by War;Bluegrass If Trouble Don't Kill Me: A Family's Story of Brotherhood
“Jesus!” he hollered. “You saved my life!”
Clayton didn’t say a word. Jones sputtered words in adrenaline-fueled bursts.
“You killed him! You just saved my life! I’m gonna remember you in my prayers tonight, good buddy!”
“Thank you,” Clayton finally said. “I’m gonna need it.”
• • •
Forward, and now upward, the men of F Company moved, but when the Japanese weren’t shelling the hell out of them, they were pitching grenades into their foxholes. Then came a roar from the heavens like nothing they had ever heard.
They were shells, enormous shells larger than anything that had ever been launched against them. The first one shook the ground with the violence of an earthquake when it hit and left a crater that would have swallowed a pair of tanks. Men wondered if those navy bastards were shelling them with their big guns by mistake. No, the barrage was coming from the hills directly in front.
They were 320 mm mortars, mammoth projectiles five feet long and more than a foot wide. These flying “boxcars” were terrifying, but the men soon learned that the shells buried themselves too deeply into the ground to cause much peripheral damage—a direct hit was its only effective strike. They also traveled relatively slowly through the air, allowing a man a chance to flee their impact (unless they were fired at night). Still, the concussion threw rocks and dirt clods and rattled the bones of every man and beast. Lizards as long as your arm flopped into foxholes to escape the earth-shaking pounding. Men wigged out and fled their holes, running and screaming that they couldn’t take it anymore. Those who stayed prayed there wasn’t a boxcar up there with their names on it. The collective psyche of F Company was near the breaking point. Just when things looked bleakest, it started to rain. Shrouded in ponchos and drowning in the merciless fire that flowed from a rocky peak, the men stared into the abyss. Then they learned President Roosevelt was dead.
Clayton was hunkered down in a muddy foxhole when word got to him. All the men were shocked at the news. Most had maintained their faith in Roosevelt’s leadership; some were doubters, but few were as enthusiastic about Truman. Clayton thought that Truman was a dud. But what did it matter who was president? They were the ones in the foxholes. They were about to do the hard work again.
• • •
Clayton’s C rations came with four cigarettes, which he smoked in succession to calm his nerves. On April 19, 1945, F Company and the rest of the battalion abandoned their foxholes beneath protective mortar fire: “The Big Push” was on. The Japanese had to be knocked off those hilltops if the operation was to succeed. Clayton was on the killing sides of those hills that day. Whether he killed a man with his bare hands or with a bayonet in the bloody foxholes near Tanabaru I cannot say. But I can tell you what he told me years later:
One side of the bayonet cuts, under the bottom. It’s got a point out here. We had that point so sharp on our bayonets you could drag your finger across and it would cut your finger. We was gonna be sure that when we hit a Jap with a bayonet it went in him. What I didn’t realize was how much trouble it was to get it out. When you’d stick one with a bayonet and go on in him, you know, you can drag that scutter. When you go to try and pull that bayonet out, you can drag him. You can drag that Jap with it. It creates a suction. We learned quick as we hit ’em with a bayonet, we hit ’em with a foot kick, too. Kick ’em off.
Listening to Papa Clayton, whom I knew as a country preacher / hillbilly singer / cornpone comedian extraordinaire, give advice on how to properly extract a bayonet from another human being gave me a healthy dose of uncomfortable, “wish-I-didn’t-know-that” reality. It was sort of like finding out that your wife is actually a man. Did I really know this guy? (I’m talking about my grandpa.) It’s easy to lull yourself into believing that your grandpappy wasn’t the type of guy to kill a person, that all the killing was done by the other guys, and your pawpaw merely ran bravely across the fields of fire and liberated oppressed people and marched in victory parades and lived happily ever after, when the truth is that he knew how to kick a man off a bayonet. There’s only one way you know something like that.
