The Last Full Measure (38 page)

William Manchester, a Marine during the war in the Pacific and later a very successful writer of popular histories, describes the intensity of this bond: “Those men on the line were my family … closer than any friends had been or ever would be.… Men, I now knew, do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another.”
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John Hogan, a US Seventh Division soldier, was offered a comparatively safe billet away from the rifle company in which he served. He wrote to his parents explaining why he was going to stick with his unit: “There is something about the spirit
of the men in this platoon that I have grown to love and I want to help guard it.” He describes their shared danger as a “sacrament.” Hogan was killed at the Gaja Ridge on Okinawa and was awarded a posthumous Silver Star.
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For Allied combat soldiers of all backgrounds personal survival was the ultimate motivation (and in it one sees a humanity utterly absent in the more fanatical elements of the German and Japanese forces for whom the idea of death seems to have had a narcotic attraction). A rifleman of the US Thirty-Second Infantry Division fighting the Japanese was quite clear about the priorities: “Put into the situation that we and thousands of others were, survival for one’s self was the first priority by far. The second priority was survival for the man next to you and the man next to him. So, right and wrong, love of country and pride in the unit … was a good bit behind.”
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The constancy of death in combat created this remarkable world with its compelling centripetal force. To be separated from the hub of confraternity could be a torment even as it offered comparative safety. Harry Arnold, of the Ninety-Ninth Division in Europe, described the sense of loss when he and his buddies got a pass to the rear:

It was as if the dead had paid the ultimate price to join an exclusive club—a club to which the living had an open invitation. The experience of death conferred membership and legitimacy on the survivors, as a Thirty-Sixth Infantry Division soldier remembers: “An individual who hasn’t experienced the trauma of witnessing sudden death, fatal wounds, extreme heat/cold or smelled gas gangrene is never initiated into that select group of warriors.”
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A Red Army officer wrote to his family in February 1944: “Many of my friends have died. The truth is that we fight together, and the death of each is our own. Sometimes there are moments of such strain that the living envy the dead. Death is not as terrible as we used to think.”
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HOW SOLDIERS DIED
was often a reflection of where they fought. Death could take on the countenance of a particularly ghoulish real estate agent, mournfully intoning, “location, location, location.” More than 109,000 US infantrymen would die in northwest Europe; 30,000 perished in Italy and almost 55,000 in the Pacific. For an American it was safer to be an infantryman in the Pacific theater, where he had a 2.5 percent chance of being killed (7.3 percent of being wounded), compared with the European theater, where GIs had a 3.5 percent chance of being killed (11.3 percent wounded).
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As a wounded soldier, though, the chances of survival were much greater in Europe than in the Pacific, where it was more difficult to evacuate men to adequate medical facilities. For Americans in all theaters, 1 in 29 wounded men died (20,810 of 599,724), which was a very significant improvement on World War I, where 1 in 12 wounded men died.
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The issues involved in, say, the conquest of the Pacific islands compared with the type of warfare seen on the Russian steppes, or in North Africa, or western Europe, were obviously vastly different. Geography dictated strategic and logistical possibility, which in turn would determine the circumstances in which soldiers were killed.

Weaponry reflected these strategic and tactical differences. Soldiers in the Pacific were much more likely to die by small-arms fire, and Japanese soldiers could expect to die by flamethrower far more frequently than any soldier fighting in other theaters. The flamethrower was a weapon particularly well suited to killing men in the spider holes, caves, and tunnels favored by the Japanese defenders. For soldiers in the open lands of western Europe, North Africa, and Russia, tanks played a major role that was unknown on any remotely comparable scale in the Pacific, where the topography—rugged and often covered in thick jungle—was unsuited to massed tank warfare.

Allied soldiers in the Pacific were less likely to be killed by artillery than were infantry in western Europe and North Africa because the Japanese were relatively deficient in that armament. Within certain tactical situations, Japanese artillery fire was not capable of terrible lethality (during amphibious assaults, however, preregistered artillery could take a fearful toll of assaulting troops) but in the tactical picture as a whole the Japanese were incapable of laying down the massed bombardments available to the Americans, as in the battle for Okinawa, when between March 24 and June 22, 1945, the Japanese were hit by 2.4 million artillery rounds delivered by a combination of ground and naval pieces.
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The greater risk of American infantrymen being killed or wounded in the European theater compared with their counterparts in the Pacific was largely due to the superiority of German artillery, which inflicted about 60 percent of all battlefield casualties.
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Artillery was overall the greatest killer of infantrymen in
World War II, but the chances of being killed if hit by a shell or grenade fragment in the European theater was 25 percent, compared with 16 percent in the Pacific.

