The Color of War

by James Campbell

  Robert Graf was a gifted student. He wrote poetry, acted, loved literature and history, and was an accomplished public speaker. But the attack altered everyone’s plans. Young men who might once have thought of going off to college now talked only of war and battlefield glory and making Japan pay.

  One month after graduating from high school, Graf went to the recruiting station in Schenectady. First he went into the Navy recruiting office. The chief petty officer was busy and did not notice him, so Graf went to the Marine recruiting office down the hall.

  Graf returned home feeling like a hero and handed his parents the enlistment papers. “Why the Marines?” they asked. What happened to the Navy or the Merchant Marine? And what about college? He was a smart boy who should be going to a good university and holding hands with a pretty girl rather than clutching a rifle. That night, after Graf had gone to bed, his parents agonized over their decision. Did they dare give him permission to join the Marines?

  Over breakfast the following morning, his father, pen in hand and tears in his eyes, looked at his young son: “I’m signing your death warrant.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Leaving Texas

  On the afternoon West Loch blew, just minutes before Robert Graf dove from the LST into the harbor, Carl Matthews was enjoying a baseball game at Honolulu Stadium. He had grown up playing sandlot baseball and like his father he loved America’s national pastime.

  Not yet seventeen, and still months short of his first shave, Matthews had signed on with the Marines on August 12, 1941. Like much of America, his hometown of Hubbard, Texas, had suffered through hard economic times during the previous decade. But unlike lots of towns that by 1941 were climbing out of the Great Depression, Hubbard was still down on its luck. If the Depression was over, or almost over, no one had taken the time to inform the good folks south of Dallas. While things could have been worse, simply trying to survive was not enough for Carl. He wanted more out of life. To make matters worse, the summer of 1941 had been a “dud.” In high school he had played fiddle in a string band that was a hit at country dances and Lions Club events. Matthews loved making music. But Royce Reeves, the band’s leader and promoter, was busy working on his father’s farm. Matthews’s other sidekick, Gene Suddeth, had joined the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in Waxahachie, Texas. Without Reeves and Suddeth, Matthews was left to bake in the hot Texas sun, feeling the absence of his best buddies.

  One morning during the dog days of August, Matthews strolled uptown, along Main Street, where some of the local merchants were sweeping the sidewalks in front of their stores. South of the railroad depot, Matthews spotted a flashy blue 1940 Chevrolet convertible parked in front of Creamland, the local sandwich and ice cream shop. It stuck out in Hubbard, where folks, if they owned a car at all, drove something practical. He could not take his eyes off the car until a handsome man stepped out and walked confidently toward the front door of the shop. The man wore a uniform every bit as impressive as the car, a white barracks hat, a crisply starched khaki shirt, a Sunday tie with a gleaming gold tie clip, perfectly creased blue trousers with red stripes running down the length of each pant leg, and spit-shined shoes brighter than Matthews’s mother’s silver platter. People stopped on the sidewalk to gawk, and the man acknowledged each of them with a nod and a smile.

  It was clear to Matthews that he was military. Young men from the area had joined the service and had come home to visit, parading through town in their uniforms, nodding to the admiring girls. But none of them sparkled like this fella. Compared to him, the Hubbard boys looked like dusty, dried-up streambeds.

  Barely over 120 pounds, Matthews might have been too small to play on the high school team, but what he lacked in size, he made up for in spirit. Unlike many young men who would have been too timid to approach the man, Matthews strode into Creamland and introduced himself.

  “Corporal Earl S. Wade,” the man replied. “United States Marine Corps.”

  Matthews had heard of the Army and the Navy; he even knew about the Coast Guard. But the United States Marine Corps? The name sounded exotic, as if Corporal Wade had just told him that he had arrived in Hubbard from the Amazon.

  Matthews slid into the booth next to Corporal Wade, who seemed eager to talk, explaining that he was in town to “hire” good men. Matthews was on the puny side, but Wade knew that the Texas boys were tough. Besides, the Marines could always put some meat on him.

