This Day in Literary History (James Jones Survives Pearl Harbor to Pen ‘From Here to Eternity’)

Dec. 7, 1941—The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor left roughly 2,400 American dead. But one witness in the 27^th Infantry Regiment at nearby Schofield Barracks, Private James Jones, lived to write a bestselling novel about that tragic day and the world it brought to a violent end, From Here to Eternity.

As he recalled what he was doing that dawn 80 years ago in World War II: A Chronicle of Soldiering:

“On Sunday mornings in those days there was a bonus ration of a half–pint of milk, to go with your eggs or pancakes and syrup, also Sunday specials. Most of us were more concerned with getting and holding onto our half–pints of milk than with listening to the explosions that began rumbling up toward us from Wheeler Field two miles away. ‘They doing some blasting?’ some old–timer said through a mouthful of pancakes. It was not till the first low–flying fighter came skidding, whammering low overhead with his MGs going that we ran outside, still clutching our half–pints of milk to keep them from being stolen, aware with a sudden sense of awe that we were seeing and acting in a genuine moment of history.”

Three decades later, Jones still remembered a Japanese pilot’s toothy grin showing through goggles as he strafed the base; Battleship Row, a “living inferno” where men, “precipitated into full–scale war without previous experience and with no preparation, performed feats of incredible heroism and rescue that seemed unbelievable later”; and, from a distance, Pearl Harbor itself, with “the huge rising smoke columns high in the clear sunny Hawaiian air for miles.”

A 20-year-old assistant clerk with aspirations of becoming a writer, Jones gained enough material from his wartime experience for a three-decade career. But his rookie effort was the one that brought him the greatest success, not only netting him the National Book Award in 1952 but becoming the basis of the Oscar-winning film that has continued to keep his characters in the public eye.

Despite having read Jones’ first novel and being generally familiar with the outlines of his subsequent career, I was unaware of many details of his Army experience until I read Roy Morris’ fine article, “Before Eternity,” in the Autumn 2021 issue of MHQ.

I did not know, for instance, that Jones not only based many of his characters in the novel on soldiers in his own unit but also that in several cases, he used only minimal means of veiling their identities (e.g., not even bothering to change their surnames, in some cases).

I was midway through high school when I read Jones’ blockbuster. It was the time of my life when, with the magic combination of the fewest responsibilities and the most energy, I could spend time with many, often long, books.

Even so, I felt my attention severely strained by a novel that, for more than 800 pages, qualifies as a true doorstop. In fact, it could be argued that, for all its concessions to the censorship code of the early 1950s, Daniel Taradash’s screenplay effectively channeled the essentials of Jones’ sprawling plot.

For all the honesty and ambition of Jones’ first published work of fiction—his attempt to depict an entire complex community—it lost much in terms of economy and artistic control. This might have been part of the reason why his best-known literary achievement has not had the same staying power of Ernest Hemingway’s influential novel of World War I, A Farewell to Arms.

In a profile I wrote for my college newspaper years ago, Frank MacShane joked that he had been labeled “the biographer of the stepchildren of literature” for writing about critically underrated authors. Although his reclamation efforts have borne some fruit in the case of John O’Hara and considerably more for Raymond Chandler, he did not produce a similar widespread revival of interest with his 1985 biography of Jones, Into Eternity.

Nevertheless, From Here to Eternity retains considerable value. Readers prepared to look beyond the pair of romances involving Sgt. Milt Warden, Karen Holmes, Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt, and Alma Burke will find both a visceral picture of the peacetime army before America became a world power and a shocking treatment of a military establishment rife with institutional corruption and abuse of power 

Jones would have none of the “Good War” mythology already taking place in the postwar period. He was intent on delivering a decidedly unromantic rendering of the caste system in the military. This novel and the two others that formed his “World War II Trilogy,” The Thin Red Line and the unfinished Whistle, reflected his belief that “In every war there were two wars, the war of the officers and the war of the enlisted men.”

Thus, while officers in that pre-war period might attend clubs where they would even present calling cards, enlisted men would face overwhelming pressures to conform and arbitrary discipline that could land them in brutal stockades.

In the latter respect, From Here to Eternity functions as what today might be seen as a dissection of toxic masculinity. Females are cheated on and exploited; officers look the other way or even encourage bullying (including pressure by Karen Holmes’ husband, the commanding officer in the unit, to induce Prewitt to join the boxing team); and enlisted men endure tedium that can suddenly transform into after-hours barroom fisticuffs and back-alley knife fights.

Within a year, Jones would be not just a witness to war but also a combatant, participating in the Guadalcanal campaign. His experience there—killing with a bayonet two Japanese soldiers—unsettled him. Wounded in early 1943, he underwent extensive medical treatment at a military hospital before being honorably discharged the following year.  

Although Jones’ physical wounds were visible, his psychic ones—what we would call today post-traumatic stress disorder—were less so. His alcoholism, his daughter Kaylie contended in her memoir Lies My Mother Never Told Me, combined with the malaria he contracted in the war to produce the heart condition that ended his life in 1977. 

