The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (8 page)

Rood exhaustively traces how the refrain came to symbolize both a universal sigh of relief after an impossible ordeal survived and, more specifically, became a theme in almost every European adventure story of survival in the East. Because so many Edwardians and Victorians, in addition to American and continental elites, had been nursed on the
Anabasis
as part of their obligatory Latin and Greek childhood education, it was no surprise that the adventure story stayed with them for life, whether they evoked it at the desk or out in the wilds of the British Empire.

And what a gallery of illustrious men (and women) Xenophon’s march has inspired, from fiction writers and poets like Daniel Defoe, Louis MacNeice, and Mary Shelley, to the real men of action like the Norwegian adventurers of the Arctic, T. E. Lawrence, and the desperate at Dunkirk. Novels and stories were titled “Thalatta,” and “O, You Xenophon!” The painter Benjamin Robert Haydon’s
Xenophon
—a re-creation of the shouters from the heights of Mount Theches—was for a time inspiration for the Philhellenic romantics of early-nineteenth-century London.

Of course, Rood acknowledges that, more recently, the image of Xenophon’s story has devolved from that of confident Western triumphalism to the postmodern angst of ending up where you don’t belong and so deserve what you get. But the sheer richness of his examples—and the wide variety of both leftists and imperialists who were inspired by the
Anabasis
—reflects the timeless power of human ordeal and triumph.

After Rood’s (often mind-boggling) catalog of Xenophonisms, one wonders: If Thucydides and Tacitus were the superior ancient historians, why is it that the ripples of the
Anabasis
proved far broader over some 2,500 years of Western creative experience?

The answer is that for all the brutality of the Ten Thousand, Alexander at the Indus, or Hernan Cortés burning his ships at Vera Cruz, Xenophon, along with Arrian and Bernal Díaz, captures a desire for something big, something heroic against all odds—however dark the heart—in all of us.

CHAPTER 5

The Old Breed

The brilliant but harrowing narrative of E. B. Sledge
*

Until the millennium arrives and countries cease trying to enslave others, it will be necessary to accept one’s responsibilities and to be willing to make sacrifices for one’s country—as my comrades did. As the troops used to say, “If the country is good enough to live in, it’s good enough to fight for.” With privilege goes responsibility.

So E. B. sledge ends his memoir of the horrors of the Marines’ fighting in late 1944 and spring 1945 against the imperial Japanese on Peleliu and Okinawa. Like Xenophon, Sledge, even at a young age, was a reflective man—a writer and a warrior, who went East and endured unimaginable suffering against enemies as brutal as they were different from those his early in life in the American South. We should recall these concluding thoughts in his memoir about patriotic duty because
With the Old Breed
has now achieved the status of a military classic—in part on the perception of Sledge’s blanket condemnation of the brutality and senselessness of war itself.

Although there are horrors aplenty in the graphic accounts of the First Marine Division’s ordeal in these two invasions in the Pacific, Sledge’s message is still not so darkly condemnatory. The real power of his memoir is not just found in his melancholy. Even in his frequent despair over the depravity seen everywhere around him, there is an overriding sense of tragedy: Until human nature itself changes, reluctant men such as E. B. Sledge will be asked to do things that civilization should not otherwise ask of its own—but must if it is to survive barbarity.

Sledge, a previously unknown retired professor, late in life published his first book, which was originally drawn from contemporary notes taken during battle and intended only as a private memoir for his family. Yet within two decades of publication that draft became acknowledged as the finest literary account to emerge about the Pacific war.

Despite the still-growing acclaim given to
With the Old Breed
—first published in 1981 by the Presidio Press of Novato, California—the death of Sledge at seventy-seven, in March 2001, garnered little national attention. After his retirement, Sledge, the master memoirist of the Second World War, had remained a mostly private person who rarely entered the public arena.

Who, in fact, was Eugene Bondurant Sledge? Even with his perfect Marine name, E. B. Sledge might have seemed an unlikely combat veteran. Born to a prominent local physician in Mobile, Alabama, the articulate, slight, and shy Sledge spent only a year at Marion Military Institute and then enrolled at the Georgia Institute of Technology—before choosing instead to leave the officers’ training program there to enlist in late 1943 in the U.S. Marine Corps as a private. This early intimate and ambiguous experience with officer training, together with the subsequent decision to serve with the enlisted corps, colors much of the narrative of
With the Old Breed.
Sledge repeatedly takes stock of officers, and both the worst and best men in the corps prove to be its second lieutenants and captains.

