This was a suicidal approach and no one knew it better than Whipple, but it had been commanded by headquarters. “I can’t order my boys into another Cassino,” he had protested. “This is worse than Cassino,” headquarters had admitted, “but it’s got to be done.” Whipple had saluted and said, “Then I must lead the boys myself.” And there he was.
His inspiration gave the Japanese the final burst of courage they needed. With terrifying intensity of spirit the Two-Two-Two moved up the ridge. The fighting was murderous, with Germans firing point-blank at the rescuers. Barrages from hidden guns, planted weeks before at specific spots by General Seigl, cut down the Triple Two’s with fearful effect, and at one faltering point Goro thought: “Why should we have to penetrate such firepower? We’re losing more than we’re trying to save.”
As if he sensed that some such question might be tormenting his troops and halting their flow of courage, Colonel Whipple moved among them, calling, “Sometimes you do things for a gesture. This is the ultimate gesture. They’re waiting for us, over that ridge.” But the men of the Triple Two could not banish the ugly thought that haunted them: “Texans are important and have to be saved. Japanese are expendable.” But no one spoke these words, for all knew that the Texas fighters didn’t have to prove anything; the Japanese did.
When night fell on the twenty-ninth of October the Japanese troops were still four hundred yards short of their goal. They slept standing up, or leaning against frozen trees. There was no water, no food, no warmth. Outpost sentries, when relieved, muttered, “I might as well stay here with you.” There was no bed. Men ached and those with minor wounds felt the blood throbbing in their veins. Hundreds were already dead.
At dawn a German sniper, hidden with Teutonic thoroughness, fired into the grim encampment and killed Private Minoru Sakagawa. For some minutes his brother Goro was not aware of what had happened, but then young Shigeo cried, “Jesus! They killed Minoru!”
Goro, hearing his brother’s agonized cry, ran up and saw Minoru dead upon the frozen ground. This was too much to bear, and he began to lose his reason. “Achhhh!” he cried with a great rasping noise in his throat. Two of his brothers had now died while under his command, and the rest of his troops seemed doomed. His right hand began trembling while his voice continued to cry a meaningless “Achhhh.”
Colonel Whipple, who knew what was happening, rushed up and clouted the young lieutenant brutally across the face. “Not now, Goro!” he commanded, using a strange phrase: Not now, as if later it would be permissible to go out of one’s mind, as if at some later time all men might do so, including Whipple himself.
Goro fell back and his hand stopped trembling. Staring in dull panic at his colonel, he tried vainly to focus on the problems at hand, but failed. He could see only his brother, fallen on the pine needles of the Vosges. Then his cold reason returned, and he drew his revolver. Grabbing Shigeo by the shoulder he said, “You walk here.” Then to his men he roared, in Japanese, “We won’t stop!” And with appalling force he and his team marched in among the great trees.
It was a desperate, horrible hand-to-hand fight up the last thousand feet of the ridge. Shigeo, following the almost paralyzed fury of his brother, exhibited a courage he did not know he had. He moved directly onto German positions and grenaded them to shreds. He ducked behind trees like a veteran, and when the last roadblock stood ahead, ominous and spewing death, it was mild-mannered Shigeo, the quiet one of the Sakagawa boys—though there were now only two left—who with demonic craftiness went against it, drew its fire so that he could spot its composition, and then leaped inside with grenades and a Tommy gun. He killed eleven Germans, and when his companions moved past him to the ultimate rescue of the Texans he leaned out of the Nazi position and cheered like a schoolboy.
“You’re a lieutenant!” Colonel Whipple snapped as he went forward to join the Texans, and a boy from Maui looked at Shig and said in pidgin, “Jeez, krauts all pau!”
In rough formation, with Lieutenant Goro Sakagawa at their head, the Japanese boys marched in to greet the Texans, and a tall Major Burns from Houston stumbled forward, his ankle in bad shape, and tried to salute, but the emotion of the moment was too great. He was famished and burning with thirst, and before he got to Goro he fell in the dust. Then he rose to his knees and said from that position, “Thank God. You fellows from the Jap outfit?”
