Flags of Our Fathers (10 page)

For several horrifying months it seemed to be in vain. By the summer of 1942 the Japanese military had conquered a swath of territory that dwarfed Adolf Hitler’s most fervent expansionist dreams.

So it was with great alarm that on July 4, 1942, American reconnaissance discovered a Japanese construction brigade building an airstrip on Guadalcanal, a jungle island near the southern tip of the Solomon Islands chain, to the northeast of Australia. An entrenched Japanese force there would spell disaster for Australia and the remaining allies in the South Pacific.

America knew it had to draw the line on this dangerous southern thrust. But who would take a stand? The British, Chinese, and American armies had all been defeated by Japan’s Imperial Army. The Japanese appeared to be supermen, impossible to stop.

It was at this critical stage of the war that the United States Marine Corps burst onto the scene as a new kind of fighting force uniquely designed to wage a new kind of warfare.

The Marines had until then been on the fringes of the American armed forces. Organized as an internal security and marksmen adjunct of the Navy in 1775, the Marine Corps had never played a significant role in American military history. As recently as the spring of 1940, the Marines had numbered only 25,000 enlisted men.

But by then, forward-thinking military strategists had long since perceived the coming importance of Marines in twentieth-century warfare.

It was in the early 1920’s that a veteran Marine officer of World War I by the name of Holland M. Smith (nickname: “Howlin’ Mad”) assembled a team of officers to reconceive the Marines’ mission. Smith, a man at once pugnacious, profane, and professorial, proposed that the business of mounting continental land offensives was the historic province of the Army, and should remain so. But the ominous stirrings in the Far East, Smith insisted, suggested that a great many American boys must soon be trained to master a more exacting array of combat skills. These skills would coalesce around the concept of amphibious warfare: troops disembarking from large ships, speeding toward enemy beaches under heavy fire, and charging ahead to enemy-held islands. Smith and his colleagues foresaw that the islands would be in the Pacific; the enemy, Japan.

Amphibious landings are the most difficult military operations in warfare. In 1915, a British-led Allied force attempted a sea-based landing at Gallipoli in Turkey; the thrust ended in disaster. After that, most military experts agreed amphibious operations were impossible against modern, mechanized weapons.

Howlin’ Mad thought otherwise. Over two decades, he and his staff created, refined, and rehearsed the modern science of amphibious warfare. There were four Army divisions in the South Pacific when the urgency arose for an amphibious expedition to seize Guadalcanal. But this battle called for the preeminent amphibious warriors in the world. It was time to send in the Marines.

The Marines waded onto Guadalcanal on August 7,1942. Caught by surprise, the Japanese did not at first oppose their landing. The Marines streamed in and unloaded their supplies until the Japanese navy finally counterattacked. After losing four ships, the U.S. Navy fled. The Marines ashore were abandoned, standing alone against an enemy that had never been defeated.

For weeks these isolated Marines fought off attacks by Japanese ground troops as Japanese air and naval power struck at them day after day.

The Marine commander, Alexander Vandegrift, rallied his men. They were Marines, he exhorted them, and “this will be no Bataan.” Fighting against seemingly impossible odds, living on two meals a day of captured Japanese rice, the Marines secured the island by December. Some 23,000 Japanese were killed; another 13,000 were evacuated. Japan had suffered its first defeat of the war.

And the Marines had won a place in the heart of America. Guadalcanal was a fight won by teamwork, but also by heroes, whose exploits became instant legends. Heroes such as Sergeant John Basilone, a rugged New Jerseyite who had enlisted in the Marines after telling his mother, “The Army isn’t tough enough for me.” With “Death Before Dishonor” tattooed on his arm, he had led eight hundred of his comrades in a nonstop seventy-two-hour firefight in October against several thousand Japanese, winning the fight that helped change the course of the battle and thus the war.

After the enemy had destroyed one of Basilone’s sections, leaving only two men still in action, the sergeant grabbed a damaged gun, repaired it by feel in pitch darkness, under withering fire, and manned it himself, holding the line until replacements arrived.

Later, with his ammunition running low and his supply lines cut off, the sergeant charged through enemy lines carrying a hundred pounds of urgently needed shells for his gunners. They remained in action and virtually annihilated the Japanese regiment.

For that heroism, Sergeant Basilone became one of the first enlisted Marines to be awarded the Medal of Honor in World War II. Offered an officer’s commission after touring the United States to promote the sale of war bonds, Basilone turned it down and asked to be sent back to the Pacific. “I wasn’t scared,” he said, in a quote that resounded among the younger troops. “I didn’t have time to be. Besides, I had my men to worry about.”

The Marines had stunned the Japanese and handed them their first military defeat of the war. But it was perhaps an even greater psychological defeat. Japanese troops had long been told they were racially and morally superior to the soft and materialistic Western man. Guadalcanal proved otherwise.

For the Marines, Guadalcanal revealed a disquieting truth: America’s War would be fought on the most primitive level, a war fought like no other.

In the fall of 1942 America was fighting two very different enemies.

The battles in North Africa were between Westernized armies who fought by the “rules.” Ernie Pyle assured his millions of American readers that there the Germans were fighting “a pretty clean war.” The German Panzer leader Hans von Luck called it the “always fair war,” and when, years later, the German radio-television network ORTF produced a film on the campaign, its title was
The War Without Hate
.

