Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  Like every other aspect of the American military experience in the Second World War, these exhumation operations were monumental in scale. The task fell to the Graves Registration Service (GRS) of the U.S. Army’s quartermaster’s office, which employed 18,000 military and civilian personnel at its peak. When opening a battlefield grave, the GRS workers wore masks and heavy rubber or leather gloves that came up to the elbows. Using poles with stiff sheet metal flaps at the bottom, like giant kitchen spatulas, they pried the remains out of the earth and rolled them onto open canvas body bags. The bags were zipped shut and lifted to the surface by ropes. This system was found to be most efficient, and also best for morale, because it saved the workers on the exhumation details “from having decayed flesh and liquefied remains spilled on them.”97 At the end of each working day, each man burned his clothing and drew a new uniform for the following day. On Okinawa, the American graves were very large and also rather poorly marked, so that it was often necessary to open several graves in order to locate a single individual. In one case, according to the GRS, “ 84 graves were opened in order to locate an unknown.”98 Not surprisingly, personnel on the exhumation details suffered high rates of the syndrome that would later be called post-traumatic stress disorder.

  According to one authoritative estimate, total American combat deaths in the Pacific were 111,606, a figure that included 31,157 officers and enlisted men of the U.S. Navy. Most of the latter would sleep forever in Davy Jones’ Locker, beyond the reach of the exhumation details, with no grave marker but an eternally monotonous blue seascape.99

  The living just wanted to get home, the sooner the better. And their families wanted them home. In Washington, demonstrators gathered each morning outside the White House gates, demanding the return of their husbands, sons, and fathers. Letters poured into Congress. Some Americans wanted an immediate cessation of the draft—but others, including those still in uniform, lobbied for an extension of the peacetime draft, so that replacement troops could be shipped overseas, allowing the veterans to come home more quickly.100 In view of emerging threats in East Asia—the territorial ambitions of the Russians, the gains of Mao’s communist guerillas in China, the looming power vacuum in Korea as Japanese forces left the peninsula—American military leaders warned against a precipitate drawdown that would destabilize the region. But the citizen-soldiers, citizen-sailors, citizen-marines, and citizen-airmen had completed the job they had been sent to do, as they saw it, and they were impatient to get on with their lives. As a junior naval officer in the Pacific put it: “We saw no reason why we should not, each of us, return to the States not only immediately, but also before anyone else.”101

  A rigid formula determined the order of priority for discharge. Servicemen with the highest number of “points” were the first to ship out. Points were allocated for a range of variables, including age, length of service, time overseas, number of days in combat, and the number and type of decorations a man had received. Additional points were assigned to married men, and still more to fathers, with a certain number for each dependent child. Samuel Hynes wrote that it was “a good enough system, and nobody complained. We just calculated our scores, figured the order of departure, and waited.”102 But the first men to ship out were inevitably the older, more seasoned veterans, including many of the noncommissioned officers. Their sudden departure deprived the fighting forces of leadership and experience at every rank. Field and task force commanders resisted letting go of their most experienced veterans, and exploited loopholes to keep them in service. Regulations permitted local commanders to impose a “freeze” on discharges of certain key personnel for reasons of military necessity. But such freezes were unpopular and aroused protests in Washington. Admiral King moved to restrict the practice, distributing an order to all naval ships and stations in September 1945: “Commanding Officers shall immediately reconsider the cases of all personnel who meet the required point scores and are being retained on the basis of ‘military necessity.’ Continued retention of such personnel shall be based only upon a literal and realistic interpretation of the term ‘military necessity.’ ”103

  Admiral Radford, commanding a carrier task group in the Pacific, was concerned that the rushed demobilization would leave the U.S. military in a “shambles,” and that the Soviets might attempt to exploit the situation. In Washington, Navy Secretary Jim Forrestal warned President Truman that if the demobilization continued at its headlong pace, “neither the army nor the navy will have sufficient trained men to be able to operate efficiently.”104 General George C. Marshall remarked to Samuel Eliot Morison: “It was not a demobilization; it was a rout.”105

