Last Frontier Days War in the Aleutians and More: Robert L. Sherrod’s Correspondence
By Hank Nuwer
Historian Ray E. Boomhower’s detailed book, “Dispatches from the Pacific: The World War II Reporting of Robert L. Sherrod” (Indiana University Press, $24), serves as an excellent resource on the Allies’ war against the fanatical Imperial Japanese.
The author covers the Pacific combat through the eyes of illustrious war correspondent Robert L. Sherrod, brave journalist embedded on the front lines. He deserves a pedestal alongside legendary Ernie Pyle, a correspondent Boomhower also wrote about in “A Soldier’s Friend.” .
Sherrod, a magazine correspondent, snagged great quotes from grunts and generals alike, but he was all journalist as well, peppering his reportage with astute detail to keep Americans back home informed in defeat and victory.
Sherrod’s biographer displays a deft hand as he pens impeccable prose in the volume’s 342 compressed pages. Boomhower is a pro’s pro as a biographer.
Boomhower tells stories as well as any fictional thriller writer. He serves up Japan’s suicidal kamikaze raids, Marine forays onto deadly beachheads, and the politicking by military brass that will keep you up long after you should have gone to bed.
Boomhower was at his best when writing why Sherrod believed the United States positively, absolutely, had no choice but to drop the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sherrod believed the U.S even in 1945 might sacrifice one million men before the Japanese threw up a white flag
“`The only phrase applicable to this war from now on is the “War of Extermination,’ [Sherrod] said in a dispatch to his editors at Time . . .
“Too many newspaper editorials,” he said, “have assumed from looking at the map that the Japanese war is nearly over.
“The top strategists out here do not think so. That is why I stress the difficulty of fighting people who won’t give up, and I am convinced no Japanese man, woman, or child will give up this side of extermination.”
While “Dispatches from the Pacific” boasts exemplary chapters on Saipan, Iwo Jima and bloody Okinawa, I believe Cordova Times readers will most be engaged by the chapter “War in the Fog and Atolls: The Aleutians and Beyond.”
In July of 1942, the U.S. Navy evacuated nearly 1,000 natives and a handful of white teachers, traders and nurses after Japanese forces landed at Attu, Alaska’s westernmost island.
Correspondent Sherrod asked Time magazine to assign him coverage of the recapture of Attu from May to August 1943. Sherrod saw some of his crucial coverage blocked by military censors—in this case, fatalities caused by “friendly fire” mishaps.
Boomhower conveys the stark challenges of hand-to-hand fighting in Alaska’s frozen western mountains.
“The only way to get to the battle lines was to walk over the mountains where a mile an hour was fair speed. Most of the fighting was done by the soldiers of the Seventeenth and Thirty-Second Infantry Regiments on snow-covered mountain peaks a thousand feet or more straight up. Some reporters did not take their shoes off for days and the icy Aleutian winds numbed an ungloved hand so quickly that taking notes was impossible.
“The wind was worse than [Japanese] bullets whistling overhead—you get used to the bullets.”
Boomhower’s research found reporters wore three sets of underwear, a field jacket, a parka, multiple woolen socks, and more as protection from chilling, fierce winds. These correspondents won praise from “dogface” soldiers for their pluck.
“[They] shared the hardships in some measure with combatants, which I believe contributed in some small measure to the realism of their writing,” said Attu’s chief intelligence officer.
Trench foot and exposure were as much enemies as the Japanese themselves in desperate man-on-man combat following banzai charges.
When the Aleutians were secured at last, Sherrod headed to Micronesia and the battle of Tarawa, which the correspondent later chronicled in a best-selling book.
Author Boomhower has contributed valuable scholarship in both World War Two and Alaska history.
Robert Sherrod showed, to paraphrase a saying, that our beloved nation worth dying for in war deserved journalism no less heroic.
Sherrod continued as a writer and editor well into old age, dying from emphysema on February 13, 1994, in Washington, D.C.
“Dispatches from the Pacific” can be ordered from https://iupress.org/ or any bookseller.
First published: Cordova (AK) Times, Sept. 13, 2024
Hank Nuwer won first place for “Best Column” this year from the Alaska Press Club. Last Wednesday, the Alaska Children’s Trust awarded him its Champion for Kids award.