  Wade opened his briefcase, revealing photographs, pins, emblems, and striking brochures, all of which depicted the proud history of the United States Marines. The Marine Corps, Wade said, took only the finest young men in the country. Matthews wondered if he was Marine material, if he would ever amble down the sidewalks of Hubbard and be the envy of every young man and woman in town. Not long after, he got his answer. Corporal Wade asked him to take a ride with him. Cruising down Main Street, he told the starry-eyed Matthews that the Marines would be honored to have a man of his caliber join their ranks. Then he told him that he would like to meet his parents and personally congratulate them on raising such a fine son.

  Feeling good and enjoying his brief celebrity, Matthews waved to everyone they passed—whether he knew them well or not—and Pecan Street came too quickly.

  Matthews introduced Corporal Wade to his mother and father. The corporal wasted no time telling the couple that the Marines only chose the best and that, in his opinion, their son was an extraordinary young man. To Matthews’s embarrassment, his parents seemed skeptical.

  When Corporal Wade left the Matthewses’ house on Pecan Street to make another appointment, he made it clear that he would return to Creamland at twelve-thirty and hoped to find the boy waiting there for him. Then he informed Mr. and Mrs. Matthews that he had filled out all the necessary paperwork, which simply awaited their signatures.

  Mr. Matthews sat down on the couch. Carl could see the concern on his father’s face. But why? Didn’t his father understand that the Marines wanted him? Mrs. Matthews left no question about how she felt; she sat crying softly into a white handkerchief.

  Young Matthews felt as if he had been swept up by a Texas tornado. Just days after his parents reluctantly signed the papers, he met Corporal Wade and a number of other recruits at the Waco Marine office. Matthews studied the other young men and was not impressed. To him they hardly looked like blue-ribbon recruits. One young man, he learned, had just been released from a juvenile reform school with the understanding that he would join the service. In Dallas the following morning they joined other prospects and went through processing. Then a doctor administered physicals, poking and prodding them, checking their teeth, feet, and legs like a rancher contemplating the purchase of a cow at a county fair. Next came the swearing-in ceremony. Barely an hour later, Matthews boarded a train bound for San Diego, California, or “Dago” as the Marines called it. The Pullman car reinforced his belief that the Marines did everything first class—convertibles and sleeping cars with fresh sheets and pillowcases and Negro porters to attend to one’s every need. He played “penny ante” poker for much of the journey. In El Paso, cabdrivers tried to entice the young men across the Rio Grande to the red-light district in Ciudad Juarez. Some of the men were sorely tempted, but decided not to risk it. What if the train left them behind? All of them, however, made a pact that if they should ever again find themselves in El Paso, they would cross the river and discover the charms of the exotic Mexican whores. When they arrived in San Diego, the bus they had boarded came to a stop at some dreary-looking buildings with dull yellow wood siding and asphalt shingles. Matthews sensed that the fun was over.

  Boot camp was not easy for him. The drill instructor—Matthews referred to him as “Sergeant Mean and Ugly”—knew every foulmouthed expression ever invented, and quickly singled him out. At five-six and 123 pounds, Matthews was the runt, the platoon’s feather merchant, and the DI never let him forget it. Struggling to keep up, Matthews cursed the sergeant and reminded himself that he would get a chance to p
rove his worth on the rifle range.

  Shooting was one thing Matthews knew he could do well. He had grown up hunting squirrels along the rich river bottoms of Navarro County, Texas. His father gave him a .22 for his ninth birthday and spent time showing him how to use it. Days later Matthews shot a crow and brought it home feeling as proud as if he had killed a charging lion on the plains of East Africa.

  During week nine of the twelve-week program, Matthews’s platoon visited the rifle range at La Jolla, California, where he was introduced to his coach, a good-looking American Indian by the name of Corporal Bonchu, who was a star marksman on the Marine Rifle Team. Corporal Bonchu competed in shooting competitions all over the country. The corporal was the polar opposite of Matthews’s drill instructor. Quietly he taught the men the basics: firing positions—standing (offhand), sitting, kneeling, prone—safety, breathing techniques, trigger squeeze. Once they had mastered those fundamental skills, they moved on to the finer points of windage and elevation. At the rifle range, they began shooting with .22s. When they graduated to their 1903A3 Springfield rifles with iron sights, Corporal Bonchu walked up and down the lines, coaching them in a calm and patient voice.

