-CH2C-

Dangers at Sea

I could not have believed it possible for the wind to blow as it did. Stevenson borrowed a foul weather jacket and came to stand with me in the turret. We were grateful we were not back in the furnace room for now the ship was pitching and listing so violently there was no mere shovel that could have kept us from falling into the open flames.  On deck it was less frightening. At first, we thought it was fun. “Whoa, holy hell, look at that wave, over there,” we’d cry and found it all amusing. But when the wind increased, and tore at our bodies, we now looked at each other in dismay. Was this really happening? Soon we stopped laughing. “I had better get back inside,” Stevenson said and I was alone.  I was going to call him chicken but I knew in my heart I wanted to be with him.

The wind grew even more frightening. There’s no describing it. How can one describe a nightmare? It tore at my clothes, threatening to rip the buttons from my jacket.

I felt the flesh on my face distort with each blast of wind and I had to turn away to breathe.  It was a monstrous thing, and the most monstrous thing about it was that it increased and continued to increase.

It was incredible! The sea, which had risen at first, was beaten down by that wind. It seemed as if the whole ocean might be sucked up into another sphere, another world. There could be no force now that could control this hellish thing we call a typhoon other than, perhaps, the very sea itself. The storm reached a point where the driving wind actually flattened the sea, but it did not reduce the swell.  Often when  I tried to find the LST to our starboard  it had completely vanished from view, lost in the trough between two mighty waves, and then it would reappear, shedding  water on every quarter as is it rose. How high were the waves? The masts on the LST were at least 40 feet above water.  God forbid, when I looked again I remembered that LST. It was carrying 3rd Phib Corps Motor Pool, and Sammy was aboard. Poor Sammy. I knew him from Okinawa. Samuel Carver Washington. He was a driver and a mechanic with Motor Pool, a black man from Alabama. Blacks were not part of the fighting corps, but they did serve as drivers in motor pools. I saw Sammy at the docks when we were hipping out, and he said he was going to sleep on his 4X4 on deck. No way was he going below deck. The very thought of the ocean made him seasick. I wondered where he was now. I wondered if maybe even his 4X4 had washed overboard.

As time passed, it became so dark it could have been another day and I wouldn’t have known the difference.  I had to get away for a spell and see what was happening below deck.  I really wanted to be with my buddies.  I told the deck officer I had to make a head call.

I descended the five sets of ladders and worked my way to the bow where my bunk was located. Here the ship tossed and heaved at its worst. The bow dropped so violently, it momentarily took one’s breath away. There was vomit everywhere, down the sides of the bunks, on the bulkheads, over the floors. It was dreadful! It made walking slippery, almost impossible. Men lost their balance as they dashed for the head, and they came down the isle head first, feet first, sidewise, rolling over and over, twisting and squirming. Now and again a man caught a grip on a bunk; but the weight of the bodies behind tore his grip loose. It was a melee, a curse, but as terrible as it was, there was still bantering and joking among the downtrodden men, even some laughter when someone went tumbling by.

I hadn’t been to the galley but we heard that it suffered the worst damage of all. A heavy cooking range broke away from its fastening and crashed from one side of the galley to the other taking out all the tables. It had to be lassoed like a wild steer before it could be stopped. They said Stretch should have been the one to do it, but at the time he couldn’t get out of his bunk.

I knew at once, no matter how terrifying the sea might be, I would be much better off topside. I went back to my turret. What happened next I shall never forget. The turret where I stood was a good 50 feet above water, but when the first sea-there were three that I recall-broke over the entire deck, in one mighty flush it flooded the turret. I was swept from my feet but managed to grab on to the railing. The second sea sent the LST to our port-Sammy’s  LST was to our starboard-so far over in a roll that her whole underside became exposed. I was certain she would continue to roll and not right herself but she miraculously rose again. The third and worst sea was yet to come.

The situation continued to worsen. Had we not been in the path of the storm, conditions may have been better. “Who makes the decision for the Navy?” Stevenson asked when he came back on deck between lulls. He answered the question himself:  “Someone back in the Pentagon says ‘steam ahead at all costs,’ and that’s what they do, at all costs. Would a day or two or three make any difference? Would those guys called communists do any more than they have done already?” He continued to rant about miscalculations and military ineptness, about the thousands of Marines who lost their lives at lwo because no one took time to consider the tides. He ranted but I lost his words in the roar of the sea, or maybe I just stopped listening. I was shaking from something more than the cold.

Stevenson had joined me during a lull, but in the absence of the wind and pressure, the sea rose. It jumped! It leaped! It soared straight up! It sprang up from every point of the compass. We had passed through the eye-when the wind temporarily stops-but leaving the eye of a storm is far worse than entering. We were about to meet the full onslaught of wind and wave.

Just at that moment the USS Napa flung down to starboard.

The third sea hit us. It didn’t merely hit us, it struck, it slammed, and it bombarded, all at once, in one powerful, mighty blow. It came so violently, so shocking, that it felt like the earth might have fallen from its axis. There was no system to the waves now, no stability. They were hollow, maniacal seas. They were higher than forty feet now, or fifty, or a hundred. What did it matter? They were not seas at all but mountains of rumbling water.

-CH2C-

-CH2B-

Ship Duties

The next morning pandemonium broke out on deck during morning chow. The cook went into a terrible rage and every navy officer from CO to deck officer assembled at the entrance to the mess hall. The navy was stunned. Their monkey was gone. He went over the side! That morning, the story goes, he had swooped down as he always did, grabbed a Marine’s hat and then leaped out on the boom, only to miss his grip and fall into the sea. At close inspection they found the boom had been greased. The CO called for an investigation. The culprit would found, and the book would be thrown at him. But, of course, he never was. No one on deck had seen Scotty drop his skivvy shirt overboard.  It was covered with lard.

