The Pacific (81 page)

Eugene found a spot on a little knoll covered in pine trees where he could sit. He and his friend Jay enjoyed the view, the breeze, and caught up. " The scene on the southern tip of the island is the one scene we all wanted to see," Eugene thought, for "it means the fight is won." Now that the fighting had ended, the losses had begun to be totaled. The Fifth Regiment had lost about two-thirds of its men. The 3/5 had lost eight company commanders, but this total was not the highest in the regiment.
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Looking around, they could see that King Company numbered less than a hundred, the majority of them replacements. The standard strength of an infantry company was 235. King had received 250 replacements during the course of the battle.

The statistic that fascinated Eugene was the number of men who had survived both Peleliu and Okinawa. He referred to these men as "the originals" and, after checking with Sergeant Hank Boyes, Gene calculated that of the sixty-seven men who had fought in both battles, twenty-six of them were in King's camp at the end of June.
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Half of the twenty-six originals, he figured, had not left the unit for a day due to illness or wounds. Both R. V. Burgin and Snafu had fallen out for short periods. Sledge's use of the word "original," a curious term for someone who had joined the Raggedy-Assed Marines in the summer of 1944, conveyed his fierce pride at having stuck it out. The Imperial Japanese Army had thrown everything it had at him. He had done everything he had been asked to do.

THE MEN OF THE 1/1 HAD WATCHED THE FIFTH MARINES MAKE THE FINAL assault on Kunishi Ridge "like it was a movie."
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In the following few days the rear echelon arrived, bringing showers and hot chow.
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The commanding general of the Tenth Army announced that Okinawa would be transformed into a massive army, navy, air corps, and marine base for the coming invasion of Japan. On June 22, Lieutenant Colonel Austin Shofner led his battalion north a few miles. They took up blocking positions along the cross- island highway, facing south. Other units in the south marched northward toward them, clearing caves, salvaging discarded equipment and supplies, and flushing out the diehards. Shifty's men had the easy job as the Eighth Marines and others went about the job of killing an additional eighty-nine hundred enemy troops, while managing to accept the surrender of almost three thousand Japanese military personnel.

With the battle over, the men of the 1st Division expected to be sent to Hawaii to recuperate. It seemed only fair, since the Raggedy-Assed Marines had lived in the boonies since it left Melbourne two years previously. No other marine division had been away from civilization that long. General del Valle had promised his men a trip to Hawaii and some of the division's rear-echelon men left on Pavuvu had been sent to Pearl Harbor to prepare the way. The rumor went around, however, that when the last marine stepped off the island of Pavuvu and aboard ship "millions and millions of rats and land crabs came down to the dock and made obscene gestures to let it be known that Pavuvu was the only Pacific island the First Marine Division could not conquer."

EUGENE SLEDGE AND THE OTHER PRIVATES OF KING COMPANY HAD BEEN PICKING up the large brass shell casings left by the artillery at the direction of their sergeants, like Burgin. They hated it and looked forward to getting back to civilization. On June 30, 1945, it was announced that the 1st Marine Division would remain on Okinawa.
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It would have to build its own camp. Morale plummeted. A few days later the division traveled north, crossing the length of the long skinny island. The Okinawa they saw had changed. Squadrons of B-29s and fighter aircraft filled the airfields in the center of the island. New airfields, bigger roads, depots, hospitals, HQs, and administration buildings had been or were being built. Reaching the Motobu Peninsula, the division found a thousand men already setting up their tents in a quiet area along the west coast.

Eugene Sledge found it "the most beautiful area on the entire island." They set up tents near a stream and started to catch up on their sleep. At mail call Eugene received an entire mailbag of letters, boxes of goodies, and magazines from his folks. A few weeks previously his parents had obtained a new cocker spaniel because Gene had taken the loss of Deacon so hard. When he learned of their desire to name the dog Semper Fidelis, he objected. "I don't want anything connected with the service when I get out." With little else to write, he thought of home. Hunting with his father and attending church with his family topped his list, although news that one of his parents' friends had given him some more "Confederate relics" delighted him and he made sure to say thanks. "I'll always remember how Mrs. Dole Parco used to let me explore her old slave quarters and barn." Lying on his cot, Gene and a friend whiled away hours talking about the Civil War and making plans to see some of its more important sites.

THE MONTH STARTED OUT ON A GOOD NOTE FOR LIEUTENANT COLONEL Austin Shofner. On July 4, 1945, General del Valle sent him a letter of commendation for his services as provost marshal. "Although the Military Police available were considerably inadequate, you utilized the force available most efficiently. Your methods in directing traffic control and in assisting with the collection of over thirty thousand civilians greatly reduced congestion in the forward areas." The letter of commendation would not be something Shifty hung on his wall or mentioned to friends. It went into his file, though, where it counted as another step forward in his career.

Plans for the next step in the defeat of Japan had already been developed and Shofner would have received briefings about Operation Downfall, to be commanded by General MacArthur. The projections as to the enemy's intentions and abilities came, of course, from the recent experiences on Iwo Jima, Luzon, and Okinawa. The experience of the Tenth Army also furnished a picture of what awaited the U.S. troops. Leaving out the navy's significant losses off Okinawa's shores, more than seven thousand Americans had been killed in action; more than thirty-one thousand had been wounded; and more than twenty-six thousand had been "non-battle casualties," or lost due to combat fatigue. Estimating the casualties of the next campaign by extrapolating from the Tenth Army experience produced frightful results because so many more divisions would participate in the Battle of Japan.

