The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Lethal Tides: Mary Sears and the Marine Scientists Who Helped Win World War II by Catherine Musemeche

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

Lethal Tides: Mary Sears and the Marine Scientists Who Helped Win World War II by Catherine Musemeche "Magnificently researched, brilliantly written, Lethal Tides is immensely entertaining and reads like an action novel. Catherine Musemeche has brought to life the incredible work of the scientists and researchers who made such a remarkable contribution to America’s war effort in the Pacific theater during WWII.” —Admiral William H. McRaven (U.S. Navy, Ret.), #1 New York Times bestselling author of Make Your Bed and The Hero Code Lethal Tides tells the story of the virtually unknown Mary Sears, “the first oceanographer of the Navy,” whose groundbreaking oceanographic research led the U.S. to victory in the Pacific theater during World War II. In Lethal Tides, Catherine Musemeche weaves together science, biography, and military history in the compelling story of an unsung woman who had a dramatic effect on the U.S. Navy’s success against Japan in WWII, creating an intelligence-gathering juggernaut based on the new science of oceanography. When World War II began, the U.S. Navy was unprepared to enact its island-hopping strategy to reach Japan. Anticipating tides, planning for coral reefs, and preparing for enemy fire was new ground for them, and with lives at stake it was ground that had to be covered quickly. Mary Sears, a marine biologist, was the untapped talent they turned to, and she along with a team of quirky marine scientists were instrumental in turning the tide of the war in the United States’ favor. The Sears team analyzed ocean currents, made wave and tide predictions, identified zones of bioluminescence, mapped deep-water levels where submarines could hide and gathered information about the topography and surf conditions surrounding the Pacific islands and Japan. Sears was frequently called upon to make middle-of-the-night calculations for last-minute top-secret landing destinations and boldly predicted optimal landing times and locations for amphibious invasions. In supplying these crucial details, Sears and her team played a major role in averting catastrophes that plagued earlier amphibious landings, like the disastrous Tarawa, and cleared a path to Okinawa, the last major battle of World War II.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss i'm hulk savanzi from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com welcome my friends to the epic show the the show where your brain hurts and i don't know my brain hurts so i can't i can't recite whatever the hell he just said but just believe him that's what i always

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Love all the wonderful things you guys say about the show. And yeah, just keep it up. We love that stuff. Today, our newest author that she'll be having her book come out, August 23, 2022, Lethal Tides, Mary Sears and the Marine Scientists Who Helped Win World War II. mindful tides mary sears and the marine scientists who helped win world war ii katherine musa mita is michi is on the show with us today did i get your name right katherine that's close enough chris that's that was pretty good there you go so she will be on the show with us today as you

probably heard she's already snuck onto the show so i'm not sure why i'm putting her in back in the queue there but that's what we do so we can get to her bio because it's important to understand who she is, where she came from as we talk to her. She was trained at one of the elite children's hospitals in the country, Children's Memorial Hospital at Northwestern University in Chicago, Chicago with great pizza. She has been a pediatric surgeon for more than three decades. She also has an MBA from the Anderson School of Management at the University of New Mexico and a JD from the University of Texas School of Law. Her first book, Small, was long-listed for the E.O. Wilson Pen Literally Literary Science Award and was awarded the Texas Writers League Discovery Prize for nonfiction in 2015.

She also contributed to the New York Times and Motherlore blog, kevinmd.com, and EMS World, and she lives in Austin, Texas. What a great place for South by Southwest. Welcome, Michelle Catherine. How are you? Hey, I'm doing pretty good, Chris. Thanks for having me on. There you go. Thanks for coming on. We certainly appreciate it. Congratulations on the new book. Give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs and learn more about you. Well, the easy way to get to it is lethaltides.com, the title of the book, which links to my website, CatherineYusamichi.com.

There you go. So you've got the new book coming out. What motivated you to want to write this book? What struck your interest in this? You know, I came across the story of Mary Sears in a book I was reading about women in World War II, scientists in World War II, and I was actually researching another person, another woman I was going to write about. When I read about Mary Sears, I just could not believe everything she had done

and what an important role she had played in the war, and I had never heard of her. And at that point, I just had to find out more about her and more about the work that she did, and that's what led me to write the book. Awesome sauce. Awesome sauce. So give us an overview about the book and what's inside. Basically what this is about, it's about a woman scientist who is initially turned down, wants to join the waves, is initially turned down, finally does get into the waves and goes to work in the Navy's hydrographic office, where at first she's just working on some fairly routine sorts of assignments.

