In some circumstances digging-in was a fatal breach of a cardinal rule to keep moving through the killing zone. On Iwo Jima the soft black volcanic ash was about as much use as talcum powder in providing shelter. Fire poured into the beachhead, and the “steep-pitched beach sucked hundreds of men seaward in its backwash. Mines blew up Sherman tanks.… The invaders were taking heavy mortar and artillery fire. Steel sleeted down on them like the lash of a desert storm.… The deaths on Iwo were extraordinarily violent. There seemed to be no clean wounds; just fragments of corpses. It reminded one battalion medical officer of a Bellevue [a New York City hospital] dissecting room.… You tripped over strings of viscera fifteen feet long, over bodies which had been cut in half at the waist. Legs and arms, and heads bearing only necks, lay fifty feet from the closest torsos.”59
Seaborne attack became almost the signature tactic of the Pacific war, again dictated by the particular geography of the island-strewn battle zone. Although the US Army undertook more amphibious assaults than the US Marine Corps (of the forty-three total the Marines spearheaded fourteen),60 those involving the Marines tended to be more memorably bloody. Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa are the battles that have stamped themselves on the popular imagination, something not hindered by the Corps’ skill on the PR front (to an extent that deeply irked the always vigorously self-promoting General Patton, who saw his own exploits with the Third Army in Europe being eclipsed in the press by the headline-grabbing casualty rates incurred by the Marines in the Pacific. It was as though the Marines had inspired some large part of the public’s idea of the heroic, while the Army was left to trudge, underappreciated, as the Corps strutted out).
The US Marine Corps cherished and actively promoted an acceptance of casualties in its role as the kicker-in-of-doors in the Pacific. Where the Army might have looked at the door and diligently searched for the key, the Marines preferred the smashing boot. And nothing suited this ethos better than the amphibious assault.61 The Corps conceded that there might be many bodies left on the beach, but, it fervently believed, the pain in the short term was outweighed by the gain overall. Marines were frankly contemptuous of the conservatism of the US Army, with its emphasis on slower evaluation and exploitation of the tactical situation. Richard C. Kennard, a Marine on Peleliu, puts it bluntly in a letter home: “My only answer to why the Marines get the toughest jobs is because the average leatherneck is a much better fighter. He has far more guts, courage, and better officers.… I’m not saying that the Army men are cowards. They are older men as a rule however and not nearly as tough and brave as any single average Marine. These boys out here have a pride in the Marine Corps and will fight to the end no matter what the cost.”62
What Kennard implies is that the Marines were volunteers for death and glory; the Army, merely conscripts.
Where landings were opposed, Marines had to take a beating in order to establish their footholds. Tarawa (November 20, 1943) was one of the earliest, and assault elements of the Second Marine Division took about 20 percent casualties. Of the 800 men of the Sixth Marines who set off as reinforcements, only 450 made it to the beach.63 A total of 990 Marines were killed outright or died of wounds—a sacrifice that shocked the American public and forced the Corps to review its amphibious doctrine.64
Not all assaults were contested at the waterline, either by accident or intention. At Anzio (September 22, 1944) on the Italian west coast, the Allies enjoyed the benefit of complete surprise, only to squander it by a pusillanimous failure of command to grab the initiative and break out in order to exploit their initial good fortune—a nervous stumble for which the Germans would later exact a very bloody price. When the Marines and Army landed at Okinawa on April 1, 1945, they were only very lightly opposed, the Japanese choosing to draw the Americans inland to do bloody battle from carefully prepared defenses.
