Bones of My Grandfather

by Clay Bonnyman Evans

  Placed on bed rest for a week, he began treatment with quinine sulphate and Atabrine. The latter was despised by the troops, not just because it turned their skin a waxy yellow, but also because it was rumored to cause what former US Senator Bob Dole would one day call “erectile dysfunction.”

  Released under treatment, Sandy was back at the doctor’s office on June 16, battling a fever of 102 degrees, and was readmitted to the hospital. He weighed just 157 pounds, having lost 41 pounds since his first marine physical. The next month was better, but after hard maneuvers he was in the hospital again on July 31, this time with a 105-degree temperature. All told, he spent more than thirty days in the hospital or on bed rest, but when he was discharged on August 7 the disease had finally run its course.

  “I have gotten back some of my pep and zeal,” he wrote to Jo. “We have been working hard and my appetite is like a horse’s so that I look like ‘Porky Pig.’”26

  Sandy Bonnyman was widely admired by his men, not just for earning his lieutenant’s bars the hard way. He was daring, competent, hard working, even keeled, and generous, going so far as to share his officer’s whiskey rations with his men.27

  “No matter what happened and we did have some rough times, on maneuvers, landing exercises, troop movements, etc. Sandy would never lose his temper or his perspective,” Tracy Griswold recalled. “He was always very even tempered, and could always see the humorous side of any situation, no matter how tense it seemed at the moment.”28

  Sandy genuinely enjoyed the company of the men in his command, seeing in each a unique character. His three-page homage to the men he commanded on Guadalcanal reads like a character sketch for a Hollywood war epic:

  “There were the Bird brothers from La. (the swamp country) . . . neither yet 20 and they have three more brothers in uniform; ‘Tommy’ Thompson from Mississippi is the wit of the company; Two Spanish boys, Vaca and Vasquez, always quiet, never hurrying but always working and both with [skills] that must be inherited from their Conquistador ancestors; Raw-boned lanky Doug had been a miner and a cowboy from Montana [who] drove the truck and got us through mud that no one else could; ‘Hillbilly’ Austin sometimes known as ‘Governor’ because he wants to be governor of Tennessee; Entwhistle (yes that is his name) is the faithful sheep dog of the outfit, the one to catch the little uninteresting routine jobs and who does them uncomplainingly; My right arm . . . is Henry Watson from near Brownsville, Texas (who) left a fine job with the telephone company to join the Marines . . . I have yet to find anything he can’t do and do well; There were others who worked for us and all of them good men who stuck to the job day in and day out in spite of heat, wind, insects, timber rash, hard work and three Jap snipers.”29

  Having spent time as an enlisted man, Sandy was a tough but fair officer, recalled Victor Ornelas. Victor volunteered for the marines as a teenager after the Army told him he was too young, arriving at Camp Pendleton in September 1942. He and Sandy both sailed aboard the Matsonia for New Zealand in October, but they didn’t meet until they pulled KP duty at the same time in Wellington. Victor spent the next week being entertained by the tall Tennessean’s wild and woolly tales life in exotic New Mexico.

  Months later, Victor was driving a jeep loaded with ammunition on Guadalcanal when he accidentally ran over a wire fence, which dragged behind him just as he passed a group of officers. One yelled for him to stop.

  “‘Hey, you son of a so-and-so, stop! You’re pulling up all that wire!’” Victor recalled. “I stopped and turned around to see who in the heck it was, figuring the worst he could do was bust me to a civilian. Well, who do I see coming up but your grandfather? He’d gotten his commission as a second lieutenant. I think he was really going to tear my head off, but when he saw it was me, he just gave me a smile and said, ‘Don’t do it again!’”30

  Sandy also befriended Father William O’Neill, a Navy chaplain who would help oversee burial of the dead on Tarawa and return after the war to search for their graves. Sandy not only received communion from “the Padre,” but also joked with him about their mutual acquaintance, New York Archbishop Francis Spellman, prelate for all Navy chaplains. The Southern rebel and the rugged priest, both fearless and eager for action, would themselves have made a pretty good duo in a war movie.

