I recently finished (again) E.B.Sledge's WITH THE OLD BREED, which is a book by a man who was a USMC assistant motarman with 1st Mar Div, K/3/5 on Peleiu and Okinawa. The book has been on the USMC reading list for years, and is considered perhaps THE most telling and exact description of WWII Pacific ground combat from the perspective of a front line combat Marine. I have read this book about 5 times.

Last night I finished SEA OF THUNDER, by Evan Thomas. This book is about the last great ship-to-ship sea battle of the Pacific War at Leyte Gulf. The story is told from the perspective of four senior naval commanders, two Japanese and two American.

Reading these books back to back paints a sharp contrast between the two perspectives of war fighting; one at arms length from the enemy, and one from a shipboard combat information center or rear area HQ.

Every nation needs educated, trained and experienced flag officers with the will and courage to order subordinates to their deaths. And every nation certainly needs men willing to follow those orders. But who are the heros?

Generals and admirals are commanders by law. Some become leaders by character, skill and ability. But can a flag officer, in modern warfare really be a hero? Frankly, I've never understood the public's willingness to grant celebrity and even hero status to these men, as great a leader as some may have been.

Conversely, I can't imagine what it must have been like to hit the beach at Omaha or Iwo Jima, or to face the Russians on the Eastern front in 1944, or wait in a bunker as thousands of Marines swarm toward you.

It will always be the GI Joe, sailor, or Mac Marine--from the professional militaries of any nation--for whom I have the greatest respect. God Bless them all.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=XpgPOSg2wBo&feature=PlayList...7FC0D065F1B4&index=6

Boots on the ground.

quote:

Generals and admirals are commanders by law. Some become leaders by character, skill and ability. But can a flag officer, in modern warfare really be a hero? Frankly, I've never understood the public's willingness to grant celebrity and even hero status to these men, as great a leader as some may have been.

Conversely, I can't imagine what it must have been like to hit the beach at Omaha or Iwo Jima, or to face the Russians on the Eastern front in 1944, or wait in a bunker as thousands of Marines swarm toward you.

There were 2 US Marines in my family. Between them they participated in 4 of the 6 worst battles of the Pacific war. I don't think it is possible to imagine what it is like to have gone through that. I also cannot imagine what it is like to be a man of conscience and order thousands of young men to their deaths.

I have probably read more than 100 books about the Pacific war. Most were informative but were written by historians and used second and third hand information. As such the accounts are much like reading the moves in a chess game. However E B Sledge's book and William Manchester's "Goodbye Darkness" are first hand accounts of the hideous reality of war.

Here is a short excerpt from "Goodbye Darkness".
In this bood Manchester goes back to visit many of the islands in the Pacific. He recounts some of the campaigns that he did not participate in. He also describes some of his own experiences including dealing with a serious head wound.


Blood That Never Dried

Our Boeing 747 has been fleeing westward from darkened California, racing across the Pacific toward the sun, the incandescent eye of God, but slowly, three hours later than West Coast time, twilight gathers outside, veil upon lilac veil. This is what the French call l'heure bleue. Aquamarine becomes turquoise; turquoise, lavendar; lavendar, violet; violet, magenta; magenta, mulberry. Seen through my cocktail glass, the light fades as it deepens; it becomes opalescent, crepuscular. In the last waning moments of the day I can still feel the failing sunlight on my cheek, taste it in my martini. The plane rises before a spindrift; the darkening sky, broken by clouds like combers, boils and foams overhead. Then the whole weight of evening falls upon me. Old memories, phantoms repressed for more than a third of a century, begin to stir. I can almost hear the rhythm of surf on distant snow-white beaches. I have another drink, and then I learn, for the hundredth time, that you can't drown your troubles, not the real ones, because if they are real they can swim. One of my worst recollections, one I had buried in my deepest memory bank long ago, comes back with a clarity so blinding that I surge forward against the seat belt, appalled by it, filled with remorse and shame.

I am remembering the first man I slew.


