Days of the Americans
December 1945 Flying Age including Flying Aces

December 1945 Flying Age Table of Contents These pages from vintage modeling magazines like Flying Aces, Air Trails, American Modeler, American Aircraft Modeler, Young Men, Flying Models, Model Airplane News, R/C Modeler, captured the era. All copyrights acknowledged.

"Days of the Americans" is one chapter out of a book entitled "The Big Distance," by Capts. Elliott Arnold and Donald Hough. Copies of it appear occasionally on eBay. Per this article which appeared in the December 1945 issue of Flying Age magazine, "The Big Distance, the official story prepared by the AAF, is to the struggle in the Pacific what Germany was to the European phase of the war." Unlike the European Theater of World War II, much of the populations of South Pacific islands were inhabited by people who were barely out of the Stone Age in terms of cultural and scientific evolution. The arrival of Northern hemisphere Western and European Anglo Saxons brought a culture of sophistication never dreamed of by the backwards civilizations indigenous to the islands. That was a common theme of the villages visited by the McHale's Navy crew in the 1960s TV series. While reading the story, I was a bit taken aback by the narrative of Americans having come to the island paradises and bringing their gigantic machines and inexplicable habits, but then the author states, "There always will be a faction among the elders who will attempt to establish the basic facts of the legend of the Americans through use of pure logic, simply pointing out that if the Americans had not been there, the Japs still would be. If the Americans weren't actually present, the question will be posed to the more cynical of the youngsters, then what on earth ever became of the Japs?" The Japanese of the day were utterly brutal and merciless to foreigners whose lands they inhabited. Ask the elders of Shanghai, who still have monuments to American airmen who helped beat back the bloody Nipponese invasion.

Days of the Americans

Those wonderful, mythical Yanks will be a fireside fairy tale after the coral isles are jungle again.

By Capt.·Donald Hough

Days of the Americans is one chapter in The Big Distance by Capts. Elliott Arnold and Donald Hough (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, $3.00.) The Big Distance, the official story prepared by the AAF, is to the struggle in the Pacific what Germany was to the European phase of the war.

Some day the Americans - with their flying machines and their incredible monsters of land and sea; with their moving pictures, their shower baths, their ridiculous sense of humor; with all the things they did, and all the things they had that made no sense - will be gone from the islands of the Southwest Pacific.

Nobody knows just when they will be gone, but the islanders have been there a long time and have seen quite a few things of one sort and another and they know that whatever all this fuss is about, in time they will go away as suddenly as they appeared. Just where they will go is a matter of scarcely more than academic interest, but in the past funny people have appeared and disappeared, loud noises have gone on a while and then stopped, and only the islands and the jungles and the people who belong in them have emerged.

The islanders know, of course, that they are living in a time of history; that is to say, in a time of the birth of a legend, a form of historical record used by primitive people to brush aside the pedantic nonsense of formal history and get at its substance and its soul.

The islanders realize; I think we surely can assume, that this essence: of a vast legend to come, a dilly of a legend, a legend to end all legends, now exists in the living flesh, right before their eyes. The only thing they are afraid of, perhaps, is that the thing is too hot for them to handle. There have been legends of the past, of course, which to the untrained ear were right on the edge of being unbelievable, even up to the point of being politely laughed at.

How to get by with this new one, this super one?

Here, if ever, are things to be called lies, come a couple of generations.

"The Days of the Americans," the legend will be called. Still, this is an awful lot to try to get into a single legend, no matter how big it is. It may be better to break the whole thing down into a series of smaller legends, easier to handle. It may be better, the native grandfathers of 1985 may decide, to start out with a few modest sublegends, such as that of the flying machines (fantastic but still believable enlargement of nature) and the trucks (carabao inside instead of outside the vehicle), then work up to the stiffer subjects, such as the motion pictures (sheer legend) and the glass bottles (incredible legend made more incredible by presence of existing evidence).

After such as these; then, the post-graduate legend: the Americans themselves.

