When the ship pulled up to the dock, Small was not disappointed. This one had obviously just come off the yard, a brand, spanking new Kaiser Liberty. Her winches would be electric and as smooth as silk. The men would load her down with 6,000 tons, and if all went well they would send her on her way seven days later so full of ordnance that her decks would be awash.
As Small approached the ship, the graveyard shift was walking off after a tough night. Small stopped the petty officer. “How much did you get?” The petty officer muttered that they had fallen short. “A hundred ninety.” Then he added that the lieutenant in charge of the division was mad as hell.
Walking toward the gangplank around a huge wire net packed full of one-ton bombs, Small moved now with a skip in his step. He could not wait to get at those electric winches. The hold crews were descending the ladders. The way it worked was that the division was broken up into five “platoons,” one per hatch, each comprising twenty to twenty-four men. The platoons were then divided in half; one squad worked the pier, while the other worked the hold.
Small saw that Hoppy was going to be his signalman. From the time a load dropped below the rail until the time it came back above the edge of the hold, Hoppy had to function as Small’s eyes, guiding him with a series of hand signals. The winchman handled the levers, pulling back on the inboard control a few clicks, taking up the outboard line a click or two, but the safety of the load depended on the alertness of the hatch attendant. He was the one who determined how quickly or slowly Small raised or lowered the bombs. If Hoppy was not on his game, things were not going to go well.
Hoppy and Kong were standing at the edge of the hold, shooting the shit. When Small saw the cable tighten, he knew that the crew, three decks deep in the ship, was in place and the net was ready to be lifted. “Better get to work,” he yelled to Kong, and then he grabbed the winch handles. Six inches long, belt-high, they felt comfortable in his hands.
By holding his right hand in front of him and moving his left index finger in a spiraling motion like water washing down a drain, Hoppy gave Small the signal to lower the outboard line. Two clicks forward, and Small set the wire net on the dock. When Hoppy clenched his left fist, he knew that the dock crew was unhooking the empty net and attaching the loaded one. Small’s mind drifted for a moment, perhaps to Lou and the previous night and the memory of her smooth brown skin, until a sharp clap focused all of his senses on the moment. Hoppy rubbed his palms together as if he were rolling something between them, and Small knew that he wanted him to move slowly. Small watched him like a hawk. When Hoppy extended his left index finger, Small pulled back on the outboard winch control just one click. Hoppy wanted a little more power, and waved his finger. Small added one more click to the winch and heard the net dragging across the dock. When it came into his field of vision, directly under the outward boom, Hoppy made a fist, and Small moved the lever to neutral. Now Hoppy wanted speed, and touched the tips of his fingers together. Small added two clicks to the slack line. The inboard line became taut and he raised the net over the ship’s rails, stopping it above the hold. He held it there while he and Hoppy did a quick inspection, making sure the net was intact and the load was balanced. If anything spilled out, the guys down in the ship were in deep shit.
The load looked good. Small swung it over the hold. Suddenly Hoppy yelled, “Hot!” What in the hell was going on? Then Small saw it, too. Some newly commissioned officer was kneeling at the edge of the hold. Another second and he would have been tumbling to the bottom deck. Fortunately for him, Small had reversed the outboard winch and brought the load straight up full speed. All the ninety-day wonder had to show for his stupidity was a bloody mouth from being hit by the net.
Delucchi had heard the valves singing and was sprinting. With both winches running under a five-ton load, the sound was unmistakable. Anxiously he examined the lines and valves. The last thing he needed was for a winch to go down and put him days behind schedule. When everything checked out, he patted Small on the shoulder. “Make it up, Randy. We need three hundred tons.” Delucchi always called Small by the short version of his middle name, Randolph, and Small had never liked it.
Small was raising his twenty-fifth load when the ship’s bell signaled 1200 hours—chow time. Lowering it to the deck, he knew he was twenty-five tons down and would have to make up the extra five lifts before the end of the day.
The guys lined up at the chow wagon. Down in the hold, Percy Robinson and his crew had been hauling loads like mules all morning. He was glad that he had spent the night at the base studying his catechism—his goal still was to be baptized a Catholic—especially when he saw the guys who had been out drinking all night. The hold was no place to nurse a hangover.
