Grunts (8 page)

This battalion, the 1st of the 21st Marines, was so hard hit that it was on the verge of total destruction. In this kind of devolving situation, a few courageous individuals can make a world of difference. One such person was Captain William Shoemaker, the commander of A Company. A retreat rumor, stoked by the chaotic fear that was unleashed by the banzai attack, circulated among some of the men. Wearing a captured Japanese trench coat, Shoemaker was all over the place, issuing orders, instilling confidence, telling his men they could not retreat. “Hold your lines, men. If the position falls, the whole beachhead will be endangered,” he said. When he again heard someone screaming to withdraw, he stood up and yelled, “No, by God! We stay here and hold them!” His men held him in very high regard so they heeded his orders. In the estimation of Private First Class Walt Fischer, one of his telephone wire men, the captain was “a great guy” and a real leader. The captain asked Fischer to go on several ammo runs to the rear. Fischer braved intense enemy fire to do so. On one run, though, a rifle bullet slammed into him like a baseball bat. “It went along the side of my head and through my ear. It went down my cheek . . . out the back of my ear, out the back of my helmet.” A corpsman bandaged his head and got him to the beach. Captain Shoemaker held his unit together, adding much to a stalwart American defense. “[He] contributed tremendously toward the defense of positions that night,” the battalion executive officer later wrote.
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At the front edge of a sector held by K Company, 21st Marines, Private First Class Bill Conley was hurling grenades into the half darkness. Friendly mortar shells were hitting just ahead, undoubtedly inflicting casualties on the approaching enemy. In the light of the mortar and grenade explosions, he could see Japanese soldiers in crouched and crawling positions, edging closer. Conley looked to the right and glimpsed Japanese soldiers stabbing two riflemen in an adjacent hole. He sensed that the enemy was only a few feet in front of his own hole, but the .30-caliber machine gun was holding them back. Conley’s crew ran out of fragmentation grenades so they threw a white phosphorous grenade. White phosphorous is designed to burrow into the skin, burning all the way through the body. Water only intensifies its heat. White phosphorous also emits white smoke. The Japanese saw this, screamed “Gas” to one another and abruptly ceased attacking Conley’s hole. “We must have gone through about eight or ten boxes [of ammo], about two hundred fifty rounds in a box. The gun was so hot . . . you could . . . light a cigarette off the barrel.” Conley could see enemy bodies lying in piles outside the hole. He estimated that there were about fifty of them out there. To Conley’s right, Private First Class Karpowicz was at the end of the company line. Somebody had told him that he was the only man between the 21st and 9th Marine lines. Pointing his BAR to the right, he was shooting at running groups of Japanese. “With the flares bursting, lighting the area, I was able to see the enemy. As I saw, I raked the area. The noise was unbearable, our firing and the racket from the enemy.” As fast as he expended magazines, his assistant loaded new ones for him.

Not far away, Lieutenant Bill Lanier was in another hole, confronting a horde of running enemy soldiers. Like nearly every other Marine, he hated them intensely. He saw them as “fiends,” or “Japs, Nips,” or even “diabolical animals.” Like everyone else, he dehumanized them, not just out of hatred, but in order to justify killing them with impunity. Denying the enemy’s essential humanity was as old as warfare itself, a crucial component to war’s necessary killing. It was also an American cultural tendency, especially in the country’s modern wars. As the Japanese charged at Lieutenant Lanier’s hole, he and the Americans around him shot them down in droves. There were literally piles of bloody Japanese corpses around the holes. Still, their survivors kept coming, jumping into the Marine holes for death struggles. “Here truly is a personal fight for survival,” Lanier wrote. “You are not fighting for glory now, nor for your country, nor your buddy. You are fighting to survive. You kill him by the quickest method you know, not because you are brave or heroic, but because you have no choice.”
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Elsewhere, Staff Sergeant John O’Neill and his platoon were dealing with a similar situation. “They came in waves and like a solid wall, yelling and shrieking. Every gun we had was blazing away, but that didn’t stop them. The first wave broke through.” Sergeant O’Neill stood up and emptied an entire BAR clip of twenty rounds into several of them. The survivors dispersed a bit, gravitating away from his hole, attacking other Marines. O’Neill’s foxhole buddy, Shorty Ferro, asked: “What are we gonna do?” “Pray that we’ll see the sunset,” the sergeant replied. O’Neill did but not Ferro, who soon got hit. “His face had been shot away.” He sagged and died in the sergeant’s arms. Soon American artillery began landing among the fourth and fifth waves of Japanese, inflicting horrible casualties. “Arms and legs flew through the air as thick as rain,” O’Neill wrote. An officer, watching the same barrage, compared the flying arms and legs to snowflakes. “Japs ran amuck. They screamed in terror until they died.”

