The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (17 page)

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On August 25, Fonda goes from the induction center to the boot camp in San Diego; upon arrival, he is detained by the Shore Patrol and sent back to Hollywood. It transpires that Zanuck has pulled strings to get Fonda’s service deferred so he can star in
Immortal Sergeant.
Patriotism or retribution? It hardly matters. Henry will spend the end of the summer in Imperial Valley, California, making a movie in which, he later sneers, “I won World War II single-handed.”

He returns to boot camp on November 18, and after eight weeks, he graduates as an ordinary seaman, third class, service number 562 62 35. This is followed by sixteen weeks of specialized training as a quartermaster—Henry finishes third in the class—and then his first assignment: quartermaster, third class, on the USS
Satterlee,
a destroyer docked in Seattle. After several weeks, he is told to report to naval HQ in New York for reassignment to an officer training program. Docking in Norfolk, Virginia, on August 26, 1943, Fonda takes the train to New York, and on September 15, he is sworn in as a lieutenant, junior grade (j.g.).

From there, he is sent to Washington, D.C., to report for his duty assignment. The navy brass present Fonda with an offer—an inevitable one, given his civilian status: He may serve out the duration by making training films and other vehicles for the War Office. He declines, saying he would prefer to work in intelligence.

It is the navy’s Office of Strategic Services, created during World War II under the direction of renegade admiral William “Wild Bill” Donovan, that becomes the first organization in the United States designed for the gathering of foreign intelligence, and precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. Fonda becomes an accidental pioneer: In 1943, military intelligence is being transformed by new communications technologies and an emphasis on joint intelligence among the service branches. Henry does not say why he is set on this aspect of naval operations, but the work of intelligence is profoundly congruent with his character, style, and inclinations.

He could have been a spy—a great one. Intelligence is about the hidden, and Fonda realizes that his natural reticence will harmonize with the hush-hush nature of the work. His job will call on his fortes of reading, listening, and absorbing to form raw units of fact and conjecture into justified predictions. There is, as well, a sensation of control: Marshaling predictions into coherent patterns to make prophecies of success or disaster confers a magisterial perspective.

Speculation is nearly all we have to go on here, since Fonda remained evasive or silent on his motivations for choosing intelligence work, his feelings about it, and, to a great degree, its nature. Speculation is a limited instrument, but it lets us suppose why he sought to make this particular contribution to the war, and why that contribution may finally have left him hollow.

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On October 4, Fonda reports to the school for officer candidates at Quonset Point, Rhode Island. There, he’ll receive indoctrination instruction—that is, training for the newly created Air Combat Intelligence (ACI) section, whose graduates will be required to synthesize vast amounts of information, including aerial photographs, encoded intercepts, captured documents, POW interrogations, and daily bulletins, and use them in the planning of bombing missions.

An ACI candidate “should have had experience in dealing with people and have been successful in his chosen profession,” and “be of good physical appearance, have a quick alert mind and a large measure of self-confidence, have a positive and pleasant personality and be free from nervousness.” F. S. Crosley, the retired navy commander who recommends Henry for duty in the ACI section, believes he “demonstrates officer-like qualities of leadership, military bearing, loyalty, judgment and intelligence.” Being an actor doesn’t hurt: “[I]t has been determined,” Crosley notes, “that individuals with acting, broadcasting and moving picture experience have made the best progress at [the ACI] school.”

Indeed, Henry thrives in this world of quadrants and bearings, where there are no unruly children, neurotic wives, or mallet-swinging moguls—only head-down, fact-based work, and plenty of it. Throughout the ACI school, writes Melville C. Branch, “there was a favorable atmosphere of educational and behavioral maturity, intelligence, energy, and thoughtful patriotism.… Discipline was definite, but consensual rather than conspicuously enforced.” Fonda is made the company’s drill instructor, and the officer in charge of indoctrination remarks on his fitness report, “Lieutenant (junior grade) Fonda is outstandly [
sic
] sincere and loyal. He is intelligent and an indefatigable worker.”

Henry graduates fourth out of forty-four officer candidates. “That impressed the shit out of people,” he will recall.

