West Loch is separated from Middle Loch by the Waipahu Peninsula.
The sailor’s quote is from Robert Graf’s memoirs.
When the Joint Chiefs of Staff finalized the date for Operation Forager, the invasion of the Marianas—Saipan, Tinian, and Guam—both the 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions began amphibious maneuvers at Maalaea Bay on Maui. In the latter part of April 1944, the Army’s 27th Infantry Division did the same. By mid-May, the Marines returned to Maui to practice ship-to-shore movements. On May 17, in a dress rehearsal for the invasion, staged at Maalaea Bay, hundreds of amtracs ran up on the beaches, and 2nd and 4th Division Marine riflemen, working against the clock, assaulted pillboxes. Observers critiqued the operation, and afterward worked to fine-tune the landing plan. On May 19, during training off Kahoolawe Island, live naval gunfire and aircraft strafing were added to the exercises. During a four-day period, May 20–24, the Army’s 27th Infantry Division held its own maneuvers on Oahu.
What Graf and Crerar may or may not have known was that because there were only six ammunition ships assigned to the entire Pacific, sixteen LSTs were forced to carry 740 rounds of five-inch, .38-caliber antiaircraft shells and the powder for them. Ten more LSTs carried 270 4.5-inch rockets, 6,000 rounds of 40-mm machine gun ammunition, and 15,000 rounds of 20-mm machine-gun ammunition.
According to an article titled “The Negro Problem in the Fourteenth Naval District,” Hawaii was not a good place for black servicemen to be. The territory did not want them. Hawaii’s delegate to Congress and its governor denounced their presence, and civic organizations passed resolutions of protest. The blacks were miserable, too. One wrote, “It is awful hard for one to concentrate all his effort toward the war when he has such a great battle to fight at home.” Another wrote, “There are a great many southerners here that seem to think we Negroes have no place here or a right in the sun. They preach to the natives a nasty, poisonous doctrine that we must fight like hell to overcome. They tell the natives that we are ignorant, dumb, evil, rapers, and trouble makers. They have the native women to a point they are afraid to even speak to our Negro boys.” Yet another black serviceman wrote, “Negroes are considered the lowest thing on this rock.… The white men have come here with tales of Negroes carrying dreadful diseases, being thieves, murderers and downright no good.”
The black press published a three-part series called “Americans in Concentration Camps.” The articles addressed the discrimination against American citizens of Japanese ancestry. They also highlighted the lack of blacks in both the armed services and on defense projects and accused the U.S. government of drawing a deliberate color line.
Details of the West Loch disaster come from a variety of sources, including The West Loch Story by William Johnson, “The Navy’s Hushed-up Tragedy at West Loch” from Sea Classic (November 2005) by A. Alan Oliver and Deloris Guttman at the African American Diversity Cultural Center Hawaii.
Rear Admiral Furlong was the commandant of the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard. Furlong had seen the first Japanese bombs hit Ford Island during the assault on Pearl Harbor.
The 29th Chemical Decontamination Company was most likely attached to Headquarters, Provisional Chemical Warfare Composite Battalion (a unit about which I found no additional information). Apparently this provisional composite battalion administered the 29th and other chemical units stationed in the area.
The original CINCPAC press release reported that Army casualties were eight dead, fifty-three missing, and nine injured. The West Loch Story by William Johnson, however, says that 163 men lost their lives and 396 were wounded in the disaster. Six LSTs and a handful of amtracs were destroyed. In Saipan: Beginning of the End, Major Carl Hoffman puts the number killed at 207: 112 from the 4th Division and ninety-five from the 2nd Division. Hoffman mentions nothing, however, about the majority of the deaths coming from the 29th Chemical Company.
Graf could not believe that his buddy Crerar did not know how to swim. Once a Marine could not even make it through boot camp without being able to swim, but late in the war the Marines were so desperate for men that they waived the requirement.
On Monday afternoon, May 22, Marine Corporal Robert Patrick Roberts, who had been at Tent City at Hickam Field with all the other Pacific replacements, when he heard a loud roar, figured he would go survey the damage for himself. What he saw was certainly worse than the Honolulu Star Bulletin described, and worse even than he could have imagined: the harbor covered in smoke, mangled pieces of steel, and Coast Guard boats still pulling dead bodies from the water. Later Stars and Stripes magazine would describe the explosion as a “minor incident.”