On October 1st, USS Napa stopped at Saipan, and on October 7th we watched the southern end of Japan come into view. We lined the deck, thankful the war had ended, knowing at it wasn’t this barren, inhospitable coast that would take our lives. “A hell of a place to die,” Marsden said.

“The bomb saved us, didn’t it, Sarg?” Chandler asked.

“Yes, maybe a million of us,” Marsden replied, reflecting or a minute or two on those words, and then continued.  “And maybe twenty million Japanese.”

“It was worth it then, wasn’t it? We’d be dead now, and all those Japs too.” Chandler commented.

Was it worth it?” Marsden repeated, hesitating over his words. We waited for we knew he would answer his own question.  Finally, he replied:  “Yes, it was worth it, for us, but I’ll tell you, the world may not think so in years to come.”

Aboard ship work parties were our daily routine. Every square inch of deck space, above and below, had to be swabbed own twice a day. Aside from the need for swab jockeys there was mess duty. Given the choice, a Marine would rather swab than stand with arms up to his elbows deep in hot soapy water.

It was a miserable assignment, but there was one even worse, and that was trashman in the furnace room. All trash aboard navy ships had to be burned. Nothing was ever to be thrown overboard. The concern wasn’t the environment. The navy didn’t want to leave tracks. So someone had to shovel trash into the furnaces. Each morning after chow Pappy Preston, the company gunny sergeant, appeared in each quarters, and with duty roster in hand he called out names and handed out assignments for the day. He had a tough time pronouncing names and often had to repeat himself several times to be understood. Since there were several Marines aboard with the same name as mine, or names sounding close to it, he would merely call out STEVE. I discovered, quite by accident, that by hesitating and not answering immediately, another Marine would answer up for me. Even my friend Stevenson never caught on and took work assignments that should have been mine.

This went on for about a week, until one morning instead of sneaking into my hideout I made the mistake of climbing back into my bunk and there I fell asleep. Before I knew what happened I found myself tumbling from the top bunk to the hard steel floor below. When I came to my senses I was looking up at an irate gunny sergeant straddling me with a heavy boot on each side.  He was so angered that even Stevenson, who Pappy said was dumb enough to stand in for me, was assigned to the furnace room with me.

The furnace room where we burned trash was midship and the only good thing I can say about it is that it was but one floor below deck. The heat was so intense, the air so stifling, that every fifteen minutes or so, while stripped to the waist, we had to charge topside gasping to get fresh air. The door to the furnace had been removed and so vast was the opening that a boxcar could have easily fit through without touching the sides, or so it seemed.  We were given wide, flat shovels to use, and we learned quickly they had a purpose other than shoveling trash. When the ship rolled sharply to starboard, we used the shovels as props to keep us from lunging into the open furnace. The fire was as vicious as the flames of Hades. It consumed piles of trash as fast as we could shovel it in. Not once did we manage to get ahead so we could rest, for as soon as we had shoveled clean the deck space in front of the furnace, another batch of trash would come tumbling down a chute completely inundating us. It never ended.

Our troubles aboard USS Napa, and for all ships in the China Sea, were just about to begin, however. During a break from the furnace room, I noticed the sky had turned an ominous black, and very strange was the texture of the sea. It was flat and an oily calm. Something was about to happen, and one didn’t have to be an old sea dog to know that. The next morning we learned a typhoon was approaching.

The news of the coming storm didn’t bother Gunny Prescott as much as did the news that Stevenson and I had been relieved from our duties as trashmen. Stevenson was summoned to company headquarters located in a tiny compartment next to the bridge. The Exec reassigned him to his old duties-Fox Company clerk. From yard bird trash burner to pencil jockey.

Not bad. My calling was of a different nature. Our convoy was sailing in seas that had been heavily mined by the Japanese, and Navy gunners were put on alert and called upon to man 20mm guns to look for floating mines. Also those Marines who had scored Expert Rifleman were called upon with their M1s to be on the lookout for mines.  Having fired 307 at Parris Island, one point over the mark, my name was called. Hecklinger also got the assignment, and for an Oklahoma cowboy it was a natural, but he wasn’t too pleased standing deck with a storm coming up.  “This ain’t like hanging on a bronco,” he said. “Why did I admit I could shoot a gun better than anyone? Hell, lettin’ the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier than puttin’ it back.” For me it was better than the furnace room.

During daylight hours I was assigned to stand guard duty with my Ml in a gun turret that extended far out over the superstructure to the right of the bridge. I had a clear, unobstructed view of the bridge and all the activity that was going on inside. I didn’t know it but I was about to have the ride of my life.

The first words from the bridge that caught my attention were that the barometer was falling. Terrifying words to seamen. I remembered those words from reading Jack London. In one of my favorite stories of his, he wrote about the barometer falling when a hurricane was coming. Odd that I should remember this now. The average for a barometer reading was 29.90, and now the deck officer was saying the barometer was down to 29.62. The only difference between Jack London’s world and ours was that we were in the China Sea, and they call the storms here typhoons. In Jack London’s Tales of the South Seas they were hurricanes. Whatever name we gave them, there was no doubt the USS Napa and the ships of the convoy were directly in its path. Orders went out for Marines to remain below deck and for the crew to close hatches and secure everything on deck.

I felt ridiculous, standing in the turret, holding on to a tiny rifle, and looking out at a raging sea. This was no time to be on the lookout for mines bobbing up in a tossing sea, but I guess it was better than being cramped up below deck in our quarters, or even worse, in the furnace room.

-CH2B-

-CH2A-

Slow Boat to China

The 29th Marines had three days to get ready to sail for China. Finally, on September 30, 1945, we made our way in a convoy of heavy trucks to the docks at Agana. Fox Company was assigned to USS Napa, AP 157. There were no bands playing to send us off, no one making speeches, no one waving flags. Instead we had MP’s in helmet liners wearing white armbands and Sam Rayban sunglasses screaming out orders. They carried carbines slung upside  down over their shoulders, directing traffic and pointing out the directions where the trucks had to line up. We disembarked and formed long lines, and with full packs and seabags to tow, we slowly filed up the gangplanks to our new quarters that would be home for the next 21 days.

