No Bended Knee

by Merrill B. Twining

  I reported in at the commander, South Pacific, headquarters (ComSoPac) in Auckland, New Zealand, the next day. Admiral Ghormley had not yet reached New Zealand, and his chief of staff, Rear Adm. Dan Callaghan, was in charge, assisted by my old friend Col. DeWitt Peck, USMC, an able staff officer of wide experience. After a short but productive discussion they put me on the night train to Wellington. Upon arrival, I reported to the headquarters of the New Zealand Army, then under the command of Lieutenant General Puttick.

  I was asked to report further to Colonel Salmon, a most able and energetic officer recruited from the highest levels of New Zealand’s business executives. He was serving in a key position in the logistics branch of their general staff. He knew I was coming and what my errand would be. I was able to provide him with all information relative to size, organization, and approximate arrival time of the Marine contingents of the division and their peculiar requirements as an amphibious force. He had served with the Anzacs in World War I and, I believe, participated in the 1915 landing at the Dardanelles (Gallipoli). He designated an engineer officer, Captain Shepherd, as my guide and advisor, then sent us out to find locations suitable for the camps and other facilities the division would need.

  The next few days were hectic. We prowled the hills and valleys from dawn to dark searching for sites. I’m convinced that New Zealand has only two directions, up and down. Although I was raised in the hills of Oregon and my Marine Corps duty kept me fit, I had to struggle to keep up. Each morning Shepherd would offer the same reassurance for the day’s undertakings, “Just a few easy downs today. We’ll be back for tea.” The downs were not easy, and we never returned in time for tea. Once we waded across a beautiful trout stream. “Any fish?” I asked. “Just a lot of little chaps,” he replied, indicating by holding his palms about eighteen to twenty inches apart. Trout must come big in New Zealand. I never had time to find out.

  Soon we decided to center the proposed installation around McKay’s Crossing, twenty miles north of Wellington. This site provided an unlimited area several miles long by a quarter mile wide of nearly flat beachfront, suitable for the camp-site plus necessary drill fields. It was also readily accessible by road and rail. It was backed on the east by an endless expanse of rolling hills, perhaps 300 feet high, given over to grazing sheep. This was the kind of training area the Corps had needed and dreamed of for years, and it was much like the site of our present Camp Pendleton, just north of San Diego, California.

  This would give us a fine area for training, firing exercises, and physical conditioning and an extensive beach area for our beach defense and landing operations activities. In addition, there were smaller areas nearby suited to the unique requirements of specialized units such as our amphibian tractor battalion and boat pool, both needing the protected waters afforded by a small harbor. We lacked only an artillery firing range but were offered intermittent use of an existing New Zealand army range situated not too far north of Wellington. Within four days we were able to submit a plan embracing locations and requirements for a main camp at McKay’s Crossing, four small additional camps nearby to the south, a proposed airstrip to the north, and nine additional facilities required for logistical purposes in and around Wellington (dumps, storage areas, offices, and so forth). These latter were the special province of my able, energetic, and extremely valuable assistant Harry Detwiler, who quickly established wide personal contacts throughout the Wellington area that proved extremely important as events, foreseen and otherwise, unfolded.

  The final step was to receive the approval of the commander of the New Zealand Armed Forces, General Puttick. This fine officer had recently distinguished himself by his brilliant conduct of the withdrawal from Crete following the collapse of Greece. With only a small and greatly outnumbered force, he had inflicted heavy losses on Hitler’s airborne elements, drastically limiting their future value to the Axis in North Africa. Naturally Puttick was a hero to the people of New Zealand throughout this dark hour of the war.

  The U.S. military attache in New Zealand was Colonel Nankeville, an elderly U.S. Army officer born in New Zealand. He loved the country and was a popular local figure. Learning of my mission, he tried to persuade me to establish the division in the Lower Hutt Valley, a sprawling bedroom community adjoining Wellington on the north.

