The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  You developed an attitude of no mercy because they had no mercy on us. It was a no-quarter, savage kind of thing. At Peleliu, it was the first time I was close enough to see one of their faces. This Jap had been hit. One of my buddies was field-stripping him for souvenirs. I must admit it really bothered me, the guys dragging him around like a carcass. I was just horrified. This guy had been a human being. It didn’t take me long to overcome that feeling. A lot of my buddies hit, the fatigue, the stress. After a while, the veneer of civilization wore pretty thin.

  This hatred toward the Japanese was just a natural feeling that developed elementally. Our attitude toward the Japanese was different than the one we had toward the Germans. My brother who was with the Second Infantry Division in the Battle of the Bulge, wounded three times, said when things were hopeless for the Germans, they surrendered. I have heard many guys who fought in Europe who said the Germans were damn good soldiers. We hated the hell of having to fight ’em. When they surrendered, they were guys just like us. With the Japanese, it was not that way. At Peleliu, my company took two prisoners. At Okinawa, we took about five. We had orders not to kill the wounded, to try to take prisoners. If they surrendered, they’d give you information. But the feeling was strong...Some guys you meet say they didn’t kill any wounded. They weren’t up there living like animals, savages.

  Our drill instructor at boot camp would tell us, “You’re not going to Europe, you’re going to the Pacific. Don’t hesitate to fight the Japs dirty. Most Americans, from the time they’re kids, are taught not to hit below the belt. It’s not sportsmanlike. Well, nobody has taught the Japs that, and war ain’t sport. Kick him in the balls before he kicks you in yours.”

  I’ve seen guys shoot Japanese wounded when it really was not necessary and knock gold teeth out of their mouths. Most of them had gold teeth. I remember one time at Peleliu, I thought I’d collect gold teeth. One of my buddies carried a bunch of ’em in a sock. What you did is you took your K-bar [he displays a seven-inch knife], a fighting knife. We all had one because they’d creep into your foxhole at night. We were on Half Moon Hill in Okinawa about ten days. It happened every night.

  The way you extracted gold teeth was by putting the tip of the blade on the tooth of the dead Japanese—I’ve seen guys do it to wounded ones and hit the hilt of the knife to knock the tooth loose. How could American boys do this? If you’re reduced to savagery by a situation, anything’s possible. When Lindbergh made a trip to the Philippines, he was horrified at the way American GIs talked about the Japanese. It was so savage. We were savages.

  When I leaned to make the extraction, as the troops used to say, this navy medic, Doc Castle, God bless his soul, said, “Sledgehammer, what are you doing?” I says, “Doc, I’m gonna get me some gold teeth.” He said [very softly], “You don’t want to do that.” I said, “All the other guys are doin’ it.” He says, “What would your folks think?” I said, “Gosh, my dad is a medical doctor back in Mobile, he might think it’s interesting.” He said, “Well, you might get germs.” I said, “I hadn’t thought of that, doc.” In retrospect, I realized Ken Castle wasn’t worried about germs. He just didn’t want me to take another step toward abandoning all concepts of decency.

  I saw this Jap machine-gunner squattin’ on the ground. One of our Browning automatic riflemen had killed him. Took the top of his skull off. It rained all that night. This Jap gunner didn’t fall over for some reason. He was just sitting upright in front of the machine gun. His arms were down at his sides. His eyes were wide open. It had rained all night and the rain had collected inside of his skull. We were just sittin’ around on our helmets, waiting to be relieved. I noticed this buddy of mine just flippin’ chunks of coral into the skull about three feet away. Every time he’d get one in there, it’d splash. It reminded me of a child throwin’ pebbles into a puddle. It was just so unreal. There was nothing malicious in his action. This was just a mild-mannered kid who was now a twentieth-century savage.

  Once on another patrol, on Okinawa, I saw Mac take great pains to position himself and his carbine near a Japanese corpse. After getting just the right angle, Mac took careful aim and squeezed off a couple of rounds. The dead Japanese lay on his back with his trousers pulled down to his knees. Mac was trying very carefully to blast off the head of the corpse’s penis. He succeeded. As he exulted over his aim, I turned away in disgust. Mac was a decent, clean-cut man.

