D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  “[They] are … good at bird calls and animal cries, which they use at times to cover their rustling progress through the jungle or to distract the Marines’ attention. When they want to be, the Japanese jungle fighters can be almost completely noiseless and invisible. Carefully camouflaged, they inch their way through the tall grass or wait motionless and supremely patient for hours, lashed to treetops or almost neck deep in swamps.”

  And they fought with fanatical courage, tearing out of jungle hideaways in the black of night on screaming banzai charges. “They never stop trying until they are killed or crushed,” Baldwin wrote. “The Marines have stopped trying to help the Japanese wounded since the early days of the Guadalcanal fighting, when badly wounded Japanese, playing dead, suddenly flung hand grenades in the faces of hospital Corpsmen who were trying to help them.

  “The war in the Pacific is, therefore, a cold, hard, brutal war. The foe is supremely tough and supremely confident.” In order to beat them in jungle fighting, General Vandegrift told Baldwin, “we shall have to throw away the rule books of war and go back to the French and Indian Wars again.”23

  The suicidal bravery of the enemy was incomprehensible to American troops, and their adeptness at jungle warfare was positively terrifying.

  “They take to the jungle as if they have been bred there,” wrote reporter John Hersey.24 This led some American troops to believe that “the enemy isn’t truly human but a furtive jungle animal,” a Marine remembered.25 “I wish we were fighting against Germans,” said another Marine. “They are human beings, like us…. But the Japanese are like animals.”26

  Most frightening of all was the way the Japanese treated their prisoners. Early in the fighting, a report swept through the American camp of the beheading of several Marine captives. In his novel The Thin Red Line, James Jones probes the reaction of raw recruits to such enemy atrocities: “A cold knifing terror in the belly was followed immediately by a rage of anger…. There was a storm of promises never to take a … prisoner. Many swore they would henceforth coolly and in cold blood shoot down every Japanese who came their way, and preferably in the guts.”27

  JAPANESE DEAD NEAR THE ILU RIVER, GUADALCANAL (NA).

  Beginning at Guadalcanal, the war in the Pacific would be a war without quarter. Prisoners were rarely taken and atrocities were answered in kind. Marine Donald Fall tells of the moral reversal that began to occur: “On the second day on Guadalcanal we captured a big Jap bivouac [and] found a lot of pictures of Marines that had been cut up and mutilated on Wake Island. The next thing you know there are Marines walking around with Jap ears stuck on their belts with safety pins…. We began to get down to their level.”28

  Or as Guadalcanal veteran Ore Marion put it:

  WE LEARNED ABOUT SAVAGERY FROM THE Japanese. Those bastards had years of on-the-job training. But those sixteen-to-nineteen-year-old kids we had on the Canal were fast learners. Example: on the Matanikau River bank after a day and night of vicious hand-to-hand attacks, a number of Japs and our guys were killed and wounded. At daybreak, a couple of our kids, bearded, dirty, skinny from hunger, slightly wounded by bayonets, clothes worn and torn, whack off three Jap heads and jam them on poles facing the “Jap side” of the river…. Shortly after, the regimental commander comes on the scene…. The colonel sees the Jap heads on the poles and says, “Jesus, men, what are you doing? You’re acting like animals.” A dirty, stinking young kid says. “That’s right, Colonel, we are animals. We live like animals, we eat and are treated like animals, what the fuck do you expect.”29

  Marines were told that mutilation was a court-martial offense, but it was hard to take that order seriously when Admiral Halsey was constructing billboards all over the Solomons with this unambiguous message: Kill Japs, Kill Japs, Kill more Japs.

