CHAPTER TWENTY
On Opposite Sides of the Pacific
During the summer of 1945, the wounded Marines and “old salts” with three battles to their names came home first, while veterans with less time on the line received a new assignment—occupation duty in China.
HARRY BENDER
They shipped me to a Navy hospital in Guam. The hospital in Guam was all right. I was there about three months, and then they put me on a hospital ship back to San Francisco. I remember going under the Golden Gate. It felt real good to be back in America.
For four days I was in a receiving hospital near Geneva and Moscow streets. Then they shipped me to Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, where I finished out the war.
STERLING MACE
We landed in San Francisco on June 10, 1945, and stayed there a couple days. On the ship I had met a Marine from Pennsylvania, which was close enough to New York that we became pals. While I was getting checked out at the hospital, I continued my friendship with this Marine. He comes to me and says he received some money from his family so we quickly secured a liberty pass and hit the streets. My mind was working pretty good by then.
We walked to a barbershop and got the works. So we’re walking down Market Street, with our uniforms on and new haircuts. This car pulled up, a guy gets out, dressed nicely, and two gorgeous young girls are with him, both about twenty years old. They saw the 1st Marine Division patches on our arm and asked us if we know a friend of theirs who’s a Marine. We say, “Sorry, we don’t know him.” There’s, like, twenty thousand Marines, you know. The man invited us along with them.
He took us to the Mark Hopkins Hotel, one of the best luxury places on the West Coast. Turned out he was the manager there at the Top of the Mark Lounge atop the hotel. He got us all this free food and drinks. The girls were very pleasant. Just a very nice time. It was amazing to think that a month ago I was in the middle of the mud on Okinawa, and now here I’m in the States, celebrating in style. The big joke was that Eleanor Roosevelt had decreed that Marines needed to be quarantined in bases in San Francisco after their return. She felt we needed rehab because we were “over there too long.”
After a week of rest and evaluation at the hospital and some outings in San Fran, I was sent on a train to Maryland via Memphis, Tennessee. The trip took about five days, and I saw the guys do something clever. Someone got ahold of some chalk and scrawled on the side of the train the names of the battles he had fought in. I borrowed that chalk and wrote “Peleliu” and “Okinawa.” As the train raced through the American heartland, you should have seen the people stop and stare as we passed. At the crossings, through the towns, at the stations. No one knew how to react. They just watched with their mouths open. That chalk was a really good idea.
R. V. BURGIN
While I was still on Okinawa, I had started the paperwork to bring Florence to the States. We had an understanding that we would get married, first chance we got. But it would be another year before she could get to the States. The reason it took so long was that getting the troops home was the first priority. Then the military was bringing over Australian women who had married Americans and had children. Next came married women without children. And last were the fiancées.
One day I started shivering. Then I started sweating. Chill. Fever. I’d caught malaria. I walked down to the camp doctor’s office, my knees so wobbly I could hardly walk. The doc started me on quinine. In about a week the symptoms subsided. But malaria never really goes away.*
After fighting on New Britain, Peleliu, and Okinawa, I had enough points to go home. I arrived in San Diego on November 9, 1945, and was discharged fifteen days later.
STERLING MACE
I got to Bainbridge Naval Hospital in Maryland. I was put in a special ward. All the guys I saw around me were there for combat fatigue. There was this little hallway with little private rooms, maybe two on each side, and windows you could look in. There was a kid, maybe eighteen, nineteen years old, he was in his room, and every time we would pass by on the way to the cafeteria, he would be doing ballet dancing. We would snap our fingers and he’d never even look back. Man, I wanted out of there.
You go before a survey board, they call it, and you sit there and there’s maybe four guys, medical officers. They talk to you to determine if you’re ready to go out into civilian life. After that they’ll say, “We’ll let you know.” The next thing I know, they say, “Mace, you’re getting discharged—you’re all finished.” I was out, that was it.
You go home with your uniform on and the ruptured duck sewed over your right lapel. It’s a gold patch of an eagle that meant you were honorably discharged from the service.
WAYBURN HALL
After the Japanese surrendered in August, they sent our division up to north China to accept the surrender of some of these Japanese troops up there.
JIM ANDERSON
On September 26, 1945, we left for north China on LSTs. Our ship got into a typhoon and the ship rolled really bad.
DAN LAWLER
I had enough points to go home. But we had to wait for replacements to relieve us, and not enough showed up, I guess, so I ended up going to China.
On October 17 we arrived at Taku harbor. We got off the ship and there was a big field there. While we were waiting, some of the nationalist Chinese soldiers came over and met us. We gave them some tobacco to chew. They swallowed it and threw up all over the place.
We boarded a train and went to Peking, the city now called Beijing. We were some of the first ones there. Our main job there was to round up any Japanese that were still there and send them home.
We arrived in Peking and filled up the French Legation then the American Legation, so we stayed at the British Legation. Of course there was so many of us, and these legations only held so many people.
On the first day there, we had some of these MPs coming in from the States. They took over. They thought they were the greatest thing in the world and that policing after a war was their job. We fought the damn war, not them.
WAYBURN HALL
They moved us into some old British barracks. They held some official ceremonies, to accept the Japanese surrender. Some of our guys were in the ceremony, and they selected the tallest guys, I remember, guys over six feet, fifty or sixty of the biggest Marines we had. The Japs looked kinda short next to them. I thought that was funny.
