by John McCain
The next day was worse. October 4 is recorded as “the bitterest single day of fighting that the 5th Regiment experienced in the whole war.” General Lejeune would later boast that the claim “ ‘I belonged to the 2nd Division, I fought with it at the Battle of Blanc Mont Ridge,’ will be the highest honor that can come to any man.”
But it was a debacle really. The 5th Marines led the attack that day, and they suffered severely. The French again were not where they were supposed to be. Crouched just below the crest waiting to renew the attack in trenches that had changed hands several times and where Mackin counted thirty-three French and German corpses, the marines of the 1st Battalion were “lashed down . . . by flailing whips of shrapnel, gas and heavy stuff that came as drumfire, killing them. . . . The fellows bunched against the fancied shelter of the larger trees in little close-packed knots, like storm-swept sheep, and died that way, in groups.” Mackin and two of the other Four Aces were hunkered down in a shallow rifle pit in open ground and were about to seek the relative safety of a shell crater when a poison gas shell exploded close to them, severely wounding Gene, the “Ozark mountaineer.” They were down to three Aces.
The 5th advanced so rapidly that day it started to lose cohesion, and some of the more scattered units of the line were nearest the strongest German positions. They had made their first charge after a hasty artillery barrage helped prepare the way, and succeeded in driving many Germans from their trenches. Yet German counterattacks would take back some of the ground they had gained. Mackin recalled watching one young marine, well ahead of the line, become hysterical and furiously attack two surrendering Germans who had their hands up, shooting one and stabbing the other in the belly with his bayonet. “He had not meant to do it” but had been lost to “bayonet lust,” Mackin explained, and he would never be the same. “The charging line swept by, but the fight for him was done.”
The Germans brought up Maxim machine guns on both sides of a stubbled wheat field and opened up a cross fire, killing many marines and trapping a good number of others. Mackin and most of the battalion’s runners were stuck there. He could see the battalion’s commanding officer, Major George Hamilton, a handsome, athletic marine whom Mackin described as a “huge Apollo of a man,” standing on the ridge, looking down on their predicament. The marines in the field needed help, or at least more ammunition, so Mackin and one of the other remaining Aces, Bud, decided to risk a run across the field to reach the major. “Bud led the way, a frenzied, fleeing rush that took them halfway across the field before the guns swung down.” Mackin reached the ridge. Bud didn’t. He was cut down by two Maxim rounds to his spine.
Hamilton told Mackin and another runner to get word to the company commanders to stop advancing. Without cover from the missing French, they were walking into a trap. They did as they were told, at times running just past and even through German positions to reach the marine lines, and they had to kill a German officer and his orderly along the way. It was too late, though; the battalion had been lured into a narrow strip of woods, a salient that ran deep behind German lines down the western slope to the wheat field at the base of the ridge that Mackin had just crossed. “It was a good place to die,” Mackin wrote, “exposed to fire from three sides, its line of communication cut off by enfilading Maxims firing from the flanks.” The marines called it “the Box.” There they would fight over the next two days, repulsing at great cost a German counterattack where the fighting was at close quarters and savage. Part of the battalion was nearly overrun. A lot of marines died in those woods. Mackin would later claim he was wounded there but stayed in the field. His old commander from the 67th Company, whom Mackin revered, was struck in the neck by shrapnel. He continued smoking a cigar and directing the company’s activity while he dressed the wound himself.
The 5th Marines were relieved on the morning of October 6, and the 6th Marines finished taking the ridge that day. Two days later the division drove the enemy from the nearby village of Saint-Étienne, and the Champagne region was freed of Germans for the first time in the war. Nearly eight thousand soldiers and marines were killed or wounded taking Blanc Mont Ridge. Of the roughly one thousand 1st Battalion marines who had started up the ridge, Mackin counted only 134 who had come out of the woods on their feet. Only three of the battalion’s sixteen runners survived the battle unscathed physically. Mackin was one of them. He had been certain he would die there and had run through hails of fire resigned to his fate. He received the Navy Cross, the Army Distinguished Service Cross, and two Silver Star citations for his service on Blanc Mont Ridge.
