They swarmed through, following lantern-bearing scouts.
A Marine roadblock began firing on the right flank of the Japanese column, and Yukioka’s men wheeled right and overran the roadblock. They moved farther to the rear, the main body setting up a position on high ground behind the Third Battalion, Twenty-first, the men of the demolition squads continuing to move down the ravines toward the beach and the Division Hospital.
The Japanese soldiers on the high ground began striking the rear of the Third Battalion, Twenty-first, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Wendell Duplantis. Duplantis asked Division for artillery. It was refused, for it might fall on friendly troops. Instead, Company L was taken out of the Ninth Marines reserve and ordered to counterattack Yukioka.
The Marines let loose a shower of grenades, charged—and routed the Japanese on the hill.
But to the rear of that hill, toward the sea, Yukioka’s demolition squads were slipping down the ravines toward the Division Hospital. They were tipsy and they were swigging the last of the saki in their canteens. Some were already in the throes of hangover. They moved on, their ranks augmented by the suiciders creeping from the caves in which they had spent the night. One such group came out reeling drunkenly, unaware that they had spent the night sitting on a terrified American who had by now lost his mind. They joined up. They came to a high hill overlooking the American hospital tents. They could see the sea only a few hundred yards west. It was half-past six in the morning, and they started down the hill.
A wounded Marine coming east from the hospital to rejoin his outfit on the front saw the short men in khaki slipping and sliding down the hill. He turned and wide-legged it back to the hospital, bawling:
“The Japs are coming! The Japs are coming!”
Corpsmen and patients grabbed weapons and flung themselves behind cots or cartons of plasma. Some of the walking wounded jumped from their cots and ran for the beach. A cook wounded the night before leaped erect, naked, and hobbled for safety.
The Japanese came with a yell and a shower of grenades. Corpsmen and patients fired back. A doctor absorbed in an operation glanced up as shrapnel whistled through the tent canvas. He sent his corpsmen outside to fight and continued the operation.
Meanwhile, at Division Headquarters, a few hundred yards to the right of the hospital as it faced the front, Colonel George Van Orden began rounding up another pick-up force. Every available man behind the lines—Seabees, MP’s, combat correspondents, truck drivers—was collected and led toward the hospital, where the Japanese were driven back into a jumble of hills.
Then Colonel Van Orden’s force turned to a methodical mopping-up of all the terrain between the sea and the front lines. It was grisly work, relieved only by the fact that the Japanese began to blow themselves up. Here and there a new method of suicide appeared. Enemy soldiers took off their helmets, placed a primed grenade on top of their heads, replaced the helmet—and awaited oblivion with folded arms.
By noon it was all over.
By nightfall it was clear that General Takashina had lost 3,500 soldiers, exclusive of the Orote losses. He had lost 95 per cent of his commissioned officers and go per cent of his weapons had been destroyed. He had so many wounded that their presence was weakening morale. He had no hope of help either by sea or by air, and American power in those elements was battering him ceaselessly. His men had killed only 200 of the enemy, while wounding 645 more, and the Third Marine Division was already prepared to come out fighting on Fonte Plateau. There was nothing for Takashina to do but withdraw. He had staked all on that grand banzai, but in the words of the man who opposed him, Major General Allen Turnage:
“It was a grand victory for us.”
13
Two days after General Takashina’s grand banzai had been shattered, the general was himself dead. He was machine-gunned by Marines breaking out of the Asan-Adelup beachhead. Command passed to elderly Lieutenant General Hideyoshi Obata, the commander of the Marianas defenses who had been caught on Guam when the Americans landed.
On that same July 28, the 77th Division completed patrolling to the south, came up north, took Mount Tenjo, and linked up with the Third Marine Division’s right flank. Also that day, Brigadier General Shepherd’s First Brigade struck out along Orote and drove into the old Marine Barracks. They found a cigar box holding prewar Post Exchange receipts, a star-spangled pillow which a Japanese soldier had made from the blue field of the American flag, and a bronze plaque. The rest was rubble. They drove on, to take the airfield and to herd the last of Commander Tamai’s 3,500 men onto Orote’s eastern tip.