The transient center, or Tent City, was built by the Seabees to house Marines staging through Pearl Harbor. Begun in October of 1943 by the 92nd Seabees, the camp was completed in four months. It was broken into two 5,000-man areas, each containing a complete system of utilities. Housing was provided in 1,250 tents erected over concrete floors, and eight 40-by-100-foot and fifty 20-by-48-foot Quonset huts.
Lieutenant Commander Joseph Hoyt was in charge of a flotilla of LSTs. Hoyt testified during the court of inquiry that the kind of load they were putting on the decks of the LSTs violated every safety precaution of the Navy. He pointed out that, if not for a bit of luck, every ship in the harbor could have exploded.
In December 1941, more than a year after President Roosevelt signed the controversial Selective Training and Service Act, every branch of service, especially the Navy, was still undermanned. Problems would continue throughout the war. In winter 1944 it took a threat from Navy Secretary Frank Knox to change President Roosevelt’s mind about the need for more men. The Navy, he said, would have to “drastically curtail presently scheduled operations.” Gradually the Navy expanded beyond the 3-million mark. By March 1944, however, the Selective Service was barely providing its quota, and the Bureau of Navy Personnel searched for ways and means to economize with those already in uniform. By July 1944, Admiral King would have to ask the president for an additional 390,000 men. Lack of numbers was a problem that would bedevil King until the end of the war. The U.S. Army that General Marshall took over in September 1939 stood nineteenth in the world with a total of 174,000 men—ahead of Bulgaria and behind Portugal.
CHAPTER 2: BIG DREAMS
During his last few months of high school, Graf used the money he made as a stock clerk at a local five-and-dime store to go to the picture show and see every war movie he could—Sergeant York, The Fighting 69th, and To the Shores of Tripoli.
The Sans Soucie Hotel drew royalty and the wealthy from all across the world to the tiny town. Ballston Spa had inspired others, too. Stirred by the rolling hills and unbroken tracts of forest, James Fenimore Cooper used the area as the setting for The Last of the Mohicans, and Cooper wrote a portion of the book in the town’s library.
Many upstate New Yorkers had fought in the 128th New York Volunteer Infantry—“Old Steady”—the regiment of Civil War fame.
CHAPTER 3: LEAVING TEXAS
Camp Elliott was the site of a 26,000-acre base that the Marine Corps leased from the city of San Diego.
When Matthews and his fellow Marines finished a clip, men working the pits would check the paper targets. When one of them waved a large red flag back and forth, everyone knew what it signified. It was called “waving Maggie’s drawers” and meant that a shooter had missed the target.
By the afternoon, Marines rushing back from liberty poured into camp. In a matter of hours, Matthews’s B Company was just a few men short of full strength. Its mortar, machine gun, and rifle platoons were mobilized. Some platoons went to the San Diego docks to load ships, while others were sent out to patrol and defend Southern California’s many small airstrips. Predictions were that Japan would follow up with an invasion of the mainland.
CHAPTER 4: MOSQUITOES, MUD, AND MAYHEM
Admiral King regarded Samoa as the linchpin in the supply line between Hawaii and Australia, and fortified it with troops, aircraft, and war matériel. Ma
ny, including Lieutenant General Henry “Hap” Arnold, head of the Army Air Forces, disagreed with King about how to protect Samoa. Arnold considered the onsite defense unnecessary. In his opinion, heavy bombers would be able to protect Samoa and the line. King, however, insisted that some bases were too important to be lost.
King also believed that the ravenous Japanese navy had to be confronted. By early March 1942, Japan had roared through Hong Kong, Malaya, Guam, Rabaul and the Bismarcks, Singapore, Java, the Dutch East Indies, and Burma, and was not about to stop its territorial expansion. King’s naval forces, however, were far inferior to Japan’s. The Japanese had ten carriers, while the Americans had only three. The Japanese had twelve battleships, while all the American ones were either sunk, damaged, or unavailable. And Japan had twenty-five cruisers to the fifteen cruisers of the Pacific Fleet. There were similar disparities in destroyers and submarines. Nevertheless, King ordered piecemeal raids, flouting conventional naval strategy and scattering his carriers, and encouraging them to hit the enemy at every opportunity.
