The Last Full Measure

by Michael Stephenson

  The greater risk of American infantrymen being killed or wounded in the European theater compared with their counterparts in the Pacific was largely due to the superiority of German artillery, which inflicted about 60 percent of all battlefield casualties.36 Artillery was overall the greatest killer of infantrymen in World War II, but the chances of being killed if hit by a shell or grenade fragment in the European theater was 25 percent, compared with 16 percent in the Pacific.

  This is explained in part by a combination of poor-quality munitions and the limitations placed on Japanese gunners by the need for concealment in order to limit exposure to the devastating counterbattery potential of American land, sea, and air forces. The usual pattern for Japanese artillerymen was to run guns up to the mouth of the cave in which they were concealed, fire a few rounds, and then pull back before they were found by GR-6 sound locators, spotter planes, or visual detection. Conservation of limited ammunition supplies was also an issue. Lack of communication between frontline infantry and the supporting gunners also reduced Japanese artillery lethality. With few radios, instructions were sent either across telephone wire, which was constantly being severed by American bombardment, or by runners, who, desperately exposed, were often cut down.

  If geography facilitated the clash of massed forces in the combat in the Soviet Union, Europe, and North Africa, it dictated an altogether more fragmented, small-unit confrontation in the Pacific theater. Ironically, the battlefields of massed confrontation are usually described as “empty” because modern artillery, tanks, mortars, and machine guns killed at relatively long range. It is a type of warfare far distant from the personal confrontation of classic “heroic” combat. One would have thought the in-your-face, cut-and-thrust of jungle warfare conformed much more closely to some ancient heroic model of mano-a-mano fighting. But the opposite was the case. The fighting in the Pacific war reminds us that combat is a bloody gutter-slop: nasty, brutish, and short—an abattoir that is only later cleaned up, perfumed, and decorated with the laurel crown of history.

  WORLD WAR II brought three broad innovations in land combat: amphibious, tank, and airborne warfare. Amphibious and tank warfare were innovative not so much in concept as in scale; amphibious assault had ancient precedents, and tank warfare had been introduced with great drama in the First World War. Airborne warfare was in a slightly different category. The principle of parachuting was well established by 1914, and although generally unavailable to aircrew of the First World War, parachutes were used by the almost proverbial sitting ducks of the Western Front—observers aloft in tethered balloons—even though, as one historian so delicately and aptly put it, “parachutes fell some way short of perfection in design.”37

  Of the three, an argument can be made that amphibious assault was the major strategic and tactical element of World War II—it kicked in the door. For the Allies—who had to respond to an enemy, whether Japanese or German, who had taken the initiative and controlled their interior lines of supply and communication—attacking their enemies first entailed reaching them: The shell had to be cracked before one could get at the meat. Seaborne assault offered the most effective method that could be supported with the logistical heft to carry the war to the enemy.

  Airborne warfare also carried the war to the enemy, but it was practically impossible to sustain logistically. The German drop on Crete in May 1941, although ultimately successful, teetered so close to disaster that it put Hitler off the whole concept of airborne warfare, an aversion Stalin shared following the Soviet debacle at Velikii Bukrin, near Kiev, in September 1943, when two Soviet brigades landed almost literally on top of the Nineteenth Panzer Division, with predictably gruesome results for the jumpers.38 Allied para-assaults on D-Day and at Arnhem in 1944, no matter how valiant, also exhibited a terrible fragility.

  For the soldiers involved in amphibious attack, the risks, paradoxically, harked back to a much older mode of fighting: siege warfare: the terrible assault of the citadel. And although it was certainly innovative in its scale and in the specialized equipment developed for its execution, what might be called the ethos of amphibious assault was rooted in the frontal attack against heavily defended strongholds that had been a major characteristic of combat during the First World War. There was always something of the “forlorn hope” about it: terribly risky, exposed, naked. It took a certain desperate, grim élan and an acceptance of potentially high casualties in order to win the bridgehead.

