A Zombie's History of the United States (22 page)

Battle of Ramree Island

I never heard so many men screaming at once.

—Anonymous soldier, about Battle of Ramree Island, 1945

In January 1945, a company of zombie Berserks were dispatched to assist the British Indian Army and the Royal Navy in Operation Mastodon, an amphibious assault to capture the strategic port of Kyaukpyu, located at the northern tip of Ramree Island, which lies off the coast of Burma (officially the Republic of the Union of Myanmar).

The British had been resistant about embracing the Berserks, but the United States had been having such great success utilizing the zombies on Japanese occupied islands (zombies were especially useful when released into the labyrinthine tunnels the Japanese had constructed on many islands), that British command specifically asked for the Berserks.

On January 21, the battleship HMS
Queen Elizabeth
opened fire with her main battery on Kyaukpyu, joined by the light cruiser HMS
Phoebe
, while planes from the escort carrier HMS
Ameer
strafed the beaches. An hour later the 71st Indian Infantry Brigade landed unopposed and secured the beachhead, but the Japanese garrison put up tenacious resistance, holding them to the beach. When the 36th Indian Infantry Brigade landed, with Royal Air Force and Royal Marine units, the Marines outflanked the Japanese stronghold and the nine hundred defenders abandoned their base and fled to join a larger battalion of Japanese soldiers on the other side of the island.

The route forced the Japanese to cross nine miles of mangrove swamps, and as they struggled through the thick forests, the British forces encircled the area of the swamp-land. Repeated calls were made for the Japanese to surrender, but the Japanese held their ground. Unwilling to risk British lives by entering the swamp and pursuing the Japanese, the Berserks were eventually dispatched during the cover of night, dropped from a plane in large crates, which burst open upon hitting the ground. One British soldier recalled years later:

That night was the most horrible that I ever experienced. The scattered and muffled rifle shots in the pitch black swamp punctuated by the screams of wounded Japs being torn apart by the Yank beasts made a cacophony of hell that I never heard likes of before. Or after. At dawn the vultures arrived to clean up what the Berserks had left. Of about 1,000 Jap soldiers that went in the swamps, only 20 were found alive.

These numbers are not necessarily accurate. Though only twenty Japanese soldiers were eventually captured, many more very likely escaped the blockade unharmed. Though even at half that estimate, the number of zombie-caused casualties still makes the Ramree Island incident the worst zombie-inflicted single-day massacre in history (compare it to the scant 189 humans that died at the Alamo).

Invasion of Japan

If forced to I will gladly turn Japan into an entire nation of zombies.

—Gen. Douglas MacArthur, 1945

By May 1945, Hitler was dead and Germany had surrendered, yet the war still raged on for America in the Pacific Theater. The Imperial Japanese Navy’s capabilities were all but crippled, yet the empire showed no signs of giving up; they were in this until the bitter end.

An outright invasion of Japan was looking to be a necessary reality, and it would be no small task. Comprising two separate parts, Operation Olympic and Operation Coronet, Operation Downfall was set to begin in October 1945, with Olympic intended to capture Kyushu, the southernmost main island of Japan. Japan made a foreboding target, both physically and psychologically. Physically, there were few beaches suitable for an invasion, Kyushu being the best of the extremely limited options. The Japanese were well aware of this too, which meant Kyushu’s beach would be heavily defended. Psychologically, it was impossible to guess how the Japanese citizens would react. The German people had grown weary from the war, ready for it to end long before it officially did. The Japanese were cut from a different cloth. Even if the Japanese military were soundly defeated, the Allies knew there was a very plausible chance that fanatical Japanese citizens would rise against them as well. Hitler had merely been a powerful demagogue to the Germans, but Emperor Hirohito was an
arahitogami
, a divine being.

Operation Overlord, which began with the famous Normandy beach landings and spanned three months in 1944, had 210,000 casualties, 125,847 of those American. The casualty prognostications for Operation Downfall were jaw dropping. For just Operation Olympic, the most optimistic estimates put the American casualty toll at around 30,000, with the less optimistic estimates going upward of 450,000. If Operation Coronet were to last weeks after that, the Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated that the total combined casualties could reach an almost inconceivable 1.2 million. These were not numbers Gen. Eisenhower or President Harry Truman found acceptable. So, with orders from on high, Gen. George Marshall—future winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his European reconstruction intuitive, the Marshall Plan—began looking into the tactical use of a new ultra-top-secret weapon: the Death’s Head.