The Japanese broke through in many places, so American artillery and mortar crews were often under direct attack themselves. Nonetheless, as the attack wore on, the American supporting fire grew steadily more accurate and more intense. The artillerymen fired twenty-six thousand rounds that night. Tanks also added devastating machine-gun and main-gun fire, cornering many screaming groups in the open. At times the enemy soldiers hurled themselves at the tanks. “Savagely they swarmed upon the mechanized vehicles, oblivious of the vicious machine-gun fire, and frantically pounded, kicked and beat against the turrets in an attempt to get the crew within,” a witness recorded. Infantrymen blasted the enemy soldiers off the friendly tanks. One can only imagine how disquieting this experience must have been for the tank crewmen.
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Those Japanese who succeeded in breaching the front lines roamed the night, attacking the 3rd Marine Division’s rear areas, including its hospital. Others holed up in caves, their courage diminished, waiting for the right moment to escape or to kill any Americans who wished to dislodge them. Confusion reigned supreme for both sides. But the Japanese could not exploit that confusion. Their assault was way too disorganized. Minute by minute, the Americans rallied, stood fast, amassed their firepower, and annihilated the Japanese attackers. “The enemy didn’t seem to know what to do after he got behind us,” the 3rd Marine Division’s after action report accurately commented. A major reason for that was a lack of coordination because of the early loss of leaders. In general, the Japanese soldier depended heavily on his officers. Their army did not value individual initiative on the part of low-ranking soldiers. Draconian discipline was standard. Officers ruled their men with proverbial iron fists. They also were expected to set the example, and lead the way in every combat situation. “The [banzai] attack was led by officers,” a 21st Marine Regiment post-battle report explained. “The result was that practically all of their officers were killed initially and the troops that penetrated our lines were ‘lost’ once they had broken through and lacked the initiative and leadership to carry out their attack.”
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Thus, by the time the sun had risen, Japanese fortunes had set. In the gathering daylight, the Americans hunted down and killed the remaining enemy. They killed them in caves and ravines where they had taken confused shelter, apart from their decimated units. Some of the Japanese killed themselves by holding grenades to their abdomens, blowing out their intestines. The Japanese battalions no longer had any semblance of organization or command unity. Nearly all of the commanders were dead. The vast majority of Japanese had died within sight of the original American positions. The beleaguered survivors now found themselves trapped among the Americans, like veritable scorpions in a bottle. As an example, one group of enemy soldiers was cornered near a gun position by a group of artillerymen from the 12th Marines. Like most Japanese, they were more interested in death than surrender. “We were set [upon] by an officer leading a banzai rush,” one of the Marines recalled. “About 10 ft. behind him was one Nip, and about 15 ft. behind him came three more. The officer was killed immediately, the one behind him wounded and falling back about 20 ft. dying. The others tried to retreat, but were killed.” This deadly drama was repeated in at least a dozen other spots.
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By noon, the crisis was over. Some seven thousand Marine riflemen had successfully defended nine thousand yards of ground. General Takashina’s great attack had failed miserably. He himself had escaped, although he would be killed a few days later. The putrefying corpses of his brave soldiers lay everywhere in mute, ghastly testimony to the dismal failure of a flawed concept. “In some spots there were heaps of cadavers, with a sprinkling of arms and legs that had been blown from bodies by mortars,” a Marine recalled. “It was impossible to walk two paces without stepping on an already bloating body.” They carpeted the entire battle area. They were tucked into ravines and lying within strands of tall grass that were waving in the afternoon sea breeze. They were heaped on the knolls and ridges as well as near American foxholes. Some were lying half buried in the sand of the invasion beaches.