He has a brief furlough, which will end just after New Year’s, 1944, during which he sees Frances and the children. Then, from Quonset Point, he is reassigned to Kaneohe, Hawaii, across the island of Oahu from Pearl Harbor, for a two-week intensified course at the navy’s antisubmarine school.
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Fonda requests duty on an aircraft carrier in the Atlantic Fleet; instead, he is sent to the navy’s Marshall Islands command in the central Pacific. Arriving April 11, he is appointed to the staff of Vice Adm. John H. Hoover—subordinate to Adm. Chester Nimitz, commander of Pacific forces—and given his second and final ship assignment, as officer courier on the USS
Curtiss.

Named after the designer of the navy’s first flying boats, the
Curtiss
is a proud, rusty bucket with a seasoned crew and its share of scars. It was at Pearl Harbor on December 7, and returned fire, despite being exploded and burned belowdecks by a dive-bomber’s load. Nineteen crew members died, and many others were wounded, but in little more than a month, the ship was back in service, “ferrying men and supplies to forward bases at Samoa, Suva, and Noumea.”

At the time Fonda comes aboard in February 1944, the
Curtiss
is based at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshalls, dead center of the Pacific theater. Flagship to the South Pacific Air Command, she is functioning as a seaplane tender—a repair and supply point for destroyers and small aircraft engaged in the great sea battles of 1943–1945 taking place in the Solomons and the Marianas. The
Curtiss
is also helping to carve a route of safe passage from San Francisco to Tokyo; in the later months of the war, as the Pacific campaign climaxes, the ship draws fire while nearing the home islands of Japan behind the ground troops who are battling for Guam, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.

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Fonda’s job as ACI officer, however fulfilling, is stressful and unpleasant. In the heat of the Pacific, perpetually drenched, bracing himself against waves and nausea, sardined with a dozen others into a tiny radio room with the noise of bombardment all around, Henry clings to focus and fact. Action alternates with boredom; hours and days are ground down in rituals of consumption—liquor, coffee, tobacco—reading, waiting, surrendering to exhaustion in a swaying, sweating metal bunk.

When action happens and an operation is called for, Fonda knows the intensest hours of his life. Operations demand of coordinating officers an ongoing mastery of the elements of chaos, of situations that have every potential for tragic failure. Evan Thomas paints a picture of the commotion in a shipboard radio room during such an operation—actually, it is the nerve center of Adm. William Halsey’s command in the leadup to the October 1944 Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, but the room in which Fonda works can’t feel much different.

Officers pored over a large chart table while sailors wrote on clear plastic plotting boards with grease pencils and relayed orders over a cluster of voice tubes. Airless, windowless, stuffed with men and machinery, [the room] reeked of a strange stew of smells: the acrid odor of radio tubes; the ever present, bittersweet warship smell of paint, lubricants, and a sealing solution called Cosmoline mingled with tobacco smoke and male sweat. Radio transmitters filled the stuffy room with the excited chatter of pilots on their bombing and strafing missions.

To appearances, though, Fonda in his downtime is affable. In a March 1945 dispatch, Henry, on liberty after many weeks of duty, is seen drinking and singing with other officers. Though he enjoys relaxing, he is never less than an obsessively hard worker; one shipmate claims that “our doctor has had to order him to take it easier.”

At worst, he suffers a hangover from excesses of tension, tedium, and drink. Writer Robert Ruark will recall sitting with Fonda on the day after Christmas, 1944. The
Curtiss,
anchored at Saipan, has just come through a bombing raid.

Lieutenant Fonda was listless as he faced me across the mess table at lunch. He looked at his Spam and looked away again, quickly. He was a little green around the gills.… The Japs could come, and the Japs could go, but Mr. Fonda had his hangover to take his mind off the war.

Gallows humor aside, these days death is coming closer to Henry than it has before or will again. During operations, he is one of death’s dealers; as a combatant in an open theater of war, he is among its vulnerable targets.

In
“The Good War,”
his oral history of World War II, Studs Terkel speaks to Robert Rasmus, a business executive who as a young infantryman survived some of the worst battles of the European theater. Barely in his twenties, he has seen unspeakable things. Then, as he is being retrained stateside for the projected invasion of Japan, the atomic bomb is dropped. “How many of us would have been killed on the mainland if there had been no bomb?” is Rasmus’s question. “Someone like me has this specter,” he says.

