Goodbye, Darkness (36 page)
The debris of battle is all around us: rusting tanks and amphtracs, artillery pieces twisted into grotesque shapes, coconut bunkers, bent armor plate blackened by flamethrowers, shattered landing craft, concrete pillboxes, and, under the coconut fronds, the Japanese admiral's command post and a cement blockhouse shaped like a double Quonset hut, looking much as it did when Bonnyman stood defiantly on top of it. The blockhouse now serves as a social club for native officials; another bunker nearby has become a meeting hall for Rotarians. Altogether, there are over five hundred fortified positions on Betio, many of them intact. Here and there, stepping on the thousands of cartridge cases underfoot, you can see a Nip coastal gun which was actually pulled out of its mooring by American naval shells. At first glance the famous pier seems largely demolished, but it isn't; beyond its stump, if you peer down, you can see the rest of it under water, submerged by half a lifetime of wave action. Takanoi remarks that the tide is now high. Looking seaward, I realize that the only way I can grasp what the assault was like for those first three waves of Marines is to get my feet wet. Leaving my camera with the policeman, to photograph me, I trudge out and don't reach landing-craft depth until I have gone over a thousand yards. Looking shoreward from that distance, seeing the bunkers and pillboxes, I feel anger roaring in my chest, and I think of the men who fell in the surf, sprawled like priests at high mass. Suddenly the most important thing in the world for me is to leave Betio.
At the ferry slip I find Tony Charlwood, the ordnance wizard. He has finished defusing shells and will return to Belfast and the IRA on tomorrow's plane. As we wait for the boat he talks about the battle here and says bluntly, “It was a bloody crime.” In his opinion even the coming of the white man was tragic for the islands because the natives adopted the worst of the newcomers' ways. Pointing toward a litter of Australian beer cans and discarded filter-tip packs, he says scornfully, “Look at that. The people here have no respect now. And look at
that.”
I am already looking at it: a monument to the Marine dead defaced by graffiti. But perhaps the memorial deserves no better, for as we read it together we see that it is clearly self-serving. “Tarawa,” the plaque reads, “was the testing ground for Marine amphibious doctrine and techniques. It paved the way for the island campaigning that followed and provided answers that saved thousands of American lives along the road to victory in the Pacific.” Tony turns away. He mutters, “That's what the British said about Dieppe.”
Now Nimitz's central Pacific drive, like MacArthur's in the southwest Pacific, began to pick up speed. MacArthur had left Rabaul to rot and was in the Admiralty Islands. Meanwhile, less than three months after Betio, GIs of the Seventh Division and Marines in the newly formed Fourth Marine Division had taken Kwajalein Atoll, next on Nimitz's hit list, 718 miles beyond Tarawa. Eleven days after that they plunged ashore on Eniwetok Atoll, another 575 miles closer to Tokyo. These islands shared with Betio one advantage for attackers: no high ground. If one assumes that the men at Betio had to serve as guinea pigs — that admirals could learn only through blunders — then these relatively bloodless assaults were a partial justification of Tarawa. Battleships and cruisers coordinated their salvos with the landing timetable; there were more amphtracs, carrying heavier armor; and carrier pilots took out the great Jap base at Truk in the nearby Caroline archipelago, destroying two hundred enemy planes and sinking forty-two ships. Unfortunately, as we shall see, Tarawa was not the last botched landing.
Approached by air, Kwajalein, or “Kwaj,” as it is now known, resembles every other atoll: low, flat, and verdant, with a tan prayer rug of a beach. This is one of the loneliest parts of the world. The 1,335 square miles of Micronesia, half the size of Rhode Island — including the Gilberts, Palaus, Carolines, Marshalls, and Marianas — comprise 2,141 islands, of which only 96 are populated. The natives on all of them would fit in the Rose Bowl. Typically, there is no heavy surf at Kwaj; the beach is a strip of unvexed sand behind which pandanus, royal palms, and Samoan palms conceal the community inland. As we fasten our seat belts and I knock out my pipe, I see all of Kwaj below, serpentine and green in the placid dark blue water, supreme and magnificent. The plane touches down beside a sign:
bucholz army field.
