7 Mar 2020

Norman Mailer’s Audacious Big Novel

by | posted in: Good Reads: Fiction, WWII, WWII: Pacific Theater | 0

Silly or serious?

Silly and serious?

The fight over American Dirt can seem either or both.

“Mexicans have been writing about the border and borderlands published in English since the 1800s. It is a bit insulting that someone thinks we need them to tell our story,” said one professor of Latinx literature [Campos]. I’m not sure that’s what the author, Jeanine Cummins, was trying to do. But she did respond to such criticism, saying, “I endeavored to be incredibly culturally sensitive. I did the work. I did five years of research. The whole intention in my heart when I wrote this book was to try to upend the traditional stereotypes that I saw being very prevalent in our national dialogue.” [Campos] I guess I see the professor’s point. Another professor weighed in: “An author has to have the authority to write a book. It does not mean they have to be Mexican. It means they have to have academic, literary or personal expertise to write it.” [Campos] Exactly so.

 

I just finished reading  The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer, published long before the current blood sport of identity politics but when a brainy, talented Jewish boy could, just, storm the New York publishing world castle. How did Mailer write about war in the Pacific jungles? Where did “a tearful, bookish momma’s boy” [Lennon 17] from the Jersey shore and Brooklyn gain the academic, literary, and personal experience to write about war with authority?

The academic and literary experience are not the subject of this blog post. Mailer went to Harvard. His father was a compulsive gambler who frittered away savings and employment opportunities, but young Norman earned a scholarship and had the support of his successful Uncle David when he lost said scholarship later in his tenure. He earned his degree in engineering, though his decision to become a writer occurred early in his freshman year. (Switching majors was harder in those days.) By graduation, he had taken a full load of writing courses but only one in literature. He created his own voluminous literary syllabus, instead.

Mailer created his own independent study for “personal experience,” too. In the summer of 1941, he hit the road, in the great American tradition, hitchhiking into the South, sleeping under the stars, playing the hobo for two weeks. He took extensive notes in his journal, as he had been since his first year in Harvard. The next summer, he worked in the Boston State Hospital, also known as the asylum. He assuaged his (Jewish) mother’s fears by telling her the patients were mostly shell-shocked veterans. He was gathering material for his fiction, he said. [Lennon 49] When one violent patient was, well, violently beaten by hospital attendants, Mailer had seen and gathered enough. He quit after just eight days. But the brutal scene became the basis for his first stage drama and, decades later, a novel.

By fall of 1942, Stalingrad and Guadalcanal, Hitler and Hirohito, were on everyone’s lips. Mailer knew that his number would be called sooner or later (probably sooner). He felt a responsibility to serve but also a deep interest in material gathering. He began to conceive the idea of a great war book and understood that he would need to experience the war from the inside, not just from the print on a newspaper. “I was a little frightened of going to war, and a great deal ashamed of not going to war, and terrified of my audacity in writing so ambitious a novel,” Mailer wrote many years later. [Lennon 56] Elsewhere he wrote, “While worthy young men were wondering where they could be of aid to the war effort, and practical young men were deciding which branch of the service was the surest for landing a safe commission, I was worrying darkly whether it would be more likely that a great war novel would be written about Europe or the Pacific.” [Lennon 43]

It would be the Pacific.

On December 8, 1944, after eight months of training stateside, the twenty-one-year-old Mailer shipped out from San Francisco bound for the Philippines. The Japanese Navy had already been roundly beaten at Leyte Gulf, but the invasion of Luzon, the main island, had yet to begin. Mailer put ashore at Lingayen Gulf affixed to the 112th Cavalry (now Infantry) on January 27, 1945, more than two weeks after the original landing. Mailer never used the artillery training he had received. His engineering education was squandered but his literary talents were (sort of) put to use. He typed reports telephoned in from the outlying posts for Intelligence and Operations. Far from the actual operations on the ground, he was nevertheless able to follow how they worked in concert–the big picture, so to speak, or at least bigger than most grunts could see. It enabled him to write passages such as this in his big novel:

“Powerhouse will reach you at 2330,” the General said. “You will deploy them between Paragon Red George and Paragon Red Easy at the following coordinates: 017.37–439.56, and at 018.25–440.06. …As additional support, I am going to send you a reinforced platoon from Paragon Yellow Sugar. They’re to be used for pack train and lateral communication with Paragon White Baker or Cat.” [Mailer 112]

Unfortunately–or the converse–his typing skills were not up to the job. The 130-lb. Harvard grad was told to study manuals on the reading of aerial reconnaissance photographs. Before he could put the training to use, he was assigned to build showers for officers–until he was transferred to another unit in communications, rolling out telephone wire from headquarters to the outlying posts. The work took him beyond base camp into rice fields and bamboo forests and war-torn villages. He carried a carbine for encounters with the enemy and engaged in his first skirmishes. He shared it all (even the showers) with his wife of one year, Bea, in a steady stream of letters. In one he told her how his unit came across the remains of a Japanese unit. The smell was “a good deal like faeces leavened with ripe garbage.” The “ape-like charred bodies” reminded him of the victims of the Cocoanut Grove fire they had seen at the morgue in ’42. (More material gathering.) [Lennon 67] The experience would provide the basis for an important scene in the big war book he eventually wrote:

