The Pacific

by Hugh Ambrose

  Bombing Six had lost a lot of its veterans to reassignments. Lieutenant Ray Davis, the new skipper, had flown with a Hornet squadron at Midway. None of the dive-bombers off Hornet had sighted the enemy's carriers. Davis reviewed the files of his new men before interviewing them. In Ensign Micheel's personnel file, Scouting Six's skipper, Gallaher, had described him as "an enthusiastic and industrious young officer." For his service during the Battle of Midway, Lieutenant Gallaher had recommended that Ensign Vernon Micheel receive the Distinguished Flying Cross. Recommendations did not come stronger than that. When Lieutenant Davis asked Micheel in his interview to name his preferred duty, Mike said he wanted to continue to serve aboard a carrier in the Pacific. His voice was calm, his eyes steady. Ray saw something he liked in the blond- haired, blue-eyed ensign and designated him the squadron's flight officer. The administrative job, to be performed in addition to flight duties, did not mean as much to Mike as Ray's attitude. As Bombing Six began its regime of practice at NAS Kaneohe, Ensign Micheel discovered he was "one of the fellas."

  SHIELDED FROM THE SUN AND ABLE TO GET ENOUGH CLEAN WATER, THE POWS in Bilibid Prison stopped suffering. They noticed their prison held men who had been incarcerated before the war as prominent Filipinos loyal to the United States. Bilibid also held anyone who was white, since the Japanese assumed Caucasians must be either American or British. One of the cells contained a German. He spoke English well enough to tell all of them of his devotion to the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler. The Americans took to calling him Heine. For lack of something better to do, Shofner and his friends began to needle Heine, whose wonderful country had an alliance with the empire. "All you have to do is go see the Japanese commander and he would release you. After all, you are an ally of the Japs and you shouldn't be in here with us. You should be getting the royal treatment." Heine agreed and demanded to see the commandant, the prison warden, or whoever ran the prison. He came back bruised and beaten. He had no identification or proof, but that had not been the issue. The guards had not cared.

  Heine could not understand why his country had allied with such an ignorant people. True Germans should have nothing to do with them. Shofner could not resist. "You saw the wrong man," he said. Heine demurred. But the prisoners had nothing but time in the jail and Captain Shofner was losing at poker, so he pressed on. "Heine, it's up to you to clear this matter up. You should go up and explain it again . . . the interpreter fouled it up some way . . ." Shifty and others amused themselves by egging him on. At last Heine's pride got the better of him and he went again. He returned bloodied once more, much to the amusement of all.

  The guards came for the Filipinos first. A few days later, they selected a group of senior officers and took them away. Soon, the guards loaded a group of a few hundred men onto trucks every few days. Shofner, who was keeping a journal, knew that it was June 26 when he and about two hundred other prisoners bid Heine farewell. Many of the men were too weak to climb onto the trucks. They were driven to the Manila railroad station and loaded into steel railway boxcars. The guards crammed them in, approximately eighty men to each car, until there was not enough room for all the men to sit down. So the prisoners took turns standing and sitting. Those who sat had to sit between each other's legs. Six hours later, they arrived at a small station, where they boarded trucks. It turned out to be a short drive to Prisoner of War Camp Number One, Cabanatuan.31

  The wall of barbed wire, interspersed with guard towers, stretched away in either direction across a great open plain. After entering the main gate, Shofner and the other new prisoners were searched. His camera and his compass were taken by the camp officials. A guard wrote down his name, as if these items would be held for him. He was assigned to one of the three sections of the camp and assigned to a ten-man squad.32 He was told that if any one of the ten men escaped, all the others would be shot. They called this a "shooting squad."

  Once inside the fence, Austin Shofner and the other new men met a few former officers, who tried to keep track of the men and were interested in any news from outside the camp. The new men, however, had the most to learn. The central fact of their new existence had been expressed many times by the guards: "No Geneva Convention!"33

  Approaching their barracks, the recent arrivals would have noticed the neat row of dead bodies covered in flies. Those who expressed shock were told, "You'll get used to that."34 Men were dying at the rate of forty per day and the guards made burying the bodies difficult. The odor of decay turned their stomachs. The barracks, built of nipa and bamboo, had no lights or running water or mosquito netting.

