The Conquering Tide (91 page)

Working and living conditions were wretched in those early days of the base-building struggle. Men were quartered in tents, but their bivouac areas were prone to flooding in the frequent torrential rains, and it was essential to construct platform tents both for lodging and for office space. Canned rations fed the men until a makeshift galley was established in a Quonset hut. A reservoir in the island's interior provided water to the coastal towns, but the pipelines had been destroyed by naval bombardment, so all freshwater had to be brought in from the fleet in five-gallon cans. Flies and an awful stench rose from the shallow graves of dead Japanese, so the dead had to be dug up and burned. Mosquitoes and the tropical diseases they carried caused a health and sanitation emergency; the construction teams had to drain swamps and other areas of standing water and spray them with disinfectant. Fuel was brought ashore in fifty-five-gallon drums and stored in open-air dumps. Several of those dumps went up in flames, causing spectacular explosions and conflagrations that lasted days. Thousands of Japanese mines were scattered around the beaches and footpaths, and several men were killed by walking into an area not yet cleared by mine disposal units.

Tens of thousands of American combat and construction troops had to be fed. A naval reserve lieutenant who had worked in hotels and restaurants organized the first large mess hall, in which the galley took up all of a small Quonset hut and the food was served directly into mess kits through small windows. Men often waited as long as two hours to be served. American forces had also assumed responsibility for feeding and sheltering the island's 24,000 native Chamorros. Many of their homes and villages had been destroyed or were not yet safe from the enemy. In early August, about 18,000 civilian inhabitants were living in three refugee camps near the coast.

The island's unpaved roads were churned up by tanks, jeeps, and trucks, and when the rainy season set in, they were transformed into impassable quagmires. Many vehicles were stranded in the mud and abandoned. The
primitive oxcart tracks and footpaths had to be widened, extended, and paved over. But trucks were needed to haul coral rock to primitive cement-mixing areas, and there were never quite enough trucks, or enough mechanics and spare parts to maintain them. The trucks operated twenty-four hours a day, with their drivers working in shifts. Roads to the coral pits were given first priority for improvement, as no major construction could begin anywhere until vast quantities of coral cement became available. The roads were to be built to last, and the builders adhered to the same standards they would meet in building a road in the United States. Rocky outcroppings and ridges were blasted out and inclines were regraded. A four-lane road between Sumay and Agana was underway before the island was declared secure. Before the war's end, more than 103 miles of new paved roads were completed on Guam.

During the enemy's two-and-a-half-year occupation, labor troops had built a 4,500-foot coral surface airstrip at Orote Peninsula. Seabees cleared the wrecked planes away by shoving them into great mountains of dirt and debris on the sides of the runways. “They were wrecks of twisted aluminum and steel,” wrote the sailor James Orvill Raines, who marveled at how high the wreckage towered over the working strip. “They had the appearance of piled junk.”
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The island's northern third was dominated by a limestone plateau, providing suitable terrain for B-29 fields, each 8,500 feet long and 200 feet wide. As 1945 began, construction teams began hacking the two big runways out of the jungle.

A base construction officer later recalled a predicament on Guam: “There were always too many men and too few men—too many for the housing that was finished, and too few for the work to be done.”
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Men living in tents were often felled by exhaustion and tropical diseases. The prefabricated Quonset hut provided the answer, and thousands of the corrugated steel kits were landed at the new pontoon piers in Apra Harbor. Because the construction units were overtaxed on larger projects, and the huts required no special machinery to build, many American marines and soldiers were told, “There are your homes—build them.”
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The sections were plainly labeled and easily screwed together. The quality of accommodations gradually improved. Showers and scrub racks were included in all barracks. By early 1945, the entire area around Apra Harbor and Orote Peninsula was covered with symmetrical rows of Quonset huts and larger prefabricated administrative buildings, warehouses, and hangars. Visiting officers and civilians were quartered
in double-decked BOQs (bachelor officer quarters) that were comfortably furnished and attended by navy orderlies.

