The aperture led to a zigzag corridor lined with sandbags stacked ten feet high. Since he had designed the sand fortress, the lieutenant proudly explained the purpose of the crooked opening. “If a bomb or artillery round should explode outside, Sister, its force and shrapnel has no direct path to the interior of the fortress. My design also forces attackers to come through the corridor no more than one or two at a time. This makes it easier for defense.”
“Faith, tis a grand design, indeed,” Sister Mary Kathleen said with feigned enthusiasm, feigned because she wished to continue to curry his favor. He had been kind to her and her fella boys since their arrival on the atoll, and she feared what might happen without his influence. “Where did you learn to build such a truly magnificent fort, Lieutenant?”
Soichi shrugged, though it was plain from his expression that he was pleased by her compliment. “I studied a few books on field fortification architecture,” he said, modestly. “And I used my imagination.”
“It shows, Lieutenant. Yes, it does.”
Soichi nodded in gratitude, then led her through the sandbagged corridor to the outside where dawn was struggling to appear. The sun had turned pink the sand and powdered coral that covered the ugly, flat atoll, but the sky was also pink, and yellow from the dust raised by the barrage. The air stank of dust and burnt gunpowder. It burned her nose and made her sneeze.
“God bless you, Sister,” Soichi said, without irony.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” she replied, then sneezed again. “Oh, this terrible dust!”
Soichi sucked loudly between his teeth, in this case an expression of sympathy. “Yes, a most unhealthy situation.” He chose a path behind a steep wall of sand. “I designed this embankment to stop naval artillery which tends to follow a flat trajectory. There are many of them across the atoll. The shells strike them and throw up great gouts of dust but with little effect.”
“A brilliant idea, to be sure,” she replied.
Soichi stopped and pointed toward a grove of palm trees and low bushes which were sheltered by the embankment. “Now, Sister, if you’ll go there, I will stay here to insure your privacy.”
She expressed her gratitude, then had her private moment in the bushes, and returned to find Soichi consulting his wrist watch. “I think the Americans will be starting their bombardment again soon,” he told her. “You must hurry back to the fortress. Just follow the path.”
“You’re not going with me?”
“Yes. I mean no. I’m sorry. Answering such a question with a negative when it should require a positive is a peculiarity of English that is hard for most Japanese to grasp. But never mind. Yes, I’m not going back because I intend to find a hole to crawl into, and somehow survive the coming battle. Captain Sakuri, as you may have noticed, is not pleased with me. He thinks I am weak because I do not share his enthusiasm for dying. If I go back with you, I think he intends to force me to lead some kind of insane banzai charge.”
“I shall miss you, Lieutenant” she said, truthfully. “You have been like a knight to a lady in distress.”
He bobbed his head. “It has been my pleasure, Sister. Now come with me. I wish to show you something.”
He led her up the slant of the embankment and then bade her to lie down beside him so that they could just peek over it. Her flowing white habit rustled as she flattened herself against the warm sand. On the other side of the embankment, she observed a cratered moonscape and a grove of shattered palm trees. Beyond was a glittering lagoon and past it lay an astonishing number of big gray ships strung broadside to the beach. “The American fleet,” Lieutenant Soichi advised. “Aboard those ships are many rough, angry men. Admiral Shibasaki has laid down a challenge to them. He says a million Americans could not take Tarawa in ten thousand years. I think it will take considerably less. They will be landing very soon.” He inclined his head in her direction. “Why don’t you go with me, Sister? I think there’s even a chance we could make it to the next island. The crossing is shallow.”
She could not take her eyes off the ships, wondering about the men aboard them, imagining them looking back at the atoll, and what they might be thinking. Were they frightened? Or perhaps they were eager for a day of fighting. The only Americans she had ever been near were rich yachtsmen who had pulled into the harbor near the convent on Ruka. Of course, she had not been allowed to talk to them. Only the older nuns and the priests had taken their fellowship. Her impression of them, based on brief observations, was that they were a bit loud, and their women a bit aloof.
“Sister? Did you hear me?” Soichi asked.
