Crucible of Hell

* This was the result of the Jones–Shafroth Act of 1917 which gave US citizenship with limited rights to all Puerto Ricans born on the island.

† The Japanese garrison on Rota – 947 soldiers and 1,853 navy personnel – finally surrendered to a detachment of Marines on 2 September 1945.

6

‘I’m going simply because I’ve got to – and I hate it’

Soon after Lieutenant General Buckner left Guam in early February 1945, an even bigger celebrity reached the island: the Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Ernie Pyle. Accompanied by twelve officers and three enlisted men, Pyle had flown the 3,500 miles from Hawaii, via the Marshall Islands, in the same type of plane as Buckner, a Douglas C-54, but without its VIP modifications. To make it easier to sleep during the final twenty-four-hour leg, therefore, Pyle had taken his blanket and lain down on some mail bags.

His first view of Guam was from the cockpit, courtesy of the pilot. ‘We came out of the boundless sky and over our island destination’, wrote Pyle, ‘just a little after dawn. The island was green and beautiful – and terribly far from home. That we could have drawn ourselves to it so unerringly out of the vast Pacific spaces seemed incredible. It was a like a blind man walking alone across a field, and putting his finger directly on some previously designated barb of a wire fence. But … they do it all the time.’1

Pyle had had an extraordinary career. Born in Dana, Indiana on 3 August 1900, he saw active service as a petty officer in the US Navy at the tail end of the First World War before attending Indiana University where he edited the Daily Student newspaper. Keen to work as a journalist, Pyle quit his economics degree to accept a job at a small newspaper in La Porte, Indiana. He soon moved to the tabloid Washington Daily News where he met Geraldine ‘Jerry’ Siebolds, a bright and attractive woman a year his senior, and they married in 1925. But Jerry was a troubled soul, suffering from alcoholism and bouts of mental illness, and they divorced in 1942 before remarrying by proxy a year later. By then Pyle had made his name as a roving correspondent for the Scripps Howard newspaper chain, reporting on the lives of ordinary people in rural America in the 1930s, and ordinary soldiers in the Second World War. His daily column about life at the front for GIs – or ‘dogfaces’ as he affectionately called them – was syndicated to more than 300 newspapers.

In covering the North African, Italian and D-Day campaigns, Pyle had preferred the ground’s-eye view to generals’ press conferences. He became ‘the author of letters home’ that thousands of soldiers could not, or would not, write. He regarded the average American serviceman as a ‘good boy’, doing ‘an awful job that had to be done’.2 Their stories deserved to be told, and he was the one to do it. One of his most memorable despatches, written in January 1944, was ‘The Death of Captain Waskow’. In it he described the demise of a company commander in the 36th Division, a native of Belton, Texas, ‘only in his middle twenties’, who ‘carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him’. After Waskow’s body had been lowered from a mule to the ground, a succession of soldiers came to pay their respects. One said: ‘God damn it to hell anyway.’

Another: ‘I sure am sorry, sir.’

Then the first man ‘squatted down’, wrote Pyle, ‘and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently at the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there’. Finally he put the hand down, got up, ‘gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar,’ and ‘sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound’, before getting up and walking ‘down the road in the moonlight, all alone’.3

Pyle continued his unique style of reporting from north-west Europe – living with ordinary soldiers and sharing their privations – until he was almost killed when the USAAF mistakenly dropped bombs on US troops near Saint-Lo in Normandy, on 25 July 1944. A total of 111 Allied soldiers were killed and 490 wounded. The dead included Lieutenant General Leslie J. McNair whose body was so badly mutilated he could be identified only by the three silver stars on his collar. Pyle wrote of ‘a gigantic rattling’ as the bombs fell on the small farm he was visiting. He remembered ‘hitting the ground flat, all spread out like the cartoons of people flattened by steam rollers and then squirmed like an eel to get under one of the heavy wagons in the shed’. Suddenly he and an officer stopped crawling, ‘feeling it was hopeless to move farther’ as the ‘bombs were already crashing around us’. He added: ‘We just lay sprawled, gaping at each other in futile appeal, our faces about a foot apart until it was over.’4

