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Summary
Summary
Radioman is the biography of Ray Daves, a noncommissioned officer in the U.S. Navy and an eyewitness to World War II. It is based on the author's handwritten notes from a series of interviews that began on the eighty-second birthday of the combat veteran and gives a first-person account of the world's first battles between aircraft carriers.Ray Daves grew up on a small farm near Little Rock, Arkansas. Impatient with school and the prospect of becoming a farmer like his father, he joined the CCC and went from there to the navy, where he learned to use the radio to send messages, and soon found himself in the momentary peacefulness of Pearl Harbor.Most of America's World War II veterans were not in uniform when the war began. Daves is one of the few who was. He could also tell what was happening on the bridge of the famous carrier Yorktown before it went down and of the secretive relationship between the Russian and American forces in Alaska at the time.Carol Edgemon Hipperson's discovery of this one man's inspiring story is shared with great skill and energy. A must-read for those looking for a personal, intimate account of the events of this tumultuous time in American history.
Author Notes
Carol Edgemon Hipperson is the author of the award-winning military biography The Belly Gunner , which was the first book selected to the Library of Congress's list of recommended resources for students and teachers participating in the national Veterans History Project. She lives in Spokane, Washington.
Reviews (3)
Kirkus Review
A veteran remembers his small part in great events of the Pacific War. Escaping a struggling Arkansas farm family, 16-year-old Ray Daves joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, and in 1939, after lying about his age, the Navy. During the next six years, advancing in rank at nearly every stop, he served as a radioman aboard many vessels and at a variety of land stations including Cold Bay and Kodiak, Ala., where he flew some search-and-destroy missions and observed the uneasy alliance between the Soviets and the Americans; Gulfport, Miss., where he celebrated V-J Day; and the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, then hard at work on part of the Manhattan Project. The heart of this memoir, however, is his eyewitness report of combat, first at Pearl Harbor, where he suffered a shrapnel wound, and then at the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, where he survived the torpedoing of the Yorktown. For most of us, these signal events have been quietly committed to history. For Daves, the odor of burnt human flesh and the image of an onrushing Japanese pilot continue to haunt. Daves's incident-filled career included brushes with fameactor John Wayne, concert violinist Yehudi Menuhin, Admiral Chester Nimitzand a prolonged and long-distance courtship of the girl to whom he remains married. A kind of one-man Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Daves seems to understand and appreciate the minor role he played in momentous events. He still mourns the many friends lost in battle and, at this late stage in life, has finally been persuaded to speak in detail about his war. Hipperson (The Belly Gunner, 2001, etc.) smartly stays out of the way, basing her text on extensive interviews with her subject and adopting a first-person narration that permits Daves to emerge as the authentic voice and heroa tag he would vigorously rejectof this straightforward, unassuming story. Interesting, long-repressed tales from a humble man relieved not to "have to remember anymore." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
This worthy addition to the World War II shelves is based on Hipperson's interviews with Ray Davis, a U.S. Navy radioman and petty officer during the war. Davis joined the navy before the war to get away from the family farm and had already served in the Arctic when the outbreak of war caught him at Pearl Harbor. Assigned to the torpedo bombers of the carrier Yorktown, he was lucky enough to survive the squadron's strike against the Japanese and the subsequent sinking of his ship. Much of the rest of the war he spent in Alaska, flying missions against the Japanese-held Kuriles and working with Russian pilots sent to assist with the ferrying of lend-lease American aircraft. He also conducted a long-distance courtship of the woman to whom he was still married in 2007. A very readable memoir by a member of the generation that, however great it may have been, definitely did a thankless job well enough to keep things from becoming a great deal worse for the U.S.