“Aye, Lieutenant, I heard ye, but I can not abandon me fella boys.”
Soichi sucked between his teeth, this time an expression of fear. “You don’t understand, Sister. The rikusentai, haven’t you noticed their preparations? They can hardly wait to die. This battle is going to be a bloody nightmare. I beg you. Come with me.”
Her smile was grateful but her answer firm. “No, Lieutenant. I cannot. If I die here, it will be with me fella boys. We have come far together and together we will stay.”
He nodded. “I understand. You are loyal. It is a fine thing to be loyal. All right, then. Go back to the fortress. But you must hurry.”
“Dear lieutenant,” Sister Mary Kathleen said, “how was it you came to this terrible place?”
His answer was bitter. “My father thought it best if I joined the militarists. It was a business decision, you see. We import and export a variety of goods and require many government permissions. So, despite my most excellent American education, Harvard no less, I entered the navy and was sent here to this awful place. I do so hope this pleases my honorable father! And you, Sister? How did you come to be here? It has never been clear to me.”
“I suppose ye might say it began when I took me vows in Ireland,” was her wistful answer. “Tis a long story.”
“Then I regret I shan’t stay to hear it,” Lieutenant Soichi replied cordially, then scrambled with her down to the base of the embankment where he waited while she shook the sand from her habit.
Although there was little doubt he was ready to leave, and quickly, Soichi was willing to tarry long enough to give her some final advice. “Stay in the fortress, Sister. I designed it well. It will survive the bombardment although your ears will surely ring from all the noise. When the invasion comes, find a dark corner, you and your fella boys. Crouch down, and keep yourselves quiet. From their talk, I fear some of the rikusentai may decide to vent their frustrations on you. Never look them in the eye, that’s my counsel. To them, it is a sign of aggression to which they must respond. Be meek and humble and perhaps you will get by.”
She put out her hand to him. “Meek and humble. Tis the nun’s stock and trade, Lieutenant! Thank ye for looking after us so far.”
“Sister, they are all going to die. Pray for them, if you will. They are at least brave men who think they are doing the right thing.”
“Yes, all right, Lieutenant,” she answered. “God go with ye, now.”
“Thank you.” And then Lieutenant Soichi bowed to her, put his hand on top his helmet, and ran like a rabbit. Sister Mary Kathleen watched him go, watched him pick his way through a scruffy bramble of wilted sea grapes, and then pause before making a run across an open field. He was heading for another long barrier of sand, and he almost made it. Halfway across the field, there came from overhead a horrible screeching noise, and Lieutenant Soichi froze, and then looked up as if God had called him to show his face to heaven. That was the last time Sister Mary Kathleen, or anyone, ever saw him. The hideous screech ended in a vast, terrible roar of orange fire, molten steel, and flying sand. Lieutenant Soichi, Sister’s only Japanese friend on the atolls of Tarawa, was gone forever, vaporized by a huge American naval artillery round that otherwise dug a shallow crater in not much of anything.
2
Booms and shrieks shattered the morning tropical mist and black smoke-rings from gray naval guns floated prettily across t
he blue, crystalline lagoon. Distant thumps and pale yellow smoke boiling aloft announced the multiple hammer blows falling from the sky to batter the tiny atoll. Aboard the troop ship J. Wesley Clayton, a big, wide-shouldered man wearing navy khakis and a Coast Guard officer’s cap watched and marveled as more naval artillery pierced the moisture-laden air and crashed and thumped until it all blended into a cascading thunder leavened by the clanking of gears and the high-pitched, energetic shriek of pneumatics turning the big guns. The United States Navy had been busy all morning, showing her marines how she could pummel a tiny island into submission. It was a fiery demonstration of the power of the great gray American fleet off the atolls known as Tarawa and one in particular, called Betio.
The Coast Guard officer marveling at the amazing bombardment was Captain Josh Thurlow. A legend of the Pacific war, though officially not part of it, he had the square-jawed look appropriate to seafarers, a face deeply tanned and properly weathered by the wind and waves, and a stout build and muscular legs adapted to a rolling deck. There was also a livid scar on his chin, a result, so the story went, of a confrontation with a polar bear when he was but a young officer on the old Bering Sea Patrol. At the present, however, as Josh stood on the troop ship before the beaches of Tarawa, his rugged face reflected not past adventures but major unhappiness, and not a little worry for the day’s endeavor.