At Guadalcanal on August 7, 1942, Robert Leckie remembers his terror as his landing craft approached Red Beach: “I could think of nothing but the shoreline where we were to land. There were other boatloads of marines ahead of us. I fancied firing from behind their prostrate bodies, building a protecting wall of torn and reddened flesh. I could envision a holocaust among the coconuts.” But the “Japanese had run” and for “ten minutes we had something like bliss, a flood of well-being following upon our unspeakable relief.”65
THERE WAS NO question about the dying. Donald R. Burgett, a 101st Airborne recruit, remembers that an “instructor … told us that we weren’t volunteering for any picnic; that most of us would die in combat. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘if any man lives through three missions, the government will fly that man home and discharge him. You know as well as I do that Uncle Sam isn’t going to discharge anyone during wartime, so now you know what your chances are of living through this war. You haven’t got a chance!’ ”66
Jumping into thin air a mile, perhaps several, above the all-too-solid earth, while enemy infantry and antiaircraft guns shot at your ever-so-slowly descending and unutterably vulnerable nether regions, was, to put it mildly, fraught. A British paratrooper during the invasion of Sicily in July 1943 felt the understandably acute anxiety common to all airborne infantrymen: “Suddenly we heard the guns ahead—the furious crackle from the quick-firing pom-poms [he didn’t know it, but they were being shot at by their own ships] and the deeper intermittent crack of the heavier barrage. At once terror gripped me as I braced myself to meet the red-hot inverted rain. I had had no experience of flak, and those fountains of red and orange tracer looked quite appalling. There is something specially disturbing about being shot at from below—one’s body seems to be much more vital when attacked from that direction.”67
The whole business from beginning to end was crazily risky. First there were the considerable dangers of training, made especially acute because the practice of airborne warfare was itself a very recent development and there was much learning on the job, which is fine if you are an accountant but less so if you are a parachutist.
Parachute descents had been undertaken in the eighteenth century, and Napoleon had toyed with the idea of sending assault troops by balloon on his aborted invasion of Britain. That extraordinary military visionary Billy Mitchell had pushed strongly for an American parachute force to be dropped behind the German lines in 1918, but nothing came of it, and the serious development of the use of parachutes in combat (as against their use as a means of escape from stricken planes or observation balloons) had to wait until the 1930s, with much of the pioneering work done in Russia, Italy, and Germany.
Although the United States and Britain lagged behind in the development of an airborne arm (they had to be spurred by the arrival of World War II), it was a Briton, Everard Calthrop, and an American, Leslie Leroy Irvin, who greatly progressed the development of the parachute itself. Calthrop’s chute—aptly called the “Guardian Angel”—was designed to make escape from an airplane possible and was attached to the aircraft; the chute being deployed from its container by the weight of the falling pilot. Irvin’s parachute, on the other hand, was a true free-fall design, the canopy activated by the parachutist pulling a rip cord—the great advantage being that the crewman did not have to be in a fixed position in the plane in order to use the chute. On April 19, 1919, Irvin himself, with a heroic belief in his own design, made the first rip-cord parachute jump. It was a historic success (apart from a broken ankle on landing awkwardly).68
Inevitably, equipment failure (including the dreaded “Roman candle,” to describe a chute that failed to inflate) and the mistakes of rookie parachutists took their toll during training and in battle. The young Donald Burgett watched
a plane swing along the Chattahoochee River and come in over the drop zone at about 1000 feet. The tiny figures tumbled out in rapid succession and all seemed well until two of the chutes bumped together in midair, and the men became entangled in suspension lines. One chute collapsed but the other one held, and for a moment it looked as if they would still make it
O.K.… But the man hanging lower than the other pulled his reserve chute. This is something we were specifically instructed not to do. The only time a reserve chute is any good is when the main doesn’t open at all or has a serious malfunction. When two men are entangled, the reserve can billow up and collapse the main chutes.… Now, as we watched, the smaller chute unfurled into the main canopy of the top man, collapsing it. The chutes looked like bedsheets fluttering behind the figures as they plummeted earthward. Neither one of the men yelled or made a sound; they must have been too busy trying to untangle the snarled lines and fighting for their lives to know how close they were. The whole mess took place in a matter of seconds.… They bounced a couple of feet in the air.… One of the sergeants leaped from a jeep and worked over the bodies a few minutes, then got back in and drove up to us. Climbing out of the jeep he held two pairs of bloodied jump boots from the two men out there. “Now does anyone want to quit?” … No one stepped out of line.69
