As darkness descended, Graf waited with his finger on the crescent trigger of his M1. Crerar, soaked in sweat, with his head propped up on his helmet, slept while Graf, eyes and ears straining, watched and listened for infiltrators. Gunnery Sergeant Townsley, who knew as much as anyone in the Marines about staying alive, had warned him about the Japanese banging their grenades against rocks. Japanese grenades were queer things: after pulling the ring, a soldier had to strike the detonator against an object to ignite the fuze.
What Graf got instead of Japanese infiltrators was an onslaught of land crabs and rats scurrying through the sand, palm fronds, crackling leaves, and discarded C-ration tins. Thank heavens for the Navy. During the course of the night, the Navy shot up flares. Burning phosphorus and hissing, they drifted in the breeze on parachutes, turning night into twilight. Had it not been for the flares, Graf would have assumed that the crabs were lurking enemy soldiers poised to stick him with their bayonets.
Not far away from Graf and Crerar, Lieutenant Leary set up his platoon command post in a shell crater, Matthews at his side. Matthews felt relief, thankful that the fight had not been tougher. A few men had been wounded, but G Company had lost only one Marine, a sweet kid from Mount Airy, Pennsylvania, who, one of the guys said, had a pretty wife, and a baby he had never laid eyes on.
At some point during the night, Lieutenant Leary told Matthews to take a message to the company command post. Matthews was terrified. This was not like running messages on maneuvers. This was the real thing, with the real possibility that some scared, trigger-happy G Company Marine would shoot before asking for the password. The prospect of being killed or wounded by an enemy soldier was bad enough, but what a disgrace it would be to be shot by a fellow Marine.
Matthews delivered the message and lived to see another day. The following morning dawned steamy and bright. By noon the 2nd Battalion had cleared out the north end of the island, disabling every Japanese rifle they found by yanking out the bolt and smashing the stock against a tree trunk or the coral. All that was left to do was to grab a souvenir. Men searched the bushes for whatever they could find. Nambu pistols were the big prize, but Marines also liked the perfectly folded flags that the enemy soldiers kept inside their steel helmets and the personal items they brought with them into battle.
Graf walked past a large trench filled with dead Japanese. What struck him first was the stench of days-old bodies killed in the naval bombardment. Rotting in the sun and bloated with gas, the corpses, he would later write, looked like “small blimps” and smelled like slaughtered hogs. What he noticed next was the size of the Japanese soldiers. These were not little bucktoothed caricatures, but powerful Imperial Marines. From the fat flies surrounding their blood-caked skulls, it was clear that, as loyal soldiers of the Empire, they had blown their heads off rather than be captured.
As for the souvenirs, his fellow Marines had beaten him to the punch. Already they had torn off buttons from the blouses of the corpses, emblems from their lapels, along with their ID bracelets, watches, and diaries. That none of them could read Japanese did not matter a bit. Later, like boys swapping baseball cards, they traded the booty among themselves—a flag with an image of the Rising Sun for a few buttons, an emblem for a family photo.
CHAPTER 19
Paradise
On February 16, 1944, following their victory on Roi-Namur, the 4th Marine Division docked in Kahului Harbor, Maui. Gunny Townsley was shouting orders in what Graf affectionately called his “foghorn” voice, and soon the men were boarding trucks. It was comforting to hear Townsley, surly as hell, yelling again. Townsley’s presence had a way of restoring order to the universe. With Townsley there, the men knew that nothing was beyond repair. He would let them grieve for lost buddies, but when he determined that their time was up, he would push them again as he always had.
Leaving Kahului, the men got a look at what they thought was paradise—the ocean, towering palm trees that lined the roadway, modest white houses with green roofs, pineapple and sugarcane fields, banana trees scattered across small pastures, and happy-faced locals who waved in welcome. It was not until they smelled the rich scents of plumeria, ginger blossoms, and blooming pikake, however, that they forgot the stench that filled their throats on Roi-Namur.
