Ken Wiley. D-Days in the Pacific with the U. S. Coast Guard. Havertown PA: Casemate, 2010. E-book.

This is a folksy, honest account of one man’s experience in the Pacific during World War II. Anyone in the Coast Guard will tell you that one of the Coast Guard heroes is Douglas Munro, the only Coastie to received the Congressional Medal of Honor. (He has had two cutters and one Navy ship named after him). Munro received his medal as a result of bravery while piloting a landing craft full of Marines during World War II.

Even in the seventies, when I was in the Coast Guard, the Marines retained a certain memory and respect for the Coast Guard because they were guys that had to have their heads above the gunwales of landing craft while they were navigating the craft ashore. During the war, many such craft were manned by Coasties because they had had experience and training in small craft because of their everyday port safety and rescue operations.

Mr. Wiley tells us of his experience in the Pacific. He begins with a famous quotation: “The Coast Guard and Marines stopped the Japs while the Army and Navy mobilized.” (196)

Wiley was the fourth of five sons from a small Texas town. All five would join the military, one was killed in the war. He enlisted in 1943. Within a year he would be in charge of an LCVP (Landing Craft Vehicle Personnel) a.k.a. a Higgins Boat. As is typical of the Coast Guard, he abbreviates certain words to indicate the way they are pronounced, so coxswain becomes cox’n and boatswain becomes bos’n.

This is a story of maturity. He begins by describing his rather innocent and carefree life in small-town America in the thirties. Even though he was not quite twenty when the war ended, he had become a man. He had seen a lot and done a lot.

The title suggests his activity. The term d-day in the military simply referred to the day when a certain activity, usually an invasion, would begin. Today when we speak of D-Day, capitalized, we think of June 6, 1944, when the Allies began their amphibious invasion of mainland Europe.

But in the Pacific, there were many D-Days, many days when the invasion of a particular island or land area would begin. Wiley himself was involved in a total of seventeen different such landings or invasions in the Pacific. Even though he was too young to have been involved in Guadalcanal, he does tell of some co-workers who had stories about that. He reminds us that “The Guadalcanal and Tulagi operations was all Coast Guard and Marines…It was the same up the Solomon chain, new Guinea, North Africa, and Italy. The Coast Guard led the way.” (181-187)

Like many raw recruits, Wiley was pretty naive about what even basic training would be like. He was brought to reality fairly quickly. (This reviewer was similarly naive. A Coast Guard friend once said to me, “You looked like you thought you were coming to summer camp.” I thought I was.)

D-Days in the Pacific has many anecdotes illustrating the savagery and commitment the Japanese fighters displayed. When they saw the way they treated captives, “It was little wonder American troops hardened their emotions toward this sort of enemy.” (2032) My father was a veteran of the Pacific War, too. Whenever he spoke of people or products from Japan, he always used the word Japanese. But whenever he spoke the enemy he fought in the war, they were Japs. Wiley’s language is similar and typical of the men of their generation.

While there are plenty of descriptions of intense fighting and some very clever strategic landings, there is also much humor. The men learned to get along and trust each other. Humor lightened things up. Wiley’s LCVP was attached to the USS Middleton a troop transport ship. One evening when the men were listening to Tokyo Rose, she bragged that the Japanese had sunk the Middleton with all hands on board. “We all had a good laugh at that bit of news.” (2130) Propaganda, indeed.

They had many close calls. One rescue involved going behind Japanese lines to get some American commandos. Several times Japanese units tried to disguise themselves as Americans. Once, one such unit gave an outdated password. They said they had been out of touch for a few days. So then one of the men asked, “Who did slinging Sammy Baugh play for?” They guessed a number of baseball teams, all not even close.

Another time someone asked a similar Japanese infiltrator who pitched for the Dodgers in the last World Series. He answered, “Joe DiMaggio.”

Another time one of the men on a landing craft recognized that a few soldiers on shore were Japanese, not American. How could he tell? By the scent of the cigarettes they were smoking.

Wiley does refer briefly to the Battle of Leyte Gulf. His observation is similar to that of Hornfischer’s:

Admiral Halsey’ decision to pull his main battle fleet out of Leyte to chase empty enemy carriers allowed the main Japanese fleet the opportunity to sail in and destroy the Leyte beachhead…Only Jap mistakes saved us from a potentially devastating defeat.” (3510-3514)

The harrowing details of some of the landings—Eniewetok, Saipan, Okinawa among them—give us a sense of what the fighting was like and the challenges that both sides had to face. At Okinawa especially when he witnessed even civilians committing suicide, Wiley “became convinced it would take us ten years to subdue mainland Japan.” (4669) As indicated in my last Pacific War review, while it is not a politically correct attitude these days, any veteran would say he was thankful for the atomic bomb. It saved thousands of American lives and probably millions of Japanese lives as well.

Wiley was nearby when McArthur made his photo-op “return.” He also tells a little about boxer Jack Dempsey who was commissioned by the Coast Guard in order to make films about their role in the fighting, not unlike actor Ronald Regan’s Hellcats of the Navy.

This lively personal account of an ordinary sailor is well worth reading. It helps us appreciate what the military in the Pacific War went through and, frankly, gives us a sense of what the Coast Guard can do. It is an inside look at what television reporter Tom Brokaw called the Greatest Generation.

One bonus. Wiley got to know Kenneth P. Riley, a fellow Coastie who would become a well-known magazine artist. The book is illustrated throughout with Riley’s drawings, both of everyday shipboard life and details from various landings.