Crucible of Hell

After completing his basic training in Fort Fannin, Texas, Carlton was sent as a battle replacement to the 7th Infantry Division on Leyte. He was assigned to the 184th Infantry’s Dog Company (Heavy Weapons) where the officer took in his massive build – six feet four inches and 180 pounds – and said: ‘Wow! Look at the size of this guy. He’ll be good at toting a machine gun.’ So Carlton was assigned to a squad in the Machine-Gun Platoon, equipped with the old water-cooled .30 calibre Browning M1917A1 heavy machine gun, weighing 103 pounds (including the seventy-pound tripod) and firing 600 rounds a minute. His job was to carry the tripod, in addition to all his other gear. Fortunately, most of the heavy fighting on Leyte was over by the time Carlton arrived there, and his contribution was ‘mopping up’ patrols in the mountains and jungles. Okinawa, therefore, would be his first proper campaign.

Having set off from Leyte, he and his fellow soldiers wondered where they were going. ‘Darned if I know,’ said one. ‘According to the sun we are headed roughly north so it’s not Australia.’

When eventually told their destination was Okinawa, one soldier asked: ‘Where in the hell is that?’

They were soon enlightened by an officer who told them that the island was 350 miles from Japan and in easy range of enemy aircraft. According to intelligence reports, the Japanese ‘were well entrenched and willing to fight to the death’. Their division, the 7th, would ‘make the assault landing on “L” [Love] day, April 1st’. Their initial objective on day one was Kadena airfield. ‘After that’, said the officer, ‘we will cross the island to the eastern shore, then turn south. For the first three days you are to take no prisoners.’

He did not explain what they should do with any Japanese who did surrender. ‘I guess’, wrote Carlton, ‘he left that up to each of us.’

Later, as he considered the task ahead, Carlton’s ‘thoughts were a mix, worried about facing a determined enemy again, but anxious to be able to come to grips with whatever the future had in store’. He was no ‘gung-ho’ warrior, but felt he could do his job. ‘It was a little quieter in the hold that night,’ he recalled. ‘I cleaned and oiled my carbine for the tenth time.’12

Sergeant William Manchester, commanding the 2/29th Marines’ intelligence section, had spent much of the voyage from Ulithi on the attack transport ship USS George C. Clymer ‘absorbed in an endless chess tournament’ with one of his men. The others ‘read, wrote letters home, shot the breeze, told sea stories, played hearts, and sang songs based on awful puns’. While not relishing the prospect of combat, he did feel ‘a kind of serenity, a sense of solidarity’ with his men, a disparate group of bright if unconventional ex-college kids from across America he had dubbed the ‘Raggedy Asses’. It was a feeling that did not fit with the ‘instinctive aloofness’ which had been part of his ‘pre-war character and would return, afterwards, like a healing scar’.13

Born in Attleboro, Massachusetts, the son of a Marine veteran who returned from the First World War with a badly withered arm, Manchester came from one of New England’s oldest families with a pedigree dating back to the seventeenth century. Two William Manchesters, for example, had fought under George Washington in the Revolutionary War. Any remaining family money, however, had been squandered by Manchester’s grandfather Seabury, a ‘gambler and drinker’. Manchester himself was a sickly child who almost died of pneumonia and spent much of his early childhood indoors. As a result he became an avid reader and a prolific writer, penning his first poems at the age of seven. Though puny for his age, and often picked on because he refused to fight back, Manchester came to admire martial achievement. ‘The pacifism of the 1930s maddened me,’ he recalled. ‘I yearned for valor … Most of the rest of my generation believed in appeasement, at least when it came to war, but I was an out-and-out warmonger, a chauvinist dying for the chance to die.’14

He was an 18-year-old freshman at the Massachusetts State College in Amherst when his father died in January 1941, partly from war wounds. ‘It was my first experience of traumatic amnesia … I was in deep shock.’ Just over a year later, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Marine Corps. He did his basic training at the infamous Parris Island in South Carolina, ‘an isle whose reputation was just marginally better than those of Alcatraz and Devil’s Island’. Yet, incredibly, he ‘adored’ his time there. ‘Boot camp’, he wrote, ‘is a profound shock to most recruits because the Corps begins its job of building men by destroying the identity they brought with them. Their heads are shaved. They are assigned numbers. The DI [drill instructor] is their god.’

