The Old Breed and the Costs of War

0:00The title of my talk is such because the old breed was the name given to the 1st Marine Division in World War II. I graduated from high school in 1942 and went to college in Marion Institute for one year and joined the Marine Corps while I was there. I joined because I had read about the different services, talked to different people, and I came to the conclusion that the Marine Corps was the best. Ironically, after all I went through, I still think that it had extremely high standards and it upheld them all the time.

0:54Now, there are several places I could begin. I could begin by quoting someone very profound and so forth. But let me just give you one quote that our DI told us the first day in boot camp. He said, you people are stupid. The first thing he said to us, this was before He said, you people are stupid, and if any of you think you can tell me what to do, step outside and I'll whip your ass right now. So that was the reality of the Marine Corps that I entered, the reality descended upon you quickly.

1:48Early on in my boot camp training, I one day got out of step. I never have understood why, but I usually managed to keep up the cadence, and he walked up beside me in a very quiet voice and said, boy, you pick up the cadence or they're going to have to take us both to sick bay because it's going to take a major operation to get my foot out of your rear end. You know, I never lost the cadence after that, never. To press on, what I want to do today is to give you, in part of the time, the sort of life that the frontline infantryman, that Paul Thussell was, and that I was.

2:35I was in the Pacific, he was in Europe. But the kind of thing that he was subjected to every day, the kind of life that the frontline infantryman experienced, and what he thought about it, and how it affected him then, and then I would like to make some few remarks about what the aftermath was. Now, I will quote someone profound. Julius Caesar said that terror robs men of their power of reason and judgment and impairs their physical capacity. That is absolutely true because the primary emotion on a battlefield was sheer absolute terror, as Paul has indicated.

3:33Even the veterans, my gunnery sergeant, who didn't seem to have a nerve in his body, told me at the first reunion I went to in the 1st Marine Division after the war, he said, Sledgehammer, I was as scared as you were, but I just couldn't show it, and he said, you remember that patrol we went on on Peleliu into that swamp, the 40 of us, went on into this swamp to hold He pulled up 1,500 Japs that were supposed to be on the other side of the swamp, and we were supposed to hold them up long enough to get help. He said, that was a suicide patrol. And he said, I didn't tell anybody. Well, when he told me then, I fell into the nearest chair 40-something years later.

4:24I think it was Paul who said that the combat veteran has to live through the experience, and then if he survives, he has to live with it the rest of his life. And how you handle yourself and what you make of yourself It depends a great deal on, I suppose, your upbringing, your discipline, things of this sort.

4:58I want to make one or two remarks about the people we fought, the Japanese soldiers. To us, they were Japs. Now, with Janet Reno in there, who might attack this building at any time as though we would... As though we were branch Davidians, because we might have weapons in here and there might be child abuse, you can't ever tell.

5:43The Japanese soldier was dedicated to his cause. The American propaganda machine said he was fanatical. It wasn't that at all. He just simply fought to the death. Because that's the way he had been trained. He was loyal to the emperor. He believed in his cause. And when he was inducted into the Japanese army, he was brutalized. and brutality was institutionalized in the Japanese Army. There are documented cases of Japanese troops first few days in combat. In fact, it lasted the first year. If he even looked at his sergeant without the proper respect, you know, what they called silent contempt.

6:29I picked up on many a rotten coconut in base camp because of silent contempt the way I looked at somebody. But the Japanese lieutenant would have his troops stand at attention, then take a hobnail shoe, field shoe, and stand there and beat them in the face until the face bled. And then, of course, when they got into combat, they didn't mind doing anything to their opponents. Compassion was something that was totally foreign to them. This is why they could rampage through Nanking China and rape and murder over a hundred thousand Chinese over a period of about three or four weeks.

7:17The best kept secret of World War II are the Japanese atrocities. There's not much even written about it. And don't worry about embarrassing the young Japanese by bringing it up, because the only thing they know about World War II is the U.S. bombed Japan. Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and as Paul Thussell says, anybody who thinks it was a bad idea, his life wasn't saved by it, because ours was. We were scheduled to invade Japan, and we literally would have had to kill every man, woman, and child, because they had a song that said, 100,000 souls for the Emperor.

