Of Men and War

by John Hersey

  I asked Captain Rigaud if I could go along with him. “You may go if you want to,” he said, as if anyone who would want to was crazy. My valor was certainly of ignorance: if I had any understanding of what Company H might meet, I never would have gone along.

  This was a company of veterans. They had been in every battle so far, and except perhaps for Edson’s Raiders, had been in all the toughest spots. The company had already lost twenty-two dead. They were tired; they had been on Guadalcanal two months. They were sure of themselves but surfeited with fighting.

  We went down into the valley in single file. My position in line was immediately behind Captain Rigaud. About half the company was ahead of us, about half behind. The company’s proper weapons were heavy machine guns, which the men carried broken down. Quite a few of the men carried ammunition boxes in both hands—a terrible load in such country. Some had rifles. Captain Rigaud and some of his platoon leaders had Browning automatic rifles.

  After we had forded the stream once, the jungle suddenly became stiflingly thick. This was enemy territory in earnest. Our column moved in absolute silence. Captain Rigaud whispered to the man in front of him and to me that we should pass the word along for men to keep five paces apart, so as not to give snipers bunched targets. The message hissed forward and backward along the line in a whisper: “Keep five paces...keep five paces...keep five paces...“

  It is impossible to describe the creepy sensation of walking through that empty-looking but crowded-seeming jungle. Parakeets and cockatoos screeched from nowhere. There was one bird with an altogether unmusical call which sounded exactly like a man whistling shrilly through his fingers three times—and then another, far off in Jap territory, would answer.

  As we sneaked forward, the feeling of tenseness steadily increased. The next word to be passed back from the head of the line came slowly, in whispers, for it was a long message: “Keep sharp lookout to right and to left...keep sharp lookout to right and to left...keep sharp lookout to right and to left...”

  As if we had to be told! After this word, another kind of message came back along the line: the tiny clicks of bullets being slipped into the chambers of weapons.

  It was probably because I was a bad soldier, and looked at the ground rather than up in the trees, that I stumbled on my first really tangible evidence of the enemy. To the left of the trail, at the foot of a huge tree, I found a green head net. It was small, and was made like some little minnow net. I picked it up, touched Captain Rigaud on the arm, and showed it to him.

  Without changing his expression, he nodded, and shaped the soundless word, “Jap,” with his lips. Belatedly, it occurred to me to look up in the tree. There was nothing.

  A little farther along, I noticed a rifle lying in the stream. It had a short stock and a long barrel—not like any U.S. type I had seen. Again I touched Captain Rigaud’s arm and pointed. He nodded again and shaped the same word: “Jap.”

  We were moving very slowly now. It seemed strange to me to be walking erect. I had had visions of men in the jungle slithering along on their bellies, or at least creeping on all fours, like animals. But we didn’t even stoop.

  Up ahead, suddenly, three or four rifle shots—the high-pitched Jap kind—broke the silence. Almost at once a message came cantering back along the line: “Hold it up...hold it up...hold it up...”

  A STRANGE little conversation followed. Several of us were bunched together waiting to move—Captain Rigaud, Peppard, Calder, Brizzard. Suddenly one of them whispered, “Hey, what I’d give for a piece of blueberry pie!”

  Another whispered, “Personally I prefer mince.”

  A third whispered, “Make mine apple with a few raisins in it and lots of cinnamon: you know, southern style.”

  The line started moving again without any more shots having been fired and without the passing of an order. Now we knew definitely that there were snipers ahead, and all along the line there were anxious upturned faces.

  About a hundred yards farther along, I got a real shock. I had been looking upward along with the rest when suddenly right by my feet to the left of the trail I saw a dead Marine. Captain Rigaud glanced back at me. His lips did not shape any word this time, but his bitter young face said, as plainly as if he had shouted it, “The Japs are——s.”