After the defeat of Japan, Sledge served in the American occupying force in China; his account of that tour was published posthumously as
China Marine
. Sledge later remarked that he found the return to civilian life difficult after Peleliu and Okinawa, as did many veterans of island fighting in the Pacific who could not “comprehend people who griped because America wasn’t perfect, or their coffee wasn’t hot enough, or they had to stand in line and wait for a train or bus.” Yet Sledge adjusted well enough to graduate in 1949 with a B.S. degree. By 1960 he had completed his Ph.D. in zoology and settled on an academic career; at thirty-nine he joined the University of Montevallo, where he taught microbiology and ornithology until his retirement.

His scholarly expertise and precision of thought and language, gained from nearly thirty years as a teacher and scientist, perhaps explain much of the force of
With the Old Breed
. The narrative is systematic and peppered with wide-ranging empirical observations of his new surroundings—and Thucydidean philosophical shrugs about the incongruity of it all: “There the Okinawans had tilled their soil with ancient and crude farming methods; but the war had come, bringing with it the latest and most refined technology for killing. It seemed so insane, and I realized that the war was like some sort of disease afflicting man.”

The look back at the savagery of Peleliu and Okinawa—based on old battle notes he had once kept on slips of paper in his copy of the New Testament—is presented with the care of a clinician. Sledge’s language is modest; there is no bombast. The resulting autopsy of battle is eerie, almost dreamlike. Dispassionate understatement accentuates rather than sanitizes the barbarity. Seemingly random observations prompt abstract philosophical summations—in between descriptions of abject savagery. Sledge describes a dead Japanese medical corpsman torn apart by American shelling thusly: “The corpsman was on his back, his abdominal cavity laid bare. I stared in horror, shocked at the glistening viscera bespecked with fine coral dust. This can’t have been a human being, I agonized. It looked more like the guts of one of the many rabbits or squirrels I had cleaned on hunting trips as a boy. I felt sick as I stared at the corpses.”

We readers are dumbfounded by the first few pages—how can such a decent man have endured such an inferno, emerged apparently whole, and now decades later bring us back to these awful islands to write so logically about such abject horrors? On the eve of the invasion of Peleliu, the ever-curious Sledge matter-of-factly asks an intelligent-looking but doomed Marine what he plans to do after the war, and then he describes the reply, “ ‘I want to be a brain surgeon. The human brain is an incredible thing; it fascinates me,’ he replied. But he didn’t survive Peleliu to realize his ambition.”

The Pacific ground theater of the Second World War from Guadalcanal to Okinawa that nearly consumed Sledge, as it did thousands of American youths, was no bad dream, but a nightmare unlike any other fighting in the nation’s wartime history. It was an existential struggle of annihilation. And the killing was fueled by political, cultural, and racial odium in which no quarter was asked or given: “A brutish, primitive hatred,” Sledge reminds us decades later, “as characteristic of the horror of war in the Pacific as the palm trees and the islands.”

The sheer distances across the seas, the formidable size of the imperial Japanese fleet, and the priority of the United States in defeating Nazi Germany, all meant that the odds, at least at first, were often with the enemy. In particular theaters the Japanese had advantages over the Americans in numbers, choice of terrain, and even supply. We now might underestimate the wartime technology of imperial Japan, forgetting that it was often as good as, or even superior to, American munitions. On both islands Sledge writes in detail of the singular Japanese mortars and artillery that wheeled out, fired, and then withdrew in safety behind heavy steel doors. Especially feared was “a 320-mm spigot-mortar unit equipped to fire a 675-pound shell. Americans first encountered this awesome weapon on Iwo Jima.”

As Sledge relates, the heat, rugged coral peaks, and incessant warm rain of the exotic Pacific islands, so unlike the European theater, were as foreign to Americans as the debilitating tropical diseases. Land crabs and ubiquitous jungle rot ate away leather and canvas—and flesh. “It was gruesome,” Sledge the biologist writes of Peleliu, “to see the stages of decay proceed from just killed to bloated to maggot-infested rotting to partially exposed bones—like some biological clock marking the inexorable passage of time.” He adds of the stench, “At every breath one inhaled hot, humid air heavy with countless repulsive odors.”

The awfulness was not just that the fanatical nature of the Japanese resistance meant that America’s Depression-era draftees were usually forced to kill rather than wound or capture their enemy. Rather, there grew a certain dread or even bewilderment among young draftees about the nature of an ideology that could fuel such elemental hatred of the Americans. On news of the Japanese surrender after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the veteran Sledge remained puzzled: “We thought the Japanese would never surrender. Many refused to believe it. Sitting in stunned silence, we remembered our dead. So many dead. So many maimed. So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past.”

