The ranks mentioned here are those held at the time and all distances are given in statute miles, usually rounded off to the nearest zero or hundred to avoid an impression of exactness. Casualties—always very difficult to determine with accuracy —are normally those given in the excellent battle monographs published by the Marine Corps Historical Branch. When these books failed to list casualties for a particular action, I have fallen back on the equally fine histories prepared by the Army’s Office of the Chief of Military History. Almost all the accounts of naval battles, together with ship and naval aircraft losses, are based on the nine volumes of Samuel Eliot Morison’s History of U.S. Naval Operations in World War II which deal with the Pacific War.
Generally these three sources—the Marine monographs, the Army histories (written, incidentally, by civilian historians), and the Morison volumes—provide the bones of military history on which I have attempted to lay the flesh of men speaking and acting. All three have also been rich in quotations from captured Japanese diaries or battle orders, and I must say frankly that Strong Men Armed could not have been written if these works had not all been published by 1960. Before then, without a research staff of my own, I would have been bogged down in literal tons of classified documents at the various headquarters around Washington and Arlington.
Japanese sources were works such as Kogun, the Japanese Army in the Pacific War, by Saburo Hayashi with Alvin D. Coox, my authority for the statement that Japanese staff officers struck each other in the quarrel over Guadalcanal or that the Japanese originally expected to have to fight the British more than the Americans; the two volumes of U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, Interrogations of Japanese O fficials, a work abounding in background information concerning Japan during the war and also surprisingly productive of “human interest” material; or The Divine Wind, by Rikihei Inoguchi and Tadashi Nakajima, with Roger Pineau, which explains much of the philosophy of the kamikaze.
Fletcher Pratt’s The Marines’ War and The Island War by Frank O. Hough, both outline works on the Marines in the Pacific, helped chart a course for the author, while The U.S. Marines and Amphibious War, by Jeter A. Isely and Philip A. Crowl, was the source of much information on logistics or the technical aspects of the Pacific. For facts and figures on Marines in the air I have quarried Robert Sherrod’s exhaustive History of Marine Corps Aviation in World War II, and have gone to John A. DeChant’s Devilbirds for accounts of individual flying feats or for ballads such as those sung at the Hotel de Gink.
Other sources were division histories, memoirs, personal-experience narratives, maps, pictures, citations, on-the-spot books of the civilian war correspondents, war anthologies, magazine articles—from news and general magazines as well as from professional periodicals such as Marine Corps Gazette, Leatherneck, Infantry Journal or U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings-verifiable newspaper clippings and Marine combat correspondents’ reports, as well as my own experiences as a scout and machine-gunner with the First Marine Division in all that outfit’s campaigns but Okinawa.
I have drawn on this last, and also on numerous interviews with famous Marines while gathering material for other books and articles, in telling such stories as that of the tongue-tied Marine who could not pronounce the password on Guadalcanal, or of Chesty Puller booting a reluctant rifleman into action. In the first incident, the author was the sentry who demanded the password, while the second comes from a conversation with Lieutenant General Puller one wintry afternoon in Saluda, Virginia.
Also, I have frequently quoted men in the midst of battle, to name a typical few: Colonel David Shoup on Tarawa, an unidentified sergeant under Peleliu’s Bloody Nose Ridge, Captain William Shoemaker on Guam, Sergeant Phil Mottola on New Britain, or Red Mike Edson at Guadalcanal. These remarks came, respectively, from Robert Sherrod’s Tarawa, Russell Davis’ Marine at War, Alvin M. Josephy’s The Long and the Short and the Tall, a story filed by Sergeant Hans R. Johansen, and The Old Breed, George McMillan’s History of the First Marine Division. Mr. McMillan’s book, incidentally, along with the late Major Hough’s monograph, The Assault on Peleliu, insists that there were no snipers riding the Japanese tanks annihilated in the D-Day attack at Peleliu. I have said there were, because I saw them and shot at them, as did many of my comrades. Major Hough’s authority was my own battalion commander, who was quite properly some distance behind the battle, whereas Mr. McMillan’s is a tank colonel who went over the battlefield after the fight was over. Certainly there were no snipers on the tanks by then; they’d been shot off or pulled down from their slings of camouflage netting.
