Writing in Wartime: Robert L. Sherrod and Tarawa

Late in the afternoon of March 7, 1944, Robert L. Sherrod, a reporter who had been covering the war in the Pacific for Time and Life magazines, boarded an Eastern Airlines plane for a flight from New York to Washington, D.C.

Sherrod was in a good mood because his first book, Tarawa:The Story of a Battle, detailing his experiences with the Second Marine Division battling Japanese troops on Beito Island in the Tarawa Atoll, had just been published—an event, he noted, that “lives in the memory, like the day I was married, the day my first child was born, the day I got my diploma.” That same day the book had received a glowing review in the New York Times, with the reviewer, John Chamberlain, writing that Sherrod’s work marked the first “real book-length introduction to what war can actually mean to a peace-loving people.”

As Sherrod settled happily into his seat, he turned and noticed that sitting next to him was a skinny navy lieutenant who looked too young to be a veteran of combat. Sherrod was astonished to see that the officer was carrying a copy of his new book. He took all of five minutes before he turned and asked the officer his opinion about what he was reading. “It’s O. K.,” the young veteran said, “pretty bloody but that’s the way it is out there.”

The officer, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, went on to explain that he had just been released from a naval hospital on Staten Island and was on his way to Florida to visit with his family. One thing that Kennedy forgot to mention, Sherrod recalled later, was his heroic exploits after his Patrol Torpedo boat (PT-109) had been sliced in half by a Japanese destroyer, the Amagiri, one dark night in August 1943 in the Solomon Islands. For his courage during the ordeal, Kennedy had earned the Navy and Marine Corps medal.

After Sherrod introduced himself as the book’s author, Kennedy passed his copy over to him and asked him to autograph it for his mother, Rose. It was the start of a nineteen-year acquaintance between the two men that ended at a White House luncheon President John Kennedy gave for Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia in October 1963—just a month before Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. “You were my first fan,” Sherrod reminded the president.

Sherrod’s book had its start on December 14, 1943, when he received a contract from the publishing firm of Duell, Sloan and Pearce for delivery of an approximately 40,000-word manuscript about Tarawa to its offices before February 1, 1944. As he prepared to work on the book, which was based on notes he had taken while the battle still raged around him and without the benefit of any official documents, Sherrod kept one thought in the back of his mind: To tell “wishful-thinking Americans that war is not always the romantic, smashing adventure the afternoon newspaper headlines make it; nor is it a duel that is won by swarms of high-flying airplanes. War is a cruel, desperate necessity which calls for courage and suffering. It is too bad, but it is true.”

The editor Sherrod worked with, Charles A. Pearce, had high hopes for the book’s success, writing Sherrod early in December, “The more I think about your book the more convinced I am that it is going to be a very much needed contribution and I wish we had it in hand to send off to the printer today.” Although he noted that war books had enjoyed an “uneven fate,” with some selling extremely well and others faring badly, Pearce promised Sherrod that his book would be the biggest on the publisher’s spring 1944 list and would be given “the absolute, fullest backing from the home office in advertising and promotion.”

In outlining his plans for the project, Sherrod said that although many people were trying to find someone to blame for what the heavy casualties that had occurred on Beito, the battle had been won “by sheer courage—when the Marines had nothing else to fall back on, they had courage.” The correspondent also noted that although his work would not be the best-written book of the war—he usually revised his work two or three times but would not have the time to do that with this book—he firmly believed it would be “one of the most exciting books of the war, and I believe it will be the best covered battle story of the war because I lived through every minute of it and I experienced it as thoroughly as anybody on the island did.”

Sherrod urged Pearce to be prepared to have the book printed as soon as possible, as the Marine Corps had asked him to help with a book by its own correspondents about Tarawa—an offer he had declined. Also, it might not be long before “there will be other battles perhaps bigger and bloodier than Tarawa. It seems we should strike while the name is hot.”

The reporter had received permission from his superior at Time, T. S. Matthews, to proceed with his Tarawa project, and Matthews agreed to review the manuscript when finished, making a suggestion here, turning over a paragraph there, crossing out a few words, and marking certain passages “this doesn’t make sense.” To make doubly sure of his accuracy, Sherrod brought aboard Mabel Schubert, who had served as fact checker on some of his articles for Time. He told her not to hesitate to make corrections when needed. “I’d rather have it right than come out ahead of the other books about Tarawa,” he said.  Before going to the printer, the manuscript would also have had to pass a review by the U.S. Navy’s book censor in Washington, D.C., Lieutenant Commander Harold Say.

Sherrod, who had rented a room in a downtown Washington, D.C., hotel to have the solitude necessary for writing, made sure to let Allen Grover, a vice president at Time Inc. and assistant to publisher Henry Luce, know about his new project. “I think it is a story that should be written,” Sherrod explained to Grover. “The people are wise enough to know that their own press has misled them these past two years—like their own sons overseas, they are beginning to suspect that we actually have not been knocking [the] hell out of ’em the past two years.” The manuscript should be finished by January 15, 1944, Sherrod estimated, and he expected to be back in the magazine’s New York office by February 1.