As they left the coastal road, they began their climb into the hills. Again Graf was filled with the romance of the place and let the names roll off his tongue like music—Lower Paia, Makawao, Haiku. After passing through the village of Kokomo, he saw the gates of Camp Maui. After the beauty of the drive, Camp Maui was a slap in the face, the sloppy roads of red clay and the rows of drab tents, built over wooden platforms. Soon he learned that electricity had not yet been installed, and the showers emitted “the coldest water this side of the North Pole.” In the head, “thunder mugs,” separated by not even a sheet of plywood, were placed so close together that a guy moving his bowels could punch the fella sitting next to him. The bathroom stank, and so did the weather. The magnificent Haleakala volcano trapped every cloud that floated over the island, obliterating the sun and dumping inches of rain over the camp every afternoon. The dining hall served the worst food east of the Marshall Islands.
At Camp Maui, Graf and his buddies supplemented their food intake with beer from the camp bar. In fact, it did not take long for them to discover that although they could get only two beers at a time, the Marines manning the PX did not seem to care how often they returned as long as they refrained from fighting. Graf, who had cultivated a taste for scotch and soda, became an avid beer man at Camp Maui.
The Gold Dust Twins, too, were drawn to the slop chute like bulls to a red flag. As if the obstacle course at the Army’s Jungle Training Center was not grueling enough, plied with beer, they staged nightly raids on a nearby pineapple plantation that their first sergeant said was strictly off-limits. Sometimes they were joined by their tentmates, including squad leader Bill Mihalek, who knew better than to get hung up with the Gold Dust Twins, but couldn’t resist the temptation to sink his teeth into fresh pineapple. Even Lieutenant Leary would occasionally join the men in what they called their “refreshments” and never once questioned where, or how, they came by them.
When Matthews realized that he would be sharing a tent at Camp Maui with Wendell Nightingale, he was delighted. They had met at the chow hall at Camp Pendleton over an evening meal where Nightingale teased everyone around him. It was not the kind of sadistic needling that a bully doles out, but funny and good-natured. What Matthews also noticed was that Nightingale could take it as well as he could dish it out.
The two grew close, which must have struck anyone who saw them together as hilarious. While the Gold Dust Twins, two tiny Texans with oversized, mischievous spirits, were made for each other, “like pigs and shit,” according to Sergeant Jack Campbell, Matthews and Nightingale could not have been more different. Nightingale was tall and lanky, with a split-rail-fence physique. He hailed from Skowhegan, Maine, and had a thick, antiquated accent that might have sounded more natural in seventeenth-century England. And Nightingale was as pure as deep-woods snow. In California, while other young Marines were rushing off to bars and prostitutes, he stayed behind, reminiscing about making maple syrup and the team of horses that pulled his sled back and forth across the December pastures. Matthews heard story after story about how Nightingale learned to dance with the pretty “faam” girls at the grange hall and how occasionally he would step outside with one of them long enough to steal a kiss.
It was Nightingale who introduced Matthews to Los Angeles’ Riverside Ranchero, a country music club where bands played western swing and whole families came for a night of fun. Nightingale spent most of his time on the floor twirling the beauties. Parents were happy to allow their daughters to dance with such a respectful young man. Matthews studied Nightingale’s technique and was soon enjoying the Ranchero as much as his friend.
Liberty at Camp Maui was nothing like liberty at Pendleton. It came once every eight day
s, and Marines had to be back in their tents by 6:00 p.m. or risk being picked up by the shore patrol. In their sack-pressed khakis (they washed and stuck them under their mattresses to remove the wrinkles), Matthews, Freeby, and Nightingale made occasional trips to Pukalani, Wailuku, or Kahului, but often after a week of intense maneuvers—including thirteen-mile hikes to the Haleakala crater—they were too tired to leave the camp. None of this bothered Lieutenant Leary, who preferred his men to stay behind. Everyone had heard the stories of drunk Marines picking fights with the locals. Some guys could not contain their hatred. “A Jap’s a Jap,” they would say, ignoring the fact that most of Maui’s Japanese were actually Nisei, or second-generation, born in the territory and loyal to the United States.
