Iwo 26 charlie, p.25
Iwo, 26 Charlie, page 25
Looking out the hospital windows that overlooked Pearl Harbor, I often wondered if the Japanese ever regretted the colossal strategic mistake they’d made right here in Hawaii way back in 1941. Based on what I’d seen of the size of the American fleet that was gathering to obliterate them, if they hadn’t, they soon would. And yet, I now knew that what would have deterred Americans into a pre-invasion peace conference wouldn’t faze those very alien people.
Once I’d gotten back to Pearl, I’d telegraphed my father that I was coming home, sometime, since I didn’t know when Tripler would release me. He replied he would meet me in San Diego or wherever they dropped me off and then escort me back to Georgia by train. I then got a second telegram, one day later, from my sister, who told me that Dad was in no shape for a transcontinental trip, and that she would come instead. I wired back that neither of them had to come; I had a surprising amount of back pay coming, and I’d get a compartment in a Pullman car and sleep my way back across the country. I hadn’t told them of my injuries, and they hadn’t asked. My sister didn’t come right out and say it, but I suspected my father’s weak heart was coming back to finally harvest him. That was a sad thought, but I’d had enough of sadness just then and put it out of mind.
Home. Just get your country ass home, Lee-boy, before anybody notices and calls you back. And that’s what I’d done.
There were lots of delays. There were hundreds of more urgent cases who were being flown back to the States for specialist care. The hospital staff was being decimated to man up yet more hospital ships, many of them quick passenger liner conversions, who everybody knew were going to be needed soon. I was wounded, but walking wounded, so I just had to wait my turn for a slot home. I didn’t mind. I used the time to build back my strength and endurance. I had to get all new clothes, too.
One day I helped a gaunt-looking older man in a wheelchair get down to the dining area in Tripler. His eyes, framed by deep black circles, were set so far back in their sockets that they looked like those well-known headlights in a tunnel. I could just about see every bone in his face and wondered how often he did get down to the dining room. We exchanged the obligatory where-were-yous. Turned out he’d been assigned to the Fifth Marine Division headquarters staff. I took a shot: you ever hear of the Goon Squad? I asked. He stopped the chair in its tracks and then I had to maneuver him out of the stream of people headed for chow.
“How do you know about those boys?” he asked, sharply.
I told him. He stared back at me. “Holy shit,” he said. “You were Iwo, two-six Charlie? The Navy guy with the new grid? Man, excuse me, but you’re famous, you know that?”
I sighed. “I don’t feel famous, but I’d sure like to know what happened to them after the fight at that canyon.”
He nodded. “The staff people called that canyon Bloody Gorge. The chief of staff explained that that name had two meanings. It was a hot fight, and bloody was the right word. But the other meaning was that a whole bunch of officers ended up in deep shit when their troops took it upon themselves to go up there and completely disrupt the plan for the next day’s general assault.”
“I figured as much,” I told him. “But isn’t that what Marines do: they hear there’s trouble, that Marines are in trouble, and they goddamn come running.”
He nodded. “I’d like to think so, Lieutenant. But this fucking war’s become so big that people all the way back in Washington think they need to control everything. The grunts ask: where were they when we hit the beaches on the ’Canal, you know?”
“So: Goon, Twitch, and Monster?”
His face sobered. “Goon survived Iwo. He got hit the day after the Gorge, but it was a million-dollar wound. When they asked him if he wanted the ticket home, he said yes. Where to, I don’t know, but he’d had enough and I think he knew what was coming next. Twitch got killed in an accident. He was so tired he fell asleep at the front of the Gorge and a tank ran him over.”
I blinked, hearing that. He saw it. “Happened more times than you wanna know, Lieutenant,” he said. “People were dead on their asses and just lay down. Sometimes in the wrong damned place.”
“And Monster?”
He shook his head. “Never heard from again,” he said. “Listed as missing in action. Probably down in some damn cave or tunnel, lookin’ for eyeballs to fry. At the end, we quit going into holes. We’d burn ’em with a Zippo, then blow the front door down. God knows how many bad and good guys are still out there on that goddamned, stinking island. Or up inside that volcano.”
