World War II: The Autobiography

by Jon E. Lewis

  ORDER OF THE DAY NO. 369, 9 MAY 1945

  Stalin, Marshal of the Soviet Union

  ORDER OF THE DAY NO. 369

  On May 8, 1945, in Berlin, representatives of the German High Command signed the Instrument of unconditional surrender of the German armed forces.

  The Great Patriotic War which the Soviet people waged against the German-Fascist invaders is victoriously concluded. Germany is utterly routed.

  Comrades Red Army men, Red Navy men, Sergeants, Petty Officers, Officers of the Army and Navy, Generals, Admirals and Marshals, I congratulate you upon the victorious termination of the Great Patriotic War.

  To mark complete victory over Germany, to-day, May 9, the day of victory, at 22.00 hours (Moscow time), the capital of our Motherland, Moscow, on behalf of the Motherland, shall salute the gallant troops of the Red Army, the ships and units of the Navy, which have won this brilliant victory, by firing thirty artillery salvos from one thousand guns.

  Eternal glory to the heroes who fell in the fighting for the freedom and independence of our Motherland!

  Long live the victorious Red Army and Navy!

  STALIN, Marshal of the Soviet Union,

  Supreme Commander-in-Chief

  Part Eight

  Setting Sun

  The War in the Pacific, July 1942–September 1945

  INTRODUCTION

  If, as Winston Churchill later explained, the entry of the US into the war meant that the ‘Japanese would be ground to powder’, this was far from apparent to the Japanese themselves – even after their defeat at Midway in June 1942. Japan’s navy was still strong enough to give the US Navy a close run at Leyte Gulf in 1944 – the greatest naval engagement in history – while Japan’s land forces had ambition enough in the same year to attempt the invasion of India; only remarkably tenacious defensive action by Britain’s ‘Forgotten Army’, at Imphal, at Kohima – where the combatants were separated by the width of an abandoned tennis court – halted the Japanese U-Go campaign.

  But Churchill was right; the Japanese would be ground to powder, because they had made a gross strategic error. They had attacked the backyard of the USA, the world’s most productive power, with an under-manned army. The Japanese committed a mere eleven mobile divisions to the Pacific and South-East Asian theatre; to their side-show wars in China and Manchuria they deployed 1.78 million men. When the Americans in the Pacific and the British in Burma went onto the counter-offensive in 1944, no amount of fanatical resistance by the Japanese could overcome the sheer weight of enemy numbers; on day one of the invasion of Leyte the Americans deployed four divisions. The Japanese defenders numbered 16,000 men.

  The Japanese soldier, sailor and airman was not well served by his imperial master. Aside from the strategic mistake of overstretch in the South, Japanese military commanders were wedded to hopelessly old fashioned forms of warfare; they preferred battleships to carriers (even after Midway); they used the submarine for reconnaissance rather than for offensive actions against Allied supply lines; they failed to build a fighter defence against US fire-bombing of Japan’s cities; and crucially they failed to develop a convoy system to protect their own merchant marine. The American submarine arm brutally exploited this weakness; in 1944 alone US submarines sunk 2.7 million tonnes of Japanese shipping. Even more so than Britain, Japan was dependent on imports, for food and for raw materials. By early 1945 the average Japanese civilian adult was on a diet of less than 1,500 calories a day, while chemicals for armaments had all but become extinct.

  Still Japan refused to bow to the obvious. Indeed, as American troops battled their way, island by island, closer to Japan, the more determined Japanese resistance became. After its bloodying at Okinawa, the US military calculated that an invasion of the Japanese home island of Kyushu would cost 268,000 GI and Marine casualties – more than the US had suffered in the war so far everywhere. This sobering figure encouraged US President Hoover to yield to the temptation to end the war quickly and dramatically by dropping a ‘special bomb’ of almost unimaginable destructive capability on Japan. And so, on the morning of 6 August 1945, a uranium 235 bomb was released from the B-29 Enola Gay above Hiroshima. Some hours later, as 78,000 people lay dying and dead in the city’s ruins, the White House called on Japan to surrender or ‘expect a rain of ruin from the air’. No surrender being received, an A-bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later. It was enough: on 15 August Emperor Hirohito broadcast to his armed forces and people that, since the war had ‘turned out not necessarily to Japan’s advantage’, his government had decided to treat with the enemy.