We reached the quarterdeck, set down our seabags, turned aft and saluted the ship’s ensign. Lt. Clark Brandmire stood at the railing with the battalion roster. “Fox Company this way, follow me,” he called. He lead the way through a double set of black curtains to a narrow ladder that led down into the depths of the ship. The light was faint, a reddish glow, and almost immediately the air grew heavy. We came to one deck, and then another, and still another. We went down five decks to the very bowels of the USS Napa. We could not have gone deeper. “Find your own bunks,” Lt. Brandmire said and left us to our own misery.

The steel-framed, canvas bunks were stacked eight high with hardly enough room to tum over once you climbed in.

Everyone struggled to find bunks near the entrance, close to the head, but I edged my way to the rear as far as I could get, and there I found a top bunk. It was a good choice. Directly overhead was a red light encased behind tiny bars, obviously to keep one from unscrewing the light bulb. The light was dim and cast an eerie glow, but with a little straining I could edge closer and then there was enough light to read.

We were allowed on deck until taps at eight, but first we had to pass through several sets of heavy black curtains to reach the open deck. There was concern that Japanese submarines hadn’t got the word that the war was over. The smoking lamp was out and in the black of night there was little to see. Ships in the convoy appeared in silhouettes of black, like paper cutouts. You couldn’t help wondering how the fleet managed to keep formation as it did in the darkness.

Daylight aboard brought much relief. We were required to wear our lifejackets  at all times, which no one liked, but Stevenson and I found an area under a lifeboat where we could escape from the crowd and no one could see us.  It took some scrambling on our bellies but the effort was worth it. Here we reclined, using our life jackets as pillows, and listened to the mesmerizing sound of the sea as the USS Napa rose and fell as she met each wave head on. We spent endless hours staring out at the sea with its unattainable horizon, and when we tired of dreaming we read or played cards. Sometimes we invited one or two others to our refuge. Other times we just talked, rambling on about home, wondering out loud about China. The others listened intently as I told them about the US Marines in China during the Boxer Rebellion. I told them horror stories about eunuchs from The Dowager Empress, stories that I read in my bunk only a couple hours before.

“You mean they cut off their balls just so they could serve the empresses?” they asked, and then they wanted to know if China still had eunuchs. I had to slow them down when they got too far ahead of me, and then that night I would read up on my history book to prepare myself.

I found the text from Spoken Chinese the most fun. I didn’t tell anyone about my hidden books. At night in my bunk under the glow of the red light I memorized a Chinese phrase or two. Of course, I had no idea about my pronunciation but that really didn’t matter. And so I studied “Are you Chinese?” – a stupid question to ask. “Do you speak English?” – almost as bad. “Where is a hotel? A restaurant? A WC.” I surmised WC had to be another name for “head,” or Marine talk for toilet. Then, the next day under the lifeboat, I would spring my Chinese on my listeners.  They had no idea what I was saying, and often I didn’t either, but it was fun playing the fool. Naturally they would ask where I learned my Chinese, and jokingly I would reply that I came from a missionary family.

“You’re full of crap,” Terry said.

Stevenson always backed me up. “He’s right,” he answered.

“I know.”

“How do you know?” “I just know.”

Our secluded area provided another service that made life a bit easier. Washing clothes aboard a troop ship was a problem. No washing machines. No laundry service. Marines crammed into the heads, under the showers, and attempted to scrub away the dirt and smell from their dungarees with salt water. Others had found an easier way, by tying their clothes to long lines and dragging them aft of the ship. The pounding sea usually washed them clean, but before long everyone was crowding the aft deck vying for space to tie their lines. Often times it became a real mess when lines tangled and fights would ensue. Under our lifeboat we didn’t have that problem. We dangled lines over the side, with our clothes securely fastened to one end.  At the water’s edge below us, the ship cast a wake that kept our laundry a yard or two away from the side of the ship. It worked as long as they didn’t pump the bilge.

When we weren’t reclining in our hideaway, we were waiting in the chow line. The lines were frightfully long and incredibly slow moving. Those who were readers could get an education just while waiting. We had but two meals a day. There was no seating arrangement in the mess hall. We ate standing up with our trays resting on narrow counters that ran the length of the mess hall. There were no seconds, and with the lines as long as they were, there was no possibility of sneaking in line a second time. There just wasn’t time.

The chow line formed above deck and led down the ladder to the first level. The chief cook, a fat sailor with four hitches behind him, had a pet monkey that he picked up in Madagascar. The monkey was the ship’s mascot. The Marines hated him. The sailors called him Jarhead, which didn’t sit well with us. He was a dreadful, vicious creature. He stood guard above the entrance to the mess hall, like King Kong, and every Marine that went through the chow line had to pass beneath this scowling, ugly beast. As we came out of the bright daylight it was hard to spot him at first, and this is when the howling, screeching animal would come swooping down from out of nowhere and snatch away a hat from the head of an unsuspecting Marine. If the Marine had on sunglasses, he would grab the glasses. Sailors roared with laughter as the monkey fled by leaping upon a boom over the sea and out of reach.

Scotty Johnson didn’t think it was so funny when Jarhead snatched away his Raybans. We were surprised how calm he remained, for those glasses were his proudest possession. He wore them constantly, even when it was dark. He actually made a good show, and we all envied him wishing we had Raybans. Scotty never said anything about the incident, but we knew down inside he intended do something about it. “What you gonna do,  jump through the rigging after him?” Terry asked and everyone laughed.

“You’ll see,” he said.  “You’ll see.”

Scotty had mess duty the next day and that night when he returned to his quarters he carried a tiny bundle wrapped in his skivvy shirt. Still he said nothing. A few minutes after taps sounded and lights went out, Scotty climbed down from his bunk on the pretense of going to the head. He slipped up the gangway and went on deck. Less than twenty minutes later he was back in his bunk.