All around the enormous airport are the varied pleasures of a remote U.S. military base: TV aerials, a movie theater, tennis courts, golf courses, swimming pools, bicycle racks — the twenty-eight hundred people on Kwaj own five thousand bikes — and a tax-free supermarket.
Consternation greets my arrival. Civilian planes are allowed to refuel here, but passengers may not wander off the runway. This rule, when written, was understandable; the Pentagon built a billion-dollar missile base here, and real military secrets cannot be reasonably challenged. I am an exception to the rule, however; I carry papers from the Department of Defense permitting me to roam. These are carefully examined. Officers huddle by the control tower and come up with a bureaucratic solution: twenty copies of my orders are Xeroxed, so everyone is covered. But they are still uneasy, and I am puzzled; the most sensitive missile equipment, I have been told, has been moved elsewhere. Then I come upon a likelier explanation for their touchiness.
It is the outrageous discrepancy between conditions on Kwaj and those on Ebeye, a much smaller island in the atoll, less than a mile long and nowhere more than 650 feet wide, where nine thousand native laborers live, six and seven to a room, in rat-infested shacks. The men are unskilled or semiskilled workers earning $2.10 to $2.40 an hour, and their wives are paid $5 to $6 a day as maids. Each morning all are boated to Kwaj and at the end of the day they are boated back. They may not stay on the main island overnight or shop in the supermarket there, though powdered milk, which must be imported, costs $4 a box on Kwaj and $10 on Ebeye. They cannot send their children to Kwaj's high school. Nor can they swim in its pools, eat in its restaurants, see its movies, use its hospital and dental facilities, or even borrow books from its library. This is what is called a Trust Territory of the United States. In an aside an American official tells me, “I hope the UN never hears about Ebeye.” I reply that if it doesn't it won't be my fault. That night, I know, the Sergeant in my dream will be bitter.
Kwaj is depressing. On all sides are radar domes, sinister square towers, and curious contraptions fashioned of steel tubing which project antennae at awkward angles. Until recently, strategists in what are euphemistically called war games fired nuclear rockets from here, knocking down other rockets coming from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, five thousand miles away. Today Kwaj's great radar systems, with walls thick enough to absorb atomic blasts, have become empty monuments to advancing technology. If
they
are obsolete, what can be said of the weapons in
my
war? In the opinion of military historians, the decisive tactical innovation of World War II was the amphibious landing, developed by the Marine Corps in response to a 1927 directive from the Joint Army-Navy Board. Its doctrines were used successfully, not only in the Pacific, but in Morocco, Algeria, Sicily, Italy, Normandy, and southern France. Today, however, in a major war, landing operations would be as useless as flintlocks. This is hardly cause for sentimental regret, but when a man reaches his late fifties almost any change empties him a little. It is disconcerting to feel quaint.
After the conquest of the atolls, Nimitz, still driving hard, took dead aim on the Mariana Islands, a thousand miles closer to Tokyo. First would come the turn of Saipan, to be attacked nine days after D-day in Normandy, and then Tinian. Saipan would be our first battlefield to be inhabited by a large number of Japanese civilians who, since the Versailles treaty gave the island to Tokyo, had established a substantial colonial presence among the Chamorro natives. Next we would take Guam, the only American possession to have been seized by the enemy in the great offensive that followed Pearl Harbor. Guam had a good image; the Chamorros there liked us, and we knew it. Saipan — where I would almost bleed to death later in a receiving hospital — was less popular. “Men,” a sergeant told his people aboard ship before our invasion of the island, “Saipan is covered with dense jungle, quicksand, steep hills and cliffs hiding batteries of huge coastal guns, and strongholds of reinforced concrete. Insects bear lethal poisons. Crocodiles and snakes infest the streams. The waters around it are thick with sharks. The population will be hostile toward us.” There was a long silence. Then a corporal said, “Sarge, why don't we just let the Japs keep it?”