After the strain and tension of months on the front line, witnessing countless deaths, the bombing was for Pyle the final straw. He spent more than a week prostrate with fever, diarrhoea and nervous exhaustion. Once back on his feet, he decided to go home. ‘I’m leaving for one reason only,’ he told his readers, ‘because I have just got to stop. “I’ve had it,” as they say in the Army. I’ve had all I can take for a while … I’ve been immersed in it too long. My spirit is wobbly and my mind is confused. The hurt has finally become too great.’5

He was almost certainly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and had been for a while. A year earlier, working on a screenplay of Pyle’s bestselling collection of columns Here is Your War, the playwright Arthur Miller had travelled to New Mexico to interview the journalist who was on a break from the war. He was, wrote Miller, ‘a tortured man, uncertain of himself and ridden with guilt. Slight of build, with sandy hair thinning to baldness, gentle and self-effacing, he seemed the last man in the world to bring himself willingly into battle.’6

Pyle returned to the United States in the autumn of 1944 a national hero, admired by servicemen not only for his honest reporting, but for the material difference he had made to many of their lives by campaigning for soldiers’ ‘fight pay’ (the equivalent of airmen’s ‘flight pay’). The law passed by Congress in 1944, giving combat infantrymen an extra $10 a month, was dubbed the ‘Ernie Pyle Bill’. Yet within a few short months he was back in a war zone, this time in the Pacific. The question is: why? The answer is complex. He went partly to escape the demands on him in America: from his wife, who had recently tried to commit suicide; from the public, who were clamouring for his attention; and from his professional commitments, including the motion picture that had been adapted from his book, The Story of GI Joe.* He had never liked the film’s title, he admitted in February 1945, ‘but nobody could think of a better one, and I was too lazy to try’.7 But his greatest motivation was guilt: how could he remain safely in the United States when thousands of ordinary Americans were risking their lives on foreign battlefields? Or as he put it to his readers:

There’s nothing nice about the prospect of going back to war again. Anybody who has been in war and wants to go back is a plain damn fool in my book. I’m certainly not going because I’ve got itchy feet again, or because I can’t stand America, or because there is any mystical fascination about war that is drawing me back. I’m going simply because there’s a war on and I’m part of it and I’ve known all the time I was going back. I’m going simply because I’ve got to – and I hate it.

He had chosen the Pacific because he assumed the war in Europe would be over before he could return. That was not how it turned out. Yet he thought it best to stick with his original plan. ‘There are’, he explained, ‘a lot of guys in that war, too. They are the same guys who are fighting on the other side, only with different names, that’s all. It’s not belittling my friends in Europe to desert them and go to the Pacific for a while.’8

His decision was certainly appreciated by the first servicemen he met on Guam as he settled in to a room of the Bachelor Officer Quarters – cream-coloured huts made of corrugated metal, equipped with a clothes closet, washstand, chest of drawers and two beds with double mattresses – that had been hurriedly constructed by the Seabees all over the Pacific. Spotting him through the open window, one Seabee called out: ‘Say, aren’t you Ernie Pyle?’

‘Right.’

‘Whoever thought we’d meet you here? I recognised you from your picture.’

The pair started chatting, and other Seabees joined in. It made Pyle’s day, and confirmed his decision to come.9

Yet, as he knew already, there were considerable challenges for a journalist covering the Pacific War. The first was distance. ‘I don’t mean distance from America so much,’ he wrote, ‘for our war in Europe was a long way from home too. I mean distances after you get right on the battlefield. The whole western Pacific is our battlefield, and whereas distances in Europe are at most hundreds of miles, out here they are thousands. And there’s nothing in between but water.’

Then there was the issue of boredom as the days went by in their ‘endless sameness’. But the hardest adjustment, Pyle felt, was the ‘different attitude’ towards the enemy. In Europe there was a feeling that the Germans, ‘horrible and deadly as they were, were still people’. In the Pacific, he had quickly got the feeling ‘that the Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive; the way some people feel about cockroaches or mice’.10 The reasons for this hatred were not hard to fathom: the unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor; Japan’s despicable treatment of its prisoners of war (more than a quarter of whom died from malnourishment, disease and overwork); and its soldiers’ refusal to surrender, in line with the bushido code of honour that was supposed to dictate the samurai warrior’s way of life.†