-CH2A-

-CH1D-

Japan Surrendered, But We’re Not going Home

News of Japan’s surrender was finally confirmed. Stevenson was right. The A-bomb had ended the war. We were told that on August 28, 1945. Only a few days before, the USS Missouri had sailed triumphantly into Tokyo Bay and accepted the Japanese surrender. What we didn’t know until later was that not far away from Tokyo Bay, last-ditch kamikaze pilots began taxiing into position on the runway, determined to sink the American battleship. There were still many Japanese in high military positions who were mindset, at all costs, to win the war. After the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, War Minister General Korechiki Anami told the cabinet ministers that it was far too early to say the war was lost. The general wanted one last great battle on Japanese soil. “Would it not be wondrous,” he said, “for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?”

That chance never came, and a million American lives were saved. A last minute appeal by Prince Takamatsu, the emperor’s younger brother, grounded the fanatics who could have started the whole thing all over again.

So once again we waited, and finally word arrived. We were moving out. This time no one grumbled when work parties were assigned and we headed back to the docks to load ships. “We not only brought all this crap over here,” Melanowski ranted, “but now we have to take it all back.”

The docks looked like a staging area that was getting ready for battle. There they were, LSTs, LSMs and PAs, all lining the water front, and farther out in the bay the 7th Fleet had moved in with its destroyers and destroyer escorts. They looked menacing, even with their guns silent. We could picture them escorting our troop ships as we steamed into San Francisco under the Golden Gate. It was a proud feeling. The victory was ours! Halleluiah!

But victory, we were about to discover, was not ours. It was only wishful thinking on our part. We would not be returning to America to a cheering, waving populace. We would be long forgotten by the time we returned. Dick Whittington, our company runner, gave us the news that was about to change everything. It wasn’t what everyone wanted to hear. We knew it was going to be something drastic the way he arrived at the docks in the colonel’s Jeep, skidding sideways sending coral flying everywhere. He had hardly stopped when he stood up in the Jeep. “We’re not going home!” he shouted, waving his helmet liner over his head. He didn’t wait for questions. Everyone stopped what they were doing and stood silent as statues. Finally, he belted it out. “The 29th is not going home,” he shouted. “You know where we’re going? We’re going to China.” He hesitated and repeated it again, as loud as he could, “We’re going to China!”

We were not going home! Whittington took the full blast of everyone’s fury. He stood fast. It seems, he told us, that the Commandant of the Marine Corps, the Secretary of the Navy, the Secretary of Defense, and President Harry Truman himself all had a different idea about where we were going. And, it wasn’t home!

This wasn’t at all what the men wanted to hear. Many of the Marines in the 29th had been with the outfit since Guadalcanal.  They had been fighting for years. Now the war was over, and they were told they weren’t going home. Instead, they were going to China.

It wasn’t a sudden headquarters decision. All the while we were sweltering in the sun on the docks, breaking our backs, the brass knew it. They knew it and that’s what was so disturbing. We had been lied to. We were heading to China to repatriate the Japanese forces. That was the reason Col. Roston gave us, but there were other factors at hand which they didn’t tell us.  These we would find out for ourselves later. All we knew now was that we were going to a foreign land we hardly knew existed, nor did we know exactly why we were going. We made no decisions, and controlled no destinies, not even on own. We knew of no secret orders. We were told to pack our gear, and to load the ships. We had to get ready to sail immediately. That was all we knew. We would be sailing to China in a few days.

Going to China! What was that song everyone was singing-“A Slow Boat to China, or Maybe Siam?” A slow boat to China. The words kept turning over and over in my mind-A slow boat to China. Not back to the farm, not to open an electric shop with my father, but to China. I was thrilled, Stevenson was thrilled, Chandler was thrilled, Harry “Smitty” Marshall was thrilled, Terry was thrilled, and so were many others, but we couldn’t say it aloud. Marsden would have belted us. We had to grumble like everyone else. But inside we were thrilled. We were going to China!

In three days the ships were loaded and Tent City was dismantled. We were told we were going to a place called Cheefoo on the north coast of the Shantung Peninsula in northern China. None of us had ever heard of the name Cheefoo, let alone where  it was. On the afternoon of the last day I broke away from my work party without anyone noticing and headed for the base library.

The place was in complete disarray. The center isles were tacked with empty wooden crates and a half dozen grumbling librarians were preparing to pack the books. “Take what the hell what you want,” a sergeant growled, “and then get the hell out of here.”

I went to the history section and picked up The Dowager Empress. There were photographs of the Empress of China taken in 1911. She looked regal, but also very mean. Would the women of China all look like her? Under one photograph it mentioned “eunuchs.” What the hell were eunuchs? I tucked the book, as well as another one about the Boxer Rebellion under my arm. On the way out I passed the REFERENCE SECTION. There they were, lined up on shelves: dictionaries, thesauruses, books on grammar, a book called Teaching Yourself to Type and  another on Learning Shorthand and Book Keeping the Easy Way. I always wanted to learn to type, secretly that is, but the book was large format and too big to carry. I then noticed the language books-How to Speak French. Spanish. Italian. And then my eyes fell upon Spoken Chinese. I took it down from the shelf and didn’t even bother opening the cover. I tucked it snugly with the other two books under my arm, and without asking further questions left the library and headed back to the docks. That night before lights went out and taps were sounded-Tokyo Rose had gone off the air-I began teaching myself Chinese.

We were going to China.

