The Last Full Measure (40 page)

The US Marine Corps cherished and actively promoted an acceptance of casualties in its role as the kicker-in-of-doors in the Pacific. Where the Army might have looked at the door and
diligently searched for the key, the Marines preferred the smashing boot. And nothing suited this ethos better than the amphibious assault.
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The Corps conceded that there might be many bodies left on the beach, but, it fervently believed, the pain in the short term was outweighed by the gain overall. Marines were frankly contemptuous of the conservatism of the US Army, with its emphasis on slower evaluation and exploitation of the tactical situation. Richard C. Kennard, a Marine on Peleliu, puts it bluntly in a letter home: “My only answer to why the Marines get the toughest jobs is because the average leatherneck is a much better fighter. He has far more guts, courage, and better officers.… I’m not saying that the Army men are cowards. They are older men as a rule however and not nearly as tough and brave as any single average Marine. These boys out here have a pride in the Marine Corps and will fight to the end no matter what the cost.”
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What Kennard implies is that the Marines were volunteers for death and glory; the Army, merely conscripts.

Where landings were opposed, Marines had to take a beating in order to establish their footholds. Tarawa (November 20, 1943) was one of the earliest, and assault elements of the Second Marine Division took about 20 percent casualties. Of the 800 men of the Sixth Marines who set off as reinforcements, only 450 made it to the beach.
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A total of 990 Marines were killed outright or died of wounds—a sacrifice that shocked the American public and forced the Corps to review its amphibious doctrine.
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Not all assaults were contested at the waterline, either by accident or intention. At Anzio (September 22, 1944) on the Italian west coast, the Allies enjoyed the benefit of complete surprise, only to squander it by a pusillanimous failure of command to grab the initiative and break out in order to exploit their initial good fortune—a nervous stumble for which the Germans would later exact a very bloody price. When the Marines and Army landed at Okinawa on April 1, 1945, they were only very lightly opposed,
the Japanese choosing to draw the Americans inland to do bloody battle from carefully prepared defenses.

At Guadalcanal on August 7, 1942, Robert Leckie remembers his terror as his landing craft approached Red Beach: “I could think of nothing but the shoreline where we were to land. There were other boatloads of marines ahead of us. I fancied firing from behind their prostrate bodies, building a protecting wall of torn and reddened flesh. I could envision a holocaust among the coconuts.” But the “Japanese had run” and for “ten minutes we had something like bliss, a flood of well-being following upon our unspeakable relief.”
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THERE WAS NO
question about the dying. Donald R. Burgett, a 101st Airborne recruit, remembers that an “instructor … told us that we weren’t volunteering for any picnic; that most of us would die in combat. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘if any man lives through three missions, the government will fly that man home and discharge him. You know as well as I do that Uncle Sam isn’t going to discharge anyone during wartime, so now you know what your chances are of living through this war. You haven’t got a chance!’ ”
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Jumping into thin air a mile, perhaps several, above the all-too-solid earth, while enemy infantry and antiaircraft guns shot at your ever-so-slowly descending and unutterably vulnerable nether regions, was, to put it mildly, fraught. A British paratrooper during the invasion of Sicily in July 1943 felt the understandably acute anxiety common to all airborne infantrymen: “Suddenly we heard the guns ahead—the furious crackle from the quick-firing pom-poms [he didn’t know it, but they were being shot at by their own ships] and the deeper intermittent crack of the heavier barrage. At once terror gripped me as
I braced myself to meet the red-hot inverted rain. I had had no experience of flak, and those fountains of red and orange tracer looked quite appalling. There is something specially disturbing about being shot at from below—one’s body seems to be much more vital when attacked from that direction.”
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The whole business from beginning to end was crazily risky. First there were the considerable dangers of training, made especially acute because the practice of airborne warfare was itself a very recent development and there was much learning on the job, which is fine if you are an accountant but less so if you are a parachutist.

Parachute descents had been undertaken in the eighteenth century, and Napoleon had toyed with the idea of sending assault troops by balloon on his aborted invasion of Britain. That extraordinary military visionary Billy Mitchell had pushed strongly for an American parachute force to be dropped behind the German lines in 1918, but nothing came of it, and the serious development of the use of parachutes in combat (as against their use as a means of escape from stricken planes or observation balloons) had to wait until the 1930s, with much of the pioneering work done in Russia, Italy, and Germany.

