(RADM Donald “Mac” Showers at Pearl Harbor last June. Photo Dave Showers).
It was Halloween yesterday and All Souls Day today. It is an appropriate one for Mac’s memorial ceremony at the Faith Lutheran Church down Route 50.
I am really disoriented- Admiral Paul stopped by Willow yesterday afternoon at cocktail hour and Old Jim called me on the cell to summon me from my desk at the office to chat at The Amen Corner.
The Macaroon Lady flew in from California to attend the service, and the regulars entertained her. Then Mac’s whole clan arrived, some in costume for the occasion, and we had plenty of wine and a fine meal in the dining room to commemorate the occasion. I clomped home later than usual and grateful to have power and now the internet.
So, the storm is in the wake. On to the next thing, which is to find the bits of cloth and metal that will complete a Service Dress Blue uniform.
I jotted down some words for the ceremony. Here they are. It is not enough and it is not particularly eloquent. But it is certainly how we all feel:
“It is a signal honor to be asked to talk a bit about the military career of our pal Mac. I still cannot quite believe that he is gone. When you knew the Admiral, in time you just came to assume that he was eternal.
It was important for Mac to help people understand things. He certainly helped me.
We starting talking several years ago. I enjoyed his company, and he enjoyed the beer, back when he could still get his doctor to agree to let him drink one or two, and we spent hours and hours talking about his life and times.
As you might imagine, he had his stories down pretty well after seven decades, and I enjoyed mixing things up. Sometimes we would start on one thing and wind up somewhere else- like life in Depression-era Iowa, with the banks closed and only a barter economy enabling people to get by.
That he had to bring his recruiting officer to meet his mother Hedwig in order to get her permission for him to enlist.
I think you know the amazing events in which he played a part. The three that everyone knows are the first even fight in the Pacific at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Then the triumph of the code-breaker’s art in the epic Battle off Midway Atoll. Before that encounter, the Americans never won a battle against the Imperial Japanese, and after it, they never lost one.
You all have heard the story about how Station HYPO identified Admiral Yamamoto’s flight itinerary and enabled Air Corps P-38s to intercept and shoot him down in the Solomons in April of 1943. It is still controversial, though it was not to Admiral Nimitz at the time. “Kill the S.O.B.,” he said.
On the way through these famous tales, I found some things that just plain amazed me.
Mac was a Deck Officer- what we would know now as a Surface Warfare officer- though he never served on a ship. Big Navy had no idea what Station HYPO was up to, and periodically they would ask Mac to go to sea. As part of that, legendary submarine skipper “Mush” Morton asked him to go on a war cruise on USS Wahoo as a sort of orientation to the art of submarine warfare.
Mac mentioned that to me one evening as I was settling up my tab at Willow, and I casually asked him what happened.
“Jasper Holmes would not let me go. The guy I was supposed to relieve got off the sub, and they had to go one officer short in the wardroom. Good thing. They never came back.”
Which brings me around to the notion of fate. We agreed that much of his legendary career- at least at the beginning- was dumb luck. Half his class at Investigation School- the top of the alphabet- was ordered to Corregidor. In other words, from graduation to prisoners of war, just like that. Mac went to Pearl, just eight weeks after the attack, and the great ships still sunk in the mud of the harbor.
Dumb luck that the Officer in Charge of the Counter-intelligence office in Honolulu was unimpressed with Mac’s experience, and sent him off to that obscure billet working for Joe Rochefort.
By 1945 he was with Fleet Admiral Nimitz, closing the ring on the Empire of Japan in Operation Starvation, slipping target nominations on the sly to General Curtis “Iron Pants” LeMay.
Walking around Yokosuka, Japan, five days after the surrender on a “courier” mission that his boss Eddie Layton arranged so he could see it. That is where that giant Japanese flag that is out at ONI came from, traded for a bottle of Three Feathers Whiskey to a young Marine guarding the last floating Japanese Battleship, IJN Nagato.
Amazing at every turn. After the war, bumping by chance into Admiral Forrest Sherman in the halls of Main Navy the very week of the transfer board that would establish the new structure of Naval Intelligence, and becoming an intelligence officer.
Convincing Marshall Tito’s people that he should have lunch with the Yugoslav leader in The White Palace.
Turning a so-so assignment at the Intelligence School at Anacostia into the first OPINTEL course.
Suggesting his colleague Rufus Taylor to transfer to intelligence at Arlington Hall Station. Ruf became the first intelligence professional to become the DNI.
At First Fleet, deciding to provide target materials to Navy pilots assigned to carry atomic weapons to the Soviet Union.
Returning to Pacific Fleet Headquarters as the Fleet Intelligence Officer- the same job in which Eddie Layton served in World War 2- to confront the conflict in SE Asia. Then Washington again, and Purple Dragon and the Pueblo Damage Assessment, and that big deal we are still not supposed to talk about.
And that is where we wander into things he preferred not to speak about on the record, but for which he was recruited to CIA by the legendary Bronson Tweedy, turning in his letter to retire on December 31, 1971.
I have paper napkins and notebooks with all of it, and since Mac reviewed them all, I feel that the unofficial and un-foot noted story will be true and accurate.
When he was done with government service in 1983, he started a third career. His experience with the cruelest disease- Alzheimer’s- helped me through the decline and loss of my Dad.
I am going to miss him a lot. When I was typing this, I had the weirdest sense that I needed to call him up and ask him a question.
At the end of the day, what Mac Showers did was make a career out of helping people to understand things. What a man he was, and what a legacy. We were all honored to have shared the planet with him, and I am absolutely confident that I will see him again for liberty on the other shore.
So long, Shipmate.”
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com