-CH1D-

-CH1C-

At Home in Guam

Tent City was far better than our accommodations on Okinawa. No one complained. It was in a way an actual city laid out in quadrants with rows of tents in neat orderly lines. Each tent quartered a squad consisting of eight men. Our machine gun platoon was assigned to one tent. Marsden was our squad leader and Johnson his assistant. Stevenson was gunner and Melanowski assistant gunner. The rest of us, Jack Chandler, Terry Howard, Harry Marshall, Walter Hecklinger and me, were ammo carriers. And there was Karl Kyley. He didn’t really count. He was a nonentity. He never had anything to say about anything. He never complained, nor talked and you didn’t even know he was there. He could be one of two people in the tent and you wouldn’t take notice of him. Maybe that’s because he was always sleeping. Even when he was awake he was sleeping. He could sleep 23 hours out of the day, using the other hour only for meals. And sometimes even the meals didn’t matter.

The tents had wooden decks and the side flaps were kept rolled up during the day. At night and when it rained, they were lowered.  The temperature inside during the day was unbearable,   but there was no other place to go to escape the brutal tropical heat. The only shade was a tent-like structure over the Lister bags which did little to keep the drinking water cool. They joked that the cook made coffee directly from the Lister bags without needing to boil the water.

The mess hall was a huge open tent which we entered in a single long line that wrapped halfway around the tent. We had our own mess kits and canteen cups and these we had to wash ourselves in 44-gallon drums filled with boiling water. Nearby was the PX, stocked with Planter’s peanuts, canned sardines and Chesterfields. The “movie theater” was an open-air semicircle with logs from coconut trees serving as seats. Navy ships supplied the movies. Lana Turner and Betty Grable were certain to bring a full house under the stars with Marines crowded around the periphery sitting on their helmet liners.

There would always be a ten-or fifteen-minute news feature by Fox Movie Tone. We cheered when we saw our ships plow through heavy seas making the landing for the invasion of Okinawa. And we always hooted, hollered and booed when we saw General MacArthur appear on the screen. If it was the Commandant of the Marine Corps or a Marine general, that was okay, but there wasn’t a Marine who had a nice thing to say about a dogface army general. Some Marines went to the theater several hours early to get seats, and many even gave up evening chow not to miss out.

Until we began loading ships, we drilled in daytime and stood guard duty at night. At the docks beneath a torturing sun and under the glare of a crushed white coral roadbed, we formed long lines and passed 105-mm artillery shells from man to man, cursing the man before us to slow down. Naked to the waist, with helmet liners to ward off the sun, we made ready for the invasion of Japan. At night, as armed sentries, we walked the perimeter of Tent City. Occasionally Japanese soldiers sneaked  down from the hills on raiding parties and cut through the fences. Every now and then a raider was shot, and his body had to be carted off the next day before sun up to be buried. Everyone went to look at the corpse, and praised the sentry who did him in. But even the war-hardened Marines felt pity for the badly starved dead man, mosty skin and bones. They were young, young as we were. We could have been friends had the circumstances been different. One night a newly arrived replacement went on sentry duty and thought he saw two Japanese stealing a Lister bag. He called out to give the password but there was no response. He opened fire, emptying a clip of ammo. A squad of armed Marines came running, and found a dead white water buffalo. The Officer-of-the-Day made the sentry bury it using an entrenching tool to dig the hole. He was considered lucky; he didn’t have to pay a farmer for his loss.

We heard about a Japanese soldier who had stolen some Marine dungarees and had sneaked into the chow line over at the 22nd Marines. None of us could understand how a Japanese soldier masquerading as a Marine could possibly have pulled off such a stunt. But then, we always said, they weren’t too bright over in the 22nd Marines anyway.

Contrary to how most others felt, I did find Guam much to my liking. While the men lay in their bunks during their time off, sweltering in the heat, beating their gums or else talking about home, I made my escape. I knew where there was a hole in the barbed wire fence along the southern perimeter, and I would go there when I could get away. I told the guys I was going to the base library, but instead I headed out into the bush. Much of Guam was out-of-bounds for GI’s, and that included all the native villages, the jungles that surrounded the camps and most beaches. However, there were a few designated beach areas where we could swim. We always had to be careful. The Japanese not only sneaked down at night to steal food and supplies, their snipers took popshots at us every now and then. When this happened, our patrols went into the hills to flush them out, but with little success.

One beach that we all liked was eventually put out-of bounds. It was a great place, very secluded. We had to lower ourselves over a cliff by ropes, and at the bottom was a small cove with white sand and a small island a dozen yards off shore. The incoming tide swept through the channel and if we caught the crest of a wave just right we could body surf right up to the beach. Then one day a Japanese sniper took popshots and the Provost Marshall closed the beach.

Stevenson and I found another beach, and while he stood guard with his Ml, I dove into the surf to test the water.  It was a beautiful turquoise, and refreshingly cool. I was about to motion to Stevenson to join me when I felt a sting, and then another, and another. Jelly fish, some only as big as a thumb nail. I came out of the water flying, covered with stinging welts that were so painful I could not put my clothes back on, not even my skivvy drawers. Stevenson escorted me back to camp as I walked naked through the streets to the sickbay.

That didn’t stop us though. Soon after I recovered, Stevenson joined me on another excursion. We sneaked through the fence and went exploring. A couple miles from camp we were hiking along the road, ducking into ditches when Jeeps and other vehicles came by, when we noticed, high up on a ridge, a disabled Japanese two-man tank. We scrambled up the hillside to take a look. One of the tracks on the left side was blown off; other than that, the tank was functional. It was one of those so-called four-ton suicide tanks. They were quite easy to knock out; a .30 Cal. armor piercing bullet could go right through the side.  Except for a .37-mm gun they had no other firepower. We opened the hatch, squeezed inside, and played like we were Japanese soldiers. It was fun. The turrets worked and by turning a hand crank I could rotate the turret, raising and lowering the gun barrel that protruded from the front. I took aim at imaginary targets and pretended to fire. I then noticed a convoy of military vehicles coming down the road below us. I made out like I was sighting in on them, and lowered the gun barrel to take aim. Suddenly all the vehicles in the convoy came to a halt. When I peered out I could see the occupants jumping out of the vehicles and diving for cover alongside the road. Holy hell! We realized what we had done! They took us for Japanese!