I cite this discrepancy between myself and two authors whom I respect only by way of indicating that I have usually preferred the account of a man who has been in the battle to that of another who has not, even if that other person happens to be the commander of the unit involved. It is the man who is on the spot who makes judgments that must be exact, if only because he risks his life on them. A Marine sees a bulky object on the back of a speeding tank and he must judge whether it is an enemy soldier or merely, say, a roll of camouflage cloth. If it’s a soldier then the Marine runs the risk of being shot before he can attack the tank, and so he must shoot the soldier first. If it is only cloth, then the Marine can throw his grenade right away. Marines who make bad judgments at such times rarely survive to confuse writers.
On the other hand, I have been wary of those inflated “I-was-there” accounts which proliferated in the press during the war. Stories which suggest that the hair on the chest of the typical Marine grew to a ferocious twelve-inch length have had no part in this book, nor have I trusted those accounts which overestimate a single man’s actions. Often the most gallant deeds turn out to be futile, or nearly so, if all results are to be measured in victory or defeat. But gallantry or valor—to this writer’s mind—are beyond such yardsticks. Because of this, and because valor and gallantry have been so frequently belittled in the reaction of the postwar era, I have named every one of the Marine Medal of Honor winners and paid particular attention to those who consciously and deliberately sacrificed their lives to save others. The French writer Albert Camus says “heroism is not much, happiness is more difficult,” and tells us in The Fall that modern man is incapable of forgetting himself for even a few seconds; the book and motion picture They Came to Cordura shows Medal of Honor winners as connivers of base motivations who are not nearly so noble as their major who hid in a ditch during battle; and Pappy Boyington, a Medal of Honor winner himself, concludes his Baa Baa Black Sheep with the remark: “Just name a hero and I’ll prove he’s a bum.” These three, and many others, are answered by the dozens of Marines who fell on enemy grenades to save the lives of their buddies. This is heroism, which is something more than natural courage, though it is often confused with it.
While being wary of exaggeration, I have also suspected almost all that is fanciful or gives off the aroma peculiar to the post-battle campfire. One of my buddies (not a source for this book) used to say of such tales: “Certainly, I believe this story. I made it up myself!” These are what Marines call “sea stories.” They are popular, though seldom believed, and they are unmistakable. One of these, I am sure, is the widely accepted story of the Battle of Coffin Corner on New Britain, where Sergeant Joe Guiliano counterattacked the enemy with a cradled machine gun. The story goes that Guiliano’s men kept calling for him by name and that the Japanese, mistaking the name for an American battle cry, began shouting it themselves—thus bringing the formidable Guiliano into their midst. Unfortunately for the story’s reputation, the name Guiliano has one of those L’s which the Japanese pronounce as R, and there is no version speaking of the enemy calling for “Guiriano.” Even if this difficulty did not exist, the story seems a bit too salty.
Official accounts of Marine operations have also been received with a cocked eyebrow, and such Marine errors as the first Matanikau operation, the useless Talasea landings or General Rupertus’ reluctance to use Army troops at Peleliu have been describe
d for what they were. However, I have also avoided taking sides in any controversy, and have presented the famous quarrel over Marine General Howlin’ Mad Smith’s dismissal of Army General Ralph Smith on Saipan only as an actual event. If even so little seems prejudicial to Ralph Smith’s case, then I refer the reader to The Campaign in the Marianas, written by Philip A. Crowl, a former Navy officer, for the Army’s Office of Military History. Chapter X, pages 191-201, gives, in my opinion, the fairest presentation of what happened and makes the calmest judgment.