“Japanese,” Goro replied evenly. He stooped to help the Texan to his feet and saw that the man was at least a foot taller than he was. All the Texans, starving and parched though they were, were enormous men, and it seemed indecent that a bunch of runty little rice-eaters should have rescued them.
Against his will, for Major Burns was a very brave man and had kept his troops alive mainly through the force of his extraordinary character, the tall Texan began to weep. Then he was ashamed of himself, bit his lip till it nearly bled and asked, “Could my men have some water?” He turned to his troops and shouted, “Give these Japs a big welcome.”
Goro grabbed the major as if they were two toughs back in Kakaako and said in sudden, surging anger, “Don’t you call us Japs!”
“Goro!” Colonel Whipple shouted.
“What, sir?” He didn’t remember what he had just said.
“All right,” Whipple snapped. “Let’s start down the hill.”
The Japanese troops formed two lines at the entrance to the pocket in which the Texans had been trapped, and as the giant men passed to freedom between the pairs of stubby Triple Two’s some of the Texans began to laugh, and soon the pocket was choked with merriment, in which big Texans began to embrace their rescuers and kiss them and jump them up into the air. “You little guys got guts,” a huge fellow from Abilene shouted. “I thought we was done for.”
Lieutenant Sakagawa did not join the celebration. He was watching his men, and estimated dully that of the original 1,200 Japanese boys that had set out to storm the ridge, fully two-thirds were now either dead or severely wounded. This terrible toll, including his brother Minoru, was almost more than he could tolerate, and he began mumbling, “Why did we have to lose so many little guys to save so few big ones?” It had cost 800 Japanese to rescue 341 Texans. Then his mind began to harden and to come back under control, and to discipline it he began checking off Baker Company, and he found that of the 183 men who had waded ashore with him at Salerno in September of 1943 only seven had managed to stick with the outfit through October of 1944. The rest—all 176 of them—were either dead or wounded.
Now Shigeo rushed up to advise his brother that Colonel Whipple had promoted him on the field of battle, a soldier’s sweetest triumph, and the brilliant-eyed youth shouted, “Goro, I guess this time we really showed the world!” But Goro, counting the dead, wondered: “How much more do we have to prove?” And from the manner in which his mind jerked from one image to the next, he realized that he was close to mental collapse, but he was saved by a curious experience. From among the Texans a hysterical medic, his mind deranged by three shells that had exploded while he was trying to cut off a shattered leg, began moving from one Japanese to another, mumbling, “Greater love bath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his brother.”
Major Burns heard the speech and yelled, “There goes that goddamned odd-ball again. Please, please, shut him up!”
But the medic had reached Goro, to whom he mumbled, “Lieutenant, indeed it is true. No man hath greater love than this, that he would march up such a fucking ridge to save a complete crock of shit like Major Burns.” In his wildness the medic turned to face Burns, screaming hysterically, “I hate you! I hate you! You led us into this death trap, you crazy, crazy beast!”
Almost sadly, Major Burns, pivoting on his good leg, swung on the medic and knocked him out. “He was more trouble than the Germans,” he apologized. “Somebody haul the poor bastard out.”
Before any of the Texans could get to the capsized medic, Goro had compassionately pulled the unconscious fellow into his arms. A gigantic
Texan came along to help, and the odd trio started down the bloody ridge, but when they had returned halfway to safety, General Seigl’s last furious barrage enveloped them, and two shells bracketed Colonel Mark Whipple, killing him instantly. Goro, who witnessed the death, dropped his hold on the medic and started toward the man who had done so much for the Japanese, but at long last his nervous system gave way.
The awful “Achhhh” filled his throat, and his hands began trembling. His head jerked furiously as if he were an epileptic and his eyes went vacant like those of an imbecile. “Achhhh! Achhhh!” he began to shout hysterically, and he started falling to his right, but caught himself by clutching air. His voice cleared and he began screaming, “Don’t you call me a Jap! Goddamn you big blond Texans, don’t you call me a yellow-belly!”