The school of realism to which Jones belonged may seem less attractive to modern readers than the surrealism of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. But Jones is just as critical in his way of the military as a soul-killing institution that even destroys its most dedicated members than these two other World War II novels. Clumsy and even artless as From Here to Eternity can seem at points, it also remains vibrant because of Jones’ fierce commitment to truth.

One of Jones’ most eloquent advocates is Joan Didion. Though her exacting, sometimes minimalist style can appear light years away from Jones, she wrote a deeply moving appreciation of the veteran-turned-novelist not long after his death in her essay “In the Island,” published in her collection The White Album:

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image, and not only Schofield Barracks but a great deal of Honolulu itself has always belonged for me to James Jones.”

This Day in WWII History (Pearl Harbor Attacked, Followed by Blame)

Dec. 7, 1941—The surprise Japanese early-morning attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii left 2,400 dead, the American Pacific fleet in tatters, and an entire generation of young men now in danger of dying in a far-off land. The worst day in the history of the U.S. Navy also left an angry citizenry—and politicians looking to assign or deflect blame.

A blue-ribbon panel, appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt and headed by Associate Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, concluded that the attack represented “a complete surprise to the commanders.” The Roberts Commission Report, delivered a month after the attack, was extremely critical of the on-the-ground commanders.

In the immediate aftermath of this, those commanders, Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short, were relieved of command and replaced. Though they never went through court-martials, they were charged with dereliction of duty, demoted and forced into retirement. Two generations of descendants have fought to clear their names, with mixed results.

But the Roberts investigation was only the first of nine into the attack. That number reflects a disbelief that this catastrophe could be the result of a perfect storm of circumstances, as well as a dark suspicion that a single person acted with either gross incompetence or gross malevolence.

Conspiracy theories are as American as apple pie. More than a thin thread runs between the Pearl Harbor conspiracy advocates and the 9/11 "truthers." The only difference between now and 75 years ago is that social media can propagate these theories more quickly and sustain them for far longer.

In the early 1940s, the isolationist movement was strong enough that suspicions lingered that FDR had known in advance that the attacks would occur, but that he allowed them to take place so that the United States would be drawn into the war. Among many Republicans, the hope existed that he would be weakened by investigations into the attack—enough so that the GOP would gain seats in the midterm elections in 1942, and, beyond to 1944, that the President would lose his reelection bid, should he decide to run again.

The Republicans were able to achieve only one of their achievements: gains in the midterm elections. But Senate Democrats managed to postpone the investigations a couple of times, then limited their scope so that sensitive intelligence information would not be disclosed while the country was still at war.

In 1999, a later Senate investigation, backed by Democrats such as Joe Biden, concluded that Himmel and Short were not guilty, after all, of dereliction of duty. Critics of the nine investigations also make a good point that General Douglas MacArthur, with more time to prepare than Kimmel, had not been relieved of command, despite his own heavy losses.

Even so, there seems little doubt that Kimmel and Short were guilty of errors in judgment and lack of imagination.

Consider this notable exception, for instance: Harold Stark, the chief of naval operations in Washington, sent a dispatch on November 27 to all U.S. Navy outposts in the Pacific that raised alarms among the military commanders in Hawaii but not enough questions:

This dispatch is to be considered a war warning. Negotiations with Japan looking toward the stabilization of conditions in the Pacific have ceased and an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days. The number and equipment of Japanese troops and the organization of naval task forces indicates an amphibious expedition against either the Philippines Thai or Kra Peninsula or possibly Borneo. Execute an appropriate defensive deployment preparatory to carrying out the tasks assigned in WPL46.

For most of the year, Kimmel had been receiving what future legend Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey would call “wolf” dispatches about possible Japanese aggression. Yet this was different. Kimmel had never, in his entire professional experience, seen the phrase “war warning,” and later admitted as much.

The problem was that neither Kimmel nor Short thought the message could apply to them. A Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor would have to cover an enormous distance. The far more likely targets were mentioned in the dispatch: the Philippines, or in Southeast Asia.

And so, on the morning of December 7, when Kimmel behold the Japanese planes appearing out of the sky, he appeared, as a friend later noted, as white as his uniform.

Quote of the Day (Stephen Vincent Benet, on War and Peace)

“Grant us a common faith that man shall know bread and peace—that he shall know justice and righteousness, freedom and security, an equal opportunity and an equal chance to do his best not only in our own lands, but throughout the world. And in that faith let us march toward the clean world our hands can make.” ATTRIBUTION: STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT, Prayer, concluding sentences (1942).

(Today, on the anniversary of the surprise, unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor, I think it’s useful to recall the spirit that animated the all-out American war effort and sacrifice in World War II.

The two transatlantic partners at the heart of the “special relationship,” Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, were, after all, two of the major architects not just of national security in their country but, before the war, of economic security—FDR, with his New Deal, and Churchill, as junior partner with David Lloyd George in creating the British program of social insurance before WWI. The world the two leaders envisioned might be best described in FDR’s “Four Freedoms,” which I briefly described in this earlier post.

Archibald MacLeish, poet and Librarian of Congress, asked Benét to write “The United Nations Prayer” to be used in the celebration of Flag Day, 1942. President Franklin D. Roosevelt used it to close his radio address on Flag Day, June 14, 1942. Adlai E. Stevenson used this final section of the prayer on his Christmas cards in 1964.)