On July 31—the day General MacArthur’s approach to the Philippines reached its terminus on Sansapor Point in western New Guinea, the date of the Allied breakout from the Normandy beachhead in France—the First Brigade came to the end of Orote Peninsula. The Brigade had fought a bitter battle since the landing at Agat, the sweep north, the fighting left-turn onto Orote. Their dead and missing numbered 431, their wounded 1,525. But they had buried 3,372 Japanese and taken only three prisoners. Now a squad had come upon the last living enemy soldier on Orote.
He was a forlorn scrimp of a man, small even for his race, and his tattered blouse and breeches were much too large. But there was an easiness about him that puzzled the Marines who took him captive. Many times Japanese prisoners had become ashamed of having surrendered and asked for a knife to commit hara-kiri. Yet this soldier seemed almost eager to be taken away. A Marine interpreter spoke to him.
“Why did you surrender?”
“My commanding officer told us to fight to the last man.” The Marine’s eyebrows rose.
“Well?”
The Japanese soldier’s eyebrows also rose—in wounded innocence—and he exclaimed:
“I am the last man.”
The same day, Guam’s two-division attack to the northeast began with the Third Marine Division on the left, the 77th Infantry on the right. The Marines were moving against Agana, the city which stood on the island’s western shore at the narrow waist where the Guam peanut twists east and north. There was no opposition in Agana. The city had been ruined by American bombing and naval gunfire called down on General Takashina’s artillery concentrations there. Its Chamorro population had fled into the bush days before the invasion, after American warplanes dropped leaflets advising them to do so.
A squad of Marines moved warily through Agana’s streets, now silent and powdery with dust. They passed what had once been a neat little cemetery, now debauched by naval shelling. Huge 14-inch shell craters pocked it and its crosses and headstones were a jumble of jagged pieces. One of the Marines shook his head.
“Even the dead can’t rest in peace,” he said.
On the right flank, Major General Andrew Bruce’s 77th Infantry Division also moved ahead with no opposition. The only hindrances were the roughness of the terrain, the heat, and nagging swarms of flies and mosquitoes.
Then, at a jungle place called Yona, the soldiers found a concentration camp filled with Chamorros.
There were 2,000 of them, cheering, weeping, laughing, singing. They had been living in lean-tos and thatched huts built in the mud to either side of a sluggish stream. They had had little food, no medical care. They were clothed in rags. They were weak, racked by continual coughing fits—victims of malnutrition, malaria and tuberculosis. Their bodies were sticks of bones and their olive skin was drawn drum-tight. But this thirty-first of July was the day they had awaited for nearly three years. When they saw the American soldiers coming through the trees they hobbled to their feet with glad cries.
They sang “The Marines’ Hymn”—for they remembered the Marines—but the soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, 307th Infantry, didn’t mind that at all. They began to sing a song of their own underground, composed especially for this date and memorized in face of every threat of reprisal.
Early Monday morning
The action came to Guam,
Eighth of December,
Nineteen forty-on
e.
Oh, Mr. Sam, Sam, my dear Uncle Sam,
I want you please come back to Guam.
Our lives are in danger—
You better come
And kill all the Japanese
Right here on Guam.
Oh, Mr. Sam, Sam, my dear Uncle Sam,
I want you please come back to Guam.
Such scenes were repeated all the way up the island, while General Geiger drove his attacking divisions forward.
There were battles along the way. On August 3 the Ninth Marines reached a place called Finegayen near Tumon Bay on the west coast. On that morning a good-humored youth with a flashing white smile and the name of Frank Witek said to his friends, “I think this is my day.” It was surely so, although Pfc. Witek did not see its end. He fought tigerishly in the attack at Finegayen, exposing himself repeatedly to cover his squad. He shot 16 of the enemy. But as so often happens to the brave, he made his last charge and fell dead. As does not so often happen, he won the Medal of Honor. The next day the gallant Captain Shoemaker fell. He was sitting beside the road when a Japanese 75 shell swooshed in and blotted out his life. “All the good ones go,” a Marine said sadly, unashamed of the tears streaking his dusty cheeks. Next day Finegayen fell. Two days later, on August 7, General Geiger put the First Brigade on the line. With the brigade on the left, Third Marines in the center, 77th on the right, the assault rolled north until it reached Ritidian Point on August 10 and Guam was declared conquered.
