Tales of the South Pacific (51 page)

"What you was anglin' for you could of had for two bucks," the heckler observed. "All right!" the cook said. "But this dame was class."

"Then what happened, cookie?"

"We stepped out! And brother, this dame was just what I said, class. When we went into a club or restaurant, guys like you looked up, but plenty!"

"What did she take you for, cookie?" the voice inquired. "But plenty?"

"As a matter of fact," the cook replied. "She did. I spent one hundred and eighty bucks on that dame in four days."

"Whew!" a seaman whistled.

"The hell you did, brother!" the persistent voice cried.

"So help me, I did!" the cook answered. "One hundred and eighty bucks in four days. And it was worth more to me."

"I suppose some of that was a hotel bill?" the drooly voice asked.

"Hell, no! We stayed at her place!"

"Oh, she ran a flop house!" the voice interpreted. "I told you what you got you could of had for two bucks."

"So what if I could?" the cook asked. "To me it was worth one hundred and eighty. We had taxis everywhere. Best seats everywhere. Went to two shows. Bought her some presents. Hell, I seen you guys lose a hundred and eighty bucks in one night at crap. What you got for it? Me? For my dough I had me the best time in Frisco, for four days, with a dame that was strictly class!"

The men looked at cookie. They thought of him differently now. Even the heckler grudgingly granted him a point. "You got to admit it ain't to be sneezed at," he said. That was the limit he would go in approval, but his ambiguous surrender pleased cookie. He grinned.

All this time I was aware of a rasping sound in a corner to my right. As cookie stopped speaking, I turned to see what caused the sound. "It's only Norval," a seaman said. I twisted my head farther and saw a thin, sour-faced fireman, perhaps twenty-three years old. He looked at me with that grim stare which officers see so often and which always means: "What the hell are you doing here?"

"Don't mind Norval," a chubby seaman advised.

What was supposed to be wrong with the man in the corner I never discovered. During that long, fateful night he sat in the shadows. First he sharpened his bayonet to razor edge. Then he honed an eight-inch dagger which he took from his belt. When this was done he took off his shoes, and I saw they were studded with long steel spikes. He sharpened each one of these, carefully, patiently, like a ball player who hears the opposing second baseman is a tough hombre.

All night Norval sat there. From time to time he looked up at the foolish gossips about the table. Twice he caught my eye. He glared at me contemptuously, blew breath through his nose, and returned to his scratching, raspy files. When I last saw him he was filing down the sear on his revolver, to make it fire at the slightest suggestion from his trigger finger. The steel of the sear was hard, and Norval's files made a thin, piercing sound.

"Lay off, killer!" a seaman cried.

Norval continued with his sear. He did not even look up, but the contempt of his shoulders and the toss of his head eloquently asked his old question: "What the hell are you doing here?"

"I had a swell time in Frisco," a machinist's mate said. "My wife came out with me. We had a hard time finding a room, but we finally did. Gee, we went to the zoo, and the art gallery, and the Cliff House, and just about everywhere, I guess." The room was silent. The last place in America most of these men had seen was Frisco. Their last fun was there, their last liberties. Some thought of the zoo; some remembered four movies in a row.

"A funny thing," the machinist's mate continued. "This may seem funny to some of you guys. But my wife and me decided we didn't want to have any kids till after the war. But being there in Frisco and knowing... Well, we got a little girl now. Like to see her?" At the first sign of encouragement he whipped out a picture of as undistinguished a baby as I have ever seen. Men with no children looked at the bundle, grunted, and passed it on. Fathers appraised the infant, said nothing, and handed it along.

"I spent four days in Frisco, too," a thick-voiced fireman said. "In that YMCA on the Embarcadero. I had dinner every day at Joe Di Maggio's, and got drunk every night. Boy, that was some four days! I met an Australian, and did we have a time! He got pinched, but they discharged him and told him to sober up. That night we put on a toot that you could hear in Seattle!"

"Any you boys spend much time on Grant Street?" a seaman asked. "Well, I was down there one night and picked me up a Chinese doll. What do you guys honestly think about chop-suey lovin'? You think it's all right?"

There was a heated discussion as to whether any white man should date a Chink, the question being solved when the seaman flashed the picture he had of this particular almond-eye. The photograph, taken of the girl in her night club costume, made the earlier argument purely academic.