  The proposed site consisted primarily of a severely restricted fairground area surrounded by residences and subjected to urban traffic along the narrow New Zealand roads. It was confining and provided no direct access to the sea or any other suitable training grounds. To move at all would require use of motor transport far in excess of the division’s limited organic allowance, thus forcing an additional burden on New Zealand’s own limited resources. The social aspects of superimposing a large military force upon the population of an already developed community were also debatable. I therefore could not accede to Colonel Nankeville’s suggestions, which, I believe, were made on behalf of Major General Weir, who exercised immediate command of the New Zealand troops defending the beaches. To be sure, our presence on the West Coast would be a factor complicating his defense planning, but certainly not an overriding one.

  As an officer of the Marine Corps, I had enjoyed an unusual amount of experience in the field of beach defense and the defense of advanced bases, had taught the subject in our schools, and had contributed to its professional literature. I had seen no evidence of training or preparation for defense along the New Zealand coast beyond the erection of a few concrete dragon’s teeth on the coastal highway north of the capital. I never asked questions, but saw nothing to indicate that anything more than the most meager of forces existed. The reason was that with a generosity bordering on nobility, the New Zealanders had sent their men to the great battles: North Africa, Tobruk, Crete, and Singapore. In their present moment of need they stood isolated and alone.

  I kept all these things uppermost in my mind when I attended the conference called by Lieutenant General Puttick at his headquarters. It was a rather large meeting and included most of New Zealand’s senior army officers. General Weir’s officers gave a fair and tactful presentation of their views. They felt our presence on the coast was undesirable because of our specified and overriding amphibious mission; that our availability for local defense could not be regarded as a certainty; and that, because of the murky command relationships, they could not regard us as an absolute in their defense equation. I was not asked to speak, but General Puttick did ask me, “How well do you know General Vandegrift?” I replied to the effect that he had personally selected me as his operations officer when he became assistant division commander of the 1st Marine Division. I said that in 1923 I had served with him in the 5th Marine Regiment at Quantico, Virginia, and again in the 3d Marine Brigade under Brig. Gen. Smedley Butler in China in 1927–28, and that Vandegrift had selected me to come to New Zealand in my present capacity as advance officer to arrange for arrival and training in the Wellington area. I tried, without saying so, to convey the impression that Archer Vandegrift was not a man who would bring a Marine division halfway around the world to surrender it to the Japanese without a fight and that he would draw a willing sword in the defense of New Zealand’s territory if the need arose.

  Persuasive speech is not one of my accomplishments, but I must have enjoyed a measure of success on this occasion. Construction of our main camp on the beach at McKay’s Crossing began at daylight the next morning. I had been in New Zealand for only a few days. In the United States it would have taken weeks to cut through the barriers of red tape and bureaucracy to achieve the same result.

  I went to McKay’s Crossing (also known as Paekakariki) each day to observe the construction. I was surprised to see that the work was being done almost entirely by hand. Even the concrete was mixed in small machines turned by hand. There were large numbers of rather elderly laborers, including some women. Noting my surprise, Major Parsons, the New Zealand engineer officer who accompanied me, said sadly, “We sent all our construction
equipment to Singapore to work on the fortifications there.” The work was performed largely by the New Zealand Department of Public Works in conjunction with the New Zealand Army Engineers. It was all done under the Lend-Lease agreement between the United States and New Zealand.

  Through Major Parsons, the New Zealand authorities inquired, somewhat nervously I thought, about what standards of construction we would expect in our camps. He showed me a magazine depicting the rather luxurious semipermanent installations built for our forces already occupying bases in Bermuda and the Bahamas. They were greatly reassured to learn that we expected nothing like that. “Old George” had never known any luxury at home and certainly did not expect it here. We had always lived under our own canvas and needed little beyond sanitary facilities (heads and showers) and screened galleys for preparing rations. Personnel would live in squad tents pitched on wooden decks. We had lived happily this way in the past at Guantanamo and during the snowy winter of 1941– 42 in North Carolina. Not quite convinced and feeling that they could do more for us, they insisted on four-man wooden huts they called “baches” instead of the tent decks I had suggested. These were constructed of green lumber from their South Island forests cut from trees in which the birds had been singing the week before.