  “When we first started out I held one of our men equal to three Japanese,” Halsey publicly declared his contempt for the enemy. “I now increase this to twenty. They are not supermen, although they try to make us believe they are. They are just low monkeys. I say monkeys because I cannot say what I would like to call them.”30

  In his deeply personal history of World War II, novelist James Jones writes that the great question of 1942 was: “Did we have the kind of men who could stand up eyeball to eyeball and whip the Japs.” America was “a peace-loving nation, had been anti soldiering and soldiers since the end of World War I. And we were taking on not only the Japs in the Far East, but the Germans in Europe as well. The Japanese with their warrior code of the bushi, had been in active combat warfare for ten years; the Germans almost as long. Could we evolve a soldier, a civilian soldier, who could meet them man to man in the field? … Not everyone was sure.31 As the novelist James A. Michener recalled years later, “Many observers considered us a lost generation and feared we might collapse if summoned to some crucial battlefield.”32

  This was the significance of Guadalcanal. In its green vastness, American boys evolved into the gritty island fighters who were needed to turn back the equally tough Japanese. In two night attacks on Henderson Field, one in September, the other in October, the Japanese were thrown back in hellish fighting at bayonet range. In the first attack, Red Mike Edson and 700 Marines, including Paul Moore, held off 3,000 Japanese troops for two nights on a small ridge in front of the airport. The enemy made excellent use of the terrain and charged entrenched positions as if impervious to death. Four of the attackers reached Vandegrift’s command tent and killed a Marine sergeant with a sword before they were gunned down. When pinned down by heavy mortar and machine gun fire, Japanese soldiers shouted insults to the Marines to get them to expose themselves. When dawn broke on the 14th of September, over a thousand Japanese dead and wounded lay in heaps on the blasted slopes that ran up what the Marines would call Edson’s Ridge, or Bloody Ridge.

  “I hope the Japs will have some respect for American fighting men after this campaign,” Edson told John Hersey. “I certainly have learned respect for the Japs. What they have done is to take Indian warfare and apply it to the twentieth century. They use all the Indian tricks to demoralize their enemy. They’re good, all right, but I think we’re better.”33

  Bloody Ridge caused both sides to bolster reinforcements and on October 25, Chesty Puller and a force of Marines and Army infantry made an equally epic stand on the ridge, in darkness and driving rain. In this all-out attack, the Japanese lost over 3,000 seasoned troops and any chance of taking Henderson Field and Guadalcanal.

  After the September raid, reporter Richard Tregaskis hurried to Red Mike Edson’s headquarters to get his story of the battle. “He told us about the individual exploits of his men and their collective bravery, but did not mention the fact that he himself had spent the night on the very front line of the knoll, under the heaviest fire.

  “He did not mention it, but the fact was that two bullets had actually ripped through his blouse, without touching him.”

  Edson and his officers “told us some good stories of valor,” Tregaskis wrote. “The outstanding one was Lewis E. Johnson’s.” He was hit three times in the leg, and “at daybreak placed in the rear of a truck with about a dozen other wounded, for evacuation. But as the truck moved down the ridge road, a Jap machine gunner opened up and wounded the driver severely. The truck stopped.” Johnson dragged himself into the cab and tried to start the engine. When it wouldn’t start, he “pulled the truck a distance of about 300 yards over the crest of the ridge. Then he got the engine going and drove to the hospital.”

  Feeling revived, he drove back to the ridge and picked up another load of wounded Marines.

  Days later, over breakfast, Major Kenneth Bailey, one of the heroes of the ridge, said something to Tregaskis about taking chances in combat. “You get to know these kids so well when you’re working with ’em … and they’re such swell kids that when it comes to a job that’s pretty rugged, you’d rather go yourself than send them.”34

  Bailey was killed three days later.

  At Guadalcanal, Bail
ey’s boys “fought bravely and better than the enemy,” wrote John Hersey. “They had shown themselves to be men, with the strength and weaknesses of men. That had given me, an unprofessional onlooker, a new faith in our chances of winning the war in the visible future.”35

  What turned “kids” like Paul Moore and James Jones into ruthlessly focused jungle fighters? For Jones, it was the acceptance that you were going to die, that you were “written down in the rolls of the already dead.” Only when a soldier makes “a compact with himself or with Fate that he is lost” can he fully function under fire. Then he has “nothing further to worry about.”