At first, even the humane Pyle felt this repulsion. The sight of a group of Japanese prisoners ‘wrestling and laughing’ had given him ‘the creeps’, he admitted, and he wanted a ‘mental bath’. But after talking to many veterans on Guam, he got over the ‘creepy feeling that fighting Japs’ – or ‘Japes’, a racist combination of ‘Jap’ and ‘ape’ that many American servicemen liked to use – was ‘like fighting snakes or ghosts’. They certainly held different ideas about the war, but they fought with specific tactics which the Americans had come to know. ‘Our men’, wrote Pyle, ‘were no more afraid of the Japs than they were of the Germans. They were afraid of them as any modern soldier is of his foe, not because they are slippery or ratlike, but simply because they have weapons and fire them like good tough soldiers. And the Japs were human enough to be afraid of us in exactly the same way.’11

While still in the United States, Ernie Pyle had told his readers that he planned to spend some time with the US Navy – since it was ‘so dominant’ in the Pacific and he had ‘done very little in the past on that part of the service’ – before going ashore on the next major operation with the foot soldiers (or, as he put it, ‘my noble souls, the doughfoots’).12

In fact, the first unit he lived with was a squadron of the USAAF flying B-29 Superfortresses out of the Marianas. ‘Their lot’, he wrote, ‘was a tough one’ as they ‘were over water every inch of the way to Japan and every inch of the way back’. They had to contend with flak and Japanese fighters over the target, but their main concern was ‘sweating out’ those six or seven hours of ocean beneath them on the way back, often in darkness. If they were shot up or had engine trouble, and were forced to ditch, their chances of being picked up were only one in five. ‘It’s mighty hard’, noted Pyle, ‘to find a couple of little rubber boats in a big, big ocean.’

Pyle even went up in a B-29 on a training run and found it a thrilling, if somewhat disconcerting, experience. The plane was so packed with gas tanks and bomb racks that the only way the crew of eleven could move around was along a thirty-foot narrow tunnel, ‘just big enough to crawl in on your hands and knees’. Some crew members slept in it for an hour or so on missions; but others found it too claustrophobic and preferred to stay awake. They wore regular clothes on missions, usually coveralls, because the cabin was pressurised and heated. But as they approached the target they put on flak vests and oxygen masks in case the Plexiglas was shattered and the plane depressurised.

While he was with the squadron, several planes were lost on missions. One should have been, but somehow survived. Hit over the target, it dropped back and was attacked by five Japanese fighters and shot to pieces. It kept flying, though its horizontal stabilisers were gone, and every so often would go into a spiral. Each time the pilot regained control. He finally reached his home base and crashed on the runway, tearing off the plane’s wings and breaking its huge fuselage in two. ‘Yet’, wrote an astonished Pyle, ‘every man came out of it alive, even the wounded ones.’13

In mid-March, finally making good his earlier promise, Pyle joined the light-aircraft carrier USS Cabot, part of Vice Admiral Marc A. Mitscher’s Fast Carrier Force (known as Task Force 58) which was heading north to attack the airfields of Kyushu, and thus weaken Japanese air power before the Okinawa invasion. Pyle had deliberately asked to be put on one of the smaller carriers because they received less attention in the press and had fewer people on board. But he was still shocked at her size: 700 feet long, carrying 1,000 people, and with ‘all the facilities of a small city’, including five barbers, three doctors, two dentists, a preacher, laundry, general store, two libraries and movies every night. The ship had been at sea since November 1943 without once returning to port, and the crew could think of nothing but home. Yet they were inordinately proud of their achievements: steaming 149,000 miles, surviving five typhoons (one of which sank three destroyers), shooting down 228 enemy planes and sinking twenty-nine big ships. Having fought in every battle in the Pacific since the start of 1944, the Cabot was known as ‘the Iron Woman’.

One particularly close shave was off Luzon in late November 1944 when a kamikaze plane hit the port side of the flight deck, destroying an anti-aircraft gun, and killing and wounding sixty-two. This caused one disgruntled member of crew to exclaim: ‘Oh, boy, this is great. Now at last they’ll have to send us back to America for repairs.’