  Another parallel with the infantry assaults of the First World War was the role of preparatory bombardment and, as in that war, the often unrealistic predictions of its ability to suppress the opposition before the assault. The preliminary bombing of the D-Day beaches by the US Eighth and Ninth Army Air Forces was ineffectual, due partly to adverse weather conditions that limited visibility and partly to a nervousness about causing friendly casualties. As Harry Reynolds, an Eighth Army Air Force bombardier/navigator, recalls: “The area was covered with an overcast to about 13,000 feet. We did not want to drop the bombs because we were afraid of hitting our own troops who had advanced in from the beachhead.”39 German batteries at Omaha Beach in particular—which would prove to be the most deadly of all the landing points on D-Day—were left almost untouched by the bombers. Forced to bomb by instruments through the overcast, the 329 B-24s scattered their thirteen thousand bombs as far as 3 miles inland.40

  For the attacking infantry the result was a disaster. Richard J. Ford of the Twenty-Ninth Infantry Division remembers: “The Air Force was to have bombed the beach creating craters for us to use. They missed the beach by three miles. Their explanation being they were afraid they might hit the landing craft, as the water was full of ships. However, this bomb preparation was to take place long before we got on the beach. As a result, that beach was as smooth and flat as a road and looked about two miles deep. As a result the Germans were in a ‘shooting gallery’ and we were the ‘ducks.’ ”41 There were about 10,000 casualties in all sectors on D-Day, of which, at a conservative estimate, about 2,000 were incurred on Omaha. Although it is surprisingly difficult to pinpoint accurate figures, around 4,400 of the 10,000 were killed.42

  Naval bombardment was more accurate than aerial bombing, but even when delivered in massive concentration it could provide no guarantee that hostile fire would be adequately suppressed. In the Pacific, many amphibious assaults proved to be particularly bloody for the attackers because preliminary bombardment had failed to neutralize Japanese defenses. At Tarawa such a “stunning” tonnage of naval shells fell on the atoll that a Marine wondered why “the whole goddam island doesn’t fall apart and sink.” Yet somehow, the Japanese survived to pour in artillery fire when the incoming landing craft were 3,000 yards out, heavy machine-gun fire at 2,000 yards, and “everything the enemy had, including sniper fire and heavy mortars,” at close range.43 On Saipan the Japanese, in their interconnected limestone caves, just as the Germans had taken to their deep dugouts in World War I, largely survived the preliminary bombardment to emerge and sweep the reef with such a ferocity of fire that observers on US ships presumed it had been mined, when in fact the explosions were caused solely by artillery and mortar shells. At Iwo Jima, US warships poured in 22,000 shells and B-24s pounded the island for six weeks, none of which seriously interdicted the Japanese capability to hammer the Marines during their approach and on the beach.

  The lethal dangers for amphibious assault troops started well before they even came close to the killing ground. Just getting into the Higgins boats (the specialized landing craft developed by Higgins Industries in New Orleans and in general use by mid-1943) could be deadly.44 Men, encumbered with heavy gear, had to clamber over the sides of the mother ship and make their perilous, swaying way down scramble netting before making an anxious jump into the landing craft. Robert Leckie, a Marine at Guadalcanal, describes the heart-in-mouth experience: “The George F. Elliott was rolling in a gentle swell. The nets swayed out and in against her steel sides, bumping us.…

&nbs
p; Three feet above the rolling Higgins Boats the cargo nets came to an end. One had to jump, weighted with fifty or more pounds of equipment. No time for indecision, for others on the nets above were all but treading [on] your fingers. So there it was—jump—hoping that the Higgins Boat would not roll away and leave only the blue sea to land in.”45

  William Manchester, another Guadalcanal veteran, remembers:

  Descent was tricky.… A Marine in an amphibious assault was a beast of burden. He shouldered, on the average, 84.3 pounds, which made him the most heavily laden foot soldier in the history of warfare. Some men carried much more: 20-pound BARs, 45-pound 81-millimeter-mortar base plates, 47-pound mortar bipods, 36-pound light machine guns … and heavy machine-gun tripods, over 53 pounds. A man thus encumbered was expected to swing down the ropes like Tarzan. It was a dangerous business; anyone who lost his grip and fell clanking between the ship and the landing craft went straight to the bottom of Sealark Channel, and this happened to some. More frequent were misjudgments in jumping from the cargo net to the boat. The great thing was to time your leap so that you landed at the height of the boat’s bob. If you miscalculated, the most skillful coxswain couldn’t help you. You were walloped, possibly knocked out, possibly crippled, when you hit his deck.46