Another Japanese lay on his back a short distance away. He had a great hole in his intestines, which bunched out in a thick white cluster like the congested petals of a sea flower. The flesh of his belly was very red and his hands in their death throe had encircled the wound…. [Mailer 211]

Near the end of April, Mailer asked for a transfer to a reconnaissance platoon. He might have felt the need to gather the experience of actual combat. He might have felt a need to bolster his self-respect. He told Bea, “You’re doing something when you go out on patrol that you don’t do when you lay a mile of wire.” [Lennon 71] Over the next three months, he made twenty-five reconnaissance patrols across the Philippine countryside and into enemy territory. After his first encounter with the Japanese, while still laying wire, he had told Bea it was just a “little combat, nothing very tremendous, but still one of the three or four ‘first experiences’ a man has.” [Lennon 69] He had written what he felt was “not exactly fear–it was more, well, ‘awareness.’ But an awareness so acute that it approached pain and fear.” [Lennon 70] He drew on this emotional authority many times when writing about the characters in his war novel:

Croft’s mouth tightened. His hand felt for the bolt of the machine gun…. Croft swallowed once. Tiny charges seemed to pulse through his limbs and his head was as empty and shockingly aware as if it had been plunged into a pail of freezing water. [Mailer 148-149]

He drew, too, on the exhaustion he experienced climbing mountains and bushwhacking through jungles. To Bea, again: “You can never plumb the last agony of exertion, there seems always a worse one beneath it.” [Lennon 73] And in The Naked and the Dead:

They were merely envelopes of suffering. They had forgotten about the patrol, about the war, their past, they had even forgotten the earth they had just climbed. [Mailer 658]

Growing up in Brooklyn, a scrawny, brainy Jew among street-tough Irish kids, Mailer expected to be beat up almost any time he stepped outdoors. The situation, he said, made him “always terribly alert to the outside world. I took the inside world for granted. And I was free to indulge myself to….” [Lennon 17] Mailer carried this attitude into the Army, where he was always The Good Private, a “detached, quiet observer,” according to Mailer biographer, J. Michael Lennon. [Lennon 61] This did not mean he stayed aloof from his fellow men in arms. He chatted up as many of them as he could, always on the lookout for character, for background stories.

Over months, the personalities he met combined and converted and coalesced into a cast of characters for his novel. Fourteen enlisted men and three officers all became primary characters in his novel. Big book, indeed. Lennon tells us that the Southern “cracker” Wilson was based on Mailer’s closest army buddy, Fig, a white Southerner with no college but a passion for books. The fictional General Cummings was based on General Julian Cunningham, Red Valsen on the actual Red Matthiessen, fictional Julio Martinez on Ysidro Martinez, Roy Gallagher on, well, Roy Gallagher. Mailer really stretched when he made Isadore Feldman into the character of Joey Goldstein. Lennon says that Mailer’s Platoon Lieutenant Horton may have served as the model for the novel’s “titular hero,” Robert Hearn. His Platoon Sergeant Donald Mann certainly did as the model for its “secret hero” Sam Croft. “Obviously, he combined some characters and sculpted the personalities of others. But he began with real soldiers,” writes Lennon. [Lennon 76]

The Good Private could not maintain his detachment his entire tour of duty. In the spring of 1946, cooking now for the occupying troops in Japan, he lost his cool at a mess sergeant. The indignities of Army protocol had finally become  too much to bear. He called the head mess sergeant a “chickenshit son-of-a-bitch.” [Lennon 83] The next day he was forced to apologize by a superior and stripped of the sergeant stripes he had recently been awarded. The experience left him with a hatred deeper than any he had yet known–and one from which he  made fictional hay in his big war novel.

For almost an hour [after being made to lick up the General’s tossed cigarette, Hearn] lay face down on his cot, burning with shame and self-disgust and an impossible impotent anger. He was suffering an excruciating humiliation which mocked him in its very intensity. [Mailer 326]

Interestingly, one of the strangest scenes in the book–also the funniest and the book’s climax–actually happened to Mailer. Croft is leading the platoon up the slope of Mt. Anaka against their combined wills. He is driven against all reason to reach the crest of the mountain, like Ahab in his quest for the white leviathan. As he nears the summit, doubt creeps in, and even a fear that the achievement of his goal may leave him empty. He considers stopping short and turning back. But before he can decide, the decision is made for him. He kicks a hornets’ nest the size of a football, and the giant, tropical insects chase him and his men down the mountain they just had labored so strenuously to scale. I laughed at the ridiculousness of the scene. But it actually happened to Mailer’s platoon! (The only difference was that the hornets struck the middle of the file sending front half scrambling up the mountain and the rear half scrambling down.)

Also interesting, the war scene I liked best had no basis in Mailer’s personal experience: the amphibious landing on the island of Anopopei.

At 0400, a few minutes after  the false dawn had lapsed, the naval bombardment of Anopopei began. All the guns of the invasion fleet went off within two seconds of each other, and the night rocked and shuddered like a great log foundering on the surf. The ships snapped and rolled from the discharge, lashing the water furiously. For one instant the night was jagged and immense, demoniac in its convulsion.
Then, after the first salvos, the firing became irregular, and the storm almost subsided into darkness again. The great clanging noises of the guns became isolated once more, sounded like immense freight trains jerking and tugging up a grade. And afterward it was possible to hear the sighing wistful murmur of shells passing overhead. On Anopopei the few scattered campfires were snubbed out.
The first shells landed in the sea, throwing up remote playful spurts of water, but then a string of them snapped along the beach, and occasionally a shell which carried too far would light up a few hundred feet of brush. The line of the beach became defined and twinkled like a seaport seen from a great distance late at night. [Mailer 19]

Mailer probably gleaned the details he marshalled so brilliantly in discussions with soldiers who had made such landings. That’s what he did as a novelist.

