In early evening, after chow, hundreds of men from different units gathered on deck for impromptu entertainment. “Thus far a large share of it—far in excess of our proportionate number—has been supplied by the 4482,” Elliott wrote as the ship sailed from Pearl Harbor to its next stop, in the Marshall Islands. “Our quintet, chorus, jive band (2 saxes, a trumpet, bass fiddle, and guitar) and our boxers have been in constant demand. Last night they all performed in ‘Officers’ Country’ and brought the house down—especially Sgt. Willie Reeves’ rendition of ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ and our band’s playing of ‘Keep Jumping’—a little-known but authentic piece of jazz written by Doc Wheeler. . . . Reeves has become the top single performer. He can never get away with less than three encores.” The salvage and repair company also dominated shipboard boxing matches, which were arranged by one of Elliott’s noncoms, Sgt. Clayburn, the motor sergeant, who fought as a welterweight in Washington, DC, under the name Tiger Nelson before joining the army.
Elliott often visited his boxers as they worked out on the ship’s fantail, sparring a bit and skipping rope. Over a month’s time, he estimated that he lost eight or nine pounds in this way. But then and always his favorite exercise was of the mind: reading. Every few days, he waited in line at the ship library to check out new books, and there seemed to be an ocean of time to read them. “From the time I went to college to the present I’ve never had the chance to read so continuously and with so much eagerness and pleasure. I must admit there is a good deal of the book worm in me.”
Books about “American literature, American history, American life” most enthralled him. The World of Washington Irving by Van Wyck Brooks and American Giant: Walt Whitman and His Times by Frances Winwar were two of his favorites from the Cape Canso library. Of American Giant he wrote, “What I liked most about the book was the life-size portrait of Walt Whitman, the man, that emerges from it. And what a man he was! Poet, essayist, printer, reporter, patriot, nurse, and the friend of every living being on earth. Probably the most interesting chapters were those on his youth and young manhood, when he was a crusading editor of the Brooklyn Eagle and up to his neck in issues of the day. Miss Winwar very skillfully shows his political development and growth, from the time when he was a regular Democrat, a faithful follower of Tammany, to his split with them on the issue of the Wilmot Proviso which sought to exclude slavery from the territories won from Mexico, and right on through to his support of Fremont in ’56 and of course Lincoln and the Republicans in ’60.” The book inspired Elliott to ask Mary if she could send him an edition of Leaves of Grass, the one edited and prefaced by Samuel Sillen, literary editor of New Masses, the Marxist magazine.
Days blurred as the Cape Canso sailed across the vast Pacific. He started keeping track by noting at the top of his letters not the date but how long they had been at sea. Eighteenth day at sea. Twenty-first day at sea. 23rd day at sea. “There have probably been transports in the Pacific that have been at sea longer than we have, but you’d have a hard time convincing anybody on this ship of that fact,” he wrote one mid-June morning. “We might just as well be in the Navy. We speak the Navy lingo, do Navy details. I’ve got barnacles between the toes, seaweed in my hair, salt-water on my knees and bulkheads in my brain. A parrot on my shoulder, a tattooed arm and a beard on my chin are all that’s lacking to complete my nautical ensemble. The Navy eats well all the time and has clean quarters to sleep in. Even so, I am now convinced that I am an Army man by conviction and preference, foxholes, C-rations, and mud notwithstanding.”
Not that he had endured much hardship so far. His letters to Mary aboard ship at times vacillated between guilt about not carrying a heavier burden and despair that politics circumscribed his military duties. “No one knows better than I that the small inconveniences we have suffered are as nothing compared to the terrible ordeal of millions of peoples all over the world. Sometimes I feel that I should have done, or been in position to do, much more than I did. It was a bitter disappointment to me not to have gotten to Europe. I would have liked to have contributed to the defeat of the Nazis. In a general way, I suppose we have all achieved that historic task. . . . But none in so great measure as the infantrymen of the First, the 45th, the 1st Armored, the 82nd Airborne, and the scores of other divisions which fought the greatest campaign in the history of our nation.”