  Most of the men Shofner met had been in the army, as the camp held some eight thousand soldiers and about two hundred marines and navy personnel. Shofner recoiled at the filthy, haggard men around him. Many were dressed in rags, without shoes. Wounds and infections marked their skin. The camp had a hospital, but it was not much better than the barracks and it was already full.

  These men who filled the camp called themselves the Battlin' Bastards of Bataan. They spent much of their day standing in line to fill their canteens at the spigot or inside the barracks out of the sun. Though the POW camp provided very little to sustain life and almost no medical care for those in need, it was not Cabanatuan that had brought them so low. Holding off the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) on Bataan had demanded everything from them. Four months of it had left them malnourished, diseased, weak. When the battle finally ended, seventy thousand men had been rounded up and ordered to march from the tip of Bataan, Mariveles, up the peninsula to Cabanatuan and similar camps nearby. A lot of men lacked the strength to march seventy miles. A lot of others, denied sufficient water and food along the route, gave out.

  It had become a march of death. The Japanese guards beheaded some. They forced prisoners to kill weaker men and bury them. Americans died by the hundreds and Filipinos by the thousands. When at last the gates of Cabanatuan closed behind them, they soon discovered their captors wanted them to die. The lack of basic sanitation--there were open sewers on the north end of their compound because the Japanese had not built facilities--had given birth to hordes of flies carrying disease. Diarrhea had become common and many could not make it far from the barracks before their bowels released. Without toilet paper, Shofner learned, "paper, rags and leaves were at a premium."

  That evening Shofner took his place in the line outside one of the six galleys serving food in the compound. He received one mess kit of steamed white rice, with about one-half a canteen cup of greenish soup with no substance in it. The rice, he noted, "looked like sweepings from the mill floor." Many of the grains were not husked and the rice "contained much foreign matter . . . like gravel, rat manure, dirt, and rice worms." There was no way for the prisoners to clean it. All a POW could do, as he sat on the bamboo floor with his mess kit, was decide how much to pick out of their food. A few finicky men picked out the rice worms, with their white bodies and black heads. Shofner decided to eat the worms, as most others did, just as he learned to be grateful that he still had a mess kit with which to eat.

  Ready to go to sleep that night, Shofner found a space on the floor of barracks number two. His body touched the bodies of those on either side of him. He pulled from his pack his mosquito netting, noticing that almost half of the men lacked this protection from mosquitoes carrying malaria. Four feet above him was the next deck of sleeping men. In the morning before chow, the prisoners picked up those who had passed away during the night. As usual it took time to get the guards to allow the bodies to be buried outside the gate in a former rice paddy. When they at last granted it, no religious services were allowed, so the chaplains made sure to bless the bodies beforehand.

  Shofner's compound, number two, encompassed a space of seven hundred yards by about five hundred yards. While the guards put enlisted men on work parties, officers were exempt. He played a lot of poker, playing with a wild abandon to prevent "my mind from feeling sorry for myself." He talked his way into becoming in charge of the softball team, w
hich played three times per month. He read anything he could get his hands on. Like all prisoners, he waited for those days when the guards added a camote top, the leafy part of the Philippine sweet potato, or some hard roasting corn to their rice.

  His diet, which had been limited for a long time before he became a prisoner, caught up with him. Shofner's tongue swelled up to twice its normal size. The sores on his lips could only mean one thing. He had scurvy. His mouth felt like the most sensitive part of his body. Chewing became unbearable, so he tried to slide spoonfuls of rice past his tongue--just drop it down his throat without chewing. Left unchecked, scurvy would eventually kill him, if it did not allow some other disease to take him first. During the day, he licked his lips and kept them apart. While he slept, however, the bloody sores on his lips sealed themselves together and he awakened--screaming, half suffocated. He caught his breath, then screamed again at the painful separation.

