Thirteen Soldiers

by John McCain

  A young, diminutive Mexican American would assault the beach with the 2nd Marines on D-Day in Saipan. It would be his first experience of combat. It wouldn’t be his first fight, though. Guy Louis Gabaldon had been in more scraps than he could remember. He took more than a few beatings too, and recounts some of them in the self-published autobiography he wrote decades after the war. He described himself as “the fightingest little Chicano.” He was also resourceful and seems to have made his own way in the world from a very early age, even when his way was harder than it needed to be.

  He was born in 1926, a descendant of Spanish settlers in New Mexico, and raised in poverty in the melting pot of East Los Angeles, one of seven children. He recalled his mother with affection, and two older brothers. He never mentions his father. At the age of ten he was hopping on the backs of streetcars and riding downtown to Skid Row, where he shined shoes. He hung out with derelicts and cowboys and with fighters from the Main Street Gym, who taught him how to spar. Bartenders on the Row and strippers from the burlesque houses looked after him; so did the beat cops. “Almost everyone on the Row was my friend,” he claimed. It “was a place where you could get a fast education in life.” With growing self-confidence, he began plying his trade all around Greater Los Angeles, from Chinatown and Little Tokyo to Hollywood and Santa Monica, Venice, and Long Beach.

  Gabaldon seems not to have suffered much from racial prejudice as a boy. In East L.A. he fell in with the Moe Gang, named for the Three Stooges character. They were kids for whom neighborhood, not race, determined associations. Like East L.A. itself and Hollenbeck Junior High, where they went to school, the gang was a mix of Hispanics, Jews, Russians, Armenians, Italians, and Nisei, first-generation Japanese Americans. They occasionally got up to no good, but their antics were a far cry from the murder, mayhem, and drug trade associated with gangs today. They got in fights frequently, but Gabaldon is quick to explain that the only weapons used were their fists. But his inventory of the black eyes, broken noses, and perforated eardrums he suffered explains why his mother became so anxious about his welfare that she sent him to live with relatives in New Mexico.

  His Manito relatives were self-reliant and proud people, and he returned to East L.A. a year later with newfound racial pride. But it didn’t affect his friendships. He picked up where he had left off, he wrote, “fighting and raising hell,” and he grew all the closer to his Nisei friends, Kakaro Mochinaga, Johnny Ito, Norman Shizumura, George Uno, and the Nakano twins, Lane and Lloyd. He was soon spending as much time living with the Nakanos, whom he considered his adoptive family, as he spent in his own home. To the end of his life, long after time and distance and differences had separated them, he would call his Nisei friends his brothers. They fought together, chased girls together, hopped freight trains and went on adventures together. They relied on each other. Gabaldon learned to speak a little colloquial Japanese and enjoyed Japanese food and customs. He admired Japanese culture too, especially Bushido, the code of the Samurai. Later, on Saipan, that admiration would turn to disdain and something close to hatred.

  That happens in war. Among its many corruptions, war encourages hate. You work up an antipathy to your enemy that seems a necessary mind-set. Sometimes it is informed by your experiences of the enemy that have offended your customs and morals or that provoked in you a desire to avenge. Sometimes it appears racist. Sometimes you learn to hate because it just makes it easier to do the things you must do, to destroy, maim, and kill. My grandfather, a navy admiral who witnessed kamikaze attacks, once publicly recommended Americans “kill all the Japs, painfully.” On Saipan Gabaldon would feel something very like that hatred. He would kill Japanese with little remorse, thirty-three of them by his own count. He would take their possessions for trophies. And for the rest of his life he harbored—and occasionally expressed—a lingering resentment toward the Japanese soldiers who had fought on Saipan and the nation that sent them there. He would describe them in terms considered offensive by most people and that likely would have offended the friends he called his brothers. But also on Saipan, to his everlasting credit, Guy Gabaldon risked his own life to spare the lives of the enemy he reviled.

