Flags of Our Fathers Page 7

  As the eldest of the three brothers, and the brightest—his intellectual skills would soon blaze brilliantly to the surface—Mike not only grasped the concept of teamwork and equal responsibility, he became a liaison between his father and his two younger siblings, an explainer of his father’s rules and wishes to Pete and John. In short, a sergeant.

  Mike Strank resembled his mother, as Jack Bradley resembled his. Like Jack, Mike absorbed his mother’s fervent Catholic faith. Before bed each night, he and his two brothers would kneel on the floor, before a vivid painting of The Last Supper, and say their evening prayers in Slovak. They looked out for one another. They took to making sure they wore the same color shirt to school each day. Like uniforms.

  Slowly, the Strank family gained a foothold. While Vasil labored, and Martha raised geese on the hill behind the apartment, plucking the feathers to make pillows, the boys attended school, where they picked up the new American language. Schools were good around Franklin Borough and Johnstown; Bethlehem Steel, a benevolent despot, paid for good buildings and teachers and even an indoor swimming pool. But no one could completely shield the immigrant children from nativist bigotry. Ann Bosophy, the Stranks’ fellow immigrant from Jarabenia, recalls cringing on the schoolroom floor after being struck by her first-grade teacher. Her sin was unthinkingly slipping into the Slovak tongue.

  Mike never made that mistake. He did not know English when he began first grade; by the end of the year he was so proficient in it that he skipped the second. He even learned to joke around in the new tongue. He took up the French horn and learned it. Quickly. It was amazing, his relatives said: The boy never forgot anything. He could open the evening newspaper, read a page of it, and the next morning tell you exactly what all the articles said. A photographic memory.

  He was shy around girls, Ann Strank, Pete’s wife, recalled. Not outgoing. You would only notice him if you knew him. But then, not many of the boys in that town were at ease with girls, or vice versa. Men, he liked. Men, he understood. And men liked and understood Mike Strank.

  His shyness had nothing to do with timidity. He saved his brother John’s life in the mines once. It happened in 1933, when Mike was fifteen and John was eleven. Coal miners’ children were allowed to go inside the tunnels sometimes, during breaks, and collect random shards of coal to fuel their families’ stoves. One day, Mike and John were walking along in the darkness, feeling for lumps of coal. John, trailing his big brother, was idly banging his coal shovel against the wall. On one bang the shovel made contact with an exposed high-power wire. John screamed, but could not let go; the electricity fused his hand to the shovel. Mike spun and hurled his body against the little boy like a football lineman throwing a block, knocking him free. John fell to the ground screaming in terror, but safe from the deadly current.

  A few years later, during the second Johnstown Flood of 1936, Mike calmly faced a current of a different kind. With most of the townspeople in near-panic as the Conemaugh River waters rose dangerously near the peak of the 1889 disaster, Mike calmly made his way down the steep incline to have a look for himself. Scrambling back up, looking bored and deadpan, he told his rapt little brothers, “It’s gonna come, and it’s gonna go. And that’s just the way it is.” The little brothers were awed and calmed by Mike’s air of detachment.

  By 1933 the Stranks had saved enough money to buy, for cash, a ten-room duplex on the side of a hill above the Conemaugh. The family kept five rooms for itself and rented out the other five. This would prove Vasil’s greatest claim on the good life in America. The Stranks were living in unimaginable luxury now: When Mary came along a little later that year, she was delivered by an actual midwife. Her arrival in the family gave the three boys an expanded cycle of duties at night: One would wash the dishes, one would dry them, and the third would take the baby out for a stroll. (Jokester Mike at times would turn this into a Three Stooges routine, slipping his dried dishes back into the sink for John to wash all over again.)

  Games of marbles on the kitchen floor. Touch football on the hard town streets; leather basketballs heaved at quivering hoops tied to telephone poles. Pennies saved for baseball cards and the collection plate. At night, the three brothers sprawled near the kitchen stove, studying—Mike tutoring each of them in turn. “Mike would help Pete and me with our homework,” John Strank remembered. “He’d tutor us on the floor, near the stove where it was nice and warm.” The good life for the Stranks began to feel as though it would never end.

  It seemed that the mills, like the rest of America, would keep on expanding forever, belching ever-brighter flames. Franklin Borough had grown so confident of its unending prosperity that it built a new municipal building, so opulent in its gleaming white brick that it was nicknamed the Taj Mahal. The movie star Gene Kelly had come to town; he did a song-and-dance routine with the local sheriff at its dedication.

  But things were not destined to go on like that forever. The year of the “Taj Mahal” dedication and Gene Kelly’s soft-shoe was a year of upheaval. The year was 1929.

  The Depression had sunk into eastern Pennsylvania well before Mike Strank graduated from high school in 1937. Soup kitchens had replaced the bustling activity in the mines and the mills; a steelworkers’ strike had failed badly. Thousands of Slavs foraged for new jobs.

  The smoke, dust, grime, and blackened skies of Mike’s childhood seemed permanent features of the landscape. Even for a bright boy like Mike, college was beyond hope, the costs unimaginable. (His “Ambition,” as noted in his 1937 high-school yearbook, was: “To Be President.”)