The Marines stationed on Samoa were aware that the two carriers (Enterprise and Yorktown) had left Samoa, and they felt isolated and vulnerable. They had all heard about the barbarity of the Japanese. On Rabaul, Japan’s famed South Seas Detachment ran barges ashore and captured almost one thousand Australian soldiers. The Australians put up a heroic fight, but the Japanese forces overwhelmed them with sheer numbers. At Tol Plantation, the Japanese tied 160 Australian prisoners to coconut palms. While the remaining Aussies looked on, young Japanese trainees used the prisoners for bayonet practice.
When the 2nd Brigade arrived in Samoa, after two weeks at sea, it had an enormous task ahead of it. The brigade’s orders were to finish what the previous defense battalion had started: a multi-island defense system code-named “Straw.” This entailed constructing gun emplacements, bomb shelters, power plants, wharves, a hospital, warehouses, coastal and mountain roads, as well as clearing jungle, blasting coral for airstrips, stringing miles of barbed wire, filling in lagoons, installing secret ration storage shelters with enough supplies and medicine to keep eight hundred men alive for thirty days, caching ammunition and supplies along forest trails, laying mines, and stringing an anti-torpedo net across Pago Pago Harbor.
The Samoan Marines were better adapted to the climate and could negotiate the steep and slick mountain trails much better than the Americans. Without their help, the effort to stock the mountain shelters would have taken months longer.
For a Marine named Enzio Demage, a big-city guy from St. Louis, mail day provided the biggest laugh. The first delivery came after the Marines had been on Samoa for over three months. When the ship arrived, Matthews received one hundred letters from his mother, and copies of the local papers, the Dawson Herald and the Hubbard City News. Matthews read the papers and then, to be a good sport, he passed them on to Demage, who often kidded him about being a hick Texan. With all the guys gathered around, Demage read aloud from the the local news: “Little Johnny Spence brought an unusually large egg by the Herald office last week”; and “A cow, belonging to Cleave Johnson, was struck by the locomotive on the Cotton Belt railroad last Wednesday. The cow was badly injured and put out of its misery by a shot from the six-shooter carried by City Marshall McElroy.” The Marines howled with laughter at the backwoods naïveté.
When Admiral Nimitz learned of the Japanese plan to invade Port Moresby—the U.S. Navy’s Combat Intelligence Unit had broken the Japanese code just months earlier—he consulted with Admiral King and together they decided to send two U.S. Navy carrier task forces and a joint Australian-American cruiser force to oppose the Japanese offensive.
After Pearl Harbor, U.S. intelligence efforts focused on cracking JN-25 (the Japanese naval code). Leading the effort, code-named “Magic,” was the U.S. Navy’s Combat Intelligence Unit, called OP-20-G, which consisted of 738 naval personnel. The unit, housed in the basement of the 14th Naval District Administration at Pearl Harbor, was under the command of Commodore John Rochefort, who combined fluency in Japanese with single-minded dedication to the task. Using complex mathematical analysis, IBM punch-card tabulating machines, and a cipher machine, Friedman developed the ECM Mark III, the unit that was able to crack most of the code by January 1942. The blanket name given to any information gained by deciphering JN-25 was “Ultra,” a word borrowed from British code-breaking efforts and stamped at the top of all deciphered messages.
On May 3 and 4, Japanese forces occupied Tulagi, in the southeastern Solomon Islands, though not without incident. Aircraft from the U.S. fleet carrier Yorktown surprised and sank several Japanese warships. The Japanese responded by sending its fleet carriers into the Coral Sea with the intention of annihilating the Allied naval forces. On May 7 and 8, the carrier forces from the two sides exchanged air strikes. The first day, the U.S. sank the Japanese light carrier Shoho, while the Japanese sank a U.S. destroyer and damaged a fleet oiler. On May 8, U.S. bombers hit the Japanese fleet carrier Shokaku. The Japanese retaliated, damaging two U.S. fleet carriers—the Yorktown and the Lexington. The end result, however, worked to the Allies’ advantage. Because he had lost so many planes and the service of two carriers, Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue called off the invasion of Port Moresby. What the Japanese had hoped to do by capturing Port Moresby was establish a base from which its bombers could pound the Allied supply line.