8:04All right, now, war to the infantrymen meant killing. And if you had any qualms about killing the enemy, you better get over it in a hurry. Because when either you made an attack or they made an attack, you killed them before they killed you. And the first one I saw, I must admit, I didn't pull the trigger on. and Snafu Shelton, our foxhole buddy, said, what the hell's the matter with you? Do you want them in the hole here with us? Talking about our foxhole. And I said, no. So then the next bunch that ran out of that pill box with their Bennett's fixed, I was firing at them before he was. Typical Japanese fashion. They came out of the pill box.

8:50This, again, is rarely written about. Benetted rifle, in the right hand, there are unbuttoned britches held up in the left hand. So when they got killed, they dropped the britches. There was something in their religion or the code of Bushido that said the lower abdomen was the place of manhood instead of the chest, the way it is to the West. We saw thousands of them on Okinawa lying out there with practically in their best day clothes, with their last ounce of strength, they had pulled their trousers down.

9:35Now, on the front lines, it's a place of passion, terror, hatred, and believe me, we hated their guts. Now, it's been said by many writers, and this is very trendy, that we hated them because they were racist. We are racist. They weren't. We are. We were. The Japanese were hated because they fought for the code of Bushido, which meant you had to kill, as I said, every last one of them before you could get the heck off the island. And when you had wounded buddies that were shot or wounded by shellfire, and try to carry them out you had to get them out as fast as you could or they got shot on the stretcher because the jack shot them on the stretcher then they tried to shoot the stretcher team down i had a good friend it was a corpsman it was working on a wounded marina on a ridge on okinawa one day doc just about got this boy fixed up then this nip sniper shot doc in the left leg up in the hip

10:45and while we were running up there with the two stretcher teams to get pull them down got dock up on the stretch and that son of a bitch shot him in the other hip just as we got him on the on the on the stretcher now why didn't he shoot him and kill him well he shot him two places to immobilize him where we'd have to carry then he started firing at us well we were outrun all the we outran all the The Olympic runners getting him down that ridge so all of us could get out of his way, and fortunately he didn't hit anybody. Wild excitement existed on the front line. I mean, when you're so close to a guy that you can throw a hand grenade at him, but you know you better not throw it, because he'll throw it back at you before it explodes, you've got a decision to make.

11:38The problem was, we probably needed Peter Jennings. He's eminently qualified, they tell us so. Of course, it might have meant that he would have had to wear a helmet, and that would have messed up his coiffured hair. I have very little left, but I've been tempted to wear a hairpiece, hairpiece, but before I retired, the students often confused me with Robert Redford. I'll just bring that up. During an attack, either on our part or the Japanese part, the bombardment preceding the attack, our attack or their attack, was so loud that it was thunderous.

12:27You couldn't even talk to the guy next to you, and at Okinawa, some of the Japanese artillery barrages went on for four and five days without stop. And when they would finally end, we were just all like that. You couldn't even hold your rifle steady because your nerves had just been so knocked about by all this terrific explosion and carrying wounded guys out, dead guys, we moved them to the rear if we could, sometimes you couldn't move them. The violence was just inconceivable. We hit it lucky at Okinawa with quotes around it.

13:14The Japanese had a full complement of artillery there, which to the infantrymen is one of the worst things you have to put up with, Except for machine guns, except for snipers, except for mortars, except for hand grenades and except for tanks. But other than that, artillery was one of the worst things. But they had additional artillery shipped to the Philippines. Before the ships got to the Philippines, they told them to turn around and go to Okinawa, because the Philippines was going to fall. So that meant that those of us who landed on Okinawa got a double dose of shelling. And if you don't think, when we get new second lieutenants in and full of bravado and all this kind of stuff they've learned at Quantico, one good shelling knocked it out of, whether they got hit or not.

14:06I mean, but poor guys, they didn't last but just a few days. Now, the machine gun fire was something at least you could get away from if you could get hunkered down in a hole, but if it caught you out in the open, it was tough. I ran across the, made an attack across the airfield at Peleliu, and the machine, I could see the traces coming by me, just like the railings on a ship or on a porch or something like that. And the shelves were just going off, just erupting to the point that you couldn't even yell to the guy next to you. After it was over with, I got across and a buddy of mine said, Sledgehammer, did you know that Billy cracked up back there on the airport and they had to actually drag him across here undercover?

15:02And I said, no, I didn't know that. What happened to him? He said, well, you remember Joe that we all went through boot camp together with. In other words, Joe got hit in the head and he splattered his brains all over Billy's face. And it was that kind of thing that happened, that was apt to happen at any time. Snipers were a, you developed a close, personal relationship with a sniper. Because you lay in your foxhole with your buddy. My buddy was Snafu Shelton, who was from the swamps of Louisiana. He still had the bark on. And we had a very fascinating juxtaposition, I suppose they would call it today, of the large prayer and the 23rd Psalm on my palm and goddamn you son of a bitch on Snafu's part.

