Tarawa

by Robert Sherrod

  The first time I had met Hawkins he had said, quite calmly, as though he wore telling me what time it was, “I think the thirty-four men were my platoon can lick any two-hundred-man company in the world.”

  After his death, and after Julian Smith had named the airfield on Betio after him, I learned more about this twenty-nine-year-old Texan, who was, I thought, the bravest man I have ever known.

  William Deane Hawkins was born April 19, 1914, in Fort Scott, Kansas. His father was from Louisiana and his mother was the daughter of a Missouri doctor. When he was three years old, and his family was living in Los Angeles, the most important event of his life occurred: a neighbor, using the Hawkins kitchen to do her washing, walked out a door holding a pan of scalding water; little Deane Hawkins ran into her and upset the pan. He suffered severe burns on a third of the surface of his body—his arms, his back, a shoulder, a leg. One leg was drawn and an arm was crooked so that he could not straighten it. The doctors wanted to cut the muscles, but Deane Hawkins’ mother was not sure. For a year she massaged her little boy’s arm and leg daily for two or three hours. Finally, to the amazement of the doctors, the muscles lived again. At the end of a year Deane Hawkins, cured, was learning again to walk.

  When he was five the Hawkinses were again living in Kansas. En route to Phoenix, they stopped in El Paso, where his father, an insurance-claim adjuster, was persuaded to settle. When Deane Hawkins was eight his father died. His mother went to work, first as secretary to the high-school principal, then as a teacher of commercial subjects in El Paso Technical Institute.

  Deane Hawkins’ scats were always with him. By the time he was ten he was a fine swimmer, but one day he came home from the Y. M. C. A. unhappy and brooding. “Aw, mom,” he said, “I don’t think I’m going to the Y any more. When I take off my clothes the kids all look and say, ‘Oh, look at Deanel’” His mother reassured him. “Son, it’s not your fault; you have nothing to be ashamed of.” He went back to the Y swimming pool.

  He wanted to get into the Navy, to study aeronautical engineering; he had plane models with “doped” cloth fuselages and rubber-band power plants flying all over the house. But he had no influence; he knew no congressman who would appoint him to the Naval Academy. So he persuaded two friends, James Colley, later of the Marines, and William Abbott, later a naval pilot, to enlist with him with a view to taking the sailors’ merit examination for Annapolis. The two friends got into the Navy. But Deane Hawkins did not; he had scars. Said the recruiting officer, “I never hated to turn down anyone so much in all my life. You’re the kind of boy the Navy wants.” Deane Hawkins went home to his mother, “They made it,” he sobbed. “It was my idea and I didn’t.”

  The sours were to haunt him still further. When he was eighteen he had a railroad job. He was working under a car when an engine humped it. In scrambling from beneath the car he dislocated a vertebra. When he took a physical examination before returning to work the railroad doctor saw the scars and said, “Nothing doing; you are not a good risk.” Later he tried to enlist as a cadet flyer in the Army Air Forces. The scars kept him out.

  Deane Hawkins was a smart boy—at El Paso’s Lamar and Alta Vista Schools and at El Paso High School. He skipped the fifth grade. He won the state chemistry-essay contest, graduated from high school at sixteen, and was awarded a scholarship to the Texas College of Mines, where he studied engineering. Like most sons of the poor, he worked. After school and during summer vacation he sold magazines and delivered newspapers; he was a bank messenger and he made photostats for an abstract company. He was a ranchhand, a railroad hand, and a bellhop. At seventeen when he was skinny and six feet tall he met a hotel guest who told him laborers were needed to lay a pipeline in New Mexico. Deane Hawkins went to New Mexico, where the hiring boss laughed at him. “Sonny, two-hundred pound men are collapsing on this job.” But he gave the kid a chance, and Deane Hawkins worked twelve hours a day lifting, with the help of one full-grown man, four-hundred-pound creosoted pipe. When his mother saw her son a week later, she was horrified at the skinny boy, burned by wind, sun, sand; and creosote. “I’m all right now, mom,” he said, “but the first day I thought I’d die.”