E. B. Sledge’s story begins with his training as a Marine in Company K, Third Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, First Marine Division. The memoir centers on two nightmarish island battles that ultimately ruined the division. The first was at Peleliu, Operation Stalemate II (September 15–November 25, 1944), where in ten weeks of horrific fighting some 8,769 Americans were killed, wounded, or missing. About 11,000 Japanese perished—nearly the entire enemy garrison on the island. Controversy raged about whether General Douglas MacArthur really needed the capture of the Japanese garrison on Peleliu to ensure a safe right flank on his way to the Philippines—and still rages about the wisdom of storming many of the Pacific islands.

Yet such arguments over strategic necessity count less to Sledge. His concern is instead with the survival of his 235 comrades in Company K, which suffered 150 killed, wounded, or missing. And so there is little acrimony over the retrospective folly of taking on Peleliu. Sledge’s resignation might be best summed up as something like, “The enemy held the island; we took it; they lost, and we moved on.”

Operation Iceberg (April 1, 1945–July 2, 1945), launched the next year to capture Okinawa, was far worse. Indeed it was the most nightmarish American experience of the entire Pacific war—with more than 50,000 American casualties, including some 12,500 soldiers and sailors killed, and the greatest number of combat fatigue cases ever recorded in a single American battle.

My namesake, Victor Hanson, of the Sixth Marine Division, Twenty-ninth Regiment, was killed near the Shuri Line in the last assault on the heights, a few hours before its capture on May 19, 1945. His letters, and those of his commanding officer notifying our family of his death, make poignant reading—including the account of his final moments on Sugar Loaf Hill. I continue to wear the ring that was taken off his finger after his death, and mailed to me by his fellow surviving Marines in 2002, some fifty-eight years later. Indeed, the very name Okinawa has haunted the Hanson family, as it had Sledge’s and thousands of other American households, for a half century hence. For decades in the United States no one really knew—or no one wished to know—what really went on at Okinawa.

In fact, neither of Sledge’s two battles, despite their ferocity and the brutal eventual American victories—being in obscure, distant places and in the so-called second theater—garnered the public attention of Normandy Beach or the Battle of the Bulge. In the case of Okinawa, the savagery was overshadowed, first by the April 12 death of Franklin Roosevelt and the May 8 German surrender in Europe, and later by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6 and 9), just over five weeks after the island was declared finally secured on July 2.

Sandwiched in between these momentous events, tens of thousands of Americans in obscurity slowly ground their way down the island. They accepted that they might have to kill everyone in most of the last crack Japanese units, led by the most accomplished officers in the Japanese military, the brilliant but infamous generals Mitsuru Ushijima and Isamu Cho and the gifted tactician Colonel Hiromichi Yahara.

When the battle was over, the U.S. Navy had suffered its worst single battle losses in its history. The newly formed Sixth Marine Division and Sledge’s veteran First Marine Division were wrecked, with almost half their original strength either killed or wounded. The commander of all U.S. ground forces on Okinawa, General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., became the highest-ranking soldier to die in combat in the Second World War. The destructive potential of thousands of kamikaze suicide bombers, together with the faulty prebattle intelligence that had sorely underestimated the size, armament, and ferocity of the island resistance, created a dread about the upcoming November 1 scheduled assault on the Japanese mainland (Operation Olympic).

Controversy still rages over the morality of dropping the two atomic bombs that ended the war before the American invasions of Kyushu and Honshu. But we forget that President Truman’s decision was largely predicated on avoiding the nightmare that Marines like E. B. Sledge had just endured on Peleliu and Okinawa. If today Americans in the leisure of a long peace wonder whether our grandfathers were too hasty in their decision to resort to atomic weapons, they forget that many veterans of the Pacific wondered why they had to suffer through an Okinawa when the successful test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16 came just a few days after the island was declared secure. Surely the carnage on Okinawa could have been delayed until late summer to let such envisioned weapons convince the Japanese of the futility of prolonging the war.

There are fine memoirs of Okinawa and narrative accounts of the battle’s role in the American victory over Japan, most notably William Manchester’s beautifully written, but controversial and sometimes unreliable,
Goodbye, Darkness
, and George Feifer’s comprehensive
Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb
. But E. B. Sledge’s harrowing story remains unmatched, told in a prose that is dignified, without obscenities or even much slang—all the more memorable since the author was not a formal stylist nor given to easy revelations of his own strong passions. John Keegan, Paul Fussel, and Studs Terkel have all praised Sledge’s honesty, especially his explicit acknowledgment that he experienced the same hatred but fought daily against the barbarity that drove others to nearly match the atrocities of their Japanese enemies.