But the southward streaming of the Chamorros did not stop. A Civil Affairs Section had been set up to care for them. Stockades were built. Captured Japanese food was issued. Some Chamorros came to the stockades to eat, to regain a little strength, to find a bayonet or a machete and slip back into the northern hills for vengeance. But most of them stayed, among them an emaciated old man with snow-white hair. He came to the stockade and introduced himself as Gaily R. Kamminga, a former member of the Guam Congress. He found old friends among some of the Navy officers who had landed with the Marines. He showed them a little pillow he was carrying. It was the only article of comfort which the Japanese had allowed him to take to the penal camp. Suddenly he ripped it open. Inside it was a faded American flag which had flown over the Piti Naval Yard the day of the Japanese invasion.
Down at Orote a new American flag flew over the rubble that had once been the Marine Barracks. It had been raised on July 29. General Geiger had been there, with his chief of staff, Colonel Merwin Silverthorn. General Shepherd had spoken quickly, while shells whistled east toward Orote’s tip.
“On this hallowed ground,” Shepherd said, “you officers and men of the First Marine Brigade have avenged the loss of our comrades who were overcome by a numerically superior enemy three days after Pearl Harbor. Under our flag this island again stands ready to fulfill its destiny as an American fortress in the Pacific.”
Colonel Silverthorn stepped forward.
“Hoist the American colors,” he commanded.
Old Glory fluttered up the pole.
“To the Colors!” commanded Geiger.
A Marine blew the quick-sweet, slow-sad notes on a captured Japanese bugle.
The Marines saluted.
It had cost 7,800 Americans killed and wounded—839 soldiers, 245 sailors, 6,716 Marines—but Uncle Sam had come back to Guam.
14
HOTEL ATOLL
No Beer Atoll
No Women Atoll
Nuthin’ Atoll
The sign had been raised outside a billet on Kwajalein Atoll. But, like that “PAVUVU RIFLE AND GUN CLUB, WHERE LIFE IS A THIRTY CALIBER BORE,” it had its cousins by the dozen from Camp Tarawa in Hawaii to the newly built Second Marine Division encampments on Saipan.
Tedium had taken hold in the Pacific. Except on Guam, where the Third Marine Division was still mopping up, life had become an unutterable yawn. The blaze of battle had flickered out and would not flare up again until mid-September.
There were occasional thrilling spectacles, such as that of the morning of August 28 at Eniwetok, when Admiral Halsey took Task Force 38 out of the lagoon for a westward-ranging strike at the Palaus, later to swing north and strike at Mindanao in the Southern Philippines. But generally there was a lull. There had not even been much news from Europe since the announcement that the Allies had landed in Southern France on August 15.
On Pavuvu, it was a time when the men of the First Marine Division “trained” by walking around and around their tiny rattrap of an island, one outfit marching clockwise, the other counterclockwise, so as not to clog the single coastal road, exchanging cordial insults as they passed each other, cursing the pervasive odor of rotten coconut and those constantly falling nuts which made it necessary to wear helmets at all times—either when going to chow for that unvarying “rest and rehabilitation” diet of powdered eggs, spam and dehydrated potatoes, or when watching a grade-B movie in what was hopefully called an “open-air theater” but was actually a clearing in which men sat on fallen logs and watched a screen, yelling like sex-starved satyrs the moment any human being in skirts skipped, swished or staggered across it. There was no beer issue on Pavuvu for the men, as there was in the plush Army and Navy bases on surrounding islands. But the men of the First knew how to strain a bottle of after-shave lotion through a loaf of bread to make it palatable; they could cook up inebriate delights with raisins, sugar and coconut milk, or vanilla extract stolen from the galley—and those men invalided across the bay to the naval hospital on Banika could be counted upon to return with stores of medical alcohol bought with battle souvenirs. So supplied, the men could drink and sing.
