Good Night Officially: The Pacific War Letters of a Destroyer Sailor, the Letters of Yeoman James Orvill Raines

"27 March 1945 ... Hello baby darling: We're at sea again. The jumping, rolling, tossing sea again. My belly isn't the only thing with the jitters this time. They affect my whole body. Okinawa. Just looking at it on the map breaks us out in a cold sweat. Okinawa spells Kamikaze Corps to us. Somebody's gotta get it and we may be lucky or unlucky. You see, the Navy loses a lot of men but you don't particularly hear about it. ..."
These are the words of Orvill Raines, a newspaperman in civilian life, who now found himself in the uniform of a Yeoman Second Class on the destroyer Howorth and smack in the middle of the Pacific war. From his assignment to the ship in April 1944 until his death one year later in a kamikaze attack off Okinawa, Orvill Raines wrote a remarkable series of letters to his young bride, Ray Ellen. His perceptive, uncensored correspondence shows us, with a directness that no conventional history could hope to match, the horrific experiences shared by thousands of American seamen who fought "the good war" against the Japanese half a century ago.
Special arrangements with the officer responsible for censoring his letters enabled Raines to candidly chronicle the war as he and his shipmates knew it. His keen and literate observations provide a rare glimpse of the everyday world of the enlisted sailor - a world permeated by boredom and routine, camaraderie and high jinks, but regularly punctuated by the frantic action and intense terror of combat.
And the Howorth's crew saw plenty of combat. The reconquest of the Philippines, where Raines's strongest memory is of the continual parade of floating bodies in Leyte Gulf; the twenty-four days spent firing on the entrenched Japanese on the stark, volcanic hell of Iwo Jima; and the bloody invasion of Okinawa are just some of the dramatic engagements that Raines witnessed and recorded.
There is a deeply personal side to these letters as well. They tell of Orvill's adoration and longing for Ray Ellen (faced with a lengthy and uncertain separation, they promised to bid each other an "official good night" every evening) and of his aspirations for a better life after the war. Knowing the author's fate renders these hopes and dreams even more poignant. Orvill's last letter - to be opened only in the event of his death - is the most touching of all, as he bids his beloved Ray Ellen a final "goodbye, officially."
The letters are carefully edited and superbly set in their historical context by William M. McBride. Good Night Officially is a tribute to the genuine heroism of the millions of ordinary men who served their country in World War II and a fitting remembrance of the squandered potential and tragic sacrifice made by hundreds of thousands of Americans in a war of unparalleled ferocity.

The destroyer USS Howorth , commissioned in 1944, took part in 11 shore bombardments, destroyed 12 Japanese warplanes, and won battle stars in the Philippines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa campaigns. Yeoman Second Class Orvill Raines's remarkably expressive letters to his wife convey in vivid detail what it was like to serve aboard a "tin can" in an increasingly dangerous war zone. He writes of the daily routine of ship and crew, his struggle against boredom and homesickness, his dreams of the postwar future, and periods of stark terror as Japanese kamikazes began to stalk the fleet. Raines, a former Dallas Morning News reporter, was 26 years old and passionately in love with his wife of four years, Ray Ellen. His expressions of devotion ("I kiss the lipstick you put on your letters . . . and feel your heavenly body next to mine") are universal and poignant in the context of a war he would not survive. McBride, professor of history at James Madison University in Virginia, has done an excellent job of editing, footnoting and putting the letters in historical context. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Orvill Raines was a happily married Texas newspaperman before he joined the navy in 1943. He served aboard the Fletcher-class destroyer USS Howorth from early 1944 until his death in action when his ship was hit by a Japanese suicide plane off Okinawa in 1945. He left behind a mass of letters to his wife, letters so full of affection that one sometimes feels like a voyeur reading them. As Raines was both older and more articulate than many enlisted men, his letters offer abundant testimony about the boredom, stress, small-group politics, hardships, and occasional luxuries of the Pacific war destroyer fleet. There is comparatively little material available on the enlisted man's naval war. As an example of such, this volume for the moment deserves to rank with James Fahey's Pacific War Diary and Thomas Heggen's classic novel, Mister Roberts. Roland Green