Q. Dr. Mason, the Naval Institute established an Office of Oral History in March 1969, with you as its Director Having been affiliated with Columbia University’s Oral History program before coming here, has your approach to Oral History changed in the past four years?
A. There have, I suppose, been subtle changes. But I remain convinced today, as I was at the outset, that large segments of modern history will be inadequately recorded for future generations unless we take action now in preserving the recollections of men who had a part.
Q. But isn’t there a great deal of documentation available to today’s historian?
A. Of course, there are multitudes of official documents today, perhaps more than ever before, and they are exceedingly useful to the historian. But they rarely supply the personal element that is so vital to the writing of readable histories. In a less frenetic age, other sources were available—the private diary, the self-revealing letter, the personal papers. It is these sources that are drying up in our time. The ascribed reasons are man’s freedom of movement and ease of communication. The airplane and the automobile are subtle but deadly enemies of the archivist.
Q. And the telephone. . . ?
A. Men resort to the telephone without stint in conducting business, in reaching out to friends. Hence, a variety of colleges, universities, government agencies museums and institutes have set up oral history programs in the last decade. The tape recorder has made this effort practical and feasible. Today there are 300 or more oral history projects in our country. Many of them are small, of local interest, but a few cover a vast range of subjects reflecting the pursuits of our citizenry.
Q. How broad a range does the Naval Institute attempt to cover?
A. The Naval Institute’s project centers exclusively on the U. S. Navy. Its efforts range from naval biography, with its rich and variegated patterns, to cluster-like interviews on a subject such as Polaris. Our efforts since1969 have been fruitful. We rank among the first ten collections in the nation in terms of hours of tape recorded and transcribed. By the end of 1972 we had almost 1100 interview hours recorded on tape and over half these hours have been transcribed (approximately 16,000 pages). Many of the interviews have been fully processed, indexed, and bound.
Q. What is the specific intent in building such a collection? To what use is it put? Does it justify the time and effort?
A. I believe the answers to these questions are rooted firmly in the overall objective of the Naval Institute itself: "The advancement of professional, literary, and scientific knowledge in the Navy.’’ The raw Materials we are collecting (and that is the oral interview) are proving of great value even now to naval historians. Subject always to permission from the interview subject, his efforts are being made available to the Division of Naval History, to Special Collections in the U. S. Naval Academy Library, to the Naval War College in Newport, and to private individuals. Of course, a man has the right to classify the material in his memoir. Confidentiality is something we guarantee if that is the wish of the memoirist.
Q. Can you tell us of any specific uses to which the material has recently been put?
A. It is rewarding to know that our unique collection is recognized today as a repository of information on a vast number of naval subjects. As illustration, the authors of at least two naval biographies in preparation (those of Admirals Nimitz and Spruance) have drawn extensively on the oral histories.
Q. And, of course, you are dealing with material that is not going to be OBE’ed— Overtaken By Events.
A. There is tremendous satisfaction in building such a collection because of the knowledge that, as the events of the present age recede into the distant past, the raw materials of the oral history collection remain as fresh and revealing as when they were given. The Collections we gather on tape contribute many details to known fact. Indubitably they add color and vitality to the official reports.
Q. The perennial timeliness of your tapes, is that their real value then. . . ?
A. One may not agree entirely with John Ruskin, c 19th century English writer, who concluded that: the only history worth reading is that written at the time of which it treats—the history of what was done and seen, heard out of the mouths of the men who did and saw.” Whether we agree or not, Ruskin’s words are entirely accurate when applied to the oral history record. . . . "heard out of the mouths of the who did and saw.”
Q. What about your subjects, the individuals being interviewed?
A. Fortunately for us, and for the enrichment of naval history, Navy men are usually conscious of the value of the record. They appreciate the fact that they have lived full and exciting lives, even privileged lives. They have seen far more of the world than most men. And many times they have stared at death, but, in the doing, they have known great events. For such men the record is important. It becomes an enduring monument of contributions made.
Q. We note that practically all of your subjects—quite understandably—have been retired naval officers.
A. Some of these men continue to be too busy, even in retirement, to attempt a written account of their experiences. Some have tried and given up, for an activist life is not always conducive to the development of real writing skills. And so the spoken memoir is the answer.