It was his greatest strength–and his greatest weakness, according to The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody. In his “mad pursuit of so-called experience,” those that he considered “literature-worthy” Mailer, in Brody’s view, missed his chance to plumb the material he knew best: Jewish Brooklyn in the 1930s. Instead, he wrote the big novel of the war and succeeded too well. “I think the book may be better than I am,” he said to his wife. [Lennon 5]

The book created a stir, but it wasn’t without its critics. Henry Luce’s Life complained that the book “seems to tell us is that such purposes as marrying and procreating and raising a family or mastering and art or a profession or building a business or beating Japan are without value to anybody now living.” [Lennon 109] The Times reviewer called it a “triumph of realism, but without the compassion which gives final authority in the realm of human conduct.” Its style, he said, “will offend many readers, although in no sense is it exaggerated: Mr. Mailer’s soldiers are real persons, speaking the vernacular of human bitterness and agony.” Marshalling all the martial metaphors at his disposal, he added, “For all its virtuosity, its deafening emotional cannonades, it is primarily a series of brilliant skirmishes; the central objective is never taken.”

 

So can a Jewish boy from Brooklyn write convincingly from the point of view of a Mexican-American sergeant, a Southern “cracker” private, a homosexual general, among many more? Mailer did so by relentlessly observing, gathering experience, and taking notes. He established his authority even while leaving the imprint of his burgeoning ego and his personal artistic intents all over the manuscript. Jeanine Cummins surely did much the same thing, though perhaps not as relentlessly as Mailer. She had the audacity to try to “upend the stereotypes in the national dialogue,” which is yet not as great as Mailer’s audacity to try to write the big novel of the biggest war of the twentieth century.

Sources:

18 Feb 2020

Robert E. Lee, Demythologized

by | posted in: Good Reads: Nonfiction | 0

Removing the statues of fallen heroes is one thing. Writing a thoroughly-researched, elegantly-written history that sets the record straight is another thing entirely. Brandon Miller’s 2019 biography of Robert E. Lee deserves praise for disentangling the man from the myth and bringing out his full humanity, both the praiseworthy and the dishonorable.

 

To begin with, Miller reminds us that “The Man” started life as a boy named, simply, Robert Lee. (The “E.” came later, as part of the hagiography.) He was an incredibly hard worker, driven to compensate for the failings of his father, both war hero and deadbeat. Miller provides illuminating details of his education at West Point, his early career in the Army Corps of Engineers, and his first battle experiences in Mexico. She shows how willing he was to undergo privation in the service of his country, yet so quick to disdain those less fortunate. Miller shares a dismissive phrase that she found more than once in the record. “They are not worth it,” he wrote, referring to Comanches or Mexicans or some other Other.

 

Miller’s section on the Civil War shows Lee at his best, though not without fallibility. The stress of war made him brittle–“Lee seldom bellowed at those around him; his anger shone forth as sarcasm, silent coldness, and a glare that chilled.”–and his military decisions were sometimes questionable. The post-war section shows Lee at his worst. It’s not just that he took stances that are objectionable to modern sensibilities. It was that he lacked the courage of intellectual honesty, falsely cloaked himself in principle, and never truly accepted responsibility for his own actions. These stances had large consequences. Robert E. Lee–both the man and the myth–gave cover to millions of Southerners who likewise shirked responsibility for decades. Knowingly or not, Lee collaborated in his own mythologization.

 

Brandon Miller has given young adult readers a mature biography that brings to life a subject who no longer convinces as a hero, a tragic figure, or even a principled statesman. To be clear, Miller is not engaged in iconoclasm, the toppling of metaphorical statues. She immersed herself in the documentary evidence and reported on what she found. It wasn’t always a pretty picture.

11 Feb 2020

Kuribayashi and Hara: Courage in Defeat

by | posted in: WWII, WWII: Pacific Theater | 0

To start with, only one lived to tell his tale. Only one could, in subsequent years, collect information from the public record and recollect his actions, thoughts, and emotions at the time. The other left only letters for a stranger from the next generation to discover and pore over, ponder and piece together into an haunting narrative for the twenty-first century. One was a captain in the Navy, remembered for numerous victories and his uncanny knack for keeping his ship afloat. The other was a general of the Army, remembered for his stalwart stand in a single, futile battle.

Yet both men shared the qualities requisite of great military leadership. They were both well-educated, perceptive, and analytical. Both were able to follow orders, as befitted a military officer, yet never blindly. Both would criticize or resist plans they thought misguided or poorly thought-out. Both demanded much of their subordinates and even more of themselves. They earned their men’s undying loyalty, as well as their willingness to die in their service.

General Tadamichi Kurabayashi’s letters from Iwo Jima to his family (and to his military superiors) served as the basis  for Kumiko Kakehashi‘s 2007 book, So Sad to Fall in Battle, which provided the inspiration for Clint Eastwood’s film, Letters from Iwo Jima, of the same year. Captain Tameichi Hara‘s memoir, Japanese Destroyer Captain, was translated into English in 1961 and annotated 1967. The resulting book gave American readers their first (I believe) comprehensive account of the Pacific War from the Japanese perspective. Though published forty years apart, the two books present a singular portrait of military leadership and honor in defeat that speaks to the ages.