There was this little hut on Motobu, perched atop a low rise overlooking the East China Sea. It was a fisherman's shack, so ordinary that scarcely anyone had noticed it. I did. I noticed it because I happened to glance in that direction at a crucial moment. The hut lay between us and B Company of the First Battalion. Word had been passed that that company had been taking sniper losses. They thought the sharpshooters were in spider holes, Jap foxholes, but as I was looking that way, I saw two B Company guys drop, and from the angle of their fall I knew the firing had to come from a window on the other side of that hut. At the same time, I saw that the shack had windows on our side, which meant that once the rifleman had B Company pinned down, he could turn toward us. I was dug in with Barney Cobb. We had excellent defilade ahead and the Twenty-second Marines on our right flank, but we had no protection from the hut, and our hole wasn't deep enough to let us sweat it out. Every time I glanced at that shack I was looking into the empty eye socket of death.

The situation was as clear as the deduction from a euclidean theorem, but my psychological state was extremely complicated. S. L. A. Marshall once observed that the typical fighting man is often at a disadvantage because he "comes from a civilization in which aggression, connected with the taking of life, is prohibited and unacceptable."This was especially true of me, whose horror of violence had been so deep-seated that I had been unable to trade punches with other boys. But since then life had become cheaper to me. "Two thousand pounds of education drops to a ten rupee," wrote Kipling of the fighting on India's North-West Frontier. My plight was not unlike that described by the famous sign in the Paris zoo: "Warning: this animal is vicious; when attacked, it defends itself." I was responding to a basic biological principle first set down by the German zoologist Heini Hediger in his Skizzen zu einer Tierpsychologie um und im Zirkus. Hediger noted that beyond a certain distance, which varies from one species to another, an animal will retreat, while within it, it will attack. He called these "flight distance" and "critical distance." Obviously I was within critical distance of the hut. It was time to bar the bridge, stick a finger in the dike—to do something. I could be quick or I could be dead.

You might be interested to know that GI Joe was also a Marine....named Mitchell Paigeetal or Paige.

It has been written that the high water mark of the Japanese empire stopped at his position.

At Ishurava?

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Originally posted by Sambar 9.3:
At Ishurava?

The Kokoda Track is your country's proud history.

Mitchell Paige was on Guadalcanal.

Yep. Certainly downhill for the 'Greater South East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere' after that one...

A few years ago I ran into a fellow called Buell. It seems he was a part of the 'Cactus Air Force' for a while. Told a few interesting stories about flying down 'The Slot'.
Said that one night, there was supposed to be a determined ground attack to destroy the planes on the ground.
Seems that Edson had an idea for the defence of the airframes.
No gunfire from the strip all night, but in the morning there were about 30 dead japs.
Edson had simply put a Raider in each of the airplanes cockpits, with a knife and pistol.

If it's true, then that's pretty effective...

in the cockpit? I doubt it.

It would seem so Ed.
Hey, it's his story, but if I had to disable a plane in a hurry with just the basic stuff a grunt carries, I'd stick a grenade or charge in the cockpit. It might not wreck it, but it sure as hell wouldn't be flying the next day...

Story makes sense to me.
Just my $0.02 worth, adjusted for inflation...

quote:

Originally posted by Sambar 9.3:
Yep. Certainly downhill for the 'Greater South East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere' after that one...

A few years ago I ran into a fellow called Buell. It seems he was a part of the 'Cactus Air Force' for a while. Told a few interesting stories about flying down 'The Slot'.
Said that one night, there was supposed to be a determined ground attack to destroy the planes on the ground.
Seems that Edson had an idea for the defence of the airframes.
No gunfire from the strip all night, but in the morning there were about 30 dead japs.
Edson had simply put a Raider in each of the airplanes cockpits, with a knife and pistol.

If it's true, then that's pretty effective...

From what I have read, a lot of the maintenance of the aircraft went on at night so they could be flown during the day. I am sure the ground crews would have butchered anyone that attempted to destroy the planes.

Here is the scenario.
Your country gets bombed and loses a large part of it's navy. You join the USMC to get back at the bastards. You go through all the Marine training. You get sent to a hot, humid, stinking island infested with poisonous snakes, bugs and a dozen different tropical diseases.
Then the Jap Navy attacks and destroys a large part of the cruiser fleet and chases off the transports. You sleep in the mud if you get to sleep, you get malaria and jungle rot, you get shot at all night and you live on Spam for months. If the enemy gets even remotely in the vicinity of your aircraft payback is going to be hell.