The Ragged, Rugged Warriors – Martin Caidin, 1966 ★½

Heroes Battle Zeroes

World War II was an Allied victory that looks more assured now than it did at the time. Like the Nazi invasion of Russia, you can call the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor a case of colossal overreach, yet it didn’t seem so crazy and reckless going down.

In fact, for several long months after December 7, 1941, momentum was all on the side of the Japanese. It’s this aspect of the war, when the Americans and their allies were in the role of decided underdogs, that Martin Caidin draws upon in this account of the air war in the Pacific.

Caidin explains his approach in a Preface:

Our story is not one of the ultimate victory we know so well, but of that time when victory belonged to some distant and unknown future, and the present was filled with raw and naked survival against terrible odds.

That excerpt gives you a fair sense of what to expect from the rest of the book, less by that vague thesis than a tone heavy on modifiers and light on qualifiers. It’s a manly sort of non-fiction you became accustomed to if, like me, you spent your early teens devouring installments of the Bantam War Book series.

Bantam War Books were often found on spindle racks and the lower shelves of a bookstore’s history section when I was coming of age in the late 1970s. Often they had garish covers of men in battle that made for an easy transition from the war comics I had been reading before.

A sampling of the Bantam War Book series, sold today as a bulk lot on eBay. Most dealt with World War II, though sometimes combat from a later era was featured. Image from https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/books-lot-10-bantam-war-non-fiction-1622118457

The books varied in quality as much as they did in subject. The best of them, as I remember, brought a human dimension to the unifying theme of the series, “a world on fire” as the editors called it.

Some still stick in my mind: To War In A Stringbag, Reach For The Sky, Horrido!, Sterling’s Desert Raiders, The Coast Watchers, and Red Duster, White Ensign. My favorite ever may have been my first, Tin Cans, the story of American destroyers in the Pacific. I still remember the author making the point that the term “can,” far from disparaging, suggested a can-do spirit which typified our destroyer crews.

Not every Bantam War Book was a treasure. This leads me back to The Ragged, Rugged Warriors, which suffers from many faults, including narrative sprawl, he-man sensibilities, and an over-reliance on single sources for long stretches, even entire chapters at a time.

A P-40B Tomahawk of the First American Volunteer Group, better known as the Flying Tigers, with distinctive jaws painted under the propeller. Despite figuring on the covers of at least two different editions of Ragged, Rugged Warriors, the Tigers are only briefly covered in the book itself. Painting by Scott Robertson from https://fineartamerica.com/featured/2427-flying-tiger-over-china-scott-robertson.html

I found Caidin a chore to read from the opening chapter, which lay on the sort of gritty prose I must have loved more when I was 12:

He squeezed a finger, and four heavy guns in the nose and wings of his airplane coughed and stammered loudly. The small figure in the harness twitched and jerked in a spasmodic writhing. There was a brief, strawberry-colored spray through the air, and the guns went silent.

That scene takes place neither in the Pacific nor World War II. Rather, it is from the Spanish Civil War, circa 1936, and demonstrates how air combat went from being a gentlemanly sport to one where enemies were slaughtered after bailing out of planes (with gory repercussions against POWs which Caidin also describes in lavish detail.)

Caidin follows this with four whole chapters on the Sino-Japanese War in China. Some attention is given here to the role of American advisers sent to help the Chinese air force, but the narrative is episodic and subjectively told before being dropped entirely. The warriors promised by the title are still to make an appearance.

Mitsubishi A5M fighters, known as "Claudes," were in wide use during the early air war over China. The arrival of the Zero in mid-1940 provided twice the speed and range and were "a dream to fly," Caidin writes. Image from https://www.historynet.com/samurai-of-the-air.htm

Instead, there’s more carnage for Caidin to vividly recount, regarding the wanton strafing of Nanking and other Chinese cities by the Japanese:

Their concept of combat in the air was a development of the single word attack, and they had little intention of allowing the Chinese to remain free of their fighters and bombers so that they could build up their strength.

Caidin avoids racial or ethnic disparagement here – in fact he pushes hard against the idea of the Japanese lacking humanity. His aim is more that of giving comic-book-glutted audience members like my younger self the bread and circuses they craved.

The gore quotient is thus set high.

You might expect the Flying Tigers, a group of American volunteer pilots who battled the Japanese over China, to put in an appearance, but Caidin makes the point three different times that this legendary force did not take to the skies until 13 days after Pearl Harbor. [The Flying Tigers are covered later on, in a short chapter that deals mostly with the difficulties they had retaining good pilots in quarters likened by one eyewitness to “an entomologist’s paradise.”]

