Goodbye, Darkness

  COPYRIGHT © 1979, 1980 BY WILLIAM MANCHESTER

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. EXCEPT AS PERMITTED UNDER THE U.S. COPYRIGHT ACT OF 1976, NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION MAY BE REPRODUCED, DISTRIBUTED, OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS, OR STORED IN A DATABASE OR RETRIEVAL SYSTEM, WITHOUT THE PRIOR WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER.

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  First eBook Edition: April 2002

  Lines from “We'll Build a Bungalow” by Betty Bryant Mayhams and Norris the Troubadour, copyright Robert Mellin Music Publishing Corp. Used by permission.

  Lines from “On the Sunny Side of the Street” by Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh, copyright 1930 by Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., Inc., copyright renewed 1957 and assigned to Shapiro, Bernstein&Co., Inc. Used by permission.

  Photographs on pages 2, 8, 14, 158, 214, 348, and 392, U.S. Marine Corps photos; page 118, Mark Kauffman, copyright 1951 by Time Inc.; page 36, U.S. Navy photo; page 54, United Press International; page 76, J. R. Eyerman, © 1980 by Time Inc.; page 190, Bruce Adams; page 254, 7th AAF; page 304, U.S. Army photo; page 323, Robin Moyer; page 394, © 1980 by George Silk. All other photographs are courtesy of William Manchester.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-05463-8

  Route March

  Illustrations

  PREAMBLE: Blood That Never Dried

  PROLOGUE: The Wind-Grieved Ghost

  ABLE: From the Argonne to Pearl Harbor

  BAKER: Arizona,I Remember You

  CHARLIE: Ghastly Remnants of Its Last Gaunt Garrison

  DOG: The Rim of Darkness

  EASY: The Raggedy Ass Marines

  FOX: The Canal

  GEORGE: Les Braves Gens

  HOW: We Are Living Very Fast

  ITEM: I Will Lay Me Down for to Bleed a While …

  JIG: …Then I'll Rise and Fight with You Again

  Author's Note

  Acclaim for William Manchester's

  GOODBYE, DARKNESS

  A MEMOIR OF THE PACIFIC WAR

  “Never have the fighting men been better caught in their talk, fear, pride, misery, pain, anguish. Never have the savagery, madness, ferocity, violence, guts, crud, gristle, and gore of war been better put down on paper. … Goodbye, Darkness belongs with the best war memoirs ever written.”

  — Los Angeles Times

  “A storyteller of uncommon gifts and imagination. … The reviewer is hard put to describe this intelligent, beautifully crafted but complicated work in a nutshell.”

  — Clay Blair, Chicago Tribune

  “Unforgettable. … A deeply felt attempt to exorcise ghosts and reclaim the integrity of the spirit. … A page-turner that is raunchy and moving by turns and very well written.”

  — Publishers Weekly

  “A very moving account. … Manchester's war wasn't subtle. His memoir is powerful, painful.”

  — People

  “Masterful.”

  — Seattle Times

  “Weaving recollection with research, Manchester lets the war unfold like memory itself, in concentric circles rising from the subjective sensations to historic events. The sensations dominate, especially those of terror, loss, revulsion, remorse, and, beneath them all, love, the unchosen love shared by fighting men amid the horror and sacrifice of honorable war.”

  —J.S. Allen, Saturday Review

  “An extremely personal memoir of World War II that will appeal to persons with traditional values and with which many veterans will be able to identify. It should also be interesting to young people seeking to understand the patriotic fervor that once was not only accepted but expected from Americans of all ages. … Manchester neither preaches nor apologizes as he presents a graphic picture of the war and of the young men who fought and died.”

  — James Simon, Library Journal

  “A compelling account of the war in the Pacific: its strategy, geography, tactics, fighting, its leaders. … No one has looked it over from so many merging or intersecting perspectives. … The campaigns for Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan and Tinian, Guam, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa — gory, in no way understated, movingly rendered and authentic.”

  — Washington Post Book World

  “This is the most moving memoir of combat in World War II that I have read. Manchester has done for that greatest of conflicts what the English poet Siegfried Sassoon did for the First World War; brought home the misery and horror of combat and what it is like to fight and be wounded and die in hell and confusion and blood of modern battle. It is a testimony to the fortitude of man. This is quite different from the other books that Manchester has written. It is very personal: a quest to find what he has lost as a youth during the fighting in the Pacific and to come to terms with that young man who slogged it out as a foot soldier in the Marines. It is a gripping, haunting book.”