Army operations, incidentally, are not described in detail, even when they are conjoined to those of the Marines—as at Okinawa, the Marianas, or the Solomons—because this is the story of the Marines’ war. This book’s account of Guadalcanal, for instance, is ended on December 9, 1942, the day command passed from the Marines to the Army. What happened between then and February 9, when the island was secured, can be found in Guadalcanal: The First Offensive, by John Miller, Jr., a Marine who fought at Bougainville and who is now the Deputy Chief Historian, Office of the Chief of Military History.
Most of the human touches in this book come from division histories, memoirs, biographies and anthologies, and the stories of Marine combat correspondents. There might have been more of them, except that my attempt to go through nearly a hundred cartons of combat correspondents’ material at Marine Headquarters was defeated by the discovery that the stories were on file by correspondents’ names. Since all were undated and rarely identified the battlefield—as censorship required—the only person who could have made use of them was he who knew the battles through which every combat correspondent had passed as well as which one was being described then. This, like the name of the Unknown Soldier, is known but to God.
A few small alterations or deliberate maintenance of misconceptions need explanation. I have spelled the Japanese word for wine as saki rather than sake, realizing that the general reader would probably pronounce the latter to rhyme with cake, rather than with rocky, as it should. I am aware, of course, that saki is the Japanese word for a point of land, just as I know that take means mount and that in speaking of Mount Yaetake on Okinawa I am committing a redundancy. But the Marines always called it Mount Yaetake, just as they still talk of the Battle of the Tenaru on Guadalcanal even though Army maps have proved that the fight was fought on the Ilu. In this book it remains Tenaru, and if there is criticism from historians, I prefer this to having a Marine friend write: “Can’t you even remember the names of the battles we were in?” For similar reasons the body of water separating Guadalcanal from Florida and other islands is called Iron Bottom Bay, rather than Iron Bottom Sound as historians now call it. No one in my memory ever called it anything but “the bay,” although it is actually neither bay nor sound but a channel and was known as Sealark Channel before the war. Also, jaw-breaking Navy Medical Corps ratings such as Pharmacist’s Mate Second Class and, worse, the mystifying abbeviation PHM 2/C, have been avoided simply by using the title “Corpsman” for all these men who served with the Marines.
It is hoped that readers will grant that numerous dramatizations such as the last few minutes aboard the sinking battleship Yamato or the suicidal end of Generals Ushijima and Cho on Okinawa or the words which Colonel Hiromichi Yahara spoke beneath Shuri Castle have their basis in historical fact. The first comes from Morison’s Victory in the Pacific, Volume XIV of his series, which quotes a surviving ensign named Mitsuru Yoshida; the second from Japanese prisoners of war quoted in Okinawa: The Last Battle, by Roy E. Appleman, et al; the third from Okinawa Operations Record and the Yahara Interrogation quoted in Okinawa: Victory in the Pacific, by Major Charles S. Nichols, U.S.M.C., and Henry I. Shaw, Jr.
Mr. Shaw, incidentally, kindly consented to check my manuscript for accuracy. He has spent the last decade researching and writing histories of the Marines in World War Two, and there are few people so well qualified to hunt for error or to detect the apocryphal. I am most grateful to him, both for helpful suggestions and corrections. Those mistakes that remain here are, of course, mine.
Before I conclude, let me acknowledge my debt to the Marine Corps and to its commandant, General David M. Shoup, as well as to Colonel James E. Mills, head of the Division of Information, and to Lieutenant Colonel Philip N. Pierce of that division’s media section. The staff of the Marine Historical Branch commanded by Colonel Thomas G. Roe has been of invaluable assistance with its customary grace and generosity, especially Mr. D. Michael O’Quinlivan, head of research and records. Although Mr. Robert D. Loomis, my editor at Random House, is already aware of my gratitude, the reader should know that if this book is consistently clear and all signposts are plainly marked, this is chiefly to the credit of his advice and criticism.
Finally, all that is subjective or impressionistic here—and I admit there is much of it—comes from my own experience in the war. This I regard as my warrant for having written this story in this way.
ROBERT LECKIE
Mountain Lakes, New Jersey
September 4, 1961
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