Within six months, the detritus of battle had been shunted to the sides of roads and the edges of the jungle, and Guam began to take on the look of an established base. A huge tank farm and pipeline system accommodated half a million barrels of fuel oil, and another 328,000 barrels of aviation gasoline.
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Hundreds of big steel arch-rib warehouses were crammed to the rafters with munitions and equipment. Fresh provisions were stored in 68,000 cubic feet of refrigerated storage. Large passenger aircraft of the Naval Air Transport Service (NATS) arrived and departed by the hour, giving the airfield at Orote the look of a major commercial airport in the United States. Prior to Operation
FORAGER
, some had predicted that Apra Harbor could not handle more than ten or twenty large vessels, but after extensive improvements and the extension of a long jetty, it was found to accommodate as many as 231 commissioned ships.
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A sophisticated water system provided twelve million gallons per day of fresh, potable water from sixty-seven springs and reservoirs. Five hospitals supplied beds for 9,000 patients. A Quonset hut housed an advanced infectious-disease research laboratory, staffed by leading doctors in the field. Blood and fecal samples were flown into Guam from other Pacific islands. The doctors reproduced the diseases in white mice, identified the viruses, and cultivated inoculations.

Ernie Pyle, a combat journalist who had made his name in the European theater, traveled to Guam in the spring of 1945. The island's old coastal towns remained in ruins, and the heaps of charred rubble reminded him of Western Europe. Just around a bend in the road, however, one found a sprawling landscape of blinding white concrete and long rows of Quonset huts, a scene that would not have looked out of place on Oahu. Pyle marveled at the quantity of provisions, supplies, and munitions stored in the warehouses of this remote Pacific outpost. “You could take your pick of K rations or lumber or bombs,” he wrote, “and you'd find enough there to feed a city, build one, or blow it up.”
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Nimitz and a small portion of his staff moved to Guam in January 1945. His new advanced headquarters and residence were built on CINCPAC Hill, a bluff overlooking the ruins of Agana. Arthur Lamar, the flag lieutenant, described the new CINCPAC residence as a “beautiful white clapboard cottage with four bedrooms and four baths opening onto a square court with grass and flowers in the middle. We had a large living room-dining
room and a long screened porch right on the edge of a cliff overlooking the harbor.”
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As in Pearl Harbor, a horseshoe court and shooting range were built in the yard. A nucleus of the CINCPAC planning and operations staff accompanied the chief to Guam, but the bulk of the organization remained behind, in Pearl Harbor. Nimitz, who always preferred a small staff and had resisted the inexorable growth of his organization, was pleased with the new setting. He adopted the “no ties” policy that had prevailed at SOPAC headquarters in Noumea but never at Pearl Harbor. Khaki uniform shorts, never approved in Oahu, were deemed suitable in Guam; Nimitz often wore them himself, to the surprise and amusement of others.

Sprawling encampments eventually accommodated more than 165,000 troops, including several marine and army divisions. Before V-J Day, the total number of American personnel on Guam surpassed 200,000. For lack of transportation, most troops never left their own camps. They had no reason to do so—each camp was equipped with many of the comforts, conveniences, and entertainments of home. Civilian visitors from the United States were surprised to learn that more than 200 movies were screened on an average night. Nearly all were shown outside, often on the side of a hill where the terrain formed a natural amphitheater, and the men sat on crates, logs, or old fuel drums. Movie reels were traded from one camp to another, but inevitably men were obliged to watch the same films twenty or thirty times, and could recite the dialogue as it left the actors' lips. Baseball diamonds, football fields, and basketball courts sprouted up in recently cleared minefields, and an athletics office organized large and sophisticated sporting leagues. There were thirty-five boxing arenas, and one well-promoted fight attracted 18,000 spectators.