  We had broken through the Japanese lines at Okinawa. I had a Thompson submachine gun and went in to check this little grass-thatched hut. An old woman was sitting just inside the door. She held out her hands. There was an hourglass figure tattooed on it to show she was Okinawan. She said, “No Nipponese.” She opened her kimono and pointed to this terrible wound in her lower abdomen. You could see gangrene had set in. She didn’t have a chance to survive and was obviously in great pain. She probably had caught it in an exchange of artillery fire or an air strike.

  She very gently reached around, got the muzzle of my tommy gun, and moved it around to her forehead. She motioned with her other hand for me to pull the trigger. I jerked it away and called the medical corpsman: “There’s an old gook woman, got a bad wound.” This is what we called the natives in the Pacific. “Hey, doc, can you do anything?”

  He put a dressing on it and called someone in the rear to evacuate the old woman. We started moving out when we heard a rifle shot ring out. The corpsman and I went into a crouch. That was an M-1, wasn’t it? We knew it was an American rifle. We looked back toward the hut and thought maybe there was a sniper in there and the old woman was acting as a front for him. Well, here comes one of the guys in the company, walking out, checking the safety on his rifle. I said, “Was there a Nip in that hut?” He said, “Naw, it was just an old gook woman. She wanted to be put out of her misery and join her ancestors, I guess. So I obliged her.”

  I just blew my top: “You son of bitch. They didn’t send us out here to kill old women.” He started all these excuses. By that time, a sergeant came over and we told him. We moved on. I don’t know what was ever done about it. He was a nice guy, like the boy next door. He wasn’t just a hot-headed crazy kid. He wanted to join the best. Why one individual would act differently from another, I’ll never know.

  We had all become hardened. We were out there, human beings, the most highly developed form of life on earth, fighting each other like wild animals. We were under constant mortar fire. Our wounded had to be carried two miles through the mud. The dead couldn’t be removed. Dead Japs all around. We’d throw mud over’em and shells would come, blow it off, and blow them apart. The maggots were in the mud like in some corruption or compost pile.

  Did you ever get to know a Japanese soldier?

  One of the few we captured at Okinawa was a Yale graduate. He spoke perfect English, but we never said anything to him. I must be perfectly honest with you, I still have a great deal of feeling about them. The way they fought. The Germans are constantly getting thrown in their face the horrors of nazism. But who reminds the Japanese of what they did to China or what they did to the Filipinos? Periodically, we remember Bataan.

  It always struck me as ironic, the Japanese code of behavior. Flower arranging, music, striving for perfection. And the art of the warrior. Very often, we’d get a photograph off a dead Japanese. Here would be this soldier, sitting in a studio, with a screen behind and a table with a little flower on it. Often he’d be holding a rifle, yet there was always that little vase of flowers.

  We all had different kinds of mania. To me, the most horrible thing was to be under shellfire. You’re absolutely helpless. The damn thing comes in like a freight train and there’s a terrific crash. The ground shakes and all this shrapnel rippin’ through the air.

  I remember one afternoon on Half Moon Hill. The foxhole next to me had two boys in it. The next one to that had three. It was fairly quiet. We heard the shell come screeching over. They were firing it at us like a rifle. The shell passed no more than a foot over my he
ad. Two foxholes down, a guy was sitting on his helmet drinking C-ration hot chocolate. It exploded in his foxhole. I saw this guy, Bill Leyden, go straight up in the air. The other two kids fell over backwards. Dead, of course. The two in the hole next to me were killed instantly.

  Leyden was the only one who survived. Would you believe he gets only partial disability for shrapnel wounds? His record says nothing about concussion. He has seizures regularly. He was blown up in the air! If you don’t call that concussion...The medics were too busy saving lives to fill out records.

  Another kid got his leg blown off. He had been a lumberjack, about twenty-one. He was always telling me how good spruce Christmas trees smelled. He said, “Sledgehammer, you think I’m gonna lose my leg?” If you don’t think that just tore my guts out...My God, there was his field shoe on the stretcher with this stump of his ankle stickin’ out. The stretcher bearers just looked at each other and covered him with his poncho. He was dead.