My knees went weak. I suddenly had to sit down and put my back to the wall, hold my head in my hands, and just weep. You’d think that might be something of a spectacle at Tripler, but I’d seen the same thing happen dozens of times since I’d been there. Nobody stared or asked why. They didn’t have to.
My companion didn’t say a word. He just waited. I finally got ahold of myself, stood up, and we rejoined the chow line. Then I remembered I didn’t recall Goon’s name. I asked him. He shook his head.
“It was just Goon,” he said, his own eyes tearing up. “That was what everybody called him.” He hesitated. “You’re gonna want to find him when this is all over, aren’t you.”
I nodded.
“Don’t do that, Lieutenant. Let it go. We’ve all gotta learn that. Let it go. He sees you, you see him, it’s all gonna come back to both of you like a goddamned avalanche. Don’t look back. Don’t ever look back. It’ll just break your heart. I just hear the name, Iwo. Breaks my heart, every time.”
“What was your job there?” I asked.
“I’m Major Paul Whiting, USMC, and medically retired. I was Number Two at the Graves Registration post on Iwo.”
My heart almost stopped. Great God Almighty. I couldn’t imagine how bad that must have been.
“Lemme tell you something, Lieutenant,” he continued, his voice tight with emotion. “There are somewhere near seven thousand Marines who’ll have to be dug up and sent back when this thing’s over, and maybe more if they start searching the caves. I was the officer who had to verify and record each name, wherever we could. I had to see each one. I see them every night, now. Every goddamn night, which is why I look the way I look. I have to stay here or in some other facility until that stops. I told them I was never wounded. They’re telling me my mind was. So: for God’s sake, don’t go looking back. You don’t know what you might disturb—up here,” he said, pointing at his head. “Okay? Take it from me, you can break more than just your heart doing that. Let it go. Let it all go.”
EPILOGUE
It was two-thirty in the morning, and my darling wife was sound asleep in my arms on the porch swing. I was tired, but somehow I felt better for having told the story. A great horned owl started cackling in the nearby woods. My chest was complaining again. Whenever I sat for long periods my chest would begin to hurt. The remains of my lung had failed again when I got back to Georgia, so I’d had to go up to Augusta to the Lenwood VA Hospital for yet more surgery, and now I was a one-lung choo-choo. No more cigarettes, that’s for damn sure. My scalp wound never did stop hurting; I swear it felt as if it had become an open fissure that moved, back and forth, every time I opened my mouth to speak, even though the docs assured me it had rewelded itself long ago. The white stripe in my hair went from ear to ear, like some kind of earphone rig. My wife called it my Pacific tiara, but never in public.
I looked out over the near fields and the long driveway. I was home at last, and I was determined never, ever to leave. I’d tried hard to banish all my experiences on Iwo, but I just couldn’t do it. Like the guy said at Tripler: it’ll break your heart. Every time. So don’t do that. Think of the present. Think of the future. And yet, something deep in my psyche did not permit it and subconsciously scolded me for even trying. I believe that anyone who was there, who was actually on that island, ended up spiritually scorched, especially the Marines. I’d tell myself I was being overly dramatic, but I often recalled the face of that walking ghost who’d been at the Graves Registration station. I shivered at the thought. My wife stirred.
“Whatever became of Sitting Bull, and Wrecked?” she asked.
I was startled. Had she listened to the whole tale, after all? I wanted to tell her I just didn’t know, except that I did.
I’d asked as I transited through the Balboa Hospital in San Diego if either of them was a patient. They had no patients named “Wreck.” I guessed that, without any identity, he’d been relegated to a psych ward pending treatment and, hopefully, eventual rehabilitation. Major Murphy had done the right thing and had paid for it up on that ridge.