  — William L. Shirer

  Books by William Manchester

  BIOGRAPHY

  American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880–1964

  Disturber of the Peace: The Life of H. L. Mencken

  The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill; Visions of Glory:

  1874–1932

  The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill; Alone: 1932–1940

  One Brief Shining Moment: Remembering Kennedy

  Portrait of a President: John F. Kennedy in Profile

  A Rockefeller Family Portrait: From John D. to Nelson

  HISTORY

  The Arms of Krupp, 1587–1968

  The Death of a President: November 20-November 25, 1963

  The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932–1972

  A World Lit Only by Fire. The Medieval Mind and the

  Renaissance: Portrait of An Age

  ESSAYS

  Controversy: And Other Essays in Journalism, 1950–1975

  In Our Time: The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers

  FICTION

  The City of Anger

  The Long Gainer

  Shadow of the Monsoon

  DIVERSION

  Beard the Lion

  MEMOIRS

  Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War

  The author in 1945

  To Robert E. Manchester Brother and Brother Marine

  Your old men shall dream dreams,

  your young men shall see visions.

  — Joel 2:28

  War, which was cruel and glorious,

  Has become cruel and sordid.

  — Winston Churchill

  But we … shall be remembered:

  We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

  For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

  Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,

  This day shall gentle his condition.

  — Henry V, Act IV, Scene iii

  Illustrations

  The author, 1945 frontispiece

  Lance Corporal William Manchester, Sr. 17

  Malinta Tunnel, Corregidor 66

  Red Beach, Guadalcanal 172

  The Ilu, Guadalcanal 185

  Bloody Ridge, Guadalcanal 190

  Sergeant Major Vouza 204

  Wading ashore at Tarawa 226

  The pier at Tarawa 226

  Enemy guns at Tarawa 227

  Suicide Cliff, Saipan 272

  Banzai Cliff, Saipan 272

  Japanese tank, Guam 299

  Cave with gun emplacement, Guam 299

  Bloody Nose Ridge, Peleliu 312

  American tank, Peleliu 319

  Japanese gun, Peleliu 321

  American monument, Peleliu 323

  Japanese monument, Pele
liu 323

  Where MacArthur came ashore, Leyte 330

  Filipino monument to MacArthur, Leyte 330

  Makati cemetery, Manila 336

  Iwo Jima 345

  The view from Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima 345

  Sugar Loaf Hill, Okinawa, then and now 392

  The author, 1979 394

  Maps

  Pearl Harbor 42

  Bataan and Corregidor 59

  New Guinea 82

  Guadalcanal 164

  Tarawa Atoll 216

  Saipan 264

  Guam 285

  Peleliu 308

  Leyte Gulf 325

  Luzon 332

  Iwo Jima 338

  Okinawa 351

  PREAMBLE

  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.

  My choices were limited. Moving inland was inconvenient; the enemy was there, too. I was on the extreme left of our perimeter, and somehow I couldn't quite see myself turning my back on the shack and fleeing through the rest of the battalion screaming, like Chicken Little, “A Jap's after me! A Jap's after me!” Of course, I could order one of my people to take out the sniper; but I played the role of the NCO in Kipling's poem who always looks after the black sheep, and if I ducked this one, they would never let me forget it. Also, I couldn't be certain that the order would be obeyed. I was a gangling, long-boned youth, wholly lacking in what the Marine Corps called “command presence” — charisma — and I led nineteen highly insubordinate men. I couldn't even be sure that Barney would budge. It is war, not politics, that makes strange bedfellows. The fact that I outranked Barney was in itself odd. He was a great blond buffalo of a youth, with stubby hair, a scraggly mustache, and a powerful build. Before the war he had swum breaststroke for Brown, and had left me far behind in two inter-collegiate meets. I valued his respect for me, which cowardice would have wiped out. So I asked him if he had any grenades. He didn't; nobody in the section did. The grenade shortage was chronic. That sterile exchange bought a little time, but every moment lengthened my odds against the Nip sharpshooter. Finally, sweating with the greatest fear I had known till then, I took a deep breath, told Barney, “Cover me,” and took off for the hut at Mach 2 speed in little bounds, zigzagging and dropping every dozen steps, remembering to roll as I dropped. I was nearly there, arrowing in, when I realized that I wasn't wearing my steel helmet. The only cover on my head was my cloth Raider cap. That was a violation of orders. I was out of uniform. I remember hoping, idiotically, that nobody would report me.

