“Took us a little longer, though,” said Bill. “Seeing as how we wanted to make sure it was a hundred percent right.”
“Two minutes and thirty seconds.” Sam laughed. “From then on, Lieutenant Hunt was a believer.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Enemies
From the code talkers who had been on the Canal, I also learned more about our enemies. During training it had sometimes seemed as if I was going off to fight monsters, not human beings. But for Bill and Sam, during those first days on Guadalcanal, those enemies were faceless. Zeros swooped in to attack. Sticks of high explosives fell swishing from two-engine bombers, including one old plane that came over every night. Its two engines were so out of sync that its sound was like no other aircraft.
“Everyone called that plane Washing Machine Charlie,” Sam said.
Shells landed all around them. Mortars and 75s from enemy batteries. They heard the crack of the .25 caliber rifles of hidden snipers, a sound very different from our own M1s. But they didn’t see any Japanese soldiers themselves. At least not alive.
There were plenty of bodies. Taking care of the American dead was the first priority in combat and as a result, the bodies of the Japanese soldiers were often left unburied for days. Those corpses were a fearful thing for Navajos to see. You know, grandchildren, our tradition tells us that we must avoid the bodies of those who have died. A bad spirit sometimes remains around the corpse. To even look upon the body of a dead person may make you sick. If someone dies inside a hogan, that hogan is abandoned forever.
Some white people who knew a little about our beliefs wondered if we’d be able to stand it. Would the Navajos just break down as soon as they actually saw dead people? I admit that it was not easy for us, grandchildren. We did find it deeply disturbing to look on the bodies of the dead, to step over them, even in some sad cases to share a foxhole for a whole night with a slain comrade. But we had been trained as Marines. Long before going into battle, we’d known we’d have to see and even touch the dead. We did our duty.
The enemy soldiers did their duty, too. One of their first duties was to fight to the death. Even if a Japanese soldier was captured and his rifle taken from him, he would still try to attack his captors with a hidden knife. Many years later, after the war, I read a translation of the Imperial Japanese Army Instruction manual. Their warrior’s code of Bushido required them to always follow five rules of combat.
1. Obey without question or hesitation.
2. Always take the offensive.
3. Surprise the enemy whenever possible.
4. Never retreat.
5. Never surrender.
Eventually, Sam and Bill told me, a few Japanese prisoners were taken at Guadalcanal. Most were common laborers, not soldiers. They were lower class, uneducated Japanese who’d been taken from their homes in Japan and forced by their army to work building the air field.
“They were pathetic,” Bill McCabe said. “Small men who looked lost and sad. Not monsters at all.”
“When we saw them,” Sam added, “we realized that our enemies were just human beings.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Field Maneuvers
Before being shipped to the South Pacific we had to take part in a two-day training exercise on the Big Island of Hawaii. Half of the Big Island is rain forest and the other half is desert, so you could experience all kinds of terrain. Our maneuvers took place out in the desert, which looked very much like our own Dinetah. It even had some of the same plants. Like many of the things that happened to me during the war, that training exercise made me very glad that I was a Navajo.
We had a gung-ho lieutenant. Everybody called him Stormy.
“We’re going to see how tough you guys are,” he said. “We’re going to cross this desert on foot in two days. You’ve got just one canteen of water each, so you have to make it last. There’s no other way you can get water out here.”
When he said that, Kee and Bill and Henry and I, the four of us who were Navajos, looked at each other and nodded. We had all seen the clumps of prickly pear cactuses that were growing everywhere.
We started out and it was hot. Pretty soon the other Marines, including the lieutenant, were drinking from their canteens. But not us Navajos. Whenever Stormy wasn’t watching, we would cut off a piece of prickly pear cactus, scrape off the spines, and suck out the juice. We knew there was a lot of water inside a prickly pear, even if Stormy didn’t have a clue. By night, just about everyone else’s canteens were almost empty.
The next day was even hotter. We went about another ten miles and people just wore out.
“Have you guys still got water?” another Marine asked me. I held up my canteen and shook it so he could hear all the water sloshing around.
