Books in Progress

My father, the old gunny, did three of the worst in the pacific, Guadalcanal,  Saipan, and Pelieu.  In the summer of 45 he was training Marines in Australia for the invasion of Japan. He never talked about it much except when he was called up for Korea. He had joined Army National Guard and his was the one of the first units called up. He called his old Colonel, a guy named Puller, and rejoined 1st Marines. I asked him why and he said, "people get killed in the Army". 

Way to go, Eddie Albert.



Yeah. No kidding.

I’m up to chapter 26, 52% into The Fleet at Flood Tide. The author only occasionally gives you grisly graphic details of battle wounds. But he does give you a good overall picture of what being in the battle on Saipan was like. Death became regular. Marines didn’t get worked up about a buddy getting wounded if only because he’s be sent out of it for a while, if not for the duration. More grave wounds gained immediate sympathy.

Incredibly, at one point King and Nimitz visit Saipan. Against the advice of someone, they go to the top Mount Tapotchau. Rotting Japanese bodies are everywhere. The author notes that it was not just a pretended stiff upper lift by the command staff to treat this as normal. Nimitz and King had seen plenty of this before apparently.

And despite warnings of possible snipers, Nimitz and King wanted to be driven around the entire perimeter of the island. Only Roosevelt could have stopped that decision and he wasn’t consulted.

It came in increments, but the soldiers and the command staff came to the conclusion that this was a new kind of enemy. The author sums it up expertly when he writes:



Lieutenant Commander Louis W. Mang was an advocate of napalm. He was having trouble selling it to the Pentagon so he decided to sell it in the field. He equipped the Army P-47 Thunderbolt pilots of the 318th Fighter Group at Isely Field in their use. A test mission was flown over Tinian with Harry Hill, Spruance, and Turner watching from a destroyer. They were impressed.

With the loss of Saipan, quickly came the end of Tojo as Prime Minister. Surely there were divergent attitudes about how the war was going. But the author gives the impression that in many very high places the fall of Saipan was a decisive signal that the war was lost. Quite a few Marines with beaches left to conquer would certainly disagree.

But perhaps (and the author does not do much analysis, per se), it was instructive to many Japanese who knew the basic facts that the suicidal defense of Saipan didn’t even slow down the Americans. But the Japanese military madness was so entrenched, denial and mania, not a negotiated surrender, obviously predominated. Much like Hitler, the top military officials saw a gyokusai for the whole nation as an honorable end.

There’s one Japanese nurse on Saipan that the story follows along for quite a ways. Eventually she is captured. The grenade she tried to use to kill herself was a dud but still causes some injury. She’s treated and then insists that she wants to go back to her own field hospital to see what was left. For some reason (I think they were courting her as a source of information), they took her back. She saw the mass suicide/homicide. All the wounded were killed with grenades. In fact, the Marines noted that the intermittent sound of grenades going off near the end of the conflict was a common sound.

They then took her to the cliff at the north of the island were so many — many through coercion — were tossed or jumped into the rocks and sea below. Someone asked this Japanese nurse why they killed themselves. She had no answer.

But there was the fascinating story of a Mexican American named Guy Gabaldon. His early yute was



He enlisted in the Marine Corps when he was seventeen:



The author also notes:




[Original]

There was a sister cliff that is less know if only because there is no road for tourists that leads to the top. This fellow (who is some kind of character) takes us to the "Sister of Suicide Cliff:"

The were certainly drunk on racialist theories. I wonder if Darwinism was a root cause of this.

I took a little side trip this afternoon and watched an episode of World War II in HD Colour. Here’s the first episode:



They have this series on Netflix. I watched the episode, The Island War. I think you can watch it online here.

It’s a pretty good summation. But it’s also a good example of why you need more than one source for your history. At one point they say the Mariana Turkey Shoot was the result of Spruance going out and chasing the Japanese. Maybe that’s the story. But the book I’m reading (and I’m pretty sure this is accurate) is that Spruance stayed put and let the Japs come to him. Then the Turkey Shoot. Afterward he did indeed go after the Combined Fleet.

Another point was they said that Mitscher turned on all the lights for the pilots because he was getting messages that they were in trouble. The book I’m reading said he had this planned. And that makes more sense because it wasn’t news that these planes were flying at the edge of their range and at night. Makes you wonder what else some of the videos get wrong.

Part of this can be forgiven from trying to condense things. But these were major points and presented entirely inaccurately.

It’s also a muddle between the book and this video in regards to how it went down with Roosevelt authorizing the Southern push into the Philippines by MacArthur. I’m not even going to try do detangle what I’ve seen and read. But it would appear that both sides (island hopping and “I shall return”) got their way because there were resources to do both.

I don’t want to be a second guesser just for the sake of doing so. But it sure looks as if it was a very bad idea to invade the Philippines. The Japs could have been starved out. Or just bypassed like Truk was bypassed. Jap troops in the Philippines wouldn’t have changed the calculus for Japan when the atomic bombs started falling. I suspect thousands of people (Americans and Filipinos) died for the glorification of MacArthur’s ego.

I sense there’s a much larger and more complicated story there than can be summed up on some History-Channel type of production.

In the book, Guam has just been declared “secure” even though it had become routine to capture or kill about 100 Japanese soldiers per day. This article notes that there were credible reports of Japanese soldiers staying hidden on Guam until at least 1972 as was the case of Shoichi Yokoi “who was found hiding in Guam’s jungles in 1972.”

The Japs were extremely adept at hiding. There were thousands of soldiers remaining after Guam was declared “secure.” They made a nearly hand-to-hand sweep (as police do of a crime scene) a across the section of the island where they new vast sums of Japanese soldiers still existed. I don’t quite understand the logistics of it, but the Jap commander noticed that the searchers always were looking down so he had his men hide on the exposed edge of cliffs. And those who couldn’t fit on the cliffs hid up in the trees.

The sweep concluded without finding a single soldier.

There’s a horrifying section in the Battle of Tinian (which otherwise went fairly smoothly) about the Colorado and Norman Scott who were surprised by hidden Jap shore batteries on July 24, 1944 during their stint at shelling. The Colorado got pummeled. The Norman Scott less so.



But they didn’t actually sink her. The Colorado continue to support the invading troops until August 3. But the cleanup required of the ship went into some gruesome detail in the book. Later, in the battle at Leyte Gulf, she was hit by two kamikazes which caused moderate damage.