Tommy: A World War II Novel
by William Illsey Atkinson
ECW Press, 2012, 184 pages
Archibald Atkinson, nicknamed Tommy, served aboard the light aircraft carrier
USS Bataan (CVL-29) from her commissioning on November 17, 1943, through
the end of World War II. According to his son and this novel's author William
Illsey, his father Tommy had started to sketch a fictional account of his life
as far back as the mid-1990s, but no explanation is provided as to why he
favored fiction over a biographical memoir. His son, a science writer and
columnist who has authored several novels, completed his father's fictional sketch and
turned it into a well-written novel with realistic crisp dialog and interesting
plot turns. Tommy covers from his childhood in California and Oregon through the
return of Bataan from Japan to Boston Naval Shipyard on October 30, 1945.
With a unique perspective in comparison to most war fiction, the hero is an
accomplished mathematician. Tommy excels in his mathematics and science courses
at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he graduates in 1934 but does not enter the
Navy due to a dearth of positions during the depression. He next completes the
MBA program at MIT's Sloan School, where he meets Feathers Mason, who
becomes a good friend and also serves aboard Bataan with Tommy as a fleet
liaison for CINCPAC (Commander in Chief, Pacific Command) Intelligence. Japan's
attack on Pearl Harbor puts Tommy back into the Navy but not where he expected.
He becomes a professor of mathematics and navigation at the University of
Michigan to teach classes to Navy men.
When he gets assigned to the light aircraft carrier Bataan, he uses
his mathematical genius to create anti-aircraft protocol to protect the ship
from incoming enemy planes by solving differential equations for minimum risk
and maximum protection. When the chief navigator gets arrested for misconduct
including being drunk on duty and uttering physical threats, the captain asks
Tommy to replace him and also to assist with the training of the gun crews. He
quickly becomes an expert at gunnery even though that is not his specialty, and
his anti-aircraft defense ideas and his intense training of the gun crews lead
to Bataan's surviving unscathed from enemy attacks.
In this fictional account, the Japanese kamikaze aircraft do not start to
attack the American fleet until Okinawa. Atkinson explains that he made some
changes in historical dates and sequences of events in order to create a more
readable narrative. On April 1, 1945, the first day of the Allied invasion of
Okinawa, Bataan shoots down several kamikaze attackers. A Judy dive bomber
misses Bataan's stern by only 18 inches as Tommy takes over steering the
ship to avoid the Japanese kamikaze when the young helmsman freezes at the
incoming plane. The Bataan crewmen witness the bombing of the carrier
Franklin, and one of the CAP (Combat Air Patrol) fighters from Bataan
chases and shoots down the Japanese plane that dropped the bomb. During
the battle with Japanese planes, an American cruiser's gunfire hits Bataan
by mistake and kills seven men, including Tommy's friend Feathers, who Atkinson
explains in the Afterword is a totally fictional character. The rest of the book
blends fact and fiction, so the reader cannot tell where the truth about
Tommy's feats ends and the fiction begins.
Feathers describes the kamikaze suicide operations of the Japanese as
"fanaticism" and "crazy hate." He incorrectly explains that Ten-Go refers to the
Japanese strategic term for the kamikaze aircraft operations. Ten-Go actually
refers to the Japanese naval operation on April 6-7, 1945, when the battleship Yamato
and nine other ships headed from Japan's Seto Inland Sea toward Okinawa on a special
(suicide) attack mission. Feathers also mistakenly says that Ten-Go literally
means "floating chrysanthemums" when it actually means "operation heaven." The
Japanese word kikusui means "floating chrysanthemums" and was used by the
Japanese to name the ten mass kamikaze attacks made against the Allied fleet between April 6 and
June 22, 1945. The author incorrectly gives the date that planes from Bataan
assisted in the sinking of the battleship Yamato as April 6 rather than
the correct date of April 7, 1945, which cannot be attributed to his desire to
create a more readable narrative.
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