The 40s: The Story of a Decade (15 page)

We finally left the deep shelter. My companion wanted me to see still another type of shelter. I begged off. I simply couldn’t stand one more. I was aware that the people in them had been standing them for over five years.

· · ·

“Perhaps,” an Englishwoman in the Civil Service said to me of the shelter residents, “you would have been less shocked by what you have seen if you were familiar with the peacetime homes of these people.” This, of course, is a devastating comment on the civilization which the war is implacably destroying. The transfer of great populations underground has been accomplished, but its accomplishment divides your feelings when you walk the surface of the city. At the end of their day’s work, the miners in Wales, emerging with blackened faces, have their cottages to look forward to for the evening, far though they may be from the idyllic interiors of the film version of
How Green Was My Valley.
The Londoners submerge.

The Londoners submerge and sit and listen to the loudspeakers and huddle around the stoves and are patient. Their patience is rather appalling. Nor are they vindictive. They are humorous about “the Jerries.” I had been told that the robot raids had changed all that, but I saw nothing to prove it. They have got used to the robots, too. The people I saw do not seem to comprehend that human beings have done this to them. They take it as they might a flood or an earthquake. The bitterness against the Germans is almost entirely confined to the articulate classes, and even among them many think that Vansittart is a crank with a “fixed
idea.” Compared to the English, we Americans are a very violent people indeed.

It is somehow a misstatement to say that the British are indomitable. It is rather that capitulation is a concept with which they are not equipped. Perhaps it is precisely because they depersonalize the enemy that the idea of a negotiated peace is also foreign to them. After all, you can’t negotiate with a flood or an earthquake. The conditions of their life are stringent to an extent which we cannot imagine. For more than five years they have been underfed, underclothed, moving in a darkness lit only by bomb flashes and the venomous streaks of robot bombs. An American congressman from a western state made a hasty trip to England. He stayed four days. He clamored to go to France, where he stayed four more. He went back to New York, bearing the nimbus of one who has stood his ground within the sound of the guns. Upon his return, he gave a statement to the press in which he said that the English were well off, that the shop windows were full of things. One wonders what would have satisfied this congressman, exactly what deprivations he would have liked to see. For myself, I can only say that a case might be made for sending over to England our civilians instead of our soldiers. The war would last longer, but so might the peace.

MARCH 17, 1945

T
wo divisions of Marines made the landing on Iwo Jima. These Marines were frankly apprehensive before the landing. I did not see a man, either in the staging areas before we boarded ship or on the journey north to Iwo Jima by transport, who expected anything but a bloody and disagreeable time of it. Iwo was far closer to the Japanese mainland than any enemy possession we had attempted to storm before, and our air observation showed that it was heavily fortified. Moreover, as officers kept pointing out to one another, Iwo was too small to provide room for maneuver, being only five miles long and, at the widest point, two and a half miles wide. Frontal attack was the only possible course, and the southeast beach, where we planned to land, was the only possible landing place. “You can’t run the ends up there,” one major said over and over again. “Every play is between the tackles.” Another officer liked to say that we would have surprise on our side like a burglar with whooping cough. This, if it meant anything at all, may have been a reference to the sinking of some mine sweepers and LCI gunboats of ours which had gone close to shore during the preliminary naval shelling of Iwo. Even a Japanese broadcaster had said that we would land on the southeast beach, but that, as I said, was the only possible landing place. Even so, the Jap announcer’s remarks reinforced the cynical mood of the younger Marine officers.

The forebodings of these officers—all of which turned out to be perfectly justified except in one or two minor particulars—were uttered humorously, as a rule, but there were also cases of serious gloom among the officers and many gaudy premonitions among the enlisted men. These
were examples of that detached professional pessimism which is ordinarily confined in war to intelligence officers, whose minds are top-heavy with knowledge of the enemy, his strength, his dispositions, and his potentialities. The Marines bound for Iwo spoke more flatly, and with less whimsical wood-rapping, of the expectation of death than any assault troops I had ever been with before. There were reasons for this apart from the special nature of the Iwo Jima operation. The number of Marine divisions is not large and nearly all of them have been badly mauled in the course of the past three years. Their work calls for it. All but two or three of the Pacific bastions attacked by Marine forces were strongly held and bitterly defended, and even when this was not the case, the mere fundamentals of amphibious landings and assault caused them damage. In the Army, shock troops are a small minority supported by a vast group of artisans, laborers, clerks, and organizers. In the Marines there are practically nothing but shock troops. For such troops, in time, no matter how well trained and competent, a saturation point is bound to come. The Marines in the Pacific point all of this out themselves at the slightest provocation, and it’s difficult, in the circumstances, to see what else they could do.

As it happened, the Marine division I went with to Iwo—the Fifth—was a new one, activated about a year ago and now engaged in its first combat mission. Most of its officers and many of its enlisted men, however, were veterans of earlier campaigns with other units. One of its enlisted men, Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone, had won the Congressional Medal of Honor at Guadalcanal. He was killed by mortar fire on Iwo Jima shortly after the division hit the beaches. Officers aboard our transport, especially those with large responsibilities, such as getting artillery ashore or conditioning amtracks and their crews for the first assault landing, stood on deck for two or three days before D Day, succumbing to bleak despair whenever the ocean swells ran high or the wind changed direction. “My God!” said Lieutenant Colonel Rose, a very young man from Toledo. “Imagine if that wind is blowing from the south when we hit!” “I’ll tell you a couple of things that can happen to my artillery,” said Lieutenant Colonel Duryea, not much older, “if it’s rough like this at Iwo.” And he did. It was gruesome.

