Gob's War

PACIFIC WAR DIARY, 1942-1945 by James J. Fahey. 404 pages. Houghfon Mifflin. $6.50.

It must have been an officer who said that war is 5% sheer fright and 95% boredom. An enlisted man knows better. To the ordinary gob of the U.S. Navy, World War II was 90% boredom, 9% infuriating trivia, and only about 1% was composed of that combination of terror and exhilaration in which battles are decided. Surprisingly little of this has come through previous accounts of what life--and death--was like for the anonymous masses of men jammed into the seagoing ovens plying the Pacific, largely because most World War II books have been written by admirals and reporters.

James J. Fahey,* a New York City orphan raised by relatives in Waltham, Mass., was the most law-abiding of gobs in all respects but one: he kept a diary. He wrote it surreptitiously, on scraps of paper, in odd and usually half-dark places when he hoped nobody was looking at him.

Nobody could have known less about the Navy than did Fahey when he enlisted in 1942 at the age of 24. He was even surprised by the haircuts that all boots get--the nearest thing to scalping. "They even asked us our religion," wrote Roman Catholic Fahey a bit querulously, not realizing--as he did a hundred pages and 100,000 miles later--how important this could be when a man must be prepared to meet his Maker. Nobody could have been more naive than Fahey. "It is an honor to be on the flagship," he opined when he was assigned to the light cruiser Montpelier, though veteran seamen knew enough to shun it. He childishly equated a raid up the Slot in the Solomon Islands by Montpelier's task force with a sortie up the Hudson to bombard New York.

Few men could have been worse writers than Fahey when he began his diary, and he improved but little in three years. Sentences are tortured into the passive voice until the reader is benumbed. The cliches that come to him naturally are as bad as the Navyese into which he gradually slips. He is mad deningly repetitious. His words are like the war itself^-- just one damn thing after the other.

Because of, and not in spite of these things, Pacific War Diary is a fine and valuable book. Nobody can read Fahey's endless and well-documented complaints about how little sleep he got without wondering how men could survive that way for months on end. Half-starved, sleepless, alternately boiled, roasted and half-drowned in tropic downpours, James Fahey, Seaman First Class, and 1,300 shipmates fought through from the Solomons to the surrender of Japan. Montpelier's guns blasted away furiously in a dozen Solomons engagements; Fahey complained of the noise in his ears. After the decisive battles off Saipan and in the Philippine Sea: "We played checkers on watch. I slept topside as usual." Watching the recapture of Corregidor: "It took approximately 15 seconds for the parachutists to hit land. A few of the chutes failed to open." Of a bomb hit on Montpelier herself: "More casualties, all wounded. One of the fellows almost had his head taken off."

At war's end Fahey put his diary in a trunk and went to work in Waltham's sanitation department. Not until 1960 did he read a paperback reprint of Admiral Halsey's Story, by Joe Bryan III. Then Fahey made a fair copy of his own diary and sent it to Bryan. He also sent it to Naval Historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who sent it to Houghton Mifflin with a gracious foreword.

As a reserve rear admiral, Morison recognized Fahey's book as an account of the war that was neither the admirals' war nor the heroes', but the war of those who merely were there.

More than anyone to date, Fahey conveys that sense of necessary numb ness that thousands of his fellows have never managed to convey to wives or friends back home: this is what it was like.

*No kin and not to be confused with James C. Fahey, compiler of Ships and Aircraft of the U.S. Fleet, a data-packed softback that has sold over half a million copies.

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