It was at this point that Bubba astounded everyone by speaking up. He recited: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains alone; but, if it dies, it bears much fruit.” He trumpeted: “John 12:24.” There was a hush. Into it he tried to introduce certain observations of Robert Ingersoll, Dale Carnegie, and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. Then Knocko — to my regret — turned him to dusky vermilion by saying gently, “Bubba, this is too deep for Dixie. The day they introduce the entrenching tool in Alabama, it'll spark an industrial revolution.” I should have said something, because Bubba was a fighter and therefore valuable to me, but I was eager to hear Wally's windup. And here it came. He said: “Like it or not, time really is a matter of relevance. We all have rhythms built into us. It wouldn't much matter if all the timepieces in the world were destroyed. Even animals have a kind of internal clock. Sea anemones expand and contract with the tides even when they are put in tanks. Men are a little different. John Locke wrote that we only experience time as a relationship between a succession of sensations. No two moments are alike. Often time drags. It dragged for most of us toward the end on the Canal. I think it won't drag much here. I have a feeling we are going to be living very fast very soon.”
Events confirmed him, though he didn't live to know it. He was right about the unevenness of the time flow, too. Time really is relative. Einstein wasn't the first to discover it — the ancients knew it, too, and so did some of the modern mystics. In our memories, as in our dreams, there are set pieces which live on and on, overriding what happened afterward. For some of my generation it was that last long weekend in Florida before Kennedy went to Dallas; Torbert MacDonald, his college roommate, was there, and afterward he said of that Palm Beach weekend that it reminded him of “way back in 1939, where there was nothing of any moment on anybody's mind.” History has other bittersweet dates: 1913, 1859, 1788 — all evoking the last flickering of splendor before everything loved and cherished was forever lost. That lazy evening in Nakasoni will always be poignant for me. I think of those doomed men, tough, idealistic, possessed of inexhaustible reservoirs of energy, and very vulnerable. So was I; so was I. But unlike them I didn't expect to make it through to the end. Thomas Wolfe, my college idol, had written: “You hang time up in great bells in a tower, you keep time ticking in a delicate pulse upon your wrist, you imprison time within the small, coiled wafer of a watch, and each man has his own, a separate time.” Out here in the Pacific, I thought, my time was coming; coming, as Wally said, very fast.
On Guam my dreams of the Sergeant begin to change. Color is returning; the sky is cerulean, the blood crimson; various shades of green merge in his camouflaged helmet cover. He himself, viewed now as through a prism, is subtly altered. His self-assurance has begun to ebb. And now, for the first time, there are intruders in the nightmares, shadowy figures flitting back and forth behind him. They seem sexless. I'm not even sure they are human. But on Guam, and in the nights to come elsewhere, they are always in the background — a chorus of Furies, avengers, whatever — and they have begun to distract the young NCO. He is becoming confused. He hesitates; his attention is divided; every third or fourth night I sleep through without any sign of him.
On the eighth day of the battle for Guam, Takeshi Takeshina, the Japanese commander, was killed in action. His army was finished, but those people never gave up. Organized resistance continued for two weeks; then the surviving Nips slipped into the hills to wage guerrilla warfare. Skirmishes continued until the end of the following year — seventeen weeks after Hirohito had surrendered to MacArthur — and even then diehards remained in the bush. Nine of them emerged from the jungle in the mid-1960s, and on February 9, 1972, a Nipponese soldier named Shoichi Yokoi ended his twenty-eight-year green exile and surrendered to amazed Guamanians, some of whom hadn't even been born when he disappeared from civilization. One by one the comrades who had shared his hideout had died. For the last nine years he had been alone, living on breadfruit, fish, coconut milk, and coconut meat. He had woven clothes from coir, and rope matting from shrubs, and he had fashioned implements from shell cases, coconut husks, and his mess gear. In Tokyo he was greeted as a national hero. It is sad to learn that he was deeply disappointed in what postwar Japan had become. I wonder if he had nightmares like mine.