The coffee that they give us, they say is mighty fine,
It’s good for cuts and bruises, in place of iodine.
I don’t want no more of the U. S. Marines,
Gee, but I wanna go home.
They say when you’re enlisted, promotions are mighty fine,
Well, I’m a goddam private, I been in over nine.
I don’t want no more of the U. S. Marines,
Gee, but I wanna go home.
The bedsacks that they give you, they say are mighty fine,
Well, how in hell should I know, I never slept in mine.
The officers they give us, can stand up to the worst,
You find ‘em every weekend, shacked up with a nurse.
I don’t want no more of the U. S. Marines,
Gee, but I wanna go, right back to Quantico,
Gee, but I wanna go home.
There was little of such diversion on Saipan-Tinian. The Fourth Marine Division had already departed, sailing back to its old base on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands, and leaving the Second Marine Division sole proprietors of islands made dismal by the August monsoon and mosquitoes carrying dengue or “breakbone” fever. There were also close to 1,000 Japanese still holed up in the hills, and there were Marines being killed in cleaning them out. But for the Second’s veterans, as with those of the First Division, there was the blessed rotation system which was taking many of them home. Close to 1,300 Marines who could claim service back to Guadalcanal were shipped Stateside. Some of their comrades painted gold stars on their tents in sardonic mockery of the American penchant for taking bows. If a man’s school, church, community, club, factory or office could put his name on a plaque headed, “Our Men in Service,” why couldn’t a man’s squad commemorate his entry in the ranks of the rear-echelons? So they put up signs like this:
WE HAVE A BOY STATESIDE.
Back at the Second’s old Camp Tarawa in Hawaii, the new Fifth Marine Division was getting accustomed to training overseas—adjusting to such novel nuisances as censorship. But there was one private who had cause to bless the censor. He had received a note: “Letter at mail desk. Name on envelope Dorothy, name on letter Bettye. Check and if correct, mail.”
The last of the Marine divisions—the Sixth—was being formed on Guadalcanal. Its nucleus was the First Brigade and its commander was the brigade’s old leader, but Lemuel
Shepherd now wore the twin stars of a major general. To the brigade’s Fourth and Twenty-second Marines—units of which had fought at Guadalcanal, Makin, Bougainville and Eniwetok —was added the Twenty-ninth Marines. The First Battalion, Twenty-ninth, had captured Mount Tapotchau on Saipan, but its Second and Third Battalions were newly formed in the States.
Though the Sixth Marine Division also got an artillery regiment, the Fifteenth, it got almost none of the specialists characteristic of Marine amphibious divisions of the past. For the Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, had been divided into two corps—the Third under Major General Geiger, the Fifth under Major General Schmidt—and all the special functions were now taken over by the corps. A Marine division was now streamlined to about 18,000 men, although the First, scheduled for a one-division landing, remained at a strength of above 20,000.
Training of the new Sixth Division began in late August with the arrival of the First Brigade from Guam, and it was made difficult by the Guadalcanal base commander’s insistence that Marine divisions furnish 1,000 men daily for base working parties. It had been to avoid this typical harassment of line divisions by rear-echelon generals that the First Division had been assigned to its private “little-ease” on Pavuvu.
To some of the Sixth’s veterans who had known Guadalcanal in the days of the Tokyo Express and Pistol Pete or Washing-Machine Charley, the island had become a placid fat cow of a place with its officers’ clubs, its hospitals, its warehouses, its roads and piers and libraries and theaters and indoor mess halls and quonset huts, its battalions of military police required to guard its Red Cross girls and nurses and to enforce the numerous regulations clattering off the typewriters of those ubiquitous clerk-typists who had become the new heroes of Guadalcanal. The Marines did not like it there, nor could they take the new Guadalcanal seriously when, at night, with the open-air theaters going full blast, the MP’s got around to playing air-raid-precaution.
Strong Men Armed Page 40