  Shofner had to find a source of vegetables or fruit. He got himself assigned to working parties outside the camp. He caught sight of a wild lemon tree in the jungle.

  The lemons were as big as grapefruit. When the right moment came, he grabbed some and began to eat quickly. The lemon juice touched his lips and tongue and it was as if he was sucking on a blowtorch. The acid burned everything it touched. He gobbled as many as he could and stuffed a few in his pocket before the guards noticed. Within a week, the skin began to heal.

  ON JULY 15, BOMBING SIX FLEW OUT TO ENTERPRISE, ALREADY UNDER WAY WITH her task force and another force surrounding USS Wasp, sailing south.35 Mike made his twenty-third carrier landing, a total of which he was keeping track, with his new rear seat gunner, Radio Machinist Gail W. Halterman. In the ready room, the skipper told them they were not headed for a raid against enemy bases or to a showdown with carriers. They would support a marine invasion of the Solomon Islands. The pilots of Bombing Six had received no training in how to support a ground assault. Hitting a building or a beach, they agreed, had to be easier than hitting a light cruiser turning hard to starboard at thirty knots. Now an old hand, Mike did not get saddled with many boring ASW missions, but the air group commander ordered an ambitious training schedule for all flight crews.36

  Eleven days later the USS Saratoga's task force joined up, as well as another comprised entirely of cruisers and destroyers. This great fleet, comprising three of America's four carriers, would shepherd a flock of troop transports to the islands of Guadalcanal and Tulagi, on the southeastern end of the chain of islands called the Solomons. First, however, the dive bomber pilots would have a chance to practice their new mission, supporting a ground assault, on July 30, in the Fijis.

  THE BOREDOM OF LIFE ABOARD USS GEORGE F. ELLIOTT FADED. THE OFFICERS ordered live ammunition issued. On the deck the machine gunners loaded their belts and the BAR men loaded their clips. The three- inch deck gun began firing and the concussions made everybody jump. Soon the 20mm AA guns fired some practice rounds at high speed. The next day a submarine was spotted and the convoy went on alert. The destroyers dropped depth charges and someone later said that an oil slick had been sighted. As the marines of the 2/1 contemplated the first action of war they had witnessed, the convoy entered another big storm that made most of them sick.

  When they reached the Fiji Islands, the weather improved. Other convoys joined them and the sight of fifty ships impressed Sid until he saw "three carriers on the horizon at one time." Their great size and distinctive flat shape made them stand out. Elliott approached close enough to a carrier for them to watch the airplanes land on it. "Pretty dangerous," Deacon observed. The next day, July 27, the ships anchored off a small island called Koro, where a practice landing would be held. It took all day to prepare for the next morning. Deacon was appointed acting corporal for #4 gun, so he was told what their boat assignment was. From now on, he would carry a BAR and give orders. Sid took his place as gunner but, for the time being, he still had to carry the base plate.

  Deacon had guard duty in the middle of the night, so he was still groggy when he met Sid and the squad. Before the sun rose, the Higgins boats swung out from their davits and the cargo nets hung over the side. Sid climbed up from the hold carrying his sixty-pound pack and the forty-six-pound base plate of the 81mm mortar. He and the machine gunners, who carried as much weight as he, brayed like mules. On the starboard side aft, the mortar section found the nets leading to their boat. Sid's base plate and other heavy parts were lowered on a line to them. A heavy roll of wire fell into their boat and broke the arm of a fellow in one of the other gun crews. Lieutenant Benson cursed loudly as poor Jontiff was hoisted back aboard.

  The ride in to shore looked good: the ships were shelling the beach, and the carrier planes whizzed overhead and dropped bombs, until a coral reef stopped the Higgins boats well short of the beach. The amtracs crawled over the reef and went ashore, but the boats could not risk being damaged on the eve of the real thing. They quickly got snarled in confusion and eventually roared back out to Elliott. Lieutenant Benson was so angry he made his mortar section keep practicing loading and unloading well into the evening. The next few days went about the same. The marines in Higgins boats could not land, so they entertained themselves by trying to make one another seasick. The marines in the amtracs returned each day bragging about all the wonderful mangoes, coconuts, and bananas they had found onshore.

