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  Strong Men Armed

  Robert Leckie

  Strong Men Armed relates the U.S. Marines’ unprecedented, relentless drive across the Pacific during World War II, from Guadalcanal to Okinawa, detailing their struggle to dislodge from heavily fortified islands an entrenched enemy who had vowed to fight to extinction—and did. (All but three of the Marines’ victories required the complete annihilation of the Japanese defending force.) As scout and machine-gunner for the First Marine Division, the author fought in all its engagements till his wounding at Peleliu. Here he uses firsthand experience and impeccable research to re-create the nightmarish battles. The result is both an exciting chronicle and a moving tribute to the thousands of men who died in reeking jungles and on palm-studded beaches, thousands of miles from home and fifty years before their time, of whom Admiral Chester W. Nimitz once said, “Uncommon valor was a common virtue.”

  Strong Men Armed includes over a dozen maps, a chronology of the war in the Pacific, the Marine Medal of Honor Winners in World War II, and Marine Corps aces in World War II.

  Robert Leckie

  STRONG MEN ARMED

  The United States Marines Against Japan

  “When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace.”

  LUKE 11 : 21

  To those brave Marines who “foremost fighting fell”.

  Books by Robert Leckie

  HELMET FOR MY PILLOW

  LORD, WHAT A FAMILY

  THE MARCH TO GLORY

  MARINES!

  CONFLICT: The History of the Korean War

  THE WARS OF AMERICA: From 1600 to 1992 (in two volumes) GEORGE WASHINGTON’S WAR: The Saga of the American Revolution

  FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA: From the War of 1812 to the Mexican War, the Saga of America’s Expansion

  NONE DIED IN VAIN: The Saga of the American Civil War

  DELIVERED FROM EVIL: The Saga of World World II

  OKINAWA: Final Battle of World War II

  The United

  MAPS

  Southwest pacific, 7

  Central pacific, 11

  Guadalcanal, 21

  Bougainville, 167

  Betio (Tarawa, 192

  Western New Britain, 245

  Roi-Namur (Kwajalein), 282

  Eniwetok, 287

  Saipan, 317

  Guam, 362

  Tinian, 367

  Peleliu, 397

  Iwo jima, 438

  Okinawa, 480

  I. Days of Wrath

  1

  It was the sixth of August, 1942—eight months since Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo had swung his aircraft carriers south and sent them plunging through mounting seas toward Pearl Harbor.

  Eight months, and during them the power of America’s Pacific Fleet had rolled with the tide on the floor of Battleship Row; Wake had fallen, Guam, the Philippines; the Rising Sun flew above the Dutch East Indies, it surmounted the French tricolor in Indo-China, it blotted out the Union Jack in Singapore where columns of short tan men in mushroom helmets double-timed through the streets. Burma, Malaya and Thailand were also Japanese. India’s hundreds of millions were imperiled, great China was all but isolated from the world, Australia looked fearfully north to the Japanese bases on New Guinea, toward the long chain of the Solomon Islands drawn like a knife across her lifeline to America.

  Eight months, and now an American invasion fleet sailed north to Guadalcanal. Thirty-one transports and cargo ships were stuffed to the gunwales with 19,000 United States Marines and their guns and vehicles. Guarding them were some 60 warships, mostly cruisers and destroyers, one battleship, a few oilers, and that trio of flattops representing all of America’s carrier striking power in the South Pacific.

  The skies were overcast, as they had been the day before. As storm and fog had covered the Japanese approach to Pearl Harbor, so low ceilings concealed these Americans in their sweep west and north from the Fiji Islands.

  Aboard the troopships it was not only the warm moist air that brought the sweat oozing from the bodies of the men on the weather decks, staining the sailors’ light blue shirts as dark as their denim trousers, making blotches on the pale green twill dungarees of the Marines. There was tension in the air. It was almost a living presence. It made voices taut, husky—made the sweat come faster. It was one with the rasp of steel on whet-stones, the sound of the Marines sharpening bayonets and sheath knives for the morning’s fight. Other Marines squatted on the grimy decks blacking rifle sights or applying a last light coat of oil to their rifle bores. Machine-gunners went over long belts of ammunition coiled wickedly in oblong green boxes, carefully withdrawing and reinserting the cartridges into their cloth loops, making certain that they would not stick and jam the guns. Other men adjusted packs, inspected grenade pins or made camouflage nets for their helmets—those exasperating scoops of steel which banged the back of a man’s neck at a walk, bumped over his eyes at a run.