THE LAST OFFENSIVE OF the war, the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, had begun on September 26 and would continue until the final hours of the war. Its main objective was the capture of the rail center in Sedan and severing the railroad lines that supplied the Kaiser’s armies. The American sector west of the Meuse River included the densely wooded Argonne Forest, where a generation later Americans would again find themselves in a desperate fight with a German Army. It was the biggest American campaign of World War I. Over a million Americans fought in it; over a hundred thousand of them were killed or wounded. The 2nd Division, having earned a couple weeks’ rest after the Battle of Blanc Mount, arrived at the front on October 30–31 and formed the center of the American line as part of V Corps in the final advance on Sedan.
V Corps was commanded by Major General Charles Pelot Summerall, “Old Charles P,” Mackin called him, a determined, aggressive commander to some, to others a cold-hearted bastard who profligately wasted American lives. “An army general came on a beautiful black horse and lectured us,” Mackin recalled, “telling combat men about the lay of the land ahead.” He told them what he wanted done and how he wanted it done, slapping his riding crop against his boot for emphasis.
“Before you are twenty kilometers of machine guns. Go and get them.
“Way up north is a railroad. Go cut it for me.
“Before you there are three low ridges. Behind the third, the German artillery is parked. . . . Go and get them. Don’t let them take away a single gun.
“On those ridges all your officers may be down, but you keep going. I want to sit back in my headquarters and hear you carried all your objectives on time.
“Go forward while you can still crawl. Top that third ridge. . . . Do it with rifle fire if you have nothing else, and . . . on those three ridges, take no prisoners, nor should you stop to bandage your best friend.”
The marines moved out on the morning of November 1, on a line just south of the little village of Landres-et-Saint-Georges, following another immense artillery barrage. Their objectives, the ridges, formed the eastern section and hardest part of the Hindenburg Line, a stretch called the Kriemhilde-Stellung, that a historian later described as “a dense network of prepared killing grounds.” Pershing considered it the key obstacle to a breakthrough. So did the Germans.
Two hours into the advance Major Hamilton, Mackin’s battalion commander, reported heavy casualties and the loss of five officers. Mackin’s pal Baldy died taking the first ridge, felled by a sniper’s bullet. “He had long known he wasn’t going home,” Mackin observed. A stretcher carrier reached the body before Mackin did. “He stopped me with a look and shook his head twice. . . . We kept on going. The new men watched and learned as we had learned before.” When they took the third ridge that day, shocked German commanders ordered their lines to withdraw. The 2nd Division marched through their abandoned positions and headed east to the Meuse.
On November 7 Mackin was at his battalion HQ preparing to report to Major Hamilton when he was delighted to see his old company commander, Frank Whitehead, who had been wounded and evacuated at Blanc Mont. The two men greeted each other warmly. “Haven’t they killed you yet?” Whitehead joked. They had not, but General Summerall intended to see to it that they would have another chance.
On the night of November 10 the 5th Marines were on the west bank of the Meuse River. Rumors had reached them that an armistice would be d
eclared that night or the next day, but such speculation hadn’t altered Summerall’s plans. He ordered army engineers to build pontoon bridges across the river and sent his corps over them that night under intense fire from the Germans on the other side. Over a thousand more Americans would die or be wounded that last night of the war.
“They lied to us that night,” Mackin wrote. The 1st Battalion marines had been told they needed only to bring ammunition to the army regiment that was constructing the bridges, but when the marines got to the river, they were ordered to cross and attack the Germans fighting on the other bank. Searching for the bridge, they passed many dead and wounded. “No one took the time to care for them.”
Frantically they searched in the dark for the crossing. “Maxims on the far bank . . . found us and thinned our ranks.” When they reached it, German flares illuminated the night and the slaughter going on below. Major Hamilton led the brigade over the bridge. “A stream of Maxim bullets churned up and down the river, searching. They rapped from time to time across the planks. . . . You felt their jarring shake all up your limbs and fought against the cramp of belly muscles knotted in fear. You watched men die in front of you.”
