Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific (28 page)

“Go on! You’re daft! You’re a bunch of schoolboys alongside the A.I.F.” He glared at me and prepared to refill the white mugs he used for teacups. “Don’t misunderstand me,” he said, carefully sloshing the hot beverage from the billy-can. “I don’t say you can’t fight. I just say you’ve got a long way to go to come up with the A.I.F.” He returned to his cot and raised his cup. “Here’s to the American forces.” We sipped, and then he added, “And thank God for the A.I.F.”

We shoved off a week later. The Digger’s “somebody back in Australia” had given him little time to join us. We were notified to stand by the day after the Digger’s arrival.

We slung our weapons, slipped into our packs and strode down that dusty road to the harbor. It was choked with L.S.T.’s, and many of them were drawn up on the beach, their ramps down and their jaws yawning while troops, vehicles and guns walked, rode and bumped into their dark and spacious bellies.

We entered our ship. The ramp came up behind us, the jaws creaked shut, and we sailed away.

2

Rain.

The rain had come. Finschhafen on the southeast coast of northeast New Guinea received us in a wet and dripping embrace.

Once again we unsheathed our machetes to hack out living space in the sodden jungle.

Once again we squatted in miserable indolence, awaiting the order to attack.

Once again we heard the bombs, whispering as though lost in that blind black rain overhead, crashing wildly into the jungle.

Only the Digger’s natives were pleased by the delay.

“Dis Noo Kinni groun,” Buri said, his strong teeth flashing in a delighted grin. He removed his ever-present pipe while stooping to pat the mud fondly. “Noo Kinni groun,” he said, almost crooning.

All of them—Buri, Kimbut, and the two others whose names I cannot recall—were from New Guinea. They were proud of it, inclined to look down their splay noses at the other Melanesians who live in the Bismarck Archipelago, the island group in the western Pacific north of eastern New Guinea. They were most especially disposed to scorn the “bush kanaka”—the non-sophisticates who dwelt in the interior beyond reach of the civilizing commerce of the coast. They all spoke pidgin English—the mark of the traveler in their tribes—and they taught it to me during our two dreary weeks in Finschhafen.

They told me of their life before the war—the unbelievably simple life of the food-gatherer, apart from the annual few months in the employ (I was about to say exploitation) of planters like the Digger—and I tried to tell them of our own complicated existence. But this was next to impossible. Only when I spoke of the buildings could they comprehend, and these I usually described with the aid of magazine pictures.

“You catchem one fella house,” I said, pointing to the bottom story of the Empire State Building. “All right. You catchem ‘nother fella house. He stop along top. All right. You catchem ‘nother fella. You catchem plenty fella, all the same number grass belong donkey. Plenty fella stop along top.”

They nodded, eyes big with wonder, sometimes perhaps a shade bigger than need be—for they were consummate actors, and impeccably polite.

The Finschhafen stopover was brief—perhaps ten days—saved from boredom only by the bombings and a pointless two-day patrol into the outback, where Buri amused us one wet afternoon, trying to provide hot tea by coaxing fire from two sticks of wood. It was a trick learned from the American comic books he was fond of studying—but it was an angry failure.

When we returned, we found the camp struck, and everything in readiness for departure.

A nocturnal patrol, mainly composed of men from our section, had reconnoitered under the enemy’s nose in New Britain. They had been taken across the Dampier Strait in a torpedo boat and had paddled ashore in a rubber raft. The information they brought back with them—and they almost didn’t get back, for their PT boat had been shot up in a running fight with a heavily armed Japanese barge—was exciting enough to send us to arms. Apparently the place where we would land was lightly defended.

The Commander called us together that night and delivered an eve-of-battle speech.

The men formed on the road running perpendicular to the beach, clustered in a thick irregular crescent around the Commander, who stood with his back to the brush. He spoke in deliberate but angry tones; he spoke like a man who hated the Japanese, as though he had suffered a personal affront at their hands and was bent on personal vengeance—as though this were a personal, not mechanical, war. His harangue seemed unreal; it was unreal, because it could never produce the desired effect.