  It was raining like hell. We were knee-deep in mud. And I thought, What in the hell are we doin’ on this nasty, stinkin’ muddy ridge? What is this all about? You know what I mean? Wasted lives on a muddy slope.

  People talk about Iwo Jima as the most glorious amphibious operation in history. I’ve had Iwo veterans tell me it was more similar to Peleliu than any other battle they read about. What in the hell was glorious about it?

  POSTSCRIPT

  During the next day’s drive to the airport, he reflected further: “My parents taught me the value of history. Both my grandfathers were in the Confederate Army. They didn’t talk about the glory of war. They talked about how terrible it was.

  “During my third day overseas, I thought I should write all this down for my family. In all my reading about the Civil War, I never read about how the troops felt and what it was like from day to day We knew how the generals felt and what they ate.

  “We were told diaries were forbidden, because if we were killed or captured, any diary might give the Japanese information. So I kept little notes, which I slipped into the pages of my Gideon’s New Testament. I kept it in a rubber bag I got off a dead Jap. I committed the casualties to memory. We had more than a hundred percent in Okinawa and almost that many at Peleliu.

  “Any time we made an attack, I recited the Twenty-third Psalm. Snafu Shelton says, ‘I don’t know what it is that got us through. I was doin’ a hell of a lot of cussin’ and Sledgehammer was doin’ a hell of a lot of prayin’. One of those might have done it.’ Some of the survivors never knew I was keepin’ notes: ‘We just thought you were awfully pious.’ Some of the guys were very religious. But some of’em, after a while, got so fatalistic they figured it was nothing but dumb chance anyway.”

  PETER OTA

  I think back to what happened—and sometimes I wonder: Where do I come from?

  He is a fifty-seven-year-old Nisei. His father had come from Okinawa in 1904, his mother from Japan. He’s an accountant. His father had worked on farms and in the coal mines of Mexico. After thirty-seven years building a fruit and vegetable business, he had become a successful and respected merchant in the community. He was a leader in the Japanese Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles.

  On the evening of December 7, 1941, my father was at a wedding. He was dressed in a tuxedo. When the reception was over, the FBI agents were waiting. They rounded up at least a dozen wedding guests and took’em to county jail.

  For a few days we didn’t know what happened. We heard nothing. When we found out, my mother, my sister, and myself went to jail. I can still remember waiting in the lobby. When my father walked through the door, my mother was so humiliated. She didn’t say anything. She cried. He was in prisoner’s clothing, with a denim jacket and a number on the back.

  The shame and humiliation just broke her down. She was into Japanese culture. She was a flower arranger and used to play the biwa, a Japanese stringed instrument. Shame in her culture is worse than death. Right after that day she got very ill and contracted tuberculosis. She had to be sent to a sanitarium. She stayed behind when we were evacuated. She was too ill to be moved. She was there till she passed away.

  My father was transferred to Missoula, Montana. We got letters from him—censored, of course—telling us he was all right. It was just my sister and myself. I was fifteen, she was twelve. In April 1942, we were evacuated to Santa Anita. At the time we didn’t know where we were going, how long we’d be gone. We didn’t know what to take. A toothbrush, toilet supplies, some clothes. Only what you could carry. We left with a caravan.

  Santa Anita is a race track. The horse stables were converted into living quarters. My sister and I were fortunate enough to stay in a barracks. The people in the stables had to live with the stench. Everything was communal. We had absolutely no privacy. When you went to the toilet, it was communal. It was very embarrassing for women especially. The parent actually lost control of the child. I had no parents, so I did as I pleased. When I think back what happened to the Japanese family...

  We had orders to leave Santa Anita in September of 1942. We had no idea where we were going. Just before we left, my father joined us. He was brought into camp on the back of an army state truck, he and several others who were released from Missoula. I can still picture it to this day: to come in like cattle or sheep being herded in the back of a pickup truck bed. We were near the gate and saw him come in. He saw us. It was a sad, happy moment, because we’d been separated for a year.

