‘You make it seem simple.’
‘It is,’ said Woody.
In the early hours of the morning on 1 November, Chuck and Eddie ate a steak breakfast with the US Marine 3rd Division just off the South Sea island of Bougainville.
The island was about 125 miles long. It had two Japanese naval air bases, one in the north and one in the south. The marines were getting ready to land halfway along the lightly defended west coast. Their object was to establish a beachhead and win enough territory to build an airstrip from which to launch attacks on the Japanese bases.
Chuck was on deck at twenty-six minutes past seven when marines in helmets and backpacks began to swarm down the rope nets hanging over the sides of the ship and jump into high-sided landing craft. With them were a small number of war dogs, Dobermann Pinschers that made tireless sentries.
As the boats approached land, Chuck could already see a flaw in the map he had prepared. Tall waves crashed on to a steeply sloping beach. As he watched, a boat turned sideways to the waves and capsized. The marines swam for shore.
‘We have to show surf conditions,’ Chuck said to Eddie, who was standing beside him on the deck.
‘How do we find them out?’
‘Reconnaissance aircraft will have to fly low enough for whitecaps to register on their photographs.’
‘They can’t risk coming that low when there are enemy air bases so close.’
Eddie was right. But there had to be a solution. Chuck filed it away as the first question to be considered as a result of this mission.
For this landing they had benefited from more information than usual. As well as the normal unreliable maps and hard-to-decipher aerial photographs, they had a report from a reconnaissance team landed by submarine six weeks earlier. The team had identified twelve beaches suitable for landing along a four- mile stretch of coast. But they had not warned of the surf. Perhaps it was not so high that day.
In other respects, Chuck’s map was right, so far. There was a sandy beach about a hundred yards wide, then a tangle of palm trees and other vegetation. Just beyond the brush line, according to the map, there should be a swamp.
The coast was not completely undefended. Chuck heard the roar of artillery fire, and a shell landed in the shallows. It did no harm, but the gunner’s aim would improve. The marines were galvanized with a new urgency as they leaped from the landing craft to the beach and ran for the brush line.
Chuck was glad he had decided to come. He had never been careless or slack about his maps, but it was salutary to see first-hand how correct mapping could save men’s lives, and how the smallest errors could be deadly. Even before they embarked, he and Eddie had become a lot more demanding. They asked for blurred photographs to be taken again, they interrogated reconnaissance parties by phone, and they cabled all over the world for better charts.
He was glad for another reason. He was at sea, which he loved. He was on a ship with seven hundred young men, and he relished the camaraderie, the jokes, the songs, and the intimacy of crowded berths and shared showers. ‘It’s like being a straight guy in a girls’ boarding school,’ he said to Eddie one evening.
‘Except that that never happens, and this does,’ Eddie said. He felt the same as Chuck. They loved each other, but they did not mind looking at naked sailors.
Now all seven hundred marines were getting off the ship and on to land as fast as they could. The same was happening at eight other locations along this stretch of coast. As soon as a landing craft emptied out, it lost no time in turning around and coming back for more; but the process still seemed desperately slow.
The Japanese artillery gunner, hidden somewhere in the jungle, found his range at last, and to Chuck’s shock a well-aimed shell exploded in a knot of marines, sending men and rifles and body parts flying through the air to litter the beach and stain the sand red.
Chuck was staring in horror at the carnage when he heard the roar of a plane, and looked up to see a Japanese Zero flying low, following the coast. The red suns painted on the wings struck fear into his heart. Last time he saw that sight had been at the Battle of Midway.
The Zero strafed the beach. Marines who were in the process of disembarking from landing craft were caught defenceless. Some threw themselves flat in the shallows, some tried to get behind the hull of the boat, some ran for the jungle. For a few seconds blood spurted and men fell.
Then the plane was gone, leaving the beach scattered with American dead.
Chuck heard it open up a moment later, strafing the next beach.
It would be back.
There were supposed to be US planes in attendance, but he could not see any. Air support was never where you wanted it to be, which was directly above your head.
When all the marines were ashore, alive and dead, the boats transported medics and stretcher parties to the beach. Then they began landing supplies: ammunition, drinking water, food, drugs and dressings. On the return trip the landing craft brought the wounded back to the ship.
Chuck and Eddie, as non-essential personnel, went ashore with the supplies.
The boat skippers had got used to the swell now, and their craft held a stable position, with its ramp on the sand and the waves breaking on its stern, while the boxes were unloaded and Chuck and Eddie jumped into the surf to wade to shore.
They reached the waterline together.