And then all of a sudden there is a problem in one of the battles, major battles of World War II called the Battle of Tarawa. And people start to realize, hey, oceanography is important. And we have one full-time oceanographer, and we better start paying attention to the reports that she's putting out. And she starts building up a bigger crew to work with her, and they start having a bigger and bigger impact on the Pacific campaign of World War II. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here with a little station break.

Hope you're enjoying the show so far. We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements. If you'd like to hire me, uh, training courses that we offer and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneur ism, uh, podcasting, corporate stuff, uh, with over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as CEO. Uh, I think I can offer a wonderful breadth of information and knowledge to you or anyone that you want to invite me to for your company.

Thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you listening to the show. And be sure to check out ChrisVossLeadershipInstitute.com. Now back to the show. So they had a women's naval reserves that was at the time. Now, you mentioned that, or at least it says in the book, she's one of the first, the Navy's first oceanographers. Yeah. I mean, people have referred to her that way. And part of that has to do with the fact that oceanography as a field

was just coming about. There were people that probably had what we recognize as oceanographic expertise involved with the Navy, maybe in a more peripheral sense up until that time. But she was hired as the first oceanographer in the Navy's hydrographic office during World War II. Wow. That's freaking awesome. So she really broke ground there, broke through. Yeah, there was someone who, let me see if I can find this. Yeah, when we posted up the StreamYard announcement of this, somebody had commented, it really sucks when your landing craft grounds on sandbars that you don't know are there. And I remember when I was a child reading about the waves of marines that would pile up on the beaches of like Iwo Jima

and a lot of those different islands in the South Pacific. And it was a real crazy thing because you knew that if you islands in the in the south pacific and it was a real it was a real crazy thing because you knew that if you're in the first few waves you're you're you were just they were just using your body as as a you know meat to throw onto the beach and that was that was being marine and so you you knew that if you were a certain part of the way the the landing party there was a high likelihood you weren't going to make it. And so I had never read about, you know, the reefs and different things like that, but

that makes sense. If you can't get to the beach and get to cover, you know, and you're being shot at, you're just standing out in the water and you're just a target practice. Is that it? Exactly. And that's the kind of thing that she was trying to get the information out. You know, initially, her reports were for the Joint Chiefs, so that she was writing them to be used at the strategic war planning level. But they were viewed as so valuable that they kind of worked their way through the chain of command down to operations planners who would incorporate some of the information she had to say about

just what you're talking about, you know, how to have a smoother landing so that you didn't lose as many lives and as much equipment and just have congestion and just more and more problems would snowball as the invasion went along. Amazing. I mean, it was, I remember reading about the Battle of Midway. And when I was a kid, I was like enthralled with all of it. I would build the model ships and, and I was enthralled with that whole theater, you know, that happened from, what was it, in Hawaii, the big attack.

Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor. Yeah. And, and then everything that went on all the way up to dropping the nuclear bomb and just that, that whole theater of war in the Pacific was extraordinary. So what were some of the things, the stories that come out of the book that we can tease people with that you'll think will entice people to pick up the book? Well, I mean, I think the Battle of Tarawa and just that it's kind of sets the stage for how important the field of oceanography and then this little band of marine scientists actually were.

But, you know, they worked on a number of things like Captain, early on, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, who had been a famous World War I ace. He was in a plane that crashed in the Pacific. He was doing some work for the State Department. His plane went down in the Pacific during World War II. And he was adrift for two weeks. He survived it, and he was eventually found. But what came out of that, part of what came out of that was Mary Sears and another colleague named Finner Chase, who was actually a crab specialist.

They worked on config, cloth rescue maps. And a lot of people have heard about these cloth rescue maps, which aviators could either carry in their pockets or wear around their necks. And then if they had to ditch your plane or something, they could take these maps out, which were, the ink was waterproof, the cloth was made to resist fading and all of this in the sunlight. And they could use this to help navigate their way home. Yeah. People don't realize.