  On the final day on the range, Matthews and the other members of his platoon were firing for record. Matthews adjusted the rifle sights based on the speed and direction of the wind. Then the range officer gave orders over the loudspeaker: “Lock and load. All ready on the firing line. Fire at will.” Undersized and unable to hold the rifle steady, Matthews did poorly standing and kneeling. But shooting prone, he excelled. At five hundred yards, he pressed his cheekbone against the sleek wooden stock, spread his legs and dug his boondockers into the dirt, and put ten .306-caliber cartridges dead on through the bull’s-eye, a perfect score.

  One week later, Matthews and Platoon 110 assembled for the final parade and inspection. The band played the marches that he had come to love. When the platoon passed the review stand and executed a precise turn, Matthews, sixteen pounds heavier than when he’d left Hubbard in August, knew that he would soon be able to return home on his ten-day boot camp furlough a proud member of the United States Marine Corps.

  After visiting Texas, Matthews was assigned to Camp Elliott and B Company in the Eighth Marine Regiment. At Elliott, Matthews’s Marine Corps career got off to a less than auspicious start. He was given thirty days of mess duty, but still he had to admit that the Marines at Camp Elliott were well looked after. There were free movies and popcorn, five-cent beers at the “slop chute,” and weekend boxing “smokers.”

  On Sunday, December 7, Matthews was relaxing in his bunk. Someone in the barracks was listening to a radio station. Matthews was not paying attention until he heard a special announcement: “We interrupt this program to bring the news that the Japanese are bombing Pearl Harbor.” Matthews thought it was part of an on-air radio drama. When he saw his buddies huddling around the radio, he knew that he was mistaken: the Japanese really were bombing Pearl Harbor.

  Matthews and his platoon were fully outfitted and assigned to loading and unloading at the San Diego docks. In just a few days, by his assessment, they had unloaded enough artillery and mortar shells, .30-caliber ammunition, hand grenades, and wooden boxes containing five-gallon cans of gasoline to take out the entire city of San Diego.

  For Christmas 1941, Matthews was staying put at Camp Elliott. What he wanted more than anything was to be home with his family, sitting in front of the fireplace that the family used for special occasions, while the aromas of his mother’s cooking wafted into the living room from the kitchen. Instead he was lying on his bunk on Christmas Eve, listening to a group of sergeants with nearly thirty years in the Marine Corps play a spirited game of cribbage. Outside, a rainy, lifeless day was turning to night. Later he wrote that he was so depressed, he would have had to “reach up to touch bottom.”

  Though Matthews did not feel like laughing, he chuckled as Sergeants Frenchy LaPoint and Dave Wasserman traded insults. They were crusty, old, tough-as-nails China Marines. Both had served in France during World War I, where Sergeant Wasserman had won the French Medal of Honor for bravery for saving LaPoint’s life. When the subject had come up in the past, Wasserman was quick to dismiss his heroism. He had saved his buddy’s “ass,” because LaPoint owed him money.

  After the war, the sergeants had served together in Central America for the “banana wars,” sweating it out aboard battleships and in jungle outposts from Nicaragua to Haiti. They had drunk hard together. By the looks of it, their drinking excursions had often led them to the tattoo parlor. Both had Oriental dragon designs that wound around their arms from their wrists to their shoulders.

  Over the din of the cribbage game, Matthews listened to the sound of Christmas carols over the radio. Then Gabriel Heatter, the beloved radio commentator, came on the air. Instead of greeting his audience with his usual cheery catchphrase, “Good evening, everyone—there is good news tonight,” he said, “Good evening, America. Tonight is Christmas Eve. Many of our young men are not home with their families tonight. Some of them will never go home again.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Mosquitoes, Mud, and Mayhem

  Just days after Christmas, Matthews found himself part of a depot platoon assigned to the 2nd Marine Brigade, working round the clock, loading onto two transport ships the many tons of ammunition, food, medical supplies, trucks, and tanks that had been stockpiled at the San Diego docks.