Both Kurabayashi and Hara led by example. Like Rickenbacker (discussed elsewhere in this space), they never asked subordinates to do what they wouldn’t first do themselves. This was especially pronounced in Kurabayashi. On volcanic Iwo Jima, he accepted no special privileges to make the privations more bearable: no special meals with multiple plates; no extra water ration. There was virtually no fresh water on Iwo, and what little there was was salty, geothermally heated, and contaminated. Collected rain water was the main water source for Kuribayashi and his men. One canteen per soldier per day (later a half, then a quarter). Kuribayashi took no more. “To wash my face (actually I just wash my eyes), I put the tiniest drops of water in the basin,” he wrote to his wife. “After that Fujita uses it to wash, and we carefully keep whatever’s left over and use it for washing our hands in the toilet.” [28] Kuribayashi worked side-by-side with his men organizing the construction of the island’s defenses. As a commanding general he could have directed the defense from the much more habitable Chichijima nearby. He did not do so. He lived and worked on Iwo with his men the entire eight months they prepared for invasion.

Life on warships in World War II was luxurious compared to Army life in foxholes on Guadalcanal or the caves on Iwo Jima. Yet, while cruising the work was highly regimented and, when battles came, terrifyingly frantic. In the first weeks of the war, Hara was on active sortie with his men for fifty days straight. One sea battle and its aftermath required him to stay at the bridge, on his feet, for 24 hours without a break. Of those, he spent fifteen hours shouting commands every thirty seconds to keep his damaged ship on course. The sailors on Hara’s Amatsukaze, and then Shigure, knew they could count on their captain. And they made sure he could count on them. Hara respected his officers and men. He expected prompt action but not mindless obedience. In just a few months, he turned a loose affiliation of sailors into a cohesive naval unit.

Consequently, Hara was surprised when, after pulling into the Kure naval base for retooling, high command ordered most of his crew replaced. He would have to start training all over again. His task began abruptly on the very first day. He came across his new gunnery officer berating a sailor and striking him with closed fists. Hara called an end to the abuse and dismissed the sailor. Then he took the officer aside and explained his views on discipline: “Maintenance of good teamwork and proper order is not easy. But I have done it without resorting to corporal punishment. It is hard, but worthwhile. If it is too hard for you, report to me for a decision, the next time you are faced with a disciplinary situation.” [89] The officer left disgruntled, but Hara had made his first step toward building a team.

A year later, given a new ship (actually an old tub), Hara put yet another crew through the most rigorous training regimen. He withheld all praise until his men were clear on his high expectations. Then his superior suggested he give the men a movie night as a well-deserved break. Hara demurred, much to the lieutenant commander’s chagrin, and apologized, not quite according to Japanese decorum: “I feel sorry for you, Skipper, having to put up with a son of a bitch like me….” [167] He might as well have been speaking to the crew, who resented the tireless drilling. But after six weeks under his guidance, Hara was confident he “had transformed Shigure‘s sloppy, dispirited crew into a snappy, hard-working team.” [169]

Kuribayashi’s drive earned him early resentment, too, before earning him ultimate respect and loyalty. Some subordinates described his as a “stickler for details,” “aggressive and imperious” in his attitude, and “having too much confidence in his own abilities.” [62] He drove the men like beasts of burden, so intent was he on being prepared for the inevitable invasion. He had them digging scores of defensive installations, fifteen-to-twenty feet below the surface of the volcanic tuff. “We came here to make war, not dig holes,” grumbled both officers and men. [68] In the end, they dug hundreds of bunkers and a dozen miles of tunnels connecting them. In the final months of their lives, these men enjoyed no entertainment, no whiskey, no women. (Unlike other generals, Kuribayashi allowed no “comfort women” for his men.) Yet the general would slip cigarettes into their pockets, gifts “from the Emperor, originally intended for him but which he chose to share with them. By the time the Americans arrived on February 19, 1945, seventy percent of the planned fortifications had been completed–and every one of twenty thousand officers and men were willing to give their lives fighting for their commander.

Kuribayashi’s defense of Iwo Jima was unyielding but also unorthodox. Until August 1944, Japanese doctrine dictated island defense begin at the shoreline. A month earlier, after inspecting every square foot of ground on Iwo, Kuribayashi had already discarded it on his own. He and his men would allow U. S. Marines to come ashore unopposed and mount his defense only after they were massed on the beaches. His troops would defend the island from defensive installations inland. Only by doing so, could they extend the battle and impose maximum cost on the enemy. Victory was not Kuribayashi’s objective, but in prolonging the fight he and his men might push back the date of the fire-bombing of Tokyo. “Exacting the maximum bloodshed from the US forces on Iwo Jima would work to Japan’s advantage in negotiating an end to the war,” he explained to one of his superiors. [45]

Navy officials were furious when they heard his plans. Iwo Jima was their “unsinkable aircraft carrier” capable of sending planes into the air in defense of the Imperial Navy’s ships–never mind that hardly a dozen planes still operated from its three air fields. Ever the good soldier, Kuribayashi assigned part of his men to build pillboxes on the beaches. They would serve as decoys…and would be obliterated in the two-month bombardment that preceded the invasion. “Precise in observation and bold in action,” according to at least one comrade, Kuribayashi was determined to give his men the best possible chance–not for victory, but to not die in vain. [61]

