The Last Full Measure (48 page)
Read The Last Full Measure Online
Authors: Michael Stephenson
The malevolent Fates often conspire to deny the warrior any vestige of the heroic, and what better way to do that than catch him with his pants around his ankles. As Milton Landry of the US Thirty-Sixth Infantry Division commented after being wounded by a grenade while assuming what he delicately calls “the proper position”: “You don’t read much about it in books.”
But it was often a surefire way of getting killed. Dick Peterson of the Twenty-Fifth Division remembers: “Dysentery was rampant on Guadalcanal.… The desire to relieve yourself is just tremendous. At night, what do you do? We had passwords, but the Japs were all over and guys were quick to shoot. So do you stay in the hole or go out for a minute and risk getting shot? Those were the alternatives. Most people stayed in the hole, but I’m afraid many of the men shot after dark had their pants down. It was amazing how many ways you could get hurt in World War II.”
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Meanwhile, thousands of miles away:
It was a beautiful and grim Christmas Eve. Shorty and I spelled each other on guard throughout the bitter cold night. The cold I could endure, but an additional misery landed on me in the middle of the night. I got the GIs [diarrhea]!
‡
That’s always a tragedy, of course—although in normal life, with the luxury of a civilized bathroom at hand, it would seem only an embarrassing annoyance—but this time the tragedy was of major proportions. You see, our dugout is on the crest of a hill, smack in the middle of an open field and with never a bush or tree to provide cover. It’s not modesty that bothers us, you understand, it’s snipers. We peer anxiously in the direction of the German lines, unbutton our pants in the dugout, hold them up with one hand while we clamber out, and get the business over in a hurry. We wipe on the run—our naked and chilled buttocks quivering in anticipation of a bullet.… A half-naked man crouching on a hilltop is a defenseless creature, unnerved by the constant sense of his nakedness framed in the sights of an enemy rifle. I winced and shook each time I dropped my
pants, expecting every moment to be caponized by a German sniper who combined marksmanship with a macabre sense of humor.
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A common way for a soldier to be killed “off the books,” as it were, was by his own comrades. The chaos of jungle warfare made friendly fire particularly lethal. On Bougainville, 16 percent of American deaths were attributable to friendly fire; and on Guadalcanal, it accounted for 12 percent of all casualties.
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On New Georgia, “the 169th Regiment thought its bivouac area had been penetrated by the Japanese. There was a great deal of confusion as knives were drawn and grenades wildly thrown into the dark. Many Americans stabbed each other. Grenades bounced off trees and exploded amongst the defenders. Some soldiers fired off round after round to no avail. Come morning there was no trace of Japanese dead or wounded but there were numerous American casualties, 50 percent of them hit by fragments from the grenades.”
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These fracture points of panic ran through all armies.
It was bad enough that patrolling was itself one of the deadliest occupations known to the infantryman, but to cap it all, just trying to reenter one’s own lines could be hair-raising and often lethal. Paul Fussell learned not to trust passwords when bringing a patrol back through the perimeter: “We learned many simple survival techniques. One was never to assume a friendly soldier knew who you were at night and in his nervousness would refrain from shooting you. We learned that ‘passwords’ were seldom efficacious: you had to raise your voice to speak them, risking arousing the enemy a hundred yards away, and it was very likely that the password had been forgotten by one or both of you anyway.”
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A misheard word could be fatal. Robert Leckie remembered a medic killed by friendly fire on Guadalcanal: “When the sentry had challenged him as he returned from relieving himself, he had
boggled over the password ‘Lilliputian’ and so met death: eternity at the mercy of a liquid consonant.”
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George MacDonald Fraser also lost a comrade to a consonant.
We stood to until dawn, half an hour later, and when the light grew someone spotted the body lying a few yards in front of the pit to our immediate right. It was the Duke. He had been cut almost in half by the Vickers [British machine gun] fire.