We Are Living Very Fast
G
eneral eisenhower once said that he doubted marines
were better fighters than his own army Rangers. In a sense he was probably right; if you tell picked men they are crack troops, they are likely to fight like an elite. The difference is that Ike's Rangers were small bands of commandos, while the Marine Corps, a
corps d'élite,
fielded six divisions in the Pacific — three corps, a whole army. Their élan helped shape the character of the war and determined the course of Nimitz's great drive across the central Pacific. It is, for example, a military maxim, repeated down the ages, that casualties of 30 percent are usually the most a fighting unit can endure without losing combative spirit. Tarawa, where over 40 percent fell, proved that wasn't true of the Marine Corps. And as we approached Japan, the casualty rates of our rifle regiments rose higher and higher. On Peleliu the First Marines lost 56 percent of its men; on Iwo Jima the Twenty-sixth Marines lost 76 percent; on Okinawa the Twenty-ninth Marines lost 81 percent. Thus they seized islands whose defenders would have flung other invaders back into the surf. Whether the gains were worth the price is another matter; what cannot be disputed is the boldness and audacity of young Marines in the early 1940s. I recalled, from the days when I had been keelhauled through schoolboy Greek at Classical High, Simonides' epitaph at Thermopylae:
Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
In the twenty-five centuries since Thermopylae, war has been variously described as an art, a profession, and a science, but the Marine infantryman of World War II was more a skilled blue-collar workman. His weapons were his tools, and even after he had become a journeyman he worked ceaselessly to improve his mastery of his craft. To this day I could, if called upon, pull the pin on an Mk. II hand grenade, release the safety lever, giving me four seconds before it will explode, count, “One Mississippi, two Mississippi,” and then hurl it and hit the deck. The Raiders on Edson's Ridge could rapidly replace warped machine-gun barrels in the dark because they had done it a thousand times blindfolded. Not only blindfolded, but also working against the clock, between battles we fieldstripped and reassembled rifles, carbines, heavy and light machine guns, BARs, and 60-millimeter and 81-millimeter mortars, the artillery of the infantry. The BAR was a bitch. There were bolts and firing pins, extractors and receiver groups, a sliding leg assembly, a flash hider, a bipod bearing, and a recoil spring and guide. I lack small-muscle skills, and I have a mechanical IQ of about 32, but I became adroit with all infantry arms. I had no choice. It was that or my ass. The tricky part of the BAR, I remember, was putting your index finger on the checkered surface of the recoil spring guide, turning and pressing until the ends of the guide were clear of the retaining shoulders, and then carefully removing the spring and guide. You never hurried that part. If you let that spring get away from you, the guide would rip right through your throat.
Except for his helmet cover, the globe, eagle, and fouled-anchor emblem on the breast of his light-infantry-green uniform, and his profile — he tended to be tall and seldom wore glasses — the Marine Corps foot soldier in combat was indistinguishable from the average GI. Certainly John Payne, wearing his smart dress blues in
To the Shores of Tripoli,
would never have recognized him as a comrade. Mud-caked, unshaven, his uniform greasy and torn, he resembled a hobo, which in a way he was. Like tramps we smoked incessantly, carrying cigarettes in the cartridge pouches on our web belts (where they fitted perfectly), and stooped beneath the weight of our equipment, we looked both crippled and middle-aged. Grenades hung from our straps by the handles, a practice not likely to be recommended by insurance actuaries, but we knew that when we needed them, we would need them fast. If marching, we preferred to walk in ditches, which could provide instant defilade. We were given a ten-minute break every marching hour, and during it we lay collapsed on our backs. Then we sergeants ripped out the command “Saddle Up!” and all hands staggered to their feet and lurched on. Our feet dragged; often we appeared to be unconscious, and there were men who swore they could sleep while staying in column. The prescribed distance between marching Marines was five yards — “Don't bunch up, men!” — to keep casualties from an enemy shell or bomb at a minimum. You could always tell whether men were moving up or coming off the line. Usually those coming off had samurai swords jutting from their packs. And they had a different look — dull, sightless eyes showing the strain, misery, shock, sleeplessness, and, in veteran fighters, the supreme indifference of young men who have lost their youth and will never recover it. The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca caught their expressions. They had “sad infinite eyes, like those of a newborn beast of burden.”
