Hammett’s service in World War II was his second time through the Army during a major war. Born in 1894 in Maryland, he served stateside in the first World War and was discharged a corporal. His WWI service is notable above all for being the period during which he, like millions around the world, caught the Spanish flu. In Hammett’s case, the flu apparently aggravated a latent tuberculosis that plagued him for years (it came close to killing him) and prevented him from working. Having to be sedentary and needing money to support a young family, he began writing detective stories. … Hammett was 48, gaunt and still somewhat sickly when on the third try he convinced authorities to take him into the World War II Army.
HAMMETT’s WORLD WAR II CAREER
Some Key Dates
1942
Sept. 17—induction at Whitehall Street, NYC
Sept. 24 (approx.) to June 29, 1943—with the Signal Training Unit, Fort Monmouth, N.J.
1943
May 18—promoted to Corporal
July 1 through July 10—stationed at Camp Shenango, Transfer, Penn.
The Army sent to Camp Shenango many who it felt were subversive or otherwise undesirable, in addition to black troops and German POWs. These included Hammett, who had worked for the American Communist Party since about 1936, and Robert Colodny, who had fought for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Both Hammett and Colodny were eventually stationed in the Aleutians, on Adak. They co-authored the Army-published booklet The Battle of the Aleutians: A Graphic History, 1942-1943, with Hammett doing all the principal writing. Colodny also wrote columns for The Adakian, the soldiers newspaper started and edited by Hammett.
July 10—Hammett has his last drink. The following year he will fall off the wagon—spectacularly, according to a friend—when he visits Anchorage to learn his assignments as head of a morale-boosting orientation team.
July 12—at Fort Lewis, Wash.
July 31—At Fort Randall, Cold Bay, Alaska
August and September (approx.)—at Fort Glenn and/or Cape Field, Umnak Island, Aleutians.
Erwin Spitzer, the poet and novelist who worked with Hammett on Adak, writes that Hammett was part of a unit that worked in cryptoanalysis. If this is true, Hammett might have done such work at Fort Glenn.
Sept. 8—arrives on Adak.
Also arriving in September or October to take command of Adak Army Air Base is Brig. Gen. Harry Thompson, who liked to read mystery stories and who would give Hammett permission to start a daily newspaper for the post. Once the Japanese were defeated in the Aleutians campaign and evacuated the islands, many soldiers on Adak drifted into a severe malaise brought on by a monotonous and inhospitable environment and the sense that theirs was an unimportant role in the larger war. The camp newspaper and the Hammett orientation tours were elements of the ongoing project to lift the GIs’ spirits. Hammett took his role seriously. As an anti-fascist, he wanted nothing more than defeat of the Axis Powers.
Nov. 25—Hammett informs Lillian Hellman in a letter dated this day that The Battle of the Aleutians, the Hammett-Colodny account of the campaign that successfully drove the Japanese off of Attu and Kiska in the far Aleutians, is headed to a printer in San Francisco.
The publication, an 8-x-5.5-inch booklet produced by the Intelligence Section on Adak for soldiers and officers, is distributed the following year. Colodny would go on to say that it was heavily censored. Hammett is not known to have said much of anything about the booklet other than that he was proud of it even if no one should ever think it was War and Peace.
December—Hammett assembles his staff and starts planning his newspaper, The Adakian.
Hammett broke with military policy and hired two black men on his 10-man staff, Donald Lincoln and Alba Morris. Repercussions of Hammett’s contradiction of Army policy (members of his staff lived as well as worked together) were relatively mild compared with the deed. The U.S. military in Alaska, like American ranks everywhere, was segregated (not until 1948 was the military officially integrated). But there was generally more tolerance of blacks in the Alaska territory than elsewhere, even if they still received odious treatment as second-class citizens, according to some writers on the war in Alaska.
1944
Jan. 19—inaugural issue of The Adakian.
The first 10 issues of the paper are a trial run. In an editor’s note in the first edition, Hammett writes of the new publication:
This is not for general distribution. We don’t think it’s good enough. Neither will tomorrow’s be, nor the next day’s. After that we’ve got hopes. Meanwhile we’re going along on the theory that to turn out a good newspaper you’ve got to turn out a newspaper and then keep improving it.
And that’s what we’re doing. We want to give the Adak soldier—every morning—a paper that he will like to read and that will keep him as up-to-date as possible on what’s going on in his world.
Hammett would go on to write short articles or editor’s notes only occasionally, perhaps no more than 15 times over the entire 16 months of his assignment in the Aleutians. Most sported “DH” as a byline; some did not.
During the course of the year and into the next, the Hammett Orientation Team would undertake several tours up and down the Aleutian chain, also spending time in Anchorage, hoping to elevate morale among the troops by explaining the war and the Alaska role in it. He would go back and forth from Adak.
Summer—He spends more time in Anchorage where he takes up with several women and returns to drinking. He invests in a bar, Corrine’s, which he later gives outright to Corrine, the African-American woman who manages it for him and with whom Hammett is carrying on a casual affair.
Dec. 14—receives a letter of commendation for The Adakian.
1945
Feb. 12—visits Russ and Rusty Dow of Anchorage at their log home in Bootlegger Cove, overlooking Cook Inlet.
Hammett’s companion is Jean Potter, a young writer who is researching aviation in the territory of Alaska, a book that will be published as The Flying North and dedicated to Hammett in gratitude for his knowing eye as an editor.
Benzie Ola “Rusty” Dow is a military contractor, the first woman to drive the length of the Alaska-Canada Military Highway (also the first woman to pass through the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel to Whittier). Russell Dow, a ski instructor for Fort Richardson troops, is an adventurer who accompanied Bradford Washburn on some of Washburn’s early Alaska expeditions. After the war, the Dows will move back to their home in Palmer.
At the close of the visit, Hammett writes in the Dows’ guest book: “Thanks for one of the kind of afternoons that make Alaska Alaska.” Next to his signature, Rusty Dow (presumably) wrote, “author of ‘The Slim Man,’” a reference to Hammett’s hit 1934 novel The Thin Man. The Anchorage log house, which had been constructed on the bluff as a lookout for potential Japanese invaders, would stand until the 1990s when the Alaska Railroad tore it down.
March—Hammett is denounced for his left-wing views in The Chicago Tribune.
April 2—date of the introduction that Hammett writes to Wind Blown and Dripping, a booklet of cartoons by Oliver Pedigo, Bernie Anastasia and Donald Lincoln.
Pedigo, Anastasia and Lincoln were cartoonists for The Adakian (Hammett was big on cartoons and wrote many of the captions himself). Each chose 50 of his cartoons that had appeared in the paper to include in this unofficial Army publication. Hammett, perhaps with contributions from others on the paper’s staff, paid for the printing. The general in command of Adak, who had replaced Gen. Thompson, gave his blessing to the publication but not until he changed the title from the original “All Wet and Dripping” (a phrase from one of the cartoon captions), which had been chosen by Hammett and his staffers. The booklet bears no mention or stamp of the Army or the War Department.
April 16—leaves Adak never to return.
Mid-June—a month-long tour of other military facilities in Alaska.
June 27—promoted to master sergeant (tec 3)
July 9—rest in Edmonton, Alberta.
It is during his stay in comparatively luxury in Edmongton that he apparently feels the urge to resign and go back to civilian life.
July—a congressional subcommittee is incensed to learn that Hammett, who has communist connections, is editing an Army post newspaper.
Aug. 28—returns to the States.
Sept. 6—honorably discharged.
Hammett, who died January 10, 1961, at the age of 66, is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
