The 40s: The Story of a Decade (16 page)

We all crouched, whether sitting or standing, as the boat moved in. Now and then we wiped spray off our eyes and noses, and we paid no attention to a battleship and a cruiser through whose shadows we passed. I had some trouble crouching, because of my length and because the shelf on which I sat was only a foot or so beneath the stern rail. There was no special need, however, for crouching now, while we were still on water. It was the beaches the Japs were mortaring. We crouched in a sort of instinctive, shrinking alarm at what we were about to meet.

· · ·

The Japs burst their mortar and artillery shells up and down the beaches for several days thereafter, but my own sharpest memories of this phase of the Iwo Jima battle are of D Day. That sort of shelling is a procedure someone can always use when he is defending a small area against an enemy who must get his supplies by water. At Iwo, as at Anzio, there quickly developed two fronts—the battle front forward and the shelling front on the beaches, where our supply and reinforcement lines were wholly dependent on boats and amphibious vehicles that were being stalled and pounded by surf and wind. And in the case of Iwo, the Marines depended also on motor or human convoys, which were slowed by
drifting volcanic sand. The Japanese were limited only by their ammunition supply. As long as they could stay alive on Iwo Jima and keep their guns intact, they were all right, for they had observation over our supply beaches and we were within the range of their mortars. The mortar shell, a little, bomb-shaped missile, travels in a high, lobbing trajectory and throws its fragments over a wide radius when it explodes. It makes for tearing, disfiguring wounds and for disfigured dead. Since the mortar fire continued steadily for nearly a week on the crowded shoreline, and hasn’t stopped on the front lines yet, our casualties have not only been large but tend to be more slashed and mangled than usual.

We saw puffs of smoke—white, gray, and black—pluming from the beach as our boat came closer. Most of the men in the boat, whose first task was to set up a regimental command post somewhere between the beach and the front lines, were burdened with radio equipment. Alwyn Lee, an Australian war correspondent, and I were also fairly cumbrously loaded. A pack in three light pieces is more trouble than a single heavy pack, and I had, in addition to my Army musette bag, a typewriter and a blanket roll containing a poncho and a small spade, or entrenching tool. I also had a sash-type lifebelt buckled around my waist, in conformance a few hours earlier with a transport regulation. This belt dropped off and vanished that day on Iwo Jima, I don’t know when or where.

The landing ramp dropped down on the beach and the passengers bustled out with their loads and disappeared behind the first low hummock in the sand. I was on the point of disembarking, second to last, just ahead of the Colonel, when I realized that I had forgotten my gear, and in the moment it took to turn and pick it up piecemeal, Wornham whizzed by me and was gone. I slogged up the beach across one wind-made ridge and trench and then another. Loose, dark sand came up to the tops of my high combat boots at each step, and my breathing was sharp and painful. I made it to the third and deepest trench, some thirty yards in from the shore, and fell to my face there alongside Lee and several men of the command-post detail. When you stopped running or slogging, you became conscious of the whine and bang of mortar shells dropping and bursting near you. All up and down Red Beaches One and Two, men were lying in trenches like ours, listening to shells and digging or pressing their bodies closer into the sand around them.

We were legitimately pinned down for about forty minutes. That is to say, the mortar fire was probably heavy enough and close enough during that time to make it impractical to go further. However, there is such a
thing as wishful pinned-down thinking, and it can become a more dangerous state of mind than any other in an area that is being shelled. A man tends to cling to his trench, even if it is in the center of a target, when the sensible thing is to proceed out of the target as quickly as possible, using his own best judgment about when it’s prudent to dive for cover again. It seems to take about twenty minutes under shellfire to adjust your nerves and evolve a working formula by which you can make progress and gauge, very roughly, the nearness of hits and the pattern of fire.