For Josh had observed the mighty barrage of the navy, smelled the wafting stink of the expended gun powder, and reached the first of several unsettling conclusions which he felt compelled to voice to the pug-faced little Marine Corps colonel who stood beside him. “The navy’s too close, Montague,” he announced. “They need to back off, and you marines would be wise to shift your beaches away from that dodging tide, too, or wait another day.”
The pluggy little Colonel was none other than Colonel Montague Singleton Burr who was also something of a legend, though, as his troops gossiped, mostly in his own mind. “What a crybaby you are, Thurlow,” he chided. “Today’s the day, that island is the island, and we’re going ashore, hell, high water, or dodging tides, whatever the hell that may be.”
“We, Montague?” Josh asked, mildly, even though he knew it would make steam blow out of Burr’s ears.
“Damn you to hell, Thurlow!” the colonel snapped, confirming Josh’s expectation. “I don’t like being a staff officer, you know I don’t. But,” he sneered, “at least I ain’t Frank Knox’s tattle-tale.”
Josh didn’t reply, mainly because Burr had him dead to rights. He was in the Pacific courtesy of the Secretary of the Navy, and he had no portfolio save as an observer. Of course, that hadn’t kept him from fighting on Guadalcanal, or going up the slot with Jack Kennedy to chase after President Roosevelt’s cousin who, some said, had deserted and gone over to the Japanese. But now, here he was, only an observer again.
It was November 1943, and the United States Navy was beginning her grand strategy of throwing her marines at island after bloody island across the Pacific. If all went well, so the admirals believed, the triumphant leathernecks would ultimately stand in the Emperor’s palace in Tokyo as they’d once stood in Montezuma’s great hall with Old Glory fluttering on its highest rampart. The United States Army, meaning General Douglas MacArthur, so recently chased out of the Philippines by the triumphant Japanese, believed the navy’s strategy to be mad. It required light infantry to go up against determined, even fanatical defenders who loved concrete, big guns, carefully prepared fields of fire, land, and sea mines, snipers, and human wave attacks compressed onto tiny battlefields from which there was no escape save death. The little atoll in front of Josh and Colonel Burr was the first island chosen for this great strategic sweep across the Pacific. On this rock, the Marine Corps was determined to build its New Church of Amphibious Assault. And it would do it without the United States We-Grind-Slowly-But-We-Fucking-Grind Army, too.
During a lull in the bombardment, Burr began to lecture Josh and anyone else within the range of this voice, which meant most of the ship, even down in the boiler room, about his beloved Marines. “War may be the Corps’s vocation, Thurlow,” he roared, “but glory is our real work. The navy knows that, and is pleased to allow us marines to occasionally wade in glorious blood, though it ain’t pretty to them in their crisp whites and polished decks. We will be victorious this day, make no mistake, and the harder the enemy fights, I say all the better. Through hardship comes experience and knowledge. Through adversity comes strength and greatness. Through privation comes triumph and glory!”
“Glory, Montague?” Josh replied, maintaining his mild tone. “Do you really think these young gents about to go ashore are as fond of glory as you and the other professionals of the Corps?”
Burr stared at the wounded atoll which seemed adrift in smoke and flame. “Now listen to me carefully, Thurlow,” he said in a low growl. “I followed you out here to tell you to keep your yap shut. I won’t have you infecting these marines with your nonsense. You ain’t part of this operation. Don’t forget that.”
Before Josh could reply, the dawn was again shattered, this time by the old, obsolete, bombed and sunk at Pearl Harbor, but by God afloat again to fight another day, battleship, USS Maryland. In a gigantic broadside, the old warship erupted with a bone-rattling display of her power. A mighty spew of plumed orange and white smoke flew away from her, and the sky seemed to fall apart like a window struck by a flying brick. Then Betio seemed to be gripped by an earthquake as the shells struck, the atoll trembling beneath a storm of dust and sand.