Japanese ace Saburo Sakai recalled for Caidin his first impression of the Zero fighter plane, seen above: "The Zero excited me as nothing ever had done before. Even on the ground it had the cleanest lines I had ever seen in an airplane." It came equipped with two machine guns and two cannons. Image from https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/196313/mitsubishi-a6m2-zero/

Then it’s off to Hawaii, to watch as the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and give the Americans a taste of what may have been the best plane for dogfighting yet invented, the Mitsubishi Zero:

On almost every occasion when Allied fighters tangled in wild dogfights with the nimble Mitsubishis, the outcome was decided before the battle – the Japanese were almost certain to win.

A clear focus to the book doesn’t emerge until it is half over, after Pearl Harbor is hit. Suddenly the Americans and their allies must fight for time, reduced to a few carriers, some second-line ships, and a welter of oddball fighter-plane models with one thing in common – they don’t stand up to Zeroes.

The Brewster Buffalo was one of the worst-performing fighters sent up against the Zero. One Australian pilot described it to Caidin as "a barrel which the Zeroes could outfly, outclimb, outgun, outmaneuver, and outdo almost everything else that was in the book for a fighting airplane." Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster_F2A_Buffalo

Caidin was known for his aviation writing. He knew how to fly and brought that knowledge to several dozen novels and history books. Here he spends long intervals explaining how different pilots experienced the sensations of flying in combat.

Caidin’s reliance on the outrageous exploits of a handful of American pilots tilted my B.S. detectors. So did the way they tell their stories, all in the same laconic, hard-boiled voice that suggests Caidin augmented their quotes liberally. Caidin never bothers with secondary sources to back up these anecdotes, or even offers needed context for them.

If the Zero was so unbeatable in the air, how did Bob Scott or Buzz Wagner manage to shoot so many of them out of the skies? I don’t doubt they were heroes in their way, but in a real way, not taking on squadrons single-handed the way Caidin depicts it, knocking down foes three at a time.

The heroes-vs.-Zeroes focus also undercuts Caidin’s opening thesis, about Americans forced into the role of underdogs.

One American hero Caidin writes of is Colin Kelly Jr., above, a B-17 pilot who stayed in his cockpit while his crew bailed out as his bomber was shot down over Clark Field in the Philippines three days after the Pearl Harbor attack: "He had sacrificed his life so that other men might live. And there is no legend to that." Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Kelly

Another very annoying habit of Caidin’s is excess quotations. He employs long passages from Bob Scott’s God Is My Co-Pilot, as well as three other World War II histories Caidin co-wrote, which fill up at least several pages of Ragged, Rugged Warriors apiece. He also quotes at length from interviews he conducted with a handful of veterans, all of whom are depicted in glowing terms.

This isn’t so bad in itself. The Bantam War Book series often relied on single-source narratives, and this sort of lived history can be quite stimulating, however subjective. But Caidin’s tubthumping on their behalf does grate.

He introduces us to Walter Krell, “one of the greatest bomber pilots who ever lived.” Not something I’d dispute after reading about Krell here, who performed some extraordinary feats over Japanese-held Rabaul in 1942, but Caidin’s overt boosterism makes Stephen Ambrose seem tame by comparison. Ambrose was bellicose, especially so as he got older and became more of a brand name, but at least he worked in multiple sources when praising the American fighting man.

Author Martin Caidin. In addition to war books, he produced a great deal of science fiction. His novel Cyborg became a hit TV series, "The Six Million Dollar Man." He died in 1997, at age 69. Image from https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/99333.Martin_Caidin

Caidin’s dramatic license does work to get the blood going. There is an account late in the book about an attack by a B-26 Marauder bomber against Japanese carriers during the Battle of Midway which sold me completely in its depiction of the craziness and horror experienced. No cheap thrills; just honest reportage, however sourced.

Caidin also spends valuable time depicting the work of the ground crews, an underrepresented element in many better books about the air war. In New Guinea, they slept through the day, which was too hot for runway work; and toiled through the night, ignoring ravenous mosquitoes.

Bodies became caked with dirt, hair matted with grease, hands and faces packed with grime. Cuts and bruises along the body were common because the men used makeshift tools and often slipped and fell from their precarious working mounts.

The resourcefulness and bravery of these men is a story that deserved to be told, and Caidin tells it, but in a way that feels pulled from the pages of some bygone men’s magazine like Argosy, for which Caidin often wrote. Despite his opening comments about you needing to appreciate how the tide was turned in the Pacific, he doesn’t actually follow that up with any strategic or tactical rationales. Rather, he alternates stories of sacrifice and derring-do that emphasize guts over reason.

Those stories register as the only things Caidin wants to relate, again and again, never mind that these anecdotes fail to cohere in any way other than celebrating the same few men over and over. Ragged and rugged they certainly were; too bad their story is told the same way.