He was promptly felled by a blow from outraged Boilermaker 1st Class Jerry Ryan, from Davenport, Iowa. Pyle got to know Ryan well, describing him as ‘a tall, well-built, mustached sailor’ who always knew right from wrong. He was, wrote Pyle, ‘what is known in the Navy as “a good man”: skilled in his work, dependable, and very smart. He’d die before he’d curry favor with anybody.’ One of Ryan’s closest friends on board was ‘a tall, athletic’ black cook from the same town called Wesley Cooper. He was the best basketball player on ship and had a scholarship waiting for him at the University of Iowa.

Some of the Cabot’s sailors asked Pyle how their service compared to that in Europe. His blunt response was that it was ‘much better’. Most saw the sense of this. ‘I can stand a lot of monotony’, said one, ‘if I know my chances are pretty good for coming out alive.’ But others disagreed, saying ‘I’d trade this for a foxhole any day.’ Pyle’s scornful reaction: ‘You just have to keep your mouth shut to a remark like that.’

The people on board he had infinite respect for, however, were the pilots. ‘Landing on the deck of a small carrier in a rough sea’, wrote Pyle, ‘is just about like landing on half a block of Main Street while a combination hurricane and earthquake is going on.’

Some came in too fast and blew a tyre; others ‘half-sideways, and the cable will jerk them around in a tire-screeching circle.’ A few come in so high they missed the arresting cables and hit the high wires stretched across the mid-decks called ‘the barrier’, causing them to somersault and even catch fire. Pyle could hardly watch, telling the air officer he needed ‘heart-failure medicine’. The man replied: ‘I’ve had to watch 2,000 of them. It’ll drive you nuts.’

The start of the cruise north seemed ‘peaceful and routine’, with each sub-unit of carriers protected by an array of battleships, cruisers and destroyers. Messages were constantly being transmitted across the fleet by signal flag, light blinker and even planes dropping packages on the flight deck; only radio messages were forbidden, to prevent the Japanese from eavesdropping. There were daily baths, lots of good food (including steaks and ice cream), movies every night and as many cigarettes as a man could smoke. Pyle even had his dirty clothes laundered and pressed by the cabin boy. It was like a hotel.

But gradually the weather got colder and, as it neared mainland Japan, the ship went into battle stations and the captain ‘never left the bridge, either to eat or to sleep’. Everybody was issued with ‘flash gear’ – including a thin grey hood to cover the head and shoulders, a white mask, glass goggles and long grey gloves – to protect against fire; all compartment doors were closed, and aid stations were manned across the ship. Finally on 18 March, from a position about ninety miles from the coast of Kyushu, the strike planes were launched from across the fleet. Finding few Japanese aircraft on the ground, they bombed hangars and barracks instead.14

The response of Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, commanding the 5th Air Fleet on Kyushu, was to order a counter-strike of heavy bombers and kamikazes. Fifty were shot down or crashed, though not before some damage had been done to three aircraft carriers: the Enterprise, Intrepid and Yorktown. The following day two more carriers, Wasp and Franklin, were hit by Japanese bombs that caused fires and over 1,600 casualties. ‘Listening to the [Japanese] claims of attacks,’ noted Ugaki in his diary, ‘it looked like we had inflicted heavy damage on the enemy, but the fact wasn’t so. Each time a search was made, I wondered why so many remained if the claimed result of attack was true.’15

This was certainly the case with the Cabot’s carrier group – TF 58.3 – which came through the operation unscathed. Pyle’s main concern on the 19th was waiting for the strike planes to return from an attack on ships in the Tokyo area. Slowly but surely they did, until just six were absent. It later transpired that the plane piloted by Ensign Robert Buchanan had been hit by flak and forced to ditch in Tokyo’s outer bay. The other five, all members of the same flight, had remained in the area to locate a rescue ship. They eventually found one thirty miles away. But as it steamed slowly towards the outer bay, the aerial escort began to run short on fuel and, one by one, its planes were ordered by their leader, Lieutenant John Fecke of Duxbury, Massachusetts, back to the carrier.

As the rescue ship entered the outer bay, its skipper realised the danger he was in – from mines, enemy planes and shore-based guns – and radioed Fecke he could not go any farther.

‘It’s only two miles more,’ begged Fecke. ‘Please try.’

‘OK, we’ll try.’

Incredibly he located the pilot, pulled him from the water and got safely away. Only now did Fecke and the other remaining pilot, Lieutenant Bob Murray, return to the Cabot. ‘They had flown six hours on a three-hour mission,’ wrote Pyle, ‘but they helped save an American life by doing so.’