Captain Hara was equally observant, analytical, and bold. Even before the war, he noticed that training torpedoes missed their targets more often than chance would indicate, if Japanese torpedo “doctrine” were correct. Hara studied the matter systematically and developed a new theory, highly technical, that the Imperial Navy later adopted. Time and again in his memoir, he describes himself thinking outside the box, devising a novel tactic for a unique situation. His idea to induce an engine explosion and thereby convince his attackers he had been struck, came on the spur of the moment. It saved his ship and the lives of his men. Likewise his response to Allied “skip-bombing” came to him at the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour–though the problem had been haunting him for months. Intuitiveness enhanced his analytic strengths.

Hara’s innate critical ability led him to enumerate the “blunders” of the Imperial Navy and of himself. He was continually shocked by how uninterested his superiors were in his experience and in his analysis. Indeed, he found their lack of curiosity disturbing, their myopia and mulishness astounding. Composing his book fifteen years after the fact, Hara had the benefit of hindsight and a wealth of documentary evidence with which to make the revisionist case. We don’t know if he were as convinced in his views at the time, in the frenzy of war. Yet Hara is unstinting in sharing his own “blunders” during the war. Indeed, the honesty and modesty of his tone are the most appealing aspects of his writing.

Kuribayashi, too, wrote refreshingly directly, in letters to his wife and children. He recounted his dreams (the kind that enlivened his sleep), responded openly to the subjects of their own letters, shared the details of his discomforts and privations, and yet expressed the joy he was able to find in being alive each day, not thinking about tomorrow. “I want so badly for all of you to be able to live long and happy lives,” he told his wife, Yoshii, more than once. [80] There is so achingly much behind that simple plea.

Kuribayashi did not shrink from speaking truth (his understanding of it) to power. “America is the last country in the world Japan should fight,” he said after a two-year tour of research in the United States for the military. [106] To an Iwo Jima civilian who asked if he would give the Americans “a good thrashing,” Kuribayashi broke all decorum when he replied, “We just haven’t the strength for that. …with things the way they are, there’s just nothing we can do.” [35] In his second month on Iwo Jima, he wrote a report to Imperial General Headquarters, asking that they “urgently appraise the fighting power of the United States, and make efforts to conclude peace after the fall of Saipan.” [44] Most famously, in his final telegram (an expectation of all Japanese commanders facing annihilation), he again shattered expectation, confessing:

…the gallant fighting of the men under my command has been such that even gods would weep. …they have continued to fight bravely though utterly empty-handed and ill-equipped against a land, sea, and air attack of a material superiority such as surpasses the imagination.

These words were “tantamount to whining,” says Kakehashi, and unbecoming an officer and commander. [xx] The offending phrases were changed or omitted in the version published in the newspapers. And it was that very discrepancy that drove Kakehashi’s years-long inquiry…which resulted in her book…which led  to Clint Eastwood‘s award-winning film.

It is the futility of the Kuribayashi’s mission that makes her book–and Hara’s, too–so powerful. “History is written by the winners,” we are taught. But these books are history as told by the losers. They are by and about men who not only were defeated, but saw defeat coming at them from a distance and could do nothing to stop it. They had their ideas to prevent it, but they were cogs in a great (if collapsing) military machine. They had orders to follow. They chose to follow orders they knew were misguided and accepted them with resignation and grace.

But always with a fighting spirit.

The man who never asked his men to do anything he wouldn’t do first, who questioned the value of sacrificing 20,000 soldiers for Iwo Jima, who wrote to his wife, philosophically, “I am past caring about myself and am ready, no matter what,” was yet the same man who wrote up a list of six Courageous Battle Vows that sound as fanatical as any kamikaze pledge we might imagine. Vow no. 2: “We  shall fling ourselves against the enemy, dashing in among them to kill them.” Those are the words of the thoughtful Kurabayashi? No. 5: “We shall not die until we have killed ten of the enemy.” He believed this stuff? “We shall continue to harass the enemy with guerilla tactics even if only one of us remains alive.” Really?

Significantly, Hara indulged in similar language as the noose began to tighten around his neck. Iwo Jima did, in fact, fall, and Okinawa became the final line in the sand (though everyone had to know its fate would be no different). Hara was asked to lead a one-way kamikaze surface fleet attack, but he saw no purpose in it other than suicide and said so. The other captains in the fleet spoke up in agreement. They were over-ruled by high command. Hara gathered his men and explained their task. “Our mission appears suicidal and it is,” he began. “But I wish to emphasize that suicide is not the objective. The objective is victory. You are not sheep whipped to a sacrificial altar. We are lions released in the arena, to devour the enemy gladiators.” [269] These words did not sound like the Hara we had come to know for 250 pages and three years of war.  Then the Hara we know resurfaces. “Do not hesitate to come back alive. …You must not give away your lives cheaply. You are not to commit suicide. You are to beat the enemy!” [270] Perhaps he did not really believe the last injunction, but sensed it was necessary to make the previous three acceptable. Then he became more philosophical, quoting from the Code of Bushido, “A warrior lives in such a way that he is always prepared to die. It does not mean that a warrior must commit suicide for some slight reason. It means that we live so that we shall have no regrets when we must die.” [271]

For twelve glorious minutes, Hara was in a sea battle high. As the American bombers circled and dove, he dodged and weaved and thrilled to the fight. But then something happened so unprecedented as almost to offend Hara. His ship took a torpedo to the hull. Suddenly, he was dead in the water, a commander with his hands tied behind his back. Bombs rained down on the deck, bodies blew up in the air, while he remained untouched. He abandoned the bridge only when the water rose to his knees. The ship’s suction pulled him under, and he believed he was dying. “I resisted and struggled, but the sucking whirlpool of a sinking ship is irresistible. I gave up and passed out, accepting death.” [282] To his credit, Hara was grateful when members of the only surviving Japanese ship rescued him among the survivors. He was happy to be alive, even in defeat.