Q. Is spontaneity the key to a good interview, or do you ask for some preparation on the part of your subjects?
A. In some measure, an Oral History memoir is only as good as the effort expended upon it. An interviewee’s thoughtful preparation is expected. Sometimes he is moved to the sketching of a rough outline. Certainly he is encouraged to delve into personal papers, notes and photographs.
It might be well to note, also, that a skilled, informed listener (for the good interviewer is that) can help to bring forth from the recesses of memory a wealth of material. Perhaps the naval historian may feel that we who do the gathering of recollections do not always ask the right questions. They will have to admit, however, that we are providing a vast amount of new material for their appraisal, analysis, and use.
Q. What about veracity?
A. From the beginning it was assumed that some historians would question the reliability of the oral method. It is a valid question to raise, but no more valid than when it pertains to letters, diaries, and other substantiating documents describing an historical event. Ultimate authentication of source materials is the inevitable burden of the historian. He is obligated to the task of sifting all that he uses, comparing it and checking it over and over again with validated records. This is not to say that the oral method itself is lacking in vigilant care. A transcript is made from the tape and is given over immediately for correction and amendment by the subject. Thus, a man has a second opportunity to ponder what he has said. Usually some minor changes are forthcoming.
Needless to say, in the 20-odd years since the first oral historians went forth with the existing recording machines of that time (and they were primitive indeed when compared with the electronic beauties of today) the effort has proved its worth. Testimony in that area is overwhelming. Here is one interviewer who feels impelled to note that it is gratifying at the end of a series of interviews to hear the verdict of the man himself ... "I enjoyed doing that.” In some intangible way this is related to the success of the effort and the worth of the material.
Q. For the same reason we wouldn’t ask a mother to name her favorite child, we are not going to ask you to select, from the scores of interviews you have conducted, one or two with which you were particularly pleased. But, was any one memorable for any reason?
A. Many were memorable for me, and generally for many different reasons. But, perhaps from a random choice, the reader will get an idea of the kind of material the oral historian is likely to come across during a congenial talk with a good man who is looking back over a long, full life. I think of Vice Admiral Herbert D. Riley, in particular, because his death this year saddened those of us who were his friends. Let him tell us, in his own words, of an incident that occurred almost 40 years ago when, as a lieutenant (j.g.) he was serving as a gunnery officer with VP-10:
Admiral Riley: "There was one more incident that might be amusing. While this was going on [winter of 1934-35], it was inevitable that the word was spread like wildfire among all military aviators that the Navy had really come up with a bomb sight. This was something—VP-10 was just knocking everything out of the water with their bombs. Other squadrons even had their gunnery officers make rides with us to watch us. There was great interest, even on the other side of Ford Island, where we were based. The other side of the Island was the Army Air Corps base, where they had the old Keystone bombers.
"They had nothing like our Norden sight—yet they were called 'bombardment squadrons.’ They couldn’t hit the side of a barn. This was not their fault—they didn’t have the equipment. They heard about our bomb sight, which was purely a Navy development with Norden; they wanted to get in on it.
"I knew these fellows, knew them pretty well and liked them, so I took a couple of them out with me and showed them how the thing operated. They became so enthused about it that they started blistering word back to the then War Department, to try to get the same thing for themselves, added onto the Navy contract. They had some kind of a new bomb sight in development which they wouldn’t see for a couple of years.
"One officer over there—the gunnery officer of a bombardment squadron—was a pretty good friend of mine. He asked me if, as a favor, after we finished our night formation practice, we would let him have one of our bomb sights to install in a Keystone bomber, by his own people, a completely assembled sight—in order to put an added boost behind their push for getting our sight in the Army Air Corps.
"I said yes. I agreed to that on my own. I wouldn’t ask for higher authority because if I’d asked I knew the answer would have been 'no.’ I said that if he would take good care of it and let me have it back on demand, he could have it to test but that I’d bring my people over to install it.
"So I did. He went out with it and took everybody around there in the Air Corps with him. He had results similar to ours. But he didn’t return when he said he was going to return it. I kept calling him and calling him, and finally when we had another practice coming up that required bomb sights in all six planes and we only had five bomb sights, I called him up and said, 'Look, I’ve got to have that sight.’
"He said, 'Well, we’re doing this, that, and the other, we’ll let you have it next week.’
"'No, I must have it by tomorrow.’