With the European campaign now over, the War Department in Washington had turned its attention to an invasion of Japan. One reason the Cape Canso was kept at sea so long, with stops at Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands and Ulithi in the Caroline Islands, was due to uncertainty about where the soldiers aboard would be most needed. At anchorage in Ulithi on June 23, Elliott still did not know the answer. “For my part, I hope to hell it’s Japan under General Stilwell,” he wrote to Mary. “The road to Tokyo is the most direct route back to you in Michigan.”
When the Cape Canso pulled anchor from Ulithi, their destination was finally made known to the troops aboard. They quickly transformed the news into a parody inspired by the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! that had opened on Broadway in 1943.
Everything’s up-to-date in Okinawa
They’ve gone about as far as they can go.
And
Ooooooooooh-key-na-wa, where the Japs lay dead upon the beach.
“The first ditty, a parody of the Kansas City song, was supposed to be ironic, expressive of our belief that in going to Okinawa we were getting about as far away from up-to-date civilization as we could possibly go,” Elliott reported to Mary. “Our minds and imaginations were filled with visions of deadly snakes (the Army handbook on the island was so detailed on this subject that nearly all of us were more afraid of the snakes than the Japs), of typhoons, and jungles and insects, wild animals, of mud and dirt and disease.”
When the island came into sight, the lightheartedness stopped, replaced by “grimness and silent determination.”
They reached Okinawa on July 2, and after disembarking, Elliott was too busy to write for the first time since he enlisted at Christmastime 1941. He went silent for three weeks, the period before the War Department officially declared the island secure. Sixteen hours after they landed, the 4482nd had set up its mobile trailers and was fully operational, repairing boots, trousers, socks, field jackets, raincoats, shirts, caps, breeches, shelter halves, barracks bags, leggings, haversacks, canteens, electrical equipment, jeeps and other vehicles. On the Fourth of July they played a critical role helping the 11th Airborne Division before its planes arrived on the island in preparation for an invasion of Japan. For that work alone, Elliott received a letter of commendation from the division commander. The fiercest fighting had been over before his troops arrived, with more than 161,000 American and Japanese casualties during three months of combat so intense and bloody that it became known as the “Typhoon of Steel.” But danger remained. “We saw plenty of fireworks here from the first day we arrived,” Elliott wrote when he finally found time. “What with air raids nearly every night, kamikaze suicide planes, snipers, bypassed Jap detachments.” As it turned out, “the Japs were more dangerous than the snakes, for while we never saw a single snake, we saw plenty of Japs, dead and alive.”
At their camp on the island, they were 725 miles from Hiroshima and 551 miles from Nagasaki when the two Japanese cities and their civilians were devastated by atomic bombs. A few days later, when Japan surrendered, the night sky over Okinawa crackled with celebratory fireworks. “We heard the news at 0800 this morning on the radio from San Francisco,” Elliott wrote to Mary. “My first thoughts were of you sweetheart. I was trying to visualize the scene at 1402 Henry when Bob Trout or Bill Henry came on the air with the announcement of the surrender. And in my mind’s eye I visualized the reactions and feelings of all the peoples of the world and the realization sunk in at long last, after the bitterest, costliest, and bloodiest war in the history of mankind, the world was at peace.”
Two weeks later, on V-J day, he took part in an army b
aseball game against a marine regiment also stationed on Okinawa, losing 4 to 1, then hurried back to quarters in time to hear the broadcast of the official surrender ceremony aboard the USS Missouri. Elliott never thought much of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, but praised him for his performance that day. “I am somewhat skeptical when it comes to pomp and ceremony, but I think this whole surrender operation was very wisely handled and all the planning that went into it to make it dramatic and symbolic was justified,” Elliott wrote. “It was truly an epochal event closing the most destructive era in the whole of human history and opening what surely must become a new age of peace and progress. The most moving and remarkable single moment about the whole ceremony was the short speech that General MacArthur made after the President spoke from Washington. . . . MacArthur has always been something of an aloof and enigmatic figure. When he began to speak I was prepared to hear some bombastic banalities. Instead, his voice came through clear, strong, and restrained, and his message was a model of sincere emotion, clarity, and showed a strength of purpose and conviction that rang true. He was truly ‘a son of the American people,’ expressing their thoughts and emotions.”
