The Last Full Measure (39 page)
Read The Last Full Measure Online
Authors: Michael Stephenson
Naval bombardment was more accurate than aerial bombing, but even when delivered in massive concentration it could provide no guarantee that hostile fire would be adequately suppressed. In the Pacific, many amphibious assaults proved to be particularly bloody for the attackers because preliminary bombardment had failed to neutralize Japanese defenses. At Tarawa such a “stunning” tonnage of naval shells fell on the atoll that a Marine wondered why “the whole goddam island doesn’t fall apart and sink.” Yet somehow, the Japanese survived to pour in artillery fire when the incoming landing craft were 3,000 yards out, heavy machine-gun fire at 2,000 yards, and “everything the enemy had, including sniper fire and heavy mortars,” at close range.
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On Saipan the Japanese, in their interconnected limestone caves, just as the Germans had taken to their deep dugouts in World War I, largely survived the preliminary bombardment to emerge and sweep the reef with such a ferocity of fire that observers on US ships presumed it had been mined, when in fact the explosions were caused solely by artillery and mortar shells. At Iwo Jima, US warships poured in 22,000 shells and B-24s pounded the island for six weeks, none of which seriously interdicted the Japanese capability to hammer the Marines during their approach and on the beach.
The lethal dangers for amphibious assault troops started well before they even came close to the killing ground. Just getting into the Higgins boats (the specialized landing craft developed by Higgins Industries in New Orleans and in general use by
mid-1943) could be deadly.
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Men, encumbered with heavy gear, had to clamber over the sides of the mother ship and make their perilous, swaying way down scramble netting before making an anxious jump into the landing craft. Robert Leckie, a Marine at Guadalcanal, describes the heart-in-mouth experience: “The
George F. Elliott
was rolling in a gentle swell. The nets swayed out and in against her steel sides, bumping us.…
Three feet above the rolling Higgins Boats the cargo nets came to an end. One had to jump, weighted with fifty or more pounds of equipment. No time for indecision, for others on the nets above were all but treading [on] your fingers. So there it was—jump—hoping that the Higgins Boat would not roll away and leave only the blue sea to land in.”
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William Manchester, another Guadalcanal veteran, remembers:
Descent was tricky.… A Marine in an amphibious assault was a beast of burden. He shouldered, on the average, 84.3 pounds, which made him the most heavily laden foot soldier in the history of warfare. Some men carried much more: 20-pound BARs, 45-pound 81-millimeter-mortar base plates, 47-pound mortar bipods, 36-pound light machine guns … and heavy machine-gun tripods, over 53 pounds. A man thus encumbered was expected to swing down the ropes like Tarzan. It was a dangerous business; anyone who lost his grip and fell clanking between the ship and the landing craft went straight to the bottom of Sealark Channel, and this happened to some. More frequent were misjudgments in jumping from the cargo net to the boat. The great thing was to time your leap so that you landed at the height of the boat’s bob. If you miscalculated, the most skillful coxswain couldn’t help you. You were walloped, possibly knocked out, possibly crippled, when you hit his deck.
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Raymond Gantter, a GI on his way to France in October 1944, recalls: “We had our first casualty as we transferred gingerly from the ship in which we had crossed the Channel to the LST that would deliver us. One of our officers, a grinning and likeable guy, was crushed to death between the LST and the Channel steamer. Climbing down the landing net hung over the side of the larger vessel, he hesitated a moment too long before leaping for the LST. A bad omen.”
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Once on board the landing craft, the dangers of the approach were exacerbated by the acutest miseries that made men even more vulnerable when they hit the beach. Sergeant John R. Slaughter of the US 116th Infantry heading for Omaha Beach described the scene:
There was a foot of water in the bottom of the boat and we had to take to the bilge pumps but they couldn’t evacuate the water fast enough so we had to use our helmets to bail the water. Everybody was seasick. I’d never been sick before and some of my buddies had filled their puke bags already so I gave my puke bag and my Dramamine tablet away. Then I got sick. What caused me to get sick was the cold. It was probably in the 40s, the wind was blowing and we were soaking wet. I was just shivering. I went into my assault jacket and found a gas cape that we had in case of mustard gas and got under it to shield myself from the wind and the water. Of course lack of oxygen under the cape caused me to get really sick and I came out from under the thing. I started vomiting and I just pulled my helmet and vomited in my helmet, threw it out and washed the helmet out, vomited some more and that’s the way we went in.