  Many of these men wondered silently how they would react next day, in the holocaust of battle. Compassionate Marines suddenly became aware that they had no wish to kill, wondering, as they sat alongside cruel Marines carving X’s on bullet ends to make dum-dums of them, if they would actually pull the trigger. Sentimental Marines composing that last letter home for the sixth or seventh time wrote in the grave periods of men already gloriously dead. But some, men such as the lazy Marines who had not cleaned or oiled their weapons, consciously drove the thought of battle from their minds. Others could not grasp its import. “Pogey-bait” Marines stood for hours in line outside the ship’s canteen, thinking no further ahead than the next Clark Bar or Baby Ruth. Yardbird Marines—those immemorial dreamers “who never get the word” —were so little impressed by all this martial bustle that one of them could clear out a crowded hold in the George F. Elliott by stepping over the threshold with a newly issued hand grenade in one hand and a freshly pulled pin in the other, asking shyly:

  “What do I do now?”

  Kiwi—as Marine yardbirds were now called in honor of that New Zealand bird which also does not fly—Kiwi was marched topside by a gunnery sergeant bellowing, “Grenade! Grenade! Git outta my way—grenade!” It was only after the gunny had cleared the fantail of the ship and had commanded Kiwi to hurl the grenade into the ocean, and had hit the deck alongside him, it was only after this that the gunny turned and booted Kiwi all the way forward and down the hatch to the head.

  It was in the heads that the big poker games were played. The money had found its inevitable way into a few skillful hands and the big winners gathered for showdown games in lavatories deep below decks, places in which the air was such a foul compound of the reek of human refuse and cigarette smoke that a man coughing in revulsion blew holes in those blue clouds.

  Above decks on one of the transports a young Marine skipped half dollars across the flat gray surface of the sea. A sergeant raged at him and the youth replied with a shrug:

  “So what’s the use of money where we’re going?”

  Aboard all the troopships platoons of men attended classes on the subject “Know Your Enemy.” For perhaps the twentieth time they listened while lieutenants, few of whom had ever seen combat, read to them from hastily assembled manuals celebrating those qualities which made the Japanese soldier “the greatest jungle fighter in the world.” Mr. Moto, said the manuals, could swim miles underwater while sucking air from hollow reeds, he could sneak stealthily through the jungle on split-toed, rubber-soled shoes, and he could climb trees like a monkey, often tying himself to the trunks and fighting from the treetops. He was tricky, capable of booby-trapping the bodies of his friends, and he often cried out in English to lure the unwary into ambush. At night the Japanese soldiers set off strings of firecrackers to simulate numerous
machine guns and frighten their opponents into giving away their position, or they signaled to each other by rifle shot. Finally, this strong, stoic Oriental, who tortured and slaughtered in the name of an Emperor he believed to be divine, was also able to march farther, eat less and endure more than any other soldier in the world. Though some of this was true, much of it was hysterical hokum born of the Pearl Harbor psychosis, and because they had been fed it so often and in such large doses, many of these Marines had come to wonder aloud if every last son of Nippon had been suckled by a wolf.

  “All right,” said a young lieutenant aboard one troopship, “if a Jap jumped from a tree what would you do?”

  “Kick him in the balls!” came the answer, almost in concert, and the lieutenant grinned and dismissed his class.

  Below decks, many other Marines had joined the sailors in preparing the ships for battle. They sweated in stuffy supply holds, often straining their heads aloft to the open hatches while winches swung the heavy hooks and cargo nets among them, sometimes cursing when beads of sweat which had formed on their eyebrows fell into their eyes, blinding them. Men could be badly hurt by swinging hooks, and one Marine had already been killed by them.

