By late afternoon, Rachitsky’s platoon had made it to a point along Lake Susupe’s western shore. In a small ironwood tree that had somehow escaped the shelling, Borta discovered a Marine helmet hanging from one of the branches. An enemy soldier had apparently detonated a grenade in it and hung it from the tree as a sign of disrespect. Everyone else in the platoon saw it, too, and all of them swore that when the time came they would get their revenge. One of the new riflemen announced that before the battle was over he was going to make himself a necklace of gold Japanese teeth and pickle a gook ear.
Not long before Rachitsky ordered the men to dig in, a shot echoed through the hills just north of the lake. The next thing Borta knew, someone yelled his name. It was Lemon. “D-d-dammit, Chick,” he stuttered in his Panhandle drawl, “I got shot in the bee-hind.” Before Borta could respond, Lemon had his pants down around his ankles. Pointing his bare ass at him, Lemon asked, “Tell me, Chick, how bad is it?” Borta could not help but laugh. All Lemon had was a purple streak as big as the state of Texas running from his lower back across the right cheek of his buttocks, a scratch that would not even qualify as a “million-dollar wound.” His pride more injured now than anything else, Lemon defended himself, “Dammit, Chick, it hurts.”
By 6:45 the dimming sun cast a dull blush of light over the Lake Susupe hills. Rachitsky was cursing his contour map, which showed the territory east of Lake Susupe as a rolling plain. “They’re big goddamn hills,” he said in disgust. The swamp north of the lake was much bigger, too, than the map showed.
While drinking from his canteen, Borta noticed a smudge of white near the bank on the lake’s north side. He studied it for some time, but could not detect any movement. Borta was no souvenir hunter. He had heard of too many men losing their lives while pilfering dead Japanese bodies for a knife, a sword, or a necklace. Sometimes they were booby-trapped, and sometimes an enemy sniper waited nearby, eager to put a bullet in the back of a distracted Marine’s head. But there was something about the white form that bothered Borta. Could it be a nun’s habit, or a child wrapped in a cloth? Stories were circulating among the Marines about persecuted priests and nuns and civilian mothers who had fled with their babies and young children to caves across the island. Borta drew Sergeant Rachitsky’s attention to the white shape.
“Whaddaya think, Sarge?” he asked. “Can I go give it a look?”
Rachitsky squinted his eyes and then turned to his runner. “If you want,” he said skeptically. “Be careful. Curiosity killed the cat.”
Borta crept along the edge of the lake. When he was forty feet away, he knelt down and watched. Finally, certain that it was not a trap, he moved forward and knelt again. What he saw was a dead Marine lying on a stretcher. A corpsman was sprawled out next to him, dead too, half his head blown away by a bullet, his mouth black with swarming flies. His first-aid kit sat next to him, open. The thing that Borta had spotted from a distance was a large white bandage that the corpsman had been reaching for when the bullet ended his life. Borta could not help but be moved by the corpsman’s selflessness. His was a gesture of compassion that seemed to have no place on the battlefield: to risk one’s life in order to save another human being. If Saipan had any room for God or goodness or Jesus, he had just laid his eyes on it. Borta reached for the necklace that his mother had given him, and realized again that it was gone. He pulled his hand out of his blouse, said a brief prayer, and then double-timed it back to the platoon.
It neared dusk, and a fog settled over the swamp. As water seeped into their foxholes, the men grew cold and uncomfortable. “Stranded in a goddamn swamp,” Borta heard one of the guys say with disgust. Then he heard the Marine leave his hole and the crunch of huge, green Great African snails being crushed under his field boots.
Until the early-morning hours, the night was quiet up and down the front. Sharing a sopping foxhole—two hours on, two hours off—Borta and Lemon even managed to sleep. At 3:40 Borta heard what he thought was the rusty rattling of tanks, and he nudged Lemon awake. Lemon opened his eyes and shivered. Then Borta heard voices in the nearby foxholes. “Tanks,” someone said, confirming his suspicion. Minutes before, the commanding officer of B Company, 6th Marines, had called the battalion CP to notify Colonel William Jones that he heard enemy tanks approaching from the east. Jones immediately alerted a nearby tank company and the 1st Battalion of the 10th Marines. In addition he requested naval illumination fires.
