Cal Dunbar of West Yellowstone, Montana, who served as a Marine sergeant in World War II, has some interesting footnotes to add to William Manchester’s article in our December, 1975, issue: As an ex-enlisted Japanese language interpreter with the Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, I really enjoyed “The Man Who Could Speak Japanese.” The article has all the flavor, color, and authenticity of the period—particularly in regard to the manner with which Marines who could really speak Japanese were treated by the other Marines of all ranks.
However, I think it only fair to venture that the impostor would have had a quick exposure in outfits other than the 29th Marines at that stage of the Pacific warfare. I graduated from the enlisted Japanese Language School at Camp Pendleton in May, 1944. By that time the Japanese Language School had sent out several classes, and we already had Major Wolf of the 1st Marine Division, of Guadalcanal fame, and Marine Captain Pratt of the 2nd Marine Division, Tarawa operation, instructing at the Pendleton school. It would have been a delicate maneuver to con anyone very long at the battalion level in the field, as there were competent interpreters in the service, even if they were few in relation to the number of Marines involved.
But Manchester has the reaction of the Corps to these interpreters down pat. I recall one incident that took place in early June of 1944 at Oahu, where the seven of us sent from the school at Pendleton were waiting to staff the interrogation centers soon to be established at Tinian and Guam. As the Saipan battle raged, replacements flowed through the camp to replenish the divisions engaged in heavy fighting. We seven mustered nightly in the formation as the others passed through. Finally, after a couple of weeks, the first sergeant began to recognize us. One night he asked us why we were still there. One of our more mature members replied that we were interpreters. “What?” The sergeant looked baffled.
“We speak Japanese,” we explained.
The grizzled “old” NCO looked us over carefully for some time—apparently weighing the ferocity of the annihilation in the Saipan operation—and finally asked in wonder: “But—who are you boys going to talk to?”
SAFEWAY
Many airlines flourished in the shadow of Transcontinental Air Transport during the rather chaotic days of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. William Voigt, Jr., of Blackshear, Georgia, worked for one of them, and was reminded of his experiences by the article on TAT in our December issue: My line was SAFEway, our nickname for Southwest Air Fast Express, Inc., with headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I, as a reporter for the Oklahoma City Times, was chosen as station agent for SAFEway at Oklahoma City, a position I held until October of 1930, when the line was sold to Universal, predecessor of American Airlines, and abandoned. I went in hoping to become public-relations chief of the line but functioned instead as station agent.
As soon as word got around the industry that TAT would furnish what we called air-rail transportation, SAFEway had to do the same to stay in business, and cooperative arrangements were made with the railroads. Our route would be New York to St. Louis overnight by rail, via SAFEway next day to Sweetwater, Texas, and thence to Los Angeles overnight via Texas Pacific Railroad.
Like TAT, we used Ford Trimotors, flying a fleet of twelve, powered first with Pratt & Whitney Wasps of 44o horsepower and later by P&W Hornets of higher power.
Our old airfield was not paved; we had a graveled north-south runway. Our office was at the northeast end of the field, where we got the heavy dust from the eternal south winds during spring, summer, and fall. And all winter long we got the aromatic breezes from the Oklahoma City stockyards. We called it our downwind office.
In our eighteen months of operation—April, 1929, to October, 1930—SAFEway carried a grand total of fortyeight thousand passengers. The great Oklahoma City oil field was in its heyday then, and sixteen thousand of the passengers originated their flights at my station. We never had a casualty, but there were some close calls. In one instance an outboard engine fell into a cornfield near Springfield, Missouri, necessitating an emergency landing at a small airfield there. Another time a pilot out of Wichita Falls, Texas, bound for my station, ran into trouble. He was flying an experimental plane in which 24-gauge aluminum alloy was being used instead of the heavier 22-gauge that had been standard. As the pilot gained altitude over Burkburnett the skin began peeling back over the cockpit. The copilot—whom we called “Mate” to the pilot’s “Captain”—herded the eight passengers back into the tail of the plane with the baggage, for stability, and the pilot brought the plane down safely in a watermelon patch.
THE BRANDED HAND
The highly unusual daguerreotype below reflects in its silver surface a grim symbol of the early tumult that eventually culminated in the Civil War.
Captain Jonathan Walker (1799-1878) was born on Cape Cod but operated out of Florida. He was strongly sympathetic to the abolitionist cause and in 1844 tried to help a group of seven slaves escape to the West Indies. The venture failed, and Walker was captured, fined six hundred dollars, and thrown into solitary confinement for a year. Before he was released, the letters S.S. were branded on the palm of his right hand.
Of course, Walker’s captors hoped to disgrace him with the stigma of “Slave Stealer,” but Walker did not bear his scar with shame. For years he delivered antislavery lectures, and he inspired John Greenleaf Whittier, himself an implacable foe of slavery, to write the following thundering stanzas:
Welcome home again, brave seaman! with
thy thoughtful brow and gray,
And the old heroic spirit of our earlier,
better day,—
With that front of calm endurance, on
whose steady nerve in vain
Pressed the iron of the prison, smote the
fiery shafts of pain!
Is the tyrant’s brand upon thee? Did the
brutal cravens aim
To make God’s truth thy falsehood, his
holiest work thy shame?
When, all blood-quenched, from the torture
the iron was withdrawn,
How laughed their evil angel the baffled
fools to scorn!
They change to wrong the duty which
God hath written out
On the great heart of humanity, too legible
for doubt!
They, the loathsome moral lepers, blotched
from footsole up to crown,
Give to shame what God hath given unto
honor and renown!
Why, that brand is highest honor!—than
its traces never yet
Upon old armorial hatchments was a
prouder blazon set;
And thy unborn generations, as they tread
our rocky strand,
Shall tell with pride the story of their
father’s BRANDED HAND !