  In other, more direct, words, World War II was over.

  THE DEFENCE OF HENDERSON FIELD, GUADALCANAL, 24 OCTOBER 1942

  Sergeant Mitchell Paige, USMC

  On 7 August 1942 the Americans landed a division of Marines on Guadalcanal in the Eastern Solomons and seized the jungle-strip airfield the Japanese were building there. The Japanese counter-attacked vigorously, and both sides poured men and matériel into Guadalcanal. The island was ringed by a series of massive naval confrontations, while the battle on land centred on the struggle for the airbase, now renamed Henderson Field. The peak of the fighting came in October.

  Before we could get set up darkness came and it started raining like hell. It was too black to see anything, so I crawled along the ridge-front until it seemed I had come to the nose. To make sure I felt around with my hands and the ridge seemed to drop away on all sides. There we set up.

  With the guns set up and the watches arranged, it was time for chow. I passed the word along for the one can of “Spam” and the one can of “borrowed peaches” that we had with us. Then we found out some jerk had dropped the can of peaches and it had rolled down the ridge into the jungle. He had been too scared to tell us what he had done. I shared out the “Spam” by feeling for a hand in the darkness and dropping into it. The next morning I sent out a couple of scouts to “look over the terrain”. So we got our peaches back.

  That night Smitty and I crawled out towards the edge of the nose and lay on our backs with the rain driving into our faces. Every so often I would lift up and call some of the boys by name to see if they were still awake and to reassure myself as well as them.

  I must have been two o’clock in the morning when I heard a low mumbling. At once I got Smitty up. A few minutes later we heard the same noise again. I crawled over to the men and told them to stand by. I started figuring. The Japs might not know we were on the nose and might be preparing to charge us, or at any moment they might discover our positions. I decided to get it over with. As soon as the men heard the click of my pin coming out of the grenade, they let loose their grenades too.

  Smitty was pulling out pins as I threw the grenades. The Japs screamed, so we knew we had hit them. We threw a few more grenades and then there was silence.

  All that second day we dug in. We had no entrenching tools so we used bayonets. As night came I told the men we would have a hundred per cent watch and they were not to fire until they saw a Jap.

  About the same time as the night before we heard the Japs talking again. They were about a hundred yards from the nose. It was so damned quiet, you could hear anything. I crawled around to the men and told them to keep quiet, look forward and glue their ears to the ground. As the Japs advanced we could hear the bushes rustle. Suddenly all hell broke loose.

  All of us must have seen the Japs at the same time. Grenades exploded everywhere on the ridge-nose, followed by shrieks and yells. It would have been death to fire the guns because muzzle flashes would have given away our positions and we could have been smothered and blasted by a hail of grenades. Stansbury, who was lying in the foxhole next to mine, was pulling out grenade-pins with his teeth and rolling the grenades down the side of the nose. Leipart, the smallest guy in the platoon, and my particular boy, was in his foxhole delivering grenades like a star pitcher.

  Then I gave the word to fire. Machine-guns and rifles let go and the whole line seemed to ligh
t up. Pettyjohn yelled to me that his gun was out of action. In the light from the firing I could see several Japs a few feet away from Leipart. Apparently he had been hit because he was down on one knee. I knocked off two Japs with a rifle but a third drove his bayonet into Leipart. Leipart was dead; seconds later, so was the Jap. After a few minutes, I wouldn’t swear to how long it was, the blitz became a hand-to-hand battle. Gaston was having trouble with a Jap officer, I remember that much. Although his leg was nearly hacked off and his rifle all cut up, Gaston finally connected his boot with the Jap’s chin. The result was one slopehead with one broken neck.