15:58I mean, he could cuss a blue streak because you knew that sniper was after you personally. And so therefore you could case him personally, but the problem was he never could hear you. And Japanese snipers were crack shots. There are actual records of them hitting a Marine on Pella Louis at 600 yards. The volume of fire that came at us when the Japanese pulled an attack, when you think of the amount of steel and fragments and bullets that came at a man, my company had 64% casualties at Peleliu. I didn't get a scratch.

16:47It lasted 30 days and 30 nights because they fought us all night. But I recently got a letter from an Air Force man who had been stationed on Okinawa, and he said that on this particular ridge, he read my book, and he said on this particular ridge that we had been on, and the Japanese pulled this major, not bonsai, not the stupid kind that John Wayne mowed them down by the thousands, but a well-planned counter-attack at Okinawa, he just was curious as to the volume of fire that possibly maybe he could find some. He measured off a square foot and then he dug just below the surface and he wrote me that he found 30 pieces of shrapnel and or bullets. And when I was out there, Yeah, I thought I was going to catch every one of the 30 every time I took a step.

17:49Every man thought that he was the object of the whole and entire Japanese barrage. At night, the nights were sheer terror in the Pacific. The typical German soldier was a superb soldier from everything anybody writes or says about. He wanted to fight as honorably as he could and then get home to the family. The typical Japanese soldier wanted to fight honorably and die for the emperor. So that meant you had to kill him before you could get it over with. Because he made that difficult because he didn't want to die. And he wanted to carry you with him. So if you took a position and wounded a bunch of others and they were lying around in, because We had to feel strippin' for souvenirs.

18:41Somebody went around and shot each one of them in the head routinely. Some of the outfits called the guys the possum squad. And it was said later that they must have thought all those guys that took those positions were all crack shots because all the Japs had been shot in the head. But they would play dead, they would go to any kind of ruse to get help, such as slipping behind the lines at night and calling for a corpsman and begging for assistance. But fortunately I went into a veteran outfit as a replacement and you could understand the intonation of the voice, you could always recognize it.

19:28Now, the fatigue that a combat infantryman is exposed to and that he knows is there is absolutely nothing like it in civilian life. Sometimes I feel so sorry for these, I'm not much of a sports fan, but I'm a boy birdwatcher and that's what I spend most of my time outside doing. But sometimes on the news it shows these exhausted football players or exhausted basketball players and I weep so much I almost have to paddle out of the room in a canoe because they are so tired. But Paul can tell you that when you go for two weeks or 30 days at Okinawa it was one One week short of three months, and there were about ten of us out of my company that made it all the way through Okinawa and didn't get hit.

20:28And we were literally walking around like zombies. And I had weighed about 145 when I went into the campaign. When it was over, we got back, got up north, built a tent camp, I weighed about 125, 120. from just the sheer stress, you can't imagine bringing up ammunition in the mud. The 30 caliber ball, which was the standard ammo for the M1 rifle, the box weighed over 100 pounds, I guess, don't you, Paul? The genius who designed the box had two little handholds in the end of it.

21:15Put the tips of your fingers in there to lift up a box that weighed over a hundred pounds in the mud, and it had mud smeared all over it. And, of course, this just brought forth more creative casing on the part of the troops. But at night, the Japanese, as the historians say, the military historians, they tried to infiltrate the lines. At Peleliu, they had a whole battalion that was assigned to raid the lines. They weren't trying to infiltrate. They would slip up as close as they could to us, throw a grenade, and come in screaming, was either a saber or Bennett or something of this sort. Now, the idea of a saber in a modern war sounds ridiculous.

22:04I had a buddy that his right arm was amputated by a Jap officer who slipped up close and then jumped in his position. I had another buddy who lost two fingers that he was holding on to his rifle and the Jap came around with a saber like that and cut his two fingers off. And then he poleaxed the Jap just like he hit a baseball with the butt of his rifle and killed him. But they usually got killed in those night attacks, but we always had casualties. It has been shown that the longer combat went on, the worse the stress got, and the more exhausted the troops got, because the fight or flight syndrome physiologically takes over.