On those days when he stayed in camp, Matthews read and reread letters from home. He also did embroidery. Matthews was probably the only man in the Corps who knew how to use a needle and thread. He took a lot of heat from his buddies—Lieutenant Leary threatened to expel him from the platoon if he ever caught him squatting to pee—but all acknowledged that he had the best-decorated “pisscutter” (slang for the Marines’ khaki “garrison cap”) in the entire 4th Division. A large Marine emblem adorned the cap’s left side. On the right Matthews embroidered TEXAS with orange lettering highlighted by bold black outlines. He also stitched the names of places he had been, courtesy of the Corps, into the cap. He included palm trees and an outline of the harbor at Pago Pago in American Samoa. What his tentmates liked best was the native girl in the grass skirt that Matthews had stitched on the right rear of the cap.
Just as they were getting into the swing of things, Robert Graf and his sidekick, Bill More, received some disappointing news. More was being moved to Battalion Headquarters and assigned to a G2 intelligence team. Graf and Crerar were being transferred from H Company to E Company. The silver lining was that Lieutenant Roth was moving, too, and he requested that both join him as runners in his platoon.
Shortly after the reorganization, Colonel Louis Jones, the 23rd’s commanding officer, ordered an 81- and 60-mm mortar demonstration. Companies gathered in a field while the mortar squads fired over their heads onto a target. As the mortars landed, an officer explained, via the public address system, how mortars were employed in combat situations.
The mortar round that fell short sounded no different from the others. Bill More saw it land. It happened too fast for him to feel panic. When it hit, he felt the searing heat of the bursting shell and the rush of wind from the explosion. Before the smoke disappeared, it was clear to him that the outcome would not be pretty.
The mortar seriously wounded several men and killed Gunnery Sergeant Emberg Townsley, who was crouched in the grass just feet from where the mortar landed. There was not a dry eye at the funeral. Harking back to their days as “Old Breed” Marines, Colonel Jones said to the assembled men, “With Townsley we cleaned up everything on the China coast … his death is not only a blow to the battalion, but a great loss to the regiment.” After Jones’s words, a firing squad sent three volleys over the grave and then a bugler played taps.
CHAPTER 20
Camp Tarawa
While the 4th Division was mourning Townsley’s death on Maui, the 2nd Marine Division was months into its training on the big island of Hawaii. After defeating the Japanese at Tarawa, the division dropped off its wounded at Pearl Harbor, where ambulances took them to area hospitals. On a dark night in early December 1943, the convoy arrived in Hawaii’s Hilo Harbor. The air hung heavy with humidity. The town was under a blackout, and the exhausted men saw nothing but shadows. They staggered and shuffled off the transport ships, wondering what the division had in store for them. Many of them barely made it to the waiting trucks that transported them sixty-five miles from Hilo Harbor to their tent camp under the giant, snowcapped peaks of the twin volcanoes Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea. Those whom the trucks could not accommodate traveled by narrow-gauge train that was originally built to support the sugar industry.
Upon arriving in camp, some of the men joked that the Marines had delivered them from one hell only to plop them down in another. It was the kind of gallows humor that all of them—veterans of the three-day carnage on Tarawa—now understood. It didn’t take long for the newcomers to give their Hawaiian home a name. “Camp Tarawa,” they called it.
The men literally had to build the camp from scratch. Piles of cots and tents lay in a pasture waiting to be assembled. Laboring in the gray mist at 6,000 feet, it took until Christmas. The men grumbled that whoever had chosen the site was one sadistic son of a bitch. There were no panoramic views of the blue-green Pacific. Mother Nature had drawn an unsparing line through the middle of camp. To the north lay sodden forests saturated by cold rains, and cloud-covered mountains that caught and trapped the northeast trade winds. To the south lay dry, hilly pastureland, plagued by cacti and dust storms, searing heat and fields of sharp black lava. Only to the west, on the lee of the island, with its quiet, palm-lined beaches, could a wandering Marine escape the climatic extremes.