  Raymond Gantter, a GI on his way to France in October 1944, recalls: “We had our first casualty as we transferred gingerly from the ship in which we had crossed the Channel to the LST that would deliver us. One of our officers, a grinning and likeable guy, was crushed to death between the LST and the Channel steamer. Climbing down the landing net hung over the side of the larger vessel, he hesitated a moment too long before leaping for the LST. A bad omen.”47

  Once on board the landing craft, the dangers of the approach were exacerbated by the acutest miseries that made men even more vulnerable when they hit the beach. Sergeant John R. Slaughter of the US 116th Infantry heading for Omaha Beach described the scene:

  There was a foot of water in the bottom of the boat and we had to take to the bilge pumps but they couldn’t evacuate the water fast enough so we had to use our helmets to bail the water. Everybody was seasick. I’d never been sick before and some of my buddies had filled their puke bags already so I gave my puke bag and my Dramamine tablet away. Then I got sick. What caused me to get sick was the cold. It was probably in the 40s, the wind was blowing and we were soaking wet. I was just shivering. I went into my assault jacket and found a gas cape that we had in case of mustard gas and got under it to shield myself from the wind and the water. Of course lack of oxygen under the cape caused me to get really sick and I came out from under the thing. I started vomiting and I just pulled my helmet and vomited in my helmet, threw it out and washed the helmet out, vomited some more and that’s the way we went in.48

  Amphibious assault shared with all frontal assaults against prepared defenses (whether it was Pickett’s charge, or Cold Harbor, or Passchendaele) the terrifying negotiation of the killing ground that constitutes no-man’s-land. The journey to the beach was a period of more or less enforced passivity for the attackers and gave the defenders their best chance of inflicting great pain.

  Mortimer Wheeler (who would later become a renowned archeologist) recounts the approach to the Salerno landings in Italy on September 9, 1943: “Meanwhile, another German battery, four 88-millimeters, had got the range of our craft over open sights as we moved slowly in, awaiting our turn at the beach. The captain of the next landing-ship beside us was killed by a direct hit on the bridge.… Our turn was next. The rounds came over in sharp salvoes and bracketed us with perfect precision, sending showers of spray over us as we changed course cumbrously to vary range.”49

  In addition to the dangers of incoming artillery and machine-gun fire, heavily laden soldiers simply drowned when they were forced to evacuate their stricken landing craft. Private Bill Bidmead, a British commando at D-Day, “saw men drowning in the shallow water. Wounded, their 90-lb rucksacks weighed them down.”50 During the Allied landings on North Africa (Operation Torch) the men carried 132 pounds, which was “110 pounds too much for a combat soldier to carry and enough to make anyone utterly useless,” nor could it be supported by the life jackets they had been issued, according to the quartermaster for the US II Corps.51

  William Manchester makes the assertion that at Tarawa a coxswain, completely unnerved by the heavy artillery and machine-gun fire hitting the landing craft as they tried to get over the reef, “lost his mind [and] … screamed, ‘This is as far as I go!’ He dropped his ramp and twenty Marines bowed by weapons and ammunition drowned in fifteen feet of water.”52

  Getting through the surf was agony in slow motion. Private Jim Wilkins, a Canadian at Juno Beach on D-Day, remembers:

  We were only 500 yards from the beach and were ordered to get down. Minutes later the boat stops and begins to toss in the waves. The ramp goes down and without hesitation my section leader, Corporal John Gibson, jumps out well over his waist in water. He only makes a few yards and is killed. We have landed dead on into a pillbox with a machine gun blazing away at us. We didn’t hesitate and jumped into the water.… Where was everybody? My section are only half there—some were just floating on their Mae Wests.… Kenny keeps yelling “Come on. Come on.”