  We kept on moving, crossing and recrossing the stream, which grew wider and more sluggish. We were apparently nearing the Matanikau. Up ahead, as a matter of fact, some of the men had already crossed the river. There seemed to be no opposition; we had reason to hope that Whaling had already cleaned out whatever had been on the other side, and that our job would be a pushover. Just a sniper or two to hunt down and kill.

  The captain and I were about seventy-five feet from the river when he found out how wrong our hope was.

  THE signal was a single shot from a sniper. A couple of seconds after it, snipers all around started to fire on us. Machine guns from across the river began to shoot. But the terrible thing was that Jap mortars over there opened up, too.

  The Japs had made their calculations perfectly. There were only three or four natural crossings of the river; this was one of them. And so they had set their trap. They had machine guns all mounted, ready to pour stuff into the jungle bottleneck at the stream’s junction with the river. They had snipers scattered on both sides of the river. And they had their mortars all set to lob deadly explosions into the same area. Their plan had been to hold their fire and let the enemy get well into the trap before snapping it, and this they had done with too much success.

  Had we been infantry, the trap might not have worked. Brave men with rifles and grenades could have wiped out the enemy nests. Captain Rigaud’s helplessness was that he could not bring his weapons to bear. Heavy machine guns take some time to be assembled and mounted. In that narrow defile his men, as brave as any, never succeeded in getting more than two guns firing.

  The mortar fire was what was terrifying. Beside it, the Japs’ sniper fire and even machine-gun fire, with its soprano, small-sounding reports, seemed a mere botheration. But each explosion of mortar fire was a word spoken by death.

  When the first bolts of this awful thunder began to fall among Rigaud’s men, we hit the ground. We were like earthy insects with some great foot being set down in our midst, and we scurried for little crannies—cavities under the roots of huge trees, little gullies, dead logs. Explosions were about ten seconds apart, and all around us, now fifty yards away, now twenty feet. And all the while snipers and machine gunners wrote in their nasty punctuation. Our own guns answered from time to time, but not enough.

  Individually the Marines in that outfit were as brave as any fighters in any army in the world. But when fear began to be epidemic in that closed-in place, no one was immune; no one could resist it.

  The Marines had been deeply enough indoctrinated so that even flight did not wipe out the formulas, and soon the word came whispered back: “Withdraw...withdraw...withdraw...”

  Then they started moving back, slowly at first, then running wildly.

  It was then that Charles Alfred Rigaud, the boy with tired circles under his eyes, showed himself to be a good officer and grown man. Despite the snipers all around us, despite the machine guns and the mortars, he stood right up on his feet and shouted out, “Who in——’s name gave that order?”

  This was enough to freeze the men in their tracks.

  Next, by a combination of blistering sarcasm, orders, and cajolery, he not only got the men back into position; he got them in a mood to fight again. I am certain that all along, Captain Rigaud was just as terrified as the rest of us were, for he was eminently human. But I kept quite close to Captain Rigaud, and I could not see a single tremor of his hands. If I had, I would have attributed it to anger.

  When he had put his men back into position, he immediately made preparations to get them out in an orderly fashion. He could see that the position was untenable; staying there would merely mean losing dozens of men who could live to fight suc
cessfully another day. He could not get his weapons into play; obviously Whaling’s force had not unsettled the enemy across the river. Therefore he beckoned to a runner, filled out a request for permission to withdraw on his yellow message pad, sent the runner off to the rear C.P., and then set about passing whispered orders for the withdrawal.

  NOW the heroism of the medical corpsmen and bandsmen showed itself. They went into the worst places and began moving the wounded. I joined them because, I guess, I just thought that was the fastest way to get the hell out of there.

  I attached myself to a group who were wounded in a dreadful way. They had no open wounds; they shed no blood; they seemed merely to have been attacked by some mysterious germ of war that made them groan, hold their sides, limp, and stagger. They were shock and blast victims.

  There were not enough corpsmen to assist more than the unconscious and leg-wounded men, so they had set these dazed men to helping each other. It was like the blind leading the blind. I commandeered three unhurt privates, and we began to half-carry, half-drag the worst of these strange casualties.