Robinson enjoyed a night on the town as much as anyone. The Black USO Club in East Oakland was one of his favorite haunts. There was something there for everybody: pool tables, a boxing ring, a basketball court, cards, food and women, and sometimes music, too. Robinson loved to shoot pool and play bridge, but he never had enough money to gamble. A Port Chicago seaman’s pay was a paltry sum. Like Boykin and a lot of the guys, Robinson would supplement his meager salary by grabbing extra work at the Shell Oil Refinery in Martinez. The refinery always needed men to clean up oil spills and to break up saltpeter for agricultural fertilizer. Often Robinson could pick up an extra eight hours, and sometimes, when he had a twenty-four-hour pass, he could put together back-to-back eight-hour shifts. Afterward, he would hustle to Port Chicago and fall exhausted into his bunk, getting a little sleep before the day’s loading began.
When he landed a seventy-two-hour pass, which, given the depot’s beefed-up schedule, was harder to come by, he and the Hawks would go into San Francisco. A trip into the big city could be dicey, though, and Robinson and his buddies would carry razors just in case. The members of the Hawks were what Robinson called his “cut brothers,” guys he could rely on when a situation got tense. They would watch one another’s backs, especially at the bus station when they were entering or leaving town. In San Francisco, white and black servicemen would self-segregate, but at the bus station they mingled whether they wanted to or not, and fights sometimes broke out.
In San Francisco, Robinson and the Hawks loved to go into the Fillmore, the coolest square mile west of Chicago, an exciting, multicultural melting pot, where many of the businesses were owned and run by African, Japanese, and Filipino Americans. Here blacks could hang out at the Subway Nightclub, Club Alabama, or Jack’s Tavern on Sutter Street, the neighborhood’s first black-owned music venue, and listen to Johnnie Ingram, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, and many other up-and-coming musicians who were not allowed to play clubs east of Van Ness Avenue. Those (like Duke Ellington) who did perform at the big hotels could not stay downtown, so after their gigs they would often return to the Fillmore to jam with other black musicians. Like the Stroll in Chicago, Harlem in New York, and Detroit’s Paradise Valley, the Fillmore swung from dusk till dawn. Because white servicemen also cruised the neighborhood, the Hawks frequented a two-to-three-block area of nightclubs and saloons called the International Settlement that catered especially to blacks. Whether or not there was mixing, the bars were rough places. Reasoning that it was better to avoid trouble than tempt fate, Robinson and his crew stuck mostly to the nightclubs where they could absorb the music and enjoy the promenade of finely dressed women.
While the Hawks enjoyed the fresh air, Joe Small, having passed up breakfast, eyed the food the cooks had laid out. Given a choice of liver and onions or bacon, Small took the bacon and then added two pieces of bread and a piping-hot cup of coffee to his tray. Then he joined Hoppy and Kong down at the water. As Small sat down, Kong spotted the cattle-car driver. Small put his hand on his buddy’s shoulder to calm him, saying, “The beach is better,” urging him to get his revenge at another time.
A KP brought over some apple pie. Small wolfed it down and then walked over to the chow wagon. A Marine guard stood over the GI can, like some moth
er superior, inspecting the trays to make sure no one was wasting food. Just then Small caught sight of Delucchi and walked over to him. The lieutenant asked how things were going.
“Rough,” he replied. “I think we’re pushing too hard.” Small had confronted Delucchi before about the rushing. Delucchi’s stock reply—in fact, the response of all the officers—was that the bombs were harmless without the detonators. Small, though, knew that detonator or not, the bombs were packed with TNT. As a winchman, sometimes swinging five-ton loads across the quarterdeck, he was especially conscious of the dangers. One slipup and he could send a whole bunch of men to the undertaker.
Delucchi looked at his watch again. Then he asked, “Do you think you can lift thirty by 1530?”
“Sure,” Small responded, “if this place doesn’t blow up, and someday it will.”
“If it does, neither you nor I will be around to know about it.” Delucchi laughed.