  “I’m coming, I’m coming,” I yell to him. We are now up to our knees in water and you can hear a kind of buzzing sound all around as well as the sound of the machine gun itself. All of a sudden something slapped the side of my right leg and then a round caught me dead centre up high on my right leg causing a compound fracture. By this time I was flat on my face in the water—I’ve lost my rifle, my helmet is gone … [I] flop over onto my back and start to float to shore where I meet five other riflemen all in very bad shape. The man beside me is dead within minutes.53

  Getting across the reef and through the surf at Tarawa presented the Japanese gunners with ample slow-moving targets. Many of the Marines in the Higgins boats on the reef had to get out far from the shoreline. Robert Sherrod, reporting for Time magazine, watched them jump out into chest-deep water: “It was painfully slow, wading in such deep water. And we had seven hundred yards to walk slowly into this machine-gun fire, looming into larger targets as we rose onto high ground.”54 Harry Smith of the Second Marine Division writes to his girlfriend: “I was one of the first ten men out, and as these first ten scrambled out many of them were hit. A fellow directly in front of me got shot in the head, the force tore his helmet off and as he fell forward into the water I could see that the top of his head had been blown off and his brains dropped into the water. To this day I don’t know how I got to shore in such a shower of machine gun and small arms fire. Men were getting shot all around me.”55

  When men have endured that kind of murderous exposure, their first thought, on reaching what they imagined to be the relative safety of the beach, is to go to ground and take whatever kind of cover they could, but when defenders’ guns have been preregistered to rake the beachhead, the attackers need to act counter-intuitively. Moving into and through fire takes an extraordinary degree of training and courage, for men will most certainly die.

  Douglas Grant, a British officer at Sword Beach on D-Day, saw how “men floundered in the loose sand under their top-heavy loads … and I ran up and down the line yelling them on with every curse I remembered.… Other troops, with the stupidity of sheep, were digging in along the length of the wire; they had not sense enough to realise that the enemy would blast it as conscientiously as a drill routine.” Somehow he got his men up and “we ran on … our hearts straining to match our wills.”56

  Sublieutenant George Green, a British naval officer taking the ill-fated A Company of the US 116th Infantry Regiment (a Pennsylvania National Guard outfit, “pleasant friendly country lads but not assault troops,” as Green described them) under the command of Captain Taylor Fellers, to Omaha Beach notes: “It took some time for the troops to disembark as the craft was bouncing up and down in the heavy surf and the soldiers were ha
mpered by the amount of kit they carried.… When they reached the beach the troops lay down and made no attempt to advance towards the obstacles 50 yards away or the menacing cliffs 250 yards further on where the hidden Germans were popping off mortars at us.… I heard that Taylor Fellers and all the men in LCA 910 had been killed. Practically everyone else in that first wave we landed at 6:30 was wiped out shortly after landing.”57

  The 116th at Omaha Beach took the heaviest casualties of any of the Allied invaders (“They just murdered them,” said an observer). The US War Department’s official history describes what happened to the first battalion as it assaulted Dog Green sector:

  All boats came under criss-cross machine-gun fire.… As the first men jumped they crumpled and flopped into the water. Then order was lost. It seemed to the men that the only way to get ashore was to dive head first in and swim clear of the fire that was striking the boats. But, as they hit the water, their heavy equipment dragged them down and soon they were struggling to stay afloat. Some were hit in the water and wounded. Some drowned then and there.… But some moved safely through the bullet-fire to the sand and then, finding they could not hold there, went back into the water and used it as cover, only their heads sticking out. Those who survived kept moving forward with the tide.… Within ten minutes of the ramps being lowered, A Company had become inert, leaderless and almost incapable of action. Every officer and sergeant had been killed or wounded.… The men in the water pushed wounded men ashore ahead of them. And those who had reached the sands crawled back into the water pulling others to land to save them from drowning, in many cases only to see the rescued wounded again or to be hit themselves. Within twenty minutes of striking the beach A Company had ceased to be an assault company and had become a forlorn little rescue party bent upon survival and the saving of lives.58