--Green, Roland Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THIS summer, travel for the sake of pure travel is out. Among the current crowd of globe-trotting writers, just about everybody has an ulterior motive. Whether it's assuaging a guilty yanqui conscience by plunging into Hugo Chávez's Venezuela or satisfying a longstanding fascination with the mummified remains of long-dead saints, these footloose authors are less interested in breathing in the atmosphere of exotic haunts than in indulging their passion for religion or liquor - or leftist politics. In RAG AND BONE: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead (Holt, $25), Peter Manseau embarks on a global odyssey in search of the "dismembered toes, splinters of shinbone, stolen bits of hair, burned remnants of an anonymous rib cage, and other odds and ends" belonging to saints and other sacred figures. The result is an entertaining, sometimes affecting inquiry into man's yearning for spiritual transcendence through the worship of holy relics, real or otherwise - from the Shroud of Turin ("considered by some to be Christianity's most holy artifact, mocked by others as little more than a medieval towel smeared with ink") to more obscure bits of clothing and body parts. The book could have been ghoulish, but Manseau's irreverent approach and enthusiasm keep the tone surprisingly light. He examines the curious dissemination of pieces of saints around the globe, meets a cast of fellow enthusiasts - including a French paleopathologist who spends his spare time rummaging through the supposed bone fragments of Joan of Arc - and explores the fringes of religious devotion. Most notable is the pious Portuguese woman who, in a fit of ecstasy, is said to have bitten off the little toe of St. Francis Xavier, whose damaged cadaver lures Manseau to the Roman Catholic enclave of Goa, India: "To look closely at the foot now - with at least three digits missing - is to wonder if she got away with an even bigger bite." Kate Hopkins, a popular food blogger and former stand-up comedian, has a far less taxing itinerary. In 99 DRAMS OF WHISKEY: The Accidental Hedonist's Quest for the Perfect Shot and the History of the Drink (St. Martin's, $24.95), she sets off with her friend Krysta on a ramble through the distilleries of Scotland, Ireland, Canada and the United States in search of the best whiskeys in the world. Hopkins's bits of history go down easy: America's Whiskey Rebellion of 1794; the spread of the Phylloxera vastatrix parasite through French vineyards that wiped out the wine industry and boosted Scotch's popularity; the rivalry between Ireland and Scotland for the best single malts. She also serves up pungent assessments of the spirits she samples, from Bushmills White Label ("the Julia Roberts of the whiskey world") to Isle of Jura Single Malt Whisky 10Y ("the perfect introduction to peated malts"). But her shtick - including a routine about an erratically functioning GPS she nicknames Molly - can be annoying, and the journey becomes an uninspired plod through distillery gift shops, tasting rooms and other well-traveled haunts. "Any idea of deep, lush Canadian farmland," Hopkins writes, on a journey to inspect the Canadian Club distillery in Ontario, "had been beaten to a pulp and then buried in a tar pit by the scenic reality of places whose best redeeming features were that they had a Tim Hortons doughnut shop AND a Boston Pizza." ANOTHER comedian hits the road in search of intoxication of a different sort in I'M OFF THEN: Losing and Finding Myself on the Camino de Santiago (Free Press, paper, $15; available in mid-June). Hape Kerkeling, a popular TV talk-show host and cabaret star in his native Germany, cuts loose from the comforts of Düsseldorf and sets off on a hike across the Pyrenees to the grave of St. James at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Searching for spiritual meaning, this self-described "couch potato" follows a 1,000-year-old pilgrimage route that lures 100,000 trekkers each year, experiencing almost insufferable heat and physical agony in the process. "Tormented by recurrent throbbing and stabbing pains in my knee," he confesses early on, "I am forced to reduce my pace, particularly because I am shuffling along in flip-flops instead of in proper footwear." Kerkeling's account of his travels (translated here by Shelley Frisch) was a best seller in Germany, possibly because it's so easy to identify with him. He skips some of the hardest stretches to hitch rides with local farmers or hop aboard trains, and he avoids fetid pilgrims' hostels whenever possible in favor of the best hotel in town (often not much better). Despite such tactics, this gregarious traveler soon gets into the spirit of things, and his encounters with fellow pilgrims, including a Peruvian shaman with a creepy fondness for "Mein Kampf," can be both funny and moving. Less successful is Kerkeling's tendency to note every minor incident along the way, as well as his shopworn insights. "What makes us human?" goes one typical epiphany. "Our minor faults and major flaws. If we didn't have them, we'd all be little angels." In NOMAD'S HOTEL: Travels in Time and Space (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, paper, $13.95), a collection of travel essays spanning four