• • •
F Company took its hills after close fighting that included killing with those bloody bayonets. For their work, the men were taken off the front line and rewarded with ten days of sports and music. The division band traded M1s for clarinets and trumpets and played fourteen shows. Soldiers played baseball and volleyball during the day and relaxed at night with a movie—if you can call watching a movie that is interrupted by nine air-raid sirens relaxing.
The newsreels were entertaining, although not quite the same way. The men got a real kick out of the film clips from Europe, which showed soldiers dancing with fräuleins, staying at lovely chateaus, and skiing. Clayton and his buddies could only cuss under their breath. He looked for Saford in those newsreels.
To top it all off, when the announcement came on May 8, 1945, that war in Europe had ended, the men of F Company were strapping on their packs and heading back to the front.
“Good,” the men said. “Now maybe they’ll send some of those bastards over here and help us. They need to see what real fighting is like.”
And that’s how F Company celebrated V-E Day. Instead of riding victory parade floats, the Deadeyes trudged grimly down roads of ankle-deep mud toward the sound of artillery, passing the bloated, maggot-ridden corpses of Japanese soldiers along the way.
• • •
It seems cruel—if not downright sadistic—to spoil a guy with a week’s worth of hot chow, ball games, love letters, movies, band concerts, and showers, then turn around and truck him right back into a combat zone. Talk about a shock to the system. Then again, maybe that’s the only way to get him to fight. Give him a taste of what he’s been missing. Let him remember the way of life he’s trying to preserve. Remind him of his loved ones, the ones who miss him terribly and desperately long for him to come home in one piece. And let him know in very specific terms that the only way he will ever get back to the life he once knew is if he chases those lousy, stinking, goddamned Japs off those rocks and helps win this war.
F Company was one of the outfits charged with cracking the Naha-Shuri Line, a seemingly impenetrable bastion of Japanese defenses fortified by hidden caves and heavy artillery. The men reached the top of Dick Hill but were stopped by grenade-tossing Japanese on the reverse slope. They dug in for the night and responded grenade for grenade. Clayton covered his foxhole with his poncho and staked all four corners to the ground. The cover served two purposes: the poncho kept him dry, and grenades bounced off it.
As the battle of Okinawa completed its second month, American casualties of a different sort were piling up: the “nonbattle casualty.” Infantrymen suffering from “combat fatigue” (or battle fatigue, shell shock, neuropsychiatric fatigue, or any other term the military used before posttraumatic stress disorder came into vogue) numbered 7,762 on Okinawa, according to the army’s later studies. Strong men crumbled beneath battlefield stress. One F Company soldier cracked from the strain and ran from his foxhole toward the Japanese line, screaming and firing a machine gun before he was shot dead. Another man ran crying in the opposite direction, back to camp.
The number of combat fatigue cases was significantly higher on Okinawa than anywhere else in the Pacific, and there was a reason for that: all the goddamned shelling.
The Japanese had saved it all up for Okinawa. On other islands, they had fended off invaders with 105 mm mortars, which caused little physical or psychological damage. Here, though, the shells were two and three times larger, and there seemed to be a bottomless supply. Heavy artillery exploded constantly around the Deadeyes. Men lay in foxholes like living corpses in graves and took everything the Japanese threw at them, suffering the kinds of wounds that would hurt worse in years to come, the psychological kind for which the army doesn’t hand out medals.
Another day, another hill to take. Hen Hill should have driven
them all insane. F Company was repeatedly driven back by rifle fire, grenades, and mortars. A steady rain fell that night and didn’t stop. No one moved a muscle for three days, until Clayton’s platoon attempted to take Hen. They didn’t make it. Clayton got almost to the top of the hill, so close to the top he could have dug a tunnel to the other side and shook hands with the enemy, but he was greeted with bullets and grenades. The men scampered back down and dug holes in the mud where they would remain for five more days, while grenades fell with the rain.
By now, F Company was a patchwork of war-torn veterans and green replacements. One of the new guys was a Tennessee kid named Raymond Jenkins, who ended up sharing some foxhole time with Clayton. Jenkins was young, eager, and understandably nervous. The grizzled veteran didn’t have much to say—old guys didn’t cozy up to the replacements. Their instructions to the green guys were simple: Keep your mouth shut and your eyes open, and, above all, don’t foul up and get me killed.
