Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
A Taste
of War
I DON'T BELIEVE I was programmed from birth to be an Indochina specialist, but my family background, military experience, and education certainly pointed me in that direction. An "army brat," I was born and raised on coastal artillery posts ranging from the harbor defenses of Boston to those of Manila Bay, with tours also on Fisher's Island in Long Island Sound, and in Honolulu and San Francisco. This environment imbued me with a keen sense of patriotism and a lifelong affinity for military matters. The coastal defense focus brought me an intense interest in international affairs, diplomacy, and the issues of war and peace.
The two years our family spent on Corregidor (1929-1931), the brief stops in China and Japan on the way home in the early 1930s, and two memorable boyhood years in Hawaii in the mid-thirties heightened my interest in the Far East and Pacific regions. This interest continued during our six years in San Francisco, where we lived until I volunteered for the Navy on my seventeenth birthday in early 1943, fifteen months after Pearl Harbor.
This burst of youthful enthusiasm and patriotic zeal brought me stunningly face-to-face with the brutal realities of war nine months later at Tarawa. As Navy radiomen five days after the invasion, we stumbled into the aftermath of one of the most bloody struggles of the Pacific war. It was only weeks later that we learned we were destined to be part of the naval air base communications component. The island had been declared"secure" two days before we landed, but mopping-up action was still under way and would continue for another thirty days. During our first two weeks ashore, however, we were diverted to the grueling and gruesome task of recovering and burying the rapidly decomposing remains of the 1,000 Marines and 4,700 Japanese who had been killed on the square-mile of hell that Betio Island had become. The equatorial heat was stifling, drinking water was scarce and carefully rationed, and no other water was available for washing, shaving, or bathing. I became inured to the stench of the rotting dead we handled for two weeks.
Betio Island had been thoroughly devastated before and during the four-day battle. Every above-ground structure—barracks, warehouses, workshops, pigstys—had been demolished, except for the concrete blockhouses and stoutly built coconut-log bunkers and bombproof shelters, and many of these had been damaged. The island looked—and smelled—like a huge garbage dump; it was littered with crumpled sheet-metal roofing, shattered vehicles, and the debris of battle-broken and abandoned weapons, half-empty cases of rations, grenades and ammunition bandoliers, and scattered personal belongings of the garrison. Everywhere there were bodies and bits of bodies: heaps of Japanese who had been machine-gunned while running between blockhouses, then seared by flamethrowers; groups of dead Japanese in blockhouses, weapons emplacements, bomb shelters, and in huge bomb craters and shell holes; U.S. Marines in their twos and threes in some places, and in their dozens lying along the beach line or floating just offshore.
Such was my soul-searing introduction to the character of war. After cleaning up Betio, where the battle had been fought, a number of us were sent off on Christmas Eve to a neighboring isle—Buota—where navy Sea Bees had built a second air base from scratch, and we set up the communications facilities that would be required to support the operations of well over a hundred navy and army air force aircraft based there. These planes—mostly B-24s and B-25s—were busily engaged for six or seven weeks in bombing raids to soften up the Marshall Islands. By the end of February, the Marshalls had been taken, and most of our aircraft moved on to new bases there.
At the end of March 1944, I was sent back to Betio for duty as the communications clerk on the staff of the Commander, Gilbert Islands Sub-Area, with added duties as clerk for the staff intelligence officer. This gave me my first exposure to the heady world of "secrecy." I found myself responsible for controlling the circulation and storage of classified publications dealing with ongoing enemy activities, and of plans for future Allied operations in the Central Pacific. My access to these fascinating documents, combined with the off-duty opportunity to study again in detail the scene of the battle on Betio, kept me intellectually engaged.
I had become deeply interested in issues of strategy and the nature of war, and absorbed with the question of why nations couldn't find better means of resolving their problems than resorting to the seemingly wanton slaughter of each other's youth. I had ample occasion to study the battle scene at Tarawa and to contemplate the character and consequences of war in general. I also explored, many times over, the remnants of the fortifications manned by the island's tenacious defenders. One could only wonder at the courage of the Marine riflemen struggling over the reef through several hundred yards of armpit-deep water in the face of intense automatic-weapons fire. And of those huddled behind the coconut-log wall fronting the beach, who ultimately had to go over the top.
In late June 1944, I returned to Pearl Harbor for assignment to an amphibious command ship, the USS Mt. McKinley. Aboard her I observed two full-scale amphibious assaults on the Palau Islands, east of the Philippines. By this stage of the war—only ten months after Tarawa—our forces in the Pacific had refined and perfected the techniques of amphibious warfare, the most complex of military operations. Our amphibious group, carrying the landing force, included about a dozen large attack transports, a half-dozen attack cargo ships, two dozen tank landing ships, and another three-score assorted amphibious vessels, together with accompanying minesweepers, patrol craft, and escort ships. Another task force, comprising some half-dozen battleships, a similar number of cruisers, and a score of destroyers, battered the island with shellfire for several days before the assault, and provided continuing gunfire support to the troops ashore after their landing. Still other task forces with carriers, stationed beyond the horizon, provided massive air support for the entire operation.
These ingredients combined to present an awesome display of American military power at its height in the last year of the war. In the landing at Peleliu, I was struck by the realization that, though some of the battleships there had been resurrected from the bottom of Pearl Harbor, most of the other ships, and all the landing ships and craft, had been built in the thirty-three months since that disaster. Similarly, the hundreds of participating aircraft and virtually all the arms and equipment being put ashore had been manufactured since Pearl Harbor. And the vast majority of the men manning the ships, and of the Marines and soldiers assaulting the islands, had—like me—been civilians two years before. Now we were employing these ships, weapons, and equipment in a highly complex activity with some semblance of professional competence. This display of what the industrial might and organizational ability of a fully aroused and determined America could accomplish made a vivid, profound, and lasting impression on me.
A month after the Palau assaults, I returned to Pearl Harbor and to a month of home leave before assignment to the USS Ancon, another amphibious command ship. I boarded her in late January 1945 and sailed for Saipan, where the ships of our task group were gathering for the assault on Okinawa. Our task force received the first kamikaze air strikes on landing day at Okinawa. Just after dawn, a troop ship immediately behind us was badly damaged when struck by a piloted, rocket-propelled bomb. The low-flying twin-engined bomber that had released the "baka" bomb went on to crash into an LST farther back in the formation.
At Okinawa we took over the command and control communications links for Admiral Spruance, who commanded the Fifth Fleet. We acted as the communications center for more than twelve hundred naval vessels in the Okinawa area. We remained in the main anchorage for forty-two trying days, enduring seemingly endless kamikaze attacks, before leaving in early June for the Philippines. At Subic Bay we boarded the USS Blue Ridge, the worn-down command ship of Admiral Daniel Barber, for the voyage back to Pearl Harbor, where the ship was to be refitted and refurbished in preparation for the invasion of Japan. It was at Pearl that we learned of the Japanese surrender.
On V-J day proper, several of us were checking in for temporary duty at the naval radio station at Wahiawa when we heard President Truman's formal announcement of the end of the war as it was broadcast over Armed Forces Radio. We were indoors, lounging about in the personnel office when the radio music was interrupted for Truman's statement, which was followed by the playing of the "Star Spangled Banner." We rose to our feet and stood at attention, with tears rolling down our faces, joyful that we had survived while mindful of those who hadn't lived to see the day. Since then I have never been able to sing the words to our national anthem; its stirring strains always take me back to that moment, raising a solemn lump in my throat.
Excerpted from NONE SO BLIND by George W. Allen. Copyright © 2001 by George W. Allen. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