Colonel Sam Nicholas survived his “incident” but had sought medical retirement at the end of his treatment at the hospital. He’d been discharged two weeks before my arrival. His home of record according to his medical file was listed simply as: unknown. The admin clerk told me that the Marines would know, but that I might want to wait a while to make the inquiry. He’d done the colonel’s paperwork, and thought that, while he’d survived whatever had happened to him, he had left unhealed. I told him I understood.
Boy, did I.
So: both of them had essentially disappeared. At least they weren’t still on that island or in that vast cemetery. I couldn’t imagine a sadder scene than Iwo Jima after all the fighting forces had withdrawn to go get ready for the next bloody expedition, or a sadder bunch of troops than those who’d been left behind to care for that cemetery. The casualty numbers had been kept quiet, but anyone could see from pictures that there must have been several thousand or more temporary graves.
I discovered the real numbers when I later read a commentary in a newspaper as I made my way home, from one of those bespectacled armchair warriors in New York who’d never served. The Japanese won on Iwo, he pronounced. They lost the island, of course, but that was pretty much a given when it started. But we had three whole divisions wrecked by “only” twenty thousand Japanese soldiers. A hundred thousand Marines committed, nearly seven thousand killed in action, and twenty thousand more wounded or still missing in action. Yes, Iwo was used as an emergency airfield and saved a lot of planes and aviators. But one had to ask: were such losses truly necessary? I couldn’t answer that question. Bare casualty statistics take some of the sting out of what they represent. But conjure up some faces and see what happens, every time.
Tears. That’s what happens. Like right now. I knew that somehow I’d have to get past all that. I wondered, as we went back inside, if I ever would.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
Tarawa, Peleliu, and, to a lesser degree, the Marianas (Guam, Saipan, Tinian) wrecked Marine divisions in terms of being an effective fighting force. The Iwo battle nearly destroyed the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Divisions as fighting forces. The stark casualty figures don’t tell the whole story: about seven thousand killed in action and twenty thousand wounded in action, out of one hundred thousand committed to the battle, but the fact is that once you kill and maim a certain percentage of any division, Marine or Army, it ceases to exist as a cohesive fighting force. That’s what happened to the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Marine Divisions. They came off the battlefield and went into reserve, which is to say they had to be refilled with manpower, then retrained, and then deployed, with your fingers crossed. In fact, at Okinawa, it was the Navy who suffered the most casualties from the kamikaze attacks offshore, with some 4,907 sailors killed and 4,824 wounded, and with 368 ships damaged in addition to the 36 ships sunk.
Peleliu, Saipan, and Iwo Jima were the first clear demonstration that the Japanese had recognized that they simply couldn’t “win” this war that they’d started with America, not in the conventional sense. Just as the American high command began to accept that the Japanese were never going to surrender and seek terms, the Pacific war transmuted into a war of extinction. People thought the European war was total war—and it was, in the sense that there were minimal rules, in the ancient meaning of the Rules of War. Although: once the depravity of the Germans became obvious when the first death camps were overrun, it became very difficult for the Allied generals to hold their soldiers back from executing every German involved.
The Pacific war was a collision between two military powers with totally different warrior cultures. The Japanese fought to the death in every case. The Western soldier fought until the “enemy” gave up and laid down his arms. The Japanese didn’t do that and thought that the Western soldier was defective in expecting mercy if he did that. Once the Western soldiers and their officers finally absorbed that bloody fact of life, things changed. American troops hated their Japanese opponents, hated them for their barbarity, their strangeness, and for loving death in battle more than life itself. In Europe, each side took prisoners of war. In the Pacific things were quite different.
As I’ve described in this book, the Japanese changed tactics at Iwo. Once they saw that the American pre-invasion bombardment was having little or no effect on the preparations they’d made, they let the Americans land without any more than token resistance. The American generals and admirals, lulled by previous “victories,” shortened the pre-landing bombardments and landed anyway, piling thousands and thousands of troops onto the beach to achieve that all-important force advantage, without even knowing precisely how many Japanese were waiting for them or what they had planned.