  At the end of the second week the engineers realized that they could not meet the scheduled date of completion at this slow rate of progress and agreed with me on the substitution of wooden tent decks with strongbacks for supporting the tents. I had brought with me construction sketches and the precise measurements used in our North Carolina tent camps. The New Zealand crews immediately shifted to this simplified form of construction. The rate of progress greatly accelerated, and the project was soon back on schedule. No Marine in the New Zealand winter ever was required to live without adequate shelter or under unsanitary conditions. It was a great accomplishment by a country severely handicapped and distraught by war.

  Rationing the troops presented no great problem, as New Zealand produced an abundance of food in great variety and of unsurpassed quality. Wartime lack of shipping had isolated both New Zealand and Australia, and exports were reduced to a trickle. Their shelves were full. All they wanted was a statement of our requirements. I had with me a copy of the Marine Corps ration in the form used in subsistence contracts at home. It specified the exact amounts of each item of a proper ration for one Marine for thirty days. It proved of great interest to all the New Zealanders involved. They noted sadly the minuscule allowance of mutton—their great national favorite. No matter, they were up to the rafters in beef and pork. “Ice cream in the ration? Ice cream is not a dessert; it is a sweet. But you can have all you want; we have plenty.” It was good, too—better than ours and made with real cream.

  One night I answered a phone call from the rationing authority. “You are allowing only one-sixteenth of an ounce of tea per man per month. This is obviously an error.” I replied that I could not recall ever having seen a mug of hot tea served in a Marine Corps mess, but once in a blue moon, in extremely hot weather, we had iced tea. They could have it all as far as I was concerned. The New Zealanders were overjoyed. They had little tea for themselves and no way of getting more at this stage of the war. We were promised all the coffee we could use. It was grown on a subtropical island to the north. Good stuff too, but not the way they brewed it.

  There was only one other American living at the Waterloo Hotel where I was staying. This was Brig. Gen. Pat Hurley, sent by President Roosevelt to Australia to persuade MacArthur to leave the Philippines. “Easiest job I ever had,” Hurley quipped to me more than once.

  The Roosevelt administration asked Hurley to remain “down under” as U.S. ambassador to New Zealand’s Labor government. A warm, vibrant, fun-loving man, full of grace and irrepressible humor, he enlivened the grim New Zealand scene and found a warm spot in the heart of all the Kiwis in return.

  It all started at a parade in Hurley’s honor shortly after his arrival. The parade went on as the usual sober affair until Pat spotted a mounted detachment approaching the reviewing stand. As a former Oklahoma cowboy, a cavalryman, and a born showman, he found the situation irresistible. He greeted the approaching horsemen with the first Rebel yell ever heard in New Zealand. It was the wildest whoop since Pickett’s Charge. It woke all the dignitaries. The spectators cheered him until the place echoed. It was the Rebel yell heard ’round New Zealand.

  New Zealanders are reserved, conservative, and dignified to a degree; but they expect something a little different from Americans. They were not disappointed in Pat Hurley, who brought a message of renewed hope and cheer at the time of the Singapore surrender, when they found themselves isolated from the mother country and yet not quite sure of the strength and depth of American support.

  Hurley always spoke kindly to me and sometimes invited me to have dinner at his table. On one such night it was raining hard, a real toad choker. We were the only guests in the large dining room with five gracious waitresses to assist us. General Hurley scanned the typical British menu. One alliterative item always intrigued him, and he would read it aloud: “Pickled pork and parsnips.” After dinner he herded the matronly waitresses and me out of the hotel, insisting we all go to a movie. We crowded into the ambassador’s large limousine. Then, after the fine show, with rain still pouring, we deposited each lady on her own doorstep and returned to the hotel in triumph.