  He resented his own government for its actions after Pearl Harbor, when the Nakanos and Shizumuras, Itos and Unos, and all the Nisei of East Los Angeles were rounded up and sent to concentration camps so suddenly he didn’t have a chance to say goodbye. He recalled the internment of Japanese Americans as “blatant racial discrimination, and an excuse to get their homes.” Fifty years later you could still sense his shock and sense of betrayal: “The Federal Government had taken my adopted family and close friends and locked them up like animals. Their own country, the U.S.A., had uprooted them from their homes.” Some of the victims would end up in uniform, serving the country that had treated them unjustly. The Nakano brothers joined the legendary 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most decorated unit in the army. Gabaldon wouldn’t see them again until long after the war.

  Gabaldon had been sent to a high school for “incorrigibles,” Andrew Jackson High. He dropped out after his sophomore year. His two older brothers had enlisted in the navy, and he wanted to join too. But he was only sixteen in 1942, and the navy wouldn’t have him. He registered for the draft even though he was two years too young. He traveled to Seattle looking for work. Finding none, he saw an ad for jobs for boys over eighteen in fishing canneries in Alaska during salmon season. He showed the agents at the union hiring hall his draft card, was hired, and shipped out in steerage for a cannery in Tyee on an island in southeastern Alaska. He spent nine months working in Tyee, Ketchikan, and Juneau, mostly enjoying himself before returning to Los Angeles to celebrate his seventeenth birthday and enlist in the navy, hoping for duty aboard a submarine.

  The navy turned him down again, this time for a perforated eardrum he had suffered in a brawl. He was devastated, he said, but not defeated. He looked for an angle, and he found one when he learned the Marine Corps was looking for Japanese interpreters. He told a recruiter, “I read, write and speak Japanese like a native.” That was a lie, of course, but it worked. He passed his Marine Corps physical—no mention was made of the perforated eardrum—and was bused to Camp Pendleton for basic training.

  He was often ridiculed at boot camp for being so short and looking even younger than his seventeen years. He was a poor shot too, by his own admission. He barely qualified as a marksman, the minimum qualification for a marine. He dismissed the rationale for boot camp’s “seven weeks of concentrated harassment,” that the hard training saved lives, as an “excuse for sadism.” But none of it seems to have bothered him too much or shaken his self-confidence. “I knew that sheer determination would get me through,” he wrote. He didn’t need to be a good shot, he explained: “In the jungle . . . you shoot fast, from the hip.”

  He got thirty days leave after basic training before he had to report to language school at Camp Elliot in San Diego. He spent most of the time at a bowling alley in East L.A., an old high school haunt, flirting with Russian girls whose boyfriends were overseas. He was back at the bowling alley one weekend a few weeks after starting language school and got into a fistfight over a girl with “a big Russian” who shattered his jaw. He spent two weeks recovering at Long Beach Naval Hospital and partying in East L.A. on the weekends. The marines kicked him out of language school and trained him to be a mortarman.

  He shipped out for Pearl Harbor with a replacement battalion in December 1943. In Hawaii he tried again to pass himself off as an interpreter, this time to the 2nd Marine Division. Again he was rejected, but he was allowed to join a scout and observer company in his regiment’s intelligence section. He spent another five months training on the Big Island, mostly in staged beach assaults and reconnaissance missions. He became close friends with another scout, Private First Class Lloyd Hurley from West Virginia, and suffered, he wrote, his first experience of overt racism in the Corps at the hands of a “redneck” sergeant from Oklahoma. He would later
blame the decision not to give him a Medal of Honor or a promotion on the bigotry of what he called “the Old Corps.” In the years before World War II, “Blacks, Browns or Yellows” felt unwelcome, and Gabaldon wrote that that sentiment still lingered in the hearts and minds of veteran officers. He exempted from the complaint his commanding officer, Captain John Schwabe, a veteran of Guadalcanal and Tarawa, whom he considered a fair, sympathetic, and capable officer.

  Sometime in May 1944 the division was loaded aboard transport ships and left Hawaii without fanfare. They just “quietly slip[ped] out of our births,” Gabaldon remembered, in a convoy bound for a destination they were not told in advance.