As much as the men came to hate Camp Tarawa’s miserable weather, the Navy physicians rightly insisted that there was no better place for veterans who had also been in the Guadalcanal campaign to recover from the ravages of recurrent malaria attacks. As the atabrine treatments killed the malaria parasites, the fever-addled men recovered their youthful vigor. The officers saw the change and began to push them again. Beginning with forced marches, and maneuvers in the Hamakua and Kan cane fields, they graduated to live-fire exercises. While they scrambled over rock and scrub and fields of knife-edged black lava, machine gunners fired rounds over their heads and artillery shells burst near them.
As a runner for Sergeant John Rachitsky, Frank Borta had gone into Tarawa late on the second day. Just sixteen years old, Borta was as green as they came, a callow young kid with peach fuzz and a sideways grin. But he was in good hands. The sergeant was a consummate Marine, tall, lean, oozing confidence, and nearly indestructible. Prior to the war, he had served in China and survived a number of close calls. Rachitsky, they said, was so rugged he needed a wheelbarrow to carry his cast-iron balls in. But he was no loudmouthed show-off. He preferred a quiet kind of leadership. Every Marine under him knew exactly what he expected: that every man would do his duty. Guys joked that they were less afraid of dying than of letting down the sergeant.
Borta knew that he had gotten off easy on Tarawa. Owing to a series of oversights and mix-ups, the units that had come in early on the second morning were nearly destroyed. That day the tide covering Betio’s coral reef was barely two feet high. Japanese defenders on the island’s eastern peninsula lowered the long barrels of their dual-purpose antiaircraft guns and hit the Higgins boats as the drivers lowered the ramps. Then gunners along the island’s north coast tore into the troops as they waded ashore. The sight horrified correspondent Robert Sherrod, who thought that nothing could be as bad as the initial landing the day before. “This is far worse than it was yesterday,” he wrote.
By the evening of the second day, when Borta came ashore, the carnage was over. By November 23, the battle’s fourth day, Marines raised an American flag to the top of one of the island’s last standing palm trees, and a bugler sounded colors. Borta saluted and thanked God for sparing his life.
Born in late January 1927, Frank Borta was only sixteen when he persuaded his mother that the only thing in life he wanted was to be a Marine. She agreed to lie about his age. When the recruiter called to verify, she assured him that June 1, 1926, was Frank’s birthday. His father, a tough Polish-American, wondered aloud why in hell the Marines would want his pipsqueak of a son. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “I knew we were losing the war, but not bad enough to take you.”
The following day Borta walked down to the station for his weigh-in. Marines had to be 130 pounds, and he came up two pounds short. Winking, the corpsman put his hand on Borta’s shoulder while he was on the scale. “This chick is underweight,” he said to the gunnery sergeant, “
but he’s big-boned. We’ll put some meat on him.”
Tarawa, though, had been a wake-up call. He had gone in dreaming of glory, but after seeing bodies sprawled on the beach and corpses floating like buoys in the surf, he knew the reality of being a Marine. It was not dress blues and adoring women and an easily earned reputation for bravery. For many the reality was death on an obscure atoll.
Borta was assigned to a burial detail, and was among the last Marines off the island. By the time he arrived in Waimea, Hawaii, Camp Tarawa was up and running. In early February his platoon was pulled out and sent back to Hilo. There Sergeant Rachitsky informed Borta and the others that they were now part of a new group called the 2nd Separate Infantry Battalion, under the auspices of the 2nd Marine Division.
In Hilo, Borta and the 2nd Separate Infantry Battalion learned that their home was to be the Kilauea Military Camp, which was still surrounded by barbed wire. Kilauea had housed Japanese-American internees before they were relocated to camps in the continental United States. By day the men guarded ammunition dumps and unloaded ships. Rachitsky assigned Borta to unloading duty. The work was dull and difficult, and Rachitsky pushed and timed the work crews to see how long it took them to unload boxes of hand grenades and 30-mm rounds. Ship-to-shore movement of ammunition—the job had invasion written all over it.
No one, not even Rachitsky, had any idea where the next battleground would be. One thing was for sure, though: wherever they were headed, it was going to be ugly. General Holland “Howlin’ Mad” Smith had made that clear. “We are through with the flat atolls,” he said. Then he added, “Now we are up against mountains and caves where the Japs can really dig in.”
The Color of War Page 15