  Utterly terrified, I jolted to a stop on the threshold of the shack. I could feel a twitching in my jaw, coming and going like a winky light signaling some disorder. Various valves were opening and closing in my stomach. My mouth was dry, my legs quaking, and my eyes out of focus. Then my vision cleared. I unlocked the safety of my Colt, kicked the door with my right foot, and leapt inside.

  My horror returned. I was in an empty room. There was another door opposite the one I had unhinged, which meant another room, which meant the sniper was in there — and had been warned by the crash of the outer door. But I had committed myself. Flight was impossible now. So I smashed into the other room and saw him as a blur to my right. I wheeled that way, crouched, gripped the pistol butt in both hands, and fired.

  Not only was he the first Japanese soldier I had ever shot at; he was the only one I had seen at close quarters. He was a robin-fat, moon-faced, roly-poly little man with his thick, stubby, trunklike legs sheathed in faded khaki puttees and the rest of him squeezed into a uniform that was much too tight. Unlike me, he was wearing a tin hat, dressed to kill. But I was quite safe from him. His Ari-saka rifle was strapped on in a sniper's harness, and though he had heard me, and was trying to turn toward me, the harness sling had him trapped. He couldn't disentangle himself from it. His eyes were rolling in panic. Realizing that he couldn't extricate his arms and defend himself, he was backing toward a corner with a curious, crablike motion.

  My first shot had missed him, embedding itself in the straw wall, but the second caught him dead-on in the femoral artery. His left thigh blossomed, swiftly turning to mush. A wave of blood gushed from the wound; then another boiled out, sheeting across his legs, pooling on the earthen floor. Mutely he looked down at it. He dipped a hand in it and listlessly smeared his cheek red. His shoulders gave a little spasmodic jerk, as though someone had whacked him on the back; then he emitted a tremendous, raspy fart, slumped down, and died. I kept firing, wasting government property.

  Already I thought I detected the dark brown effluvium of the freshly slain, a sour, pervasive emanation which is different from anything else
you have known. Yet seeing death at that range, like smelling it, requires no previous experience. You instantly recognize the spastic convulsion and the rattle, which in his case was not loud, but deprecating and conciliatory, like the manners of civilian Japanese. He continued to sink until he reached the earthen floor.

  His eyes glazed over. Almost immediately a fly landed on his left eyeball. It was joined by another. I don't know how long I stood there staring. I knew from previous combat what lay ahead for the corpse. It would swell, then bloat, bursting out of the uniform. Then the face would turn from yellow to red, to purple, to green, to black. My father's account of the Argonne had omitted certain vital facts. A feeling of disgust and self-hatred clotted darkly in my throat, gagging me.

  Jerking my head to shake off the stupor, I slipped a new, fully loaded magazine into the butt of my .45. Then I began to tremble, and next to shake, all over. I sobbed, in a voice still grainy with fear: “I'm sorry.” Then I threw up all over myself. I recognized the half-digested C-ration beans dribbling down my front, smelled the vomit above the cordite. At the same time I noticed another odor; I had urinated in my skivvies. I pondered fleetingly why our excretions become so loathsome the instant they leave the body. Then Barney burst in on me, his carbine at the ready, his face gray, as though he, not I, had just become a partner in the firm of death. He ran over to the Nip's body, grabbed its stacking swivel — its neck — and let go, satisfied that it was a cadaver. I marveled at his courage; I couldn't have taken a step toward that corner. He approached me and then backed away, in revulsion, from my foul stench. He said: “Slim, you stink.” I said nothing. I knew I had become a thing of tears and twitchings and dirtied pants. I remember wondering dumbly: Is this what they mean by “conspicuous gallantry”?

  PROLOGUE

  The Wind-Grieved Ghost

  The dreams started after i flung my pistol into the connect-icut River. It was mine to fling: I was, I suppose, the only World War II Marine who had had to buy his own weapon. My .45 was stolen and hidden by a demented corporal the day before we shoved off for Okinawa, and the battalion commander regretfully told me that there was no provision for such a crisis. He promised me the rifle of the first man to fall on the beach. Somehow unreassured, I bought a Colt from a supply sergeant who would never be close enough to the front line even to hear the artillery. The transaction was illegal, of course, but I had a receipt for thirty-five dollars, and afterward I kept the gun. It lay, unloaded and uncleaned, in the back of a file cabinet for twenty-three years, until Bob Kennedy was killed. Then, on impulse, in a revulsion against all weapons, I threw it away. That, I thought, severed my last link with the war. Kilroy, for me, was no longer there.