This is explained in part by a combination of poor-quality munitions and the limitations placed on Japanese gunners by the need for concealment in order to limit exposure to the devastating counterbattery potential of American land, sea, and air forces. The usual pattern for Japanese artillerymen was to run guns up to the mouth of the cave in which they were concealed, fire a few rounds, and then pull back before they were found by GR-6 sound locators, spotter planes, or visual detection. Conservation of limited ammunition supplies was also an issue. Lack of communication between frontline infantry and the supporting gunners also reduced Japanese artillery lethality. With few radios, instructions were sent either across telephone wire, which was constantly being severed by American bombardment, or by runners, who, desperately exposed, were often cut down.

If geography facilitated the clash of massed forces in the combat in the Soviet Union, Europe, and North Africa, it dictated an altogether more fragmented, small-unit confrontation in the Pacific theater. Ironically, the battlefields of massed confrontation are usually described as “empty” because modern artillery, tanks, mortars, and machine guns killed at relatively long range. It is a type of warfare far distant from the personal confrontation of classic “heroic” combat. One would have thought the in-your-face, cut-and-thrust of jungle warfare conformed much more closely to some ancient heroic model of mano-a-mano fighting. But the opposite was the case. The fighting in the Pacific war reminds us that combat is a bloody gutter-slop: nasty, brutish, and short—an abattoir that is only later cleaned up, perfumed, and decorated with the laurel crown of history.

WORLD WAR II
brought three broad innovations in land combat: amphibious, tank, and airborne warfare. Amphibious and tank warfare were innovative not so much in concept as in scale; amphibious assault had ancient precedents, and tank warfare had been introduced with great drama in the First World War. Airborne warfare was in a slightly different category. The principle of parachuting was well established by 1914, and although generally unavailable to aircrew of the First World War, parachutes were used by the almost proverbial sitting ducks of the Western Front—observers aloft in tethered balloons—even though, as one historian so delicately and aptly put it, “parachutes fell some way short of perfection in design.”
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Of the three, an argument can be made that amphibious assault was the major strategic and tactical element of World War II—it kicked in the door. For the Allies—who had to respond to an enemy, whether Japanese or German, who had taken the initiative and controlled their interior lines of supply and communication—attacking their enemies first entailed reaching them: The shell had to be cracked before one could get at the meat. Seaborne assault offered the most effective method that could be supported with the logistical heft to carry the war to the enemy.

Airborne warfare also carried the war to the enemy, but it was practically impossible to sustain logistically. The German drop on Crete in May 1941, although ultimately successful, teetered so close to disaster that it put Hitler off the whole concept of airborne warfare, an aversion Stalin shared following the Soviet debacle at Velikii Bukrin, near Kiev, in September 1943, when two Soviet brigades landed almost literally on top of the Nineteenth Panzer Division, with predictably gruesome results for the jumpers.
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Allied para-assaults on D-Day and at Arnhem in 1944, no matter how valiant, also exhibited a terrible fragility.

For the soldiers involved in amphibious attack, the risks, paradoxically, harked back to a much older mode of fighting: siege
warfare: the terrible assault of the citadel. And although it was certainly innovative in its scale and in the specialized equipment developed for its execution, what might be called the ethos of amphibious assault was rooted in the frontal attack against heavily defended strongholds that had been a major characteristic of combat during the First World War. There was always something of the “forlorn hope” about it: terribly risky, exposed, naked. It took a certain desperate, grim élan and an acceptance of potentially high casualties in order to win the bridgehead.

Another parallel with the infantry assaults of the First World War was the role of preparatory bombardment and, as in that war, the often unrealistic predictions of its ability to suppress the opposition before the assault. The preliminary bombing of the D-Day beaches by the US Eighth and Ninth Army Air Forces was ineffectual, due partly to adverse weather conditions that limited visibility and partly to a nervousness about causing friendly casualties. As Harry Reynolds, an Eighth Army Air Force bombardier/navigator, recalls: “The area was covered with an overcast to about 13,000 feet. We did not want to drop the bombs because we were afraid of hitting our own troops who had advanced in from the beachhead.”
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German batteries at Omaha Beach in particular—which would prove to be the most deadly of all the landing points on D-Day—were left almost untouched by the bombers. Forced to bomb by instruments through the overcast, the 329 B-24s scattered their thirteen thousand bombs as far as 3 miles inland.
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For the attacking infantry the result was a disaster. Richard J. Ford of the Twenty-Ninth Infantry Division remembers: “The Air Force was to have bombed the beach creating craters for us to use. They missed the beach by three miles. Their explanation being they were afraid they might hit the landing craft, as the water was full of ships. However, this bomb preparation was to take place long before we got on the beach. As a result, that
beach was as smooth and flat as a road and looked about two miles deep. As a result the Germans were in a ‘shooting gallery’ and we were the ‘ducks.’ ”
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There were about 10,000 casualties in all sectors on D-Day, of which, at a conservative estimate, about 2,000 were incurred on Omaha. Although it is surprisingly difficult to pinpoint accurate figures, around 4,400 of the 10,000 were killed.
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