Vivid Violence

TORPEDO 8--Ira Wolfert--Houghton Mifflin ($2).

Torpedo 8, fruit of NANA Correspondent Ira Wolfert's three-month stay in the South Pacific, is a report of U.S. air fighting in the Solomons. Terse and nerve-tingling, the book communicates the stab-&-run violence of aerial battle with a verbal violence as calculated and vivid as an explosion.

"In about the time it takes to stamp out a pile of ants," Number 8 of the Navy's torpedoplane squadrons was utterly smashed by ack-ack and Zeros at the Battle of Midway. "The squadron was like a raw egg thrown into an electric fan, and only three men came out of the action alive." Reformed, Torpedo 8 was flung straight into the Battle for the Solomons under the leadership of ardent, painstaking "Swede" Larsen. Armed with stubby Grumman Avengers, Torpedo 8 changed its old slogan from "Attack" to "Attack--and Vengeance."

Dispensers of Death. Revenge, and how they got it, is Author Wolfert's story. Not that the men of Torpedo 8 were romantically vengeful: they were "astonishingly practical, very realistic and hardheaded." When asked to volunteer for near-suicide missions, they and their fellow airmen would withdraw to ponder upon the matter. They volunteered "only when, independently of their officers, they decide [d] the possible gain [was] worth the probable loss." They knew that launching torpedoes from the bellies of their fat little craft meant "going in fast and low and drawing their planes across the mouths of the enemy guns, as if their planes were handkerchiefs wiping off those foaming, frantically chattering mouths." But since they had "been men a much longer time than they had been soldiers," their calm masked "veritable paroxysms of nerves."

Hardheaded Suicides. Torpedo 8 was one of the first American squadrons "to use Guadalcanal for the purpose for which it was taken--as an unsinkable aircraft carrier anchored in the throat of Japan's South Pacific conquests." They learned to know "the groove"--a' long strait down which the Jap Navy escorted its transports to the beach and on whose blue waters lay "a great glitter of sunlight . . . making ships as difficult to spot as pins in a tray of diamonds." On Aug. 24, in the Second Battle for the Solomons, Torpedo 8 went out to revenge Midway.

They found their target in the evening. "Four heavy cruisers steamed abeam in the center of the force. Three . . . light cruisers were aft of them and three forward. ... Six destroyers champed and pawed around them in, a rough, diamond-shaped formation, so that whichever way a plane came in there would be hoofs in its face."

"Get the nearest big one," said Swede Larsen over the radio, and these "were the only words uttered by anybody during the whole attack." Northwest of the target hung a purple curl of cloud. Torpedo-planes sheltering in it would have a vital 20 seconds' protection from the Jap gun ners before emerging on the very nose of the target.

Swede made for the cloud. The squadron followed him in attack formation. On the ships below little orange lights flickered at him like fireflies. He watched them become "strange black chrysanthemum-shaped puffs of smoke [which] began to walk toward him, each flower-like puff with large hurtling chunks of steel for petals."

Arithmetic of Destruction. The Jap ships were dead ahead of them. Zeros were flashing from nearby clouds, scud streaming off their wings. Torpedo 8's plummeting craft were so low "a man could hang his hat on them." Twenty thousand eyes, thought Swede, must be watching from the decks below, ten thousand minds trying to estimate what he and his mates would do. "And there the torpedo pilot sits, throwing his plane around with both hands and both feet, his eyes flitting from enemy plane to enemy ships to target to waves to altimeter to speedometer, his brain racing through the arithmetic of destruction and the arithmetic of conservation . . . and with all his reflexes working at once, thrusting past, around, and through each other, like the notes of some terrible symphony . . . that he must conduct . . . with utter flawlessness, knowing well that one flaw will kill him." Square in the Belly . Now he had reached the tremendous climax. Suddenly "the whole setup swam sluggishly into focus" and through the water, "like a pencil stripe," ran the torpedo's wake and Swede was away, whipping, ducking, sashaying out of range of the angry guns. With a start Swede heard a voice in his earphones say: "Nice work, Swede. You got him square in the belly."

"In three months and one week," concludes Author Wolfert, "[Torpedo 8] carried out 39 attack missions. . . . They were credited with two carriers. They also hit a battleship, five heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, one destroyer, and one transport. . . . When there were no Jap ships to torpedo, they glide-bombed Japs on the ground." After one such bombing, the Marines found 407 enemy dead. The Author. Ever since his hasty birth in a bathtub (Manhattan, 1908), talented Author Wolfert has been in a hurry. In the last 19 months he breathlessly:

> Scooped the world (for NANA) on the Free French seizure of the isles of St. Pierre and Miquelon (TIME, Jan. 5, 1942).

> Won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of the Fifth Battle for the Solomons (TIME, Nov. 23).

> Achieved a Literary Guild selection with his best-selling Battle for the Solomons.

> Published his first novel (Tucker's People, a study of Harlem's policy racket and concomitant gangsterism), dubbed "the most thoughtful and talented novel" of the year by Manhattan's finicky Nation.

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