  Yet strangely, the “giving up of hope” creates a compensatory kind of hope. Jones adds. “Little things become significant. The next meal, the next bottle of booze, the next kiss, the next sunrise, the next full moon. The next bath.”

  When you know you’re going to die, “every day has a special, bright, delicious, poignant taste to it that normal days in normal times do not have. Another perversity of the human mechanism?”36

  At Guadalcanal both sides fought with desperate determination. “Every day I was there,” wrote reporter Ira Wolfert, “the Jap gave new evidence of his intense willingness to go to any lengths to win, or, if unable to win, to go on fighting until his breath stopped.” Wolfert did not see a single Japanese officer taken alive on the island, “and the great majority of the few soldier prisoners we have taken have been wounded and in a condition where their minds have not been up to par.” There “[is] one thing nobody in the world can be better at than the Japs,” he wrote admiringly. “and that’s in the guts department.”

  And yet the Americans, on land, at sea, and in the air, were licking them. “We’ve shown that we have more military brains than they have, are better at war, all kinds of war, from strangling and knife-fighting and head-trampling on up into the complicated mechanized operations of modern battle.”

  Guadalcanal would not be a battle won by heroes. “Heroes don’t win wars,” Wolfert wrote, “They help…. But the heroes are the exception, and it’s the ordinary run-of-the mill guy who doesn’t feel tempted to do more than his share who has to be relied on to win for our side….

  “Our fellows … don’t look like actors being brave. They look mostly like fellows working.

  “Nobody looks young in a fight. I’ve seen lots of twenty-year olds out there in the middle of all that stuff flying around and some eighteen-year olds, but I never saw anybody who looked much under forty while the fight was going on. That’s one way our fellows show what they’re up against. The blood in their young faces gets watered with a kind of liquid of fear and takes on that blued-over color of watery milk. Their skin looks clothlike, with the texture of a rough, wrinkled cloth.

  “Then when things get really thick, like when fellows start getting hit and dropping and crying out with pain all around you … sometimes the flesh around their mouths starts to shake as if they were whimpering and their eyes … you can see their eyes coated over with a hot shine as if they were crying. But they go right on doing what they have to do … doing the work of war.”

  It was important that these young lighting men were learning to be tough because even greater battles lay ahead, Wolfert cautioned. But the people back home would have to be tough, as well “able to stand the losses, stand all the terrible sorrow and misery that the dead leave in their wake.

  “Our losses have been very small thus far. That is because we have been on the defensive in the Solomons since the day we took the place. The Japs have had to come after us. Soon we’ll have to start north and go in after them. Then our losses are very likely to increase. There are a lot of people better able than I am to guess how the people back home are going to stand up under that. What I can say is how our fighting fellows are going to stand up under it because I’ve seen them do it.”37

  In December, the 1st Marine Division was pulled out of Guadalcanal. Although the division had been reinforced earlier by Army units, it had done most of the fighting up to then and the men were tired, sick, and emotionally drained. Almost all of them had malaria and great numbers of them also had dysentery and dengue—“break-bone fever,” the doctors called. But they had been told that no one would be pulled off the line unless he was a litter case.

  By the time General Vandegrift turned over command at Guadalcanal to Army Major General Alexander M. Patch, the Japanese high command had decided that Guadalcanal was a lost cause. Many of its soldiers on the place they called “starvation island” were so undernourished and wracked by jungle diseases that their hair and nails had ceased to grow. In the next, two months, infantry soldiers and remaining Marines, using trained war dogs to seek out the enemy, began a great push westward from Henderson Field that ended when about 11,000 Japanese troops were evacuated by destroyer convoys at Cape Esperance, a Pacific Dunkirk. On February 9, 1943. General Patch sent a radio message to Admiral Halsey: “Tokyo Express no longer has terminus on Guadalcanal.”

  HASTILY DUG GRAVE OF A U.S. MARINE (USMC).

