Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975)

by William Manchester

  “How do you say it?” shouted the quartermaster.

  “‘Naka-naka eeda kooda-sai,’” Whitey said slowly. There was a long pause while we all made sure we had that one right. Thirty years later I can read it clearly in my yellowing notes, carefully printed in block capitals.

  The colonel stood up, yawned, and prepared to shove off. He was bushed, he said, and he looked it. Doubtless this was his most intense cogitation since the invention of the flytrap. But then, we were all stretching ourselves. Although Marine Corps routine can be exhausting, it is rarely cerebral. The only man there who looked fresh was Whitey. Of course, he already knew Japanese.

  The colonel was nothing if not dogged, however, and every day thereafter we assembled on the fantail for more skull sessions. By the end of the second week we were jabbering at each other with reasonable fluency, and the more enterprising platoon leaders were drilling their men in the basic idioms. Hastings, now well into his third notebook, was a bottomless source of questions (“How do you say ‘Put down your weapon’ and tell him to do that?”) We all felt that the 29th had a distinct edge on the other twenty-eight marine regiments. Even the jaded members of my intelligence section were roused to pride—Jasper, a particularly apt pupil, marveled at the exquisite nuances of the tongue, at its Oriental precision and delicacy of phrasing—though Zoglin dampened our enthusiasm somewhat by pointing out the unlikelihood that we would ever have an opportunity to use our new skill. Japanese soldiers were notorious for their refusal to surrender. At the end of an island battle, they would sprint toward our lines in a traditional banzai (hurrah) suicide charge, and our people would obligingly mow them down. (Banzai, Whitey explained in response to a question, was spelled )

  On the morning of the seventeenth day we climbed topside to find ourselves lying off the ’Canal, that lush, incredibly green, entirely repulsive island that for most of us had existed only in legend. Ivice had a lot to say about its banyan trees and kunai grass, but Whitey continued to be reticent about his recollections of it. Toward the end the journey had been a great strain for him. Of course, he had a lot on his mind. Rising in the night for a trip to the scuttlebutt or the head, I would see him lying awake on his bunk, sweating in his skivvies, preparing the next day’s lecture.

  Slinging our 782 gear over our field packs, we scrambled down the cargo nets thrown over the side of the Morton, landed in the waiting Higgins boats, and raced in them toward the shore. There we found that we were to make our training camp on the banks of a river. And there Whitey committed what seemed to be a peculiar blunder. As he looked down on the stream his eyes misted over. “Sweet Jesus,” he said feelingly, picking up a corroded old cartridge case. “I never thought I’d see the Matanikau again.”

  Ivice looked at him in disbelief. “The Matanikau!” he said. “What the fuck are you talking about? This is the Kokumbona. The Matanikau’s four miles to the east!”

  Whitey hesitated and wet his lips. It was the first time any of us had seen him shook. Finally he blinked and said, “Man, I must be Asiatic.” He shrugged. “All these goddamned rivers look the same to me.”

  The rest of us accepted that—this tangled island bewildered us too—but Ivice said nothing. Throughout that day I caught him eyeing Whitey strangely from time to time, and the following morning, when I hitched a ride to Lunga Point on a DUKW and crossed the coconut-log bridge spanning the Matanikau I understood why. The two rivers were entirely different. Compared to the mighty Matanikau, the Kokumbona was a shallow brook. Whitey’s error was inexplicable.

  Ivice was the first to entertain doubts about the star of our intelligence section, and I was the second. One evening over a joe-pot I mentioned to the sergeant major that Mrs. Dumas was a movie starlet. The sparrow chirped, “There ain’t no Mrs. Dumas. If there was one, there’d be an allotment for her on the books, and there ain’t none. I keep the books. I know.” Shortly thereafter I saw a pinup of Betty Grable in a slopchute near Henderson Field. I recognized the style immediately: an eight-by-ten glossy print. What Whitey had been passing off as a photograph of his wife was a publicity shot of some Hollywood aspirant. Probably he had never met her. I never learned for sure.