Borta shook his leg to get the blood back into a foot that had fallen asleep. When he realized that the tanks were moving to the north, he was relieved. He knew that among the elements of the 29th dug in near Lake Susupe there were no bazookas or artillery. If the tanks had ventured into their sector, they would have been unable to stop them.
General Saito’s goal in sending out the tanks was for them to push 400 yards behind the 6th Marines’ lines and to recapture the radio station. Although the station had no strategic value, it was a prominent landmark that Saito knew the island’s defenders would recognize. The motivation for the counterattack was in keeping with Saito’s strategy to “destroy the enemy at the water’s edge.” Had he been able to execute the assault on the night of June 15 or the morning of June 16, he might have caught the Marines off guard. By the early morning of June 17, however, they had solidified their hold on the beachhead and were prepared to fight.
When the destroyers off the coast fired their five-inch star shells, Colonel Jones’s men saw the attack unfolding. For the Japanese, who were counting on the cover of darkness to confuse and unnerve the Americans, the star shells were dispiriting. According to one officer, they turned “night into day” and made the “maneuvering of units extremely difficult.”
Saito’s tanks advanced in groups of four or five. The Americans were dug in and determined to hold. When several of the tanks broke through the front lines, the well-drilled riflemen merely pivoted and, using bazookas, mortars, rifles, and machine guns, subjected the Japanese to a withering onslaught. Reinforced by the pack howitzers of the 10th Marines and 75-mm halftracks, the Marines repulsed the first major tank attack of the Pacific War. By 7:00 a.m., over two dozen Japanese tanks sat smoldering on the battlefield. Colonel Jones’s 1st and 2nd Battalions suffered ninety-seven casualties. In beating back the enemy tanks, however, they had delivered a tremendous blow to Saito’s plans for defending Saipan.
Although General Saito’s plans to cripple the Marine invasion before it had a chance to move inland had failed, in the first two days his troops had inflicted heavy losses on the Americans. Aboard the Rocky Mount, General Holland Smith’s wall chart told a disconcerting story: casualties in some of the assault battalions pushed 40 percent, and the 6th Marines had already lost six top-notch officers. Losses south of the sugar dock were “very heavy, especially in the 23rd.” Overall, U.S. forces had already suffered 3,500 casualties, and hospital ships were filling up fast. Most of the wounds were not clean bullet wounds, either, but the nasty work of shell fragments that tore, ripped, and gashed their victims.
CHAPTER 26
A Healthy Spirit of Competition
As the morning sun flowed into the barracks hall, Seaman Second Class Joe Small was still lying in bed. Small usually rose early for breakfast and then returned to the barracks to wake the guys sleeping off hangovers before the petty officer burst in, but on this morning he needed the extra shut-eye. In Pittsburg, the night before, he had met a woman and barely made the 1:30 a.m. bus, the last one back to Port Chicago.
Joe Small was born in 1921 in Savannah, Georgia, but spent most of his childhood in Middlesex County, New Jersey, where his family moved in 1927. When his father, a part-time Baptist preacher and a farmer, died in 1936, Small became the family’s mainstay. Like his father, who could wield a hammer and a welding torch as well as he could quote from the Bible, young Joe was a gifted handyman. He liked to swim and play baseball, but there was often too much to do for him to devote any time to either pursuit. He, his mother, three brothers, and
a sister made do, working a small farm where they grew corn and wheat for sale, and tending a large garden plot of tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage, and collards for their own use. In 1939, realizing that the family needed cash money, Small entered the Civilian Conservation Corps. An officer saw that he had leadership potential and that the other men respected him, and soon promoted him to lieutenant. Rather than spending his money on beer and entertaining women, Small sent the bulk of his paycheck home to his mother. After putting in a year with the CCC, he took a number of jobs, learning to operate heavy equipment—cranes, backhoes, and bulldozers—acquiring skills he would put to good use at Port Chicago. He worked hard, but manged to find time to be the lead voice in the church choir. In 1943, while making thirty dollars a week driving a truck for a flour company (at the time the average weekly salary for a white driver was forty to forty-five dollars), he was drafted.