  Some workers had come to Franklin Borough while he was in high school; men who said they belonged to something called the WPA. President Roosevelt had created it so that people could work their way out of poverty. These WPA men had built a band shell in the town; sidewalks; some sewers. Mike learned that the men were being paid the impressive sum of fifty-seven dollars a month. He decided that he would see what Mr. Roosevelt had available for him.

  He ended up in a similar brainstorm of the President’s, one that perfectly suited his energy and developing physique: the Civilian Conservation Corps. The CCC was designed to wean young men off street corners by getting them involved in shoring up the nation’s natural environment. Through the 1930’s, youthful CCC workers planted millions of trees across America; they released nearly a billion game fish into the country’s rivers and lakes; they built wildlife shelters, created camping grounds, and dug thousands of miles of canals for irrigation and transportation.

  But the CCC had a greater function—one that did not fully reveal itself until America went to war. It served as a premilitary training experience for some three million boys, many of whom would flood into the armed services after Pearl Harbor. Administered by the Army, the CCC introduced its recruits to camp life, to military discipline, to physical fitness, and to a sense of loyalty to comrades and to a cause.

  All this was certainly true of Mike Strank. The former French horn player, scholar, and good Catholic boy disappeared into the CCC in 1937 weighing 140 pounds and reemerged two years later a strapping 180, tanned and handsome. He had headed first for the Petrified Forest in Arizona; then he came back to Pennsylvania, working as a laborer on highway projects for another year.

  He would have stayed on happily in the CCC, swinging an ax and hauling concrete under the great American sun, but the government denied his application for an extension: His father had by then found work a couple of days a week, and the family was no longer technically destitute.

  Mike Strank was nineteen now. The year was 1939. In Europe, Hitler’s legions were overrunning his Czech homeland, making slaves of his people.

  Mike decided to join the Marines.

  He didn’t have to do it. He could have avoided military service altogether, given his Czech citizenship. Brother John always puzzled over the fact that the Marines allowed him in at all: Apparently, no one checked out his nationality.

  Mike enlisted on October 6, 1939. He was th
e only one of the six flagraisers to sign up before America entered the war. But soon the brainy Czech boy would transform himself into a prototype American fighting man: a tough, driven, and consummate leader, advancing without complaint toward what he came to understand was his certain death.

  Three

  AMERICA’S WAR

  What kind of people do they think we are? Is it possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL, ON THE JAPANESE, 1942

  WHEN IT STRUCK, it must have seemed a plot twist out of some futuristic movie, but this time for real.

  A sleepy American Sunday afternoon in early December, Yuletide season in the air, roast chicken dinners finished, and the dishes washed, family radios tuned to Sammy Kaye’s Sunday Serenade on the NBC Red Network, or a Great Plays presentation of The Inspector General on the Blue, or perhaps the pro football game between the Washington Redskins and the Philadelphia Eagles…

  And then suddenly urgent bulletins crackling through static. The future had begun.

  The shocking interruptions started at 2:25 P.M.

  John Daly of the NBC Red was on the air first: “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by air!” Five minutes later an anonymous announcer elaborated over both NBC systems:

  From the NBC newsroom in New York! President Roosevelt said in a statement today that the Japanese have attacked the Pearl Harbor…Hawaii from the air! I’ll repeat that…President Roosevelt says that the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii from the air. This bulletin came to you from the NBC newsroom in New York.

  As the afternoon wore on, the bulletins multiplied and a vast radio audience built: as many as eighty million listeners by one estimate. Some of them heard an anonymous announcer describing the tumultuous damage by telephone from the roof of radio station KGU in Honolulu. After a bomb narrowly missed the broadcast tower the man screamed: “This is no joke! This is real war!”

  The following day, most of those same listeners, including hundreds of thousands of children, tuned in again to hear President Franklin Roosevelt intone the six-and-a-half-minute speech whose key phrases would resound in American folklore:

  Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan…

  With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God!

  No joke. The real thing.

  Before Pearl Harbor America had looked across the Atlantic for an enemy. Adolf Hitler was the enemy we feared and Japan was dismissed as only a threat. But after the “day of infamy,” newspaper maps of the Pacific and Asia were scrutinized at the kitchen tables of America.

  Now America was in a World War, a “two-ocean war.” Across the Atlantic, in Europe, the U.S. would be fighting in support of and with an allied force. But for years, Russian, English, and French troops would do most of the fighting and take the brunt of the beating. And it would be Stalin’s troops who would really beat Hitler: seventy-five percent of the German troops who died fighting in World War II were killed by Russian troops.

  Against Japan, however, America would stand virtually alone in the Pacific. Japan had violated American soil, and the first and last American battles of World War II would be fought there. The Pacific War would be “America’s War.”

  America went to war in 1941. The Europeans had been fighting since 1939. But for millions of Asians, World War II had begun a decade before, in 1931.