  Deane Hawkins was quiet and serious. He liked to go dancing, but he had no use for jitterbugs. He didn’t like a certain girl because “She can’t carry on a sensible conversation; she giggles too much.” Sometimes he took his mother to a dance. He helped her to make the beds, sweep the floors, and he could cook. When he had enough money he bought a car—not a jalopy, but a conservative blue Ford roadster.

  He left home when he was twenty-one. He worked two and a half years in Tacoma, Washington, in a dank, underground office so unlike the Texas outdoors. He was married there, and divorced. Then he went to work as an engineer for a Los Angeles title-insurance company. He was there when Pearl Harbor happened. Before the war he had said, “I hate war. I don’t see why the United States ought to get in it.” But when the United States was forced into it, Deane Hawkins said, “I’ve got to go. I’m going to see if the Marines will have me.” That was when he was at home, at Christmas, 1941. There was no Marine recruiting office in El Paso, so he went back to Los Angeles to enlist. He was very proud when “the toughest outfit of them all” accepted him, scars and all.

  “Hawk” was what all the Marines called him, in boot camp, in commando school, in battle—when he was killed, nobody from his own outfit could remember his first name. When his regiment went overseas in June, 1942, Hawkins was a private first-class. On Shipboard he was promoted to corporal; by the time he landed on Tulagi in August, he was a sergeant, and before the Battle of the Solomons was a month old he had been commissioned a second lieutenant. Wrote a Marine sergeant to his mother, “When he was a sergeant, I knew he would make a fine officer.... Your son was born to lead and I would have followed him anywhere.... You see, ‘Hawk’ loved trouble. If there was a tough job to do, he’d ask for it.”

  He sent his mother high-spirited, amusing letters from Tulagi and Guadalcanal. “I heard the darnedest argument last night. I woke up and was being carried into the jungle by two bugs, I heard one bug say, ‘Shall we eat him here, or carry him a little farther?’ And the other bug said, ‘Hell, no, let’s eat him here before some big bug comes along and takes him away from us.’”

  Like handsome Deane Hawkins himself, his friends were orderly youngsters: Ballard McClesky, Wallace Love, and Austin Pritchett. They all, like tens of thousands of liberty-loving Texans, left good jobs to volunteer in the armed services. Earlier they, like Hawkins, had worked after school to supplement family incomes. After Deane Hawkins’s death, Sergeant MoClesky of the U. S. Army wrote to Deane Hawkins’s mother: “Mom, did I ever tell you of the last talk Deane and I had the Christmas of 1941 when we were together? With Pearl Harbor only a short time before and Deane’s plans to enter the Marines completed, we naturally spoke of the future that we could expect. Deane’s last words to me were: ‘Mac, I’ll see you someday, but not on this earth.’ Even before he left, he knew he wasn’t coming back.”

  After I had returned from Tarawa, Mrs. Hawkins wrote to me, as so many mothers, fathers, and wives write to war correspondents, a letter of great dignity, asking if I could tell her the details of her son’s death. “Those things mean so much to me,” she said. “He was my whole world, all I had. … He lived as he died, always on the peak of excellence. He was a wonderful son, always cheerful, confident, sweet, kind, and thoughtful of others. … Please help me, if you can, to get a complete picture of his last days.... I hope I am not imposing when I ask you to do this for me.”

  I wrote Mrs. Hawkins all that I could recall of Hawk. Then I added a last paragraph. “I do not know what else I can say. What can one say about a man who died so nobly in the service of his country? If Lieutenant Hawkins had lived a hundred years, he could not have known a fuller life. He could not have achieved more. Hawk knew what the war was about. He knew that we must crush the Japanese utterly, so that our sons will not have this war
to fight again in twenty or thirty years hence. His example of devotion and unselfishness will surely serve to sustain other millions of young men who must finish the job. His name will live always in the brightest pages of those men who are proud to call themselves ‘United States Marines.’”