When bodies hit the ground, they sounded “like large ripe pumpkins being thrown down to burst against the ground,” or a “large mattress going ‘floomp.’ ”
Inferior design as well as the sheer weight of the equipment could be extremely hazardous to jumpers. The parachute used by the German Fallschirmjäger, the RZ-1, pitched the man face-forward so that he had to do a nifty forward roll on landing—something that demanded a very high degree of athletic ability and often resulted in injuries to knees, hands, and face. The design also severely limited the weaponry that could be carried to a pistol and perhaps a submachine gun. The tightness of the harness, the violence of the canopy opening, and the forward-facing gait all meant that any solid objects on him would likely injure him, so his weaponry had to be sent down in separate metal containers. Retrieving these on the battlefield put the Fallschirmjäger at a potentially lethal disadvantage: “A German platoon needed fourteen containers for their weapons and ammunition, which meant there was a lot of running about on the drop zone.… In Crete [May 1941] the British and Commonwealth troops were already familiar with the need for the parachutists to rally round their containers before they became an effective fighting force, and they merely watched for the colored canopies of the containers and laid their machine-guns on them after they had landed.”70
In their most famous action, the battle for Crete, German paratroopers took horrific casualties. Of the 22,000 parachutists committed, 5,000 were killed, “most of them coming from the junior leaders—the corporals, sergeants, and young officers. In addition, 2,500 were wounded.”71 After Crete the German airborne arm undertook no more large-scale assaults and mutated into elite light infantry.
The Allied jumpers had the opposite problem. They were loaded “like a military Christmas tree.” Their parachutes held them upright so that they would hit the ground (theoretically) feet-first, and “there was scarcely a part of the body which was not covered by some equipment or weapon.” One of the US 101st Airborne listed the things he carried:
Jump suit … helmet, boots, gloves, main chute, reserve chute, Mae West, rifle, .45 automatic pistol, trench knife, jump knife, hunting knife, machete, one cartridge belt, two bandoliers, two cans of machine gun ammo, 66 rounds of .45 ammo, one Hawkins mine capable of blowing the track off of a tank, four blocks of TNT, one entrenching tool with two blasting caps taped on the outside of the steel part, three first-aid kits, two morphine needles, one gas mask, a canteen of water, three days’ supply of K rations, two days’ supply of D rations … six fragmentation grenades, one Gammon grenade, one orange smoke and one red smoke grenade, one orange panel, one blanket, one raincoat, one change of socks and underwear, two cartons of cigarettes and a few other odds and ends.72
In addition, they often had a musette bag weighing as much as 80 pounds attached by a cord to a leg. So heavily laden were they that getting up to board an aircraft often required a helping hand. They were the modern equivalent of the medieval knight in more ways than one. The sheer amount of gear worn and carried by a knight and a paratrooper signified potency. In another way, though, it was an indicator of their vulnerability. The knight could be attacked from so many angles with such a variety of weapons that he had to be his own mobile fortress. The paratrooper, whose great tactical vulnerability was that, by necessity, he had been projected far from the main army with all the logistical support it offered, needed to replicate in miniature that support. He too was a one-man fortress. Knights died when they were separated from their archers and infantry support, and the significant defeats of airborne warriors came at those times when they too were separated for too long from artillery and reinforcements. One thinks of the British First Airborne at Arnhem and the British First Parachute Brigade at Primosole in Sicily, both of which were eventually outgunned and overrun.
Another parallel, of course, is that both knights and paratroopers reveled in their role as primary assault troops; they celebrated the heroic nature of their elite combat status. It is interesting that in the equipment of the 101st Airborne trooper listed above there are four edged weapons. In the indoctrination of airborne warriors, much emphasis was placed on the fearsome psychological impact of the blade. This is not combat in the empty technological battlefield but something ancient, fierce, and personal. And like the knight or the samurai, the airborne warrior demanded that this special valor be advertised. As an example, the Mohawk hairstyle of the American paratrooper at D-Day announced the very considerable harm—with an association to a much older, much more personal style of killing—that was about to be visited on his enemy.