  The rain and trampling had made the trail so bad now that a sound man walking alone would occasionally fall, and in some steep places would have to crawl on hands and knees, pulling himself by exposed roots and leaning bamboo trunks. We slid, crept, walked, wallowed, waded, and staggered, like drunken men. One man kept striking the sides of his befuddled skull with his fists. Another kept his hands over his ears. Several had badly battered legs, and behaved like football players with excruciating Charley horses.

  The worst blast victim, who kept himself conscious only by his guts, was a boy whom I shall call Charley Utley. Part of the time we had to carry him, part of the time he could drag his feet along while I supported him. Before we went very far, a corpsman, who saw what pain he was in, injected some morphine in his arm. Utley had a caved-in chest, and one of his legs was bruised almost beyond use.

  As we struggled along the trail he kept asking for his sergeant, Bauer. “Don’t leave Bauer,” the wounded boy pleaded.

  Gradually I pieced together what had happened. Utley and several of these others had been the crew of one of the machine guns that did get into action. Sergeant Bauer was in command of the gun. While they were approach-firing, a mortar grenade went off near them, knocking the crew all over the place. Most of the men took cover. But Bauer crawled back to the gun just in time for another grenade to come much closer yet.

  We asked around in the group to see if Bauer was with us, but he was not. “They got him sure,” one said.

  “He shouldn’t have gone back,” Utley said. “Why in hell did he have to go back?”

  All the way out of that valley of the shadow, Charley Utley mumbled about his friend Sergeant Bauer.

  The farther we went, the harder the going seemed to be. We all became tired, and the hurt men slowed down considerably. There were some steep places where we had to sit Utley down in the mud and slide him down ten feet to the stream; in other places, uphill, we had to form a chain of hands and work him up very slowly.

  It was almost dark when we got out of the jungle, and by the time we had negotiated the last steep ridge, it was hard to tell the difference between the wounded men and the bearers. We turned the wounded over to Doc New, the Navy surgeon, who had an emergency dressing station set up on the crest of the last ridge.

  While I talked with Captain Rigaud, who had led his men out by a shorter way and had beaten us in, corpsmen and bandsmen hurried down for Bauer. It was pitch dark when they found him. They were in territory, remember, where snipers had been all around, and where, if they betrayed themselves by the slightest sound, they might have mortar fire pouring down on them.

  One of the bandsmen asked Bauer, “How you feel, Mac?”

  He said, “I think I can make it.”

  The men fashioned a stretcher out of two rifles and a poncho, and started out. Bauer was in bad shape. He was conscious, but that was about all.

  The only way the group could find their path was to follow, hand over hand, a telephone wire which some wire stringer had carried down into that hot valley. In the darkness they had great difficulty making progress, and had to halt for long rests.

  Men who are wounded do not talk rhetorically; famous last words are usually edited after the fact. Bauer’s sentences to Sergeant Lewis Isaak and Private Clinton Prater were simple requests: “Help me sit up, will you please. Oh God, my stomach.”...Soon he said very softly, “No, no, I’ve got to lie down, do it slow.” They eased him down. For a few minutes his head tossed quickly from side to side. He gave a few short breaths and then just stopped breathing.

  A DYING officer was brought to Doc New. He was in absolute shock. He was gray as ashes in the face. His hands were cold. You could not feel his pulse. He had suffered a bad wound from mortar shrapnel in his left knee, and he had another shrapnel wound in his right hand. Doc New realized that blood plasma, and lots of it, was all that could save this man.

  The doctor had to maintain blackout, and he had also to try to keep the man warm. To serve both these ends, most of his corpsmen gave up their ponchos. Working feverishly, interposing rustic expressions—“Dadgummit” and “Gollydingwhiz”—he covered first the wounded man, then his own head and shoulders, with ponchos. Before the first unit of 250 cc. of plasma was in the wounded man’s veins, the patient came out of his coma. By the time the second was in, he was able to speak. By morning he was able to talk to his C.P. on a field phone, stand the ride on a stretcher down to the beach road, and sit up in a jeep on the way back to the camp hospital.