  Even those who accumulated the required points could not be sure of a quick trip home. Most of the rank and file were obliged to wait, sometimes for weeks, to be assigned a berth on an eastbound ship. Washington had assumed that the Pacific War would continue for at least nine months after the collapse of Germany, and Japan’s sudden capitulation had thrown its demobilization plans into turmoil. Much of the needed shipping had already been committed to the Atlantic. Hundreds of Douglas C-54 and C-47 transports were flying regular routes between Tokyo, Guam, Okinawa, Luzon, Hawaii, and California—but the seats were reserved for generals, admirals, war correspondents, well-connected junior officers, and important civilians. Throughout the Pacific, transit barracks accommodated crowds of idled servicemen. At Yokosuka, eight hundred cots were set up in an airplane hangar, and men stood in long lines to receive sheets, pillowcases, and blankets. They would live together in that cavernous space—soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen—until orders came through to board a departing ship. At the piers, frustrated men attempted to sneak aboard ships without orders, and some succeeded. According to a marine officer, most of these stowaways were never disciplined, and simply “got away with it.”106

  In the chaos of demobilization, corruption was rife. Charles McCandless, a Seabee officer, was told by a chief yeoman in Manila that a hundred other men were due to receive their discharge papers, so McCandless would have to wait. “I asked him if a hundred dollars, American, would help. He said that a hundred and fifty dollars would get the orders the next day and I should come back in the morning.” McCandless paid the bribe and obtained the needed documents. Later that day, he paid another $100 to someone in the transport command for a berth on a departing ship.107

  In an operation designated MAGIC CARPET, the War Shipping Administration hastily converted 546 Liberty and Victory ships to provide sealift for returning veterans.108 Tiered wooden bunks, some stacked as many as nine high, were erected in airless, filthy cargo holds. Homeward-bound naval vessels, including battleships, aircraft carriers, and LSTs, were pressed into service as provisional troop transports. Carriers transferred their airplanes ashore and installed tiered bunks in their hangars. Every returning ship carried troops—some in the hundreds, and others in the thousands. In San Francisco, the most frequent port of entry for returning Pacific War veterans, ferries sounded their fog horns, fire boats shot high-arching streams of water into the sky, and citizens cheered from the pedestrian walkways of the Golden Gate Bridge. At the piers along the Embarcadero, the veterans marched down the gangways, perhaps to be greeted by a brass band and a volunteer contingent of beaming Navy League ladies serving coffee and cookies. These gestures were appreciated by all, but the men who lived east of the Rocky Mountains found themselves in another exasperating limbo, stranded for lack of eastbound transportation. Barracks, airfields, commercial airports, and railway stations were crowded with idle servicemen waiting for a seat. The navy had warned families against traveling to California in hopes of meeting their returning sons or husbands, citing a “critical housing shortage in West Coast ports.”109 Some tried to telephone their families in the east, but in 1945 it was no easy task to place a call across the continent, requiring a fistful of coins and delicate negotiations with a live switchboard operator.

  Describing the melancholy atmosphere at a transit barracks in Sa
n Diego, a marine compared it to “a locker room after a game, a game that you’ve lost.”110 Men parted ways with the friends they had lived with and fought with for years. “Goodbyes were said with mixed feelings, not much sentiment or emotion,” said the marine John Vollinger. “We had made it ‘home alive in forty-five’ and could hardly believe it.”111

  Moving the great mass of demobilizing soldiers and sailors east across the country taxed the passenger-hauling capacity of the railways. Obsolete rail cars were hauled out of stockyards and returned to temporary service, including coal-burning locomotives and ancient wooden passenger cars from the days of the Old West. Servicemen departing San Francisco boarded one of the huge Southern Pacific rail ferries and crossed the bay to the end of the Oakland Mole. Nearby, at the Oakland Terminal, flag-draped caskets were lifted from cargo ships in slings, and loaded into U.S. Army Transportation Corps “mortuary” railway cars.112 The mortuary cars were added to the end of some of the same civilian passenger trains that brought the living veterans home.