We scrambled out of the tank and slid down the hill on the opposite side of the convoy. Fifteen minutes later, when we were on our way back to camp, we looked back and watched two P-51s dive at the hilltop and release their bombs. In two sorties the entire top of the hill, tank included, were blown away. Stevenson was more careful after that when I asked him to join me. But boredom always made him change his mind. Terry on the other hand was ready for anything, but I didn’t like his tagging along. He insisted on taking bis Ml, thought he might have secretly wanted to get himself a threatening to shoot at anything that moved. Sometimes I thought he might have secretly wanted to get himself a Japanese sniper.

For a farm boy, Guam was my dream. Here were Kipling’s Jungle Books and Edgar Rice Burrow’s Tarzan of the Apes. Their characters were alive and flourishing here. I ran among the trees, through verdant undergrowth, down sun-flecked paths, until I became breathless and could run no more. When I laid down with my back against the roots of a massive tree and looked up, I wanted to swing through the trees like the animals of the forest do, but I could hardly put my arms around any of the trees they were so mighty. And often my expectations were short lived. I tried to climb a coconut palm and found that even a simple task like that was impossible for a new comer.

I spent one afternoon in the forest; it was late when I sneaked under the fence and returned to camp. I feared I might be in trouble, but I wasn’t even missed. The men were preoccupied with a new subject. A new point system was announced. Stevenson and Whittington were hot at it debating the finer points. “I tell you this,” Whittington insisted, “the CINCPAC memorandum on the Point System states if you have 30 or more points you are eligible to go home.”

“Yeah, and a Purple Heart gets you five extra points,” Johnson interrupted.

“That doesn’t mean shit,” said Melanowski. “When are we going home anyway?”

“Overseas time is double Stateside time,” Marsden added. “That’s still not the frigin’ answer,” Melanowski said. Gradually the conversation took another turn. The war was over! What would we do now? We would certainly miss our buddies. Who could understand us better than those guys with whom we shared the same foxholes for the past year. Men began jotting down addresses, and making promises to “keep in touch.” Harsh words were no longer uttered and enemies became friends.

There were some who hated to see the war end. When the news came, they may have shouted the victory call, but deep inside there was the feeling that more than a war had ended. Back to the farm they would go, to the steel mills, to the coalmines, to the humdrum, the mundane. And I would go to work in an electric shop with my father. It wasn’t a very happy thought.  No more heroes. No more victories. No more buddies to confide in. No more war to fight. It happened so quickly, and now it was over.

-CH1C-

-CH1B-

What lead to Japan’s surrender?

The capture of Iwo Jima, less than eight square miles of real estate consisting of nothing more than volcanic ash, cost the Marine Corps nearly 26,000 casualties.  At Okinawa, kamikaze pilots willfully crashed 7,830 fighter planes into American warships anchored off shore. They sank 34 US ships and damaged another 368. The battle of Okinawa-the largest land-sea-air engagement in history-took the lives of 23,000 Americans, 91,000 Japanese and 150,000 Okinawan civilians.

Sitting on a hill above Naha Bay, we witnessed the kamikazes in action, watching helplessly as these suicide pilots bombed our ships in the bay. We saw them come in high, the sun picking up their reflection as they dove. Puffs of black smoke from our ackack guns popped up all around them. “There, there,” one of our guys would shout, and we would all look in that direction. “Here he comes!” we called, not knowing to be amused or bewildered. We were kids, all of us, and we should have been watching football games back home but instead we were watching men die.

Iwo Jima and Okinawa were over. Won at a heavy price. But what would be the cost to take more than 142,000 square miles of Japanese homeland?  Planners estimated we could lose as many as one million men-more than the total of the European and Pacific theaters combined.

But we Marines holed up in Tent City on Guam were not planners. We were kids, 17 and 18 year olds. The oldest Marine was Pappy Preston, and he was 29. Terry was 15 when he joined. He had just turned 17.  We figured we were winning the war but there were times when we had our doubts, when dark confusions of the mind took over. Every night on Guam when we climbed into our bunks, we listened to Tokyo Rose on the short wave. We listened to what she had to say about the war. We laughed when she spoke in her soft sexy patter about home. “Tuck in your mosquito nets, you handsome Marines,” she would say softly. “Lay back your head on your pillows, and picture your 4F cousins back home, out tonight with your girls, out with your wives, driving your car that you locked away in the garage, listening to the music of Harry James, drinking bourbon and gin you should be drinking, and where are you, Marines? Where are you? I know where you are. You’re not home where you should be!”

We laughed at her banter, wondered who she really was, and listened when she played “The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy from Company B.” We made remarks, and joked that we would look her up when we reached Tokyo. One by one the men grew quiet. The radio went silent and the night melted into dreamy thoughts as we drifted off in sleep wondering what our 4F cousins were doing that night.

We wondered about the war when we watched the B-29s returning from their bombing missions over Japan. They had made more than 35,000 sorties flown against targets on the enemy mainland. We watched those that survived the guns and Zero fighters, and those that didn’t run out of fuel, come limping back. We heard their droning, sputtering engines before we could see them. We stopped what we were doing and looked up to watch them come into view, all shot up. What miracle was it that kept them in the sky? Some appeared like skeletons, tail sections blown away, gaping holes in their wings and fuselage, only metal rib frames showing. Still, they flew, and we watched in disbelief. But even then, some so close, lost the race. They came in low, too low, and we held our breath. Some prayed, as pilots attempted their final, desperate approach to reach the airfield. They would disappear, and soon we saw balls of smoke rise from over the rim of palm trees.

But the question now: was the war really over? That morning at roll call it was confirmed. Not officially, but we knew there was some truth to the matter when all work parties for the day were canceled. That never happened before.