Small had not chosen the Navy, nor had it chosen him. He ended up there because he and a buddy got their physicals at the same time. When the doctor asked them which one wanted to go into the Army, neither of them responded, so his buddy got the Army and Small got the Navy.
At Port Chicago, Small became a section leader and a hold boss. By January 1944 he was the division’s official “cadence caller,” the man assigned to summon the division to attention so that the petty officer could call the roster. As a cadence caller, he always marched outside the ranks, and regardless of rain or mud, he kept his men moving at a regulation sixty-two steps per minute. At twenty-three, he was a few years older than many of the men in his division. He was tough, bull-necked, and strong-shouldered—though, at five feet seven and a half inches, and 170 pounds, not physically imposing—sometimes cantankerous, and a tireless worker. More important, the guys looked up to him and some feared him, too. He had no patience for malingerers and was not shy about his dislike for the white officers or a good portion of the all-black enlisted crew. Although he had only an eighth-grade education, he was exactly the kind of person whom the officers at the October 1943 “Conference with Regard to Negro Personnel” had in mind when they talked about the importance of finding a respected “Negro” boss or a “headman” to keep the others of his race in line. The black petty officers, whom many of the loaders considered to be Uncle Toms, did not mess with him. Even the white commissioned officers treated him with respect.
Eventually Small got transferred to the winches. He was undoubtedly delighted about the move. Working in the cargo holds, fourteen to twenty-seven feet down in the belly of the ship, was dangerous work. Small knew that there was “no place to run or hide in the hold of a Liberty ship,” especially when a winchman, waiting for instructions from his signalman, held suspended in the air a wire net filled with bombs. The seamen in the hold wanted their best men up above—one at the levers and the other giving him instructions. When the winches started to hum, just short of burning up, the man running them had better know what he was doing, especially if he was trying to stop a big load from free-falling. The waterfront union had strict regulations that required its winchmen to have many years of experience with various kinds of cargo before graduating to ammunition. If the Navy Bureau of Ordnance had similar regulations, Port Chicago did not observe them.
Small started on the winches without any kind of special training; he just “picked up” the skill by closely observing other operators, filling in when one needed to use the head, playing with the levers over his lunch hour. He was good with machines and loved to watch the way the winches worked, a design as practical as it was simple. A winch consisted of two steam engines connected to a crankshaft, which, in turn, was connected to a drum. One end of a wire runner (cargo lifting line) was wound around the drum while the other was run up a cargo boom or crane—which was anchored to a mast—and was used to move loads from the dock to the hold of a ship. Each Liberty ship had five five-ton booms and two jumbo booms (one fifty-ton boom and one fifteen- or thirty-ton boom) rigged to three masts. As long as a winch was cared for properly and greased often, it might run forever.
Lieutenant Ernest Delucchi rode Small hard, but Small saw through his power plays. From his first day on the base he could tell that the lieutenant was a “short fat man … who was making a desperate attempt to change the color of his bars.” What Small meant was that Delucchi was bucking for a promotion, trying to trade in a lieutenant’s two silver bars for the gold oak leaf of a lieutenant commander. Consequently, little holdups pissed him off, and he could be a vindictive SOB, wielding liberty passes to deliberately inflict pain. If the division made its tonnage goals, he might reward it with a free movie or a twenty-four-hour pass. If he was in a really good mood, and a ship was not scheduled to come in for a few days, he might give the men seventy-two hours off. Tick him off, though, or fall short of his tonnage targets, and he would be as “hot as a peppermill,” florid-faced and unforgiving. A guy might have a beautiful woman on the line in Berkeley or a hot date at the USO club in Oakland, but if Delucchi decided that he wanted the men to stay on base, they were not going anywhere. If he were really ticked, he would assign the men to extra duty handling explosives.