I mean, back then we didn't have, you know, all this tracking and technology. There probably wasn't, you know, ships, things in space that could take satellite images to figure out where reefs were and stuff like this. So what were some of the things they did to map deep water levels and kind of understand? And I guess some of this helps submarines and things. Oh, yeah. Well, one of the projects that they were involved with early on, and this had to do with the technology that was being developed at Woods Hole

Oceanographic Institute, even prior to World War II, was they had this very large instrument, about two feet long, very heavy. It was called the Bathy Thermograph. And it was basically something somebody had to hang out over the side of a boat and reel a device down that would measure the temperature of the water at different levels. Wow. Yeah. And basically, it would etch on a glass slide that had been smoked with skunk oil. That's right.

And a little stylus would etch this very primitive graph, and they'd pull it back up again. They had to do this thousands of times to get these measurements that were important in identifying where the thermoclines were, where our submarines could hide from enemy ships. So that could be a very dangerous job, hanging over the outside of a ship during World War II. And I wrote about one particular gentleman, Ensign Carl Wyant, who was one of the very first people trained in this technique. And his ship was torpedoed while he was taking these measurements. And unfortunately, he did not survive his injuries from that incident. But, you know, people were doing some amazing things to collect oceanographic information and bring it back to

Mary Sears and her group at the hydrographic office so they could then compile it and get it out to the field. Yeah. So you mentioned in the book that she was called upon to make millinite calculations for last minute top secret landing destinations. Right. I mean, that's got to be, that's got to be hard to pull off sometimes because you know if you've got those islands are crazy in the south pacific and you know you can't you can't just be like hey we're gonna we're gonna pull up here and we're just gonna test the depths of this water so we can evade you later is that cool with you guys yeah well exactly i mean what you're talking about are locales that were not only extremely remote, but were also in enemy hands.

They were being held in the invasion. They were some of the people that risked their lives to get some very basic oceanographic information. That's crazy. And now we just take pictures from space and things, I imagine. Well, yeah. I mean, exactly. oceanographic information it's crazy and now we just take pictures from space and things i imagine well yeah i mean exactly but then it was a very primitive situation in terms of technology and oceanography was just coming into its own so all of this had to be developed you know in real time as these invasions were unfurling and And, you know, planes and pilots having to ditch in the ocean happen all the time. I mean, they run out of fuel. There's a lot of stories

and authors that we had on the show that documented some of the attacks where they were having to really turn some of their planes into little gas tanks, you know, piling on extra gas. And they would fly home in fumes, literally knowing that, you know, down to the last gallon, how much they needed to make it. Sometimes they didn't. You know, they have to run these long sorties. And so it was a crazy time. And then who was it, the great female pioneer flyer?

Amelia Earhart. Amelia Earhart. I mean, she evidently, they surmise, maybe ended up ditching close to an island and the reef probably took out the plane or took them out. They ended up landing on, you know, just wild stuff about everything that went on in that theater in that time. Was there anything that surprised you in the book that you were like, holy crap, that's amazing to know that this happened during that time. Well, I think just going back to what you said, the Pacific Ocean is 64 million square miles. It is our largest ocean.

So if you're going to ditch somewhere and hope that someone finds you, that is probably not the most optimum place. You know, I would say one of the hardest things for me to ferret out about the book were the people that worked with Mary Sears in that office. And they were a quirky group. And one lady in particular, Dora Henry, was a barnacle expert from the University of Washington. And she got to be known all around that region, the Puget Sound region, as the barnacle lady. And one of the odd things she was asked to do is if the police pulled a body out of the water,

she was asked to come down and look at the barnacles. And, you know, barnacles will, what she would say, they'll attach to everything. They particularly attach to clothing and to shoes. And she would be asked to say, okay, where did this body come from based on your inspection of the barnacles? How long has it been in the water? Again, today we have scientific techniques that might help with that. But she just was the world's expert on giving those details. Oh, wow.