  Firing died down a little, so evidently the first wave was a flop. I crawled over to Pettyjohn, and while he and Faust covered me I worked to remove a ruptured cartridge and change the belt-feed pawl. Just as I was getting ready to feed in a belt of ammo, I felt something hot on my hand and a sharp vibration. Some damned slopehead with a light machine-gun had fired a full burst into the feeding mechanism and wrecked the gun.

  Things got pretty bad on the second wave. The Japs penetrated our left flank, carried away all opposition and were possibly in a position to attack our ridge-nose from the rear. On the left, however, Grant, Payne and Hinson stood by. In the centre, Lock, Swanek and McNabb got it and were carried away to the rear by corpsmen. The Navy boys did a wonderful job and patched up all the casualties, but they were still bleeding like hell and you couldn’t tell what was wrong with them, so I sent them back. That meant that all my men were casualties and I was on my own. It was lonely up there with nothing but dead slopeheads for company, but I couldn’t tell you what I was thinking about. I guess I was really worrying about the guns, shooting as fast as I could, and getting a bead on the next and nearest Jap.

  One of the guns I couldn’t find because it wasn’t firing. I figured the guys had been hit and had put the gun out of action before leaving. I was always very insistent that if for any reason they had to leave a gun they would put it out of action so that the Japs wouldn’t be able to use it. Being without a gun myself, I dodged over to the unit on my right to get another gun and give them the word on what was going on. Kelly and Totman helped me bring the gun back towards the nose of the ridge and we zig-zagged under an enemy fire that never seemed to stop. While I was on the right flank I borrowed some riflemen to form a skirmish line. I told them to fix bayonets and follow me. Kelly and Totman fed ammo as I sprayed every inch of terrain free of Japs. Dawn was beginning to break and in the half-light I saw my own machine-gun still near the centre of the nose. It was still in working order and some Japs were crawling towards it.

  We got there just in time. I left Kelly and Totman and ran over to it.

  For too many moments it seemed as though the whole Japanese Army was firing at me. Nevertheless three men on the right flank thought I might be low on ammunition and volunteered to run it up to me. Stat brought one belt and he went down with a bullet in the stomach. Reilly came up with another belt. Just as he reached the gun, he was hit in the groin. His feet flew out and nearly knocked me off the gun. Then Jonjeck arrived with a belt and stopped a bullet in the shoulder. As I turned I saw a piece of flesh disappear from his neck. I told him to go back for medical aid, but he refused. He wanted to stay up there with me. There was not time to argue; so I tapped him on the chin, hard enough so that he went down. That convinced him that I wanted my order obeyed.

  My ears rang when a Jap sighted in on me with his light machine-gun but luckily he went away to my left. Anyway, I decided it was too unhealthy to stay in any one place for too long, so I would fire a burst and then move. Each time I shifted, grenades fell just where I had been. Over the nose of the ridge in the tall grass, which was later burned for security, I thought I saw some movement. Right off the nose, in the grass, thirty Japs stood up. One of them was looking at me through field-glasses. I let them have it with a full burst and they peeled off like grass under a mowing machine.

  After that, I guess I was so wound up that I couldn’t stop. I rounded up the skirmish line, told them I was going to charge off the nose and I wanted them to be right behind me. I picked up the machine-gun, and without noticing the burning hot water jacket, cradled it in my arms. Two belts of ammo I threw around my shoulders. The total weight was about 150 pounds, but the way I felt I could have carried three more without noticing it. I fed one of the belts off my shoulders into the gun, and then started forward. A colonel dropped about four feet in front of me with his yellow belly full of good American lead. In the meantime the skirmish line came over the nose, whooping like a bunch of wild Indians. We reached the edge of the clearing where the jungle began and there was nothing left either to holler at or shoot at. The battle was over with that strange sort of quietness that always follows.

  The first thing I did was to sit down. I was soaked in perspiration and steam was rising in a cloud from my gun. My hand felt funny. I looked down and saw through my tattered shirt a blister which ran from my fingertips to my forearm. Captain Ditta came running up, slapped me on the back and gave me a drink, from his canteen.

  For three days after the battle, we camped around the nose. They estimated that there were 110 Japs dead in front of my sector. I don’t know about that, but they started to smell so horribly that we had to bury them by blasting part of the ridge over on top of them. On the third day we marched twelve miles back to the airport. I never knew what day it was, and what’s more I didn’t care.