  ON JUNE 11, 1944, five days after the Allied landings in Normandy, the second largest naval armada ever assembled set out from Eniwetok, an atoll in the Marshall Islands: 535 aircraft carriers, battleships, destroyers, cruisers, transport ships, and landing craft, carrying an invasion force of seventy thousand men. Their destination was Saipan, one of four islands in the Marianas archipelago (Tinian, Roto, and Guam were the others) targeted for invasion as part of Operation Forager, the American offensive against the Japanese-held Marianas and Palau Islands. Admiral Spruance still commanded the Fifth Fleet, and Vice Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner commanded the amphibious landing force. Major General Holland “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, his nickname a nod to a legendary temper, had been given command of all ground forces on Saipan, army and marine, and told to take the island in three days. On June 9 he told the reporter Robert Sherrod, “A week from today, there will be a lot of dead Marines.”

  On June 13 the Fifth Fleet’s guns began pounding Saipan and Tinian. Air squadrons from a fast carrier task force commanded by Admiral Marc “Pete” Mitscher (and subsequently commanded by John S. McCain Sr.) had been periodically bombing Saipan for months, and intensely so in the days before the fleet arrived.

  Saipan’s topography favored the defenders. It’s a large island, thirteen miles long with a varying width of three to five miles. It is volcanic, with hills, ravines, swamps, heavily forested mountains, and jagged cliff faces, unlike typically flat and sandy coral islands. Saipan’s two ridgelines run the length of its interior on either side of a central valley with thick fields of sugarcane. It has four prominent peaks; the highest, Mount Tapotchau, in the center of the island, rises fifteen hundred feet. Limestone caves are hidden everywhere.

  Since the first American air raid in February, Japan had been sending men and matériel to the Marianas. Twenty-five thousand Japanese soldiers defended Saipan, commanded by Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito. There were over six thousand Imperial Japanese Navy sailors on the island as well. Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who lost four carriers at the Battle of Midway, had been dispatched to Saipan to command the small craft fleet there. Saipan had one airfield and another, smaller airstrip under construction. The Japanese had artillery batteries positioned in the hills and ridges to cover the beaches and an armored regiment with forty-eight tanks.

  Japan had occupied Saipan since the end of World War I, and it was the first American invasion target with a large civilian population. More than twenty-three thousand Japanese, Okinawan, and Korean civilians were living on the island in 1944. Both sides recognized the Battle for the Marianas would likely prove a turning point in the war. The Japanese high command had expected the initial strike farther south, at Guam. But surprised or not, General Saito was prepared to give his life, and the lives of every other Japanese on Saipan, military and civilian, rather than surrender the island.

  The naval and aerial bombardment that began the offensive continued almost uninterrupted for forty-eight hours. Battleships, destroyers, and heavy cruisers fired nearly two hundred thousand shells of various calibers. It was an unprecedented bombardment that had Japanese soldiers hunkered down in caves writing of it in their diaries with awe.

  Admiral Turner gave the order “Land the landing force” at 5:42 on the morning of June 15. At seven o’clock eight thousand marines from the 2nd and 4th divisions began climbing down cargo nets to three hundred armored amphibious landing vehicles (LVTs). Shortly after eight o’clock the LVTs, accompanied by twenty-four light gunboats, started racing toward eight landing sites along a four-mile stretch of the island’s southwest coast. Ahead of them, battleships, destroyers, gunboats, and carrier bombers hit the island with a rolling bombardment while carrier fighters strafed the beaches and the trenches behind them.

  As soon as the first LVTs crossed the barrier reef, Japanese artillery and mortar batteries started shelling them, using red flags that had been placed in the water to mark distances. Twenty amtracs in the first wave were destroyed. Some of the landing ships ferrying tanks (LST) got hung up on the reef. The first marines came ashore at 8:45 and met a hail of fire from machine guns and rifles as shells and mortars rained down on them from the hills and land mines sent men and machines hurtling into the air.

