has told his readers what it was like to go down with the Titanic (A Night to Remember), to fight at the Alamo (A Time to Stand) and to wake to the World War II overture one Honolulu morning in 1941 (Day of Infamy). As a popular chronicler of historic days and nights, the bestselling author relies heavily on eyewitness accounts from participants and survivors. Incredible Victory, his narrative of the Battle of Midway, crackled with aging voices from both sides. For Lonely Vigil: Coastwatchers of the Solomons, the author traveled 40,000 miles (including a rugged three-day bivouac on Guadalcanal) to assemble this story of the men and women who flashed reports of Japanese ship and plane movements and rescued more than 100 downed pilots. A number of foundering sailors also owe their lives to the coastwatchers. One was a 26-year-old lieutenant (j.g.) named John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose torpedo boat had been karate-chopped by the hull of a Japanese destroyer.

The saga of coastwatching has been swamped by the gross tonnage of war books launched in the past 30 years. Yet, as Lord describes it, vital Pacific island victories were won with the eyes and ears of clandestine observers: ex-planters, Micronesian guides, Australian mavericks, priests and nuns, who provided intelligence essential to understanding the enemy's battle plans.

The Japanese were resourceful warriors. On the island of New Georgia, they cleared palm trees for an airstrip but left the tops suspended on wires. Beneath this camouflage, the field was completed before U.S. reconnaissance photos could detect the ruse. In 1941-42 the Japanese had island-hopping plans of their own. From their major base at Rabaul, just off New Guinea, they moved to Buka and Bougainville--the most northerly of the Solomons. From there, they established bases southward on other islands, including Guadalcanal.

The U.S. naval victory at Midway Island stopped the Japanese tide in the Pacific and enabled Americans to take the initiative. On Aug. 7, 1942, Marines landed virtually unopposed on Guadalcanal and captured a vital airstrip that was renamed Henderson Field, after a pilot killed at Midway. Already ashore for many months were teams of coast-watchers who had taken to the wild highlands, where they played hide-and-seek with Japanese patrols and relayed information about enemy installations.

Changing Fortunes. As the unlikely spies demonstrated, fortunes of the Pacific war could change as quickly as the tropical weather. A daring Japanese sea attack at Savo Island gave the U.S. Navy one of the worst beatings in its history and left Marines on Guadalcanal stripped of support. A year later, the island and its airstrip were dramatically saved--a rescue made famous by Richard Tregaskis in his book Guadalcanal Diary (1943) and by Lloyd Nolan, William Bendix, Anthony Quinn, et al., in the movie version.

What was omitted was the work of such coastwatchers as Australian Lieut. Donald Macfarlan and former Colonial Office Cadet Martin Clemens, who conducted their heroics offscreen, scanning the sea and sky, living on taro root and pan pan. On other islands, observers gave early warnings of Japanese bombers and shipping coming down "the Slot," as the passage between the Solomons was known. In the years before long-range radar, that notice gave the pilots at Henderson Field time to prepare and inflict 2-to-1 losses on the raiders. In the end, the Solomons became a war of attrition, with the Japanese losing planes and flyers faster than they could replace them.

The watchers, too, suffered losses--though until now their sacrifices were uncelebrated. Some were discovered in their hideouts and captured. Others were executed as spies. They often lived on the run, transporting their heavy radios through jungles or by canoe past Japanese patrol boats. Lord's memorable cast ranges from Sergeant Yauwika, a bearded native policeman turned scout on Bougainville, to Father Emery de Klerk, a Dutch missionary who disobeyed church orders to remain neutral, and became an informant on Guadalcanal. The author pieces their stories together with his customary thoroughness--and with his customary accretion of insignificant and often tedious details. But sometimes information like the 19 steps required to flush the toilet on a submerged submarine comes as a welcome relief in this dogged tale of fortitude and isolation. Yet it is a necessary and ultimately compelling tale. As Admiral "Bull" Halsey summed it up when the smoke had cleared, "The coastwatchers saved Guadalcanal, and Guadalcanal saved the Pacific."