The two men in front of Mackin fell. The first man “sank to his knees, twisting, and slid face first into the river.” The second “staggered, unseen hammers driving him sideways.” Mackin froze. His “shaking knees sagged in awful fear.” He fought to keep on his feet. He took a step and stopped again. “The night belonged to bitter men,” he wrote, “who long before had known there was no hope,” who “thought they had conquered fear.”
He spoke out once. “Oh, God!” Two words, a prayer. He moved toward a place of bullet-streaming death. The instant of it left a sense of guilt. He hadn’t ever meant to pray again. Prayer was for men who carried faith, and most of them had died in other places.
The Maxims swung away to let him live.
The battalion had 350 men when it crossed the Meuse that night. Mackin didn’t know how many of them made it across unhurt. If it hadn’t been a foggy night, he believed none of them would have survived. Just after they crossed, German artillery took out the bridge. “I lost friends that night that I’d been with all the way from Belleau,” Mackin grieved. “I lost guys that I loved.”
They fought past daybreak on a skirmish line through a patch of woods. They found a drainage ditch just outside the woods, where they stopped. “I was so goddamn tired, weary, sick, and hungry, beat, whipped,” Mackin recalled a few months before his death in 1974. “I got down on my knees in that drainage ditch. My rifle was sticking . . . under the fence through at the Germans. . . . I laid my head over on my rifle and went sound to sleep.”
A few hours later, around noon, a pal shook him awake to tell him the war was over.
PFC Guy Louis Gabaldon poses with a Japanese family he saved from mass suicide on the island of Saipan.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lone Wolf
Guy Gabaldon, alone and cave by cave, convinced as many as fifteen hundred Japanese on Saipan to surrender.
NO ONE EVER SAID HE lacked guts or initiative. Private first class Guy Gabaldon was as brave as any marine on Saipan during World War II, and more enterprising than many. He had no shortage of bravado either, a common enough, if not universally admired, trait. Some marines felt his exploits were exaggerated and doubted he was quite the lone wolf he claimed to be. Many others believed he earned every bit of the acclaim he received. His company commander praised his courage unreservedly and credited his actions with shortening a campaign that was longer and bloodier than anyone had expected. He recommended Gabaldon for the Medal of Honor.
A marine sergeant on Saipan called Gabaldon “a glory seeker,” but then acknowledged, “The two traits often go together: bravery and glory seeking.” So does the sort of enterprise Gabaldon possessed: daring, foolhardy, and individualistic to the point of insubordination. Courage was a common virtue in a three-week Saipan campaign where nearly fourteen thousand Americans would be killed or wounded. And many marines and soldiers who fought there showed initiative again and again in solving problems posed by difficult terrain and a tenacious, desperate enemy. The initiative Gabaldon took, at great peril to himself, helped spare even more lives, American and Japanese, from the prodigious killing that characterized the Battle of Saipan.
Gabaldon’s war began and ended in the Marianas, a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean west of the Philippines. But to appreciate fully what he did there, and to understand the nature of the challenge Americans faced there, it is instructive to consider an earlier battle on a flyspeck of an island on the west side of a small atoll in the Gilbert Islands.
While General Douglas MacArthur’s army slogged through northern New Guinea toward his rendezvous with destiny in the Philippines, Admiral Chester Nimitz opened the island-hopping campaign in the central Pacific that was the necessary prelude to the invasion of the Japanese home islands. In November 1943 Operation Galvanic, the invasion of Tarawa—specifically the invasion of an islet at Tarawa called Beito—was the first offensive of the campaign. Tarawa is shaped like a triangle, with a wide coral reef and thirty coral islets enclosing a lagoon. Beito is the largest of the islets, but still tiny at three miles in length and a half mile across at its widest point. It is hard to imagine such a small, unimposing place possessing strategic significance, but it did. Before the Allies could invade the home islands, they needed air bases in the northern Marianas, where they could base strategic bombers capable of reaching Japan. To take the Marianas they needed air and naval bases in the Marshall Islands. To take the Marshalls they had to invade Tarawa, from where the Japanese could threaten the sea routes from Hawaii to the Marshalls.