Joe Small was still sleeping when the barracks petty officer stormed in, shouting at the top of his lungs, going from seaman to seaman, and inspecting the bunks. Those men who lingered under their sheets got a rude awakening when he grabbed their mattresses and pulled the whole works onto the floor. Near Small, a small group of guys was telling tales about their night on the town. Outside the barracks, one of the guys was pitching horseshoes in his skivvies with his sneakers wrapped around his neck, as he had every day for the last two months. The fella wanted out of Port Chicago, even if it meant that he had to settle for a Section Eight discharge to get it. In the background Lieutenant Delucchi’s voice boomed over the intercom, “Now hear this, now hear this. Division Four, Barracks B, fall out, fall out!”
Small could already see the day unfolding. There would be another ship at the dock, and everybody would be pushing to load more tonnage. The lieutenants and inspectors would be sounding off. The black enlisted men, trying to earn a night’s liberty pass, would be racing, too, rolling bombs out boxcar doors, down ramps, and across the dock until they clanged against the ship’s hull and nearly ricocheted into the bay.
After leaving the barracks and slopping through the mud, Small stood with the petty officer and called the division to attention. After the men settled in, the petty officer shouted roll call. Then the cattle car pulled up, waiting to take the division to the docks. When Lieutenant Delucchi stepped out of the bachelor’s officer’s quarters, Small barked, “Right face, forward march.” The men boarded the cattle car reluctantly. It seemed that the driver was always deliberately popping the clutch, sending men sprawling across the floor.
When the truck reached the docks, the men, some of them limping, exited and lined up in columns. When Small took his position, he saw Kong break ranks. Long-armed and wide-shouldered, he was a powerfully built man. And he was livid. Flying across the back of the truck was the last straw. The previous night he had gotten tanked and picked up a woman who turned out to be a man. Kong did not find out until he was up in a room and almost naked. That was when the guy tried to rob and kill him. Now Kong not only had a king-sized headache, but he had a bad case of blue balls, and his body felt as if he had been hit with a sledgehammer.
Kong started for the truck driver, fully prepared to tear him apart and then accept a long bread-and-water stay in the brig. The petty officer, however, stopped him and ordered him to get back in ranks. He obeyed, walking back to his spot in the column, all the while shaking his fist at the driver. One day he would get him.
The 3rd Division had arrived at the docks first, and the division officer was already briefing his men on the day’s work. Then he called over his petty officer and said in a hushed tone, “This hull needs two hundred fifty ton to sail. Tell the boys if we get it by 1530, they can hit the beach at eighteen hundred.”
When Delucchi walked u
p, he and the division officer greeted each other like two friends meeting in a saloon. “Ernie [Ernest Delucchi], you want to kick that another fifty?” the officer asked. Delucchi did not even pause. “Sure,” he said. Small was standing near enough to overhear them. It did not take a genius to figure out what they were talking about. Each was wagering that his group of guys could put on more tonnage than the other’s. Although Captain Goss probably would not have approved of the betting, he encouraged a rivalry between the divisions, what he called a “healthy spirit of competition.” Delucchi’s bet with the other officer sealed, he turned to Small. “Okay,” he said. “Move them out.”
Small gave the cadence call, but his mind was elsewhere. Unlike his buddy Kong, on the previous night he had met the sweetest girl he had seen in a long time. Small had been with his share of women, but this woman, this “Lou,” had really “hung one on him.” Pittsburg, California, had never been his favorite liberty destination. Because of Camp Stoneman, it was an Army town, and a sailor, especially a black one, walked around with a bull’s-eye on his back. But on the night of February 13, Small took the bus to Pittsburg anyway and ran into Lou at a little place called the Tender Rib Café. He had walked her home and now he could not get her out of his mind.
The clang of metal on metal snapped Small from his reverie in time to see the Liberty ship coming into the bay. She was empty, drawing only a few feet of water. Small had been hoping that the ship was a new one with state-of-the-art electric winches. Old-fashioned steam ones, with their old leaky valves, were a bitch. The last few ships had been steam, and Small’s hands were blistered from weeks of manhandling the long iron handles.
The Color of War Page 21