  “When the Padre wasn’t up in the front he was charging all over the muddy Guadalcanal roads in a truck with no windshield top or brakes on it,” Sandy wrote. “He would drive from the front ten and twelve miles so that the boys in the rear areas could go to Mass.”31

  With the same theatrical flair that had so entertained his sisters when he was a boy, Sandy also regaled his men with tales about life in the rugged west, fishing and hunting expeditions, and his drinking exploits.32

  My grandfather seldom passed up a chance to play games of chance, whether Acey-Deucy—a variant of backgammon—or poker, until long after midnight. On the decks of the USS Heywood the night before landing on Tarawa, he famously refused to accept payment for a $10 drinking debt incurred by Capt. Joseph Clerou, joking that if the captain were killed, he’d be happy to accept his brand-new combat boots as payment.33

  Somehow, he always seemed to balance such easy camaraderie and playful spirit with his role as a leader and his deep understanding of the war’s gravity.

  “I found him a man of rare intelligence, understanding and compassion,” wrote Richard W. Johnston, a United Press International correspondent who received a Marine Corps commendation for bravery on Tarawa. “He seemed to me one of the relatively few Americans in the Pacific war who fully comprehended the meaning of the war and the meaning of his own country.”34

  In light of his accomplishments and the widespread respect of both officers and enlisted men, it was no surprise when Sandy Bonnyman was appointed to the rank of first lieutenant in the US Marine Corps Reserve on September 1, 1943. It had been fourteen months since he’d arrived at boot camp as a buck private.

  ELEVEN

  BITTER PILLS

  1942–1943

  The deeper I delved into my grandfather’s past, the more I realized how completely whitewashed his life had become since his death. Google “Bonnyman,” and the Wikipedia article about Sandy always pops up on top. The information there isn’t exactly wrong, but it’s so shallow that it’s closer to meme than man. Peering into shadows my family didn’t even know existed, I was slowly chipping the plaster from St. Sandy. I’d always admired my grandfather, but only now was I beginning to mourn him.

  The Second Marine Division had a long break from combat between Guadalcanal and Tarawa, in part because most of New Zealand’s defense forces had been shipped off to fight in the Africa campaign.

  But there was plenty to do, as men trained to operate new medium Sherman tanks, engineers refined the flame-throwing skills they’d first tested on Guadalcanal, and all worked hard to stay in fighting trim. Finally on September 15, 1943, the division was attached to the Fifth Amphibious Corps, a harbinger that they would soon be in action again.1 They just didn’t know where.

  Plans to take Tarawa back from the Japanese had been brewing in earnest since March. Even before the fight for Guadalcanal had been wrapped up, marine and navy commanders were pondering next moves in the Central Pacific. With the Caroline and Marshall islands too far from ground-based bombers stationed in the Ellice Islands, the airfield at Tarawa soon became the next logical step in the island-hopping campaign.2

  Commanders believed an assault on Betio would be a relatively painless way to achieve several goals, including capturing an airfield that would be able to provide critical support for successive campaigns and eliminating a potential threat to crucial shipping lanes between Hawaii and Australia. Just as important—maybe even more so—the marines had been looking for a laboratory to test men, equipment, tactics, and strategy in a full-scale amphibious assault on a heavily defended beachhead. Moving north toward the Japanese home islands via a series of enemy-held atolls and islands would be all but impossible without am
phibious capabilities, and Tarawa was to be a kind of a laboratory.

  By mid-October, the second interlude in New Zealand finally came to an end. Marines began boarding sixteen transport ships in Wellington Harbour, informed that they were going to conduct exercises at Hawkes Bay on New Zealand’s northern tip. But that was a ruse intended to foil Japanese spies, as well as prevent marines going AWOL to remain with brides or girlfriends. In fact, they were headed to Mele Bay on the island of Efate in the French-British administered New Hebrides islands some 1,800 miles to the north, where they would begin practicing amphibious landing.

  Sandy boarded the Heywood on October 13, along with the rest of the 2nd Battalion, 18th Marines (or 2/18) Pioneers, which had been attached to Maj. Henry P. “Jungle Jim” Crowe’s 2/8. Built in 1919, the Heywood had sailed between San Francisco and New York as the City of Baltimore for Panama Pacific Lines before being acquired by the Navy in 1940. A massive convoy finally departed November 1. Most of the men would never see New Zealand again.