Lee and I, by agreement, finally left our gear in a trench near the shore (we planned to salvage it later, if possible) and worked our way up the beach in the wake of Wornham and his men. There were Marines on all sides of us doing the same thing. Each man had a different method of progress. One, carbine in hand, walked along steadily, pausing and dropping to one knee only when something about the sound of the shells seemed to confuse him. Another made a high-hurdling jump into every trench or hole he used. At one point I listened to a frail Nisei interpreter arguing with an officer who wanted to help carry his pack. Again, at a moment when Lee and I were catching our breath, something stirred beside the dune just behind us. A wounded man, his face blackened by sand and powder, had roused himself from the lethargy in which he lay and noticed us. Shell fragments had hit him in one arm, one leg, the buttocks, and one eye. His eye, a red circle in his dark-stained face, worried him most. He wanted to know if there were any medical corpsmen with a litter nearby. He had been so deafened by the explosion of the shell that I had to go very close to make him hear me. There were no corpsmen or litters about. In fact, the enemy fire on the beach made it hard to get help to wounded men for the first two days, and then the process of evacuating them in boats, which had to bump their way through a high surf, was incredibly rough and painful. I promised this man to report him and get him help as soon as possible.

The next Marine we passed was dead, and so were a number of others on our diagonal course over the beach to the upland, but I didn’t see a dead Japanese soldier until we got near the edge of the plateau. “That’s the third one we’ve found on Red beaches today so far,” said a soldier who sat near the mouth of a Jap concrete pillbox, which gave off a faint, foul smell. This pillbox, with walls three feet thick and built on a frame of metal tubing, was a good specimen of the Jap defenses on Iwo Jima, but in the days that followed I saw others even more substantial, with
walls four to five feet thick, revolving gun turrets, and two or more approaches lined with neat stairs.

· · ·

By mid-afternoon, Lee and I were ready to send our first dispatches. We decided that the only way to get them off quickly was to make for the flagship, several miles offshore. We did not feel very good about the prospect. The mortar fire on the beaches was as steady as ever and the surf was running higher than it had been in the morning. We reluctantly started down toward the shore, threading our way through a column of silent, apologetic-looking reinforcement troops climbing uphill with boxes of ammunition from the beach. Occasionally a soldier stepped out of line and asked us if we knew where this column was bound. I don’t know why the people going downhill inspired more confidence or looked better-informed than the leaders of the column moving uphill, unless it was that the very direction of our progress suggested that we were Iwo Jima tenants of long standing—five or six hours, perhaps—possessed of sweeping oracular powers and the ability to speak words that would restore confidence and banish fear and confusion. This was certainly untrue. Lee and I paused in a hole halfway down the beach to argue about where we had left our packs and typewriters. I thought it was somewhere to the left, but every time I pointed, a shell was dropped on the exact spot I had in mind. Shells were now also chasing amtracks, ducks, and other craft some little way out from the shore.

It seemed clear, by the time we reached Wornham’s command post, now at least several minutes old, in a broad shellhole above the beach, that the Japs had quickly abandoned the beaches, after losing a few men, and had taken most of their dead with them. This worried Wornham, because he figured that it meant heavy counterattacks in the next night or two, and he was also worried, as regimental commanders are everywhere in battle, by the problem of keeping his combat battalions in communication with each other and with him. Sitting in his shellhole, along with a couple of dozen staff men, medical officers, messengers, radio operators, and stray visitors who just wanted to be in a hole with other people, we followed, by radio and courier, the adventures of three battalions a few hundred yards away. The battalions were known in Wornham’s shellhole by their commanders’ names—Robbie, Tony, and Butler. “Tony says he’s ready to make his turn up the west beach,” Wornham said fretfully, looking at a message in his hand. “I gotta get him.”
Now and then he looked around his hole and said plaintively, “Come on, let’s break this up. Let’s have some room here.” At these words, a few of the strays would drift away in one direction or another, and a few minutes later others would take their places. The shells dropped more rarely in that neighborhood, but they were close enough. Tanks began to rumble up from the beach, at long intervals, and angle and stutter their way through a gap at the top of the ridge nearby. Purple Heart Louis came to the edge of the command post and had his right arm bandaged by a doctor to whom we had already reported the position of the wounded Marine on the beach. “I knew Louis would get it again,” said a young captain. “Right where he deals the cards, too. I hope it will be a lesson to him.”