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Amphibious assault shared with all frontal assaults against prepared defenses (whether it was Pickett’s charge, or Cold
Harbor, or Passchendaele) the terrifying negotiation of the killing ground that constitutes no-man’s-land. The journey to the beach was a period of more or less enforced passivity for the attackers and gave the defenders their best chance of inflicting great pain.
Mortimer Wheeler (who would later become a renowned archeologist) recounts the approach to the Salerno landings in Italy on September 9, 1943: “Meanwhile, another German battery, four 88-millimeters, had got the range of our craft over open sights as we moved slowly in, awaiting our turn at the beach. The captain of the next landing-ship beside us was killed by a direct hit on the bridge.… Our turn was next. The rounds came over in sharp salvoes and bracketed us with perfect precision, sending showers of spray over us as we changed course cumbrously to vary range.”
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In addition to the dangers of incoming artillery and machine-gun fire, heavily laden soldiers simply drowned when they were forced to evacuate their stricken landing craft. Private Bill Bidmead, a British commando at D-Day, “saw men drowning in the shallow water. Wounded, their 90-lb rucksacks weighed them down.”
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During the Allied landings on North Africa (Operation Torch) the men carried 132 pounds, which was “110 pounds too much for a combat soldier to carry and enough to make anyone utterly useless,” nor could it be supported by the life jackets they had been issued, according to the quartermaster for the US II Corps.
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William Manchester makes the assertion that at Tarawa a coxswain, completely unnerved by the heavy artillery and machine-gun fire hitting the landing craft as they tried to get over the reef, “lost his mind [and] … screamed, ‘This is as far as I go!’ He dropped his ramp and twenty Marines bowed by weapons and ammunition drowned in fifteen feet of water.”
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Getting through the surf was agony in slow motion. Private Jim Wilkins, a Canadian at Juno Beach on D-Day, remembers:
We were only 500 yards from the beach and were ordered to get down. Minutes later the boat stops and begins to toss in the waves. The ramp goes down and without hesitation my section leader, Corporal John Gibson, jumps out well over his waist in water. He only makes a few yards and is killed. We have landed dead on into a pillbox with a machine gun blazing away at us. We didn’t hesitate and jumped into the water.… Where was everybody? My section are only half there—some were just floating on their Mae Wests.… Kenny keeps yelling “Come on. Come on.”
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” I yell to him. We are now up to our knees in water and you can hear a kind of buzzing sound all around as well as the sound of the machine gun itself. All of a sudden something slapped the side of my right leg and then a round caught me dead centre up high on my right leg causing a compound fracture. By this time I was flat on my face in the water—I’ve lost my rifle, my helmet is gone … [I] flop over onto my back and start to float to shore where I meet five other riflemen all in very bad shape. The man beside me is dead within minutes.
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Getting across the reef and through the surf at Tarawa presented the Japanese gunners with ample slow-moving targets. Many of the Marines in the Higgins boats on the reef had to get out far from the shoreline. Robert Sherrod, reporting for
Time
magazine, watched them jump out into chest-deep water: “It was painfully slow, wading in such deep water. And we had seven hundred yards to walk slowly into this machine-gun fire, looming into larger targets as we rose onto high ground.”
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Harry Smith of the Second Marine Division writes to his girlfriend: “I was one of the first ten men out, and as these first ten scrambled out many of them were hit. A fellow directly in front of me got shot in the head, the force tore his helmet off and
as he fell forward into the water I could see that the top of his head had been blown off and his brains dropped into the water. To this day I don’t know how I got to shore in such a shower of machine gun and small arms fire. Men were getting shot all around me.”
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When men have endured that kind of murderous exposure, their first thought, on reaching what they imagined to be the relative safety of the beach, is to go to ground and take whatever kind of cover they could, but when defenders’ guns have been preregistered to rake the beachhead, the attackers need to act counter-intuitively. Moving into and through fire takes an extraordinary degree of training and courage, for men will most certainly die.