“Kill Japs,” the Commander was saying, “I want you to kill Japs. And I want you to remember that you’re marines. We’ve got a tough job where we’re going. And where we’re going we won’t have much room for ammunition. So you’d better be sure you see something before you shoot. Don’t squeeze that trigger until you’ve got meat in your sights. And when you do—spill blood—spill yaller blood.”

That was all.

We walked back to the tents. It was Christmas Eve.

At the tents, Father Straight was preparing to say Midnight Mass. He had an altar erected beneath a pyramidal tent, and we gathered before this, kneeling in the mud and hunched against the fine rain falling, to witness the immolation of the Prince of Peace. Girded in the ugly, awkward habiliments of modern war we worshipped the Divine Son of the God of Battles.

Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts …

Father Straight spoke gently. He reminded us that not all of us would live to see another Christmas, that perhaps some of us might die this very day. He told us to be sorry for our sins, to ask the forgiveness of God, to forgive those who had wronged us—to prepare our souls for death.

We sang hymns. Nineteen hundred and forty-odd years ago the Babe had been born in Bethlehem, and we celebrated Him this night in a dark and misty forest that His Father had wrought. We sang hymns to Him: “Silent Night” and “Adeste Fideles” and “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”

Mild he lays his glory by
Born that man no more may die
.

And tomorrow our hands would be stained with the blood of our brothers.

But we sang on, half-heartedly, half-hopingly; sometimes mechanically, sometimes with a desperate, driving poignancy; one hand on the heart, the other on the hilt of a bayonet; now convinced by the truth and urgency of what Father Straight had said, now despairing of words and ideas as fine and as gossamer as the mist around us. But we did not leave off singing, and when we had finished, we went to bed.

In the morning we marched down to the ships.

But they gave us a wonderful Christmas dinner. We were dispersed on the beach, along that expanse of smooth black volcanic mud where a single row of great oaklike trees leans seaward, like a bristling line of gigantic spears. There was turkey and mashed potatoes, bread and even ice cream, and we marveled to think that we could eat so regally on the eve of battle.

Then they brought us our Christmas mail. It was as though we kings, having finished banqueting, had clapped our hands and called for minstrels—and got them. We spent the remainder of the day picnicking on that smooth black beach.

When it grew dark, we boarded our assault ships, bound for the morning’s battle on the shores of New Britain northeastward across the Dampier Strait.

Into the night we sailed—silent and songless—back to war.

3

On the sunless shores of New Britain, where the rain forest crowded steeply down to the sea, we of the First Marine Division came back to the assault, and it was here that we cut the Japanese to pieces, literally, when that devouring jungle did not dissolve them; and it was here that we pitied them.

Now, to pity the enemy either is madness or it is a sign of strength. I think that with the First Marine Division on New Britain it was a sign of strength.

We pitied him in the end, this fleeing foe, disorganized, demoralized, crawling on hands and knees, even, in that dissolving downpour, for in the end it was we—the soft, effete Americans—who had learned to get along in the jungle and who bore up best beneath the ordeal of the monsoon, and in these things lay our strength.

It was the jungle and the rain, too, that made New Britain so different from Guadalcanal. I knew that it was going to be different the moment that I ran down the ramp of our L.C.I. and across a narrow black beach, scrambling up a small steep bank to burst from sunlight into the gloom of the jungle. For, in that moment, the rains began to fall; and in that moment we began to hunt the foe.

The sound of cannonading and diving airplanes had already been stilled when the Commander—our new battalion leader—set up his command post about fifty yards in from the water. Our assault companies had moved forward to take up positions that formed a defense perimeter, a half-moon with its straight edge running along the beach. Across its widest point, it could not have been quite four hundred yards wide.

As a unit, we would advance no further. Here we would sit, alone, astride the coastal track while the remainder of the division conquered Cape Gloucester to the northwest. We had inserted ourselves as a defensive wedge between our division and the enemy believed to be below us to the south. To reinforce his comrades, the Japanese would have to come through us. So here we sat, alone, out of contact with our main force because we were in what the Commander called “radio defilade.”