We heard of death after death of men we had been with on the transport. One divisional surgeon had been killed and another had already had a breakdown from overwork. Visible Japanese dead were still scarce, even though one company had found a nest of Japs and killed a hundred. “Here’s a report from FFF Company colonel, sir,” said an aide. “He says the presence of a lot of flies in a trench suggests the Japs buried some dead there.”

There were live Japs near enough, for whenever the Navy’s Grumman fighter planes dived at a point just to our right, near the airfield, they drew machine-gun fire. Looking around, I had the leisure for the first time to think what a miserable piece of real estate Iwo Jima is. Later, when I had seen nearly all the island, I knew that there were no extenuating features. This place where thousands of men of two nations have been killed or wounded in less than three weeks’ time has no water, few birds, no butterflies, no discernible animal life—nothing but sand and clay, humpbacked hills, stunted trees, knife-edged kuna grass in which mites who carry scrub typhus live, and a steady, dusty wind.

· · ·

Presently Lee said he thought that if we were going to file our stories we should head toward a place where we could see some boats bunching and where there might be a chance of our getting a ride. We started off, and a few minutes later we tumbled into a trench practically on top of our gear. There were a lot of men in this refuge now. Two Negro soldiers carrying supplies had stopped to give some water to a pair of Marines who were lying quietly at one end. The Marines had been hit by shrapnel and were waiting for litter bearers. After they drank the water, their only
movement was a slight, mechanical stirring of their heads each time a shell burst close by. By now almost everyone on the beaches, even those not killed or wounded, had had some sort of direct contact with Japanese shells, if only to the extent of having tiny spent fragments, still burning hot, drop onto their clothing or into the sand right beside them.

By the time we reached a hole by the water’s edge, near where we had landed, we had lost our sense of urgency and entered that stage, which comes after a certain amount of time in a shelled area, when you can no longer bring yourself to duck and run constantly, even when you are moving in the open. But the men in the boats along the shoreline immediately re-aroused us. Since they came into the fire zone only at intervals and remained as briefly as possible, they had no time to lose their awareness of danger. It suddenly seemed to us a matter of desperate importance to get out of there at once. An ammunition dump was beginning to grow up around us, and the shelling did not abate.

We went up to a boat whose ramp was slapping the waves a few feet out from the shoreline and whose coxswain was trying to hold her to shore by keeping her engine running. There we encountered a Marine named Connell, who for the next half hour gave the most spectacular demonstration of energy I have ever seen. Though he moved with great speed and fervor, there seemed to be no fear in him. He had been helping moor and unload supply boats all afternoon. He was stripped down to his green Marine shorts, and he spent as much time in the water as out of it, his lank, blond hair plastered to his skull. When he wanted to salvage a piece of equipment from the water, he made a long, flat power dive over the surf. His problem at the moment was to make this boat fast, so that the ammunition aboard her could be unloaded. With the coxswain’s permission, we got into the boat and stowed our packs in the stern. It was quickly obvious that the crew of the boat, though they remained calm, were of no help to Connell whatever and considered the odds against unloading at this time overwhelming and the situation irremediable. Connell shouted orders or suggestions at them, but they simply stared at him and then stared up and down the beach at the shellbursts. Connell got hold of a rope, made it fast to the boat, then darted up the beach to tie the other end to a tractor, whose driver surveyed him curiously from the top of the vehicle. Connell persuaded the driver to start his engine and try to pull the boat in. The rope broke. Connell tied it again and it broke again. He swam out to get another rope, but by the time he returned to the beach the driver and tractor had disappeared.
Swimming furiously, he then approached Lee and me, at the stern of the boat, and called out the courteous suggestion that we get ashore. “This is going to take a long time,” he shouted over the sound of the surf, “and you fellows will do better somewhere else!” He never once showed the slightest sign of temper or desperation. He appeared to regard the wild scene and his own mighty efforts and constant frustrations as wholly rational and what was to be expected. He was wrong about the boat’s being there a long time. A few minutes after Lee and I swam and struggled to shore—Connell made three personal amphibious trips to help us with our gear—the boat withdrew to sea, with its cargo still aboard, possibly to try a landing somewhere else. The last we saw of Connell, he was racing down the beach to grasp a mooring rope on another boat thirty yards away.