For Kurabayashi, defeat, in its common understanding, was inevitable. Death was unavoidable. And yet, defeat, as he defined it, was never an option. The lives of 20,000 men would not, could not, be in vain. Kuribayashi willed himself to believe that their inland defense with Six Courageous Vows would save lives on the Home Islands, would bring a negotiated peace with at least a modicum of honor for the Empire. Like Hara, Kuibayashi steadfastly refused to allow his men to sacrifice their lives in a meaningless banzai charge, as was becoming commonplace in the Pacific. Nor would he or his adjutants commit ritualized suicide, hara-kiri, as prescribed by tradition. His island defenders would take as many Americans with them as they possibly could. Indeed, they took 25,000 American casualties (7,000 killed), in their fight to the death. Flags of Our Fathers author James Bradley said Kuribayashi was “the man America respected the most because he made them suffer the most.” [47]

A month into the siege of their underground, tunneled fortress, Kurabayashi was finally ready to make their last stand. They were reduced to a few hundred souls in an area less than a tenth of a mile square. The dearth of food and water had become untenable. The shortfall of ammunition had reduced their armaments to knives and grenades. Kuribayashi called his officers together and told them to burn their insignia of rank and all important papers. He gave each a cup of sake and two cigarettes (from the Emperor) and spoke: “With things as they are, each one of you must kill one hundred–there is nothing else for it.” [189]

Then an interesting thing happened. The commander dithered. He was ready to die, but, like the rest of us, perhaps, not quite yet. Eight days passed: more assaults from the Americans repulsed by the holed-up Japanese. Kakehashi argues that Kuribayashi did not deem the situation suitable for a final charge that would not be merely suicidal. (I admit the distinction is too fine a one for me to discern.) But on March 25, the American assault slackened, and Kuribayashi delivered his final, final speech: “The glorious exploits that you have carried out will never be forgotten. …Be easy in your minds and sacrifice yourself for your country.” [194] The attack that followed in the early morning of March 26, according to the official US Marine Corps History, “was not a banzai charge, but an excellent plan aiming to cause maximum confusion and destruction.” [195] Was their sacrifice “meaningful” in any meaningful way? And what of the 170 U.S. casualties that day?

Nevertheless, it is hard not to admire Kuribayashi as both principled and a hard-nosed realist. And Hara, too. They fought as hard as they could, enlisting all of their perspicacity and skill, in the aid of their nation’s cause, even when they disagreed with its tactics and strategy. Both men, in similar–and different–ways, loved life, but were willing to sacrifice their own in defense of their countrymen’s. Kuribayashi’s words ring loudest today, three quarters of a century later:

Unable to complete this heavy task for our country
Arrows and bullets all spent, so sad we fall. [Kakehashi 186]

 

Sources:

29 Jan 2020

Grenade

by | posted in: Good Reads: Fiction, WWII, WWII: Pacific Theater | 0

D-Day: Love Day. Also, Easter Sunday and April Fool’s Day, 1945. Company E of the 1st Marines has made the landing on Okinawa unopposed. They can’t believe their good fortune: a “stay of execution,” as it were. [Sledge 187]

Making their way cautiously across the empty landscape, the men of Easy Company come across a farmhouse, abandoned by all but a single pig, snuffling in the muck. The soldiers plead with their sergeant to let them butcher it and cook it up. Countermanding his first order, the sergeant agrees. Hard Luck Lineker–so named because he took a bullet in the butt on Peleliu only to recover in time to get sent to Okinawa–scrambled over the fence to execute the pig when–Pak!–a sniper’s bullet struck him in the back. He fell face-first in the muck. Hard Luck, indeed.

Thirty pages into the novel, Grenade, and Alan Gratz had me hooked. As in vintage Larry McMurtry, a colorfully named secondary character falls victim to the blindness of chance, setting an action-packed plot in motion.

Later in the book, as the close calls and brushes with disaster build up, I wondered if perhaps the plot were too tightly packed. Were all these encounters necessary?

On close review, they almost all were–and are. Gratz’s novel is finely crafted with an impressive attention to recurring details and threaded themes.

 

Grenade is told in two voices, one Okinawan, one American. Hideki is barely fourteen (the same as Rickenbacker when he lost his father and went to work fulltime!) and a recent inductee into the Okinawan Blood and Iron Student Corps. But at his class graduation, with American ship-born bombs going off in the distance, Hideki burns “hot with shame” for feeling fear. [4] He is well acquainted with this shame, for he has been teased often by his classmates. Cowardice is his destiny, brought on by the actions of his ancestor centuries before. Shigitomo surrendered to the Japanese without a fight leaving a curse upon the first-born son of every third generation of his descendants.