From here, the Commander sent our daily patrols. With that restless precision characteristic of him, he had been dispatching patrols into the unknown terrain from the moment of our landing. They came and went constantly; out and in, out and in, north, south and east, further and further, rolling out like feelers, like the tactile senses of our battalion—that military organism that lay there blindly in the jungle—hunting for an exasperatingly absent enemy.

To the north, one patrol discovered the body of an E Company scout who had been reported missing. The area bore marks of a struggle, as though he had fought hand to hand. His body bore dozens of bayonet wounds. They had used him for bayonet practice. In his mouth they had stuffed flesh they had cut from his arm. His buddies said he had had a tattoo there—the Marine emblem, the fouled anchor and the globe. The Japs cut it off and stuffed it in his mouth.

The Commander was angry.

Again—to the north—two Japanese officers had been caught snooping around our positions and had been killed. An E Company outpost, scouting the terrain at their front, had discovered a Japanese force, in platoon strength, sleeping on the ground. Sleeping! They fired into them, into these sleeping supermen of the jungle, withdrawing upon the approach of another enemy platoon.

So the enemy was there. But in what strength? If the Japanese platoons had been but patrols, then the foe was in sizable force. The enemy’s actions, too, were mystifying. Sleeping indeed! Could it be they were not aware of us?

These must have been among the Commander’s considerations when he called for a fresh patrol to the south, for from the south had come silence—and it would not do to have it suddenly erupt, to have ourselves pinched between two fires.

He chose Lieutenant Commando to lead the patrol, and I went along as scout. Commando, who had joined us in Australia, was a big powerful Frenchman with a slight accent that might have been the English of a French Canadian as well as the accent of a Frenchman. He gained his name through having been at the disastrous Dieppe raid. The fighting techniques he observed among the British commandos he sought to graft onto us. But he overlooked our own pride as marines and ignored the obvious difference between the terrains of Europe and Oceania—and so was often disappointed and offended when his well-meaning criticism was resented and rejected.

The track we were to follow began as a narrow path along the beach and slanted inward from the ocean to follow rising ground that soon lost itself in the luxuriance of the jungle. It twisted and turned as though blazed by a native, drunk on betel nut.

There were ten of us—a man in the Point, normally the position of the Intelligence scout, but now occupied by a G Company man, and the rest of us strung out behind him. Our alignment was not neat, of course, but deliberately staggered—and between each man was an interval of about twenty feet. At a sign from the Point—usually a raised hand—we melted into the jungle. No one smoked, of course, nor did anyone speak. Canteens, knives or ammunition clips were secured so as to make no noise. Weapons were carried cradled over the breast, ready to be swung down for instant firing or for the butt to be dug into the earth to break a fall. I kept my Tommy gun loaded and cocked, but with the safety catch on. A single motion of my right index finger would unlatch the safety and trip the trigger. Even those armed with rifles expected to shoot from the hip—because all jungle encounters are sudden, and because the density of the rain forest affords a visibility of about five yards. Who needs to aim at such range, even if there were time?

A patrol moves slowly in the jungle. Fear of ambush produces the most extreme caution, which reduces speed to a crawl. It is this literally. Each foot is firmly planted before the other is raised, utmost care is taken to avoid twigs, and a sort of crablike rhythm is produced as the eyes and torso travel in the alternating directions of the feet. Left foot, lean, look, listen, pause; right foot, lean, look, listen, pause.

At such speed, it would take a day to move a mile and return. Should the trail be hilly, or especially twisting, it might take longer. On this patrol, it had taken twenty minutes to go around one bend, precisely because that curve lay at the foot of a rise and because such a terrain feature is admirably suited for ambush. It holds the twin advantages of ground and surprise: the enemy can deliver a plunging fire into your ranks at the very moment when your own visibility is at zero. He might even allow you to gain the hill, permit you to pass him—and then fire from behind you—a most demoralizing trick.