decades, the Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom wanders from Mali to Venice to pre-Ayatollah Iran. Despite some occasionally awkward passages in this translation by Ann Kelland, Nooteboom's observant eye and ravenous appetite for third-world backwaters sometimes recall the work of his contemporary, the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski. In the best piece, "Lady Wright and Sir Jawara: A Boat Trip up the Gambia," written in 1975, Nooteboom flies on a whim to Banjul - capital of Gambia, a former British colony in West Africa - and, after hanging around the torpid city for days, trying (for no good reason) to interview the president, he boards a beat-up river boat to nowhere. "His head is broad, Mongolian," Nooteboom writes of one prosperous trader squeezed beside him on the deck, "and decorated with a mustache fit for Pythagoras: a black triangle of which the sharply angled upper corner seems to point at his nose. His smile is as sweet as caramel and does not wane for a moment." CAPRI BY THE SEA, by Patrick Howlett-Martin. (Skira, $59.) An introduction to the island, filled with photographs, reproductions, documents and quotations from poets who loved it, from Homer to Pablo Neruda. It includes 14 sea-going routes around Capri for the use of divers like the author. In an essay called "Nooteboom's Hotel 1," he constructs a virtual inn out of the most memorable places where he has stayed and describes his definition of traveler's hell: "the murmurings of the fellow in the next room, . . . the traces of someone else's lust or sounds of same, . . . the slow torture of the gutta cadenda from a leaky tap and the axiomatic certainty that the next drip is on its way." "I have four parents," explains 18-year-old Chesa Boudin to his bemused Guatemalan hostess at the beginning of GRINGO: A Coming-of-Age in Latin America (Scribner, $25). The son of the radicals Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, who were sentenced to long prison terms for their role in a deadly 1981 Brink's truck robbery, Boudin was raised by his jailed parents' comrades, William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, and eventually became a Rhodes Scholar. This earnest account of his decade-long travels through Latin America - from a dirt-poor village near Guatemala's Lake Peten Itzá to the corridors of power in Caracas - is part travel memoir, part social and economic critique. Many of Boudin's encounters are extraordinary: he meets ordinary Argentines caught up in the country's financial collapse and befriends a beautiful young Brazilian on a boat up the Amazon, then follows her home to the two-bedroom Manaus apartment she shares with at least a dozen members of her family. Boudin's unusual background gives him special entrée on a continent where the anti-Bush backlash is sweeping leftist governments to power. "I had found one of the few places on the planet where having parents in prison in the United States for politically motivated crimes actually opened doors rather than closed them," he writes after landing a job working for an adviser to the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez. But he falls into simplistic condemnations of globalism, the International Monetary Fund and structural adjustment programs, and loses credibility with his one-side cheerleading for Chávez. "Fighting off sleep, Pablo, Liza and I donned our proChávez red paraphernalia and raced out to join the inevitable celebrations," he writes after the Venezuelan leader's 2006 electoral victory. Boudin's starry-eyed enthusiasm makes one long for a more dispassionate approach to his subject. RORY NUGENTS 1993 travelogue, "Drums Along the Congo," was an uproarious account of his pursuit of a dinosaur rumored to be lurking around Lake Tele in the heart of Africa. In DOWN AT THE DOCKS (Pantheon, $24.95), his first book since, Nugent sets his sights much closer to home - on the commercial fishermen of New Bedford, Mass. Their once-thriving industry has been done in by "feds, regs and quotas," says a rye-swilling seaman called Sword, one member of a fraternity of Vietnam vets, drug abusers, alcoholics and other hard-bitten types Nugent encounters during his immersion in the community. Nugent has a knack for getting people to talk, and their sometimes harrowing, sometimes hilarious stories of late-night marijuana drops, work injuries and weeklong benders capture a world of entrepreneurial independence and fearsome risk. Most memorable is Mako, an erstwhile pot smuggler and scallop fisherman whose dysfunctionality on land is countered by his authority at sea: "As captain, he runs the show, a benevolent dictator of a tiny, self-propelled island populated by five or six other pirates joined in common cause: to grab as much sea booty as they can set their hooks into."' Joshua Hammer, a freelance foreign correspondent, is researching his next book, "Empire of Sand: A Tale of Greed, Glory and Horror in German Colonial Africa."