  Bit by bit the elaborate structure he had erected so adroitly and so successfully was beginning to come unstuck. Working on the Point Cruz dock, Yates met a port battalion officer who had been an Oakland lawyer before the war and who hooted at the idea of California law defining a boxer’s punch as an assault with a deadly weapon. Then a gunnery sergeant, arriving as a replacement from Pendleton, recognized Whitey and revealed the true reason he had been stripped of rank and sent to prison. While still in boot camp, it turned out, he had been arrested for impersonating an officer in downtown San Diego. Since he hadn’t become a recruit until the fall of 1943, Whitey had been a civilian during the battle for the ’Canal. Ivice was confirmed; our prodigy had never seen the island before he had landed with us. There was another thing: Whitey had told us that he had been a reporter. Journalism was something I knew about—in college I had been a stringer for the Springfield Republican—and when I started a camp newspaper, I invited him to contribute to it. He tried; he really tried. For days he struggled with a pencil, but when the result came in, it was functionally illiterate, almost incomprehensible. If he had ever been a reporter, the paper hadn’t been published in the English language.

  Of course, it might have been a Japanese newspaper. Whitey’s claim to be a linguist was the last of his status symbols, and he clung to it desperately. Looking back, I think his improvisations on the Morton fantail must have been one of the most heroic achievements in the history of confidence men—which, as you may have gathered by now, was Whitey’s true profession. Toward the end of our tour of duty on the ’Canal he was totally discredited with us and transferred at his own request to the eighty-one-millimeter platoon, where our disregard for him was no stigma, since the eighty-one-millimeter musclemen regarded us as a bunch of eight balls anyway. Yet even then, even after we had become completely disillusioned with him, he remained a figure of wonder among us. We could scarcely believe that an impostor could be clever enough actually to invent a language—phonics, calligraphy, and all. It had looked like Japanese and sounded like Japanese, and during his seventeen days of lecturing on that ship Whitey had carried it all in his head, remembering every variation, every subtlety, every syntactic construction.

  Whitey stayed out of jail, and in the 29th, because the one man who never lost confidence in him was Colonel Hastings. The colonel continued to believe, not because he was stupid, but because Whitey staged his greatest show—literally a command performance—for the regimental CO. I was there, yet to this day I don’t fully understand how he pulled it off. What happened was that the First Marine Division, while securing Peleliu in October of 1944, had bagged five Japanese prisoners. That sort of thing happened from time to time in the Pacific war, usually under freakish circumstances. A Jap was dazed by a shell or otherwise rendered unable to kill himself. Seized by our troops, he was physically restrained from making amends to the emperor. Five months after their capture these failed suicides were ferried to the ’Canal from the First’s base on the Russell Islands. Clad in loincloths and penned behind maximum-security concertinas of barbed wire, they passively Awalted the pleasure of their conquerors. But nobody with jurisdiction knew quite how to dispose of them. Then word of their presence reached the C.O. of the 29th. Hastings knew exactly what to do; he announced to their wardens that he would interrogate them through his very own interpreter, Private Harold Dumas. Whitey greeted the news with a ten-thousand-yard stare and utter silence. There was, it seemed, nothing he could say.

  The POW stockade was at Koli Point, and one morning at 0800 we set out for it in a convoy, with Colonel Hastings and his private translator leading in a jeep and the rest of us trailing in a green crocodile of DUKW’s, six-by trucks, and various other military vehicles. This was a big day for the colonel; he wanted every officer and staff N.C.O. to remembe
r it. Since Whitey was riding with him, I didn’t see the interpreter during the trip, and I have no way of knowing how he behaved, though I’m sure he retained his poise. Anybody who had the guts to snow his way through those classes on the Morton would be equal to almost any crisis; it was not crises, but day-by-day, round-the-clock testing that had led to our disenchantment with him. When I arrived at Koli, Hastings’ jeep was already parked beside the huge barbed-wire coils. The colonel was outside, glaring in wrathfully. The prisoners were squatting miserably on their haunches, and Whitey, dressed in marine dungarees and a raider cap, was squatting alongside them.