  The transcontinental journey was long and uncomfortable. Every train was loaded to capacity, with servicemen and civilians sitting on their luggage in the aisles or lying on the overhead luggage racks. From San Francisco to Chicago was a journey of three days. Babies wailed. The lights flickered out. The bathrooms grew filthy and unsanitary. The cars were fetid and stifling, but when the windows were opened, recalled a sailor, they “let in as much in the way of coal smoke, cinders, small stones, and birds’ feathers as they did air.”113 Troop trains were equipped with stoves, food, and cooking utensils, but the provisions often gave out and the men went hungry. At stations along the way, they debarked to stretch their legs and buy a hot dog or a sandwich, but as they stepped down onto the platforms, an officer told them that any man who was not back aboard when the train left the station “would be considered AWOL and subject to courts-martial.”114

  Having won the war and returned to their home soil, the veterans’ tolerance for military authority was running short. On many trains, discipline began to disintegrate. Louis Auchincloss, a navy lieutenant and future novelist, was placed in command of a troop train from Portland, Oregon to New York City. A generous quantity of liquor had been smuggled on board. Lieutenant Auchincloss insisted on patrolling the cars and confiscating the illicit bottles, until a delegation of chief petty officers politely warned that “if I continued to inspect the train, it was only a matter of time before I was knocked over the head with a bottle.” He wisely accepted their recommendation to leave discipline in their hands. For the rest of the transcontinental journey, Auchincloss remained sequestered in his private cabin, reading Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

  As the trains arrived in the east, many veterans felt a powerful temptation to simply go home. But if they did not first obtain a legal discharge, they could be declared AWOL and face a general court-martial. “Everyone wanted to go home,” wrote Admiral Jocko Clark. “Many of our young enlisted men simply left without permission. The war was over. Navy regulations meant nothing.” A young sailor brought up on charges of desertion told Clark: “I wanted to see my mother.”115 Hoping to avoid a general epidemic of desertion, the navy scrambled to set up temporary regional separation centers in gymnasiums and public meeting halls. Some sailors were invited to reenlist. All were informed of their rights and benefits under the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act—the “GI Bill.” Those who mustered out received their discharge papers and a train or bus ticket home.

  The first wave of returning veterans, arriving from Europe in the summer of 1945, were welcomed with speeches, bunting, brass bands, and parades. On the West Coast, the early waves of returning servicemen received a similarly rapturous welcome. But most Pacific War veterans came home in the fall of 1945 or the spring of 1946, and by that time the bloom was off the rose. The American people were eager to forget the war, and there was no great novelty in seeing a young man in uniform. The wartime control measures that had kept inflation in check were collapsing under the weight of public opinion and political pressure. Unions demanded pay raises and launched nationwide strikes in most basic industries, including automobiles, steel, coal, and railroads. Veterans returned to a roaring economy, instead of the expected postwar depression, and that was a welcome surprise. But many found it difficult to transition back into the civilian workforce. They were perplexed by workplace politics and the rat race. Jobs seemed senseless and boring, lacking the unifying purpose they had known in war. They found themselves missing the elemental companionship of their old frontline units. Veterans found it difficult to replace the personal bonds forged by war, even with their own wives, parents, siblings, friends, and children. According to Private Gene Sledge of the 1st Marine Division, “all the good life and luxury didn’t seem to take the place of old friendships forged in combat.”116

