Before war struck, I was preoccupied with the routines of academic life at Yale—teaching and research with their modest rewards, departmental administration with its headaches, pleasant extra-curricular associations with my colleagues. The principal thrill was to observe (and participate in) the gradual upsurge by which Yale came to assume unquestioned leadership in the social sciences. [. . .] I wrote a little, imbibed a little, played some tennis, arbitrated a motion picture dispute, and instituted a fairly ambitious project called the Cross-Cultural Survey but dubbed by the New York Times a 'bank of knowledge.' Then came Pearl Harbor, the explosions of which reverberated even in academic halls. Through my chairmanship of the Oceania committee of the National Research Council I helped mobilize the country's anthropologists in the war effort. On the advice of the intelligence experts of the Army and Navy I converted the Cross-Cultural Survey into a fact-gathering organization on the Japanese-held islands of the Pacific. For the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs I organized and ran the Strategic Index of the Americas, a similar fact-gathering unit. Like so many of my colleagues I spent a good bit of my time running back and forth to Washington. Early in 1943, when the military program in the Pacific began to accelerate, the Navy Department urged me to speed up the research of the Cross-Cultural Survey and made a very generous offer of financial support. They urged me even more strongly, however, to give up my other commitments, to come into the Navy with my associates, and to do the job 'on the inside.' I said, 'Yes,' and within a week received a lieutenant commander's commission. [. . .] After a month of informal indoctrination at the Office of the Naval Intelligence in Washington I was assigned to the staff of the Naval School of Military Government at Columbia University. Here for fifteen months I managed a research unit at Yale which assembled all available information on the Pacific islands held by the Japanese, operated a second unit at Columbia which organized the information into a series of nine handbooks, and gave a course on the Pacific to military government officers. The last handbook, on the Ryukyu Islands, was (providentially) published just when it was decided to invade Okinawa, and I was sent out to Hawaii to join the staff of the Tenth Army in planning that operation. The planning complete, I was sent out to Okinawa as a military government officer. [. . .]
For two months, helped by one language officer, my job was to induce or drag the terror-stricken natives out of their mountain fastnesses into the coastal villages where we could house and feed them, give them medical attention, and get them back to a normal peace-time economy. [. . .] Like millions of my compatriots I have seen at first hand the heroism, cowardice, monotony, resourcefulness, inefficiency, and frustration of which war is compounded. [. . .] I was transferred to the headquarters of military government for Okinawa and the adjacent islands, being placed in charge first of political affairs and then of all civilian affairs, social and economic as well as political. My principal task was to organize an island-wide civilian council and to establish uniform local government throughout the area, during the course of which I organized and supervised two general elections. During this period my contacts were largely with the political, professional, and business leaders among the Okinawans. [. . .] By early October the pull for home was very strong, and I left Okinawa on a task force bound for Norfolk. We stopped en route for three or four days each at Singapore, Colombo, and Cape Town, where we were welcomed by the residents and wined and dined by the Royal Navy. Having completed a circuit of the world, I rejoined my family on December 7.