Note to self, stop throwing bodies in bodies of water. Bodies in bodies of water? I don't know what that is. Yeah. That's why we always bury them in the desert, folks. I don't do that. That's just a we always bury them in the desert folks i don't do that that's just a joke the the other thing i think that was really surprising is like the you

know once the strategy for the pacific campaign had been set by admiral limits it was an island hopping campaign and they just had to keep doing these amphibious assaults till they got to Japan, no matter the difficulty. You know, there was no stopping and saying, hey, we got to get better at this. It was like, we're doing this in real time. These dates are set. And Mary Sears and her crew were just trying to interject, you know, some information that would make these things a little bit safer, a little bit smoother. But there were all sorts of mishaps on the way, and they just had to learn from every single one of them. They had to make their equipment better as they went.

They modified their amphibious tractors. They got the information out faster and faster. And, you know, by the time they got to Okinawa, which was the last major amphibious assault, it was the smoothest landing that you could ever dream of. And so that was kind of the culmination of all this effort. Were there any horrific events that prompted, you know, this, them to go, oh crap, this is, this was very deadly. I mean, you titled the book Lethal Tides. Was there, was there any, you know, events that happened where people went, you know,

a bunch of people died and the landing went awful? Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'd say almost from the get go, people understood that these landings were not going to be easy. They were extremely complicated. They, first of all, involved shipping troops, equipment, landing boats, all this stuff, thousands of miles from Hawaii and from the coast of California all the way out to these remote islands.

And they would set up basically an aquatic battlefront. So then they're floating out there, getting closer and closer. And, of course, the closer they get, the more they're going to get shot at and shelled by the Japanese. And, you know, right from the get-go, even at the landings where Guadalcanal took place, the Guadalcanal was the main landing, and they surprised the Japanese. But by the afternoon, they were making smaller landings and having more problems because the element of surprise had been lost.

And there were more difficulties. Then when they got to the Battle of Terawa in November of 1943, that was the one where, you know, they thought they understood what the tides were going to be. And, you know, the main landing boat, I don't know if you realize this or not, Chris, was developed in Louisiana. It was kind of an offshoot of a boat that had been developed for the swamps of Louisiana for the logging industry. So it had a very small draft, which meant it could move in shallow waters without getting stuck. But, and it's called the Higgins boat. Andrew Higgins was the man that, you know, developed, designed it and developed it. Well, the Higgins boat needed at least four feet of water

to move through the water. That's the minimum draft that it needed. And in preparing for the Battle of Terawal, the Navy consulted some locals and some, you know, foreign experts, and they were told, oh, we'll get five feet. We'll get five feet. It won't be a problem. They had some amphibious tractors, but not a lot of them. what happened was on that particular date, November 23rd, 1943, it was one of two dates of the entire year that tides are extremely small and narrow. So instead of getting five feet, they got three, three across the reef. And that's why the landing boats could not get across. And they had some, again, this is the first landing where they used amphibious tractors. The backup plan was, well, we'll use these tractors if the men get stuck.

But they didn't have enough tractors. And the tractors, which that generation was referred to as the tin can because it wasn't armored. So they got shot up. Holy crap. Right away. And they got shot up right away. And it's just your worst nightmare. So men are stuck on the reef. Some are waiting in. Some are getting in these tractors and getting blown up

as soon as they load onto the tractors. And it was just, it delayed the reinforcements getting in. And even though we prevailed, narrowly, I would say prevailed in that assault, they lost, you know, a thousand men died and another 2000 were injured. And that was kind of unheard of for an amphibious assault. They were not expecting those numbers. And the public was outraged. They held hearings, they held congressional hearings. I mean, they put a lot of heat on the Navy to say, you know, you're going to keep going with this campaign and we're going to have to expect, to make a difference. He was getting letters from grieving mothers who had lost their sons at Terawai. And that's when, you know, they kind of turned to their oceanographers and said, you know, we need to pay attention to what these people are trying to tell us. Yeah. Yeah. I'm reading here, the Higgins boat changed the way the war was fought.