  Many young veterans went back to college or enrolled in vocational training programs, but others lived on a government stipend paid under the “ 52–20 program” of the GI Bill. Uncle Sam paid a weekly stipend of $20 to veterans, for up to a year, to subsidize their transition back into the civilian economy. To collect the check, they had to visit an unemployment insurance office each week and tell a story about their ongoing efforts to find a job. Many young veterans were content to take a year off in the “ 52–20 Club,” whiling away their time in neighborhood bars, playing poker and craps, and “doing everything we can to forget.”117 George Niland, veteran of the 6th Marine Division, went out drinking with his fellow veterans every night. Returning home at one in the morning, he was confronted by his father, a Boston firefighter. “Listen, you bum,” the elder Niland told the younger, “you either go to work or go to college, but you’re not going to continue coming in here.”118 Niland moved out, and soon afterwards found a job. Another 6th Division veteran, Bill Pierce, bought a motorcycle and rode around the country with some other nomadic bikers. His parents dubbed him “bum of the year,” but Pierce finally went to college, also on the government’s dime. He considered it “another horrible experience to a combat marine, sitting there learning English, poetry, business, arithmetic . . . drove me batty!”119

  The humorist Bob Yoder noted that women had grown accustomed to looking after themselves and earning a living; they had acquired certain skills and a self-sufficiency that were likely to upend relations between the sexes. Watching a group of female mechanics working on an automobile, Yoder reflected: “The fact of the matter is, they are learning more about the anatomy of automobiles than their husbands even pretend to know.” He joked: “A little light brain-work may be all that is in store for men. It is a prospect the adult male will face bravely. We are too pretty to work anyway.”120 But the dilemma was a real one, as many couples learned after the war. Shirley Hackett, who had lived on her own, and supported herself by working on the assembly line in a ball bearings factory, found it difficult to adjust to the domestic role that her husband expected her to perform. “I remember changing tires on cars, taking care of the motor myself, yet he treated me as if I were insane to think that I could do these things.”121

  Government-sponsored public service announcements urged women to leave their jobs, to yield them up to demobilizing veterans. Some left dutifully, because they were willing and even eager to resume their customary roles in the home. Others resisted, and were let go or demoted. PSAs and advertising campaigns depicted an idyllic, blissful domestic life, in kitchens equipped with modern, time-saving appliances, with machines that would perform the drudgery of housework without fuss or bother. When her husband returned from the war, said the magazines and film shorts, she should defer to his authority. The home must be his refuge, and he must be in charge. “After the war, fashions changed drastically,” said Frankie Cooper, who had worked as a crane operator in a steel mill. “You were supposed to become a feminine person. We laid aside our slacks, our checkered shirts, and we went in for ostrich feathers, ruffles, high-heeled shoes. All this was part of the propagan
da in magazines and newspapers to put a woman back in her ‘rightful place’ in the home. Go back now, forget all you’ve learned, be feminine. Go home and make your bread, raise your children. Forget you had them in a nursery and you were out there in pants.”122 Dellie Hahne, whose husband was a sergeant in the Army Air Forces, had conjured up an elaborate fantasy about their future after the war. Much of it was inspired by stories she had read in Good Housekeeping magazine. In her fantasy, she and her husband lived in a three-bedroom house in the suburbs, “and I got up at seven every morning and fixed my husband’s breakfast, and in my head I had a schedule of keeping the house. I’d do my ironing at eleven-thirty, and I would scrub the kitchen floor at two in the afternoon, and at the end of the day dinner would be on the table and I would be changed into a lovely cocktail dress and meet my husband at the door with martinis.” But the man Hahne had married was not the husband depicted in the pages of Good Housekeeping. He was more like a character in a country music song. “I got a drunk and a gambler and a guy who loved to show me the lipstick on his handkerchiefs—and it wasn’t my lipstick. So I thought, how in the hell am I going to be an American housewife if I don’t have the guy?”123 Frankie Cooper, the former crane operator, remained married for three years after the war. Then she left her husband and returned to the workforce as a schoolteacher. “I was not the same person I had been when I married him,” she explained. “I realized that I had grown. I could take care of myself. I did not need to go from my father’s house to my husband’s house. . . . My husband would have been happy if I had gone back to the kind of girl I was when he married me—a little homebody there on the farm, in the kitchen, straining the milk. But I wasn’t that person anymore. I tried it for three years, but it just didn’t work out. All at once I took a good look at myself, and I said no. No, you’re just not going to do it. You’re not going back where you started from.”124 As legions of social historians have observed, the Second World War was a slingshot for second-wave feminism.