Minor infractions drew brutal punishments and woe betide the recruit who failed to use the correct terminology for field boots (boondockers), rumours (scuttlebutt), company commander (skipper), coffee (Joe), battle dress (dungarees), bar (slopchute), latrine (head), information (dope) and neck (stacking swivel). There were three ways of doing things: the right way, the wrong way, and the Marine way. Yet Manchester embraced all this ‘petty tyranny’ because, in the wake of his father’s death, he ‘yearned for stern discipline’ and Parris Island gave it to him ‘in spades’. Though physically frail, he had ‘limitless reserves of energy’ and could feel himself ‘toughening almost hourly’. It helped, too, that he was an excellent shot, scoring 317 out of 330 on the rifle range with the M1 Garand and easily earning the highest rating of ‘Expert’ rifleman.

Thanks to his college education and easy adjustment to Marine life, Manchester won a place at the corps’ Officer Candidate School (OCS) in Quantico, Virginia. But he did not take to his fellow cadets. ‘I had known many of them, if distantly, in college,’ he wrote. ‘They were upper-middle-class snobs, nakedly ambitious conservative conformists, eager to claw their way to the top. In another ten years their uniforms would be corporate gray-flannel suits.’ Yet he stayed on and had been measured for his uniform when he came to grief: he had earlier refused to evaluate critically his fellow cadets; now he disobeyed a corporal’s chickenshit order to cancel the cadets’ final weekend leave to clean their rifles properly (they were already clean). He was court-martialled and thrown off the course just days before graduation.

Posted instead to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, where new battalions were forming for overseas duty, he took over the intelligence section of the 2nd Battalion, 29th Marines (2/29th). Its main tasks were, wrote Manchester, to ‘estimate enemy strength on the battalion’s front, to identify enemy units by the flashes on the tunics of their dead, to patrol deep behind enemy lines, to advise our junior officers who were having trouble reading maps, and to carry messages to company commanders whose field radios … were out of order’. Of the nineteen men in his section, most were ‘military misfits, college students who had enlisted in a fever of patriotism and been rejected as officer candidates because, for various reasons [they] did not conform to the established concept of how officers should look, speak, and act’. They resembled a ‘slack-wire, baggy-pants act out of a third-rate circus’ and were ‘rarely given liberty, because the skipper was ashamed to let civilians see us wearing the Corps uniform’.

Shipped out of San Diego in early August 1944 for Guadalcanal in the Solomons, Manchester’s 2/29th became part of the newly activated 6th Marine Division. Of the 29th Regiment’s three battalions, only the 1st had previously seen action, in Eniwetok and Guam, whereas many of the soldiers in the division’s other two infantry regiments, the 4th and 22nd, had fought on Guadalcanal, New Georgia, Bougainville, Eniwetok, Saipan and Guam.

As the commander of his section, Manchester’s main task on the voyage from Ulithi was to brief his men. He did this by spreading a big map of Okinawa in the fantail of the George C. Clymer and explaining that their division, the 6th Marine, would assault the five most northerly of the Hagushi beaches.* Further south would land, in turn, the 1st Marines, the 7th and the 96th Divisions. The assault troops’ immediate objectives were the Yontan and Kadena airfields. Once they had been seized, the 6th and 1st Marine Divisions would wheel north, while the two army divisions moved south. It seemed to Manchester that the ‘most ambitious goals’, including the mountainous Motobu Peninsula, had been assigned to his division because it was assumed that ‘the enemy was entrenched in the north’.

He then passed on the ‘usual crap’ about the dangers of ‘malaria, dengue, filariasis, typhus, leprosy, dysentery and jungle rot’, and stressed the need to ‘watch out for snipers, don’t shout names (a Jap would shout the same name again a minute later and drill the poor jerk who stuck his head up), maintain fire discipline when the enemy screams to draw fire and thus spot automatic weapons, and if you face a banzai charge, stay loose: don’t fire till you see their buck teeth’.

As he prepared for his first taste of combat, Manchester felt intensely close to the ‘Raggedy Asses’, an emotion contrary to all his instincts. ‘I had been,’ he wrote, ‘and after the war I would again be, a man who usually prefers his own company, finding contentment in solitude. But for the present I had taken others into my heart and given of myself to theirs.’ Only later would he realise how vulnerable that made him, and ‘how terrible’ the price he ‘might have to pay’.15

* The troops landed on twenty-one beaches. From north to south: Green 1 and 2 (22nd Marines); Red 1, 2 and 3 (4th Marines); Blue 1 and 2 (7th Marines); Yellow 1, 2 and 3 (5th Marines); Purple 1 and 2 (17th Infantry); Orange 1 and 2 (32nd Infantry); White 1, 2 and 3 (381st Infantry); Brown 1, 2, 3 and 4 (383rd Infantry).