Son of the American people. That is how Elliott thought of himself as well. He had a Whitmanesque love of the land and its people, and now that combined with more traditional expressions of patriotism, including admiration for the American military and its leaders. “After nearly four years in the service, I understand why the army life has always had a certain attraction and fascination for a certain type of man, and not all of those Regular Army men are lacking in imagination, initiative, and energy, either, as so many people think. The proof of that lies in the fact that our Regular Army produced a man the caliber of Dwight Eisenhower, certainly one of the greatest men in our nation’s history. I’ve met many an old soldier whose pride in organization and country, uncompromising sense of duty, and whose natural, easy and friendly way of dealing with other men could well be emulated.”
* * *
THE LETTERS MY mother wrote to my father during the war had vanished by the time I became interested in this story. For years they were stashed in Dad’s olive-green army trunk in the attic of our house in Madison. My sisters read them at one point, and Jean later remembered that they “were full of news about family and friends” but also included vivid reports on Mom’s dreams, often nightmares that reflected her sensitivity to violence and her fears for her husband and about the war. I never saw the letters, so reading only my father’s responses was like listening to one end of a telephone conversation. One of the responses he wrote from Okinawa drew my attention. He was trying to answer her apparent concern that he sounded “complacent about the post-war world and was just looking toward security, job, home.”
One way to read this is that she thought he was not being political enough, too bourgeois, that he had fallen into the rut of accepting the status quo. They were in dramatically different circumstances, even as they both worked in the war effort. He had spent virtually every hour of the day for four years with soldiers, talking soldier talk, thinking like a soldier. Every soldier thought about home, peace, security, job. Until my older brother was born, my mother had worked in the defense industry, but in her free time she had been consumed by leftist politics. Bereniece Baldwin would later testify that she encountered my mother in the offices of the Young Communist League on Broadway near Grand Circus Park sometime in 1944. By Baldwin’s account, my mother went by the name Mary Morrison then, which is possible; she might have used a pseudonym, though no one in the family ever mentioned it later.
But there was more to it than politics. If my mother was more ideological than my father, her beliefs were shaped by a deep moralistic streak, a characteristic that drew on her midwestern roots and the rectitude of a disciplined father born in a lean-to in the rolling hills of Kansas. I was very close to my mother and loved her deeply. She was intelligent and forgiving. We had an unspoken bond of empathy. But I also saw the sharp edge of her moralistic streak, which had little to do with normal sins. If you did some trivial thing wrong, that would not bother her much. But if she sensed that you thought you were better than anyone else, or enjoying life too much while others were suffering, or placing too much emphasis on material things or conventional notions of success, she would let you know it. I never got a letter from her, but I got the message.
My father was more social and fluid. He was open to the world, with all its contradictions. He understood his own flaws and accepted them in others. He was more of a romantic than a moralist. And he was also a survivor, adapting to his surroundings. A tinge of the Marrano heritage, perhaps. In any case, he certainly got my mother’s message. “Do you think I won’t fight—or don’t expect to have to fight—and work for the things I want for myself, my family, and the nation?” he responded. “Simply because I enumerated those things—job, home, peace, etc.—as the elements of the kind of postwar world in which I want to live doesn’t necessarily mean that I expect to find it that way ready-made. If I did expect that I wouldn’t be complacent; I’d be stupid and ignorant. I have known for a good many years now that nothing comes about in this world without effort, struggle, work, sweat, blood.”
* * *
ON THE MORNING of September 4, Elliott learned that all censorship regulations had been removed from mail leaving Okinawa and he was able to tell Mary what he could not reveal before. He and his troops would soon be going to Korea as part of the XXIV Corps of the Tenth Army. The company was scheduled to depart with the second echelon near the end of the month, but Elliott was planning to leave within a week or ten days, taking Sergeant Henderson along with him, to arrange for housing and an operations area. He thought it was an honor that his unit was chosen. “The other 5 salvage repair companies in the Tenth Army will sweat it out here or some other island,” he wrote. “We are the only Salv Rep Co going. The order which directed us to go stated: ‘The units chosen for this operation have maintained a high standard of efficiency and have proven to the satisfaction of the Commanding General that they will be worthy of the high honor accorded them to help restore Korea to the list of free, independent nations, as provided by the Yalta agreement.’ It was signed by ‘Vinegar Joe’ (Stilwell) himself.”
