Two Tales of Tragic Irony at Pearl Harbor

Ernest Davenport, left, and Austin Jackson. Both photos were published in the weekly Roanoke Beacon of Plymouth, North Carolina soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

On December 7, 1941, two young servicemen from eastern North Carolina were in the middle of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s attacks on American forces that plunged the United States into World War II.

Neither U.S. Army Private Ernest Davenport nor Navy Seaman Austin Jackson would survive the war. And although thousands died on that long-ago Sunday, Davenport’s and Jackson’s deaths were touched by irony.

Davenport, a U.S. Army medic from the Washington County town of Creswell, was aboard a merchant ship that probably was the first ship sunk by the Japanese attacks in the Pacific. Jackson from Jamesville in adjoining Martin County was aboard a U.S. battleship docked at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Davenport was only two years old when his father was killed in an accident in 1920. His mother remarried, and Davenport grew up on a farm. Times were tough during the Great Depression, and he left school to go to work after finishing the eighth grade in 1934.

In 1939, Davenport joined the U.S. Army, in part to earn money to send his half-sister, Olean Clifton, to college.

On December 7, 1941, Davenport was one of two Army soldiers aboard the SS Cynthia Olson. The privately owned transport ship had been chartered by the Army to haul a load of lumber from Tacoma, Washington to Honolulu, Hawaii.

The Olson was approaching Hawaii on the morning of December 7. But the crew did not know that a Japanese submarine, the I-26, had been following it since the previous day, waiting for orders to begin the attack on U.S. forces.

On the morning of December 7 the commander of the I-26 received coded orders from Tokyo for all Japanese ships to commence the attack. He immediately surfaced and his crew fired a warning shot across the bow of the Cynthia Olson indicating that the I-26 was about to attack the American ship.

The crew of the Olson lowered lifeboats into the water and abandoned the ship. The I-26 crew then opened fire with the submarine’s deck gun. Eventually, the Olson sank and the I-26 left.

Although Japanese planes were on their way to Hawaii, the I-26’s attack on the Cynthia Olson happened shortly before bombs started falling on Pearl Harbor. So the Olson probably was the first American ship sunk by the Japanese on December 7. And although Davenport and the other members of the Olson’s crew reportedly all made it into lifeboats, no trace of them was ever found.

Austin Jackson’s death was even more emotionally wrenching than Davenport’s. His ship, the USS California, was among the seven battleships sunk by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. More than 2,300 American soldiers and sailors were killed that day. In the chaotic aftermath of the attack, it was difficult to determine who had died.

On December 12, Jackson’s mother, Ora Jackson Burnette, was visiting relatives in Plymouth when a stunning telegram arrived from the Navy telling her that her son had been killed at Pearl Harbor. The following day, photos of the baby-faced Austin Jackson were published in local newspapers with the news that he’d died on the “day of infamy.”

But on New Year’s Day 1942, Ora Burnette received a card from her son dated December 12 – five days after the attack. The following day, she received another message from the Navy saying that her son was indeed alive.

Her joy was only temporary, however.

In March 1942 Burnette received yet another telegram from the Navy. This time there was no mistake. Austin Jackson was dead. Then a letter dated March 21 arrived from Jackson’s commanding officer, Navy Lieutenant F.W. Purdy.

In the edgy days following the attack on December 7, military commanders in Hawaii were certain that the Japanese were going to bomb Honolulu again. So they set up anti-aircraft guns around the islands. Since Jackson’s ship, the California, was undergoing repairs, he had been assigned to the crew of one of the guns.

Around 3 a.m. on February 12, 1942, Jackson was reporting for his duty shift at one of the guns. In the darkness, he tripped. He fell onto a rifle with a bayonet attached. He died soon afterwards.

Jackson’s body eventually was returned to the U.S., and he’s buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

That Creepy Little Man

 

The Tragedy in U.S. History Museum was tucked away in a modest, one-story house on a quiet street in St. Augustine, Florida, a bizarre sideshow to the nearby graceful antiquity of the nation’s oldest city. As you approached the entrance, you saw an eerie-but-fascinating tableau. Peering at you from a living-room picture window was a life-size wax figure of Lee Harvey Oswald hiding behind stacks of cardboard boxes, about to change history with the scoped Italian-made Carcano rifle he’d bought for a few bucks from a magazine ad.