For fifty yards around Lieutenant Lanier’s foxhole “was pile after pile and row after row of the beasts in every conceivable stage of crawling and charging with arms, legs and weapons in grotesque positions.” The lieutenant was unmoved by the sight. Like most of the other Americans, he was infused with the dehumanization of war. He hated the Japanese, seeing them as dangerous, treacherous beasts that must be exterminated. “One never minds seeing dead Japs—they’re just like so many animals.” Staff Sergeant O’Neill’s platoon had started the night with thirty-six men. Now fifteen were dead and another eleven wounded. The ten survivors were “grimed with coral and mud, deep lines etched into young-old faces, the thousand-yard stare of battle shock in their eyes, cracked lips parched with dried blood.” They stared dully at the nightmarish scene of slaughter around them. “The enemy dead laid two and three deep in front of our lines. There were many instances of Jap and Marine laying side by side. The ground was slick with blood. Water in the foxholes from the rain was a reddish brown muddy liquid.”
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The stench was already considerable. The rotten, corrupting, languid smell of death ebbed and flowed on the breeze. Flies and maggots were already descending in pestilential droves to feast on the dead flesh. Private First Class Goodwin, who had fought much of the night with his bare hands, came upon a pile of dead Japanese. “The Japanese were very young and their eyes were wide open . . . and flies were all over them. It was just terrible. It smelled like garbage, rotting garbage . . . with a very sweet smell. Their bodies were all swelled up and black.” His torso and his field jacket were covered with the blood of the man he had stabbed to death. He poured an entire canteen of water on himself, trying to wash the blood off, to no avail. He changed clothes but the stains remained on his skin. There were mental stains, too. For the rest of his life, he had trouble sleeping through the night.

At the division hospital, now secure after a horrible evening of fending off banzai assaults, doctors and corpsmen were totally absorbed in treating many hundreds of wounded men. Private Jack Kerins was passing the hospital’s surgery tents, on his way to the front, when he noticed the survivors of B Company, 21st Marines, shuffling into the hospital area. He knew that these men were the remnants of a company that had been nearly annihilated. “They were filthy and ragged and wore blood soaked bandages at different places on their bodies. Some were openly crying. I never learned what happened to those Marines, but I do know I’ll never forget them.” The 3rd Marine Division lost 166 killed, 34 missing, and 645 wounded in the enemy attack.
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Ever the souvenir hunters, many of the Americans were already stripping the Japanese bodies of swords, pistols, binoculars, watches, rings, flags, pens, photographs, and other family mementos. A few Marines even carried pliers to remove gold teeth from Japanese corpses. Intelligence specialists combed the bodies for documents and other important military information. None of this would have been appropriate behavior in a “normal” situation. But, in the context of war, it was standard stuff. The same was obviously true for killing. Though the Americans viewed their enemies as animals, and knew they must kill them in order to survive, this still took a toll on everyone who had to take lives. Like other normal human beings, these Marines eventually carried some remorse over having to kill, even under such justifiable circumstances. “After the war was over, my thoughts on killing started to change,” Jim Headley wrote. “As time went by, my attitude toward the enemy went from survival to regret—taking a life and sending someone into eternity. This bothered me and stayed on my mind.”
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S. L. A. Marshall claimed that, in World War II, less than 20 percent of American soldiers ever fired their rifles in combat. He believed that the reluctance to shoot came from an unwillingness on the part of the average American man to kill. He further claimed that, even when men were directly in danger of being killed themselves, they still would not fire their weapons. Marshall was an excellent combat historian who did much pathbreaking work on the realities of battle for infantrymen. He was correct about the intrinsic hesitancy to kill, and he intuited something of the psychological cost of having to do so. However, he exaggerated this pacific tendency’s effect on real battles. Moreover, he based his contentions on no verifiable evidence.