The Death’s Head was an untested bomb designed by Project Phantom’s Dr. Neil Moore, which, if dropped into a heavily populated area, could hypothetically zombinate thousands of people simultaneously. Affectionately known as the “Bombie,” the Death’s Head worked by dispersing a concentrated cloud of the zombie contagion into the air upon impact. In theory, the concentrated contagion would not need to enter a wound, but could simply be absorbed by any exposed skin. Death’s Head quite clearly was biological warfare, and thus was strictly prohibited by the Geneva Protocol (a 1925 treaty prohibiting the use of chemical or biological weapons during war). Conveniently, though, both Japan and the United States had failed to sign the Geneva Protocol.

Death’s Head bombings were planned for four major Japanese cities, including Tokyo. If Japan had been exposed to that magnitude of zombination, zombism would surely have spread to the Asian mainland during the ensuing panic, and to a wildly unprepared human population. It would have been an outbreak the likes of which history has never seen. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. For those who decried President Truman’s authorization of the atom bomb, it may have been some consolation to know how much worse things could have been.

The atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, preventing the need of Operation Downfall or of the Death’s Head. The long war was finally over. The brave soldiers could finally come home and receive their hero’s welcome…the human soldiers that is. Despite all the sacrifices they made, hybrids were forced back into hiding. They at least fared better than the Berserker Corps. With Col. Howard Alan gone, the Berserks lost their guardian. Gen. Eisenhower ordered the entire Berserker Corps de-animated and Project Phantom closed.

Excerpts from Felix De Waldon’s personal sketchbook, 1947.
Compositional studies for a proposed memorial to the WWII Berserker Corps. Conceived in the wake of his successful sculptural depiction of Rosenthal’s iconic Iwo Jima flag-raising photograph, now known as the Marine Corp War Memorial. This lifesize sculpture was to have been installed on the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.

Unfortunately, it was not the last we would see of weaponized zombies.

NINE

The Dead Menace ZOMBIES DURING THE COLD WAR ERA

He who trusts in the zombie bomb will sooner or later perish by the zombie bomb or something worse.

—Henry A. Wallace, 33rd Vice President of the United States, 1949

During the restructuring of Europe following the end of World War II, a division arose between the Soviet Union and the other Allies. The USSR, it turned out, was not eager to give back the territories that it had spent twenty million soldiers to acquire, and the Allies were, of course, not eager for the Soviets to keep them. Moving unilaterally, the USSR annexed many of the Eastern European countries it occupied, converting them into Soviet Socialist Republics while maintaining the remaining nations as satellite states. The Eastern Bloc was born and the Cold War began.

The USSR and the United States, the two most powerful countries in the world, were now pitted against each other in an epic stalemate that would abstractly lead to several military conflicts, including two major American wars, and an apocalyptic arms race that would keep the entire world nervously holding its breath for four decades. The Soviets were the perfect enemy for postwar America. Our fear pushed us to extremes, good and bad: leaping forward triumphantly to new heights in scientific achievement, while also leaping backward shamefully to familiar lows in paranoia and irrational persecution of our own citizens.

Socially the era was a spectrum of both prosperity and turmoil for America, as the rose-colored idealism of the 1950s gave way to the counterculture and civil rights movements in the 1960s. The country was being cleaved in two. The melting pot was finally boiling over. Long-festering issues came clashing together, each demanding action and attention—issues of race, gender, fringe politics, sexual orientation, and yes…

State of animation.

Trials of the Living Dead

I have here in my hand a list of forty-five individuals
that are known as being undead and who nevertheless
are still working and shaping the policy of the State
Department.

—Senator Joseph McCarthy, Chicago speech, May 20, 1951

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) is best known today for its investigations into so-called anti-American activity in the American film industry. Forgotten are HUAC’s origins and its decades-long probe into a rumored secret cabal of the undead.

The original incarnation of HUAC began its life in 1918. Standing
then
for the House Un-Dead Activities Committee, HUAC was spun off of a special agency created to enforce the Mann Act, or White-Slave Traffic Act, which prohibited the interstate transport of females for “immoral purposes.” During a routine Mann Act bust in 1917, agents stumbled upon a zombie brothel, which apparently left enough of an impact on the agency to warrant the formation of a special committee for the sole purpose of investigating zombie prostitution. In 1924, when J. Edgar Hoover was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation (later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation), HUAC broadened the scope of its undead investigations. Hoover believed hybrids to be deeply involved in the world of bootlegging and organized crime, though HUAC never collected concrete evidence to support Hoover’s theory.

In 1938, the mostly irrelevant HUAC was folded with the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, which had been created in 1934 to investigate Nazi activities in the United States. Rebranded the House Un-American Activities Committee, HUAC investigations now ran the gamut on so-called anti-American groups: Communist, Nazi, undead, KKK, and so on. The irony is that during this period, the hybrids were the exact opposite of a group, and generally so secretive that they actively avoided interaction with each other. It was largely due to the unrelenting persecution by HUAC that hybrids were to band together in the 1960s.