It was a dreadfully tacky depiction of one of the most tragic events of the 20^th century, and not something you’d see at the Smithsonian Museum. But that dark image of Oswald haunts our national psyche – that creepy little man with his cheap mail-order rifle who is going to blow the brains out of arguably the most charismatic president in U.S. history. And it’s seemed to me since the day I saw it that, as morbid, gruesome and tasteless as that display was, it was somehow as appropriate a comment on John F. Kennedy’s death as the most insightful essays and deftly understated museum exhibits.

Browsing through the dusty, amateurishly displayed exhibits at The Tragedy in U.S. History Museum was like rubbernecking as you drive slowly past a horrible car wreck. There was a steam whistle purportedly from the locomotive operated by Joseph “Steve” Brody on the night in 1903 when he left this world in a spectacular and legendary train wreck that came to be known as “the wreck of the old 97.” And the car that supposedly was the one in which actress Jayne Mansfield died also was on display.

But the museum’s centerpiece exhibits were artifacts from the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. The displays included the dresser from Oswald’s $7-a-week rented room and the bed he’d slept in the night before his terrible deed. There was the 1953 Chevrolet in which he’d gotten a lift to work at the Texas Schoolbook Depository on that fateful day. And there was the 1962 Ford ambulance that had rushed him to Parkland Hospital two days later after he’d been fatally shot by Jack Ruby.

In the days following Kennedy’s assassination, St. Augustine businessman Buddy Hough made frequent trips to Dallas to acquire objects associated with the president’s death. In the process, he decided to open a museum focusing on tragedies that had darkened U.S. history.

 But St. Augustine’s purveyors of more traditional tourist attractions never liked Hough’s macabre collection, and Hough deeply resented the cold shoulder he received from the town’s Chamber of Commerce.

The Tragedy in U.S. History Museum struggled to make money in a town that attracts more than a million tourists every year. Hough died in 1996, and his wife auctioned off her late husband’s unusual collection – including, I assume, that wretched wax likeness of Oswald.

So today, we’re remembering where we were 50 years ago when a troubled, fatherless drifter who’d learned to fire a rifle with deadly accuracy in the U.S. Marine Corps stunned the world.

I was in an eighth-grade math class in Richfield, North Carolina when a teacher abruptly opened the door, stepped into the classroom, and announced that Kennedy had been shot.

For days afterwards, the three television networks dropped all other programming and focused on what had happened in Texas. And the events were incomprehensible. Lyndon Johnson grimly taking the oath of office accompanied by a dazed Jacqueline Kennedy still wearing the chic Chanel suit stained with her husband’s blood; Oswald’s murder on live television; the endless line of mourners filing past the dead president’s coffin in the Capitol; and the funeral, during which I acquired an abiding respect for the somber, dignified ceremony of a military sendoff. And all of this depicted in black-and-white television images. I wonder if anyone turned off their TV in the week following Kennedy’s death.

Still, as morbidly compelling as this drama was, I think everyone craved normalcy. And eventually, the shock faded and the routine events of life resumed. But I wonder whether "normalcy" has returned since that event.

In 1964 we were handed a massive document that was the official product of the Warren Commission. It told us that Oswald, the chinless loser unable to find a satisfying place in this world, had plotted and carried out, alone, the murder of the most powerful man on Earth.

The Warren Commission’s conclusion has been debated for 49 years.  Many now-familiar phrases have been added to our popular lexicon – lone gunman, magic bullet, rogue CIA, second shooter, Castro-Mafia connection.

I keep going back and forth on whether I believe the commission’s version of events. At the moment I’m swinging back to the lone gunman theory for two reasons. I’ve read that the “magic bullet” theory is disproved by the fact that Texas Governor John Connolly’s seat in the limousine was three inches lower than Kennedy’s and thus the path of the bullet didn’t have to defy the laws of physics to hit them both. And I hear that the second shooter theory -- which says that if Oswald's bullet had hit Kennedy, his head would've moved in a different direction than the one depicted on film and therefore JFK was hit by a gunman other than Oswald -- is disproved because the movement of the president’s head is what happens when a bullet hits the brain in just the right (or wrong) way, causing brain cells to explode in a certain way.

