Tarawa

by Robert Sherrod

  The Marines apparently had been heroes to the New Zealanders, especially to the New Zealand girls. Several hundred Second Division men—some said two hundred, some said a thousand—had married New Zealand girls. And there had been plenty of women to go around, a rare state of affairs in this womanless war. “Hey, Jones,” shouted one Marine who stood near the stern of the boat, “tell ’em about that old dame about thirty-six or thirty-seven you had out in Wellington that sneezed and her teeth fell in her beer.”

  Major Rice ordered everybody to duck low in the boat for the last couple of hundred yards. The boat driver put on full steam and after a few minutes we heard the boat crunch on the sand; the ramp in the bow was lowered and we dashed the remaining twenty-five yards through knee-deep water. We had made our last practice landing. The troops deployed into the jungle, some as deep as eight hundred yards—the maximum width of Tarawa. Overhead some planes, but not nearly as many as we would actually have on Tarawa, made practice dives and strafing runs. Behind us came other waves of men who rushed ashore when the white wakes of their boats had melted into the land.

  Ashore I met the man who commanded the combat team, the three assault battalions. His headquarters had been set up just as they would be set up on Tarawa, in the same relative spot, using the same telephones and radio and staff who would perform the same functions under enemy fire. Colonel David Shoup —he had been promoted from lieutenant colonel that day—had assumed command only yesterday, relieving an ailing regimental commander almost on the eve of battle.

  He was an interesting character, this Colonel Shoup. A squat, red-faced man with a bull neck, a hard-boiled, profane shouter of orders, he would carry the biggest burden on Tarawa. On his judgment and his ability would depend the lives of several thousand men and, ultimately perhaps, whether or not we won the battle.

  David M. Shoup had been born on a farm near Battleground, Indiana, thirty-nine years ago. He had won a scholarship at De Pauw University, where he was an A student. I learned all this later. As a matter of fact, Colonel Shoup’s grammar, which had not the slightest thing to do with his winning or losing the battle, was more like that of a Marine sergeant who had never passed the eighth grade. He had joined the Marines as a second lieutenant soon after he finished college in 1926. He had served in the usual Navy yards and aboard the battleship Maryland, and in Shanghai, Pekin, and Tientsin. Early in the war he had commanded a battalion in Iceland, and lately he had been Operations Officer of the Second Division. He was the tough Marine officer in the best tradition, and he had the greatest faith in the Marines’ ability to succeed in anything they undertook.

  Finally the transport was on its way to Tarawa, surrounded by many other transports and by scores of warships: battleships, aircraft carriers, heavy cruisers, light cruisers, countless destroyers, mine sweepers, and the various auxiliary craft necessary for landing operations. Whether this naval might induced a general feeling of security, or whether the fifty-five percent of the Marines who were already veterans bred confidence in the others, I do not know. Maybe the heat simply made them lethargic. But there was no more excitement aboard the Blue Fox than if so many men were on their way to the factory on a Tuesday morning.

  Several men told me that they had a lot of confidence in the Navy. These men were part of a regiment that had been on Tulagi and Guadalcanal from the start, and their confidence had been shaken when the Navy pulled out after it had lost four cruisers, leaving the Marines without much food and without much visible hope of staying alive. The military necessity of pulling the Navy out of Guadalcanal did not even occur to the average Marine, whose philosophy is based on the simple premise that “when the other fellow is in trouble you don’t go off and leave him.” “But now,” said Pfc. Herman Lewis, who quit his Johnstown newspaper job to enlist in the Marines, “we look at all this Navy, and it gives us confidence. When we looked out at the stretch of water between Tulagi and Guadalcanal and didn’t see anything, we didn’t feel so good.” This renewed confidence in the Navy was shared by enlisted men and officers alike. One of the higher ranking officers on board told me, “The Navy is really going to take some chances this time, even if they lose some ships.”