Lunch was over and the work began again. It did not take long for Small to figure out how Lieutenant Delucchi was going to make up the morning’s tonnage shortfall. He felt the winches drag and realized that the petty officers, obviously under orders from Delucchi, had added another bomb, another ton, to the net. Now the winches would be straining to lift six tons instead of five.
Small put the load in the hold, and Hoppy waved him up and out. What the hell’s going on? he thought. What’s Hoppy doing? Then he got his answer. Delucchi had added another net in addition to the extra ton. Now there was always a loaded net ready to be set in the hold and an empty one to bring back up. No resting. In order to get his tonnage by quitting time, Delucchi was willing to risk the safety of every man out there, or at the very least burning up the winches or frying the brake bands.
At five-thirty the cattle car returned with the night division, and the crew members of Division 4 assembled on the dock. They were tired and hungry. Their only consolation was that since the 183 men from Great Lakes arrived in late December, they were putting in two to four hours less per shift.
Small was getting ready to march the division, when Delucchi put his arm around his shoulder. “Thanks, Randy,” he said, holding the day’s tally sheet. “You did a fine job. We got five ton over.”
Small marched his men to the cattle car and watched them board. Then he, too, climbed on. He had not been joking when he told the lieutenant that the place was going to blow. As the winchman, he knew better than anyone else how hard they were pushing. An extra ton per net, with no break between loads, was not a pace that could be maintained without courting disaster. Small hoped like hell that when that day came, he would be far away from Port Chicago.
CHAPTER 27
The Devil’s Backbone
Now that the 6th Marines had fought off the early-morning tank attack and the beachhead was secured, General Holland Smith could begin to implement his master plan. The 4th Division would push across the island, while the 2nd Division held the pivot, waiting until the 4th made it across the interior spine and swung north, before it began its own movement up the west coast. What that meant for Matthews’s Company G was that it would fight its way through the swamps along the southern edge of Lake Susupe, past Aslito Field, over the “Devil’s Backbone,” into the shallow valleys with their small farm plots and bellowing cows, toward the wild cliffs of Magicene Bay. Lieutenant Leary knew it would be a risky proposition for his 2nd Platoon. From the ridgeline, which ran parallel to the beach and looked down on the lake, Japanese artillery observers could see and target the advancing Marines.
Carl Matthews felt as if he had not eaten in days, but it was not hunger for food that burned in his belly; it was a desire for vengeance. First for Witte, a fellow Texan from Desdemona. Leaving Witte behind was the sensible thing, but it went against all his instincts, and gnawed at his gut. He knew that a halo of flies had probably discovered the body. He knew, too, that more soldiers would die that morning as Company G walked into the teeth of the Japanese artillery.
The moment the men of Company G stepped out into an open field, hidden machine guns tore into them, and a Japanese artillery unit atop Kannat Tabla Mountain opened up with its 150-mm howitzers, laying waste to the forward platoons. A Marine halftrack answered, firing its 75-mm cannons, but Leary called for his men to retreat. Everyone was sprinting in the direction of a small ravine when Richard Freeby, Matthews’s Gold Dust Twin, noticed that Wendell Nightingale had been hit. Freeby stopped, threw down his rifle, and headed back into what Matthews saw was a “hail of bullets.” Matthews and every member of G Company dropped to their bellies and opened up on the brush behind Freeby, hoping to provide him with enough covering fire that he and Nightingale might escape. With enemy bullets spattering around him, Freeby dragged and tugged at his friend. For a moment it seemed as if they might get out alive. Then Nightingale was hit again. Freeby continued to pull at him, until he felt the weight and knew that Nightingale was dead. Then, as if realizing for the first time that every Japanese rifle was trained on him, he ran for his life, racing and zigzagging across the field to safety.
Every man who had watched him knew what an extraordinary act of courage he had witnessed. What each of them also knew was that nothing short of a miracle had saved Freeby. The Japanese had him dead to rights. His pack was riddled with bullet holes. Why he was not lying out there spouting blood from a dozen holes, they could not say. Lieutenant Leary said that if he lived beyond Saipan, he would recommend Freeby for the Silver Star. From the moment he rolled into the ravine, however, Freeby knew he had failed and knew, too, that not being able to save his friend was something that would stick with him for the rest of his life. Nightingale would never again lay his eyes on his beloved Maine. While Marine artillery and mortarmen hammered the enemy command post, Freeby put his face in his hands and cried like a baby.