Also unhappy for technical reasons was an officer known in his regiment—our passengers were mainly from the Twenty-seventh Regiment of the Fifth Division—as Purple Heart Louis, a high, broad, hulking man who presented an excellent target and invariably got hit in
combat. He anticipated a great deal of bloodshed on Iwo Jima, but aboard the transport he was bothered chiefly by the fact that the cook for the commodore of our transport division fried everything he cooked, and Louis ate at the commodore’s table. One of Louis’s Purple Hearts had involved the loss of his gall bladder, and fried foods were poison to him. He relieved his misery by looting the junior officers in wardroom poker games at night. Ships in the Pacific are hot at night, with doors and blackened portholes closed and all air shut out, and Louis stripped to his gleaming torso when he played poker, revealing a cicatrix across his belly and abdomen which looked like the mother and father of all Caesarean scars. He was hit in the right arm about an hour and a half after landing on Iwo Jima.

· · ·

D Day was Monday, February 19th, and H Hour was 0900. On D-minus-one, the regimental surgeon reported a hundred and twenty-five cases of diarrhea among the men and officers aboard. This had come from something they ate, but that evening the Navy cooks did better and served everyone a turkey dinner with ice cream. At the last meal, breakfast at 0500 the morning of the nineteenth, there was steak and eggs. Everyone had dressed in his green combat blouse and trousers and had strapped on his pistol belt, with a long knife, ammunition, a bandage roll, and one or two canteens attached, and had checked his carbine. After breakfast, everyone put on his helmet, which had a camouflage cover simulating sand, and went out on deck and over to the ladder nets. The sun was just coming up, so Iwo Jima was visible from our line of debarkation, which was several miles out at sea. There the larger transports halted, to keep beyond the range of shore batteries, and put off their cargoes of Marines into small boats. On Suribachi, the volcano at the south end of the island, we could see bursts of fire and smoke from our naval shelling, which continued till H Hour. Some of the men stared at the island. Others remarked that the wind was running in our favor, from the northwest, and that the sea was calmer than it had been, though still difficult. Many could think of nothing but the immediate necessity of climbing the slick, flaccid web of rope down the ship’s side without looking silly or getting killed. Even young Marines have been killed on these descents when the sea has been rough, and for those over thirty-five the endless sequence of nets, Jacob’s ladders, bouncing gangways, and lurching boats is a hazard and nightmare which can occupy their
minds to the exclusion of all other dangers. Admirals and generals can look ridiculous in these circumstances. They are well aware of it, and their tempers during amphibious operations are correspondingly short.

I got into a small boat with Colonel Thomas Wornham, regimental commander, and some of his staff, his messengers, and his radio operators. We chopped and splashed through the ocean swells to Wornham’s control ship, which was anchored nearer the shore, at the line at which the first assault troops formed up in their amtracks and began their long, slow, bobbing run for the beach. They went in in ragged waves, which left the departure line at intervals of a few minutes, coached hoarsely by a loudspeaker from the bridge of the control ship. The men in the amtracks were a fierce and stirring sight as they passed us to disappear in the valleys of water between us and the beach. I stood watching them as well as I could from the rail of the control ship beside a regimental messenger, a Navajo Indian named Galeagon, and we spoke of how most of the shock troops we could see, their hands and faces greased dead white for protection against possible flame barriers, sat up very straight and looked intently ahead. The first wave struck the beach approximately at the appointed hour of nine, and simultaneously the Navy shellfire, which had been raking the shoreline, jumped its range to the ridges and pillboxes farther inland. The central ridge was in our sector of the island. We could see the wreckage of Japanese planes piled at one edge of the plateau. We knew that an airfield lay just beyond this junk—one of the two airfields for which the Marines were beginning the dogged battle of Iwo Jima.

After a while, I walked to the cabin of the control ship where the radioman was receiving reports that were coming in to Wornham from the first radios set up on the beach. The first two hours’ progress seemed to be good. The Japs had pulled back upland from the shore, leaving few dead behind them, and Wornham’s regiment, which was second in the assault line striking north along the beach near Suribachi, had reached high ground, had crossed the southern end of the first airfield, and was beginning a descent to the western shore of the island, a half mile distant from the point where it had landed. I left the wireless room, where the radioman, earphones over his head, was now reading
The Case of the Caretaker’s Cat.

Wornham’s Higgins boat, a rectangular little launch with a hinged landing ramp in the bow, pulled up on the starboard quarter of our ship, and those of us who were going ashore with the Colonel climbed down
a ladder and jumped in. It was exactly 1100, or two hours after the first landings, and this was the fourteenth wave. I should say that we were the fourteenth wave. As far as I could see, no other boat was moving shoreward at that moment. As we cast off, Galeagon came to the ship’s rail and yelled something at us through a megaphone. Wornham, a short, stocky career Marine of about forty, smiling and convivial on our voyage north but now very taut and serious, leaned precariously over the stern of the boat, clutching at the rail, and cupped a hand to one ear. “Red One now under heavy mortar fire!” shouted the messenger. The Fifth Division’s share of beaches was Green Beach and Red Beaches One and Two. To the north, the Fourth Division had landed on Yellow One and Two and Blue One and Two. We were fifty feet from the control ship when Galeagon yelled another message. “Red Two under mortar fire,” he said, the sound of his voice seeming to bounce across the waves. “Heavy mortar fire on both Red beaches.” The others in the boat looked with expressionless faces at Wornham, who smiled wryly. “Head for a point about a hundred feet to the right of the line between Red One and Two,” he told the coxswain. Then he turned to the rest of us and said, “All right, be ready to bail out of here goddam fast when we touch that beach.”