We went back to our tents and in the downpour of heat we waited. We waited for the official word from headquarters that seemed would never come. There was much speculation, all conjecture, of course. From squad leader to company runner we each had our opinions, and we were only too willing to share them with others, wanted or unwanted. And no one hesitated giving voice to his thoughts. Focus centered on that thing they called the “A-bomb.” The A-bomb! The US had dropped an A-bomb on Japan. There had been talk about the bomb days and weeks before, but no one in the 29th had the slightest idea what this super bomb might be. With the opinions came disagreements, but the one thing that everyone agreed upon, unequivocally, was that whatever kind of bomb it was, it had to be big, really big.

“It’s an A-bomb,” Stevenson emphasized.

“What’d hellava frigin’ kind of bomb is that?”  Scotty Johnson asked.

“It’s a big sonava bitch. It can lay flat a place a mile square,” Terry chimed in. He was repeating what he had heard earlier. “Shit, you believe that crap,” announced Melanowski with conviction. “No frigin’ bomb can do that. None, I tell yeah. We ain’t gotta frigin’ plane big enough that can carry a frigin’ bomb that frigin’ big.”

“You dumb Polack! Who said so?” snapped Terry. “Frig you, Terry.” Melanowski shouted.

“Yeah, even a dumb Polack knows it’d havda be bigger than 500 pounds to do that much damage,” added Chandler. “And that’s the biggest size our B-29s can carry.”

“It’s a special bomb, you dumb shit,” Terry continued, his comment aimed at Chandler this time. “This ain’t no ordinary bomb I tell you. It’s an A-bomb.” “What’s the A fur,” asked Scotty.

“What’s the A fur! A is for the first, the first of its kind, that’s what,” Chandler said.

“Hell,  if an A-bomb can blow a hole in the ground bigger than a square mile, think what a B-bomb will do when it comes out,” Cpl. Marsden said.

“Yeah, then the C-bomb’s gonna come.  I’d like to see that.”

“You’re all full of shit. I never heard of any kindah A-bomb before, and I’ve been reading the news all the time,” Melanowski concluded.

“You stupid shit, what news you been readin’?” Terry said. “You ain’t gonna find nothing about A-bombs in the stupid funny papers.  That’s about all the news you ever read.”

“What you talking about!” Chandler said. “He can’t read.” “Go stuff yourself, all of you,” Melanowski said and turned away.

Marshall and Hecklinger now got into the argument. Harry Marshall was from Indiana and argued with midwest logic, the “show me” kind of attitude.  He didn’t like the name Harry and wanted to be called Smitty. Walter Hecklinger was from Oklahoma and what he said he considered gospel. Six foot four with the demeanor of a rodeo rider, no one argued with him. We called him Stretch.

And so the debates continued, and all we could do was wait, the curse of the Marine Corps. I felt I had to get away. I needed time to think. If the war was over, did this mean we were all going home? Already the men began talking about being home for Christmas. I should have been excited, but I wasn’t. What was wrong? Like everyone else I clamored about wanting the war to end, and what I was going to do when I got home. Smitty planned to sleep for a month, getting up only to eat his mother’s home cooking. Terry was going to take his discharge and blow his separation pay on the longest binge of his life. Whittington pictured himself  in Saugerties in New York by Christmas. Melanowski would grab the first woman he saw and Stevenson was going back to school. Marsden didn’t talk about it, but we knew he had his wife on his mind.

I too had my future planned, or rather my father had it planned for me.  He was awaiting the day I would return. He wanted to open a small electrical repair shop, and I would help him run it. The only problem, electricity didn’t interest me. “There’s a great future in electronics,” he would write me but I never paid much attention.

The Marines of the 29th, for the most part, hated Guam. I guess I was one of the few exceptions. We learned we were going to Guam when we were still on Okinawa. When word came that Okinawa was secured, and we were being evacuated, three LST landing crafts immediately left for Guam with an advance work party. Rick Whittington, our company runner, was with them. Only then he wasn’t company runner. He was a machine gunner like all the rest of us and had served his 87 days under fire. He and the others arrived on Guam and had the honor of erecting tents for the other eleven late-arriving LSTs that brought the rest of the men of the 29th. We could hardly call it a triumphant welcome for returning heroes. There to greet us was Whittington, with the news that he had been appointed Fox Company runner. We didn’t congratulate him, but envied him, and gave him the title-Brown Noser.

No sooner were we assigned our tents than our thoughts turned to Japan, and Fox Company was soon back at the same old business, training for the coming invasion of Japan. While we went on hikes, with full gear and did close-order drill under the scorching sun, Whittington rubbed it in. Each day all he had to do was go to the Second Battalion Quonset hut and warm the bench for as long as the Battalion Exec was at his desk. When the Exec left, Whittington left. “While you guys run around in the boonies playing war, I sit on my ass and drink coffee,” he boasted. Whittington was ribbed by the men, and thrived  on it,  but he was  also  our private source of information gleaned from executive orders he had to deliver. He even outshone Stevenson now as the information man. He was invaluable to us.

-CH1B-

-CH1A-

The war is over

The date is August 15, 1945. The place, Tent City on Guam. It’s late, long after midnight.

The sound grew louder. The sound, at first, was faint, far-off, like the wind that rustles the trees on the farm back home in Pennsylvania, just before a storm. It seemed I was in one of those half-awake, half-asleep dreams, thinking of home, but when I heard Cpl. Marsden moving about in his bunk, I knew the sound was not from a dream. It was  real. The others heard it too, and they began to stir.

There was a sliver of moon in the night’s sky, enough to give some light to the inside of the tent. I could see Marsden sit up in his  bunk. I watched him push back his mosquito net, as if that would help him to hear better. Melanowski saw him too, and spoke up. “What is it, Sarge?” he asked in a voice barely above a whisper. He  had called Marsden “Sarge.” Everyone called Marsden Sarge. All squad leaders were sergeants, but headquarters never got around to promoting Marsden. He became squad leader when Sgt. Hamilton was killed on Okinawa.