  THE sunrise next morning, after the slop and terror of the day before, was one of the most beautiful things a lot of Marines had ever seen. Bill said, “Anyone who can’t see beauty in that doesn’t deserve to live. My mother would like to see that. ‘Dear Mom: You should’ve seen the sunrise this morning.’...”

  Operations now proceeded according to plan—the formal way of saying, “with moderate but unspectacular success.” By 10:20 A.M. the leading troops of the flanking units had reached the beach. They found that most of the Japs had withdrawn during the night, taking their wounded with them. Evidently they had pulled out in quite a hurry, for they had left packs and other equipment behind. They left two hundred dead on the field. The Marines lost sixty dead—their worst casualties in any single operation on Guadalcanal up to that time.

  Probably the bitterest clash of the whole battle had occurred at the mouth of the Matanikau. For the two whole days, Edson had been unable to root out the entrenched company of Japs on the east side of the river. Finally, on the second night, he called on his Raiders. He put them between the Japs and the spit, their only avenue of escape.

  In the pitch-black night the Japs made a desperate break. They put on a shrieking attack into the Raiders’ positions. Some of them leaped silently into foxholes beside the Marines, who had no way of knowing whether the intruders were comrades or enemy. In the knifework that followed, the Marines came out better than the Japs, to judge by the number of dead in the foxholes in the morning.

  Now all that was behind the men. The air that morning was bland. On the hillside where Bill and C.B. were bivouacked, the sun beat down and warmed the Marines and melted away the cold thing that had settled hard inside them the afternoon and night before.

  A few of them decided they would rather die than go any longer without some hot coffee. They scoured around for some dry wood and finally, at the upper edge of a coral precipice, found some little bushes that had been a season dead and weathered. They broke twigs up into tiny fragments about twice the size of matches. They lit up and found to their delight that the twigs burned with a light blue haze, which would not betray their position. One fellow who had not helped gather the twigs kept putting his canteen cup right over the best part of the fire, until one of the others snapped at him, “Didn’t you ever hear that old American custom, no work, no eat? Scram, Mac.”

  And so, returning to everyday actions and th
oughts, the men did their best to forget the horrors of the battle of the river.

  NINE MEN ON A FOUR-MAN RAFT

  During the month of September, 1942, I was a war correspondent aboard the U.S. aircraft carrier Hornet in the southwest Pacific. One day the carrier received a message that a destroyer in its screen had picked up seven men, the crew of a Flying Fortress, who had been found in a life raft in the sea. Presently the destroyer came alongside the Hornet, and the men were transferred to the carrier, where they were all put in sick bay. After they recovered their strength, they told me this story of their seven-day voyage on an inflated raft that had been designed to carry only four men.

  I have put the entire story in the mouth of Lieutenant A. W. Anderson, the co-pilot, but parts of it came from Lieutenant J. P. Van Hour, the pilot, and other crew members.

  B-17 Number 41-2404 was one of the oldest planes we had. Even before we got her, she was called “The Spider.” We didn’t know for a long time what the reason was, until we figured out it must have been because she was hanging by nothing but a thread. Still, we couldn’t get rid of her. Every time another crew took her out, we used to wish that they would drop her in the drink. One day we went up and bombed Tulagi and some Zeros jumped all over us and knocked out two turrets, but they couldn’t down her. She was tough. But we knew she’d go sometime.

  Well, a day came when we were out, four ships of us, looking for Japs. “The Spider” was in the number-three position, and we had just swung around to return to our base when the inboard engine on the right side conked out. We couldn’t keep up with the formation on the other three engines, and we kept dropping back.

  When night settled down we lost all track of the formation and started flying blind. We knew we were somewhere over the New Hebrides Islands, but there was a lot of overcast and we didn’t dare let down for fear of hitting a mountain. Occasionally we would run into giant thunderheads, where it took all the strength of both pilots to hold a true course.