Pearl Harbor: 'Very Bitter' Housewife in '45 Notes Flaws in the Official Story
Relates that Losing Beloved Children Gives you a Different Perspective on War
Here’s a letter to Senator Homer Ferguson from Mrs. Paul Swager, aka Mrs. Mary Josephine Swager. In it, Mrs. Swager offers several incongruities about the Pearl Harbor story as of November 1945, when she writes. She writes with factual claims.
She relates that she is a bit biased: she has lost an adopted son when the USS Northampton sank, and her nephew came back from the war after being in the 34th Division “shell shocked” and not the same boy she sent off to war. In the letter she describes herself as “very bitter.”
The Northampton sank during the Guadalcanal campaign - here is its current location.
The current status of the Northampton, sitting in 650 meters of water.
The factual claims Mrs. Swager makes are interesting in their own right, but I think this letter, to me, captures the academic and media suppressed feelings of many at the time: extreme frustration and anger at the windup to global war where their precious children were sent into repeated meatgrinders.
There’s a certain glory to war and battles that is tempting, but ultimately naïve and immature. The homefront cost to violent wars is found in the lives and letters like this: people history forgot who suffered greatly as a result of politics and policies they had no part of.
Here are the main claims from Mrs. Swager’s November 14, 1945 letter:
Alaskan forces were put on alert 10 days prior to Pearl Harbor on December 7 with orders to shoot first, while Pearl wasn’t alerted.
Pearl Harbor forces were placed in inspection formation an hour before the Japanese struck, the first time that had happened on a Sunday.
Pearl Harbor was not patrolling the seas or skies for enemies, and had just one
destroyer on patrol. Command also lowered the submarine nets, suspiciously.
The orders to line up the airplanes on the ground came from Washington, and though they were for ‘inspection’, there was no practical way to do that.
Her letter received a canned, form letter response, from Senator Ferguson’s office.
With the benefit of time, we can now see that Mrs. Swager lived from 1900-1957.
We can even see her death record, available at familysearch.org. She died 12 years after writing the letter to Senator Ferguson.
On that death record we can see that she died at age 57 from a narcotic overdose, and was a known addict at the time.
One can only speculate the degree to which the wartime loss of her adopted son, and the ruin of her nephew in battle, contributed to her demise.