"He said, 'Well, I’ll do my best.’ Tomorrow came but the bomb sight didn’t. So I got my squadron truck and drove around on the other side of the island, and went down to his squadron there, to the gunnery shop, to get that bomb sight and bring it back. When I got in there I saw about eight people working on it. They had taken that bomb sight apart completely to see how it worked, to learn all about it—and they couldn’t get it back together again. Parts of that bombsight were all over the ordnance and gunnery shop. I died a thousand deaths, because we had to use it in a couple of days, and it was going to take more than a little bit of putting together. So I got all my best men over there right away and said, 'Leave us alone, we’ll take it as it is.’ And so, with about 30 hours of exhausting work, we finally got that thing put back together and back in commission in one of our airplanes. We operated it in the practice. Nobody but my crew ever knew about that. I never breathed a word. Beauty Martin didn’t know a thing about it. That was the first Air Corps experience with a Norden Bomb Sight—one that I let them have on a 'cumshaw’ basis.”
Q. The Norden bombsight! That was quite a topic before and during World War II. But Admiral Riley’s very personal view of it might not have been told but for your interview?
A. Men like Admiral Riley, of course, move up the ladder and their perspective changes with the addition of years, ranks, and responsibility. He told me, for example, a story about Secretary of Defense Johnson and Chief of Naval Operations Denfeld. At the time of the incident, Captain Riley was serving as Aide to the Secretary of Defense . . . but, let him tell it:
Admiral Riley: "When Admiral Denfeld made his appearance before a Senate Committee he came out solidly in support of his belief in the Navy position, and against that of the Secretary of Defense. Denfeld was near the end of his initial term as CNO. Of course, the big question was, would he be reappointed? Before then, Johnson, [Truman’s Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson], felt that he was getting as much service out of Louis as any other officer he could get as Chief of Naval Operations. He had a paper drawn up reappointing Denfeld for two more years. I saw him sign it. After he had signed the paper, he said, 'I want you to take this up to Admiral Denfeld and give it to him; tell him privately that he can forget about any worry or thought about whether or not he’d be reappointed; he is being reappointed. He can put this paper away and sit on it; the announcement will be made by me at the appropriate time. But I want him to have this paper and know about it before the announcement is made. I will make it official sometime in the next month or so. But he can put any worry about it out of his mind.’
"I took the paper to Admiral Denfeld and gave it to him. I told him exactly what the Secretary had said. Naturally, he was elated about being reappointed. He put the paper in his personal safe.
"But—after his testimony before the Senate Committee, when he went straight down the line for the Navy position, Denfeld’s number came up with Louis Johnson. He decided right then that he would not reappoint Denfeld, that he would bring Forrest Sherman in to be CNO—and did so.
"The time approached for the end of Denfeld’s term, and no official announcement was made, nor was any intention expressed. Finally, out of the blue, it was announced that Admiral Denfeld would not be reappointed, and that Sherman would be Chief of Naval Operations. He was commander of the Sixth Fleet at the time. He was brought back 'under cover.’ Nobody was informed of this, so Johnson could tell him first. But it was announced in the press by the Secretary of Defense that Denfeld had had not been fired, as the press had claimed, because of testimony in opposition to that of Secretary of Defense—just that he had not been reappointed. The announcement went on to say that the Secretary wanted to bring in his own choice as Chief of Naval Operations, that there was no obligation on his part to reappoint Louis Denfeld so he just had not done it. He had appointed Sherman, and that was all there was to it. I don’t believe that he even added that this actually was a Presidential appointment, following his recommendation.
"Johnson knew and I knew, and Denfeld knew, that Denfeld had a piece of paper signed by Johnson, that I had seen Johnson sign, saying that Denfeld was going to be reappointed.”
Q. Did Johnson communicate with Denfeld?
Adm. Riley: "I don’t know whether he ever did or not. He never did through me. But Denfeld never told the story. That story never got out. The press never got it, and hasn’t to this day. Johnson just announced that he was not reappointing Denfeld, was under no obligation to do so, was bringing Sherman in. He emphasized that Denfeld had not been fired. Actually, if anybody was ever fired, it was Denfeld.”
Q. Did any other CNOs remain on active duty after they had served their term?
A. I can think of none. But, let me conclude with a fragment from an interview I conducted with Rear Admiral Arthur H. McCollum. It has nothing to do with either the Norden Sight or the Denfeld case, but it does give some idea of the range of topics covered by our interviews. By way of background, Admiral McCollum was Fleet Intelligence Officer on the staff of Commander Allied Forces, Southwest Pacific Area for most of World War II, and, as such, a part of his duty was to perform liaison between Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid and General Douglas MacArthur.