  “Along the rails the Marines watched Wellington, warm and gray and soft with remembered delights, slowly drop astern,” wrote journalist Johnston, who stood beside them. “And in many of the homes on Wellington’s steep hills, moist-eyed girls waved unseen farewells.”3

  Despite his enviable record of achievement in just over a year as a marine, the war’s seesaw between action and sheer boredom had taken its toll on my grandfather. He missed his wife, children, and mother, and his old domestic life now didn’t look so bad.

  “I would never make a peace-time soldier . . . I have great respect for the discipline and thoroughness of the Marine Corps methods, but it is definitely a grind and of a great sameness,” he wrote. “In action it is all different, one has to deal with the unexpected and things move along fast so it is easier to forget how terribly lonely you really are, lonely even when you can’t turn around without bumping into a Marine.”4

  Despite all appearances of success in business and the military, Sandy felt burdened by life and feared how he would be affected by the war.

  “I have had to (at least in my own mind) swallow a lot of bitter pills in my thirty-three years. I guess in a way these things, these uncertainties, these disappointments have hardened me,” he confided to Jo. “My recent life has not been one to soften up a person and the eventual results I often wonder about. I do believe Jo that no matter what turns up now I can keep my sense of values. I hope so.”5

  His regrets were many, from struggles with his father to his sometimes-volatile marriage. But he remained a devoted son, husband, and father, writing letters home almost weekly. Though stiffly formal when addressing both his parents as “Father and Mother,” his frequent letters to his beloved Mumsie were relaxed and warmly conspiratorial.

  Alex Bonnyman struggled with his talented son’s rebellious, reckless streak. But Frances almost seemed to live vicariously through Sandy’s high-spirited embrace of life and refusal to live according to anyone else’s expectations. My great-grandmother was herself a non-conformist who scandalized neighbors by inviting poor families to have lunch at posh Bonniefield and attending services at a neighboring synagogue to the outrage of a sniffy local Protestant minister. She not only let her son have his head, but also constantly assured him she was on his side; she even promised to help him buy the horse farm in Kentucky he dreamed of when the war was over.6

  Though work at the mine had kept him away from his daughters before the war, Sandy now desperately missed them. His letters to the girls were mostly cheery and chatty, emphasizing school, Catechism, helping their mother, and physical fitness. But with Fran, the only one old enough to read, he could be more vulnerable: “Daddy is expecting his big girl to look after everything while he is gone”; “I hope Alix doesn’t forget her real Dada by the time I get home”; “I thought of you when I went to Mass this morning Baby and realized how much I would have loved taking you to Easter Mass at the Cathedral.”7

  Sandy’s letters to his wife were full of love and longing, liberally sprinkled with terms of endearment—Baby; my dearest Darling; my favorite gal. Alas, my grandmother was not the best correspondent. “Mail call has not been good to me lately, Jo,” Sandy wrote a few weeks before his death, noting that he had not received a letter from her since summer.8

  His mother had been writing since the spring that Jo was “distracted” and paying little attention to the girls. He seemed to know all was not well in Santa Fe and understood that that his business partner and erstwhile best friend, Jimmie Russell, was the cause of the trouble. But rather than fume or rage, he and his mother devised a plan, by letter, to lure Jo away from Russell. In June, without judgment, Sandy began urging her to leave the house on East Garcia Street and move in with the Bonnymans in Knoxville for the duration of the war, so she would have more help and “the Babies” would be “one hundred percent on the playlist. . . . I honestly believe you will find the move very constructive too.”9

  My Granny Great had always loved Jo, treating her with kindness even as she recognized her deep insecurities. It was with politely controlled fury that she wrote “My Dearest Jimmie” warning him not to take advantage of Jo’s vulnerability.