While contemplating a dreadful future, Shofner found himself in charge of the mundane. He spent the month of July serving as the president of the court-martial. A rise in the number of infractions being reported signaled the tightening of discipline on veterans and replacements alike. The veterans in the 1/1 and across the division grumbled that the "chicken shit" was starting up again.
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The spit-and-polish formality would have been expected in Hawaii, had they been rotated there. Officers knew that the men's morale was very low and that this stemmed in part from the missed liberty in Honolulu.
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Something more important, however, was at work under the surface. After surviving the biggest and longest battle of the Pacific, the marines found themselves at a dead end. The fact was self-evident. The next time they went into combat, they would be landing on the shore of Tokyo Bay. As a man in Shofner's battalion put it, "No one was going to survive. No marines. No japs."
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THE MEN OF KING COMPANY WERE ALSO GETTING BRIEFED. THE 1ST MARINE Division would not participate in the first invasion of Japan, scheduled for November. Rather, it would land on the isthmus that creates Tokyo Bay in March of 1946, along with twenty-four other divisions in the largest amphibious assault of all time. Amid descriptions of how this operation would more than double the size of D-day in Normandy came also the news that the first men off the boats and up the bluffs were not expected to survive. Junior officers, like Lieutenant Scotty MacKenzie, were told, "You are expendable."
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Eugene Sledge knew that he would serve in the next campaign because a "point system" for rotation stateside had been posted. General del Valle had established the system to prevent the onset of a serious morale problem. The system allowed the general to ship out the eight hundred men in the division who had been overseas for thirty months, as well as begin to rotate the more than three thousand who had been with the division for two years. After reviewing the "point system" in light of his one year with the division, Sledge knew that guys like him "won't be released until the war is over." His buddy Snafu had eighty- seven points and shipped out one morning in mid-July.
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Attempts to make life more enjoyable for the remaining men--by installing lights in the tents, bringing in a USO show, and building the mess hall on a bluff overlooking the South China Sea--could do little to assuage Gene's fear of the approaching apocalypse. His fear fueled an angry hatred of all things Japanese. His fear also found another, more surprising target. He included in one of his letters a check for $225, representing his pay for the Battle of Okinawa and a few of the months preceding it. "A ship worker," he asserted, "makes that much for loafing in two weeks time." The caustic observation followed his decision to cancel his subscription to
Leatherneck
magazine because he found it to be "too much of a boot- ish, flag-waving affair."
^an
His comments revealed a growing cynicism toward those Americans who seemed happy to dress up the nasty, vicious experience he had just endured with platitudes about glory and courageous sacrifice, while they themselves made little, if any, sacrifice. "I'm just praying that the terrible mess will soon be over because I don't want any more good American blood lost."

On August 9, Gene heard on the radio "that Russia had declared on Nippon. I surely hope its true--it would really shorten the war." The radio had also announced the second use of a new weapon, an atomic bomb, and "everybody is laying bets on what is going to happen." For his part Gene began to think of his future. "I'll soon be 22, and I'm no closer to getting set for postwar than I was a year ago. So I'm hoping that I can get back to civilian life very soon. Maybe I'm too impatient, but I'm anxious to get started back to college." A lot of marines, particularly his officers in King Company, celebrated the news by getting drunk. Gene got a record player and for once the popular music he disliked (jazz in general and Frank Sinatra in particular) gave way to Tchaikovsky's
Nutcracker
suite.

"We hear so much scuttlebutt and dope," Eugene admitted, that he was not sure what was going on during the next few days. Daring to hope Japan would surrender could seem by turns possible and ludicrous. On August 13 he heard that Japan had surrendered. "No doubt, the new bomb made up the minds of the yellow men that they are finally beaten." Still, the idea of the Japanese surrendering was not easy to accept with finality. Admiral Nimitz had warned to "beware treachery," because the enemy had long used surrender as a means of killing a few more marines. While a friend of his had Frank Sinatra "crooning through one of his numbers on the record player," Gene and his friends discussed the big question: "if the war does end now . . . how soon will we be home . . . ?"

THE DAY PRESIDENT TRUMAN ANNOUNCED AMERICA'S VICTORY OVER JAPAN, August 14, Sidney Phillips and his friends "built a gigantic bonfire in the middle of the main street of Chapel Hill." The blaze "set the asphalt pavement on fire and burned up the traffic light hanging in the middle of the intersection."

LIEUTENANT MICHEEL CELEBRATED THE END OF THE WAR WITH THE OTHER officers at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station in Kingsville, Texas, where he had been transferred a few months previously. He had joined a night fighter training group, the most dangerous specialty a navy pilot could have, given the rudimentary electronics available. The war's end prompted the navy to disband the night fighter group. The immediate needs had ended and the age of the jet engine had dawned. Once again in his navy career, Mike would be "thrown to the winds."

ACT V