"I think one of the most amazing jobs we did was—on the island of Cebu there was a fellow named Cushing. He’d been promoted to be a lieutenant colonel, he was a reserve, and I think actually he was part Filipino. A very nice chap, but he was running a so-called guerrilla movement on the island of Cebu.
"Well, you know, Admiral Yamamoto had been killed in the Solomon Islands on the 18th of March of 1942. The man who relieved him was Mineichi Koga, whom I’d known in Japan, a very fine person. The Japanese, as you know, had their main base at Truk. Well, we made Truk too hot for them. Spruance’s aircraft carriers were periodically bombing Truk, so Admiral Koga and his staff shifted their headquarters to Palau. Well, they’d hardly gotten ashore at Palau when Spruance struck that place and we were landing a Marine division there to take it over, whereupon Koga hastily loaded himself and the principal members of his staff into a seaplane and took off for the Philippines.
"Well, they got lost, and we knew something was up because, my Lord, the Japanese had planes out searching the ocean all over creation and we were listening in on their communications. We didn’t know what was going on but we knew that something very important had happened. There were all-out searches, and all of a sudden we got a message from this guy, Cushing, on Cebu, "I have captured a Japanese general, his entire staff, and all of his headquarters papers.” We didn’t pay too much attention to that because none of these guerrilla people ever captured anybody of less rank than a general. They wouldn’t capture just a captain, so I didn’t pay too much attention to it. But it came out that the guy’s name was Koga, General Koga. Hell, that’s Admiral Koga, Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet!
Well, the Japanese found out that Koga’s plane had crash-landed off Cebu and that he had fallen into the hands of these guerrillas, and through the grapevine the Japanese garrison learned of it so they started pressing the guerrillas.
Cushing, I thought smartly, compromised, saying 'Lay off and I’ll give up the bodies.’ MacArthur was incensed. He had visions of having Koga in a cage to display in Australia, you know. That kind of thing. But Cushing made a deal with the Japanese. He would give up the bodies and call it quits if they’d take the heat off, which they did. And Koga died right on Cebu. He was badly hurt in the crashlanding, but we got all the papers. So we sent in a submarine to pick up the papers. They were the staff papers of the Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese fleet. They were loaded in a submarine, and I thought they were so hot that as soon as the submarine got clear enough we had it met at sea by a flying boat which took the papers off and delivered them to our headquarters. That’s where we got the complete dope on the Japanese strategic plan for the war, the so-called Sho Operation. That was the one that they put into effect at the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
"We wouldn’t have called it a campaign plan, but it was what you might call a strategic concept. In other words, you have a decoy fleet up here, and the main fleet would come through here, they pinch in there, and so on and so forth. It was called the Sho Operation. 'Sho' is an alternative pronunciation of the Japanese character meaning 'victory.'
"We got the papers and I thought they were so hot that we immediately sent the whole business- without translating it, to Admiral Nimitz who, by this time, was in Saipan, I think it was. We sent the whole business right there because we knew enough about it. But we weren’t running the static operation, you understand. So that’s where it belonged and whether that affected anything or not I don’t know. But the fact of the matter is that we had the Japanese campaign plans, and we got the papers from the Commander-in-Chief of the Jap fleet, who had been captured on the island of Cebu by Cushing, and it was quite a thing to get that submarine in there and hurry him back and then, later on, to make a rendezvous at sea with a flying boat. It was quite a feat!”
Q: And the Japanese acquiesced in this exchange? I mean, they accepted the arrangement to leave the papers and—
Adm. M.: "Well, I don’t know about that. I know what the arrangement was. In other words, Cushing was being so pushed that his outfit would have been wiped out had he not made a deal with them. I don’t know whether the Japanese knew that there were any papers on there or not. When the flying boat crash-landed, the people were pretty badly shaken up and pretty badly hurt, and we had several sacksful of these things. So it does pay off. You can win, you know, in this business.”
Q: Dr. Mason, with excerpts such as those to provide, literally, a point of reference, the historical potential of your program seems to be equalled only by its inherent interest.
A. Certainly, for both interviewer and subject, that is the principal source of satisfaction. It is extremely interesting work—and unusual, too, in that, as with all oral history projects, our future is dependent upon other people’s past.