22:51You're all keyed up, the adrenaline's pumping, and believe me, when that goes on for almost three months, you don't have much reserve left. When buddies were killed or wounded, many of us just simply cried because we were very, very closely knit. Even the replacements came in that way, became that way. We had a great deal of respect for each other because in the Marine Corps, they can call it brainwashing, I don't care what they call it, But the greatest sin you could commit was to let a buddy down. And so you knew you could depend on any guy that had a marine uniform on, whether you knew his name or not. Now, at Okinawa, we went through a period of about 10 days of torrential rain.

23:41This meant the tanks couldn't move. It was right in front of Shuri, the main Japanese defense bastion. We couldn't move without the tanks because the Japs would have mowed us all down. We, as it was, we could move in behind the tanks and the tank gun could be firing at 75. The outfit that had tried to take this particular ridge I was on before us had heavy casualties. Almost every shell hole there had a dead marine in it. They couldn't get them out. The maggots were in them. The rain was washing the maggots off the dead over the top of the soil If you go into your foxhole, the foxhole that Snafu and I dug, we had to put boards in the bottom of it and then dig a sump hole in the end of it and bail it out with an old helmet that occasionally had left.

24:31If we hadn't, it was just like a colander immersed in water. Water came over the edges of it and water came through the soil. It spouts just like turning on a spigot. It was raining so hard. The Japs were attacking every night. We were killing them in the lines every night. You tried to throw mud on them with your entrenching tool. Then the next day or the next few days, usually in the tropics they got pretty ripe in a day, shells would come in and blow them all apart. So their body parts just lying all over the place. The guys called it maggot ridge. And if you went down the ridge and slipped and fell, when you slid down to the bottom, when you came up, The maggots were falling all out of your dungaree pockets, all out of your cartridge belt and everything else.

25:17The personal filth that the instrument had to go through is inconceivable. Three months without a bath, living in the mud, your mouth felt like it was full of mud, you had no way to brush your teeth, but you had to stay awake, you had to be attuned to every tiny sound at night. Because they slipped around at night, and they were experts at it.

25:48Of course, you can imagine the odor of the dead. The only way we could eat anything, your stomach was tied in knots, they gave us a little tripod-like thing, you put a sternotablet on it, before a dog, because you'd draw sniper fire if you didn't. And then try to heat up a can of beans or something, When you were out there and the stuff hit the fan, and it was a matter of life and death, Sure, we were all fighting for the Constitution, but basically you were fighting for your buddy, and he was fighting for you, because that was the elemental level.

26:47Because there wasn't anything between us and the Japs but space, and sometime at night that space was no more than here to that chalkboard there, and if it got in your foxhole, it was a hell of a lot closer than that. The aftermath of all of this, as Paul said, there were widows, there were authors, orphans. Many of our guys were not married, but some of them were. Some of them had children. The one thing that we were all left with was nightmares. I had them for 25 years. I'd wake up in a cold sweat, screaming, having gone through something in a dream When it was just as realistic as when it happened, in a cold sweat, some nights, I was afraid I would have nightmares and was afraid to go to sleep. So I'd stay up late reading poetry or biology or something like that, hoping they didn't come. Now, the casualties, the dead, we mourn them because, like I say, if he was a Marine, he was sorry the guy got

27:57I have a buddy named John Hubel. He lives up in Virginia. He's one of the finest men I ever knew. At Okinawa, Hubel's hip was terribly damaged. At Okinawa, Huber's hip was terribly damaged by a Jap grenade. Here, 50 years later, he's had to have one of numerous surgical operations because his hip had to be replaced. It's thrown his spine out of line, then it threw his right ankle out of line.

28:45He's never complained because he's alive. and to Huber to complain would be ridiculous. I had another friend named Jim, Jim Cronizel, whose family lived in Nebraska on the big wheat farm. It was his ambition, his dream to get back and farm that wheat farm. One day I was standing right in front of a little ridge with one of these deep-japped standing foxholes right in front of me in front of me, watching through the binoculars, because we'd been pulled off the line, we'd made a push the day before and lost a heck of a bunch of guys out of my company, so they pulled us off the line for a few days, and I saw these mortar shells coming towards us.

29:34So I got the binoculars and was looking and I said, the guys were incidentally at an ammo box behind me, six or eight of them, playing pinnacle, and I said, you guys better look I looked out, that nip gunner is walking them right down this little valley. Well, I got what a guy usually got in a case like that. Oh, hell sledgehammer, you're just nervous in the service. So I said, okay, I'm telling you, you better look out. Just about that time, there was this terrific crash as a shell exploded right in front of me down at ground level. And I was on this little hillock. It was no higher, really, than that blackboard. The concussion knocked me off my feet and just down into the foxhole, standing up. It wounded five men. How in God's name? I didn't get my head blown off, I'll never know.