In wild fury he began lashing out at his tormentors, stupidly, ineffectively. He kept shouting irrelevant threats at the Texans whom he had just saved, and was ready to fight even the biggest. One man from Dallas gently held him off as an adult would a child, and it was pathetic to see the stocky Japanese swinging wildly at the air, unable to reach his giant adversary. Finally he returned to the horrible achhhh sound, and at this point his brother Shigeo ran up to take command. He pinioned Goro’s arms, and when the latter seemed about to break out once more, Shigeo smashed a hard right-cut to the jaw and slowed him down.
Now Goro began to whimper like a child, and two men from his outfit had the decency to cover him with a blanket, so that his disintegration would not be visible to his own troops, and in this condition they patiently led him, shivering and shuddering, out of the Vosges Mountains where the Texans had been trapped.
Toward the foothills they passed through a guard unit from their own battalion, and a young lieutenant from Able Company, a haole boy from Princeton asked, “Who you got under the blanket?” and Shigeo replied, “Lieutenant Sakagawa.”
“Was he the one who got through to the Texans?”
“Who else?” Shig replied, and as the cortege of wounded and near-mad and starved and war-torn passed, the Princeton man looked at Goro Sakagawa’s mechanically shuffling feet and muttered, “There goes an American.”
VI
The Golden Men
IN 1946, when Nyuk Tsin was ninety-nine years old, a group of sociologists in Hawaii were perfecting a concept whose vague outlines had occupied them for some years, and quietly among themselves they suggested that in Hawaii a new type of man was being developed. He was a man influenced by both the west and the east, a man at home in either the business councils of New York or the philosophical retreats of Kyoto, a man wholly modern and American yet in tune with the ancient and the Oriental. The name they invented for him was the Golden Man.
At first I erroneously thought that both the concept and the name were derived from the fact that when races intermingled sexually, the result was apt to be a man neither all white nor all brown nor all yellow, but somewhere in between; and I thought that the Golden Man concept referred to the coloring of the new man—a blend of Chinese, Polynesian and Caucasian, for at this time Japanese rarely intermarried—and I went about the streets of Hawaii looking for the golden man of whom the sociologists spoke.
But in time I realized that this bright, hopeful man of the future, this unique contribution of Hawaii to the rest of the world, did not depend for his genesis upon racial intermarriage at all. He was a product of the mind. His was a way of thought, and not of birth, and one day I discovered, with some joy I may add, that for several years I had known the archetypes of the Golden Man, and if the reader has followed my story so far, he also knows three of them well and is about to meet the fourth, and it is interesting that none of these, in a direct sense, owed his golden quality to racial intermixtures. His awareness of the future and his rare ability to stand at the conflux of the world he owed to his understanding of the movements around him. I have known a good many golden men in the secondary, or unimportant, sense: fine Chinese-Hawaiians, excellent Portuguese-Chinese and able Caucasian-Hawaiians; but most of them had little concept of what was happening either in Hawaii or in the world. But the four men of whom I now wish to speak did know, and it is in reference to their knowledge that I wish to end my story of Hawaii, for they are indeed the Golden Men.
In 1946, when the war had ended and Hawaii was about to explode belatedly into the twentieth century, Hoxworth Hale was forty-eight years old; and one morning, when the trade winds had died away and the weather was unbearably sticky, he happened to look into his mirror while shaving, and the thought came to him: “This year I am as good a man as I shall ever be in this life. I have most of my teeth, a good deal of my hair, I’m not too much overweight, and my eyes are good enough to see distances without glasses, though close up I have a little trouble, and I suppose I’ll have to see an oculist. I can still concentrate on a problem, and I derive pleasure from control of business. I like to go to work, even on mornings like this.” He pummeled his midriff to start perspiration before entering the shower, and as the hot, muggy day closed in upon him he was forced to inspect the two areas in which he was no longer so good a man as he once had been.
First, there was the gnawing, never-ending pain that started when his son Bromley was shot down during the great fire of Tokyo in 1945, when the air corps practically destroyed the city. More than 70,000 Japanese had died in the great raids, and a city too, so that in one sense Bromley’s death had contributed positive results, and after his raids victory for our side was assured. But Bromley Hale was a special young man. Everyone said so, and his departure left a gap both in the Hale family and in Hawaii that would never be filled, for in his last letters home, when capricious death had become so routine in his B-29 squadron as to depress all the fliers, he had spoken intimately of what he hoped to accomplish when the war ended, as soon it must.