  On January 6, 1942, the 2nd Brigade boarded the Lurline, a former Matson luxury liner that had been semi-converted to a troopship. The men were proud of the fact that they were part of the first expeditionary force to go overseas following the Pearl Harbor disaster. The Marines, they bragged, were the only ones brave enough to sail into hostile waters. The convoy consisted of two other Matson Line ships, two freighters, USS Jupiter and Lassen, a tanker, and a Navy escort that included the carriers Yorktown and Enterprise, Admiral “Bull” Halsey’s flagship, which met the convoy along the way.

  Although Matthews carried the lucky rifle with which he had shot for record, he was grateful for the naval escort. Although the Matson ships had been outfitted with .30- and .50-caliber machine guns, without the Navy carriers the ships and the five thousand enlisted men and 245 officers would have been sitting ducks in the event of a Japanese attack.

  On January 11, a ship’s announcer informed the Marines that an enemy submarine had just shelled the naval station on Pago Pago in American Samoa. Military analysts predicted follow-up strikes. The announcement confirmed the general scuttlebutt regarding their destination. But the men still wondered: just where in the hell was Samoa? Some had heard the beautiful Dorothy Lamour, playing the daughter of a South Seas island chief, sing about Samoa in John Ford’s 1937 movie The Hurricane. But that was their only association.

  One thing the men did know was that wherever Samoa was, it was an important piece of real estate. General Thomas Holcomb, the commandant of the Marine Corps, who had agreed to participate in a Navy public relations program, went on NBC radio on November 22, 1941, to reassure the American public that his men would fiercely defend the country’s interests abroad. He had 61,000 men in uniform, and they would perform their “duty as the frontiersmen of the nation’s huge new defense network.”

  What that meant in early 1942 was a matter for debate. The Allies’ strategic situation in the Pacific was a fragile one. If, as the Combined Chiefs of Staff had directed, Australia was to be held at all costs, Admiral Ernest King insisted that air, ground, and naval forces be used to ensure the safety of the sea routes and lines of communication to the Southwest Pacific. Although King grew bolder as the war progressed, in early 1942 he could not even consider the possibility of staging an offensive. His only strategic alternative was to defend the island bases between Hawaii and Australia, which meant fortifying New Caledonia, Fiji, and especially American Samoa. If one of the island bases fell, King envisioned convoys having to detour far to the south in order to supply Australia. Worse ye
t, he feared that Japan would try to take Hawaii, the Aleutians, even mainland Alaska.

  By the time the 2nd Brigade arrived in Pago Pago on Tutuila, American Samoa’s largest island, 2,300 miles southwest of Hawaii, it was clear that the Japanese were headed eastward down the Solomon Islands in an effort to isolate Australia. Perhaps they also had designs on Samoa.

  After two weeks at sea, the 2nd Brigade arrived in Samoa. Now it had an enormous task ahead of it: first to unload, then to fortify the island. Had the men known what lay in store for them, some might have jumped ship somewhere along their blue water route.

  When the Lurline made its way through the narrow channel into the oil-slick calm of Pago Pago Harbor, the heat, which had turned from torrid to unbearable, nearly brought Matthews to his knees. Like the others aboard ship, Matthews was still wearing the cold-weather gear he was issued before leaving San Diego. Someone made a wisecrack about half-naked savages being a lot smarter than the Marine Corps.

  The heat was like nothing he had ever experienced before. Summers in Hubbard, Texas, were hell-hot. But in Samoa the heat was obscene; it permeated everything. The leaves on the trees gleamed and dripped with it. It hung over the land like a disease. Only the daily rain provided a respite. Sounding like a West Texas tornado, it came down in great sheets. Trees hung uncertainly on steep mountain slopes, looking as if they might rush down on rivers of mud. The parched Marines loved it. They held their palms up and bent back their heads like tent preachers barnstorming through the Bible Belt. The downpours, though, subsided as quickly as they came and all that remained was a light mist that lay over the hillside forests. Metal roofs steamed in the sun, and pools pockmarked the harbor road.