  Earlier in the century, Japanese civilians had lost control of the government to the military. Intent on making Japan into a world power, the military became preoccupied with Japan’s one glaring weakness: Japan had almost no natural resources, and its industrial base was at the mercy of imports whose supply lines could be cut. Japan, they argued, had to acquire a secure resource base to guarantee its industrial security.

  To the military, this goal was important enough to alter the very structure of Japanese society. The entire nation had to be militarized for the goal, and military thinking and training were imposed on each citizen.

  The military squeezed the Japanese populace in an iron vise. On one side was a militarized educational system that prohibited free thought. Schools became boot camps complete with military language and physical discipline. Youth magazines carried jingoistic articles such as “The Future War between Japan and America.” The final examination at the Maebashi middle school in March of 1941 required the students to discuss the necessity for overseas expansion. “It was commonplace for teachers to behave like sadistic drill sergeants, slapping children across the cheeks, hitting them with their fists, or bludgeoning them with bamboo or wooden swords. Students were forced to hold heavy objects, sit on their knees, stand barefoot in the snow, or run around the playground until they collapsed from exhaustion.”

  The other side of the vise was a regimen of draconian “thought control” laws that constrained all civilians. Imprisonment and torture were the fates of anyone who questioned authority.

  Using the deceptively neutral term “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” Japanese propaganda claimed that Japan’s aim was to free its neighbors from white colonial rule. Instead, Japan, like Nazi Germany, used a master-race mentality and a highly mechanized war machine to subjugate those it claimed to be freeing.

  Tokyo enslaved “those peoples who lacked the capacity for independence,” and stole their national resources. The Japanese attitude of superiority is evident in a document from the Imperial Rule Assistance Association entitled “Basic Concepts of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”: “Although we use the expression ‘Asian Cooperation,’ this by no means ignores the fact that Japan was created by the Gods or posits an automatic racial equality.”

  The nation “created by the Gods” initiated “co-prosperity” by raining terror down on Manchuria and China. With official approval and chilly detachment the Japanese army bombed Chinese cities and slaughtered everyone in its way, including unarmed men, women, and children.

  Japan’s first conquest was Manchuria in 1931. Then, to consolidate control of Manchuria, Japan attacked China in 1937.

  The Japanese army employed ruthless tactics in China. Japanese airplanes bombed defenseless civilians. Rats infected with deadly bacteria were systematically released among the populace, making Japan the only combatant to use biological warfare in World War II. The Japanese army raped and pillaged with full encouragement from its superiors. But China is a vast country, and despite millions of casualties, Japan’s war became a debilitating war of attrition.

  And Japan’s relations with China’s allies, especially the U.S., became strained. Then, in 1939, war in Europe appeared to offer Japan a fortuitous way out of its dilemma.

  Awed by the German blitzkrieg into France in May of 1940, Japan pushed into French Indochina. Japan’s military leaders calculated that Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 would be successful. They argued that now was the time to capture other resource-rich Asian countries. Japanese militarists reasoned that the U.S. and the U.K. would be preoccupied by the German thrust and would not dare to allocate large military resources to Asia. Hawks argued that the American public would not support a long war far from its shores. A slowly tightening American economic boycott of critical exports to Japan hastened the decision to act.

  Japan’s principal war aim was the conquest of European colonial empires in Asia. These empires would give Japan the resources it needed, and fostered a hope that a surrounded China would capitulate.

  With a thoroughly militarized citizenry, an experienced army, and an immense navy, Japan was confident it could control the Pacific as its sphere of influence.

  After disabling the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces thrust southward toward Australia,
overrunning Wake Island, Malaya, Singapore, the Philippines, and what is now Indonesia. Japanese forces soon controlled the Pacific battlefield. Only Australia in the south remained unconquered.

  The Japanese army had even humbled the United States Army. On December 7, hours after hearing the news from Hawaii, General Douglas MacArthur sat in the Philippines, stunned, seemingly unable to give a command to mobilize the largest fleet of warplanes in the South Pacific. When nearly two hundred Japanese bombers arrived over Manila, ten hours after the Pearl Harbor attack, they simply obliterated this fleet, which sat in convenient clusters on the tarmac.

  MacArthur was soon forced to withdraw 65,000 Filipinos and 15,000 American troops from a defense of Luzon and into the mountains of the Bataan peninsula. They retreated in the face of a converging Japanese naval and infantry force. President Roosevelt, realizing the Bataan defenders were doomed, ordered MacArthur, America’s most decorated soldier of World War I, to flee by boat to Australia under cover of darkness.

  “The battling bastards of Bataan,” as the trapped troops styled themselves, held out, starving, until April 3, 1942—Good Friday. They surrendered, the most crushing defeat in American military history. The emaciated survivors were driven sixty-five miles on foot for three days in lacerating heat to a prison camp: the infamous Bataan Death March. Some 15,000 prisoners perished en route. They succumbed to thirst, starvation, exposure, and the merciless abuse of the Japanese soldiers, who whipped, beat, and shot those who stumbled or paused to lap at water in some roadside stream.

  But if the men in charge of America’s Pacific forces were temporarily stunned by the onslaught, America’s boys were spoiling for vengeance.