To the End of the War
Read To the End of the War Online
Authors: James Jones
Unpublished Stories by James Jones
Edited and with Introductions
by George Hendrick
To My Father
Nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it; he died
As one that had been studied in his death
To throw away the dearest thing he owed.
As ’t were a careless trifle.—Macbeth
INTRODUCTION: FROM
THEY SHALL INHERIT THE LAUGHTER
TO
TO THE END OF THE WAR
EVERY TIME I DROP AN EGG . . .
ARMY POLITICS AND ANTI-SEMITISM
YOU ARE AWOL UNEDITED MANUSCRIPT PAGES
FROM
THEY SHALL INHERIT THE LAUGHTER
TO
TO THE END OF THE WAR
J
AMES
J
ONES WROTE TO HIS
editor, Maxwell Perkins, about his first, unpublished novel,
They Shall Inherit the Laughter
: “
Laughter
was largely autobiographical and I had a readymade plot and characters who followed it; all that I had to do was heighten it and use my imagination.” He wrote the truth; he used his own life in a story set during a dramatic period when World War II still raged and he went over the hill, returning to his hometown, Robinson, Illinois. Almost every character in the novel was based on someone he knew, or knew about, in East-Central Illinois.
A soldier named James Jones went AWOL, probably November 1, 1943, and went back to Robinson, where he had been born in 1921. His grandfather George Jones had once lived on a nearby farm but became prosperous after oil was discovered on his property. He moved into Robinson, studied law, established a practice, and became sheriff of the county for four years. He was a leading citizen and moved his family into a three-story Southern-style mansion.
George Jones was a religious man, a Methodist, a teetotaler, domineering. He demanded that his four sons become professionals: two doctors and two lawyers. He sent his sons to Northwestern University, where one son took his own life. Ramon Jones, father of James Jones, was destined for medicine, but he convinced his father to allow him to go into dentistry, which demanded fewer years of study, in order to marry more quickly. He married Ada Blessing in 1908, and soon established his practice in Robinson. Dr. Jones was a handsome, outgoing man, but he began to drink heavily. Ada Jones was a vain, beautiful woman, obsessed with social status. Eventually she became religious and turned to Christian Science. James Jones, deeply attached to his father, came to despise his mother, who often quarreled with her husband.
George Jones died in 1929, and the family at first was partially immune from the economic depression, which began that year, for he left a significant estate. In 1932, with the collapse of the Samuel Insull public utilities empire, where George Jones had heavily invested, the largest part of the family fortune disappeared. Dr. Jones lost his inheritance and was losing his patients since they could no longer afford dental care.
After Dr. Jones was forced to give up his house, he moved his family into rented quarters. His wife was acutely unhappy about her decline in social standing, and Dr. Jones withdrew more and more into alcoholism. In this bitterly divided family, struggling through the long depression, Jones had an unhappy, rebellious adolescence. As soon as he completed high school and turned eighteen, in 1939, he joined the Army Air Corps but eventually transferred to the Infantry and was stationed in Hawaii. His service in the peacetime army, concluding with the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, became the subject matter of his second novel,
From Here to Eternity
.
Jones’s personal world was shaken while he was in Hawaii; his mother died and his father committed suicide. The most positive thing that happened in this period of his life was his discovery of the novels of Thomas Wolfe, who wrote about a family much like his own. From reading Wolfe, Jones wrote, he realized that “I had been a writer all my life without knowing it or having written.” He began to write poetry and prose sketches.
Jones had been assigned to Company F, Second Battalion, Twenty-Seventh Infantry Regiment, which was ordered to go to Guadalcanal. The troopship he was on arrived December 30, 1942. The battles on that island were fierce, and the troops suffered from dengue fever, malaria, and other tropical diseases, and continual fear.
In an undated manuscript, he wrote, “I might be dead in a month, which would mean that I would never learn to say and never get said those things which proved I had once existed somewhere.” Every soldier “accepted,” Jones wrote in
WWII
, “that his name is already written down in the rolls of the already dead.”
Jones often told the story of a day on Guadalcanal when he killed a Japanese soldier and found in the man’s billfold a picture of his wife and child. Jones then viewed war in a different way, recognizing he had obliterated a so-called enemy who was a fellow human being. He wanted to be finished with killing. Jones’s most dramatic retelling of the incident is in his novel
The Thin Red Line
.
Jones was saved from taking another man’s life. On January 12, 1943, he was hit in the head by a fragment from a mortar shell. There was blood everywhere, and his glasses were shattered. Had he not been in a shallow foxhole, he would have soon been in a deeper grave.