But Jenkins was OK. He was a country boy who loved hillbilly music, and he reminded Clayton of other boys from the hills. Clayton still talked to Boone and Humphries, his buddies since Oregon, even though they were dug in with other guys. During those miserable days wallowing in the mud at the bottom of Hen Hill, the men talked about what they were going to do once this war was over. Boone had a grand plan. He was going to be a radiator repair man back home in North Carolina. Humphries wanted to get back to his wife, the girl he had married on furlough after his first choice had married somebody else.
Clayton, well, his prospects didn’t look so hot. His banjo-playing gig was in jeopardy, considering that his boss had been killed in a car wreck. Maybe he and Saford could form a group of their own, just like in the old days, when they were country boys primed for the big time. They could lead their own group, make records, get rich, and have any girl they wanted. He could hear the crowds, the applause.…
Well, enough of that. The rain let up. The order had come for Clayton’s platoon to take the hill. Armed with rifles, grenades, and satchel charges, the platoon moved up the muddy slope. The men were near the top when enemy snipers opened up. The other platoons picked off the snipers as Clayton’s group continued its advance. Grenades from the other side halted them momentarily, and more bullets zipped above their heads, but they pressed on to the top. Just before reaching the peak, the platoon lobbed several grenades toward the enemy positions. Unlike the Japanese tosses, the American grenades found their marks and forced the Japanese to leave exposed trenches and seek refuge in their caves and pillboxes. Battle-hardened and tested during too many combat actions to remember, Clayton went over the top.
A slithering line of men crashed over the hill like an ocean wave, washing down the other side and hitting the enemy with grenades and satchel charges. Fighting broke out across the entire ridgeline, as elements of different companies hurled themselves at the enemy. Now would have been the perfect time for the Japanese to surrender. The Deadeyes had heard rumors of enemy surrender—it sounded like it happened all the time in Europe, where entire companies of Germans threw up their hands and were afforded the comforts of American custody. Hot chow, showers, warm clothes, maybe even an all-expenses-paid trip to the States where they would serve their imprisonment picking apples in Virginia orchards. All of this awaited the Japanese, if only they’d just surrender.
Instead, they retreated to their caves and pillboxes and made a final stand. They would inflict as much carnage on the invading Americans as possible. When they could kill no more enemies, they would kill themselves—and anyone around them—by holding grenades to their chests, a “poor man’s hara-kiri,” the Americans called it. The military rulers of imperial Japan had taught their soldiers that death was preferable to surrender. The Japanese army did not even bother to set up medical stations for their wounded. Those not well enough to fight would commit suicide. The Americans, they said, were dogs, barbarians who executed prisoners, murdered innocent civilians, and raped women. Even the citizens of Okinawa had been instructed to kill themselves and their families rather than become the slaves of the savage Americans.
The Americans obliged their enemies’ desire to die on the battlefield. They killed the Japanese that had not made it back to the caves. They sealed others inside pillbox tombs with explosives. The ones who escaped and fled down the hill were cut down like rye stalks. If the Japanese expected savagery, the Americans would not disappoint. One man from G Company, Clarence Craft of Santa Ana, California, single-handedly killed thirty Japanese and was awarded the Medal of Honor.
And when the killing was over, the Americans did what all brave, honorable, decent soldiers had done throughout the Pacific war: They scavenged the carcasses for souvenirs. Men raced one another to be first to reach piles of dead Japanese, where they took flags and hand-stitched scarves from the waists of the dead. They disarmed corpses of their weapons, their firearms, their sabers. They relieved them of jewelry, the precious family heirlooms that had been given to war-going sons for luck. The scavenging became fuel for the imperial government’s propaganda machine, which desperately needed to churn out new recruits for the futile Japanese cause. All over Japan, women, children, and old men learned to handle ancient weapons such as pikes and spears, and some even learned how to detonate explosives. They would be ready for those American dogs.