Fecke and Buchanan had form. The previous autumn, off Formosa, they had helped to save two crippled American cruisers by engaging seventy Japanese planes with a flight of just eight, commanded by Fecke. They shot down twenty-nine, for the loss of just one of their own planes, and drove the rest away. Fecke and Buchanan each downed five planes – making them ‘aces’ after a single engagement – and were awarded the Navy Cross. ‘So the little Tokyo Bay incident’, wrote Pyle, ‘didn’t rattle them.’16

* The film was premiered in June 1945 and earned its co-star, Robert Mitchum, his only Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

† Even senior commanders were not immune from this dehumanisation of the enemy. ‘You’ve got to instill in your men’, insisted Major General Lem Shepherd, commanding the 6th Marine Division, ‘the will to kill the enemy to the point … that killing a Jap was like killing a rattlesnake.’ (Quoted in Lacey, Stay off the Skyline, p. 83.)

7

‘I was crying as I did it and she was crying too’

From the deck of the USS Gunston Hall, Sergeant Robert C. ‘Bob’ Dick of the 763rd Tank Battalion could see ‘every kind of ship built, or so it seemed, and there looked to be hundreds’ stretching all the way to the horizon. ‘It was’, he thought, ‘both reassuring and at the same time unsettling. A lot of help is always good, but we must be going to where a lot of help would really be a big necessity.’1

A veteran of eight previous campaigns, the Gunston Hall (or LSD-5 as she was also known), a 7,900-ton flat-bottomed dock landing ship, had left Leyte on 25 March 1945, as part of a convoy of ships carrying the 7th and 96th Infantry Divisions towards Okinawa. Also setting off that day were ships carrying the assault groups of the 1st and 6th Marine Divisions from Ulithi, the 2nd Marine Division from Saipan, and the 27th Infantry Division from Espiritu Santo. Lieutenant General Buckner and his staff were due to leave Leyte on Admiral Turner’s faster command ship Eldorado on the 27th. Ahead of everyone, however, was the 77th Infantry Division. It had departed Leyte on March 19 and was now nearing its target, the Kerama Islands, which needed to be captured before the Okinawa landings.2

Like most enlisted men in the gigantic armada, Sergeant Dick only learned where he was headed en route. ‘We were told’, he recalled, ‘that the island was only about 350 miles from the Japanese mainland, and that the fight ahead was going to be a tough one.’ Born and brought up in El Monte, southern California, Dick was just seventeen when he joined the 40th Infantry Division of the National Guard in 1938. He was then six feet two inches tall and ‘a skinny 155 pounds, with brown hair combed in no particular direction or style’. Posted to Hawaii in 1942, he transferred to the 763rd Tank Battalion after an ankle injury put paid to his career as an infantrymen. He was assigned as the driver of Tank No. 60 – nicknamed Cutthroats – a thirteen-ton Stuart M3 with a 37 mm cannon, later upgraded to the much heavier thirty-ton Sherman M4 with a 75 mm cannon and three .30 calibre machine guns. The Sherman also had ‘state-of-the-art radio equipment’ and ‘an intercom’ so that the four-man crew could communicate in battle, and the commander no longer needed to tap Dick with his foot to get him to change direction.

Dick’s first and only experience of combat was with Charlie Company of the 763rd, part of the 96th (‘Deadeyes’) Division, in the Leyte operation in the autumn of 1944. But the rough terrain on Leyte was unsuitable for tanks and Dick saw little action until one terrifying experience when his tank was part of a platoon of four that was ambushed on a narrow road with ditches on either side by Japanese ‘carrying mines attached to long bamboo poles’. Before anyone could react, the lead and rear tanks had their tracks blown off and the two in the middle, including Cutthroats, were trapped. Suddenly, recalled Dick, a Japanese officer jumped onto the back of the tank in front, ‘and as the turret began to traverse in our direction (in order to shoot the Japs off our tank), the officer began hacking away at the machine-gun barrel with his two-handed sword!’ On the fourth blow the blade snapped, and the officer was shot by Dick’s gunner. ‘The attack couldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes but it seemed an eternity … Several Jap soldiers, still alive, were found in the ditches among the dead, and they were quickly despatched by our crews.’