Thousands of radios were distributed to the camps. A “Pacific American Expeditionary Forces Station” provided news and entertainment, but many listeners still preferred the popular jazz and buffoonish propaganda of Radio Tokyo. There was a brisk trade in Japanese souvenirs, and prices of certain items (especially enemy battle flags and samurai swords) eventually rose to extravagant heights. Traveling USO camp-shows were performed on outdoor stages ringed with benches. The hardworking entertainers often put on four or five identical shows per day, moving from one camp to another on buses. The navy shipped forty pianos into Guam. Troops put on lavish in-house productions, which often poked fun at their own commanding officers. Several dozen stores or PXs offered cigarettes, candy bars, magazines, soda
foundations, ice cream, toiletries, and native souvenirs. The shelves were swept clean each day, often before noon, and in some of the larger camps it was deemed necessary to establish two duplicate stores in one location so that one could be restocked while the other was open for business. Beer was rationed, two cans per man, in large recreation huts and beer gardens. Cash circulated, from paymasters to men to stores and back to paymasters. On an average day, $30,000 was sent back to the United States.
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In the densely vegetated hills overlooking these trappings of an ultramodern, omnipotent, and prosperous military civilization, Japanese stragglers watched, starved, and considered their alternatives. Now and again an American was ambushed or felled by sniper fire, but most surviving Japanese seemed preoccupied with food and survival. Recognizing that malnutrition and disease would gradually reduce the threat posed by enemy holdouts, the island commanders took a patient approach to rounding them up. Loudspeaker trucks lumbered over the dirt tracks in the northern hill country, broadcasting their rhythmic appeals for honorable surrender. Leaflets were dropped from airplanes. Japanese POWs were sent back into the jungle to persuade their comrades to give themselves up.

Driven to desperation by hunger, many Japanese drew in close to the American encampments and looked for opportunities to steal food. Sentries often killed or captured these emaciated intruders around the edges of ration dumps, warehouses, or mess halls. In one often-related incident, a Japanese soldier was found sitting among a company of marines watching an outdoor movie. When discovered, he grinned broadly and raised his hands. Another surrendered to a marine sitting on a privy, later explaining that those circumstances seemed to offer the best odds of not getting shot. When a Japanese straggler was spotted one night on CINCPAC Hill, Nimitz's marine guards chased the man back into the jungle and Nimitz, dressed in pajamas, emerged from the house with a pistol in hand.

Even long after the end of the war, hundreds of Japanese remained stubbornly at large in the jungles of Guam. Small groups lived in caves and survived by hunting lizards, toads, and rats, trapping fish, and stealing food from local farms and villages. Chamorros, embittered by the Japanese occupation of 1941–44, tended to attack them on sight. The Japanese government sent emissaries, and a steady trickle of holdouts came out of the jungle each year throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The last Japanese straggler on Guam was Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi,
a native of Aichi Prefecture, who lived in a remote section of the Talofofo river valley until 1972. This latter-day Robinson Crusoe survived in the jungle for almost twenty-eight years by eating fruit, nuts, snails, rats, pigeons, shrimp, eels, and native plants. His story remains an extraordinary example of what can be achieved with advanced wilderness survival skills. Yokoi built traps of wild reeds and wove clothing of pago fibers. He avoided disease by bathing frequently and boiling water before drinking it. He dug an underground shelter and installed bamboo walls and floors. Until 1964, he had remained in occasional contact with other Japanese holdouts, but for the last eight years of his ordeal he was alone. When captured by two Chamorro natives in January 1972, Yokoi accurately identified the month and year. Doctors judged the fifty-six-year-old man to be in excellent health and in full possession of his mental faculties.

His return to Japan caused a national sensation. Yokoi said that he had known the war was over since 1952, but had dreaded the disgrace of surrender. “I am ashamed that I have returned alive,” he told reporters. In a visit to the grounds of the Imperial Palace, he addressed himself to the emperor and empress: “Your Majesties, I have returned home. I deeply regret that I could not serve you well. The world has certainly changed, but my determination to serve you will never change.”
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Such sentiments could not fail to ignite the Japanese imagination. Many of his countrymen hailed Yokoi as an authentic samurai, a paragon of
bushido
and
chukin
(“zealous devotion”). Others found his story as tragic as it was poignant. Only a fanatic chooses to live alone in a jungle for twenty years after he knows his war is lost. And was it not precisely that sort of fanaticism that had dragged Japan down to a calamitous defeat in 1945?