"What did you do in Frisco?" a fireman asked me.

"I seem to have missed the fun," I said. "Got in there one night and left the next night on the Clipper."

"You flew out?" the men asked.

"Yes."

"Was it in the Mars?" they asked.

"No. Regular Clipper." The fact that I had flown out made me an authority.

"How soon do you think the war will end?" they asked.

"About four years," I said. This was greeted with silence. The men thought what four years would do to them.

"We can hope, can't we?" a wag said in sepulchral tones. "You know what they say, sir? Optimist: 'In 'Forty-five, if I'm alive.' Pessimist: 'You and me in 'Fifty-three.' Realist: 'Golden Gate in 'Forty-eight.' Damned fool: 'A bit of heaven in 'Forty-seven.' "

"I don't get it," a seaman said. "Why the damned fool?"

"Cause they won't be any heaven left in 'Forty-seven! Guys back from Europe will use it all up!" The wag slapped the table.

"You think we'll be kept out here that long, sir?"

"Somebody will be," I said.

"You think you will be?"

"Could be."

"Ain't you mad about it, sir?"

"I was at first," I admitted.

"What happened?" the men asked. They were interested. This touched them, too.

"Oh, I sort of decided that it doesn't matter much when I get back," I said. Then the closeness of battle prompted me to honesty: "I don't think that I'm going to be stopped merely because somebody else got there first. I got a lot of work to do!"

A chief petty officer looked at me. "That's exactly how I feel, sir. Boy, I got a lot to do when I get home! The longer I stay away the more certain I am I'll do it, too."

"What you gonna do?" a voice asked.

"That's my business," the CPO said.

"I felt that same way in Frisco," a storekeeper added. "Said to myself, This is the last look for a long while. Make the most of it.' But you know what I did?" There was a furious bombardment outside. We looked at our watches. "I just couldn't make up my mind what to do first! So I lay in my damned room till about noon each day, got up, ate some lunch, and went back to bed. I went out a couple of nights, but it was lousy. I was glad when the ship sailed."

"Me?" a yeoman asked. "Them days wasn't long enough for me. Them Frisco street cars! Boy, I bet I rode a hundred miles a day on them babies. I'd get on and ask every pretty girl I met what she was doing. Kept right on until I made contact. Different dame every day. I been to Boston, Panama, San Diego. None of them compares with Frisco for a liberty."

"Say?" a seaman interrupted. "Ain't we movin'?" We remained silent. Yes, we were moving. We were moving toward the beach. Again we looked at our watches. A head appeared in the hatchway.

"Assault party!" Norval dropped his files and leaped for the gangway. "Assault party! Prepare to land. Prepare to land!"

When the smoky room was emptied, I went on deck. In the gray twilight of D-Day the first wave was going in. Fire raked them as they hit the coral. Jap guns roared in the gray dawn. But some of them got in! They were in! And now the battleships lay silent. The airplanes withdrew. Men, human beings on two feet, men, crawling on their bellies over coral, with minds and doubtful thoughts and terrible longings... Men took over.

THE LANDING ON KURALEI

WE WOULD have captured Kuralei according to plan if it had not been for Lt. Col. Kenjuro Hyaichi. An honor graduate from California Tech, he was a likely choice for the job the Japs gave him.

As soon as our bombers started to soften up Konora, where we built the airstrip, the Jap commander on Kuralei gave Hyaichi his instructions: "Imagine that you are an American admiral. You are going to invade this island. What would you do?"

Hyaichi climbed into a plane and had the pilot take him up 12,000 feet. Below him Kuralei was like a big cashew nut. The inside bend faced north, and in its arms were two fine sandy bays. They were the likely places to land. You could see that even from the air.

But there was a small promontory protruding due south from the outside bend. From the air Hyaichi studied that promontory with great care. "Maybe they know we have the two bays fortified. Maybe they will try that promontory."

The colonel had his pilot drop to three thousand feet and then to five hundred. He flew far out to sea in the direction from which our search planes came. He roared in six times to see if he could see what an American pilot, scared and in a hurry, would think he saw.