  On the day before the battle there came to the men aboard the Blue Fox a mimeographed message:

  “To the officers and men of the Second Division:

  “A great offensive to destroy the enemy in the Central Pacific has begun. American air, sea and land forces, of which this division is a part, initiate this offensive by seizing Japanese-held atolls in the Gilbert Islands which will be used as bases for future operations. The task assigned to us is to capture the atolls of Tarawa and Abemama. Army units of our own Fifth Amphibious Corps are simultaneously attacking Makin, 105 miles north of Tarawa. …

  “Our Navy screens our operations and will support our attack tomorrow with the greatest concentration of aerial bombardment and naval gunfire in the history of warfare. It will remain with us until our objective is secured and our defenses are established. Garrison troops are already en route to relieve us as soon as we have completed our job of clearing our objective of Japanese forces.

  “This division was especially chosen by the high command for the assault on Tarawa because of its battle experience and its combat efficiency. Their confidence in us will not be betrayed. We are the first American troops to attack a defended atoll. … Our people back home are eagerly awaiting news of our victories.

  “I know that you are well-trained and fit for the tasks assigned to you. You will quickly overrun the Japanese forces; you will decisively defeat and destroy the treacherous enemies of our country. Your success will add new laurels to the glorious traditions of our Corps.

  “Good luck and God bless you all,

  JULIAN

  C. SMITH,

  Major General, U. S. Marine Corps

  Commanding”

  This day before the battle probably deserves some detailing. It was hot, as all days en route to Tarawa were hot. There was a slightly increased tension among the Marines-nothing exciting, just a sort of stretching and unlimbering, as men who are about to undertake something flex themselves. They made up their rolls which would follow them ashore: blankets and shelter halves and mess gear; beyond their weapons these assault troops themselves would take nothing with them except ammunition, water canteens, a day’s emergency rations—G and K—and a spotted poncho for light cover. A dozen at a time would gather in the wardroom to study intently the big table-mounted relief map of Betio, which was detailed to the point of glued on miniature palm trees.

  The Marines cleaned their rifles for the last time, applying oil industriously with small paint brushes, lovingly stroking the barrel as they removed the last tiny grain of dirt with a ramrod into whose slit a folded circular piece of cloth had been inserted. They wrote their final letters—which Swede Norvik censored, though he had sent out a notice two days previously that the mails were closed. They joked with one another. “Hey, Bill,” said one Marine to another, “I just remembered I still owe you a pack of cigarettes. I want to pay you before we get killed. Say, you want to buy a good watch?” Said Bill, “We’ll get that watch off you on the way back.”

  At 1310 (1:10 P.M.) came the thumping buzz (twenty-three buzzes) for General Quarters, which meant that we might expect an attack from the enemy at any time. I lay in my bunk, reading Deadline by the French newspaperman, Pierre Lazareff, growing angrier as I read, because the French had been stupid enough to be misled into apathy or comradeship toward the Germans. Gamelin, Bonnet, Laval, Daladier. For these names I had no difficulty in substituting Lindbergh, Nye, Wheeler, McCormick, but it was consoling to recall that these blind Americans had not held correspondingly important positions in the United States Government during our critical moments. And Congress had voted for Lend-Lease despite Lindbergh’s testimony in January, 1941, to the effect that Germany, with her overpowering technological superiority, was a sure bet to win, and “the position of Great Britain becomes more and more difficult ” I remembered Lindbergh’s appearance before the House Foreign Affairs Committee under the sponsorship of a congressman named Fish in the resplendent new House Office Building’s committee room. To me he had seemed at the time a guileless, bewildered young man who had been sold a bill of goods by Goering, a man trying to buck the inevitable—like honest intentioned young Bob LaFollette—because his father had bucked it in the dim past of 1917. Now, as General Quarters sounded on the day before the Tarawa battle, Lindbergh seemed in retrospect, not a traitor—only a young “colonel” who had never been in battle.

  These thoughts were interrupted by the ship’s loudspeaker. “This is no drill!” Theretofore, on the Blue Fox, General Quarters had meant only a rehearsal for the appearance of real enemy submarines or real enemy planes. Reluctantly I put on a steel helmet and snapped a rubber lifebelt around my waist and went topside. There were perhaps a hundred planes in the bright sunlight around us, but no sign of the expected enemy.