At three o’clock that afternoon, the company learned that its job was to cross the field and set up a bivouac shelter in a cluster of palm trees on the far side. If the men were surprised by the order, they should not have been. Since D-Day they had made little forward movement. Now that they had begun the push across the island, battalion commanders wanted to see progress.
When Leary gave the signal, his 2nd Platoon moved out. Every man hoped that the mortar and artillery barrage had done a job on the command post. When they reached the clearing, they began to run. It was an obstacle course, littered with dead Marines. Matthews dodged and jumped over corpses, cursing under his breath, determined to use his long-thrust bayonet training and gut every Jap hiding in the trees ahead. To his right a group of Marines dropped concussion grenades into every gap and gash they found, and riddled the bushes with bullets. Matthews heard the sound of empty clips popping out of rifles. When a man jumped out of a hole, the Marines shredded him with fire. Only later did they realize that they had killed an old Chamorro farmer.
By evening Leary’s platoon had made it into the hills. The lieutenant ordered his men to dig in, and then he and Matthews went out in search of Nightingale’s body. They found him facedown where Freeby had left him. Lieutenant Leary wiped the dirt off Nightingale’s cheek and forehead and then removed one of his dogtags, leaving the other so that the burial detail could identify him. Then Leary stuck Nightingale’s rifle, bayonet first, into the ground and placed Nightingale’s helmet over the butt. It was standard Marine procedure, but he performed the work tenderly, as if it were a benediction. When he finished, Matthews stood over his friend’s body. He avoided Leary’s eyes. No one had ever told him it could be like this, that after such a short life it could come to this. Before leaving, Leary whispered a few words. Then he and Matthews hustled back to the platoon.
As Matthews climbed into his foxhole that evening beneath the gray monsoon clouds, the energy and hate seeped from his limbs. He felt old, homesick, and weary of war.
• • •
Back at the beach, Robert Graf sat in the sand in the blinding late-afternoon sun. He had barely moved for two days. He, too, was done with war.
After the deaths of Lieutenant Roth, for whom he had been serving as a runner since his early days at Camp Pendleton, and Sergeant Lipfield, he had checked himself into the battalion aid station. Later he would admit that he had lost faith and cracked up. Perhaps he thought of home, pinching his eyes to sharpen the view, to see the mid-autumn trees streak the blue sky with color, to feel the half-moon curve of a girlfriend’s hips. He was watching the sea when a long shadow fell over him. Looking up, he saw an officer, and rose slowly until he realized that he was face-to-face with a major. “Your name Graf?” the officer inquired.
When Graf answered yes, he thought, Jesus, I’m gonna be court-martialed.
“My name is Fought,” the major said. “I’m taking over Company E and I want you as my runner.”
Stunned, Graf almost asked if the major could repeat himself. Then he exhaled as if he had just been saved from a firing squad. Sticking out his chest and squeezing his shoulders together, he said, “Aye, aye. Thank you for the vote of confidence.”
The major explained to Graf that Company G’s mortar section had been hit so bad that battalion was sending them a new squad. He had barely walked away when Graf saw the men approaching. Two of the mortar men were none other than Bill Jurcsak and Jimmy Haskell, his old Ballston Spa buddies. They were a sight for sore eyes. Just a day before, Graf had been almost paralyzed with grief. Now he felt happiness, and as that happiness grew, so did the hate. He would avenge Lieutenant Roth’s death by killing every bucktoothed Jap he could.
Later that morning the 1st Battalion, 29th Marines, had orders to take the ridge in front of them. Realizing that Japanese spotters were watching the bare hills and the meadows, Rachitsky pulled out his compass and took a bearing and then charted a course through the swamp and along the north shore of Lake Susupe. The route enabled his men to avoid being destroyed by Japanese artillery. Hugging the bank, the men sloshed and stumbled through the waist-high water. When a shot rang out and a man near them slid into the coffee-colored muck, Borta and Lemon held their rifles over their heads and crouched as low as they could until the lake was lapping at their chests.
The Color of War Page 22