  Above the whining of the winches rose the spluttering roar of landing-boat motors being started. Their coxswains were testing them, even as they were being freed of their lashings and swung out on davits. Brassy-voiced bosun’s mates shouted at their men, and the harder the sailors worked, the louder the bosun’s mates yelled—for it is characteristic of their calling that they sweat only about the mouth.

  On the artillery transports, boxes of shells were lifted on deck and placed in readiness to go over the side next day. Seventy-five- or 105-millimeter howitzers were trundled to the gunwales and coils of rope for hauling them inland were looped about their barrels. Winchmen on the assault transports hauled boxes of rifle ammunition, mortar shells, spare gun parts and roll after roll of barbed wire on deck.

  So much barbed wire puzzled the men. It was defensive warfare material, and they, as they thought, were strictly offensive troops. Once they had seized Guadalcanal, they would turn it over to a garrison of soldiers and move on to assault another island. So they had been told, and the great stores of barbed wire bewildered them almost as much as the outlandish nature of the island they were to capture.

  “Who ever heard of Guadalcanal?” one of them growled. “Whadda we want with a place nobody ever heard of before?”

  It was a common complaint, and it had been raised since July 31 when the troopships had made rendezvous with the warships off the Fijis and the men had been informed of their destination. They had been startled, but their surprise had far from rivaled the astonishment of their commander, Major General Alexander Vandegrift, when he, too, had been abruptly made aware that he was going to Guadalcanal.

  When Vandegrift had come to Auckland in New Zealand on June 26, his First Marine Division had already been fragmented by the problem of moving men and munitions across the vast reaches of the Pacific. His Seventh Regiment had been detached from his command and sent to Samoa. His Fifth Regiment was encamped outside the New Zealand capital of Wellington, his First Regiment was sailing from San Francisco for Wellington, the Third Defense Battalion assigned to his division was in Pearl Harbor, his Eleventh Regiment of artillery was divided among these fragments, along with other supporting troops, and the Second Regiment, which would be detached from the Second Marine Division to replace Vandegrift’s missing Seventh, was in San Diego Harbor. More gravely, not half the men in this division had been a year in uniform. They were mostly boys in their late teens and early twenties. Though they were high-hearted volunteers, tough and sturdy youths who had flocked to the Marines in the weeks following Pearl Harbor, they were still barely better than “boots.” Some had been with their units only a week before departure from New River, North Carolina. They were in great need of training, for all their zest and bounce. So were their junior officers, those “Ninety-Day Wonders” just out of the Officer Candidates School in Quantico. Many of the senior NCO’s and officers at company and even battalion level were reservists, men who had trained in armories one night a month and spent an annual two weeks in summer camp. But the division was heavily salted with seasoned NCO’s, as well as with many of the battle-blooded officers in the Marine Corps. With these-and with six months’ grace—Vandegrift was confident that he could field a fine fighting force in early 1943.

  In this mood of confidence, Vandegrift came to Auckland and sat at a table across from Vice Admiral Robert Ghormley, commander of the South Pacific Area. Ghormley handed him a dispatch from America’s supreme command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It said:

  Occupy and defend Tulagi and adjacent positions (Guadalcanal and Florida Islands and the Santa Cruz Islands) in order to deny these areas to the enemy and to provide United States bases in preparation for further offensive action.

  Vandegrift read, deeply interested. Perhaps, when this base was assaulted and secured, he would be able to train his division there.

  “Who will do the occupying?” asked the general.

  “You,” said the admiral.

  There was an interval, and then:

  “When?”

  “The first of August.”

  If Alexander Vandegrift had glanced at his watch, he could not have been exaggerating the urgency of that moment. August 1! Between the present date and August 1 were thirty-seven days. But it would take six days to sail from New Zealand to the Fiji rendezvous area, and it would take another seven days to sail from the Fijis to the objective in the Solomons. That left twenty-four days in which to await the arrival of troops from California and Hawaii, to reconnoiter the objective, to study its terrain and map it, to get Intelligence working at an estimate of probable enemy defenses and troop strength, to load 31 transports and cargo carriers with 19,000 men and 60 days’ combat supply—and then to conduct joint rehearsals before the day of assault. Twenty-four times twenty-four hours to go, and there was not even a battle plan begun. There was not a scrap of information on the objective beyond a Navy hydro-graphic chart made thirty-two years ago and Jack London’s short story The Red One, which, though set in Guadalcanal, was already suspect by spelling it Guadalcanar. If General Vandegrift had been asked to land his Marines upon the moon, he could not have had less knowledge of the battleground.