Ray is old enough to be a Marine, but only barely. At eighteen, he’s as green as a leaf bud in May. Love Day, the opening of Operation Iceberg, will be his first day under fire, and he feels “weak” and “shaky” at the thought. [15] Unlike his battle-hardened comrades, Ray feels a concern for the civilian Okinawans they eventually encounter. Coming from different worlds, these two protagonists share a heightened sensitivity and an outsider point of view.

The pig incident serves other purposes besides grabbing the reader’s attention. It introduces us to actual combat–the tension, the fatal consequences, and also the sounds: Thwack! Pak! Chu-chu-chung! Chu-chu-chu-chu-chung! Pa-kow! KA-THOOM! It plays a key role in character development, too, even if indirectly. As the only farm boy in the company, Ray leads the eventual butchering of the pig and, after the meal, earns his Marine nickname: Barbecue. Moreover, when the sniper turns out to be a twelve-year-old Okinawan boy, we experience with Ray the scrambled moral calculus of this war. Who is the enemy? What is right and wrong? This surprising scene, which starts almost comically, sets in motion the unavoidable hardening of Ray’s heart. And there is more. (See below.)

“God help me, I’m getting used to it!” Ray thinks a couple chapters and several encounters with the enemy later–and soon after having killed his first man. [75] A couple chapters after that, he shoots Okinawan civilians and realizes, to his horror, through the narrator, “In just a few awful seconds, he had become the monster these people were so afraid of.” The narrator adds, in light of backstory recently revealed: “More of a monster than his father had ever been.” [101] A photo received from his mother in the previous chapter stirred memories of his father whose violent anger he was only now beginning to understand. That day his father attacked him after Ray had tried to execute the pig, the second gunshot had triggered a kind of post-traumatic flashback. If his father was a monster–and at times he was–Ray understood it was because of his experience in the First World War. Now, in the Second World War, he felt himself becoming a monster, too. The pig butchering scene becomes a rich vehicle by which Gratz tours the reader through Ray’s back story.

The climax for Ray comes in the battle of Kakazu Ridge when a group of Okinawans, hands raised, march up the slope toward E Company’s line on the ridge. Ray’s gaze focuses on the woman in a blue kimono bearing a baby in her arms–and a string of dynamite strapped around her waist. In the ensuing confusion, Ray’s unit makes a disorderly retreat. Stumbling and sliding down the ridge, Ray is a whirl of emotion: “He just knew he never wanted to see another Japanese soldier as long as he lived.” [134]

Hideki’s hardening is, understandably, slower in coming. He is younger. He flees from his unit at the first suicidal encounter with the enemy, without a proper uniform or weapon (though  he does carry two grenades, one of breakable ceramic). In his aimless flight he trips over the dead body of his schoolmaster and recovers the fallen pictures of the Emperor Principal Kojima had been trying to protect. He finds his father, sitting wounded in the family tomb, and stays by him in his death. But the truly inciting event is his slide down a mud-slicked slope into a mire of writhing maggots. Hideki is so disgusted he pulls off all his clothes in an effort to escape them. It is a shocking scene.

But not far-fetched. E. B. Sledge in his memoir of Okinawa mentions the abundance of maggots at least three times. He says, “If a marine slipped down the back slope of a muddy ridge, he was apt to reach the bottom vomiting. I saw more than one man lose his footing and slip and slide all the way to the bottom only to stand up horror-stricken as he watched in disbelief while fat maggots tumbled out of his muddy dungaree pockets, cartridge belt, legging lacings, and the like. Then he and a buddy would shake or scrape them away with a piece of ammo box or a knife blade.” [260] Hideki had neither buddy nor knife, so he stripped. In the two-and-a-half-month battle, maggots were rife because of the ubiquity of decomposing bodies swallowed by the mud. Gratz elides this graphic detail–but, after all, his is a children’s book.

In Gratz’s novel, the maggots are not used to underscore the putrid degradation of war as in Sledge’s memoir. They allow the author to have Hideki, in the next scene, be given a Japanese uniform which he will wear throughout most of the rest of the book. Thus clad, he will be seen as a Japanese combatant, however young, when he, quite literally, runs into Ray in the novel’s pivotal event. The dazed Marine cannot aim his rifle before the AWOL Blood and Iron recruit detonates his eponymous grenade. Unsure of the result, we, the readers, are forced to turn the page and enter Part Two.

Ray does not accompany us there. Hideki will be our only guide from here on out. This is shocking storytelling for a children’s book. I would love to be a fly inside young readers’ brains as they try to accommodate the sudden death of a character they have come to know intimately for 130 pages. I know I missed him desperately right away. But I am an old guy, experienced enough to take it. I read on.

Hideki still fears he is a coward, but now he is also a killer. The rest of the book traces the hardening of Hideki’s heart, followed, at the end, by its swelling with generosity and courage. The onslaught of inhuman incidents and images have led to a deepening clarity of understanding.

Hideki’s hardening starts when he meets the deranged Private Maeda, who holds him and a group of Okinawans hostage to his paranoid, erratic behavior. Hideki stands up to him using his remaining grenade to back up the threat: “I’ve killed a man. Have you?” [163] This is convincing character development.