The Japanese likewise recognized Tarawa’s strategic value. They built an airstrip on Beito and an elaborate network of trenches, concrete bunkers, and minefields connected by tunnels and defended by thirty-eight hundred soldiers and twelve hundred Korean slave laborers. The Japanese had fourteen big, eight-inch, coastal defense guns on Tarawa, forty field artillery pieces, and almost a hundred tanks. They would also adjust their tactics at Tarawa. Though they had fought their ground tenaciously, the Japanese defenders on Guadalcanal had offered only light resistance to the initial marine landings. Tarawa would be a fight to the death from the moment the first marine set foot on the beach.
The 2nd Marine Division, late of the Guadalcanal campaign, freshly reinforced and rested, and the army’s 27th Infantry Division, roughly thirty-five thousand men in all, commanded by Marine Corps Major General Julius Smith, were given the assignment. They would arrive in an armada that included seventeen aircraft carriers and a dozen battleships under the command of Admiral Raymond Spruance. The invasion began before dawn on November 20, 1943, with a duel between the Japanese big guns and American battleships, followed by carrier aircraft strikes that dropped nine hundred tons of ordnance. After the planes finished their runs, the navy resumed its barrage, firing two thousand shells at the tiny island.
The barrage lifted at nine o’clock, and the first wave of marines were streaming toward their various landing zones on Beito’s north shore when they encountered an unanticipated problem: the tide was too low for the landing craft to clear the reef. Only the armored tractors, amtracs, were able to get ashore. Most of the marines had to wade hundreds of yards through waist-high water. Japanese machine gunners who had survived the shelling fought from positions near the beach and mowed them down, and pinned down those who managed to reach the beach and huddle miserably among the corpses. Reinforcements were ferried into the battle throughout the morning, as were several tanks that enabled the marines to expand their precarious foothold and overrun the first Japanese lines by noon. Progress was costly and slow from there on out, but by the end of the day five thousand marines were ashore and were nearing the airstrip.
They took it the next morning and also succeeded that day in blocking and destroying a Japanese force that was trying to retreat to another islet. Heavy fi
ghting continued for the next two days as more American reinforcements, tanks, and howitzers streamed ashore, killed the enemy in their bunkers and trenches, and pushed the survivors to the eastern end of the islet. The defenders, their commanding general already killed, attempted a counterattack the evening of November 22. It was repulsed. Before dawn the next day the last Japanese defenders launched a final banzai charge. When the killing was finished, only one Japanese officer and sixteen soldiers from a force of nearly four thousand were captured alive. Only 120 of the twelve hundred Korean laborers survived. Eleven hundred marines had been killed at Tarawa, and twice that number were wounded. In a little over three days on Tarawa, the marines had suffered casualties comparable to those lost in six months of fighting on Guadalcanal. The bones of half the American dead are still scattered in unmarked graves on Beito.
The American public was shocked by accounts of the bloody first day on Tarawa from correspondents who had come ashore with the marines and by descriptions of the awful toll paid by its defenders, who had fought, almost literally, to the last man. A correspondent who landed with the first wave of marines, Robert Sherrod of Time magazine, wrote, “No one who has not been there can imagine the overwhelming, inhuman smell of 5,000 dead who are piled and scattered in an area of less than one square mile.” The marines learned important lessons at Tarawa they would put to use in bloodier battles to come. For as heavy as casualties were, they would not compare with casualties suffered in the island battles ahead, as the fanaticism of Japanese soldiers grew more extreme and deadlier the more desperate they became.
THE INVASION OF THE Marshall Islands was launched ten weeks after Tarawa, with the 4th Marine Division and the army’s 7th Infantry Division in the lead. The 2nd Marine Division and the 27th Infantry Division had left the Gilberts several weeks earlier for a few days of rest and reinforcement in Hawaii before conducting amphibious landing exercises in preparation for their next assignment. After the Marshalls were secured, the 2nd Marines would join the 4th Marines in the first multidivisional landing of the Pacific war, and the army’s 27th would follow them onto the island of Saipan.