Of course it goes without saying that the temptation to duck the whole subject will be great. There are bound to be, among the legend-spinners of the days to come, a certain percentage of barracks-room lawyers and general wise guys with a few words of English who will point out that to bring up the subject at all in the presence of the kids is to stick one's neck out a million leagues. They will counsel a dead-pan approach:

"Okay, there weren't any Americans, the whole thing was just a big wind." Then there will be the middle-of-the-roaders, the moderate Republicans, who will simply tell the kids how it was when the Americans were around, and let it go at that, take it or leave it.

Perhaps the majority of the elders will take the line that is traditional in telling legends: just point to things, and to circumstances, and invite the listener to explain them, if they know so much, in terms other than those that constitute the legend itself.

All right, the elders who pursue this course will say, if the Americans weren't here with their big pushers and tremendous noises, how about the thousands of trees, these giant trees of the rain forest, the jungle, heaped up all helter-skelter in all directions? You still can see the trunks plainly if you pull away the vines. And if it is claimed that this was only a cyclone, how come those long smooth strips where the trees used to be, strips of cleared space a quarter of a mile wide and more than a mile long, now badly grown in the way the jungle does things, but with pieces of the old steel mats still intact? Rusted away, they are, and nearly gone, perhaps, but the pattern of their presence is still clear to keen eyes.

And what were these places used for, if not for the flying machines? If you don't believe us, kids, you better come up with something. You've already seen the rusted remnants of what we declare to be those flying machines, some with the outline of the wings still traceable on the coral: the big ones, as large as from here to there, vast in the wingspread, like great grasshoppers that had no legs but had four eyes and could wiggle their eyelashes with unbelievable speed. And the slim ones that could go on up and up until they were out of sight and could fly even while lying on their backs.

Another thing: where do you think these trails came from? It is most flattering to us, those of us who are of the generation that saw these things as youngsters, to have it said that we, a super-race in our day, wore down these trails through the jungle with our own feet, but that's just a lot of balla-walla. They're badly grown in now, of course, but you've seen the places where they still exist - broad enough for a village to stand on (with a little crowding at the edges) and curved to shed part of the water, sweeping through the jungles, two-way stop streets if we ever saw any, going as far in a single direction as a man can travel in a week (a day or two off for fishing on the way.) Well, here's the point; if the Americans didn't build them, who did? Secondly. If the Americans built them what were they for? What, if not for the use of the machinery, the wheeled machinery, you've heard mentioned. Think fast, baby, and make it good.

Now then, you've made the journey out to Buka Point to see that shape on the coral. What is it the shape of? Agreed, it is the shape of a canoe, maybe a little broad across the beam, or it's the shape of a cigar. But if it was a cigar, only the Americans could have smoked it, so if you take the stand that it was not a canoe, but a cigar, you prove the existence of the Americans anyway. If you want to know the truth, that was one of the smaller ships - hardly a ship at all, in the American standard of living. Take it or leave it alone, that was hardly more than a tub. They had them easily fifty times as large, such as the one that's on the beach (you can laugh, but it's there) at Morotai. All right, now we're getting someplace: what were these ships used for, if not to bring the Americans?

Think it over ....

If it was not the Americans who came in those countless thousands of ships, from the little ones with ants in their pants all the time to the monsters that had some dignity under their tails, who was it? It must have been somebody, some people, who lived a great ways off, otherwise they would have used fewer and smaller ships - a question of ordinary logistics in anybody's language. In the time of the Americans, there was naturally a good deal of discussion among us as to where they had come from. Many supposed, naturally, that they came from the Milky Way, but there always was an active minority declaring that they came from this very planet on which we ourselves live. In the end, this latter view held more water than the other. It was decided simply that the Americans came from America. Anybody, by looking at the map, can see that there are around 8,000 miles of ocean between us and San Francisco, and it is estimated that these ships would be just the size ships we would have to have if we were to attempt military operations against the Pacific coast. So the whole thing is perfectly clear, if you'll look at it calmly. The question persists: if it was not the Americans who came this eight thousand miles from America in these ships, who was it?