  Apparently an exchange of some sort was going on. Obviously the colonel thought so; his eyes darted alertly from Whitey to the Nips, and his right ear was cocked, trying to pick up a thread of sense by using the vocabulary he had learned on the voyage from San Diego. It was, of course, impossible. Whitey was adlibbing with his brilliant double-talk, which, however Oriental it sounded to us, was utterly devoid of real meaning. What the Nips were saying is a matter of conjecture, since no one there was equipped to understand them. My own belief is that they were replying to Whitey, “We only speak Japanese.” All that can be said with any certainty is that the POW’s and their interrogator had reached an impasse. After a long lull in the non-conversation Whitey came out with a hangdog look.

  “What’s happening?” the colonel asked anxiously.

  “Sir, I goofed,” Whitey said wretchedly.

  “What? Why? How?”

  With a swooping gesture Whitey swung out his right forefinger and pointed to the Marine Corps emblem printed on the left breast of his dungaree jacket. “I should never have worn this,” he said in his guileless voice. “You see, sir,” he explained, looking directly at Hastings, “they know what the globe-and-fouled-anchor means. They know what the Marine Corps is. They realize that the Corps is destroying their emperor and their homeland, and they just won’t answer my questions.”

  For a long moment the colonel stared back at Whitey. Then he squared his shoulders, and his pouter-pigeon chest swelled. “Goddam right,” he grated, his voice like a coarse file. He peered contemptuously into the pen and said, “Those sons of bitches are a bunch of bastards.”

  With that he strutted back to his jeep and soon, it developed, out of our lives—Whitey’s, mine, and the 29th’s. That week the battalion boarded the APA (attack transport) George C. Clymer for Okinawa, where the colonel left us after the first few days of battle. He was relieved of his command on Motobu peninsula after the divisional commander asked him the whereabouts of his first and third battalions and received no satisfactory reply. I happened to be there when the question was raised, and I can still see the look of utter bewilderment on Hastings’ face. He had always been vague about the rest of his regiment; his heart had belonged to our second battalion; he had allowed his lieutenant colonels to run the others, and in the excitement of combat he had neglected to update his situation map. “Inexcusable!” said the general, clearly outraged. “I’m sorry. I regret it,” the colonel croaked brokenly. Later I heard that he had been shunted back to the corps staff, where he was awarded the Bronze Star “for excellence in keeping records during combat.”

  Whitey had vanished at about the same time during a sick call. Quite apart from gunshot wounds, there was a pattern of bizarre casualties in the island battles of World War II. Some poor bastard wading toward the beach would stumble off a reef, and with eighty pounds of hardware on his back he would sink like a stone. A BAR man in Easy Company disappeared that way in the early hours of Love Day, as Okinawa’s D-Day was quaintly called. Other people went rock happy—“combat fatigue,” it was called. The sergeant major did; he was carried off cackling nonsense even less intelligible than that of Private Dumas. Then there was always some sad clown who, the first night on the beach, would forget that he had to stay in his hole until dawn, or “morning twilight,” because the Japs were ingenious at night infiltrations. We scratched one Fox Company 60-millimeter mortarman at 2 A.M. that April 2; he was up relieving himself over a slit trench when a sentry drilled him. (“A good shot in the bull’s eye,” said our callous colonel the following morning, just before he was deprived of his command.) Finally, there were the back cases. Whitey became one of them.

  Every salt knew that you could get surveyed if you complained long enough about chronic back pains. Back on the ’Canal I lost a Philadelphian who had enlisted at the age of twenty-eight—we called him “Pop”—and who, fed up with jungle training, used that excuse to get stateside. Whitey followed his ignoble example. To the disgust of the Gung-ho 81-millimeter mortarmen, he kept insisting that his spine was killing him, and finally the skeptical medical corpsman sighed and took him away for a check.