Amphibious warfare theory had long been: rapidly concentrate your forces on the shore, and then move inland to overwhelm the enemy’s defenses. The Japanese, who fought this entire battle from the perspective that “we’re all going to die here anyway,” simply waited until they had enough warm bodies in their gunsights on the beach, and then killed just about all of them.
I personally think it never occurred to the American high command at the time what the Japanese mission on Iwo really was, namely to convince the Americans that when you come to Japan, proper, you are going to suffer unimaginable casualties. So will we, but we exult in such casualties as a mark of honor. And if you don’t learn that lesson here, come to Okinawa and we’ll administer yet another dose of reality. General Kuribayashi told his twenty thousand troops that they had to think of this island as their grave. It would be a grave of great honor as long as they each took ten Americans before they died. Twenty thousand true believers saluted and went to work.
But here’s the thing: the Japanese strategy on Iwo made everything personal. The reaction of the average GI on the beaches as he watched thousands die was—hey, this isn’t fair: come out of your holes and fight like men. The Japanese said: no, we’re going to stay in our holes and die like warriors. You’re going to die out there in the sand like the stupid dogs you are. Once the GIs figured that out, the battle turned into one driven by pure hate. Marines began to find dead Marines out on the battlefield with their severed genitals stuffed into their mouths. Or obviously wounded, but not yet dead, Marine POWs strangled or impaled. And then the older sergeants would start telling tales from when the Japanese army invaded Chinese cities, like Nanking, and used pregnant women for bayonet practice: stab them shallow until you feel the baby, then skewer the baby, but leave the woman alive.
The Japanese justified such actions by professing a self-serving theory about such barbarity: make war so horrible, so painful, so complete, that no one will ever even think about taking Japan on in battle. That way you make war shorter, which is better for everybody. Cruelty is the order of the day—the worse you make it, the less likely you will see your opponent ever again.
The American Marines reacted just like you’d think they would. The Japanese were not human. Utter barbarians. Bring me my flamethrower and let’s burn them to cinders in their caves like cockroaches. Then drag ’em out and burn them again. I feel that, in one sense, the dropping of the atomic bombs was the ultimate expression of how the armed forces felt about the Japanese. And yet today, they are probably our staunchest allies in the western Pacific, especially in the face of growing Chinese imperialism.
The surviving veterans of Iwo have mostly died out. There are some who have been able to reconcile with their Japanese counterparts in the battle of Iwo Jima. There are photographs of Japanese vets and American vets weeping together as they revisited the island to pay homage to those who died there and to those whose bones still lie out there in all that volcanic sand. Nothing quite embodies the horrible scourge of war as a scene like that, two old men standing on the black slopes of Suribachi, weeping for what they lost there. I must admit that I teared up sometimes just thinking about what happened there while writing this story.
I’m not a Marine, and thus I don’t rate saying it, but I still take a lot of pride in pronouncing the Marine Corps motto: Semper Fi. Semper fidelis. Always faithful, to your duty, to your comrades in arms, and to the Corps.
PTD
ALSO BY P. T. DEUTERMANN
THE CAM RICHTER NOVELS
The Cat Dancers
Spider Mountain
The Moonpool
Nightwalkers
THRILLERS
Red Swan
Cold Frame
The Last Man
The Firefly
Darkside
Hunting Season
Train Man
Zero Option
Sweepers
Official Privilege
SEA STORIES
The Last Paladin
Trial By Fire
The Hooligans
The Nugget
The Iceman
The Commodore
Sentinels of Fire
Ghosts of Bungo Suido
Pacific Glory
The Edge of Honor
Scorpion in the Sea
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
P. T. DEUTERMANN is the noted author of many previous novels based both on his experiences as a senior staff officer in Washington, DC, and at sea as a navy captain and, later, as a commodore of destroyers. His World War II works include The Last Paladin and Pacific Glory, both of which won the W. Y. Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction, The Hooligans, The Nugget, Sentinels of Fire, The Commodore, Trial by Fire, Ghosts of Bungo Suido, and The Iceman. He lives in North Carolina with his wife of fifty-five years. You can sign up for email updates here.