Ricky Bordallo thinks there are more stragglers out there. He predicts they will come in from the hot in 1994, the fiftieth anniversary of the battle. If so, their artifacts, like Yokoi's, will be preserved in Guam's museum, whose most enthusiastic patroness is Ricky's Minnesota-born wife, Madeleine. The museum is an archaeologist's paradise: prehistoric mortars and pestles; ancient pottery shards fashioned from the island's thick red clay; a belembautuyan, which is a stringed instrument startlingly like those found in the interior of Brazil; huge stone rai disks, some of them twelve feet in diameter, once used for money on the Yap Islands, which lie five hundred miles to the southwest — the rai have holes in the center to permit them to be strung on poles and carried on men's shoulders — and blubber pots brought in 1823 by British whalers. Outside the museum is the Kiosko, or “Chocolate House,” a gazebo where upper-class Chamorro women once gathered each afternoon to eat sweets and gossip. Nearby a handsome young priest, Thomas Devine, has rebuilt a primitive Guamanian village, an exact replica of those found by the first Spaniards four and a half centuries ago. It is seductive; my New England drive flags; I find my mind drifting, wondering what it would be like to be a beach comber, wondering, like Captain Cook, whether Magellan's arrival has been good for the Guamanians or bad for the Guamanians.
The author with the relic of an enemy tank
A cave with Japanese gun emplacement
Guam's architecture, like its history, reflects a hodgepodge of influences: Spanish, English, Chinese, German, Filipino, and Dutch. But the prevailing influence is American. Mustard-colored stucco walls are flimsy carbons of Beverly Hills originals. Orote's airfield has been cleared of bamboo clumps which sprang up after the war and is now used by local teenagers as a drag strip. The outskirts of Agana, which has never really recovered from its wartime devastation — 90 percent of its prewar population never returned; it looks like a ghost town — are cultural atrocities: junk-food stands, supermarkets, bars, filling stations, discount houses. Partly because taxi fares are exorbitant, there are over forty thousand Detroit gas-guzzlers on the island. Unless you are lucky enough to have a friend who will put you up, you stay at the Guam Hilton Hotel on Tumon Bay.
Looking up from the hotel pool you can see Nimitz Hill, the admiral's headquarters in the final months of the war and still a treasured property of the U.S. Navy. One source of abrasion, were the islanders less complaisant, would be this huge U.S. military presence on the island. Erwin Canham, whose siesta I interrupted on Saipan, confirmed their tolerance of it. The Canhams chose to live in the Marianas after he had retired as editor of the Christian Science Monitor. Over and over they express astonishment that the Saipanese and the Guamanians, who have much to be bitter about, are unresentful, though clearly they were pawns in a titanic quarrel, victims because they happened to be bystanders. Guamanians have erected war memorials for their sons lost in battle, and not just in the battle of 1944. They cannot participate in American presidential elections. Their representative in Congress can vote in committee but not on the floor. They couldn't even choose their own governor until 1970. Yet islanders of military age were drafted and sent to Vietnam.
Guam was a major staging area in that hopeless war; over 100,000 U.S. GIs passed through here. Since Okinawa was returned to Japanese rule in 1972, Guam has become the chief U.S. base in the western Pacific. Nearly 20,000 uniformed Americans are stationed on the island, and it is the home of a B-52 fleet. The navy owns a third of the isle — all of it prime real estate, with vast tracts where officers hunt wildlife and where one finds lovely beaches for wives and children. The navy opposes first-class citizenship for the islanders because they still read, speak, pray, and are taught Chamorro. The Gua
manians reply that linguistic differences haven't crippled Puerto Ricans, that the Viet Cong didn't spare them because they hadn't mastered the English. In the islanders' opinion, the admirals regard Guam as the navy's paradise and intend to keep it as such.