Although the United States and Britain lagged behind in the development of an airborne arm (they had to be spurred by the arrival of World War II), it was a Briton, Everard Calthrop, and an American, Leslie Leroy Irvin, who greatly progressed the development of the parachute itself. Calthrop’s chute—aptly called the “Guardian Angel”—was designed to make escape from an airplane possible and was attached to the aircraft; the chute being deployed from its container by the weight of the falling pilot. Irvin’s parachute, on the other hand, was a true free-fall design, the canopy activated by the parachutist pulling a rip cord—the great advantage being that the crewman did not have to be in a fixed position in the plane in order to use the chute. On April 19,
1919, Irvin himself, with a heroic belief in his own design, made the first rip-cord parachute jump. It was a historic success (apart from a broken ankle on landing awkwardly).
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Inevitably, equipment failure (including the dreaded “Roman candle,” to describe a chute that failed to inflate) and the mistakes of rookie parachutists took their toll during training and in battle. The young Donald Burgett watched

When bodies hit the ground, they sounded “like large ripe pumpkins being thrown down to burst against the ground,” or a “large mattress going ‘floomp.’ ”

Inferior design as well as the sheer weight of the equipment could be extremely hazardous to jumpers. The parachute used by the German
Fallschirmjäger
, the RZ-1, pitched the man face-forward so that he had to do a nifty forward roll on landing—something that demanded a very high degree of athletic ability and often resulted in injuries to knees, hands, and face. The design also severely limited the weaponry that could be carried to a pistol and perhaps a submachine gun. The tightness of the harness, the violence of the canopy opening, and the forward-facing gait all meant that any solid objects on him would likely injure him, so his weaponry had to be sent down in separate metal containers. Retrieving these on the battlefield put the
Fallschirmjäger
at a potentially lethal disadvantage: “A German platoon needed fourteen containers for their weapons and ammunition, which meant there was a lot of running about on the drop zone.… In Crete [May 1941] the British and Commonwealth troops were already familiar with the need for the parachutists to rally round their containers before they became an effective fighting force, and they merely watched for the colored canopies of the containers and laid their machine-guns on them after they had landed.”
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In their most famous action, the battle for Crete, German paratroopers took horrific casualties. Of the 22,000 parachutists committed, 5,000 were killed, “most of them coming from the junior leaders—the corporals, sergeants, and young officers. In addition, 2,500 were wounded.”
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After Crete the German airborne arm undertook no more large-scale assaults and mutated into elite light infantry.

The Allied jumpers had the opposite problem. They were loaded “like a military Christmas tree.” Their parachutes held them upright so that they would hit the ground (theoretically)
feet-first, and “there was scarcely a part of the body which was not covered by some equipment or weapon.” One of the US 101st Airborne listed the things he carried:

In addition, they often had a musette bag weighing as much as 80 pounds attached by a cord to a leg. So heavily laden were they that getting up to board an aircraft often required a helping hand. They were the modern equivalent of the medieval knight in more ways than one. The sheer amount of gear worn and carried by a knight and a paratrooper signified potency. In another way, though, it was an indicator of their vulnerability. The knight could be attacked from so many angles with such a variety of weapons that he had to be his own mobile fortress. The paratrooper, whose great tactical vulnerability was that, by necessity, he had been projected far from the main army with all the logistical support it offered, needed to replicate in miniature that support. He too was a one-man fortress. Knights died when they were separated from their archers and infantry support, and the
significant defeats of airborne warriors came at those times when they too were separated for too long from artillery and reinforcements. One thinks of the British First Airborne at Arnhem and the British First Parachute Brigade at Primosole in Sicily, both of which were eventually outgunned and overrun.

Another parallel, of course, is that both knights and paratroopers reveled in their role as primary assault troops; they celebrated the heroic nature of their elite combat status. It is interesting that in the equipment of the 101st Airborne trooper listed above there are four edged weapons. In the indoctrination of airborne warriors, much emphasis was placed on the fearsome psychological impact of the blade. This is not combat in the empty technological battlefield but something ancient, fierce, and personal. And like the knight or the samurai, the airborne warrior demanded that this special valor be advertised. As an example, the Mohawk hairstyle of the American paratrooper at D-Day announced the very considerable harm—with an association to a much older, much more personal style of killing—that was about to be visited on his enemy.

Just as the unhorsed knight could be betrayed by the very thing that was meant to protect him—his armor—so too was the airborne warrior. As with overburdened amphibious soldiers, should the paratrooper land in water (and it didn’t need to be very deep), he stood an excellent chance of being dragged under and drowned, something that happened with sickening frequency. On D-Day, men of the Eighty-Second Airborne landed in an area around the rivers Douve and Merderet that had been deliberately flooded by the Germans, and they drowned, partly because their harnesses were difficult to release.
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