He had written, from a but on Iwo Jima: “We had to ditch our monstrous plane in the waters near here, and by the grace of God we were all saved, but in the going down, as I worked with the wheel I was not so much concerned about a perfect water landing as I was with my determination to do what years ago I had sworn to do while a senior at Punahou. I am determined to write a novel about—and this may stagger you, but bear with me—Aunt Lucinda Whipple. I shall have her sitting in the late afternoons in her house in Nuuanu Valley, and each day as the afternoon rains sweep down from the Pali and the white mildew grows on all things, she entertains the straggling members of our family. It has always seemed to me that Aunt Lucinda was everybody’s aunt, and everybody comes to her and listens to her monotonous chatter about the old days, and nothing I write will make any sense at all—only an old woman’s ceaseless vanity—until it begins to weave a spell, the kind of spell in which you and I have always lived. I shall show Aunt Lucinda exactly as she is, religious, family-proud, unseeing, unknowing, garrulous and unbelievably kind. She has become to me a web, a fatal emanation, an encroaching dream, and as our plane struck the water, I was listening not to my co-pilot, who was frantic as hell, but to dear old Aunt Lucinda. How she hated airplanes and fast automobiles and Japanese. As a matter of fact, if you took time to analyze it carefully, I guess she hated everybody but the Whipples, and the Janderses, and the Hales, and the Hewletts, and the Hoxworths. But even they gave her a lot of trouble, for she always took great pains to explain to visitors that she came from the branch of the Whipple family that had never had even a drop of Hawaiian blood, and she kept segregated in her mind those of her great family of whom this could not be said. She was suspicious of you and me, because we were not pure English stock; and of course all the Hoxworths and half the Hewletts were contaminated, and often when I spoke with her she would hesitate, and I knew she was thinking: ‘I’d better not tell him that, because after all, he is one of the contaminated.’
“And from Aunt Lucinda’s endless vagaries I want to construct an image of all Hawaii and the peoples who came to build it. I want to deal with the first volcano and the last sugar strike. You may not like m
y novel, but it will be accurate, and I think that counts for something. It is strange, I have been writing about Aunt Lucinda as if she were dead, but she is living and it may be I who shall be dead.”
This dreadful hurt never left Hoxworth Hale’s heart, and he started listening to Aunt Lucinda’s meanderings, and he picked up the thoughts that his son had laid down: “We live in a web. Sugar cane, Hawaiian ghosts, pineapple, ships, streetcar lines, Japanese labor leaders, Aunt Lucinda’s memories.” The web became most tenuous, and at the same time most cruelly oppressive, when it involved the upstairs rooms where several of the great families kept the delicate women whose minds had begun to wander past even the accepted norm, and in one such room Hoxworth’s own wife passed her days. In the 1920’s, at Punahou, Malama Janders, as she was then, had been a laughing, poetic young lady, interested in music and boys, but as the years passed, and especially since the 1940’s, her mind lost its focus and she preferred not to try understanding what had happened to her son Bromley or what her dashing daughter Noelani was doing. Her only joy came when someone drove her up Nuuanu Valley to Aunt Lucinda’s, and there the two women would sit in the rainy afternoons talking of things that never quite got into sequence … and neither cared.
For generations the missionaries had railed against Hawaiians for having allowed brothers to marry sisters, and on no aspect of Hawaiian life was New England moral judgment sterner than on this. “It puts the Hawaiian outside the pale of civilized society,” Lucinda Whipple’s ancestors had stormed, particularly her great-grandfather Abner Hale, and yet the same curse had now overtaken her own great interlocking family. Whipples married Janderses, and Janderses married Hewletts, and if full brothers and sisters did not physically wed, intellectually and emotionally they did, so that a girl named Jerusha Hewlett Hoxworth was practically indistinguishable either in genes or ideas from a Malama Janders Hale, and each stayed mostly in an upstairs room.
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