Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [59]
One winter in Manila in the mid-1930s, Wylie walked into the wardroom of his ship, the heavy cruiser Augusta (Captain Chester W. Nimitz commanding), and encountered a “fist-banging argument” between two of the ship’s up-and-coming young officers. At issue was what it took to become skilled at rifle or pistol marksmanship. One officer, Lloyd Mustin, said that only someone born with a special gift could learn to do it well. The other, a marine named Lewis B. Puller, said, “I can take any dumb son of a bitch and teach him to shoot.” Mustin would go on to become one of the Navy’s pioneers in radar-controlled gunnery. Puller would ascend to general, the most decorated U.S. Marine in history. Gesturing to Wylie standing in the doorway, Chesty Puller declared, “I can even teach him.”
A ten-dollar bet ensued. The next time the Augusta’s marine detachment found time to do their annual qualifications at the rifle range, Wylie was Puller’s special guest. And by the end of the experiment, he was the proud owner of a Marine medal designating him an expert rifleman.
The experience helped Wylie understand both native gifts and teachable skills and predisposed him to work with the rural kids under him. Now he could smile when the sighting of an aircraft approaching at a distant but undetermined range came through the Fletcher’s bridge phones as, “Hey, Cap’n, here’s another one of them thar aero-planes, but don’t you fret none. She’s a fur piece yet.” Wylie was a good enough leader to appreciate what the recruits from the countryside brought to the game. “They were highly motivated,” he said. “They just came to fight.”
Back home, a great gathering was still under way. The stately pace of a global war allowed time for the majesty of a mass mobilization to build. Few of the untraveled young men who made their first venture west ever forgot its impressions. A Pullman car clicked and rolled through the slash pine and swamps of the South, and then into other terrain. “The moon rose, but still there were only the pines, a light here and there, a crossing bell, headlights of a car, then darkness again,” a new second lieutenant with the 1st Marine Division wrote. Bored but too anxious to sleep, recruits in dining cars played cards into the night. Others, foreheads leaning on windowpanes, watched the nighttime landscape roll unendingly past. From Augusta to Atlanta, then Birmingham, St. Louis, to the high plains, across the Rockies, and toward the Pacific’s great frontier.
Nimitz’s successor as chief of the Navy’s personnel office, Rear Admiral Randall Jacobs, lamented that “The Nation has passed through an era of soft living and rampant individualism” that resulted in a “staggering” rate of rejection among new recruits for physical shortcomings. But the flood tide was rising. On December 7, the Navy had 325,095 personnel, plus more than 70,000 marines. Two years later the fleet’s muster rolls would carry more than 2,250,000 names, and the Marine Corps 391,000 more.
Routed to training centers in San Diego or Michigan, finding their ships at Norfolk or Mare Island, shaking down and running speed trials off Maine or Puerto Rico, the new recruits made their homes in ships that would steam to victory, and carry kids and men and admirals alike to their death. A navy was still in the making, its day of triumph unknown, the men who were forming it yet unformed themselves, but motivated and carrying west. As Marine Corps aviator Samuel Hynes would observe, “They go to war because it’s impossible not to. Because a current is established in society, so swift, flowing toward war, that every young man who steps into it is carried downstream.”
Standing in its rolling surge, directing traffic, was Bob Hagen. A newly minted ensign himself, Hagen was assigned to duty as a service school selection