There was little of such diversion on Saipan-Tinian. The Fourth Marine Division had already departed, sailing back to its old base on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands, and leaving the Second Marine Division sole proprietors of islands made dismal by the August monsoon and mosquitoes carrying dengue or “breakbone” fever. There were also close to 1,000 Japanese still holed up in the hills, and there were Marines being killed in cleaning them out. But for the Second’s veterans, as with those of the First Division, there was the blessed rotation system which was taking many of them home. Close to 1,300 Marines who could claim service back to Guadalcanal were shipped Stateside. Some of their comrades painted gold stars on their tents in sardonic mockery of the American penchant for taking bows. If a man’s school, church, community, club, factory or office could put his name on a plaque headed, “Our Men in Service,” why couldn’t a man’s squad commemorate his entry in the ranks of the rear- echelons? So they put up signs like this:
Back at the Second’s old Camp Tarawa in Hawaii, the new Fifth Marine Division was getting accustomed to training overseas—adjusting to such novel nuisances as censorship. But there was one private who had cause to bless the censor. He had received a note: “Letter at mail desk. Name on envelope Dorothy, name on letter Bettye. Check and if correct, mail.”
The last of the Marine divisions—the Sixth—was being formed on Guadalcanal. Its nucleus was the First Brigade and its commander was the brigade’s old leader, but Lemuel Shepherd now wore the twin stars of a major general. To the brigade’s Fourth and Twenty-second Marines—units of which had fought at Guadalcanal, Makin, Bougainville and Eniwetok —was added the Twenty-ninth Marines. The First Battalion, Twenty-ninth, had captured Mount Tapotchau on Saipan, but its Second and Third Battalions were newly formed in the States.
Though the Sixth Marine Division also got an artillery regiment, the Fifteenth, it got almost none of the specialists characteristic of Marine amphibious divisions of the past. For the Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, had been divided into two corps—the Third under Major General Geiger, the Fifth under Major General Schmidt—and all the special functions were now taken over by the corps. A Marine division was now streamlined to about 18,000 men, although the First, scheduled for a one-division landing, remained at a strength of above 20,000.
Training of the new Sixth Division began in late August with the arrival of the First Brigade from Guam, and it was made difficult by the Guadalcanal base commander’s insistence that Marine divisions furnish 1,000 men daily for base working parties. It had been to avoid this typical harassment of line divisions by rear-echelon generals that the First Division had been assigned to its private “little-ease” on Pavuvu.
To some of the Sixth’s veterans who had known Guadalcanal in the days of the Tokyo Express and Pistol Pete or Washing-Machine Charley, the island had become a placid fat cow of a place with its officers’ clubs, its hospitals, its warehouses, its roads and piers and libraries and theaters and indoor mess halls and quonset huts, its battalions of military police required to guard its Red Cross girls and nurses and to enforce the numerous regulations clattering off the typewriters of those ubiquitous clerk-typists who had become the new heroes of Guadalcanal. The Marines did not like it there, nor could they take the new Guadalcanal seriously when, at night, with the open-air theaters going full blast, the MP’s got around to playing air-raid-precaution.
“Put those goddam lights out!” an MP called to a Marine driving a jeep one night.
The driver obeyed. But he happened to be a general’s driver, and the general said evenly:
“Put those goddam lights back on.”
The driver obeyed.
“Put those goddam lights
“I
If late August and early September meant a time of lull to the Marines on the ground, it marked the end of the doldrums for the Marines in the air. They would soon get the escort carriers from which they would launch close-up aerial support of their foot-slogging comrades. They would also send 17 squadrons into the Philippines to place this tactic at the service of Army divisions. And the “forgotten war” they had been fighting over the Marshalls would be over.
Having shown how to knock out a base at Rabaul, the Marine fliers had been assigned a repeat performance over the bypassed atolls of Wotje, Maloelap, Milli and Jaluit. Resistance had been fierce at first. Thirty-six planes had been shot down. But then the fearful accuracy of such dive-bomber pilots as Major Elmer (Iron Man) Glidden —who set the record of 107 combat dives in the Pacific—gradually eliminated the Japanese antiaircraft guns and the Marshalls mission became a boring “milk run.”
All of the glory, all of the glamour, had moved westward with the invasion timetable. Except for the Marshalls siege and the occasional appearance of squadrons flying by stages to the Marianas, life on Eniwetok, Kwajalein and Majuro could be the perfection of tedium. It was worse at Tarawa, now the backwater of the Pacific War.
Only the cemetery on Betio served to remind the atoll’s garrison of the savage four-day battle fought there less than a year before. It was a place of shining coral and slender white crosses, surrounded by a neat coconut-log wall which the Seabees had built. Here a lieutenant colonel lay between privates. Here was so often the word “Unknown.” And here, on a white plaque raised above the cemetery gate, was inscribed the sadly beautiful epitaph which Captain Donald Jackson wrote for his comrades.