“How the heck can you get along without water?”
“Oh,” I said, “I’m just not thirsty.”
“That’s just the Indian way,” Kee added.
By about 2:00 that afternoon, everybody but us Navajos had collapsed. Stormy was sitting on a little hill.
“Come on,” Henry said to him. “We got ten more miles to go.”
“You fellas still got water?” he said in a cracked voice.
“Sure,” I said, offering my canteen. “Here, Lieutenant, you can have some of mine.”
He raised one hand weakly. “No,” he said. “That wouldn’t be fair.” Then he stood up and looked back at his worn-out Marines. “If any of you can’t make it, just wait here. I’ll have them send back water from camp.”
He got about a hundred yards before he fell down. Everybody else fell down right behind him, except us. We four were the only ones standing. Bill tried to help him get up, but he just waved us away.
“Chiefs,” Stormy croaked up at us, “do you suppose you guys could go all the way in to camp? I’m going to write a letter for you to take to Colonel Wood asking him to send us out some water.”
We did like he said. By the time the water truck got out to them they were all about dead. We never did tell Stormy about prickly pear cactuses. It was more fun having him and the others think that we Navajos were the toughest Marines of all.
A few days after that we shipped out. I was with the Third Division, Ninth Regiment along with several other code talkers, including Bill Toledo. Just as the scuttlebutt had it, we men of the First Marine Amphibious Corps were heading for the Solomons to force a landing on Bougainville. We had to drive out the Japanese and secure the airfields.
We did not go straight into battle, though. First, we had more field maneuvers. This practice was really important. It was to make sure that things did not go wrong too much. I say “too much,” grandchildren, because one of the unwritten rules of war is to expect the unexpected. If there’s any possible way that something can go wrong, you can bet the ranch that it will. Imagine two dozen ships and a dozen different landing beach sites. Think about all the preliminary air strikes and naval bombardment before even boarding the landing crafts, those LCVPs (short for landing crafts for vehicles and personnel) and LCMs (short for landing crafts, mechanized) that we all just called “alligators.” There were also the LSTs, much bigger landing ships that carried tanks and trucks. Then picture 14,000 Marines and 6,000 tons of cargo hitting the beaches by nightfall. Plus, we had to do this against an unknown enemy force dug in and waiting for us with rifles, machine guns, mortars, and artillery. There was no way to avoid foul-ups.
However, practicing a beach landing in a similar setting would help prepare everyone better than just going into a situation cold. So, where did we go to practice? Guadalcanal. From October 17 to 19 of 1943 we conducted landing exercises on the beaches of the Canal. Every Marine who’d be landing on Bougainville felt what it was like to wade through the surf up onto a boiling-hot sandy beach and then stare into the thick mysterious green of a steamy tropical jungle.
Wet and hot. That is what it was everywhere in the Solomons. If I hadn’t already been on Hawaii, which had some jungle of its own, i
t would have been a total shock to me. Think how strange it was for a Navajo boy from a land where rain is so rare that it’s a blessing from the Holy People to find himself in a place where it rains every day and sometimes keeps on raining for days on end. Instead of the night songs of the coyote, we would hear the buzzing and chirping and chattering of millions of insects—all of which seemed to see us Marines as their midnight snacks. But they would give us something in return for their meal—malaria.
I had to be careful where I walked and sat. There were leeches and spiders and scorpions everywhere, as well as huge poisonous centipedes. The first one I saw fell from a branch and crawled across my bare arm before flopping off and disappearing into the rotten palm leaves. It left an angry red welt on my skin and my whole arm ached for days after that. There were also giant crocodiles in the swamps and rivers, man-eating sharks and poisonous jellyfish in the ocean. And I did not even want to think about the snakes in that jungle.