Grover gave his blessing to the project, but did express some reservations, noting that sometimes, when Time’s writers used their vacations to write books, they would “write themselves out—and return to the magazine stripped of ideas, emotion and vigor. But I know you have a hell of a supply of all three, so I’m not worried.” Sherrod wrote Glover back telling him not to worry, noting he should have the opportunity to get a couple of weeks’ rest before returning to his Time duties in early February. “You see the pressure is on me,” Sherrod said. “But I think I’ll make it.” He even anticipated being able to work on the book as he flew to Detroit, Michigan, on January 10 to make a speech before the Automotive Engineers Society.

By January 9, Sherrod had reached the halfway point in his work, and was racing madly to meet his deadline. “My wife, who is actually my severest critic,” Sherrod wrote Pearce, “thinks that first half is swell. She likes practically nothing I write, so I don’t know whether to be comforted or not.” Sherrod was less sanguine about his progress in an earlier letter to an officer friend in San Francisco, Captain C. A. Woodrum Jr. of the Fifth Amphibious Corps, admitting that the work “is killing me.” Although it seemed simple enough to write a narrative on a subject for which he had fairly complete notes, Sherrod had found it “awfully hard to put words between two hard covers.”

His publisher had high expectations for the Tarawa book, believing it would be read by more people than war correspondent Richard Tregaskis’s 1943 best-seller Guadalcanal Diary, later made into a film with the same title, or any other book yet produced about the war. As a “gloomy fellow,” however, Sherrod could not “see any reason to share their optimism.” Sherrod and his publisher did agree on one thing—a title. As he had worked on his manuscript, the correspondent had suggested “Report from Tarawa,” but later agreed with Pearce on the sales conference’s consensus, “Tarawa: The Story of a Battle,” noting, “it suits me.”

By January 19 Sherrod found himself still 4,000 to 5,000 words short in spite of working for thirty-six straight hours and finishing 144 pages. He faulted himself for repeating too many verbs, but noted there were only so many he could use to describe bombing and shelling in his dazed state of mind. “I have used the word ‘fucking,’ which my wife objects to strenuously and I don’t like overly,” he admitted to Pearce. “I have used the word ‘ass,’ which is a favorite Marine word several times. Perhaps too many times. But I’m in favor of retaining it where no other word can very well be substituted.”

Sherrod did express some confidence in the book’s chances with the public. “This is no masterpiece,” he said, “but it is factual reporting to a degree that hasn’t been done before. And the evaluation is solid, I’m sure, after talking to the smartest officers I know.” By late January, Sherrod had finished, and celebrated his achievement by traveling to Hot Springs, Virginia, for a well-earned rest, sleeping sixteen hours one night, twelve hours the night before, and fourteen hours the night before that, he wrote Matthews.

Published on March 7, 1944, with a first printing of 25,000 copies, Sherrod’s Tarawa: The Story of a Battle, proved to be a hit with the critics, the public, and the military, having to go into a second printing of 15,000 copies by the end of the month and edging into the best-seller lists of the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune—all this for a book whose last thirty-some pages listed the names of those who were killed or wounded in action on Beito.

By the first of May Sherrod could report to John E. Drewry, his old journalism teacher at the University of Georgia, that the book had done far better than he had expected, with its first three printings totaling 50,000 copies having sold out. (Later, the book appeared in a dozen languages, including Hungarian and Serbo-Croat, and sold five times as many copies when it was printed in Japanese in 1950 than it had in English, noted Sherrod.) “Booksellers generally think the public is fed up with war books, and I am frankly surprised that mine is doing as well as it is,” Sherrod wrote a friend.

The book’s initial success had been spurred in part by a positive notice from one of the country’s most respected critics, Edmund Wilson, whose reviews appeared in The New Yorker magazine. Wilson called Tarawa an “altogether exceptional book produced by a war correspondent,” as it eschewed the usual “vices of journalism, and provides perhaps the best first-hand description of action that has yet come out of the war.” The battle, he continued, had been reported by Sherrod “in all its misery, mischance, and confusion just as it was lived through by one man. Not, however, that Mr. Sherrod is particularly interested in himself; he differs from certain other reporters of wars in not being at all preoccupied with his own reactions to danger; he merely notes, along with other things, as details of the general picture, his frights or forgetfulness of bullets. He sets down what people say, what they do, how they look.”

John Chamberlain of the New York Times reiterated Wilson’s view, describing Sherrod’s effort as “the first real book-length introduction to what war can actually mean to a peace-loving people,” capturing, as it did, the sights, noise, and smell of battle."