Let's, take a look at the record, It is written along the beaches, in the jungle, along the roads and the airstrips, even in the shallow water, on the trees, right in the huts of your own families. Take first the big loud things they had, some well preserved (as in the water) and some evidenced by no more than a handful of red dust, an odd radio tube, a slice of Spam, and other imperishable bits and pieces. Many of the better-preserved specimens, of course, were salvaged by our lads. Your uncle, Officers Only, lived in a 1941 Oldsmobile (hydromatic drive) staff car for several years, and of course you've heard the tragic story of Baga Waga, his jeep and the cliff at the south end of Biak ... We pounded a number of these things apart and got spring leaves for making knives, inner tubes for beach use, wheels for hanging in trees to serve as drums for our communications system, spark plugs for adorning our ears, and so on.

This stuff was left over from the Big Pusher and Noise Department of the Americans. At one time there was a very strong contingent among us given over to the conviction that it was the noise that did all the work. To the untrained ear, it certainly sounded like it. The uproar and crash and wham was worse than a thousand Niagara Falls (Niagara Falls is a place in America that makes a lot of noise). Thunder? You only think you've heard thunder. The Americans could get it for you wholesale, in the large economy size. Some of these things, the largest and loudest that made the most dust and in time of rain could go through mud up to a normal man's belly button, were, so incredible that at times even the Americans themselves didn't believe them. While they were working okay, the Americans were happy, shouting at each other to get the hell out of the way, sometimes engaging in a coup de main to see which one should have the right of way, and so on, but sometimes these things, and all the noise that they made would stop, and the Americans would stand around, bewildered, scratching their heads just like anybody else, afraid they were going to be put on KP.

The little things, the odds and ends, that the Americans left behind proved the most interesting and useful. Their signs, Stop-Boulevard, Broadway, Sixth Ave., This Space for the Commanding Officer, Closed for Inventory, Closed, Club El Bolero, Powder Room, Officers Only, and so on, have gone, of course, but they live on in us who decided to take on American names - as evidenced in the cases of your uncle, Officers Only, and your late grandfather, Latrine Closed. It ought to be clear that we didn't just make these names up.

Even while they were still here they were tossing aside things that any sensible person could see were the choicest of their possessions. Some of these were nationally advertised products, some were items supposed to be just as good. They even threw away razor blades. That was one for the book; they'll use a razor blade a few times, throw it away, then take out an identical razor blade and start all over again, The finest things of all were their various containers, which they used only once - having brought them 10,000 miles - and to hell with the taxpayers. Take the tin things, they were ugly outside, and beautiful and useful only when the inside was exposed, which was precisely when the Americans threw them away. You can chew on that one a while. And those glass things! Nobody knows where the Americans got them; certainly they were not the sort of things that could be made. Some of our people tried to alter the shapes of them, and it didn't work. We concluded that they must have them wild where the Americans come from, much as we have shells. You have seen the one on the pedestal in your grandmother's parlor. It's brown, and has a sleek body and it's sure a mighty pretty thing to see. It used to say "Budweiser" on it but that came off. Your grandmother bows down to it every evening. She caught that idea from, the Americans. She saw three of the American soldiers, the GI kind that we got along so famously with, pick up the bottle on the coral one day - it evidently had washed ashore from the Navy - and set it up on a rock and go through just those same genuflections your grandmother uses. She's never quite sure she has it right, it is from memory of course, but she does her best, bless her heart.

And so the legend will go.

There always will be a faction among the elders who will attempt to establish the basic facts of the legend of the Americans through use of pure logic, simply pointing out that if the Americans had not been there, the Japs still would be. If the Americans weren't actually present, the question will be posed to the more cynical of the youngsters, then what on earth ever became of the Japs?

The Americans, it will be explained, beat the Japanese, of course, and shagged them all the hell out of here. That was the main job of the Americans, the elders will point out ...

Not everybody knows how it was done, but we do, because we had the time to watch and the brains to understand.

The Japs, or Nips, as we called them (American vernacular) would come in from the sea in their frail boats and apologize to the jungle, sucking in their breath, and get some little shovels and bamboo rakes and tin trowels and fix up a grade D strip for their flying machines.