There were native people on those islands. They had been there long before the Japanese invaded. Those Solomon Islanders were short, about the same height as us Navajos. Their skins were dark black, almost blue. Their hair was curly and red-red because they dyed it with lime juice. Their teeth were stained red, too, because they were always chewing betel nuts. That dangerous, steamy island was their beloved home. They saw it the way we saw our dry land of Dinetah. It was a sacred place given to them by their gods and they knew how to survive and be happy there. But they had not been happy during the Japanese occupation. Although the Japanese said they were liberating the island, they used the native people like slaves, beating or killing them if they tried to escape.
It was a familiar story to me as a Navajo. It made me feel I had much in common with them. So I spoke more often to the islanders than most white Marines did. Those natives talked a kind of broken English called pidgin, which was not too hard to understand. I remember one man named Gene-gene who was a sort of chief. He had terrible scars all over his chest from when the Japanese had tied him to a tree and tortured him by stabbing him with their bayonets. They’d wanted him to tell them where the American soldiers were, but he’d refused to talk. When night fell, he got loose and crawled to the water. Then, in spite of being weak from the loss of blood, he swam for three miles through water filled with sharks and crocodiles to reach an American Ranger squad and tell them where the Japanese were.
One day, Gene-gene approached me.
“You come,” he said.
He took me by the arm and led me to a big rock near the ocean. We sat together there for a time without saying anything. Then he bent over, pressed his palm on the ground, and lifted his hand up to rest it against his chest. I understood. He was telling me this land was in his heart. I knelt down on one knee and did the same, then swung my hand in the direction of the rising sun. Gene-gene nodded. He understood that the land of my own heart was there, far across the wide ocean. He placed his left hand on my chest and I did the same. We stood there like that for a while feeling each other’s hearts beat with love for our sacred homelands. It was one of the best conversations I ever had.
For our landing exercise at Guadalcanal, there was a full-scale debarkation of all the equipment and supplies we’d be taking with us when we did it all for real. Bill Toledo and I climbed into a blunt-nosed thirty-six-foot-long Higgins boat with thirty other men and were lowered over the side into the calm sea half a mile off shore. Then we chugged in at six knots an hour toward the tranquil beach.
“Okay,” our officers yelled. “Go, go, go!”
My combat pack was on my back, my rifle held at the ready. I jumped in, feeling the warm water fill my boots. It was strange knowing that American blood had darkened the surf of this island I was landing on so easily. Then my feet sank into the sand. For the first time, I was on soil where American Marines had died fighting the Japanese. I slogged bow-legged up from the beach as quickly as I could through the deep black volcanic sand. I was carrying an eighty-pound TBX radio set strapped to my chest, so I wasn’t able to run really fast.
Bill waited for me at the edge of the jungle. I crouched next to him and looked back at the beach. Hundreds of Marines were calmly climbing out of the alligators. Some looked serious, but there was a lot of laughing and joking. Trucks and tanks roared down the ramps of LSTs. Planes buzzed low overhead. There were all the sounds of a full-scale training maneuver. Everything was running like clockwork. Fifty yards farther down the beach George, another code talker and our most experienced radioman, waved at us. Bill and I waved back.
Bill shook his head. “You know what’s missing?” he said.
I nodded back at him. What was missing was chaos. There was none of the noise and confusion of real battle. No enemy fire. No bullets striking us, no mortar shells exploding. No wounded men screaming in pain or calling for their mothers. Instead, at one moment when everything was quiet, I heard the haunting cry of a bird echo out from somewhere deep inside the jungle. Our only attackers were a swarm of mosquitoes that descended on me, humming their thirst for my blood.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Bombardment
One of the strange things about war is the way it brings people together. Before we left Guadalcanal, it reunited me with one of my buddies from basic training. I was standing by the water, looking out at the President Adams, the transport ship that would soon carry us to Bougainville. All of a sudden a familiar voice drawled up from behind me.
“Chief, that yew?”
I turned to look at the tall blond-haired, blue-eyed Marine beaming down on me.
“Georgia Boy,” I exclaimed, holding out my hand. Instead of shaking it, he picked me up in a bear hug.
“I am so dang glad t’ see yew,” he said. “I’m gonna be with yew on this here Cartwheel. And I won’t let nothin’ happen to my little Indian buddy.”