  The 2nd Marines were hit hardest. Some battalions came ashore well north of their assigned landing zones, causing traffic bottlenecks and presenting densely crowded targets to Japanese gunners, who held their fire until the beaches were crammed with marines. Commanders trying to organize their battalions in the chaos were among the first casualties. Despite the heavy casualties, the intensity of the fire they faced, and the chaotic scene they encountered, at least the assault battalions hadn’t had to wade ashore under fire, as they had at Tarawa. They landed on the beaches, and the beaches were bad enough. And the marines kept coming. An hour after the first landing, all eight thousand marines in the initial assault were fighting, wounded, or dead on the crowded beaches. By day’s end twenty thousand had come ashore.

  As the morning wore on the detritus of combat accumulated on the beaches: parts of destroyed vehicles and other machinery, abandoned weaponry, shell craters, and body parts. John Chapin, who as a young marine officer had fought on Saipan and later wrote a brief history of the battle, described the scene: “Jap and Marine bodies lying in mangled and grotesque positions; blasted and burnt-out pillboxes; the burning wrecks of LVTs that had been knocked out by Jap high velocity fire; the acrid smell of high explosives; the shattered trees; and the churned-up sand littered with discarded equipment.”

  The dead and wounded too were aggregating. Many of the latter would succumb to their wounds when the crowded, confused, and dangerous conditions on the beaches prevented their evacuation. The marines suffered nearly two thousand casualties that first day. Japanese casualties were mounting faster, though. Marines who landed later in the morning had to wade through dead bodies, Japanese and American. Guy Gabaldon would always remember the smell that assaulted him as he approached the beach: “The Jap bodies were already starting to rot. . . . If I were to live a thousand years I would never get over that sweet stink.”

  The marines advanced relentlessly but slowly. Well-placed Japanese artillery and mortar batteries had stopped amtracs from bringing men to the woods behind the beaches. By nightfall most of the invasion force was still on the beaches, still braving shellfire, machine guns, and snipers, and hadn’t secured its first-day objectives. The Japanese made repeated small-scale attacks through the night, especially against the 2nd Division’s left flank. They launched a massive counterattack against the entire beachhead at three o’clock in the morning on June 16. It continued in waves for three hours. Finally the weary marines repulsed the last attack as the first rays of sun illuminated beaches littered with some seven hundred Japanese dead.

  Private Gabaldon hit the beach late that morning and described it as “a mad house . . . bullets were kicking up the sand . . . and dead Marines were all over the area. . . . It was almost every man for himself until late that afternoon when we established our first lines. It took us almost eight hours to gain the first mile and that was under extremely heavy opposition.”

  Captain Schwabe hustled the company across a beach road next to the airstrip and ordered them to dig in. Gabaldon stumbled upon a marine, no older than eighteen, with a bullet hole in his hea
d lying dead on the road “in a grotesque position,” and he froze. He wondered to himself what he was doing there. He should have been back at his neighborhood bowling alley doing the things eighteen-year-olds normally did. He couldn’t explain why the sight of one dead marine among hundreds affected him so, but it practically paralyzed him. “I just stood there,” he remembered, “in the middle of the cross fire, the Japs ahead, and our boys on the beach behind me.”

  Lloyd Hurley pulled him into a foxhole and told him, “Get your ass in gear and start shooting.” Gabaldon and the rest of his unit remained in their foxholes along the airstrip, exchanging fire through the night and into the next morning. Schwabe had ordered them to stay there until he determined where they would set up their observation post. But after a quick breakfast of “canned scrambled eggs and beach sand,” Gabaldon, who seemed to have quickly acclimated to combat after his horror, decided to leave their lines and venture into “no man’s land to see what it’s all about.”

  He reached a trench filled with Japanese killed during the shelling that preceded the landings. Crawling carefully around the trench, he approached from behind three Japanese soldiers who were still alive and watching the Americans. He ordered them in Japanese to raise their hands. One soldier swung his rifle around and Gabaldon shot him. “My first Jap,” he records. “I feel nothing, neither pride in killing him nor fear that I will be killed.” The other two raised their hands. He assured them in Japanese they wouldn’t be harmed if they obeyed him, and marched them back to his command post. He expected to be commended for his audacity and possibly rewarded with the interpreter’s job he still hoped to land. Instead an angry Schwabe threatened to have him court-martialed if he ever pulled a stunt like that again. “Don’t you ever go off on your own again,” the officer demanded. “Understand?”