  But Vandegrift was a Marine accustomed to adversity and skilled in the art of improvising. In those years between World Wars, when Congress slashed military budgets with a belligerence matched only by the ferocity of its pacifism, he had been among those officers who fought to fulfill a vision of the Marine Corps as a highly trained assault force with a special mission of making ship-to-shore landings on enemy-held terrain. To such professionals, the seeming setback was the normal condition of career. And Vandegrift was a professional, a soft-spoken, tough-minded commander in the mold of Stonewall Jackson. Intelligent enough to be appalled by the task confronting him, sensible enough to mask that dismay before his staff, he set that staff to work at organizing America’s first full-scale amphibious invasion—imparting to them some of his own sense of urgency that was the surest guarantor of unpleasant surprise.

  It was a surprise to find that the totality of the war did not impress the Wellington longshoremen’s union controlling work on the huge Aotea Quay provided by the New Zealand government. The union still believed that the longer a job takes the longer the pay lasts. All cries for speed elicited the scornful rejoinder “Not half!”—and the unloading of ships moved at a crawl. So the union was ignored and the Marines were used as dock-wallopers. Enormous working parties of 300 men each were placed on around-the-clock shifts, unloading and loading their own ships. For the problem was one of unloading as well as loading.

  Most of these ships had come to Wellington stuffed with supplies for a division assembling for training in a civilized country. But now this division was bound for combat in one of the world’s wildest places, a place where priori
ty belonged to bullets, beans and barbed wire, where such niceties as field cots and mattresses landed on the bottom of the heap, beneath drums of gasoline, water cans and mosquito nets. All of these supplies were in bulk lots. They had to be piled on the wharf, classified in the order of their importance and either reloaded or sent inland.

  The cold driving rains of the Down-Under winter poured from mackerel skies. Shore winds whipped the rain up and down the great dock in sheets, drenching the Marines in their brown ponchos and tan sun helmets, making a mush of tons upon tons of cornflakes, cigarettes, candy, C-rations—of anything packed in those thin paper cartons that seemed to melt like snow beneath the downpour. Drifts of cornflakes were so deep that the flat-bedded New Zealand lorries could barely butt their way through the mess. Men stumbled or slogged through a churned-up marsh of paper, tobacco and food, sometimes kicking with savage glee at the detested little cans of C-rations which lay glistening in the glow of wharf lights that were seldom doused. Sometimes these Marines drifted to the landward end of Aotea Quay, vanishing in the darkness only to reappear in “browned-out” railroad stations, there to slip off poncho and dungarees covering those neatly pressed green uniforms in which they roamed the steep streets of Welhngton, determined that a rain-soaked dock and a mush of ruined supplies would not be the only memory of the first foreign land which most of them had seen. But they came back to join their working parties, and when the division sailed off to battle there were not a dozen deserters among 19,000 men.

  At Division Intelligence, meanwhile, that old marine chart and Jack London’s short story had been augmented by nothing more than a few oblique aerial photos taken five years before the Japanese occupation, plus a half-dozen postcards made from bad pictures taken years ago by missionaries. True, fliers from the Yorktown had photographed the target area in May, but Yorktown had been sunk in the Battle of Midway. If the pictures had survived, no one knew anything about them. Worse, the Australian coastwatchers—those intrepid islanders who had remained in Japanese-seized territory to report the enemy’s movements—were at present in bad shape on Guadalcanal. The only reliable informant there was Captain Martin Clemens of the British Solomon Islands Defense Force, and he had sprained an ankle and been ordered to hole up in the hills until it healed. Earlier coastwatcher reports had provided an estimate of 1,500 Japanese troops on Tulagi and the twin islets of Guvutu-Tanambogo, and 5,000 more on Guadalcanal. Beyond this, nothing.