  I spent a lot of time studying the Marines. They looked like any group of ordinary, healthy young Americans. The range of their background was as broad as America: farmers, truck drivers, college students, runaway kids, rich men’s sons, orphans, lawyers, ex-soldiers. One day Lieutenant William B. Sommerville, the battalion supply officer, himself a Baltimore lawyer, was showing me around the ship. On deck we passed a Marine corporal with a bandaged thumb. Sommerville stopped and asked what happened.

  “I let my air hose get away from me,” grinned the corporal. We walked on. “That guy,” said Sommerville, “was a county judge in Texas when he enlisted.”

  All these Marines were volunteers. Only now, several months after voluntary enlistments had been stopped—to the unconcealed disgust of old-line Marine sergeants who had from time immemorial been able to fall back on the final, scathing word, “Nobody asked you to be a Marine, bub”—were the first Marine draftees being sent overseas as replacements.

  The Marines ate the same emergency rations that soldiers ate in battle. They used the same weapons. They came from the same places.* They went to the same schools. What, then, had gained the Marines a reputation as fighting men far excelling any attributed to the average young U. S. citizen in a soldier’s uniform?

  I had been curious about this question for at least a year before the United States went to war. I recalled a White House press Conference in June, 1940, when President Roosevelt said angrily that a year of military training would be good for the molly-coddled youth of the United States—at least, it would teach them to live with their fellow men. The weeks I spent on maneuvers with the Army in the swamps of Louisiana and in the Carolina hills did not serve to ease my fears that perhaps we had grown too soft to fight a war; at that time some low morale outfits were threatening to desert, rather than stay in the Army. Almost none of them deserted, but the threat was an unhealthy sign, and it could not be blamed entirely on poor leadership.

  * With some differences. A glance at the roster of men aboard the Blue Fox showed a preponderance of Midwesterners, Southerners, and Californians, and almost no New Englanders. Thus, of 1,618 Marines and attached naval units aboard, 115, or seven percent, were from Texas, whereas Texas holds just under five percent of the U. S. population. But I had seen no units overseas in this war, outside some National Guard outfits, to which Texas had not contributed more than her pro-rata share. Texans were sometimes immodest on this points but their boast was well-founded.

  When I came back to the United States after half a year in Australia, in August, 1942, I went around Cassandra-fashion, crying, “We are losing the war—you don’t realize it, but we are losing the war!’ I talked to several men at the top of the Army and Navy. I went to the White House and sang my mournful tune to the President. To bear bad tidings is a very rocky road to popularity, but I felt that somebody had to do it.

  What worried me was not our productive ability, although it was barely in evidence at the time. I knew we could make the machines of war. But I didn’t know whether we had the heart to fight a war. Our men who had to do the fighting didn’t want to fight. Their generation had been told in the all-important first ten years, in its teens, and at the voting age that it was not necessary to fight. Sometimes it almost seemed that they had been taught that peace was more important than honor. Our men just wanted to go home.

  I could not forget my conversation one chilly August day in a room in Lennon’s Hotel in Brisbane. My companion was an Army general, a friend of many years. I asked his opinion of the American soldier. He became very depressed. He said, “I’m afraid, Bob. I’m afraid the Americans of this generation are not the same kind of Americans who fought the last war.”