It soon became plain what had happened. Someone had got up to go to the latrine, and in the dark had trod on one of the sleeping Jats [Indian troops fighting with the British Army in Burma] who had cried out—not loudly, but still loud enough to wake a third party, who had asked what was up. A fourth man had said something like: “It’s just one of the Jats,” and a fifth man, probably half-awake, had misheard the last word of the sentence and exclaimed: “Japs?” In an instant someone else had shouted “Japs!” and there was a mad scramble for the pits, with the Jat gunners starting to blaze away—and at some point the Duke must have come awake, remembered that he was away from his pit and his rifle, and made a bee-line for them. Only it was pitch dark, and he had run the wrong way.
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There were also “friendly” fatalities on a grand scale. Operation Cobra was a US bombing mission to help American troops break out of the Saint-Lô beachhead in Normandy. The bombers missed their mark and killed 25 Americans on the first day and 111, including Lieutenant General Lesley McNair, the next, and wounded 400-plus more. A couple of weeks later British bombers inadvertently dumped their loads on Canadian and Polish troops near Caen. The Régiment de la Chaudière, for example, suffered 400 killed and wounded.
But nothing compared to accidentally killing a comrade up close:
“Soon be home, Charlie,” somebody would say.
“Oh, no,” Charlie would reply—almost taken aback by the suggestion.…
Bet he didn’t know he was going to cop it like that, though. It’s a different feeling killing your pals to killing Jerry. Nobody minds you killing Jerry. That’s what you’re here for. But you have to have a big excuse if you want to knock off your own. There was no excuse here. You were told to stay in the field away from the house—rain or no rain. But hell, it rained so hard you were afloat. So you got into the farm with Harry and another bloke, and you jammed the door. Nobody was going to surprise you. And you sat on the floor of one of the bedrooms with your backs to the wall, and faced the only window looking up to the black sky … you all agreed that it would be too dangerous to sleep and you all swore you would stay awake, and you all slept.… And then there was the bark of a gun, and all was commotion and fear, and for one sharp second you thought your heart would burst, and the window was filled with a body and the body was grunting and falling down head over heels upon you. And when you saw it was Charlie coming in search of his fate you thought, “Thank God it’s Charlie and not the Jerries, and thank God he got it quick.” But Charlie didn’t get it quick and he wouldn’t die, either, and his lifeblood sprayed over you and refused to be stanched. And Harry, who had shot him, felt himself part of Charlie’s fate and it unnerved Harry, and he shook Charlie and told him he hadn’t meant to kill Charlie, and he asked Charlie to forgive him, and he wept, and he asked Christ to let Charlie
speak to him. But Christ didn’t hear; nor did Charlie, and Charlie died with his blood saturating you as he lay on you, and the blood ran down your legs all warm and sticky, not like water.
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THE RELENTLESS EXPOSURE
to combat affected a reverse alchemy: the precious metal of “It can’t happen to me” was turned into the lead of “It will happen to me.” Paul Fussell charts that transformation: “We came to understand what more have known than spoken of, that normally each man begins with a certain full reservoir, or bank account, of bravery, but that each time it’s called upon, some is expended, never to be regained. After several months it has all been expended, and it’s time for your breakdown. My reservoir was full, indeed overflowing, at St. Dié and so certain did I feel that no harm could come to me—me—that I blithely pressed forward, quite enjoying the challenges and the pleasures of learning a new mode of life.… But at the Moder River line in the snow hole, some courage leaked away, and it was distinctly hard for me to leave the hole at night to go out and check on my men.”
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“Perhaps if you are very brave,” observed a British soldier, “it diminishes imperceptibly, but it does diminish as a chord on a piano once struck grows steadily weaker and can never behave otherwise.”
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The soldiers of the Second World War were, perhaps, less inhibited about expressing their fear than those of earlier wars. Ike Roberts, a combat GI in Europe, admits its prevalence as well as its antidote: “As for the actual feeling, the day I hit the front line and every day thereafter I was the same as all the other GIs and our officers—scared as hell and you get more scared at every attack. But when the word comes, scared or not you climb out and
go. You know damned well it has to be done and it’s up to you. If a man says he’s not scared he’s one of two things, he’s either a fool or a damned liar.”