  With camp construction properly under way I directed my attention to the Wellington harbor area, which I knew would soon be the center of much activity. The shoreside facilities consisted of a number of small piers built long ago and inconvenient for modern operation, particularly in connection with military cargoes and equipment.

  However, one large modern and commodious installation was available to us: Aotea Quay. It would accommodate three to five ships, depending upon their size, moored bow to stern along the harbor side. Construction was of reinforced concrete with broad, unobstructed areas for cargo storage and unimpeded movement of heavy trucks. It was a beautiful facility in which the New Zealanders took great and justifiable pride. I saw nothing to equal it in any of the other ports of the South or Southwest Pacific: Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, or Noumea. Without it we could not have met the swift movement demands that would be placed upon us by events then unforeseen.

  Construction of the camp was now well under way, and I had time to begin preparations for the arrival of the division itself.

  Navy ships began assembling in the harbor. Two transport divisions— McCawley (AP-10), Neville (AP-16), Fuller (AP-14), and American Legion (AP-35), together with their auxiliaries—were first. The vessels had just disembarked the 7th Marines (reinforced) in Samoa, where they were deployed in defense of those islands and consequently had passed out of the division’s control. Then these ships were unexpectedly diverted to New Zealand to take part in amphibious training exercises with the remainder of the division, numbering 13,000 men, and consisting of two reinforced regiments, an artillery regiment, and division troops, all proceeding to Wellington in two echelons. Neither had yet arrived.

  The commodore of this first unit was Capt. Lawrence Reifsnider, USN, commanding the American Legion. It was a lucky break for the Marines and the military fortunes of the United States that Captain Reifsnider was the senior officer present afloat (SOPA). Many of the transport captains were disgruntled, passed-over officers who regarded their present jobs as bottom-of-the-barrel, end-of-the-road assignments. They refused to take seriously the role that amphibious warfare would play in the South Pacific and could not realize the opportunity it offered them to redeem their professional careers.

  The one exception was Captain Reifsnider, who must have failed of selection to flag rank only because of some minor indiscretion in junior officer days. He embraced a positive view of the role of amphibious operations during the forthcoming phase of the war and the importance of the part he could play in it. The captain placed great faith in and reliance upon his military staff offi
cer, Maj. William B. McKean, an officer well versed in every phase of amphibious warfare. McKean was a close friend of mine and had been a fellow instructor in the Marine Corps schools at Quantico.

  Reifsnider cooperated closely with the Marines throughout the war, was highly regarded by Admiral Turner, received increasingly responsible assignments in the amphibious forces, and attained the rank of rear admiral. Most of the other captains were soon replaced by younger and more aggressive officers.

  The Ericsson and the Wakefield were huge transports used only for the administrative movement of large units and not for landing operations. They were not designed or equipped to perform the mission of attack transports. Hence the criticism popular along the Washington Beltway that they should have been sent out combat loaded is based on a faulty concept of amphibious warfare and amphibious ships. These large ships would have to be unloaded in Wellington and their troops reembarked on smaller, combat-loaded attack transports, designed, armed, and equipped to go in harm’s way with a reasonable chance of survival.

  Furthermore, at the time of embarkation—May 1942—the Battle of Midway had not yet been fought, and there was nothing to indicate that this unforeseen and brilliant victory would give Admiral King—who instinctively knew what the navy and Marines should do and where they should do it—a fleeting opportunity to take the offensive. Hence this administrative movement was an entirely sound and economical procedure at a moment when our maritime shipping was at a wartime low.

  Even with the economies of administrative loading it was necessary to augment the movement with additional ships able to accommodate the heavy equipment and weapons of a Marine division: tanks, construction equipment, tracked landing vehicles, and medium artillery. The first of these freighters to arrive in Wellington Harbour were the Electra (AK-21) and del Brazil.