  He never really expressed what his true inner feelings were. It just amazes me. He was never vindictive about it, never showed any anger. I can’t understand that. A man who had worked so hard for what he had and lost it overnight. There is a very strong word in Japanese, gaman. It means to persevere. Old people instilled this into the second generation: You persevere. Take what’s coming, don’t react.

  He had been a very outgoing person. Enthusiastic. I was very, very impressed with how he ran things and worked with people. When I saw him at Santa Anita, he was a different person.

  We were put on a train, three of us and many trains of others. It was crowded. The shades were drawn. During the ride we were wondering, what are they going to do to us? We Niseis had enough confidence in our government that it wouldn’t do anything drastic. My father had put all his faith in this country. This was his land.

  Oh, it took days. We arrived in Amache, Colorado. That was an experience in itself. We were right near the Kansas border. It’s a desolate, flat, barren area. The barracks was all there was. There were no trees, no kind of landscaping. It was like a prison camp. Coming from our environment, it was just devastating.

  School in camp was a joke. Let’s say it was loose. If you wanted to study, fine. If you didn’t, who cared? There were some teachers who were conscientious and a lot who were not. One of our basic subjects was American history. They talked about freedom all the time. [Laughs.]

  After a year, I was sent out to Utah on jobs. I worked on sugar beet farms. You had to have a contract or a job in order to leave camp. The pay was nominal. We would have a labor boss, the farmer would pay us through him. It was piecework. Maybe fifteen of us would work during the harvest season. When it was over, we went back to camp.

  If you had a job waiting, you could relocate to a city that was not in the Western Defense Command. I had one in Chicago, as a stock boy in a candy factory. It paid seventy-five cents an hour. I was only in camp for a year. My sister was in until they were dismantled, about three and a half years. My father was in various camps for four years.

  I went from job to job for a year. I had turned draft age, so I had to register. It’s ironic. Here I am being drafted into the army, and my father and sister are in a concentration camp waiting for the war to end.

  I was in the reserve, not yet inducted, in the middle of 1944, when I received a wire from my father saying that my mother was very ill. I immediately left Chicago for Amache, Colorado, to get my clearance from the Western Defense Command. It took several days. While I was waiting, m
y mother passed away.

  Since we wanted her funeral to be at the camp where my father and sister were, I decided to go on to California and pick up her remains. At Needles, California, I was met at the train by an FBI agent. He was assigned to me. He was with me at all times during my stay there. Whether I went to sleep at night or whether I went to the bathroom, he was by my side.

  As soon as we stepped off the train at the Union Station in Los Angeles, there was a shore patrol and a military police who met me. They escorted me through the station. It was one of the most... [He finds it difficult to talk.] I don’t even know how to describe it. Any day now, I’d be serving in the same uniform as these people who were guarding me. The train stations at that time were always filled. When they marched me through, the people recognized me as being Oriental. They knew I was either an escaped prisoner or a spy. Oh, they called out names. I heard “dirty Jap” very distinctly.

  After we got to the hotel, the FBI agent convinced the military that it wasn’t necessary for them to stay with me. But he had to. He was disgusted with the whole situation. He knew I was in the reserve, that I was an American citizen. He could see no reason for him to be with me. But he was on assignment. We spoke personal things. His wife was having a baby, he couldn’t be with her. He thought it was ridiculous.

  I was in the armored division at Fort Knox. We were sent to Fort Mead for embarkation when the European war ended. They didn’t know what to do with us Japanese Americans. We were in our own units. Should they send us to the Pacific side? They might not be able to tell who was the enemy and who was not. [Laughs.]

  The war ended while I was at Fort McDowell on San Francisco Bay. That was the receiving point for Japanese prisoners captured in the war. I went back with a boatload of them. I didn’t know how they’d react to me. I was very surprised. The professional soldiers who were captured during the early days of the war in Guadalcanal, Saipan, never believed the war ended. They would always say, when the subject came up, it was propaganda. The civilian soldiers were very different. We could get along with them. They were very young—boheitai, boy soldiers. We could relate to them as to children. They were scared. They had nothing to go back to. Okinawa was devastated. A lot of them lost their families.