9

‘It was quite a show’

‘I had a good rest’, recalled PFC Don Dencker on the USS Banner, ‘and was awakened by reveille at 4:00 a.m. Love Day had arrived!’ After dressing, he and his squad joined ‘a long chow line to be served a fine breakfast of steak and eggs, bread, fruit cocktail, and coffee’. They were then issued their Love Day rations: a D-bar* of ‘hard, waxy chocolate’, a K-ration† and one assault ration – ‘a form of candy’. As dawn broke, they were allowed up on deck to watch the landings. ‘It was’, recalled Dencker, ‘a beautiful, clear, calm morning with excellent visibility after the haze lifted … What a sight! About a mile from the beaches a line of battleships and cruisers engaged in the softening-up process. Flame and smoke belched from their guns as they fired repeated salvos.’

Shortly before 8:00 a.m., he saw ‘US Navy planes come in waves of horizontal bombers, dive-bombers, and fighters, giving the entire length of beach in front of our four divisions a thorough working over with bombs, rockets and strafing’. Then waves of amphibious tanks and amtracs began moving towards the beach, ‘crawling successfully over the reefs starting about 800 yards from the shore’. At 8:30 a.m. the tanks reached the breaches in the sea wall, ‘and a minute later our troops were scaling the walls’ from the amtracs. ‘With a few minor hitches,’ wrote Dencker, ‘the entire landing validated the detailed planning and preparation put into our effort. It was quite a show.’1

Part of that ‘show’ in the 96th Division’s sector, following the assault troops of the 383rd Infantry on to Brown Beach 3, were the Sherman tanks of Sergeant Bob Dick’s Charlie Company, 763rd Battalion. Dropped off by a landing craft at the coral reef, about half a mile from the shore, the tanks used ‘deep-water wading stacks’ to prevent water getting into the engine while they covered the remaining distance across the coral shelf. Unfortunately the tank running parallel to Dick’s Cutthroats drove into a shell hole and capsized. ‘They went into the water upside down,’ he wrote, ‘and our reports said that the driver drowned.’ In fact the whole four-man crew was lost.2

Approaching the shore, Dick headed for a large opening in a huge sea wall that appeared to be at least twenty feet thick and twenty feet high. As he drove Cutthroats through, he was astonished to see ‘quite a number of photographers, both still and movie type’, milling around on the beach, as well as MPs directing traffic. His mission was to ‘find and drive up a fairly narrow dirt road for approximately one mile’ and then ‘stop and sit there, in plain sight, and wait’. He did exactly that, nervous in the knowledge that Cutthroats was to act as bait for a hidden coastal gun. As soon it showed itself, they had been told, the navy would ‘take it out’. Fortunately the only sign of movement was a goat wandering by.

‘All of us were in disbelief’, recalled Dick, ‘over the total lack of opposition by the Japanese. We had not heard a single shot fired by them, and the longer they delayed in opposing us, the more our forces would pour ashore. The lack of any enemy seemed almost scary. What’s going on, what do they have up their sleeves?’ Knowing that his division was due to head south, Dick hoped ‘that just maybe all the Japs were up north and the Marines could take care of them for us’. It was wishful thinking.3

Back on the USS Banner, meanwhile, Don Dencker heard the welcome news that GIs from the 381st and 383rd Infantry had met ‘only scattered light opposition and that some units were already one mile inland’. With the landings well ahead of schedule, Dencker’s L Company was ordered below to prepare for their own disembarkation. Told to leave behind their duffel bags and shelter halves – which would be put ashore later – they put on their light packs, containing a waterproof jungle poncho, spare socks, toilet articles, mess kit, writing paper and envelopes, personal photos, a pocket New Testament, and other minor items like matches. Attached to the back of the pack was an entrenching tool, while each soldier also carried two full canteens of water, plus his specialist arms and ammunition.