Jones was taken to a field hospital where he stayed a week before rejoining his company. The battle for Guadalcanal was basically over then; the Japanese troops were being evacuated. The U.S. troops there expected to be sent to New Georgia in the Solomon Islands for more combat. Jones felt his luck had run out. He wrote his brother that until a soldier was hit, he was confident it would happen to other guys but not to him. Once hit, he wrote, “You lose that confidence.”
He was spared a landing and battles on New Georgia by another piece of luck. He was having trouble with his ankle, which he had injured playing football at Schofield Barracks. After it became increasingly difficult for him to walk, he was sent home by hospital ship, first to New Zealand for a short time and then on to San Francisco. He was then transferred to Kennedy General Hospital near Memphis, Tennessee.
At Kennedy General Hospital, he received a course of therapy and then was sent to a convalescent barracks for a month, but the treatments had to be extended and went on month after month. In the months he was hospitalized, he came into contact with large numbers of men from two battle zones: Attu and Guadalcanal.
Attu is in the fog-shrouded Aleutians off the coast of Alaska. In an attempt to retake the island from the Japanese, American troops landed on May 11, 1943. From the first, the battle for Attu was a fiasco. The practice landings for the officers and men took place on warm California beaches, giving them no worthwhile knowledge about what they would face in the fog and on the tundra of Attu. In addition, through faulty intelligence, the army believed that 500 Japanese were stationed on the island. In fact, there were 2,300.
To make matters even worse, the map available to those planning and supervising the operation showed the topography only up to a thousand yards from the shoreline. In the uncharted interior of Attu, companies were lost and wandered for days in the eternal fog.
The absolute disaster came early. The troops landed wearing ordinary winter uniforms, not suitable for the fierce winds and rain of the island. They wore leather boots, which were not waterproofed. Men had cold, wet feet, rubbed raw. Gangrene followed. Whole wards were soon filled with Attu survivors who had lost their feet. The Japanese commander decided to stage a banzai attack, said to be the first of the war, on American forces, May 29, 1943. His men had suffered large-scale casualties in the past eighteen days. He had only a thousand men who could bear arms. His men who were ill or who could not walk were ordered to kill themselves. At three a.m., the Japanese began a silent attack, bayoneting U.S. troops in their sleeping bags. Then shooting began and grenades were exploded. According to one account, once the silence was broken the Japanese were screaming, “Japanese drink blood like wine.”
After the Japanese slaughtered the first American troops they came upon, they moved on and finally met resistance. The Japanese then began killing themselves, mostly by holding grenades to their bodies. Of 2,300 Japanese men on Attu, 29 were prisoners. The rest were dead. The U.S. troops also suffered heavy losses: 549 were killed, 1,148 wounded, 2,100 with gangrene, exposure, and shock. The Attu survivors in the hospital had many stories to tell Jones.
The survivors of the Guadalcanal battles had their tales, and Jones had his. His dreams were crowded with scenes he could not forget, scenes largely connected with ridges named the Galloping Horse. General Collins on January 8, 1943, gave the order to take those mountain ridges. Later, in
The Thin Red Line
, Jones wrote an unforgettable account of that battle. He also wrote a long poem called “The Hill They Call the Horse” sometime after that battle. Sleepless in a hospital—New Zealand? San Francisco? a hospital ship? the hospital near Memphis? We do not know—he relived scenes in the concluding section of the long poem:
And my fear crawls up and chokes me.
This is why I came:
This is the force of madness that took me by the hand
And would not let me cringe! Why me! Why me!
Dumbly with cloven tongue I stand in the bloody dawn
Atop, the Horse.
I would run: my legs laugh in my face.
For across the crest they come
In solitary line
As I last saw them:
Dried mud ground into their green fatigues, gritty to the touch;
Helmets, those who have them, rusty, caked with mud;
Sweat streaming down, faces twisted with the agony of fear,
and tension.
They pass by me with stumbling tread,
And each looks at me reproachfully and sadly:
They died: I lived. They resent my luck.
They cannot see that I am not the lucky one.
As they pass, I see them as I saw them last:
George Creel—
A little string of brains hanging down between his eyes;
Joe Dommicci—
His eyes big between his glasses and a gaping hole where once
had been his ear; . . .
Hannon—
Stumbling along, face gone below the eyes;
Big Kraus—
No marks, no blood, just dead with hard-set lips and
unbelieving eyes; . . .
The line goes on—for there are many.
Red Johansson—
Both legs gone and spouting fountains while he drags
himself across the ground.
The line goes on—for there are many more.
There is the boy (I never knew his name)
Who was lying wounded on a litter,
Glad he had been wounded,
And believing he was safe at last
When a sniper blew his brains out
And filled the litter with a pool of blood.
The line goes on—
I see it in the distance, climbing,
Groping blindly up that hill,
The hill they call The Horse.
And my unseen chains release me,
And I am away—through swirling wisps of madness and
of pain.