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 THE TREE ARMY June 1936-September 1937 They were waiting for us in North Dakota. I saw the crowd as soon as I stepped off the train in that little town. At least fifty of them--men, women, children--were all dressed in leather with feathers and beads, head to toe. And bells. I heard bells jingling when they moved toward us. I was not afraid of them. I was just curious. I didn't know what they were going to do until they began to chant and step to the beat of the drums. The first dance was very slow and swaying, with lots of arm movements. It felt like a prayer or a blessing. As the drumbeats got louder and faster, the dancers were whirling in lines and circles all around the train station. It was more than beautiful. It was amazing. How anybody could dance like that for a whole hour on such a hot, dusty afternoon was beyond me. No one told us the name of the tribe, and I have never known why they chose to dance for us that day. Maybe the Army or the government paid them, or maybe they just did it because they wanted to. Either way, I thought it was awful nice of them. I had never seen Native American ceremonial dancing before. The local townspeople must have thought it was pretty special, too, because over a hundred of them came out and watched it with us. And there was a little black and white mongrel puppy. He was just wandering through the crowd, like he was looking for somebody. We tried to find his owner; the station workers said he was a stray. So we smuggled him aboard the train and took him with us. I had a window seat through the rest of North Dakota, into Montana, and across the Rockies. I'd never seen such high mountains and thick forests--we didn't have anything like that back home in Arkansas either--and I think that's when I knew for sure that my high school principal was right. When I told him I was planning to quit school at the end of tenth grade, he advised me to enlist in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). My parents had to sign the papers, of course, because I was only sixteen. I doubt that they would have agreed to it, if not for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The CCC was one of his ideas, so it had to be good. Mom and Dad practically worshiped FDR.1 If they needed another reason, it was me: Of their seven children, I was the renegade. My parents probably knew I would have just run away if they hadn't let me go. I boarded that train in Little Rock in the summer of '36, along with seventy-five other guys from Arkansas. There were a few older men in my group, like in their twenties, but everybody else was under eighteen. I don't think any of us understood that the CCC was actually run by the military until we got to Idaho. The buses that picked us up from the train station in the town of Worley had Army markings, and when they dropped us off at Camp Peone, the first man who spoke to us was a captain in the Army. He was the camp commander. The assistant camp commander was an officer in the Navy. They gave us each a couple of sets of Army-looking olive drab uniforms, and all of the camp buildings had military-sounding names: the "mess hall" was for eating, the "barracks" were for sleeping, and toilets were "latrines." But we never had to salute or march around the camp or anything like that. They even let us keep our puppy. He slept with us in the barracks that night. We called him Camp Dog. The next morning, and every morning except Sunday for the next six months, the LEMs--"local experienced men"--took us somewhere outside the camp to work. Most of the time, they had us planting trees on the hillsides, which was supposed to stop soil erosion.2 We also dug irrigation ditches for the farmers in northern Idaho and built roads for the loggers. I'd be lying if I said I liked that kind of work, but it was a whole lot better than farming. I didn't mind milking cows and feeding chickens, but I hated the rest. I especially hated pitching hay in the barn on a hot summer day. All those little stickery pieces go down the back of your neck and get stuck in the sweat underneath your shirt. For me, the CCC was just a way to get out of working for my dad on the family farm. It was probably also the only way. Some of the guys at Camp Peone had high school diplomas, and even they couldn't find a job anywhere else. But the CCC gave us each a five-dollar bill at the end of the month, plus a twenty-five-dollar check that we never saw because the government mailed it directly to our families. My parents could have got by without it--farmers always had something to eat, even in the worst of times--but I think a lot of families really depended on those checks every month. The older men didn't even keep their five-dollar bills. They sent those home to the wife and kids, too. I never heard anyone say this was all because of "the Depression." We just called it "hard times."3 From 1933-1942, about 3 million Americans chose to live and work in CCC camps much like this one. The CCC "Tree Army" was the first organized attempt to restore and preserve the nation's natural environment. COURTESY OF NATIONAL ARCHIVES. Most of us at Camp Peone were just killing time until we were old enough to join the real military. I was thinking about going into the Army myself, until I heard the Army was still using mules.4 That didn't sound very modern to me. I was afraid I might end up pitching hay for a string of mules. I didn't know there was such a thing as an Army Air Corps, and I'd never even heard of the Coast Guard or the Marines. As far as I knew, there was only one other choice. I started asking questions about the Navy. The CCC officers told me all about the Navy's service schools, which sounded a lot like trade schools. They claimed you could learn to be a mechanic or an electrician or a baker, or just about anything in the Navy, and it only took four years. The camp commander told me I should try for radio school. "Son," he said, "the future is in communications. If you can get the Navy to teach you about radios and electronics, you'll never be out of work again." That was all I needed to hear. Right then and there, I decided to join the Navy, and patriotism had nothing to do with it. I doubt if I could have even spelled the word. If anyone had told me America was about to go to war, it wouldn't have made a bit of difference. I didn't know the meaning of war. It was just History, something you studied in school. Oh, there were lots of World War I veterans around then, but not in my family. I'm sure my great-grandfather could have told me a thing or two--he was a Civil War veteran--but he died when I was four. I didn't even know which side he was on. I did get scared when I overheard my parents talk about an invasion somewhere. 