  On July 30 the ships weighed anchors and got under way. Each man was given a one-page typed letter from the commanding officer of the First Marine Regiment, Colonel Clifton Cates.37 "D-Day and Zero Hour are near," Cates wrote them, "of the first major offensive of Marine Corps units in this war." His message contained no specifics. The marines would make the Japanese pay for their "unwarranted treacherous action" so long as each man gave his utmost. "This is no ordinary war," he concluded, "it is for the right of liberty and freedom," and for the protection of their families. "We have enjoyed the many advantages given to us under our form of government, and, with the help of God, we will guarantee that same liberty and freedom for our loved ones and to the people of America for generations to come."

  The task of briefing the men on the details fell to the junior officers and NCOs. "The japs," they said, had almost completed an airfield "on the Guadalcanal Island." Any planes based at the airfield would control a wide area, including the shipping lanes between the United States and Australia. The 1st Marine Division and its attached units would invade Guadalcanal and a small island twenty miles away called Tulagi. After landing on Red Beach, the First Marines would cross three rivers and hike through swamps and an old coconut plantation to reach the objective. While the First Marines secured the high ground, the Fifth would take the airfield.

  During the next few days, the men prepared themselves for combat. White mosquito nets were issued, so the marines dyed them dark using cans of navy coffee. The ammo carriers for #4 gun took six shells out of their cases and put them into the six pouches of their new canvas assault ponchos. Sitting next to Sid on the forecastle, watching small islands pass, Deacon foresaw two options: death or victory.

  On the afternoon of August 1, the ship went on high alert. A submarine had been spotted. It caused an uproar as the convoy maneuvered and the destroyers went slicing toward the threat. The ship's radar picked up enemy planes and an announcement beginning with the usual "Now hear this . . ." ordered all machine gunners to report with their weapons to the weather deck. As the depth charges shot geysers into the sky around them, marines held their weapons ready and scanned the horizon. The all clear sounded an hour later. The alert had not, however, made them feel heroic. It made them wonder if they were headed for another Bataan. The lush islands Elliott passed occasionally had once looked lonesome. Sid had joked about going ashore and finding Dorothy Lamour, the actress. Now the dots of land looked sinister. At night, the marines could see fires burning. The word was the islands were inhabited by cannibals.

  One of How Company's lieutenants held jungle warfare training on deck. The company's
skipper, Captain Ferguson, told his men that "five thousand japs" had dug themselves into Guadalcanal, an island about sixty miles long and twenty miles wide. He was counting on his mortar section to play a big role on Friday, when they landed. In the convoy around them, someone noticed the carriers had disappeared; the rumor was they had gone to strike Guadalcanal on August 4 to make the landing easier. Every day it got hotter and hotter, until the holds belowdecks were ovens. Deacon chewed his tobacco like it was his last day. On Thursday morning the marines noticed the ships of the convoy had increased speed. Elliott seemed to be making its top speed. No one would tell them why. Everyone in the mortar section acted jumpy, but only one man, Herman, seemed scared to the point of being a danger. That night the 2/1 sat on deck, unable to sleep, and unable to smoke cigarettes. No one could light a match; once dusk had come the word passed that the "smoking lamp was out." The enemy might see it. Deacon prayed for God to be with them.

  THE CAPTAIN OF USS ENTERPRISE DECLARED THE REHEARSALS A SUCCESS, although Ensign Micheel and the dive bombers had not seen hordes of marines racing across Koro Island when they made their runs. One would have thought that was the point. When the convoy set sail for the targets, the troop transports forced the flattops to slow down. As they approached the Solomon Islands, the carriers got out in front of the convoy and increased both the number of scouting flights per day and the fervor with which they were conducted. Briefings in the ready room described the strategic situation.