In the case of most US infantrymen, that meant the .30 M1 Garand, the first standard-issue semi-automatic military rifle. Weighing nine and a half pounds, the Garand could rapidly fire a clip of eight bullets, one after the other, by repeated pulls on the trigger. Once the last bullet had been fired, the clip would drop out and the bolt lock open, ready to be reloaded. This gave it a much higher rate of fire than the bolt-action Arisaka Type 99 rifle used by the Japanese army. The Garand was a fine weapon: well constructed, durable and easy to operate and maintain. But as Dencker was an assistant gunner – with responsibility for carrying the 60 mm mortar’s baseplate – he was armed only with a .45 semi-automatic M1911 pistol, which could fire repeated single shots from a seven-round detachable magazine. Trying it out on a range in Leyte, Dencker had found it almost impossible to hit a target more than twenty-five yards away, and concluded that his sidearm ‘was strictly a close-in personal protection weapon’.

Dencker wore the standard infantry M1 helmet, a one-size-fits-all steel construction with chin strap and a hard inner plastic liner with an adjustable sweatband and cotton webbing for comfort. On a chain around his neck was suspended a pair of stainless steel dog-tags, debossed with his name in reverse order (DENCKER DONALD O), his serial number (37570375), the year or years he was given a tetanus shot (44), blood type (A) and religion (P for Protestant, a detail included for the benefit of those who might need to administer last rites). Finally, to assist with the battlefield control of troops, each man had a unit symbol stencilled onto the back of his fatigue shirt. In the case of Dencker’s 3/382nd Infantry, this was the ‘Queen of Battle’ logo, the outline of a naked lady wearing a helmet, and holding a rifle with a bayonet attached in front of her crotch. It was, according to Dencker, the ‘envy of every other unit’.

Shortly before 11:00 a.m., Dencker and the rest of Love Company, heavily burdened with packs, weapons, life belts and gas masks, climbed down the Banner’s cargo net and into a line of large landing craft. They then transferred to amtracs for the trip across the reef, reaching White Beach 1 at 11:30 a.m. ‘So far,’ noted Dencker, ‘Love Day for Love Company could not have been more benign.’

The beach was a hive of activity as the Corps of Engineers unloaded supplies from ‘Ducks’.‡ Reaching slightly higher ground, about a hundred yards from the edge of the surf, the men of Love Company dropped their gas masks and life belts before moving quickly inland, in the wake of the 381st Infantry, though the latter were ‘nowhere to be seen.’ After an hour they stopped at the junction of two small roads to eat a K-ration lunch and to drink water from their canteens. ‘It was sunny and mild,’ remembered Dencker, ‘with a temperature of about 70 degrees, so we weren’t very thirsty. It would have been a perfect Easter Sunday back home.’

The only indication they were in a war zone was the ‘disconcerting sight’, on the far side of the road, of the bodies of five US soldiers, covered by ponchos with only their combat boots protruding.4

A little further to the north, Private Don ‘Slim’ Carlton of Dog Company, 1/184th Infantry, had been forced to walk through chest-high water to get to Purple Beach 1 after his landing craft grounded on the reef. ‘Some of the shorter men were having trouble with the depth of water,’ he wrote. ‘Lucky for me I was well over six feet tall and was having little difficulty. The heavy machine-gun tripod kept me firmly anchored to the bottom as I churned my way shoreward.’

Suddenly the man in front of him went under the water and did not resurface. Had he been shot, wondered Carlton, or just fallen into a hole? Just to be certain, he skirted a few yards to the left, scanning the water for any sign of the man. There was nothing. He continued on and, once on dry land, realised he and a few other Dog Company men were north of the Bishi River in the 1st Marine Division sector, when they should been to the south. As they discussed where to cross back, they saw several Japanese planes target some of the big ships offshore. Instantly the air was filled with tracers and black puffs of smoke as scores of anti-aircraft guns opened fire. ‘One plane was hit’, recalled Carlton, ‘and exploded with an orange flash’, leaving ‘a trail of black smoke as it spiraled to the sea’.

Led by a non-com back across the Bishi, they moved inland, passing Kadena airfield which had been their primary objective. What was wrong? Where were the Japs? they wondered. ‘We had landed almost unopposed much to our surprise,’ wrote Carlton. ‘Were we being led into a trap?’ They continued on across ‘small hills covered with scrub trees and bushes’. In a cave they found twenty or so bewildered civilians, mostly elderly. Unsure what to do with them, they left one man to guard the cave entrance and continued on up the next hill where they established a perimeter and dug in for the night. Still wet, Carlton put on an extra sweater and wrapped himself in his poncho. Unable to sleep, he listened to the sound of naval shells passing overhead ‘like a distant freight train’.5

Having watched the assault troops of the 5th Marines land without incident, the journalist Ernie Pyle followed in the 7th wave with the regimental command group at around 9:30 a.m. ‘We had all expected to go onto the beach in a hailstorm of tracer bullets, mortar shells throwing sand, and artillery shells whistling into the water near us. And yet we couldn’t see a bit of firing ahead. We hoped it was true.’