In the exhaustion of his flight, Hideki passes out and is recovered by American medics. They give him food and water, stitch up a gash in his head and give him medicine to help him sleep. He sees the Americans at their best. Not monsters, but saviors. Maybe surrendering to them, as the propaganda leaflets prompted, would not be so bad. But Hideki has to find his sister, a nurse with the Japanese Imperial Army, and the only other member of his family still alive. She is also a yuta with powers to communicate with ghosts, who can help him escape Rei‘s mabui. He flees again.

Marching south with hordes of Okinawan refugees, he notices army boots underneath “women”‘s kimonos. If the Americans discovered the enemy hidden among civilians, they would all be in danger. Hideki abandons the road for the safety of the forest. That night, American bombers attack the road. Hideki knows innocent civilians have died along with Japanese infiltrators. But he hurries on, “his eyes dry and his heart hard.” [183] He is following the same trajectory as Ray before him.

Now he encounters the Miyagi family, hiding out in their ancestral tomb. After weeks underground, they look wasted away like ghosts. “We thought the Japanese Imperial Army would protect us,” they say, completely oblivious of Gratz’s irony. The reader is aware because Hideki has begun to realize, that Okinawa is a sute-ishi, a sacrificial stone in the game of Go. The Miyagi ask, ingenuously, “Is it true what they say? That the Americans are monsters?” Because of his encounter with the American medic, Hideki is able to say, “They’re monsters only when they’re afraid. Just like the Japanese.” [185-186] He convinces them to surrender–according to regulation–and continues on his odyssey.

Hideki stumbles upon a command post in yet another cave and–aha!–there are nurses. But none of them knows a Kimiko. The Americans have arrived and the Japanese with whom he has sought refuge will fight to the death. Hideki and Masako, the nurse he has befriended, survive the grenade blast by throwing themselves under a metal cabinet. I wasn’t quite convinced of the feasibility of such an escape, or why the event was necessary to the story. It underscores the ruthlessness of the Japanese army, perhaps. Also, the deaths of so many in his midst continues to harden him to war’s cruelty. Lastly, he develops a bond with Masako, whose role as foil is not insignificant in the story’s final scenes.

Another cave. Another command post. Another Japanese call for suicidal defense. Hideki speaks for the reader in his mind: No! Not again! But this time his bad luck merges with good fortune: He finds Kimiko! In one of the funniest–and most meaningful–scenes in the book, younger brother and older sister argue over who is saving whom. “‘You don’t have to rescue me!’ Hideki protested. ‘I’m rescuing you!'” [204] Neither one is quite right. They have to save themselves. More, they rescue a troop of Okinawan children, also caught in the war’s crossfire.

And so, another escape out the back of a cave through a secret exit, by squeezing past an unexploded bomb, the Mother of All Bombs, as it happens. Masako freezes in fear, and Hideki, fated from time immemorial to be a coward, now speaks the words of encouragement to help dispel her panic. It is a significant moment, made all the richer after Hideki achieves his escape and Masako cajoles him to use his grenade. He could use it, she says, to detonate the Mother of All Bombs and bury the cruel Japanese in their own tomb. Hideki ponders, but shakes his head. Then Masako goads, “You told me to be brave enough to slide past that beast, but you’re not brave enough to throw your grenade at it.” [216] Gratz asks us to consider again: What is bravery?

In their next trial, Hideki, Kimiko, Masako, and the children must sneak past an American machine gun nest to escape the vise of No-Man’s-Land. But how to do so without getting shot by the Americans? Will the Americans be monsters or saviors? Again, the cowardly Masako pushes Hideki to use his grenade. But after all Hideki has been through–and he has been through an awful lot!–he now knows that this is not his, not the Okinawans’, fight. “No, if we attack them,” he explains, “we’re their enemy. When they’re not under attack, when they’re not afraid, the Americans are human beings.” [228-229]

It’s time, at last, to surrender.

He follows all the guidelines he remembers reading in the propaganda leaflets–and then some. Knowing how war can turn human beings into monsters (as Ray had known before him), he instructs the children, his sister and Masako, to remove their clothes. No hidden bombs, no human shields to threaten the Americans. He remembers the nakedness he felt after his encounter with the maggots, and he knows he must feel it again here, now. He places the grenade on the ground under his helmet and walks out with his hands up, in only his underwear. “Defenseless. Exposed. Vulnerable.” [234]

The maggot scene, like larva into pupa, has fulfilled its purpose. Living through war as a civilian is to be naked and exposed. Even, young readers, far from the brutalities of war, can begin to understand that.

Oh, but Gratz is not through with us yet. A young American recruit panics in the moment and fires. An Okinawan child falls wounded. The American in charge, the big bear-man with the missing ear begins shouting in his strange language. Are they all going to die? No, the man the reader knows to be the heart-hardened Big John is berating his own private for lack of control. The reader sighs deeply, appreciating that even a hardened warrior can defend the good. Indeed, in war, only the strong, righteous soldier can ensure peace.

 

In the last chapter, Gratz finally allows his reader relief from the tension and a chance for satisfying resolution. None is more satisfying than the response his sister gives to his question, “Why do you keep looking at me like that?” “You’ve changed,” she answers. You’re more confident. Braver.” The reader knows this to be true, of course, but there is nothing so pleasurable as hearing the outspoken Kimiko say it aloud. Rarely does a character change so convincingly or as meaningfully as Hideki does in this book. Rarely does a character’s development give a young reader such hope that confidence and bravery are attainable for him, too.

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