5 I went right out, loaded my granddad's shotgun, and stashed it under my bed that night. I thought I was ready if anybody tried to invade Arkansas. I think I was about ten. By the time I got to high school, I'd heard so much war talk, I was sick of it. I tuned it out. I didn't care which country was invading which country. They were all on the other side of the world, anyway, and Current Events class was boring. The only class discussion I really remember was when the teacher told us about the Nazis and all the crazy laws they were making against the Jews in Germany.6 We even had to listen to one of Adolf Hitler's speeches on the radio. My classmates and I agreed that Hitler was the craziest Nazi of all. We had no idea what he was saying, of course, because none of us understood German. It wouldn't have mattered if we did. You couldn't make out the words, what with all the crowd noise in the background. It sounded like cheering, so I assumed Hitler was popular in Germany. My parents couldn't stand him. They called him "that crazy paperhanger." I guess he used to be an artist before he went into politics.7 Mom and Dad were just sure we would go to war with Germany again. "It'll be just like World War I," they said, "only bigger." I don't know where they got that idea--probably from listening to Kaltenborn. Of all the different news programs on the radio, they liked H. V. Kaltenborn the best.8 I can't recall if my folks thought we might also go to war with Japan at that time, but I knew better than to tell them I'd decided to join the Navy. They still had it in their heads that I was going to come home and finish high school. So I wrote and told them what they wanted to hear, that I was taking classes at Camp Peone. Some of it was even true. The CCC did offer a few high school-level courses. I took a couple in soil conservation, mainly to get out of digging ditches. I signed up for typing because the camp commander said it would help me get ahead in the Navy. He also advised me to visit the high school English teacher in Worley and ask her what books I should be reading. She recommended The Canterbury Tales. According to her, if I could read that book and pass the same test she gave her students, I would have no trouble with the Navy's technical manuals. So I read The Canterbury Tales. Took me weeks to get through that sucker, and I hated every minute of it. But it sure felt good to pass that test. I guess I just needed to know that I could. The CCC took us on field trips, too, just like in school. The one I remember best is when they let us ride in the seat behind the pilot of a small airplane. That was my first plane flight, and I loved it. Couldn't wait to go again. When they told me that the Navy had planes, too, I was all the more determined to join up. Of course, I didn't put that in the letters I was writing to my parents either. I told them I was going to church. That was quite a stretch. I'd always been the family rebel that way, too. When Dad read the Bible out loud every night after supper, I usually went to bed early so I wouldn't have to listen. But there was that one Sunday at Camp Peone when the Baptist youth group from Spokane came out and conducted church services for us in the mess hall. One of the girls was pretty cute, too. You better believe I got her phone number. CCC workers who took classes sometimes wore a school sweater over their uniform. Ray Daves, 16, models his new P sweater at Camp Peone, Idaho, December 1936. Building in background is the camp administration building. COURTESY OF RAY DAVES COLLECTION. Adeline Bentz was older than I--nearly seventeen when I met her--but that was all right. And even though she lived in Spokane, which was in the state of Washington, it was only an hour's drive from Camp Peone. I didn't have a car, of course, but the CCC bought most of our supplies in Spokane. Well, somebody had to go along and help load all those groceries on the trucks. I got to visit her two or three times a month that way. I met her parents, too. They didn't seem to mind that I was in the CCC, and they never made fun of the way I talked. Frankly, I thought they were the ones with an accent, but I never said so. I wanted them to like me, because I really liked that girl. She had a lot to do with my decision to reenlist for another six months in the CCC. CCC worker Ray Daves, 17, said goodbye to "that girl" Adeline Bentz, also 17, at her home in Spokane, Washington, August 1937 . COURTESY OF RAY DAVES COLLECTION. When I passed my typing class at Camp Peone, I got promoted to company clerk. That raised my pay to thirty-six dollars a month, and I got to keep ten instead of five. The best part was, I didn't have to plant trees or dig ditches any more. I just sat in the camp office all day and listened to the radio while I did the commander's paperwork. I kept the radio tuned to the music stations at first, but I soon got hooked on the news about the king of England. He was threatening to quit if he couldn't marry Mrs. Simpson, but she was married to somebody else when she took up with the king, so she was trying to get a divorce, and it was just one thing after another, like a soap opera. Every day there was some new development. Sometimes I stayed past quitting time--typed the same report twice--just so I could keep up with the king of England's love story on the radio.9 I could have signed on for another hitch in the CCC after I turned seventeen, but I was anxious to go home and join the Navy. When I said goodbye to Adeline, I didn't think it was very likely that we would ever see each other again. I just promised to write and let her know if I made it in the Navy, and that's where we left it in the summer of '37. See Time Line and Historical Notes . RADIOMAN. Copyright (c) 2008 by Carol Edgemon Hipperson. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. Excerpted from Radioman: An Eyewitness Account of Pearl Harbor and World War II in the Pacific by Carol Edgemon Hipperson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