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A British artilleryman also recognized that dogged acceptance in a description of fortitude and quiet courage that is heir to centuries of infantry battle: “I stood watching the infantry. Without any show of emotion they got up, picked up their P.I.A.T. mortars, their rifles and ammunition, and walked slowly up the road towards the enemy, with the same bored indifference of a man who goes to work he does not love … No hesitation, no rush on the part of anybody. Men move slowly against death, and although the shaft of every stomach was a vacuum of bile and lead no sign was given and I tried to cover my fear.” A chaplain watched Canadian infantry preparing to attack the Hitler Line in May 1944: “My boys move in tonight … New boys with fear and nerves and anxiety hidden under quick smiles and quick seriousness. Old campaigners with a faraway look. It is the hardest thing to watch without breaking into tears.”
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Corporal Ralph Pearse of the 2nd West Yorkshire Regiment remembered that “Both Sid Wright and I were sure by this time that we couldn’t go on coming through battle after battle alive. Like Sid, I’d become a fighting man and nothing else; no hope of anything else but more fighting, until in the end we knew we must be killed. We didn’t care much. We knew it was inevitable.”
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At the extreme of physical and psychological exhaustion what was once feared above all else now is almost welcomed. To be killed, wounded, or captured would be a release, remembers Henri Atkins: “At the time, any one of those possibilities was OK with me. I had been living in such miserable, bitter cold, I didn’t really care what happened.” Resignation was a kind of liberation, a calmness in the face of almost certain obliteration. The Soviet war correspondent Vasily Grossman talked to an infantry commander who had come through the appalling battering as the Germans swept up to the gates of Moscow:
At Khasin’s tank brigade, Captain Kozlov, the commander of the motorised rifle battalion, was philosophising about life and death while talking to me at night. He is a young man with a small beard. Before the war he was studying music at the Moscow Conservatoire. “I have told myself that I will be killed whatever happens, today or tomorrow. And once I realised this, it became so easy for me to live, so simple, and even somehow so clear and pure. My soul is very calm. I go into battle without any fear, because I have no expectations. I am absolutely convinced that a man commanding a motorised rifle battalion will be killed, that he cannot survive. If I didn’t have this belief in the inevitability of death, I would be feeling bad and, probably, I wouldn’t be able to be so happy, calm and brave in the fighting.
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As a young replacement in the terrible battle of the Hürtgen Forest, Raymond Gantter recalls one of the veterans:
I was struck by how old he seemed. Not in physical appearance—in spite of his heavy beard, his haggard eyes, and all the evidence of great weariness, he was still a young man in his early twenties. Nor, in spite of what’s written in war novels, was his age heavily implicit in the tragedy of his eyes. No, it was in the way in which he spoke of life and death and mutilation, in his calm acceptance of transiency and impermanence, his serene willingness to receive whatever would come instead of the Quixotic rebellion against fate that every young man has a right to enjoy. I felt young and naïve before his mature and unbegging resignation.
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But fatalism could also be a kind of gloriously noodle-headed “Quixotic rebellion.” Robert Leckie saw it at work with one of
his buddies on Guadalcanal, Scar-Chin, who took to standing outside during bombing raids,
stirring not a foot even when the thump of the bombs was dangerously close, or when we in the pit below could hear the tinkle of falling shrapnel or the whizz of bomb fragments.…
“C’mon down here, Scar-Chin. C’mon, you crazy bastard, before you get your ass blown off.”
Scar-Chin would chortle, “What’s the difference? They can knock it off down there, too. Makes no difference where you are. If you’re gonna get it, you’re gonna get it, and there isn’t anything you can do about it. When your number comes up, that’s it, brother. So why worry?”
There was no arguing with him, nor with his fellow fatalists. Kismet was all the fashion on Guadalcanal. You could hear them saying, It Is Written, in a hundred different ways: “Why worry, you’ll go when your time comes.”
There is almost no argument against fatalism. Argue until you are weary, but men like Scar-Chin still lounge among the falling bombs.… Suggest that it is they, through their own foolhardiness, who choose the time. Impress upon them that they are their own executioner, that they pull their own name out of the hat.…
It is a fine argument, an excellent way to pass the time while the bombs fall and Scar-Chin—that disturbing fatalist Scar-Chin—lounges above without a word of rebuttal, himself alone among the exploding steel.
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