  It was months before I learned what happened to him after that, because once the battle began in earnest, my people became extremely active. Okinawa turned out to be the bloodiest engagement of the Pacific war, eclipsing even Iwo. After it was all over, a presidential citation commended the division “for extraordinary heroism in action against enemy Japanese forces” and for “gallantry in overcoming a fanatic enemy in the face of extraordinary danger,” but all I remember is mud and terror. Years later I learned from reading Samuel Eliot Morison that the 29th had sustained the heaviest casualties of any regiment in the history of the Marine Corps—2,821 out of some 3,300 riflemen. My section was cut to pieces. Once the slaughter began, we were used as runners, carrying messages between battalion staff officers, company commanders, and even platoon leaders whose walkie-talkies had conked out. It was exceptionally perilous work. We were rarely in defilade, usually exposed, and often had to spend long periods lined up in some Jap sniper’s sights. I myself was hit twice. The first time was May 17 on the northern slope of Sugar Loaf Hill. It was only a flesh wound, and I jumped hospital to rejoin the battalion, but on June 5 I was decked again. That one was almost for keeps, a massive back wound from fourteen-inch rocket-mortar shrapnel. For five months I was on and off operating tables on a hospital ship, on Saipan, in Alewa Heights Naval Hospital overlooking Honolulu, in San Francisco, and finally at San Diego’s naval hospital in Balboa Park.

  A letter from Jasper—who survived the war to marry a Nisei—reached me in Balboa that October, filling me in on Whitey’s last adventure in the 29th. I was wearing a buck sergeant’s stripes by then, or rather they were sewn to the sleeves of my greens, for I was still bedridden. I have a hazy memory of church bells tolling the previous August, and my asking a chief petty officer what it meant, and his answering, “The war’s over,” and my saying “Oh,” just “Oh.” Within a few months the 29th’s people began heading home. Whitey, however, was not among them. His complaint about his back hadn’t deceived the mortarmen, but then, they, like us, had known him. The physicians at the regimental aid station, on an LST offshore, had been seduced by his earnest charm, though the ultimate result was not quite what he had had in mind. The docs sent him back to a Corps clearing hospital. All badges of rank having been removed before we hit the beach—Nip sharpshooters liked to pick off officers and N.C.O.’s—the hospital’s medical corpsmen had no way of knowing the military status of casualties, so they usually asked them. They asked Whitey, and he repeated his boot-camp lie. He said he was a first lieutenant, reasoning that life would be more comfortable, and the chow more edible, on an officer’s ward.

  He was right, but there were special hazards for him there. A captain in the next bunk asked him what his job in the Marine Corps was. “Japanese-language interpreter,” said Whitey. They shot the breeze for a while, and then the captain asked Whitey for a lesson. Ever obliging, our man rattled off a few phrases and jotted down some of his Oriental hieroglyphics on a slip of paper. “Very interesting,” the real officer said slowly. Then he yelled: “Corpsman! Put this man under arrest!” It developed that the captain was one of the first graduates of the Japanese-language schools that had been set up after Pearl Harbor. They were arriving in the Pacific too late to do much tow
ard winning the war, but this one had turned up at exactly the right time to nail Whitey. Our confidence man had tried to dupe one mark too many. He was shipped straight back to Portsmouth.

  I never saw him again, but I heard from him once. Five years after the war, when my first stories were appearing in national magazines, I received a letter postmarked Hollywood and written in a familiar scrawl. It was on MGM stationery. God knows where he had picked it up, but he certainly hadn’t acquired it legally. Letters from studio executives—for that is what it claimed to be—are typed. They are also spelled correctly and properly phrased. This one was neither. I have never seen a clearer illustration of Whitey’s own aphorism that we have two languages, one we speak and one we write. He was entirely verbal; when he lectured, it was with easy assurance and an impressive vocabulary. On his pilfered MGM stationery he was another person. Gone were his casual references to conjugations, modifiers, inflections, and the imperative mood. Not since his stab at journalism on the ’Canal had he been so incoherent.

  His missive ran:

  Dear Bill,

  Caught your artical in this months Harpers. Real good. Always knew you had it in you.

  Look—could you give yours truely a break? Am now doing PR for Sam Goldwyn & Co and am trying to promote to stardom a real cute chick name of Boobs Slotkin. (Boobs—ha! ha! I gave her the name & when you glim her knockers youll see why.) Give me the word and I’ll shoot you some pix. Some for the public and some for your private eye if you get my meaning—ha! ha!

  Sure miss the old gang on the Canal and all the good times we had. I don’t hear from any of them, do you?

  Let me know about Boobs. This is a real good deal and I can put you next to her roommate whose no dog either next time your in this neck of the woods. Brunette 37–24–30 and hot pants. A real athalete in the sack. You won’t regret it believe me.

  Your old asshole buddy,