  THE KOKODA TRAIL, NEW GUINEA, SEPTEMBER–NOVEMBER 1942

  George H. Johnston, war correspondent

  Despite the setback of Midway, the Japanese persisted in summer 1942 in advancing southwards across New Guinea towards Allied-held Port Moresby. The intervening Owen Stanley mountains made for the worst terrain of the war in the Pacific.

  I may be wrong, for I am no soothsayer, but I have an idea that the name of the “Kokoda Trail” is going to live in the minds of Australians for generations, just as another name, Gallipoli, lives on as freshly today, twenty-seven years after it first gained significance in Australian minds. For thousands of Australians who have walked the weary, sodden miles of this dreadful footpath – and these Australians are the fathers of the next generation – it will be the one memory more unforgettable than any other that life will give them.

  Five days ago the Japanese began their resistance again – on the wide shallow plateau of the Gap, the pass through the forbidding spurs of the main range. The weather is bad, the terrain unbelievably terrible, and the enemy is resisting with a stubborn fury that is costing us many men and much time. Against the machine gun nests and mortar pits established on the ragged spurs and steep limestone ridges our advance each day now is measured in yards. Our troops are fighting in the cold mists of an altitude of 6700 feet, fighting viciously because they have only a mile or two to go before they reach the peak of the pass and will be able to attack downhill – down the north flank of the Owen Stanley’s. That means a lot to troops who have climbed every inch of that agonizing track, who have buried so many of their cobbers and who have seen so many more going back, weak with sickness or mauled by the mortar bombs and bullets and grenades of the enemy, men gone from their ranks simply to win back a few more hundred yards of this wild, unfriendly, and utterly untamed mountain. Tiny villages which were under Japanese domination a few weeks ago are back in our hands – Ioribaiwa, Nauro Creek, Menari, Efogi, Kagi, Myola – and we are fighting now for Templeton’s Crossing.

  Fresh troops are going up the track, behind on the slimy trail from which the tide of war has ebbed and in ebbing has scattered the debris of death and destruction all the way along the green walls that flank the snaking ribbon of rotten mud. The men are bearded to the eyes. Their uniforms are hotch-potches of anything that fits or is warm or affords some protection from the insects. I remember years ago how we used to laugh at newsreels showing the motley troops of China when they were fighting the Japanese in the days when the men of Tokyo could do no wrong in the eyes of the western world. These men
on the Kokoda track look more unkempt, more ragged, than any of the Chinese of those old film shots. . . .

  There are many Japanese graves, some crude, some elaborate, all marked with the piece of sapling bearing Japanese ideographs. There are many crudely penciled signs stuck in the bushes or nailed to the trees: “Bodies two Australians – ’th Battalion, 25 yards into Bush.” “Twelve Jap Bodies 50 yards northwest.” “Unknown Australian Body, 150 yards down slope.” In the green half-light, amid the stink of rotten mud and rotting corpses, with the long lines of green-clad Australians climbing wearily along the tunnel of the track, you have a noisome, unforgetable picture of the awful horror of this jungle war.

  There are the bodies, too, of native carriers, tossed aside by the Japs to die, discarded callously and left unburied in the jungle. These natives were recruited in Rabaul, sent to Buna, roped together in the stinking holds of Japanese freighters, and then thrown into the enemy’s carrier lines. They received little food, no medical attention and payment with worthless, newly printed Japanese one shilling notes of their invasion currency. They died in their hundreds of overwork, malnutrition and sickness.

  Since then the Japs have made their stand in the toughest area of the pass through the Owen Stanley’s – a terrible terrain of thick mountain timber, great rocks drenched in rain, terrifying precipices and chasms. Often the troops have to make painfully slow progress by clawing with hands and feet at slippery rock faces overlooking sheer drops into the jungle. The almost constant rain or mist adds to the perils of sharp limestone ridges, narrow ledges flanked by chasms, slimy rocks, and masses of slow moving mud.