Elliott was in the middle of a gin rummy game with Tom Meisner, the other lieutenant in the company, on the Saturday night of September 15 when a jeep pulled up in front of their tent and a messenger piled out with the orders: he and Sergeant Henderson were to leave that night by a ship known as an LST (Landing Ship, Tank), which was waiting and would leave as soon as they arrived at the loading beach. “Things began to fly fast and furious then as we completed our packing, loaded our stuff in a jeep and scrambled down to the beach in a driving, blinding thunderstorm,” Elliott recounted. “All the way down, I kept yelling above the din of the storm and the jeep motor at Meisner, trying to tell him about a score of things he should check and watch while he was in temporary control of the company. It was a wild ride, all right, but as things turned out it was calm and peaceful compared with what was in store for us.”
When they arrived at the loading point, Purple Beach #1, on the western coast of Okinawa, they realized they were in a classic military hurry-up-and-wait situation as the beachmaster struggled to bring order to the mass chaos of stalled jeeps, mud, darkness, and confusion. An hour before midnight, after sitting in their uncovered jeep for several hours, they received the signal to drive up the ramp and park with other vehicles on the lower tank deck. It was too late, and there was too much confusion, to make sleeping arrangements, so Elliott and his sergeant sat in the jeep the rest of the night and tried to sleep there. At 4:30 the next morning, the ship weighed anchor and set off into a choppy, waving sea.
Elliott recorded the scene in a letter to Mary as though he were keeping a journal. He explained that the LST was a vessel designed and built for an amphibious war. It was the largest of many different types of landing craft and ships the navy designed to land men and suppli
es directly on beachheads without a dock or pier. It was 220 feet long and about 50 feet wide, with two main cargo decks to carry tanks and other vehicles. LST 718, the one they were on, was packed on both decks with trucks, jeeps, and trailers, but no tanks. It was so crowded on board that it was hard to move without bumping into someone or something.
“On Sunday morning, Sgt. Henderson and I crawled out of our jeep, wet, cold and woozy, and climbed up to the upper deck to have a look around and to make some inquiries about sleeping and eating facilities. A chief boatman’s mate gave us the dope and also apprised us of the obvious fact that we were heading for a storm. Before we could give way to the sickening feelings that were taking control of our bodies, we pitched in with the crew and other Army troops to lash and chain down all the vehicles on both decks. It was hard, slow, and difficult work, but at least the effort and the concentration prevented us from getting very sick.”
By Sunday noon the storm had turned into a full-fledged typhoon. Typhoon Ida.
“Our little ship kicked and bucked and heaved and tossed and soon everybody, including the Navy men, were heaving and tossing too, overboard. Actually, we were in much graver physical danger than I ever suspected. It turned out that the Naval officers on board were seriously afraid that the ship might crack in two. It has happened to many a ship in these very waters, including much larger ones than this. We were all too miserable with our own personal troubles to worry much about the hazards of the sea.”
Elliott did not hold down a meal on Sunday and lost the first two meals Monday. He might not have been the sickest man aboard, but he had never felt lousier. He managed to hold down Monday night’s chow, and by Tuesday morning he was better. They had passed the peak of the storm by then. The waters were choppy, but smoother sailing appeared ahead. By Tuesday night they had passed from the East China Sea into the Yellow Sea. “The stars were twinkling in the sky that night and from all over the ship wretched creatures crept forth for a breath of fresh air,” Elliott wrote. The voyage was supposed to take four days, but they hardly moved the first two rough days at sea and needed six before reaching the harbor at Inchon on the west coast of Korea. The bay was cluttered with ships from the U.S. fleet amid hundreds of junks, sampans, and fishing craft. In their little boats, Koreans grinned and waved at the arriving ship as they moved past.
A Good American Family Page 23