Douglas Grant, a British officer at Sword Beach on D-Day, saw how “men floundered in the loose sand under their top-heavy loads … and I ran up and down the line yelling them on with every curse I remembered.… Other troops, with the stupidity of sheep, were digging in along the length of the wire; they had not sense enough to realise that the enemy would blast it as conscientiously as a drill routine.” Somehow he got his men up and “we ran on … our hearts straining to match our wills.”
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Sublieutenant George Green, a British naval officer taking the ill-fated A Company of the US 116th Infantry Regiment (a Pennsylvania National Guard outfit, “pleasant friendly country lads but not assault troops,” as Green described them) under the command of Captain Taylor Fellers, to Omaha Beach notes: “It took some time for the troops to disembark as the craft was bouncing up and down in the heavy surf and the soldiers were hampered by the amount of kit they carried.… When they reached the beach the troops lay down and made no attempt to advance towards the obstacles 50 yards away or the menacing cliffs 250 yards further on where the hidden Germans were popping off mortars at us.… I heard that Taylor Fellers and all the men in LCA 910 had been
killed. Practically everyone else in that first wave we landed at 6:30 was wiped out shortly after landing.”
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The 116th at Omaha Beach took the heaviest casualties of any of the Allied invaders (“They just murdered them,” said an observer). The US War Department’s official history describes what happened to the first battalion as it assaulted Dog Green sector:
All boats came under criss-cross machine-gun fire.… As the first men jumped they crumpled and flopped into the water. Then order was lost. It seemed to the men that the only way to get ashore was to dive head first in and swim clear of the fire that was striking the boats. But, as they hit the water, their heavy equipment dragged them down and soon they were struggling to stay afloat. Some were hit in the water and wounded. Some drowned then and there.… But some moved safely through the bullet-fire to the sand and then, finding they could not hold there, went back into the water and used it as cover, only their heads sticking out. Those who survived kept moving forward with the tide.… Within ten minutes of the ramps being lowered, A Company had become inert, leaderless and almost incapable of action. Every officer and sergeant had been killed or wounded.… The men in the water pushed wounded men ashore ahead of them. And those who had reached the sands crawled back into the water pulling others to land to save them from drowning, in many cases only to see the rescued wounded again or to be hit themselves. Within twenty minutes of striking the beach A Company had ceased to be an assault company and had become a forlorn little rescue party bent upon survival and the saving of lives.
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In some circumstances digging-in was a fatal breach of a cardinal rule to keep moving through the killing zone. On Iwo Jima the soft black volcanic ash was about as much use as talcum powder in providing shelter. Fire poured into the beachhead, and the “steep-pitched beach sucked hundreds of men seaward in its backwash. Mines blew up Sherman tanks.… The invaders were taking heavy mortar and artillery fire. Steel sleeted down on them like the lash of a desert storm.… The deaths on Iwo were extraordinarily violent. There seemed to be no clean wounds; just fragments of corpses. It reminded one battalion medical officer of a Bellevue [a New York City hospital] dissecting room.… You tripped over strings of viscera fifteen feet long, over bodies which had been cut in half at the waist. Legs and arms, and heads bearing only necks, lay fifty feet from the closest torsos.”
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Seaborne attack became almost the signature tactic of the Pacific war, again dictated by the particular geography of the island-strewn battle zone. Although the US Army undertook more amphibious assaults than the US Marine Corps (of the forty-three total the Marines spearheaded fourteen),
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those involving the Marines tended to be more memorably bloody. Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa are the battles that have stamped themselves on the popular imagination, something not hindered by the Corps’ skill on the PR front (to an extent that deeply irked the always vigorously self-promoting General Patton, who saw his own exploits with the Third Army in Europe being eclipsed in the press by the headline-grabbing casualty rates incurred by the Marines in the Pacific. It was as though the Marines had inspired some large part of the public’s idea of the heroic, while the Army was left to trudge, underappreciated, as the Corps strutted out).