And it's basically the boat that you see in a lot of normandy landing sort of movies and stuff it's like flip down front yeah i remember reading about how you know the marines sometimes would pile six to seven waves of men onto the beach before they would before they would be able to start uh you know doing something to take the island and you you just would know if you were in those early landing things your your survival rate was next to nil and it was just piling bodies on the beach and i think there was like you mentioned there was one of the real problems of that war was the amount of bodies you know some generals were throwing i think patton got some some stuff

for that and of course he was in the european theater but i think patton got some stuff for that. And of course, he was in the European theater. But I think Patton got some heat for, yeah, you were a great winning general, but look at the numbers of people you threw into the shredder. It was a horrific war. And that's why later no one wanted to go to war ever again. And well, it was World War II that was that way as well, too. People didn't want to go back and do another World War. But yeah, it's interesting they were going through a lot of this to save as many people as they could. You're exactly right.

There were a lot of logistical nightmares. There always seemed to be surprises that they had not anticipated. And I remember one landing, the beaches were just really steep. And so when the boats came in and they were made of plywood, they just splintered. They just crashed. And it created this giant mound of lumber and equipment and all this stuff. And how do you get the beaches clear? How do you get the troops where they need to be in that kind of situation? And there was a really, you know, there was a learning curve as they went along. And they just, they had to learn better techniques of communication. And they had to incorporate some of this oceanographic intelligence to prepare for some of these inevitabilities that were going to cause complications on landing.

And like I said, by the time they got to Oklahoma, I'm not to Oklahoma, to Okinawa, by the time they got to Okinawa, they had worked out a lot of these details, and it was the smoothest landing. Other than the kamikazes, it was the smoothest landing of the Pacific. Yeah. I mean, the Japanese fought fiercely. That's why we ended up dropping a nuclear bomb. I mean, the Kamikazes, they would fight to the death. I mean, there's that famous story of a couple, I think a couple famous stories of Japanese who were on islands, I guess we never went to, and they kept fighting for, what was it, 40 years or something?

Definitely. They were ferocious. They didn't surrender. went to and they they kept fighting for what is it 40 years or something definitely they were ferocious they didn't surrender i mean they did not believe in and surrender they their philosophy was to fight to the death and so it was a crazy war fun to read about i remember the pt boats i remember reading about john f kennedy and and his his PT boat experience and the PT boats. I read like so many books as a child about the World War II theater, especially in the Pacific. And it was so interesting to read about. And so this will be an exciting book for people that really love this stuff. And probably also my assistant, people who haven't understood, you know, what went into this war.

Yeah, I mean, I hope so. I mean, this is a book that brings to light, you know, a group of individuals, in this particular case, mostly women, who were working behind the scenes to support the troops, and no one knew that they were there. And in many cases, they were working around the clock and providing pivotal information in the middle of the night. And, you know, I just think they're, they were an incredible group of people. There you go. There you go. Anything more you want to touch on or tease out before we go? You know, I just, I just would say anytime you write a book like this and, you know, there've been several really good, good books just like this, like Code Girls and, and Silver Wings and, and about the women Air Force pilots. You know, it's not easy to find these stories.

They're not jumping out at you. And all the people that do this kind of research, they really have to dig the details. And that's probably why these stories haven't come to light because they're not easy to find. Yeah, and it's great that history brings these in. You know, there's so many different stories from histories that never get told. You know, there's always kind of stories from histories that never get told.

You know, there's always kind of that main theme that everyone hears about. But it's great that there's, you know, all this gets brought to light and dug out of history. Because history is rich with so many different details. Well, Catherine, it's been wonderful to have you on the show. Thanks for coming on. I've learned a lot today. I'm like digging through this, the Higgins boat stuff now and reading about it. It's pretty cool. Great, great, Chris. And I appreciate you having me. Thank you for coming. Give us your.com so that people can find you on the interwebs, please. Okay. My name, Catherine Musumichi.com or Lethal Tides, the title of my book.com.

And my email is drkate at Catherine Musuminemusamichi.com. There you go. There you go. Order the books, folks. It'll be out August 23rd, 2022. So there's time to get it in your pre-order there, wherever fine books are sold. And that way you can be the first one in your book club to say you got a hold of it and you've read the amazing story.

Lethal Tides, Mary Sears and the the Marine scientists who helped win World War II. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Be sure to go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Foss. Go to youtube.com, Fortress Chris Foss, for the show, your family, friends, and relatives. See us wherever we are on the social media webs there. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.