“Aside from the four ribs you just broke,” I said when he finally put me down and I was able to get my breath back.
But I smiled as I said it. We Navajos know it is always good to see a friend. And it is even better when you know that a friend is going to be by your side in battle.
What was that “Cartwheel” Georgia Boy mentioned? Operation Cartwheel. That’s the name they gave the Allied plan of which our invasion of Bougainville was a part. It was a good name, for our aim was to turn things around. If we succeeded, the Allies would no longer be on the defensive. We would be on the attack.
West of Bougainville were the islands of the Bismarck Archipelego and New Guinea. All of those were in Japanese hands. The biggest and most dangerous Japanese airbase was at Rabaul on the northwest tip of New Britain Island. Every day, Zekes and Vals, Kates and Bettys came streaming out of Rabaul to make life hard for our forces.
Yes, grandchildren, I am sure that now you want to know what Zekes and Vals and Kates and Bettys were. Well, just as we code talkers made up names for things, so, too, did the ordinary fighting men create nicknames for just about everything. They did so for the equipment we used—like the name “alligator” given to our landing boats. And they did so for Japanese planes. Men’s names were given to fighters and women’s to bombers. Zekes were Zeros, fast little A6M Japanese fighter planes. They could go 700 miles at 350 miles an hour without refueling, and climb up to four miles high in seven minutes. They had two machine guns in the nose, two wing-mounted cannons, and each plane carried a 500-pound bomb. Until our carriers got the new Grumman Hellcats in 1943, nothing in the sky could outfly a Zero. Val was one of the enemy’s big, slow two-engine bombers. Kate was the Japanese torpedo-bomber, and Betty was their newer, faster Mitsubishi G4M, a twin-engined long-range bomber.
Why did we make up nicknames? Maybe they were easier to remember. Maybe, too, they just made frightening things more familiar, even a little funny in the midst of the seriousness of war. Personalizing a submarine that shells your beach every morning by calling it “Oscar” or referring to that one sputtering bomber that flew over Guadalcanal as “Washing Machine Charlie�
�� made them seem less scary. A sense of humor can be just as important for a soldier’s survival as a gun or a foxhole.
D-day for Bougainville was November 1, 1943. Thirty-five thousand of the enemy were on the island, but Admiral Halsey and his staff had what they thought was a good plan. Aerial reconaissance had revealed where the main concentrations of Japanese defenders seemed to be—in the southern part of the island. So the best place to attack was on the western shore, a place called Empress Augusta Bay, forty miles from the nearest large Japanese base on Bougainville’s other side.
A patrol dropped by a submarine in September had scouted the area and found little evidence of defenses there, although they also reported that the ground was very swampy as soon as you left the beach. There was a Japanese outpost at Cape Torokina nearby, but our scouts thought it had only about a hundred men. Because the terrain was so difficult, with hills and mountains, jungle and swamp, it would be hard for the Japanese to get reinforcements quickly. We could establish a defensible perimeter, build a new airfield, then gradually work our way out to neutralize the whole island.
While we were taking Bougainville, General Mac-Arthur’s forces would be landing on the western end of New Britain Island at Cape Gloucester to establish a new airfield there, too. Planes from the two new fields would have Rabaul caught in between them. MacArthur had wanted to attack Rabaul straight on, but it was heavily defended. Admiral Halsey thought that too many of our boys would die on the beaches. This was before our forces landed on such awful places as Tarawa and Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Our leaders were still innocent about how many American lives it would cost to defeat the determined Japanese.
However, as usual, just as soon as that plan was made, problems began to develop. Admiral Nimitz and the Navy were getting ready for the first attack on the Gilbert Islands, about 2,000 miles northeast of the Solomons. Nimitz demanded some of the battleships and destroyers originally given to Admiral Halsey for our Marines. So, instead of two carrier groups, Halsey now had only one. There was plenty of grumbling in the staff conferences at Guadalcanal about Operation Cartwheel being turned into Operation Shoestring Number Two.
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