a number of my illusions have been shattered

--------------[excerpt, An Unfinished Life - John F. Kennedy]------------...He immediately requested transfer to the South Pacific and prevailed upon Senator Walsh to arrange it.  By the beginning of March, he was on his way to the Solomon Islands, where Japanese and U.S. naval forces were locked in fierce combat.  After U.S. victories in the Coral Sea and at Midway in the spring of 1942, both sides had suffered thousands of casualties and lost dozens of ships in battles for control of New Guinea and the Solomons.

Jack's eagerness to put himself at risk cries out for explanation....Was he hoping for a war record he could use later in politics?  Almost certainly not.  In 1943, Joe Jr. was the heir apparent to a political career, not his younger brother.  Instead, his compelling impulse was similar to that of millions of other Americans who believed in the war as

an essential crusade against evil,

an apocalyptic struggle to

preserve American values against totalitarianism. 

One wartime slogan said it best:  "We can win; we must win; we will win."  ...Jack applauded [his school friend] Lem's success in getting himself close to combat in North Africa by becoming an ambulance driver in the American Field Service.  "You have seen more war than any of us as yet," he told Billings, who had failed his army physical, "and I certainly think it was an excellent idea to go."  Jack also admired their friend Rip Horton for thinking about transferring from the Quartermaster Corps to the "Paratroopers -- as he figured if my stomach could stand that [the PTs] he could stand the other. 

He'll be alright if his glasses don't fall off."

The seventeen months Jack would spend in the Pacific dramatically changed his outlook on war and the military.  "I'm extremely glad I came," Jack wrote Inga, "I wouldn't miss it for the world, but I will be extremely glad to get back. . . . A number of my illusions have been shattered."

Among them were assumptions about surviving the war.  The combat he witnessed in March 1943, on his first day in the Solomons, quickly sobered him.  As his transport ship approached Guadalcanal, a Japanese air raid killed the captain of his ship and brought the crew face to face with a downed Japanese pilot, who rather than be rescued by his enemy began firing a revolver at the bridge of the U.S. ship. 

"That slowed me a bit," Jack wrote Billings, "the thought of him sitting in the water -- battling an entire ship." 

An "old soldier" standing next to Jack blew the top of the pilot's head off after the rest of the ship's crew, which was "too surprised to shoot straight," filled the water with machine-gun fire.  "It brought home very strongly how long it's going to take to finish the war."

...His Harvard friend Torbert Macdonald described a letter Jack wrote the next day, telling Macdonald "to watch out and really get trained, because I didn't know as much about boats....and he said I should know what the hell I was doing because it's different out in the war zone."

A visit to the grave of George Mead, a Cape Cod friend who had been killed in the Guadalcanal fighting....was "among the gloomier events," he told Inga.  "He is buried near the beach where they first landed."  It was "a very simple grave" marked by "an aluminum plate, cut out of mess gear . . . and on it crudely carved 'Lt. George Mead USMC.  Died Aug. 20.  A great leader of men -- God Bless Him.'  The whole thing was about the saddest experience I've ever had and enough to make you cry."...

What impressed Jack now was not the eagerness of the men in the war zone for heroic combat -- that was romantic stuff dispelled by battlefield losses -- but their focus on getting home alive....What "the boys at the front" talked about was "first and foremost . . . exactly when they were going to get home."  He wrote his parents:  "When I was speaking about the people who would just as soon be home, I didn't mean to use 'They' -- I meant 'We.'"  He urged them to

tell brother Joe not to rush to join him in the Pacific, as "he will want to be back the day after he arrives, if he runs true to the form of everyone else."

= = = = = = = = =
1944. 

------------------ Although Joe assured Jack in his letter of August 10 that he was not "intending to risk my fine neck . . . in any crazy venture," he knew that he had taken on what might well be a suicide mission.  Several earlier attempts to strike the V-1s in this way had failed with casualties to the pilots, who had to bail out at dangerously high speeds and low altitudes.  "If I don't come back," Joe told a friend shortly before taking off,

"tell my dad . . . that I love him very much."

The mission on August 12 ended in disaster when Joe's plane exploded in the air before reaching the English Channel coast.
------------------ [end excerpts]

----------------------------
An Unfinished Life.  John F. Kennedy; 1917 - 1963.  Robert Dallek.  2003.  Little, Brown.

-30-