This strip would be muddy half the time and bumpy half the time; and they would wiggle their carts and pale tin lizzies through the jungle over little, single wheel-track trails, and it would take them forever to get any place or do anything; and after they had been around for as long as two years there would be no change. They lived like rats burrowing and scampering around on the theory that they were suffering for the Emperor; and they'd get sick from malaria and the other things we have to offer around here, and their people would just let them die, the sooner the better.

The Nips were funny people, They had started to imitate the Americans a long time ago, you see, and they had the same kind of boats, on a modest scale, and the same kind of weapons, on a lean budget, and their flying machines, though not as large as those of the Americans were, nevertheless, swift as the very devil. But this was all on the surface, and the war was won on a basis that was more than skin deep. They just couldn't do anything with the Americans once the ice was broken. They fancied themselves as jungle fighters and because they had this and the war machinery, too, they couldn't figure to lose.

Now look at the Americans. They would come up to the jungle and throw the book at it, which is exactly the way the jungle likes to be treated and will react to. Then the Americans would base their flying machines there, and go out clear to hell-and-gone, wherever the Nips were, and drop heavier stuff on them than the Nips ever had seen, then they'd swoop down on them, go through like a hurricane on wheels, shooting the guts out of them, and then the soldiers would come along and shoot some more guts out of them, and the Nips would go to pieces. They just didn't know what to do against all that firepower.

That brings us to a fundamental difference between the two people, the Nips and the Americans. All their lives the Nips went in for making tiny fragile things by hand and it was their nature. That is why their flying machines, a contraption of very delicate balance, made up of a great many parts finely and intricately fitted together and therefore right up the Nip's alley, were so good. But aside from their ships, in which department they had a head start because they were Islanders and always had had to use the sea for getting around, they just couldn't get the bang of the big stuff. They didn't know how to make massive, brutal, roaring, jungle-killing machines and they didn't even know how to use them. Just no soap, as your grandmother says.

Another thing the Nips had been brought up on was saving things. They never really had enough of anything but kids, of which history has proved they had too many. An artillery shell, once you take it apart as your poor grandfather, Latrine Closed, tried to do, is a thing of beauty and intricate mechanism. It seemed a pity to the Nips to fire the thing off. They couldn't get over that, and it helped mightily to beat them. They saved their ammunition, they saved everything but their men. Then the Americans would come in, throwing everything at the Japs and the Japs would slip right back a few centuries and burrow into caves and whimper and cry and in the end, kill themselves. Every battle, however fiercely it started out, ended in just that way. The Nips couldn't stand up to all this extravagance.

It was much the same deal in the air. The Nips were good at flying, they liked to flutter around in the air, and they were brave in a rather silly and wasteful way, and they would have been wonderful any place but where the Americans were. For one thing, the Americans in the end, after struggling along on a really pitiful basis, had more flying machines than the Nips could visualize as being within the bounds of possibility. They kept blinking their eyes; they thought they were seeing at least triple. For another thing, the Americans threw in their flying machines where they were needed. If it was necessary to toss every single machine from all available places into a single action. in order to win, they did it - a thing the Nips never would countenance.

In a general way, then, my grandson, here's the pay-off: the Nips were trying to play the American game. Now, in America, at least, you don't play the other fellow's game if you want to come up with sandals for the bambino, and all this mechanical stuff was strictly the American game.

Of course the Americans had no business sense, being willing to part with articles of great value in exchange for a lot of dime-store junk that we'd whip up. But they were kind. They gave us small things we fancied, and took us for rides, You stand by the side of a road and do this with your thumb. They tried to understand us and to do what they could to make each one of us feel at home.

Well, that's not the whole story of the war, of course. But it's enough for this evening, and it's enough to give all of us something to remember next time we come up against the Hill People: never play with the other fellow's dice and expect to come up with a string of naturals.

† Note the pilots' wings on the guy. He can fly a plane but can't handle an elevator ride?

Posted May 27, 2023