30:23But poor Cronizel got a bad tracheal wound in the head. And then I had a seizure and I fell off the tractor. And he said when I fell, I luckily kicked it in neutral so it didn't run over me. I went to my doctor and he said, He said, son, you're going to have these all the rest of your life because of that head wound. Get off that farm. So he said, I had to give up the farm, and if you can believe it, loving the outdoors like I do, I'm in a damn insurance office. I had another buddy named Jim Day. Jim lived in California. He had a horse farm. When he got home, he wanted to make it into a horse ranch. At Peleliu, a Japanese machine gun literally, before my eyes, cut off Jim's right leg.

31:15It was a heavy machine gun and he was so close to us. The NIP just moved it just a little bit as a free gun. And poor Jim just toppled over. There was his leg lying on the ground. There was his blood spaiting out of the stump. I ran over there to him. The corpsman ran over there to him. When Jim would come to First Marine Division reunions, maybe some of you can't conceive of this, but we'd have to help him go to the bathroom, because his wife had to do that at home. The poor guy couldn't do it. Now maybe with these bars and so forth for the handicapped he could. I had a wonderful friend named Vermeer, and Marion Vermeer was a lumberjack from Washington State.

32:03He wanted to be a lumberjack when he went home. One day on a ridge on Okinawa, the Japs got a, they put some pressure on the army. I don't mean any offense to any of you army people out there, but they put some pressure on the army, and the army line moved back a little bit. That meant there was a bend in the line to the left, so the Japs got this 70-millimeter mountain gun. It was on small wheels, they could move it around real quick, but 70 millimeters was about that big, fired a high-velocity shell. They fired a shell and it went right behind our lines and hit out there at west and knocked out tanks for us. Somebody said, what the hell was that? One of the NCOs said that was a nipped mountain gun. The next shell went, I am not exaggerating, no more than a foot over my head, past the foxhole next to me that had two kids that were replacements,

32:59hit in Bill Layton's hole where Bill and Marion Vermeer were. Bill was blown up into the air. Vermeer just fell over. The two kids in the hole next to me, one of them jumped up and was doing like that, and the other one was yelling, Oh Jesus Christ, it hurts so bad. Make me die, I can't stand it. For Christ's sake, Jesus, do something. And then he just toppled over dead. This was the glory of, and we were all after this glory stuff, see. This is John Wayne. But I'm telling you what really happened. I ran over, started over toward Ladens Fox Hole And the sergeant said, Sergeant Howard, get back on the gun.

33:48The mortar was right at the base of the ridge, and I had been observing. I had more experience than the gun that they had on it. He said, if they locate that mountain gun, I'm going to need you to get on the gun. So I must admit I was glad to get back, get down below the ridge. The gun didn't fire anymore. They brought Vermeer by me on a stretcher. His right leg below the knee was just a bloody bandage. Thrown up on the stretcher was his bundaka, or field shoe as we called it, bundaka, and his ankle was sticking out of it. And he said, Sledgehammer, you think I'll ever be able to be a lumberjack again?

34:40And I said, sure, buddy, you'll make it. You'll be back in all those beautiful trees and doing what you want to do. And if you don't think I didn't feel like I'd been stabbed in the heart, they carried him about 20 yards and didn't put the stretcher down. He was dead. Those are some of the things that are the cost of war To those who actually fight it, and believe you me, I could wax not maybe as eloquent as Paul Fussell, but I could get my back up about Bill Clinton getting into some of these things.

35:32There was absolutely no excuse for those rangers to get killed over there in Somalia. Experts have come out and said, ah, what was the guy's name that was secretary of defense, whatever his name was? Aspen, who was Aspen? Aspen, yeah, Aspen for tanks. Aspen said, well, you know, he thought about it and thought there really didn't need tanks. They come out, I think the Indonesian troops sent some things up there that looked like Model T Fords, and, naturally, the Somalis blew them all up. But nobody can tell me the way those rangers were situated in a circular defense surrounded by all those Somalis, if they hadn't had a couple of tanks up there, they would have gotten out of there with minimum casualties.

36:25Because, believe me, when tanks came into an outfit, the gooks hauled tail because they got shot up or something was going to give. Thank you.