What the Japanese defeat did not do was save the men stationed on Samoa from the ravages of disease. Physicians stationed in Samoa soon learned that the island’s steamy, bug-infested jungles were perfect incubators for a host of debilitating vector-borne diseases. By midsummer 1942, Carl Matthews had fallen victim to an undiagnosed illness that left him with oozing blisters all over his body, sapped his strength, and stripped him of nearly thirty pounds. The skin condition began innocently. The medical corpsman diagnosed it as a simple case of jungle rot, from which nearly every Marine stationed in Samoa suffered. When the lesions began to spread to his hands, and Matthews’s feet swelled painfully, a concerned medical officer sent him by field ambulance to the regimental hospital. There a corpsman examined the oozing blisters and determined that Matthews had leprosy. The news left Matthews in a state of near panic. Growing up, he had read enough of the Bible to know that leprosy was one of the many scourges that the Israelites believed God had inflicted upon man in retribution for his sins. Bearing the mark of leprosy often meant a lifetime of pain and alienation.
When another physician dismissed the leprosy diagnosis, Matthews was enormously relieved. Still, however, his symptoms continued to stump the doctors. When his temperature climbed and his hands hurt too much for him to hold a fork, and he weighed in at less than 100 pounds, his physicians transferred him to the Samoan Hospital just north of Pago Pago. His condition worsened, and the head doctor decided that he needed to be sent back to the United States for treatment.
Three weeks later, Matthews was aboard the USS Brazos, bound for the United States. When the Brazos arrived at the dock in San Pedro, California, an ambulance waited to take Matthews to the lavish Lake Norconian Country Club, which had been turned into a naval hospital, near Riverside, California. There, amid the decidedly un-Marine-like amenities, he recuperated. James Roosevelt, son of the a president, was a patient in the officers’ area.
The naval hospital sported a lake, mineral baths, two swimming pools, a billiard hall, a golf course, and a graceful dining room where staff members served sumptuous meals on fine china. To Matthews’s delight, there was always fresh fruit and cold milk.
Movie stars often came to visit the patients, whom they treated like heroes. Matthews met Kay Francis, Mary Beth Hughes, Randolph Scott, Claudette Colbert, and Red Skelton, and could not have been more starstruck. Claudette Cobert even kissed his forehead.
As Matthews recovered, he was invited to participate in a War Bond drive in Compton, California, where he rode in a red fire engine near the front of the parade, which was led by Rudy Vallee’s Coast Guard ba
nd. Just behind Matthews, in an extravagantly decorated float, were the Sons of the Pioneers, a Western band that he had listened to while he was growing up in Texas. Before the parade kicked off, William “Hopalong Cassidy” Boyd, Matthews’s boyhood idol, spurred his white horse alongside the fire engine and introduced himself.
The parade ended at Compton Stadium, where Matthews and the other servicemen were escorted to the main stage. The crowd applauded appreciatively. Boyd and Vallee spoke, Vallee sang “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady,” and then people were urged to buy War Bonds and to have them signed by Matthews and the other military men. Matthews enjoyed the attention, scrawling his name and hometown on the bonds and posing for photographs with the buyers.
CHAPTER 5: SEMPER FI
Graf had learned the basics of boot camp quickly: he moved his bowels in the morning, as ordered; he learned that the Marines did everything “double time”; he could take a shower, including soaping up and rinsing off, in under ninety seconds; he could recite his serial number quicker than his address; he could hit the deck running at 4:30 a.m.; scrub, or “holystone,” the barracks floor until it was gleaming (to “holystone” the floor, troops threw sand onto it and then wet the sand with water; then they used cobblestones to rub the floor until it shone); rattle off the Marine Corps’ eleven General Orders, Marine Corps history, its Core Values, and Code of Conduct, as well as he could recite the Lord’s Prayer; and take apart and reassemble his ’03 Springfield rifle as easily as he could slip on a pair of skivvies. The horrible lessons would come later.
After two weeks of practice landings, the 23rd returned to New River. There, Graf qualified for the first time with the Browning .30-caliber machine gun. He liked this medium machine gun, which spat out four hundred to six hundred Springfield .30-06 rounds a minute. But it was heavy, weighing over thirty pounds, and Graf did not envy the men who would one day be lugging it through the jungle. Graf also learned to blow up tanks. In battle they could sabotage tanks from spider holes by sticking a Molotov cocktail through the tank’s exhaust slits or firing into its relatively unprotected underbelly. The bullets would bang around inside, killing or wounding its occupants.
The Color of War Page 39