  In the spring of 1943 I went to the Aleutians. The Battle of Attu in its early stages was not well handled.
Our equipment was poor. Nearly fifteen hundred men became casualties from exposure because of their poor equipment, and because their leaders allowed them to be pinned down for days in icy water on the floor of Massacre Valley. But the Battle of Attu did not make me feel any worse. In this primitive, man-against-man fighting enough of our men rose up to win. I thought I learned a lesson on Attu which probably applied to all armies: not all soldiers are heroes—far from it; the army that wins, other things being fairly equal, is the army which has enough men to rise above duty, thus inspiring others to do their duty. There were many such Americans on Attu—men received the fairly commonplace Silver Star for deeds that would have earned a Congressional Medal of Honor earlier in the war. I thought I learned another lesson on Attu: no man who dies in battle dies in vain. There is no time for mourning during a battle, but the after-effect a soldier’s battlefield grave has on his comrades is sometimes overpowering. Five weeks after the Battle of Attu ended, a memorial service was held for the six hundred Americans who died there. No man of the 17th, 32nd, or 4th Regiments who attended this service is likely ever to forget that hundreds of men scaled Attu’s summer-clad brown peaks to pick wild mountain flowers, with which they made wreaths for the graves of their brothers-in-arms. Could the living fail to gain from their own dead an inspiration which would sustain them in future battles? Can one American watch another die in his cause, by his side, without realizing that that cause must be worth while, and, therefore, must be pursued to a victorious end, whatever the cost?

  This was the hard way of gaining an education, but, since we in America had made such an abominable job of educating a generation, we had no other method during the first two years of war. Therefore, our soldiers showed up poorly in their first battles. The number of “war neuroses” or “shell-shock” cases among them simply reflected the fact, in my opinion, that they were not mentally prepared to bridge the vast gap between the comforts of peace and the horrors of war. In other words, they had been brought up to believe that it was only necessary to wish for peace to have peace, and the best way to avoid war was to turn our heads the other way when war was mentioned. I had no words to describe the effect the first bombs and bullets had on many of the men educated in such fashion. Fortunately, most of them recovered their equilibrium after the initial shock. Fortunately, there were signs after two years of war that the oncoming generation of soldiers—those who had been conscious for two years of the nearness of war to them—would go into battle better prepared, better educated.

  I thought Attu could be told in the story of the sergeant. On top of one of those snowy, marrow-chilling peaks in May, 1943, the platoon leader, a second lieutenant, ordered the sergeant to take a squad and go over there and knock out that Jap machinegun nest. The sergeant just stared. His mouth was open. He was horrified. He had been in the Army two years; now, all of a sudden, he was told to go out and risk his life. He, like most Americans, had never thought of the war in terms of getting killed. In disgust, the second lieutenant said, “All right, sergeant, you just sit here. If any of you bastards,” turning to the rest of his men, “have got the guts, follow me. We’ve got to get that machine gun. A lot of our men are getting killed by that machine gun.”

  Well, about ten men followed the second lieutenant. They killed the Japs and the machine gun didn’t kill any more Americans.

  That afternoon the sergeant went to the second lieutenant and said, “Sir, I am ashamed of myself. Give me another chance.” By then there was another machine gun to be knocked out. So, the second lieutenant ordered the sergeant to take a squad and knock it out. The sergeant did just that. In fact, he knocked it out personally. The necessity of risking his life had finally been demonstrated to him.

  Why didn’t the sergeant on Attu do as he was told? Why did he volunteer to do the same thing the second time? I think men fight for two reasons: (1) ideals, (2) esprit de corps. The sergeant’s education had not included any firm impression of the things that are worth fighting for, so he didn’t see why he should risk his life the first time. But the second time he was willing to risk his life for his fellows, for the lieutenant and the ten men who had risked their lives, possibly for him, in the morning. The bonds of their common peril of the moment bad gripped him as nothing in the past could.

  In talking to the Marines aboard the Blue Fox I became convinced that they didn’t know what to believe in, either—except the Marine Corps. The Marines fought almost solely on esprit de corps, I was certain. It was inconceivable to most Marines that they should let another Marine down, or that they could be responsible for dimming the bright reputation of their corps. The Marines simply assumed that they were the world’s best fighting men. “Are you afraid?” Bill Hippie asked one of them. “Hell, no, mister,” he answered, “I’m a Marine.”