Yet all this is low-key. Guamanians are proud of their relationship with the United States. They have built an unknown soldier a memorial: “Here lies in honored glory an American soldier known but to God.” The length of shoreline where our Orote force came ashore is called Invasion Beach; the coast below Chonito Cliff is Nimitz Beach. On the first, near two rusting Jap warships, are gazebos for family picnics; an elementary school has been built near the second, and a spent artillery shell is cemented there into a stone marker. Every July 21 the island celebrates “Liberation Day,” in remembrance of the Marines and GIs who retook Guam. Schools are out, shops are closed, and community leaders deliver eloquent patriotic speeches pitched on an emotional level unheard in the United States for at least a generation. American visitors find them embarrassing, which perhaps says more about them than about the rhetoricians. Veterans' Day is similarly observed. On a cloudless November 11 I found myself in a packed square, sitting in the front row with Ricky, a U.S. general, and two flag officers of the navy. Toward the end of the ceremony the band played a medley of U.S. military songs. There is a tradition that anyone who has served in the Marine Corps must stand when he hears the “Marines' Hymn.” I hadn't been in that situation since my return to civilian life, but I was in it now. Somewhat to my amazement — for I am not that kind of man, and I scorn the sequins of militarism — I found myself rising and standing there, the only spectator on his feet, until the band switched to another tune. As the program ended and the crowd broke up, I was surrounded by islanders who wanted to embrace me. It was embarrassing, but it was moving, too. I still don't understand why I did it. But I'm not apologizing.
My last evening on Guam is spent with Ricky and Madeleine atop Oksu Jujan, Chamorro for the heights upon which the governor's mansion stands. Lights play upon a lovely fountain, through the mists of which lighted buildings below us gleam and winkle. Ricky's defeat at the polls overshadows my thoughts. Eviction from high office is always hard, but especially so for the imperious, and Ricky is very much the aristocrat. Yet he is philosophical about his discomfiture. He has lost, he says, but the people haven't; the people never lose a free election. And Guam's devotion to democracy lies as deep as in any of the United States. A clock booms deep within the mansion, and we head for the hay. Checking my watch — I keep zigzagging from one time zone to another — I remember one official here pointing out to me shortly after my arrival that because of the International Date Line, Guam's dawn arrives when it is still early afternoon of the day before in mainland America. Indeed, the local newspaper here carries a front-page ear: “Guam: where America's day begins.” It sounds like one of those old FitzGerald Traveltalks, but it is literally true. The first rays of each sunrise first touch the Stars and Stripes here. It's not a bad start for a day.
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I Will Lay Me Down for to Bleed a While …
The palau islands, about halfway between the marianas and the Philippines, are so remote that none of the European colonial powers had bothered to develop them. Indeed, except for a party of sixteenth-century conquistadores led by Ruy López de Villalobos, few outsiders were even aware of the mini-archipelago until the autumn of 1944. Peleliu is the southernmost isle in the Palau group. Roughly speaking, it was to the Palaus what Betio was to Tarawa — the key to the Japanese defense of the surrounding atolls and volcanic land masses. Today it is the least accessible of the central Pacific's great battlefields, hidden away in the trackless deep like a guilty secret. And that is altogether appropriate. It was a bad battle, fought at a bad place and a bad time, with an enemy garrison that could have been left to wither on the vine without altering the course of the Pacific war in any way.
To grasp what happened on Peleliu, or what ought not to have happened, you need only glance at a map of the Pacific. America's two enormous pincers — the drives of MacArthur and Nimitz — were swiftly approaching one another. In the Pentagon, Peleliu seemed necessary to protect MacArthur's flank when he invaded Mindanao, the big island at the bottom of the Philippines. But then Halsey, cruising off the Philippines, launching carrier strikes at Japanese bases, concluded that Leyte, farther up the Filipino island chain, was held by far fewer enemy troops than had been thought. He radioed Nimitz, suggesting the canceling of all other operations, especially Peleliu, which, he had already predicted, would become another Tarawa. In their place he urged the swift seizure of Leyte.
Nimitz relayed the proposal, accompanied by recommendations of his own, to Quebec, where the Combined Chiefs of Staff were attending a formal dinner as guests of Prime Minister W. L. Mackenzie King. Admirals King and Leahy and Generals Marshall and Arnold excused themselves, read the message, and told a staff officer to cable their approval. There was one small difficulty. In Nimitz's endorsement of Halsey's message he insisted that the convoy of Marines steaming toward the Palaus, which was two sailing days from its objective, steam on and take Peleliu anyway. This defies understanding. The island's only strategic value was that it lay 550 miles east of Mindanao, which, under the new plan, would be bypassed.