Just as the unhorsed knight could be betrayed by the very thing that was meant to protect him—his armor—so too was the airborne warrior. As with overburdened amphibious soldiers, should the paratrooper land in water (and it didn’t need to be very deep), he stood an excellent chance of being dragged under and drowned, something that happened with sickening frequency. On D-Day, men of the Eighty-Second Airborne landed in an area around the rivers Douve and Merderet that had been deliberately flooded by the Germans, and they drowned, partly because their harnesses were difficult to release.73
The chute that was designed to safeguard the paratrooper could also be the instrument of his death. Its very ability to keep him in suspension increased his exposure to enemy ground fire. It was for all an agony of anticipation and for some a bloodily premature extinction. General Sir John Hackett, dropping with the First Airborne at Arnhem, saw “an inert mass … swinging down in a parachute harness beside me, a man from whose body the entrails hung, swaying in a reciprocal rhythm.”74 The chute could snag the jumper up on a tree or pole as a helplessly dangling target for enemy infantry, and on the ground it might drag him into God knows what peril.
Private Ken Russell of the US 505th recalls about D-Day: “I don’t remember all the stick [the unit] in our plane but I know Private H.T. Bryant, Private Ladislaw ‘Laddie’ Tlapa and Lieutenant Cadish were most unfortunate. They were the fellows who were shot on the power poles. My close friend Private 1st Class Charles Blankenship was shot still in his chute hanging in a tree.” In addition, he remembers that when
we jumped there was a huge fire in a building in town. I didn’t know that the heat would suck a parachute towards the fire … one trooper landed in the fire … I landed on the right side of the roof. This other trooper came down and really got entangled on the steeple.… Almost immediately a Nazi soldier came running up from the back side of the church shooting at everything. Sergeant John Ray had landed in the churchyard almost immediately below.… This Nazi shot him in the stomach while he was still in his chute. While Ray was dying he somehow got his .45 out and shot the Nazi in the back of the head, killing him. He saved my life … it was one of the bravest things I have ever witnessed.”75
The fate of the airborne warrior was also greatly dependent on the mode of delivery—aircraft or glider—and the crews who flew them. Both had their own unique risks, but both shared the difficulties of navigation, weather, and hostile fire, often in an unholy con
fluence. The Allied airborne assault on Sicily in 1943—a mixture of glider and airplane delivery—was probably one of the best examples of that deadly nexus.
The British First Air-Landing Brigade went in first on July 10, 1943. The idea was to fly in gliders with the stealth the Germans had used against the Belgian fort of Eben-Emael in May 1940. The operation fell apart. Gale-force winds blew up great sandstorms that obliterated landing sites; there was insufficient fighter cover and inadequate training. Sixty percent of the tugs (the aircraft towing the gliders) detached their gliders prematurely, and once a military glider (unlike lightweight recreational versions) was let loose, it dropped fast. Many gliders crashed into the sea, and 252 troopers were drowned. Of the 52 gliders that had left the North African coast, only 12 landed anywhere near their targets. Of the 2,000 men of the First Air-Landing, 490 were lost, and of the 145 glider pilots, 88 were lost.76
Shortly after the British attack, the aircraft-borne US 505th Parachute Infantry Brigade, led by the legendary Colonel James Gavin, a pioneer of airborne warfare, battered by high winds and disoriented by the lack of adequate navigational aids, was dropped up to 60 miles off target with men landing “on stone ridges, olive groves, barbed wire, beaches—and a few in the sea.”77 Their sister regiment, the 504th, was sent in as reinforcement, and before it could even get at the enemy it was hammered by friendly fire that spread like a “contagion” from the beachhead and the anchored Allied fleet. It was, to use a descriptive phrase from the Vietnam War, a “cluster fuck.” Due to the congestion of communication, the fleet had not been properly forewarned of the 504th’s flyover:
“I looked back,” reported a captain in one of the lead planes, “and saw the whole coastline burst into flames.” Pilots dove to the deck or swerved back to sea, flinging paratroopers to the floor and tangling their static lines. Men fingered their rosary beads or vomited into their helmets. Bullets ripped through wings and fuselages, and the bay floors grew slick with blood.…
The Last Full Measure Page 28