It was. Stepping from the amtrac onto Japanese soil, he heard an incredulous Marine say: ‘Hell, this is just like one of MacArthur’s landings,’ which were famously unopposed.§ It was a beautiful day, ‘sunshiney and very warm’, and Pyle soon stopped to take off one of the two pairs of trousers he was wearing. Like the Marines, he was dressed in a green herringbone combat uniform, known as ‘corduroy’, and wearing a helmet with its distinctive Marine camouflage cover. He also had two water canteens and was carrying, in a pack on his back, three rubber life preservers, two jackets, the extra pair of trousers, assorted knives, first-aid kits, a shovel and a blanket rolled up in a poncho. He was, he wrote, ‘overladen as usual’.

Pyle followed the headquarters group for about a mile and a half inland, stopping every now and then to rest while the others forged ahead. ‘A lifetime of sin and crime’, he commented ruefully, ‘finally does catch up with you.’ The land was mainly cultivated, and ‘rose gradually from the sea in small fields’. It was not, he thought, unlike his native Indiana in late summer ‘when things have started to turn dry and brown, except that these fields were much smaller’. Edged by ditches and small two-foot wide dykes, they were filled with sugar cane, sweet potatoes and wheat, which the Marines cut with small sickles. Further inland the fields gave way to rougher, hilly country with less cultivation and more trees. ‘It is’, noted Pyle, ‘really a pretty country.’

Not so attractive were the farmhouses destroyed by the bombardment, some reeking of the ‘sickening odor of death’. There were, Pyle knew, ‘always people who won’t leave, no matter what’. Those civilians who had survived were either ‘very old or very young’ and all ‘very, very poor’. The women were dressed in traditional Okinawan kimonos, the old men ‘in skintight pants’. All were filthy and seemed ‘shocked from the bombardment’; one or two spoke scant English but did not make much sense. They were handed over to officials of the Military Government whose job it was to look after the civilian population. ‘The poor devils,’ commented one Marine officer. ‘I’ll bet they think this is the end of the world.’

That evening, having caught up with the 5th Marines’ headquarters group, Pyle dug his foxhole alongside the others, at the foot of a small embankment, and inflated his three life preservers to use as an improvised mattress, a trick he had learned in Europe. The Marines seemed impressed. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ commented one. ‘Why in the hell couldn’t I have thought of that?’

At dusk, three planes flew overhead which Pyle assumed were friendlies. He was wrong. ‘In a moment’, he noted, ‘all hell cut loose from the beach. Our entire fleet and the guns ashore started throwing stuff into the sky. I’d never seen a thicker batch of ack-ack.’ It seems as if, said one Marine, there were more bullets than sky. All three planes were shot down.

Lying in his foxhole, Pyle could hear the low voices of officers nearby, directing troops by field telephone and radio. Every now and then the stillness was broken by the boom of a naval gun, a burst of machine-gun fire or a few scattered rifle shots. These sounds were eerily familiar, ‘unchanged by distance or time from war on the other side of the world’. It was a pattern, wrote Pyle, ‘so embedded in my soul that, coming back to it again, it seemed to me as I lay there that I’d never known anything else’.6

* A high-energy chocolate bar, made by Hershey’s, that would not melt.

† First introduced in 1942, the K-ration consisted of three boxed meals of candy, hard biscuits and canned processed meat, totaling 2,830 calories, for a single day’s consumption.

‡ DUKW, a six-wheel-drive amphibious truck, produced by Sparkman & Stephens and the General Motors Corporation.

§ After his unopposed landing on the island of Leyte on 20 October 1944, MacArthur announced: ‘People of the Philippines: I have returned.’

10

‘There’s always some poor bastard who doesn’t get word’

‘We hit with a jolt that tumbled us in a heap’, recalled First Lieutenant Chris Donner, ‘and ground up onto a coral shelf, then onto sand. The stern ramp dropped, and as some of the infantrymen swarmed over the sides, I led the rush out onto the beach.’