Arranging to see a film depicting a World War II battle  with a veteran of that battle and several more does not necessarily mean a shared aesthetic experience. That’s what I discovered last week after synchronizing my viewing of  “The Thin Red Line” with a former navy officer who took part in the invasion of Guadalcanal.

However, my long talk afterward with Joe Groden turned out to be fascinating, giving me an insider’s account of warfare both in the Pacific and in the D-day invasion. This veteran, now 80 years old and a resident of Plymouth, recalled for me some of the dramatic events in which he took part starting at age 22.

His judgment of the film’s depiction of the battle of Guadalcanal is simple: “I felt, in the first place, it was phony.” As a person highly experienced in warfare, he found the technical details so often wrong that they spoiled his sense of reality. Among other details, the soldiers’ uniforms did not look right to his eyes nor did the landing ships.

He did concede a few virtues to the film. “I thought the battle scenes seemed to be fairly accurate for a while.” But even there he could not share my enthusiasm for the surrounding beauty of the vegetation, the birds, and wildlife so brilliantly displayed in “The Thin Red Line.”

After growing up in Cambridge, Joe Groden graduated from Boston College in 1940. The following summer he enlisted in the Navy, was given three months of training, and commissioned an ensign.

Based in Pearl Harbor as communications officer on the destroyer Henley, he found himself commanding the vessel when the Japanese air force attacked. Ensign Groden took the ship out to sea as ordered, the second ship to escape port and begin searching in vain for the Japanese carrier strikeforce.

Incidentally, he has long believed that, because they had the Japanese secret codes, authorities in Washington knew that a sudden attack would come. He thinks that they “may have wanted Pearl Harbor to happen.”

After taking part in the Battle of Coral Sea, the U.S.S. Henley was the lead destroyer when the American forces invaded first Tulaghi, some twenty miles from Guadalcanal, and then Guadalcanal itself. There the Henley landed the Marines who immediately came under heavy fire from Japanese sharpshooters perched in trees over the beach.

Groden was gunnery officer by now and he directed fire at the snipers. “They fell out of the trees like coconuts,” he recalls.

Perhaps the most dramatic events in his naval career took place off New Guinea when the Japanese sank his ship. The Henley was hit by a torpedo and went down in fifteen minutes. Like most of the others, Joe jumped into the water and had to cling to a raft for seven hours before American ships dared to come back and rescue him.

His next ship, the O’Brien, was a new destroyer built at Bath, Maine, where he boarded it. Incidentally, this ship was twice the size of the Henley and much more heavily gunned. After escorting a convoy to Scotland, the ship sailed to Plymouth to prepare for the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

The O’Brien picked up 26 landing craft and took American Rangers to Omaha Beach. After rushing on to the beach, these troops were under withering fire from machine guns on either side. As the officer in charge of the O’Brien’s guns, Joe used reports from a spotter plane to steer his fire at the machine guns and eventually knocked them out.  .

Much later, in 1983, when he visited Normandy as a tourist, Joe looked with fascination at the indentations in the rock that he had made.

As he looks back on it all, he disclaims any heroism of his own. Instead, he gives credit to others, especially Americans back home. “The people who won the war for us,” he says, “are those who worked turning out the equipment.”

Many other war stories came from Joe Groden as we reviewed his adventures. Some of them moved me to laughter – – despite the general grimness of the war experience, humorous events stay lodged in memory.

“I am content with my life,” he says. “I thought it was a fabulous experience for me, learning how to get along with people and how to handle people in such a way that we would all work together. And you also learned to think not only for yourself but for many people so that I think that … it was a tremendous experience for me and also improved me tremendously.”

“Spiritually? I don’t know that it made many changes in my spiritual life. . . . I always had strong beliefs even then.”

Asked about getting killed, he answers simply, “ I never really ever ever felt  .  .  . I was going to leave this soil.”

Richard Griffin