Interview with an Author – Don Caldwell

Don Caldwell is the author of seven books on the Luftwaffe including three on Jagdgeschwader 26 (JG26), one of the German fighter wings facing Great Britain on the coast of France from 1940 onwards. He has new book out called Thunder on Bataan: The First American Tank Battles of World War II *.

We took a few minutes to talk to him this week:

Heather Steele: I’ve read your Luftwaffe books and really enjoyed them. I know that this book is really different from those Luftwaffe books, and I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about your inspiration to do this story about the first American tank battles of World War II?

Don Caldwell: I can credit one man who really got me interested in this – Tony Medahl’s his name – we were email correspondents. He was researching the 8^th Air Force, and I had a lot of Luftwaffe data, of course. After corresponding for quite a while, I found out he was an Ohio National Guardsman and had an enormous amount of material that he had accumulated on a unit that I had never heard of.

I found out he was an experienced researcher. He had worked for Joe Galloway and Iris Chang, among others, knew what he was doing, but he didn’t like to write. He had never written a book. He was very ill with cancer and wanted to know if I was interested in maybe turning this into a book. After I looked at the material, I said “yeah.”  It was very challenging; it was a unit it was totally new to me; but I was ready for something other than Luftwaffe. I’d written seven books on the Luftwaffe, and had run out of unused material. Could I do something else?

The Provisional Tank Group had a number of unique aspects to it. It comprised six light tank companies from state National Guard divisions, originally headquartered in small towns in the six states. The group was sent to the Philippines when rapid expansion was attempted in the months before Pearl Harbor.

The six tank companies each contained 17 M3 light tanks and various ancillary materials. The equipment was all brand new, which was kind of surprising to me, sent overseas to be sacrificed. The unit did very well, but they were doomed.  After they men surrendered, their treatment as POWs is well known. Their treatment after they came back was new to me, however, and of great of interest to me. So this is why I took on the project – I decided to see what I what I could do with the material that Tony supplied me.

Heather: When you started to dig into the research and start writing, how challenging was it? You’re so familiar with the Luftwaffe stuff, and this is digging into somebody else’s research, and you have very little initial familiarity with it. What was that like?

Don:  The history itself wasn’t all that challenging. I’m an experienced historian. That’s been a hobby of mine for sixty years or so, since I was a teenager. I have an extensive library, and I’m familiar with using the internet for research, but I was never in the army, had never been inside of a tank. So, I was kind of concerned about the technical aspects of what I was doing. I asked for a technical read of the manuscript, and apparently technically it’s okay.

Heather: It can be something that really sucks you in.

Don: Yeah, it does.

Heather:  Why do you think the Pacific has been so neglected?

Don: The policy of Europe-first, Germany-first was decreed by Roosevelt and the military before Pearl Harbor. This was American strategy. Germany was always considered the most important adversary, the most dangerous adversary. I’ll have to say there is quite a bit of racism involved here, but the E.T.O. took a larger percentage of our resources, a larger percentage of our casualties, and that’s just where the interest is has lain from 1941 until the present. Also, it was a lot easier to find correspondents to send to England and later the European continent than to Peleliu or Tarawa.

Heather: What’s so important about remembering these men and the battles that they took part in?

Don:  These particular guys in this particular campaign are important to me, because they were nearly all volunteers, Guardsmen. They were just guys. They put themselves in a mortal danger in an unprepared theater of operations to buy a time for the U.S.A. to halt the expansion of the Japanese Empire while the U.S. expanded this its own military to the point that it could overwhelm the Japanese in future years.

The Provisional Tank Group was of interest for a number of reasons. It was the first American unit to take armor overseas in World War II. Its new tanks entered battle in a very inhospitable environment, in a mountainous tropical jungle, with no tactical doctrine, which it developed and then radioed back to the U.S. This doctrine was used in the Pacific Theater for the rest of the war.

Heather: Can you share with us one of the things you found most fascinating or interesting during the research and writing of the book?

Don: One’s gonna be tough. Some of the things I learned were political as much as military. It was very startling to find out that when the U.S. decided to reinforce the Philippines, they sent National Guard units. They didn’t send Regular Army. We sent and lost virtually the entire New Mexico National Guard – they were in a coast artillery unit, which had been updated to an anti-aircraft unit.

I chose twenty key men for various reasons. They all had different backgrounds and different experiences. One of the most interesting, Bill Gentry, was a lieutenant who wound up in C Company of the 192nd Tank Battalion, one of the two battalions in the Group. He had a typical background, but a pretty atypical career itself. He joined the Harrodsburg, Kentucky tank company in 1936. He got a commission by taking correspondence courses, which was typical of Guardsmen. The Regular Army hated Guardmen for a variety of reasons, this is one of them. They were just not as well-educated in the military sphere as the Regular Army.

When the guard was federalized in late 1940 four tank companies were ordered to Fort Knox. Gentry was an electronics hobbyist and made head of the radio school at Fort Knox. Before shipment overseas Gentry was named head of the communications detachment of the 192^nd Tank Battalion and given a large extra supply of men and materiel – it turns out that he was to set up a school for Philippine army radio men. He was given the job of assistant platoon leader in C Company when the company commander broke down completely when the Japanese invaded. He was the key commander in the major battle of the retreat to Bataan, the battle of Baliuag.

He survived the Death March with the help of friends. The Provisional Tank Group guys, their camaraderie was so great. In 1944 he became extremely ill with dysentery, and remained at Cabanatuan when most of the men were shipped to Japan and most of them died on the Hell Ships. He escaped that and was rescued by the most successful Ranger raid of the war. He was brought back to the States and became a very popular speaker at war bond rallies. He started out with virtually no formal education, and wound up very successful commander.

Virtually all of the men came back with P.T.S.D., which of course was not diagnosed. Most of them had bad experiences with the V.A. A large number of them had brought back vitamin deficiency diseases especially pellagra, which was one of the worst. The V.A. was totally incapable of diagnosing or treating them.

Some came out of it just ok. A lot of them came out of it as alcoholics, never were able to hold a job.

Heather: What other plans do you have for this book?

Don: I’ve been invited to give a talk to a World War II roundtable in Minneapolis in April. I hope the snow is melted by then. You know, I’m in Texas, I’m not used to it.

Heather:  You’ve got it good! Thanks so much for your time, it was really great to talk to you. Good luck with the new book.

Don: Thank you.

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