  Approximately 60,000 Army and Marine Corps ground forces fought on Guadalcanal. Almost 1,600 were killed in combat. Over 4,700 were wounded and twice that number were evacuated after being struck down by jungle diseases or battle psychosis. The Japanese lost close to 21,000 ground troops, about two thirds of those who fought on the island. It was the first defeat suffered by the modern Japanese army.

  Samuel Stavisky, a reporter for the Washington Post, was there for the “mop-up,” when worn-down American troops went into jungle hellholes to hunt down the Japanese who had not been able to get off the island and refused to surrender. “Killed all the yellow slant-eyed bastards,” a Marine announced to no one in particular as he emerged with his death squad from a growth-covered gorge. He said it matter-of-factly, almost wearily, for he and his fellow Marines were too tired and sick to feel any elation in victory. Just then, Stavisky saw “four skinny, starved, wounded, and unconscious Japs … dragged out. The rest were dead: shot, bayoneted, blasted by grenades. Rooted out. Grubbed out. Rubbed out.”

  “It’s over guys.” the lieutenant told his men.38

  It was for them, that day, in that place, on that island. But in stopping the Japanese juggernaut at Guadalcanal, these never-to-be-the-same boys had committed themselves and their country to the greatest reconquest effort in all of history.

  Great battles, said Winston Churchill, are those that “won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres in armies and in nations.”39 That was Guadalcanal.

  ANONYMITY

  Two weeks after a vicious firefight on Guadalcanal, James Jones was assigned to Graves Registration detail. His unit was ordered to go up into the hills and dig up the bodies of dead comrades:

  THE DEAD WERE FROM ANOTHER REGIMENT, so men from my outfit were picked to dig them up. That was how awful the detail was. And they did not want to make it worse by having men dig up the dead of their own. Unfortunately, a man in my outfit on the detail had a brother in the other outfit, and we dug up the man’s brother that day.

  As they dug up the bodies, the officer in charge told them to take one dog tag off each man before putting him into a body bag. It was awful work anyway, but these men had been dead for two weeks.

  WHEN WE BEGAN TO DIG, EACH time we opened a hole a little explosion of smell would burst up out of it, until finally the whole saddle where we were working was covered with it up to about knee deep. Above the knees it wasn’t, so bad, but when you had to bend down to search for the dogtag (we took turns doing this) it was like diving down into another element, like water, or glue. We found about four bodies without dogtags that day.

  “What will happen to those, sir?” I asked the lieutenant….

  “They will remain anonymous,” he said.

  “What about the ones with dogtags?” I asked.

  “Well,” he said, “they will be recorded.”

  As Jones wrote later, “To accept anonym
ity, along with all the rest he has to accept, is perhaps the toughest step of all for the combat soldier…. It is one of the hardest things about a soldier’s life.”40

  NEW GUINEA

  While the battle of Guadalcanal still raged, General Douglas MacArthur’s forces were fighting an equally ugly war of attrition in the tangled jungles of New Guinea, where the Army, not the Marines, ran the campaign and did most of the suffering and dying. In September 1942, after the Japanese failed to take Port Moresby in their forced march over the Owen Stanley Range, MacArthur’s troops chased them back over these forbidding mountain jungles toward their bases at Buna and Gona on the north coast of New Guinea. The Australian correspondent George H. Johnston describes the road back over the treacherous Kokoda Trail at the height of the rainy season. The Australians, with American support, led the advance:

  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….

  The weather is bad, the terrain unbelievably terrible, and the enemy is resisting with 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 years. Our troops are fighting in the cold mists of an altitude of 6,700 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 Stanleys. That means a lot to troops who have climbed every inch of that agonizing track, who have buried so many of their cobbers [mates] and who have seen so many more going back, weak with sickness or mauled by the mortar bombs and the bullets and grenades of the enemy, men gone from their ranks simply to win back a few hundred yards of this wild, unfriendly, and utterly untamed mountain….