Gentlemen’s agreements suspended hostilities for the day at five o’clock each afternoon, and each side held its fire for medics to care for the wounded.

Combat was fierce, casualties were heavy, and passion ran high when fighting the Germans. But rules were followed and a sense of restraint existed in Europe that was absent in the Pacific.

The Marines headed for Guadalcanal had heard of the atrocities committed by the Japanese army over the years. In 1938
Life
magazine published photographs, smuggled out by a German businessman, of Japanese atrocities in Nanking.

Nanking, capital of China, had fallen to the Japanese on December 13, 1937. As the Japanese entered the capital, only unarmed civilians remained. The victorious troops plastered the city with billboards featuring a smiling Japanese soldier handing a bowl of rice to an appreciative Chinese child. The poster proclaimed the peaceful intentions of “co-prosperity.” But instead the Chinese suffered an orgy of torture and death.

In less than a month Japanese troops, with the encouragement of their officers, killed up to 350,000 Chinese civilians. Pregnant women were marched to one killing field where Japanese placed bets on the sex of the fetus about to tumble from its mother’s womb, cut by a samurai sword. In another area of town drunken soldiers laughed and tossed babies in the air to be skewered on the ends of their buddies’ bayonets. Dogs grew too fat to walk, feasting on the corpses in the streets.

Three hundred fifty thousand: That amounted to more civilians dying in one city in one month than died in entire countries during the entire war. In six years of combat France lost 108,000 civilians; Belgium 101,000; the Netherlands 242,000. The Japanese in Nanking killed even more than the atomic bombs later would. (Hiroshima had 140,000 dead, Nagasaki 70,000.) The Japanese “loot all, kill all, burn all” scorched-earth policy in North China would eventually reduce the population from forty-four million to twenty-five million. Co-prosperity indeed.

The U.S. Army had encountered the Japanese army’s ways in the Philippines and Burma. Stories of buddies found trussed like pigs, disemboweled with their severed genitals in their mouths circulated, as did horrifying accounts of boys staked in the hot sun, forced to endure the voracious bugs who savored the honey rubbed into the prisoner’s eyes and mouth.

However, the Marines on Guadalcanal had not experienced the atrocities firsthand and found them hard to believe. Until they mistakenly extended a hand of mercy to the Japanese.

On August 11, Frank Goettge led a patrol to rescue a Japanese unit on an isolated spit of ground on Guadalcanal. Marine intelligence had reported sighting a white flag, and a captured Japanese sailor said the unit was unable to maintain itself and inclined to give up.

Goettge called for volunteers to rescue the Japanese unit. Twenty-five, including an interpreter and a Navy surgeon, stepped forward.

Landing on the beach identified by the informant, Goettge announced he was there to help the trapped Japanese. His offer was met by withering gunfire. After hours of fighting only one Marine managed to escape and swim away. As he looked back at the bloody shore, he could see the glint of Japanese swords hacking his buddies’ bodies.

A Marine patrol later found the mutilated corpses. They had been violated in the worst possible manner. Chunks of flesh with the Marine Corps symbol tattooed on them had been hacked off arms and stuffed into their mouths. The Marines began to realize they were fighting a war of no rules.

What shocked Marine sensibilities the most was the Japanese treatment of their noncombatant corpsmen. U.S. Navy medics would respond to calls for help from wounded Japanese who would cry “Corpsman! Corpsman!” in English. When the corpsmen came to their aid, they were then either treacherously shot by the wounded Japanese or blown up by hand grenades concealed on their bodies.

America’s War in the Pacific would be a war without quarter, fought with no rules. It would be a primitive battle, a fight to extinction.

The Japanese fighting man believed he was fighting in the proud tradition of ancient samurai. But this was not the case.

Bushido, the “Way of the Warrior,” had for centuries been the honored code of Japan’s proud samurai caste. In the first half of the twentieth century the military romanticized the “Way,” calling upon all young men to be willing to die for their Emperor. It was this interpretation of Bushido that motivated the Japanese soldiers to fight to the death in a manner the Marines judged fanatical.

But this ideal was not the real thing. Rather, it was a corruption of Bushido.

In the past the Bushido code had been as specialized and isolated as the Hippocratic oath. The samurai had always been a small elite within the larger society. For them, Bushido defined a life of honor and duty. But in the early 1900’s the Japanese military set forth an updated version of Bushido. Its aim was to make warriors of the entire male populace. Death in battle was portrayed as an honor to the family and a transcendent act on the part of the individual. Surrender was a disgrace to the soldier and his family.

This vulgarized version of the Warrior’s Way would have surprised samurai of an earlier era. Those professional warriors had never advocated a willingness to sacrifice themselves for anyone. A true samurai would slice his belly open over an issue of honor. But he didn’t believe mass suicide in hopeless situations was sound strategy. As the American General George Patton phrased it: “No one ever won a war by dying for their country. They won by making the other son-of-a-bitch die for his.”

But the twentieth-century Japanese military wasn’t being run by samurai. The new leaders taught a cult of death, that sacrificing your life is the ultimate beautiful goal. A corruption of Bushido.

The young men the Japanese military drew into its ranks were never aware of this corruption. They had no outside information on which to build critical judgments. They were, in effect, brainwashed to believe that by laying down their lives they were walking in the footsteps of heroic samurai.