Sometime shortly after his release Walker met Albert Southworth, a pioneer photographer who had learned the daguerreotype process from Samuel Morse and had recently gone into partnership with Josiah Hawes. Southworth and Hawes produced some of the finest early daguerrean images, and their skill and imagination are evident in this stark likeness of Walker’s hand. The image is among the earliest “conceptual” portraits ever made—that is, one in which a part of the body is made to symbolize the personality of the subject. Ironically, no full portrait of Walker is known to exist, but his memory is well enough served by the image of his strong, scarred hand.
The initials here are reversed, since the daguerrean process produced a mirror image. The picture will be included in a book entitled The Spirit of Fact: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes, 1843-1862, to be published by David R. Godine, Boston, and the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, Rochester.
SHORT HAUL
In the December, 1973, issue we ran the sad news that the St. Johnsbury & Lamoille County Railroad had gone out of business, thereby endangering the world’s shortest covered railroad bridge, which protected ninety feet of the Vermont line’s right of way. However, Robert L. Hagerman of Morrisville, Vermont, tells us that service has been revived: Of your selection of handsome photographs of American bridges by David Plowden I’m happy to report that the railroad using the covered bridge that appears on page 47 has not been abandoned as reported in the caption. It was a close call, however, and the St. Johnsbury & Lamoille is still not out of the woods—either literally or figuratively (the tracks are overgrown with brush in some places).
A petition for the line’s abandonment had been filed with the Interstate Commerce Commission, but that became void when the state of Vermont purchased the roadbed from its private owner and subsequently leased it to a different operator. Service on the east end of the ninety-eight-mile line, which includes what is known as Fisher Bridge, was restored late in 1974 after some two years of idleness. Major rehabilitation is needed, and whether it will be carried out is still very uncertain. But for now at least, as my accompanying photo attests, trains are again rolling through the historic timbered bridge, which has been reinforced by the addition of steel girders and a pier in midstream.
ROCK OF AGES
We regret that our December, 1975, frontispiece, which showed Isaac Minor standing by the immense granite boulder that was to supply the stone for his mausoleum, disturbed Mary Cotter, the manager of the Greenwood Cemetery Association in Arcata, California.
Ms. Cotter wrote to tell us that we were wrong in our assertion that Minor was buried elsewhere: “He is buried in the mausoleum. He was encrypted December 14, 1915, the place of death being Arcata, California, and the undertaker a Mr. J. A. Todd, now deceased. It would certainly make us feel better if some form of retraction could be made, as there are still members of the Minor family living who plan on being encrypted in said mausoleum.”
Mr. Wilson K. Minor, Isaac’s grandson, also wrote to inform us that—notwithstanding our statement to the contrary—at least three of Isaac’s children are not buried in the mausoleum.
LUSITANIA
Thomas A. Bailey, the distinguished history professor emeritus at Stanford University, has taken exception to our editorial judgment in connection with material he submitted to us on the Lusitania. We are pleased to print herewith his letter to us: “Who Sank the Lusitania?” is a review-article that appeared in AMERICAN HERITAGE, December, 1975. Written by editor E. M. Halliday, it combines a generally favorable appraisal of The Lusitania Disaster, authored by myself and Captain Paul B. Ryan, with an unfavorable appraisal of an unpublished article that we had also written on another book on the same subject.
The background is that in 1972, a London publisher brought out that other volume, Lusitania, by a British journalist, Colin Simpson. Nearly forty years earlier, I had published two scholarly articles on the same subject, and I immediately spotted much sensationalized misinformation in Simpson’s work. I therefore suggested to AMERICAN HERITAGE that my collaborator and I write a detailed review of Simpson’s book pending the appearance of our own volume on the subject. AMERICAN HERITAGE responded cordially, and when our article of some 4,200 words was submitted, it was accepted promptly and enthusiastically.
Some two months later, after our article was set in type, AMERICAN HERITAGE’s editors came to the conclusion that our account was “immoderately severe,” especially as it came from “competing authors,” but delayed proposing specific changes for about a year and a half. When our own book was announced for publication, they decided at last to run a critique of our article in connection with a review of our book. This took the form of Mr. Halliday’s article, which attacked our original—and unpublished —review as too “agitated,” while praising the book as “far calmer and more detached.” We feel confident that if the unpublished article was as “fierce” and “nasty” as Mr. Halliday claimed, AMERICAN HERITAGE would never have accepted it originally.
We admittedly used strong words, such as “fictionalized,” because they were true words. Truth can be harsh, and justice must be uncompromising to be justice. Colin Simpson, in our judgment, had forfeited all right to what is commonly called fairness.
Mr. Halliday’s article-review argued that we should not be “agitated” because Simpson’s bad history will fade away before long. We disagree. Few things are longer-lived than a conspiratorial myth, such as Churchill’s alleged exposure of the Lusitania. Simpson is already being cited with respect in standard reference books and in college classrooms.
Simpson’s volume no doubt contains more truth than fiction, but only a few informed readers can tell the difference. The historian has a duty to warn them, and this we tried to do in the unpublished article and in our own published book.
MRS. MELVILLE AND MRS. MELVILLE
A number of people wrote us about an anomaly that occurred in the article on Melville and Hawthorne in our December, 1975, issue. Among those who picked it up was John Maass, whose piece on the Centennial Exhibition appears in this issue. He writes: “The 1820 portrait of a bold brunette on page 20 makes an effective contrast to the picture of the fair and prim Mrs. Hawthorne. But it does not depict Mrs. Herman Melville, who was born in 1822.”
True enough. The portrait we incorrectly identified as that of Melville’s wife is in fact of his mother, Maria Gansevoort Melville. Below, to set things straight, is a photograph of Mrs. Herman (Elizabeth Shaw) Melville.