Then he studied the island from a small boat. Had it photographed from all altitudes and angles. He studied the photographs for many days. He had two Jap spies shipped in one night from Truk. They crept ashore at various points. "What did you see?" he asked them. "Did you think the bay was defended? What about that promontory?"

He had two trained observers flown over from Palau. They had never seen Kuralei before. When their plane started to descend, they were blindfolded. "The bays?" Hyaichi asked. "And that promontory? Did you think there was sand in the two small beaches there? Did you see the cliffs?"

Jap intelligence officers brought the colonel sixty-page and seventy-page reports of interrogations of American prisoners. They showed him detailed studies of every American landing from Guadalcanal to Konora. They had a complete book on Admiral Kester, an analysis of each action the admiral had ever commanded. At the end of his study Lt. Col. Hyaichi ruled out the possibility of our landing at the promontory. "It couldn't be done," he said. "That coral shelf sticking out two hundred yards would stop anything they have."

But before the colonel submitted his recommendation that all available Jap power be concentrated at the northern bays, a workman in Detroit had a beer. After his beer this workman talked with a shoe salesman from St. Louis, who told a brother-in-law, who passed the word on to a man heading for Texas, where the news was relayed to Mexico and thence to Tokyo and Kuralei that "General Motors is building a boat that can climb over the damnedest stuff you ever saw."

Lt. Col. Hyaichi tore up his notes. He told his superiors: "The Americans will land on either side of the promontory."

"How can they?" he was asked. "They have new weapons," he replied. "Amphibious tanks with treads for crossing coral." Almost a year before, Admiral Nimitz had decided that when we hit Kuralei we would not land at the two bays. "We will hit the promontory. We will surprise them."

Fortunately for us, Lt. Col. Hyaichi's superiors were able to ignore his conclusions. It would be folly, they said, to move defenses from the natural northern landing spots. All they would agree to was that Hyaichi might take whatever material he could find and set up secondary defenses at the promontory. How well he did his job you will see.

At 0527 our first amphibs hit the coral shelf which protruded underwater from the shore. It was high tide, and they half rode, half crawled toward land. They had reached a point twenty feet from the beach, when all hell ripped loose. Lt. Col. Hyaichi's fixed guns blasted our amphibs right out of the water. Our men died in the air before they fell back into the shallow water on the coral shelf. At low tide their bodies would be found, gently wallowing in still pools of water. A few men reached shore. They walked the last twenty feet through a haze of bullets.

At 0536 our second wave reached the imaginary line twenty feet from shore. The Jap five-inch guns ripped loose. Of nine craft going in, five were sunk. Of the three hundred men in those five amphibs, more than one hundred were killed outright. Another hundred died wading to shore. But some reached shore. They formed a company, the first on Kuralei.

It was now dawn. The LCS-108 had nosed in toward the coral reef to report the landings. We sent word to the flagship. Admiral Kester started to sweat at his wrists. "Call off all landing attempts for eighteen minutes," he said.

At 0544 our ships laid down a gigantic barrage. How had they missed those five-inch guns before? How had anything lived through our previous bombardment? Many Japs didn't. But those hiding in Lt. Col. Hyaichi's special pillboxes did. And they lived through this bombardment, too.

On the small beach to the west of the promontory 118 men huddled together as the shells ripped overhead. Our code for this beach was Green, for the one to the east, Red. The lone walkie-talkie on Green Beach got the orders: "Wait till the bombardment ends. Proceed to the first line of coconut trees." Before the signalman could answer, one of our short shells landed among the men. The survivors re-formed, but they had no walkie-talkie.

At 0602 the third wave of amphibs set out for the beach. The vast bombardment rode over their heads until they were onto the coral shelf. Then a shattering silence followed. It was full morning. The sun was rising. Our amphibs waddled over the coral. At the fatal twenty-foot line some Japs opened up on the amphibs. Three were destroyed. But eight got through and deposited their men ashore. Jap machine gunners and snipers tied into tall trees took a heavy toll. But our men formed and set out for the first line of coconut trees.

They were halfway to the jagged stumps when the Japs opened fire from carefully dug trenches behind the trees. Our men tried to outfight the bullets but could not. They retreated to the beach. The coconut grove was lined with fixed positions, a trench behind each row of trees.