But really, it doesn’t matter what I believe because nothing will make Oswald’s haunting image go away. And that’s why I think that ghastly display years ago in The Tragedy in U.S. History Museum was a legitimate commentary on John F. Kennedy’s shocking death. Oswald is always going to be rising from the dark, dusty, cobweb-infested depths of our collective minds’ eyes, disrupting our efforts to return to normalcy and distorting our perceptions of the world around us. Oswald is the face of this tragedy, and the face of that psychopathic piss-ant will trouble us until the day we die.

Too Many Deadlines, Please Stand By . . .

Up to my ears in deadlines at the moment and can't even think about blogging. Hope to have a post ready for early October, when things have calmed down a bit. Please check back in a couple weeks.

Take Me Out To The Ultra-Ball Game

So Major League Baseball has thrown out a dragnet again and hauled in 14 players accused of using so-called performance enhancing drugs. And the biggest catch in this batch of alleged cheaters is the New York Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez, who has long been considered a certainty to join other immortals in the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

When MLB announced that Rodriguez had failed a drug test and faced a lengthy suspension, he needed just 13 home runs to tie Hall of Famer Willie Mays’s home run total of 660, which places Mays fourth on the list of all-time home run kings behind Barry Bonds (also accused of using drugs), Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth. ESPN reported that Rodriguez’s contract calls for him to receive a substantial bonus when he matches Mays’s mark. That doesn’t seem quite fair to reward a juiced Rodriguez for reaching a milestone that was accomplished by players who weren't using any sort of performance-enhancing drugs to achieve their prodigious totals.

And to me, that’s the reason it matters that Rodriguez and Bonds achieved their impressive career statistics while using drugs. Baseball, more than any other major league professional sport, is tied to its history and its superstars that have been spread across more than a century of play. The statistics compiled by stars of bygone eras are part of the appeal of the game and a topic that can be endlessly discussed and debated by old fans and young fans.

“Baseball fans love to argue statistics,” Benjamin Hoffman wrote in today’s New York Times. “Mentions of Willie Mays or Ted Williams are often accompanied by the caveat that they lost time to war. Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s color barrier, would have had even better statistics had he been allowed to play before he was 28.”

Cynical fans ridicule the anti-drug sentiment and argue that drug use doesn’t matter and that players should be allowed to do whatever they can to improve their performances. It’s nobody’s business what they do to their own bodies, the argument goes.

But here’s the thing about that ultra-libertarian perspective about MLB and drugs: If you’re going to do that, you might as well close and seal the baseball record books from 1904 – when the Major Leagues as we know them began – until 1997 – the season before a steroids-enhanced Mark McGwire hit 70 home runs in 1998 to become the first juiced player to set a season record for home runs.

A few years after Bonds, McGwire, Sammy Sosa and other “enhanced” players elevated seasonal home run totals beyond anything seen since the beginning of the sport, MLB actually started enforcing its no-drugs rules. Seasonal home run totals by MLB players, which had escalated dramatically in the late 1990s, came back down to Earth. And that dramatic decline in home runs made the effect of drug use on baseball’s sacred statistics obvious to anyone who cared to compare the numbers.

So if you want to allow juiced players to play MLB, then close the record books from 1904 to 1997, declare the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown to be filled to capacity with stars of “old” baseball, and start over with record-keeping and a new league and a new game. Call it “ultra-baseball” or “extreme baseball” or “robo-baseball” or “ultimate baseball,” something to indicate that this is not a game for mere wimpy mortals but a game that’s being played by super-evolved, chemically enhanced cyber-humans.

Then, instead of arguing whether Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle or Duke Snider was the best centerfielder of his era, you can argue about whether Barry Bonds’s home run total would have been higher if he’d avoided steroids and used a different type of performance-enhancing drug. That doesn’t seem to have the same appeal as talking about Willie, Mickey and The Duke, but I suppose it could make for a lively debate among chemists.

NOTE: The photo at the top was published by the New York Daily News on October 8, 2011 and shows Alex Rodriguez after he struck out to end the game that the New York Yankees lost to the Detroit Tigers, 3-2 in the American League Divisional Championship Series.