  There was one man aboard the Blue Fox who had made a thorough study of why men fight. Lieutenant Colonel Evans F. Carlson had, during his forty-eight years, seen war in many places. At sixteen he had enlisted in the Army; at twenty-one he was commissioned an officer; in World War I he was a captain in the Adjutant General’s department of Pershing’s staff. Two years of civilian life convinced him that he was cut out to be a soldier, so he enlisted again, this time as a Marine. After a year as an enlisted man he was commissioned a Marine officer. His most notable tours of duty were with the Marines in China, where he served four times in the next fifteen years. His experience as an observer with the Communist Chinese Eighth Route Army convinced him that social distinctions between officers and enlisted men must be abolished, and that every officer must prove himself before he can command the complete respect of the men in his command. The officer who forgot that his rank was a symbol of great responsibility had no place in Carlson’s scheme of things.

  Carlson became enthusiastic about the Eighth Army and he became bitter against the Japs the Chinese were fighting. He did not hesitate to say so; therefore, he had to resign from the Marine Corps in 1938. He became a lecturer and an author (Twin Stars of China and The Chinese Army). He cried out against selling scrap iron to the Japanese. But, after two more years of civilian life, he became convinced that it would be necessary for the United States to go to war. In 1940 he went into the Marines again, this time as a major in the reserves. He was given his finest command, the Second Marine Raider Battalion—Edson had the First—which became known throughout the world as “Carlson’s Raiders” after the famed Makin Island raid of August, 1948. At that time the United States needed a spectacular gesture against the Japs. Carlson provided it by bringing his raiders in by submarine and blowing up all Jap installations on Makin. Only two of the one hundred fifty Japs on Makin escaped.

  A gaunt, soft-voiced, Lincolnesque sort of man, Carlson ran Ms Raider Battalion according to die theories that he had been developing for twenty years, the theories that had, he thought, been proved and improved by the Chinese Communists. His officers and men lived and worked together on equal terms—there had to be obedience, of course. The mess cook was made to feel that his job was just as important as the machine gunner’s. The battalion adopted as its slogan, “Gung Ho” (Work Together). Every man of the 600, chosen out of 7,000, was taught that his life depended on every other man.

  “We used to hold discussions,” said Colonel Carlson one day when I met him on the Blue Fox’s deck. “We would tell these men the implications of the war. We would show the connection between the war in Europe and the war in the Pacific. Then we would ask for questions. It was surprising how those privates could point out things that hadn’t occurred to me, and I had studied global war for a long time. I learned as much from them as they did from me.

  “That was a great outfit, that Second Raider Battalion,” Carlson said, rubbing his long, sharp chin. “I think they knew what they were fighting for. Anyway, I tried to teach them. We tried to educate them politically—by that I don’t mean we told them whom to vote for, but what to believe in. That’s harder than teaching them how to shoot a gun. But they learned. E
very man knew that if he didn’t understand something he had a right as an individual—and we tried to encourage individualism—to ask about it. We made sure every man understood all about every operation before we went into battle. It’s the only way.

  “You spoke about esprit de corps. It’s mighty important, and the Marine Corps has got it to a high degree. But, when the going gets toughest, when it takes a little bit more drive to keep sane and to keep going, and a man is hungry and tired, then he needs more than esprit de corps. It takes conviction.

  “That last ounce of sacrifice takes more than esprit de corps.

  “Our greatest weakness is the caliber of our officers, and that, of course, is a reflection on our system of education. On Guadalcanal, with General Vandegrift’s approval, I commissioned sixteen officers in the field. Ex-enlisted men often make the best officers after they have proved themselves in battle. On the other hand, I had to relieve two of my company commanders—it’s sometimes hard to tell whether a likely-looking officer will pan out in battle. Then I promoted one of my company commanders to major. This boy—his name was Washburn and he was from Connecticut—crossed over the river, took his company up the shore, then crossed back and came in behind the Japs. They killed seventy of them by surprise. When the Japs collected themselves, Washburn had to withdraw. The Japs thought he had gone. Then Washburn hit them again from five hundred or six hundred yards. He used his head. I promoted him on the spot and it was good for morale, because every man in the company knew that Washburn deserved it.”