“Oh, God love you, old girl,” Burr admired, beaming in rapture at the resurrected vessel. “Pound ’em into dust, my darling!”
Standing around the bridge high above the deck, the J. Wesley Clayton’s duty officers were cheering, goading the huge shells to fly straight and true. But straight was the problem in Josh’s view. “You know your artillery theory, Montague,” he persisted. “Those shells are on a flat trajectory. They’re throwing up sand, I’ll warrant, but they’re not digging Jap out of his hidey-holes. If the navy would back off and raise their tubes, the shells would come down at a steeper angle and penetrate the sand before exploding. I think Jap’s just hunkered down right now behind and beneath all that sand, waiting us out.”
Contradicting Josh, there was a sudden explosion on the island sending a massive shock wave flying across the water, so thick that Josh and Burr could feel the pressure on their faces. Burr laughed out loud. “As per usual, you’re wrong, Thurlow!”
Josh caught a whiff of the sulfurous stink of exploded gunpowder, the odor conjuring up the terrible battles he’d fought over the years against his country’s various enemies. “There’s still that dodging tide,” he remarked, stubbornly.
“What in God’s fucking underpants is a dodging tide? You keep repeating that damnable phrase!”
Josh was always a patient teacher of the sea, especially with marines who thought the ocean but a nuisance across which they had to endure in order to get at the throats of the enemy. “There’s spring tides, neap tides, and dodges,” he explained. “It all has to do with the sun and the moon and where they are to one another. When both of them big fellows line up and start pulling in tandem, you’ve got a dodging tide and, as bad luck would have it, Montague, that’s what you’ve got on that atoll before us right now. That means this very minute the tide’s going out, way out, and the reefs are rising. Soon, they’ll be as dry as your Aunt Sally’s picket fence. And your boys will have to get over them.”
Burr spat a brown stream of tobacco juice over the side. His temper was not helped when a good portion of it blew back in his face. He used the sleeve of his crisp new camouflage utilities to wipe his face, then spat again for good measure, this time with the wind. “Again, you’re wrong. We’ll get over the reef with our amtracs, and then we’ll dig out the few Japs left alive after this barrage, and we’ll kill them, see, and bury them. All in a morning’s work.”
Josh knew he was wasting his breath, had known it
all along although a kind of desperation had made him voice his fears even though he knew Burr was too low on the totem pole to do anything about them. Josh had seen it happen before, a kind of momentum that took hold during the planning of an operation where errors in judgment were often buried beneath wishful thinking. Since Guadalcanal, it was the belief of every Navy and Marine Corps staff officer that their marines could overcome any obstacle, including poor tactics. But Josh loved his history and knew Napoleon at Waterloo and Lee at Gettysburg had also come to believe their men could do anything, even charge up a hill into the teeth of cannon. Defeat served up on a cold plate was what those great generals had received, and now Josh feared these islands called Tarawa, and especially this atoll before him called Betio, was the next cold serving of error, this time for General Holland M. “Howling Mad” Smith and his cocky leathernecks. They were about to launch themselves onto a hot, sandy beach where a determined enemy waited, no matter how many flat, skipping rounds were thrown at him courtesy of the United States blue-water, pleated-pants, brown-shoe Navy.
“Jap’s figured out he’s not going to win this war but he thinks if he bloodies us enough, we’ll sue for peace,” Josh said, thinking aloud.
“That will never happen,” Burr swore.
“I agree, but them folks on that island, they don’t know that. And they ain’t just your normal Japanese soldiers. Those are Imperial Marines. They call themselves Rikusentai and are tough as they come.”
Burr screwed up his ugly face. “Marines, did you say? There ain’t a Jap boy born yet who deserves the title Marine. We’ll brush them aside and be across that spit of sand in an hour.”
“If you say so, Montague,” Josh replied wearily. “Of course, you’re right.”
Burr registered surprise at Josh’s sudden surrender and eyed him for a long second. “How long’s it been? Us knowing one another?”