AMERICANS REMEMBER THE HOME FRONT by ROY HOOPES 398 pages. Hawthorn. $12.95.

While the battle raged in the Far East and Europe, there was one on another front--the home front. Thomas Page, then in his last year at Harvard Law School, thought he could divine the future from "semiwarlike" ads in the New York Times Sunday Magazine of late November 1941: "I thought, my God . . . This country has almost accepted the inevitability . . . and [is] all geared up for it mentally." The afternoon of December 7, the Washington Redskins were getting trounced at Griffith Stadium. Melville Grosvenor, who was assistant editor of the National Geographic, recalls the murmuring that passed through the crowd, then the public address system beginning its litany to summon official Washington out of the stands: "So and so. Secretary of the Navy, will you please come to the telephone ..."

Evelyn Keyes, then a young actress under contract to Columbia Pictures in Hollywood, says wistfully, "People started going off to war--they showed up in sailors' uniforms, and they seemed almost soft, childish." Up in Nelson, N.H., a farmer named Newton Tolman felt an atavistic bitterness: "In the Civil War, my grandfather at 18 was hired by his brother, who was 24 and much richer, to go into the service. It ruined his health, and the old farm fell down. I had to eventually rebuild it. War was not for me." A doctor in Ocean City, Md., heard about Pearl Harbor and spat: "Yeah, that's Roosevelt for you."

Still, writes Author Roy Hoopes, "1 doubt if the nation has ever been as united in spirit or purpose before or since." Hoopes interviewed nearly 200 Americans for this oral history of the home front. Many of them speak wonderingly of an almost innocent exhilaration triggered by World War II, and how different it was from Viet Nam. Says Stephen Ailes, who came up from Martinsburg, W. Va., to serve in the Office of Price Administration: "You just routinely worked till midnight; you worked Saturdays. You always had in mind the fact that all these guys were in foxholes someplace or sitting out on some cold deck somewhere. All of us had relatives and pals doing that." The Civil War was a unifier in one sense: it brought young Americans out of their provinces and showed them what the nation looked like; World War II also showed Americans something larger than themselves.

This collection of memories ranges over wartime Washington, the transformation of industries, the families stumbling around in blacked-out houses, the rapt attention paid to H.V. Kaltenborn, the vacations spent on beaches dark with oil from ships sunk off the New Jersey coast by German U-boats. Hoopes found hundreds of nostalgic oddments. One man remembers a lapel button: "It showed Uncle Sam, and when you pulled the string. Uncle Sam pulled Hitler up on a tree limb and hanged him. The slogan was LET'S ALL PULL TOGETHER." A woman asks, "Do you remember punching oleo up in a bag to make it look like butter?" Restaurants posted a sign: USE LITTLE SUGAR AND STIR LIKE HELL. WE DON'T MIND THE NOISE. Radio stations did not give weather forecasts, lest they help the enemy launch an attack.

Breaking the News. Such a collage has an effect of Whitmanesque tenderness. Some rather enjoyed the war, of course; it was an adventure. The worst of it was waiting for what one man called "the boy with the yellow envelope." Normally, Western Union tried to send someone older, gentler, to break the news. And even when the bodies came home, the families were not so sure. Remembers one man: "There was much talk in the neighborhood that they just put sand or rocks in the coffin and didn't have bodies in a lot of them because there wasn't anything to put in." In one strange story, a husband was reported killed. His wife waited a year and then remarried, only to have her first husband reappear like Enoch Arden. The man decided his wife was happy as she was and went away.

The most wistful summaries, as always, come from noncombatants. Columnist Marquis Childs remembers telling himself after Pearl Harbor. "Nothing will ever be the same again." And, of course, it was not. An army wife was perfectly correct when she called World War II "a very broadening experience." Both for better and for worse, as Melville Grosvenor concludes, "It made a country out of us."

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