  “It’s a wonderful feeling,” said Colonel Carlson. “Many planes and they are all ours.” I asked him what the scoop was— “scoop” is the Marine word for Army “dope” and Navy “scuttlebutt” “Don’t know a thing,” he said, “except the order was ‘Prepare to repel air attack.’” Unless one stands on the bridge beside the captain, news travels slowly on board ship. It was tea hours later that I learned from the young Michigan major, Howard Rice, that it was tar-ranging friendly planes which had caused the alert.

  After an hour on deck, watching the bright, pale-blue sky, unmottled except for a few wisps of white clouds near the horizon, I heard the “secure from General Quarters” signal and went below again. In the passageway I met Father Kelly and asked if the word about “another Kiska” had reached the Marines. “Some of them have heard that there may not be any Japs on Tarawa,” he said, “and you know what their reaction is? They hope there are at least some Japs left there. They say they would hate to come all this way for nothing.”

  The night before the battle was upside-down. The enlisted men were to start eating “breakfast” at 10 P.M., the officers at midnight. The menu was steak and eggs, a British dish which the Marines during their long New Zealand stay had come to favor over the American ham and eggs. “Jesus,” said one of the transport surgeons, “that will make a nice lot of guts to have to sew up—full of steak.” In the U. S. armed forces, it occurred to me, steak had become the standard menu on the night before D Day—in the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps, the Government seemed to stand up and say, “You men, you who are about to go into battle, you are our foundation; without you young men we would not exist; you are our better physical specimens, none of you is 4-F. Therefore, I, the Government, want you to have the best food we’ve got. I know you had your weekly meal of steak only last night, but I want you to go into battle knowing that I gave you the best meal I could.”

  Catholic mass was held in the wardroom at 1900. Physically, it was oppressive. Some five hundred men knelt in the dripping room or in the passageways leading to the room—it was built to seat about two hundred maximum. The heat and the stench from the bodies of so many sweltering men hit one in the face like a bucket of dishwater, even from a distance down the corridor. I never got to know what Father Kelly said in his last prayer to steel the men who were about to die.

  I went back to the junior staff officers’ bunkroom. I took down my helmet and put in it a folded sheaf of toilet paper and a jungle-green mosquito head-net. In the pockets of my green Marine Corps dungarees I put a can of G ration and a pack of K ration. I filled my two canteens with fresh water. One of the transport surgeons gave me two morphine syrettes and a two-ounce bottle of medicinal brandy. I got out two fresh notebooks —if I were killed I did not want the Japs to learn anything about us from the notes I had made during the convoy trip. My barracks bag, which contained all my clothing except what I wore, and my typewriter, I left t
o be brought ashore at some in definite date—when the island was ours.

  Three and a half hours before midnight we turned out the light in our bunkroom and tried to sleep. I had convinced myself, to my own detriment, that all the Japs had left Tarawa, that we were in for another Kiska. The idea fairly obsessed me. I should have slept, but I did not. Instead, I leaned over every half hour, reached for a cigarette and hoped that my lighting it did not wake up my roommates, I need not have worried. When we were called at ten minutes before midnight, we all observed that we had been as wide-awake as a two-months-old baby yelling for his six-o’clock bottle. That is, all except the red-headed boy from Athens, Texas, Marine Gunner Stogner, who had already broken all records for sleeping. For the rest of us the excitement of possibly landing in the face of hostile enemy fire was too much. We all half believed, and I nine-tenths believed, that the Japs would be gone. But there was the possibility....

  THE FIRST DAY

  WE JUMPED OUT of bed at midnight, swimming in sweat. We donned our dungarees and headed for the wardroom. Nobody took more than fifteen minutes to eat his steak, eggs, and fried potatoes and drink his two cups of coffee, but everybody was soaking before he had finished. This was the hottest night of all. Before we filed out, gasping, there was an oversupply of the rumors that attend every battle: one of our cruisers had sunk a Jap surface craft (though not until seventy-seven six-inch shells had been fired, and an accompanying destroyer had let go two torpedoes); one of our ships had been attacked by a Japanese bomber during the night; a searchlight off Betio had already tried to spot our force.