“Shut up, Ski,” Marsden barked. Everyone in the tent was sitting up now, pushing back their mosquito nets.

“But what is it?” Melanowski asked again.

“Nothing,” Marsden said. “Be quiet.”

“It sounds like a fire,” Stevenson said, coming  into  the tent from outside.  He was excited. “We had one in Camp Lejune,” he continued. “It started at one end of Tent City and in minutes wiped out the whole battalion.” Stevenson was the company brain. He had a year of college and answered questions no one else could answer. He used impressive sounding names, and he knew how to spell big words. He was in college and then one day out of the blue, he enlisted in the Marines. He liked to have others think it was patriotism but it wasn’t. The war was winding up and he figured if he acted quickly, he’d have the GI Bill to pay for his schooling. What he never expected was that three months after he signed up, the war was anything but over, and he found himself dodging bullets and digging foxholes on Okinawa.

No sooner had Stevenson mentioned the word fire than every Marine in the 29th began yelling at the tops of their voices. “Fire, fire!” they shouted. Had someone deliberately pushed the panic button they could not have done better. It was now a scramble to see who could get out of their tents first, not only those Marines in our tent but from every tent in Tent City. The crushed coral pathways between the rows of tents suddenly filled with excited Marines, standing there in their bare feet, some completely naked, others in their skivvies. Private Terry stood naked clutching his Ml rifle.

But where was the fire? There was no blazing red sky in any direction, and no smell of smoke. The sky was clear with the moon poking over the tops of the palms that ringed the camp. The men stood baffled, confused. The sound kept growing louder, like the roar of the sea, and it crept closer and closer.

Like a roar! That’s exactly what it was, a roar, a roar of voices. Men in the distance were shouting. They were shouting at the tops of their voices, and the message they had to tell came like a wave rushing to shore. “The war! The war!” they shouted. “The war, the war.” Then we made out the words “It’s over!” The war was over! “The Japanese have surrendered,” they shouted.

The entire regiment now picked up the chorus, shouting until they became hoarse, jumping up and down in their bare feet on the coral pathways. “The war is over,” they all sang together. They became hysterical, uncontrollable. They rushed into their tents and returned toting their Ml rifles. It was against regulations to possess live ammunition but some men kept a few extra rounds tucked away for emergencies. They loaded their Mls, pointed them skyward and fired. Some Marines had tracers and they fired these too, and when they went off they left long streaks across the sky, like falling stars.  Soon the sky was all streaked. No one would have been surprised had the navy gunboats offshore fired their big guns. But then, maybe they hadn’t heard.

Finally, over PA speakers, the duty officer instructed everyone to keep calm, to put away their rifles and return to their tents. There would be an official announcement in the morning. We returned to our tents.

“It was that bomb that did it,” Melanowski announced when we were back inside. Stevenson agreed, it was the bomb that did it. We had heard about this wonder bomb before but didn’t know what to believe. We learned that on August 6th, a B-29 Super Fortress named Enola Gay had flown nearly 1,500 miles across the open Pacific and dropped a single bomb on a city in Japan. No one could remember the name of the city but they remembered the bomb’s dimensions: ten feet long, twenty-eight inches in diameter and weighing nine-thousand pounds. Then a couple of days later, there was talk about another B-29 dropping a second bomb on a Japanese city. No one could remember the name of that city either.

After we arrived back on Guam and began training, Stevenson was made Fox Company clerk, and he came back after work with all kinds of reports. Everyone was keen to hear about the bombing on Japan. The Allies, Stevenson reported, had been bombing Japanese mainland cities since June 15, 1944. They had dropped 170,000 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs on the enemy before the Enola Gay ever appeared in Japanese skies.

“I don’t care how many friggin’ bombs they dropped. I told you guys to shut up,” Marsden shouted for the last time. There were no more discussions about bombs, not that night. We all went to sleep.

When reveille sounded the next morning, it started all over again. Even Marsden became involved this time. From the moment we were out of our bunks, we began questioning the outcry that awoke us in the middle of the night. The war was over!  What the hell was all that about? Maybe it was only scuttlebutt. “Rumors, that’s all,” we mumbled. They expected us to believe that crap about Japan giving up! They taught us from the very start, from the first day in boot camp, that Japan would never surrender. “They’ll fight to the very last nip, down to the last woman and kid,” Col. Roston said only a few days before when we were headed in work parties down to the docks to load ships that would carry us and a million others on the invasion of Japan.

We knew the big push was coming. “Nine out of ten of you bastards will be dead in another month,” the colonel’s Exec officer reminded us, “so enjoy it while you can.” We hated that guy; he was a rear echelon major who had just joined the 29th; nevertheless, we listened, and we reasoned, never would the Japanese give up. The 29th had witnessed this on Okinawa. How many Japanese pulled the pins on their potato mashers and fell on them rather than give themselves up? How many thousands more, soldiers and civilians alike, leaped off the cliffs at the southern end of the island rather than surrender?

Official reports were kept from the troops, but Stevenson sneaked some through. The first invading force, called Operation Coronet was scheduled for November 1, 1945, less than three months away. It was to be followed by Operation Olympic. More than two million Japanese combat troops were waiting on the main islands. In reserve were four million civilian workers. Beyond that, the Japanese cabinet had approved drafting the remaining men between 15 and 60, and women from 17 to 45, to provide 28 million people armed with grenades and sharpened bamboo spears ready to die for the Emperor. Admiral Rikihei Takuma, chief of the Kamikaze Corps, had stockpiled fuel and armaments for 5,368 suicide aircraft, including biplane trainers, to use against the invasion fleet. The Mitsubishi plant and the Japan Steel works were on a seven-day, around-the-clock war-production schedule. In the harbor, Japanese sailors were readying hundreds of suicide boats to repel the approaching Allied invasion; torpedoes and high-explosive charges were piled high in seaside caves.

-CH1A-