  “While my son is on the other side of the world, having been sent by his Country to kill the betraying little yellow men, do you find what you are doing akin to betrayal? Whatever his shortcomings & faults may be, he, his brand of honor would never permit him to do the thing that you are doing,” she wrote. “You are among those fortunate young Americans who will never know the horrors of this war & who can enjoy in security the peace and plenty of our beloved land. For this you must be very grateful. Could you not in your blessed security make a little sacrifice and let Jo alone while her husband is far away defending this very security? She could then go her way, coordinate her life, put out the Confusion you have brought into it, settle down and give a mother’s thought and care to the little children who need it so profoundly.”10

  Sandy’s campaign may have given Jo courage to end the affair. In June she left the girls in Tennessee as usual, but when she returned in August she informed them that they weren’t going back to Santa Fe. The girls, and the Bonnymans, were thrilled.

  But the plan to stay in Knoxville didn’t last long. Jo spent the next couple of months in Florida with baby Alix and her nurse Rosa Dee while Fran attended school in Knoxville and Tina was cared for at Bonniefield. But in November, Jo retrieved Fran and took her to live at Mooney Cottages in Fort Lauderdale, leaving frail Tina behind.

  Though Jo’s attempted geographic cure had seemingly ended her affair with Jimmie Russell, it didn’t quiet her gnawing neediness, and she began bringing sailors and soldiers home “to entertain” while living in Florida.11 Her tragic anxiety about living life without a man beside her would continue to shatter lives for decades to come.

  Trouble had also been brewing with The Guadalupe Mining Company. The copper mine had made Sandy Bonnyman a wealthy man, but troubles were already bubbling to the surface before he had finished training in California.

  Despite enthusiastic reports from Jo—whom Russell had appointed as his bookkeeper despite her lack of experience—the operation was grinding to a halt. The heirs of I.J. Stauber, who owned the property leased by my grandfather, were dissatisfied with ten percent of declining profits and were clamoring to sell off the land, and one thousand tons of low-grade ore was sitting unsold because the market had collapsed.12 In October, Sandy arranged to begin providing Jo’s income from one of his New York bank accounts because receipts from the mine were no longer adequate.13

  And despite nearly four years of impressive profits, Sandy had never started repaying his $5,000 loan from the Blue Diamond Investment Company. Russell finally made the first payment of $1,000, on July 1, 1942,14 but the mine shut down in December and he stopped paying on the debt. Not long after, Frances Bonnyman quietly retired her son’s debt, which amounted to about $56,000 in today’s dollars.

  “Mumsie,” Sandy wrote
from New Zealand, “paying off my Blue Diamond note was the most wonderful thing for you to do.”15

  And there was one bitter pill that Sandy never revealed to his family. On July 23, 1943, he was arrested in Wellington for “rendering himself unfit for duty by excessive use of intoxicants.” In punishment, he was immediately suspended from all duties and confined to quarters from July 27 to July 31.16

  The arrest clearly had a sobering effect on my grandfather, and he had begun to see his alcoholic excesses in a new light. “It is amazing,” he mused, “what extremes one goes to in this life to fool himself into thinking that he is having a wonderful time.”17

  The Marine Corps treated the incident as a minor blip on the record of an otherwise excellent officer, but it would taint my grandfather’s legacy long after death.

  The marines of the Second Division had no idea where they were headed on November 8 when they arrived at Mele Bay. But almost from the moment they anchored, they were practicing assaults on the beach with Higgins boats—wood-bottomed transport vehicles used in World War I—rubber rafts and oars, and seventy-five brand-new “landing vehicles, tracked,” or LVT-1 amphibious tractors (aka amtracs), dubbed Alligators. Unfortunately, a shipment of new, rubber-wheeled LVT-2 tractors, known as Water Buffaloes, which had been specially adapted for use in Pacific combat, arrived late in the game, leaving the marines without an opportunity to try them out in the water.18 Gen. Julian C. Smith, commander of the Second Marine Division, was unhappy with the results of his marines’ first practice landings and ordered them onto the beaches over and over until there was simply no time left.

  One pivotal development at Efate would greatly influence the coming invasion of Tarawa: Smith replaced Col. William M. Marshall with thirty-nine-year-old Col. David M. Shoup as commander of the 2nd Marine Regiment.19 Though twenty years younger than Marshall, Smith and other officers felt more confident in his ability to command.