Part of the problem lay in U.S. ignorance of the Palaus and the assumption that Peleliu would be easy to take. There were no coast-watchers and therefore no information on what was happening there. Intelligence came from navy frogmen demolishing beach obstacles, submarine shore parties, and aerial photographs. Since the frogmen and the submariners could not see inland, they could not contradict the conclusions of those who had analyzed the aerial photographs and said Peleliu was flat. None of them suspected the presence of jagged limestone ridges overlooking the island's airfield, heights which had been turned into fortresses of underground strongpoints shielded by cement, sand, and coral, all connected by tunnels and virtually impervious to air and naval bombardment. One hulk of rock, later to be christened “The Point” by the Marines who had to take it, rose thirty feet above the water's edge, a bastion of huge fractured boulders, deep gorges, and razor-sharp spikes, the entire mass studded with pillboxes reinforced with steel and concrete. It was Tarawa, Saipan, and Guam in spades.
During the preinvasion bombardment, a gunnery officer on the heavy cruiser Portland glimpsed what lay ahead. Focusing his field glasses on a Peleliu slope, he saw a coastal gun emerge from a coral fissure. Shells were rapidly fired at the U.S. warships and then the gun was dragged back out of sight. The gunnery officer ordered his crews to hit the coral with five salvos of eight-inch shells. It was done. The gun, untouched, repeated its act. Frustrated, he said, “You can put all the steel in Pittsburgh onto that thing and still not get it.” But he was a junior officer, and in a minority. Admiral Jesse Oldendorf ordered his batteries to cease firing. He said he had run out of targets; the Jap defense had been annihilated. William Rupertus, the Marine commander, told his officers: “We're going to have some casualties, but let me assure you this is going to be a short one, a quickie. Rough but fast. We'll be through in three days. It might take only two.” Company K of the First Marines climbed down the cargo nets singing, “Give my regards to Broadway.” The captain of a transport asked the First Marines' CO, Chesty Puller, “Coming back for supper?” Chesty asked, “Why?” The captain said, “Everything's done over there. You'll walk in.” Puller said, “If you think it's that easy, why don't you come on the beach at five o'clock, have supper with me, and pick up a few souvenirs?”
Later, after the First Marines had suffered over seventeen hundred casualties, another naval officer asked an evacuated Marine if he had any souvenirs to trade. The Marine stared at him and then reached down and patted his butt. “I brought my ass out of there, swabbie,” he said. “That's my souvenir of Peleliu.” Painfully aware that they continued to carry prewar equipment, priority still being given to the ETO, and learning that the bombardment had been ent
rusted to inexperienced naval commanders, the men who suffered on this ill-starred island became bitter. A Marine officer later said: “It seemed to us that somebody forgot to give the order to call off Peleliu. That's one place nobody wants to remember.” Oldendorf conceded that if Nimitz had realized the implications of his decision, “undoubtedly the assault and capture of the Palaus would never have been attempted.” Time called it “a horrible place.” Few Americans at home even knew of the ferocious struggle there. When President Truman pinned a medal on a Peleliu hero, he couldn't pronounce the island's name. Samuel Eliot Morison, rarely critical of U.S. admirals, wrote that “Stalemate II,” as the operation had been prophetically encoded, “should have been counter-manded,” being “hardly worth” the price of over ten thousand American casualties — three times Tarawa's.
The target island, seven miles long and two miles wide, lies within the coral reef which surrounds most of the Palaus. Peleliu is shaped like a lobster's claw. The Jap airstrip had been built on a level field south of the claw's hinge. North of the hinge a spiny ridge of rock dominates the battlefield. Steep, heavily forested, and riddled with caves, it was known as the Umurbrogol until the Marines rechristened it Bloody Nose Ridge. The enemy knew that any assault on the Palaus would have to hit Peleliu's mushy white sand coast because the airfield was there, and because the reef there was closest to the shore. The island's postwar population is about four hundred. In the summer of 1944, over twelve hundred natives had been living here. Most of them left before the battle because U.S. planes, in one of those humane gestures which fighting men will never understand, had showered Peleliu with leaflets warning of the coming attack. Undoubtedly that saved the lives of many islanders, but it cost American lives, too, because the Japanese also read the pamphlets and made their dispositions accordingly.