Clayton was not above looting the dead. He came away with a Japanese sword, a few medals, and some other trinkets that he kept in his duffel bag back at base camp. Lifting a few novelties off dead men who had tried to kill him seemed a minor sin compared with the butchery he had witnessed and carried out.
One day while on patrol, Clayton smelled a rank odor of decaying flesh. He looked around and saw no dead Japs—a rarity on an island where bloated corpses were more plentiful than fieldstones. (There was a story about a poor American greenhorn who had slipped and slid face-first down a muddy hill, and when he stopped at the bottom he discovered his pockets had scooped up pounds of maggots.) But the odor Clayton smelled emanated from the guy in front of him. When Clayton asked him what stunk so bad, the fellow took off his pack and pulled out his collection of gold-capped Japanese teeth, flesh and bone still attached, that he had carved out of the mouths of dead men.
• • •
As the Deadeyes prepared to deliver the mortal blow to the Japanese, the division had been fighting with little rest for more than two months. The men were the embodiment of misery—wet, wounded, tense, and constantly under siege. Their once ruddy visages had melted into classic dogfaces—unshaven, baggy-eyed, deep-lined, and weary. But it wasn’t over yet. One more ridgeline loomed. They were beginning to learn that there were twice as many enemy troops as had been estimated when the battle began.
Two steep escarpments bookended a mass of hills near Okinawa’s narrow southern tip. F Company would attack a peak called Yuza-Dake, a two-hundred-foot slope of coral that crouched like a boxer on the western flank of hills. To the east was the taller Yaeju-Dake escarpment, which would be left for the Seventh Infantry Division. The two peaks and connecting hills formed a natural saddle-shaped wall for the Japanese defenses, which numbered more than thirty-thousand. This was the final line that had to be cracked. Once it was rubbed out, nothing would hold the Americans back.
The first men to the top were fired upon by snipers. The rest of the company made it to the top without a scratch. The plateau was narrow, green, and adorned with a few trees. The company moved west to leave room for the rest of the battalion to complete its ascent. The men had only gone about fifty yards when all hell broke loose again.
• • •
Clayton never had many buddies in the army, which was probably a good thing, considering how many of those buddies died.
Surely, he had more friends in the service than he remembered as an old, ailing man. With just a month to live, though, he mentioned only three: Humphries, Jones, and Boone. They were all killed on Okinawa.
Humphries got it first. The slow-talking Ozark rid
ge runner was killed in a hail of bullets that met the company as it moved on the escarpment. Boone, Clayton’s trusted buddy from North Carolina who remembered the Roy Hall band on WBIG and who wanted to be a radiator mechanic, was killed later on patrol. Jones died either from a sniper’s bullet or artillery. Clayton could not remember, nearly six decades later. He just knew they were all dead.
F Company was under new leadership during this mission. Cledith Bourdeau had Captain Barron’s old job as company commander. Bourdeau, a dark-headed, handsome Californian with a dazzling smile, had come over from first Battalion. Clayton’s platoon had a new leader, as well, first Lieutenant Donald Seibert, a young replacement with no combat experience who had joined the company in the midst of the Okinawa battle. Clayton had his doubts about Seibert. Why wouldn’t he? The platoon had cycled through nameless lieutenants who all seemed to crumble when the shooting started. Now, here comes a guy from the States who thinks he can lead a platoon of men who’ve been on the front line in two major battles.
Seibert, however, turned out to be a hell of a leader. He led the company to the top of the Yuza escarpment, where they were stopped behind an earthen berm by murderous sniper fire. Clayton saw a radio operator take a bullet between the eyes. It seemed that every foot of this hellhole would require a soldier’s sacrifice.
Seibert hollered, “Let’s move out!” Clayton and the others started to climb over the berm and were immediately soaked with fire: machine guns, rifles, small arms—the Japs hit them with everything, maybe even a rock or two. Seibert ordered the men back over the wall to safety.