Those words could echo forever. How many men found themselves walking, marching, crawling with some version of that specter beside them? Was the specter every question never asked about the horror they had to swallow? Was it the man of feeling that had to be separated from the man of action? How many men left their specter behind in the war, and how many came home feeling the specter was now them?

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Fonda describes a kamikaze striking the
Curtiss
in early 1945, after the Americans have captured Iwo Jima and firebombed Tokyo. The plane, damaged by gunfire, misses its target and crashes in the ocean near the ship. Fonda and a partner volunteer as divers to see if documents may be recovered. The two descend, and thirty feet below the surface, they encounter a tableau from a Surrealist painting, or a uniquely disturbing dream: the wrecked plane, and floating upside down, the strapped-in corpses of the pilot and bombardier. “It was an eerie sight,” Fonda will recall. The hidden man remembers what he sees; the man of action cancels the feeling, recovers the documents, and retreats from the floating, inverted tomb.

There are—according to his account—three outstanding events in Fonda’s war career. Each is an encounter with death, each a confrontation with his specter.

The first is an antisubmarine operation staged sometime in early 1945. Navy cryptanalysts are intercepting and decoding a high percentage of Japanese cipher traffic; as intelligence man on the
Curtiss,
Fonda has received many of these intercepts, mainly detailing enemy sub movements. He plots an attack area based on an estimate of the sub’s position at a safe distance from its target; American search planes and patrol ships will swarm the designated area.

He has performed this function several times, passing on the information to higher-ups, then leaving the loop and hearing no more about it. But this engagement occurs close enough to the
Curtiss
for Fonda to feel the depth charges as the targeted subs are hit. It is the first time he feels a sense of aftermath sticking to an attack he has directed.

His autobiography presents the consequence flatly and factually: submarine parts bobbing on the surface of the sea. Among the things omitted is whether Fonda felt any elation at this deadly success—the elation that men in war zones are said to feel. Fonda will receive a Bronze Star for his part in this and similar engagements. The citation lauds his “keen intelligence, untiring energy, and conscientious application to duty.… His conduct and performance of duty throughout were outstanding and in keeping with the highest traditions of the Naval Service.”

The second event occurs at dusk on June 21, 1945. According to the navy’s Office of Public Information, the
Curtiss
is “operating in the Southern Ryukyus Islands, near Okinawa,” when lookouts report a kamikaze at eight hundred yards. It strikes the
Curtiss
’s starboard side seconds later and explodes a half-ton bomb. “The engine, part of the tail assembly and the heavy bomb ripped through the skin of the ship, opening two gaping holes and exploding on the third deck,” the OPI report reads. The sick bay, officers’ mess, pantry, library, and other areas are destroyed; fires threaten to detonate the ship’s own bomb- and ammunition-storage magazines. It takes the crew an hour to extinguish the blaze, with the help of nearby salvage vessels. In the end, twenty-eight men have been killed and twenty-one wounded.

Among the areas destroyed on impact is the stateroom occupied by Fonda and his bunk mate. But on the night of June 21, the two happen to have been on shore leave on Guam. Here, in the final weeks of the war—midway between V-E and V-J days—Fonda is nearly claimed by the death he has thus far been able to evade.

The third event is Hiroshima. Fonda accompanies his intelligence superior to Tinian, where they brief the crew of the bomber
Enola Gay
on weather conditions. The B-29 that carries the atomic bomb is, like Henry, a product of Omaha, where its captain, Col. Paul Tibbets, Jr., has personally selected it from the Martin Aircraft assembly line. The meeting itself is brief and businesslike, barely worthy of remembrance beyond being a tick mark on the agenda of the long-planned dropping of the bomb.

Fonda knows, though not clearly or completely, what the mission is really about—that the planes will drop something extraordinary, and that many will die. He probably hears the word Hiroshima. But he does not know enough to be prepared for the resultant blast and its human toll and moral aftereffects. The reality, when it dawns, “sort of took me back,” he remembers.