JIM ANDERSON
We were busy putting them on trains and sending them to the harbor for a ship ride home. They were happy to get out of China, and we were happy to be sending them away. It was strange to go out on liberty and see Japanese soldiers in their uniforms, just without guns.
DAN LAWLER
I was on guard duty at the front gate soon after we got there. Our colonel came down and said, “I want nobody out those gates!” I said, “Yes, sir.” I had a young greenhorn kid with me, fresh from the States, so I said, “Something’s wrong, put your bayonet on.” He put it on and we guarded that gate.
A few MPs—they were miserable bastards—they walked in there with their sticks swinging around, and one of them tried to walk out the gate, so I pinned him up against the wall. I said, “When I tell you to halt, you halt!” He said, “I’m an MP!” I said, “I don’t give a f—k if you’re Jesus Christ, when I tell you to halt, you halt!” I had an order from the colonel that nobody was to go out that gate. Nobody.
Come to find out the goddamn Japs had killed three Marines that day. They had shot them. That’s why the colonel didn’t want anybody going out the gate. The Japs weren’t even prisoners, they were free. The war was over for two months by then. They were just waiting for a ride home and still had to be killing Marines like they had since 1941.
That started it. We never said a word. The next night a bunch of guys and myself went out on liberty into the streets of Peking. We had pistols and carbines under our jackets. We went to where this group of Japs was staying and cleaned them out. We shot every goddamn one of them. Now they could send them home—in wooden boxes. We did that on our own. They couldn’t order us to do that because the war was over. We probably weren’t supposed to do that. The Japs wanted war, so we gave them war.
WAYBURN HALL
We were there a few days, then they moved us to the Chinese sector of the city. The Chinese Communists were attacking no telling who, so we were purposely isolated in the city, for our safety. We stayed in a girls’ two-story schoolhouse, all brick. We were confined to that schoolyard unless we had official reason to be outside. To go on liberty, you had to get on a truck where they took you downtown. You had to catch a truck back at a certain time at night, or you’d be stranded.
DAN LAWLER
One day I decided to go wandering a little farther, so I took my pistol with me and headed off base. I didn’t like what I was seeing. A little Chinese man came walking toward me along a wall. He had a hurt leg. When he saw me, he just leaned up against the wall. Another guy came along who spoke English, and I said, “What’s that guy doing?” He spoke to the man and translated. He said, “He’s waiting for you to shoot him.”
You see, the Japanese would just line up Chinese and shoot them. They’d get a line of them, shoot them all, and, like a contest, see which one hit the ground first. This Chinese guy got a big smile on his face when he understood I wasn’t going to shoot him.
JIM ANDERSON
At that time I was K Company’s supply sergeant. I didn’t have hardly anything to do, and they assigned me two privates to help me do…nothing. So I could go out anytime that I wanted to. I spent a lot of time talking with Eugene Sledge, just reminiscing. We had a lot of back pay, and could go out and have a big dinner for 50 cents. Everything was reasonable. China was pretty easy duty.
I carried a Japanese rifle for a time, a bolt-action rifle, but I got sick of carrying that, so I gave it away. One day they told us we could go down to the old Japanese arsenal. The guys who’d been overseas the longest got to go in first. You could pick out sabers, bayonets, rifles—and I picked out this brand spanking new Nambu 8mm pistol, still in Cosmoline and a holster.
DAN LAWLER
I saw the Great Wall of China and the Forbidden City. But it wasn’t over yet. The Chinese Communists attacked us. We were aboard a steam engine going someplace. They put logs across the track, stopped the train, and got two of our Marines. Shot ’em. They were still shooting at us even after we cleared the tracks, so we said, “Okay, shit with that.” Instead of getting back on the train and leaving, we took two water-cooled machine guns and put them up front on either side of the engine, on the walkway where people taking care of the steam engines would walk. We cleaned the commies out, piled them right up. Had to wait a day just to get the bodies off the damn tracks. After that they never touched us again.
WAYBURN HALL
It was maybe December 1945; a buddy and I were able to get a seventy-two-hour pass into Peking. We rode this old train up there; the windows in the boxcar were all busted out. It was freezing. We visited all the historic sites of the city.
They started rotating us home on the point system. I had two years overseas by then and had double the amount of points required to come home.
I landed in San Diego in the middle of February 1946. I had a good trip all the way home. Landed in the same pier I left from two years ago. Sure enough did.
JIM ANDERSON
I left China on December 21, 1945, and was aboard a ship for Christmas. When we landed at San Diego, I’d been gone from home for almost three years. I came back partially crippled for life from my wounds on New Britain. But I was proud of my flag and the small part I played in keeping the United States free.
DAN LAWLER
After four months in China I was shipped home. I brought a ton of souvenirs with me. I had pictures of Japs that I got, the pictures off the bodies. None of the people in the pictures I have are smiling. It must have been cold country, because some of the people are wearing winter clothes. I took some bigger souvenirs, too. I had two Japanese flags that they wore around their necks, a bugle, a samurai sword I picked up on Okinawa, two rifles with bayonets, and a naval officer saber that I got in China.
We could bring all this loot home as long as we had clearance slips, which I got for my stuff. But when I got into Grand Central Station back home in New York, two Army MPs grabbed me and took me into this room. The chief was there, and they brought in the state troopers. “Are you trying to be a wise guy, trying to bring all this stuff into the country?” one said to me.
“You think I’m a wise guy?” I said. “Listen—if you try to take any of that, I’ll have your asses in jail by tomorrow morning. I guarantee it. You want to try?”
They went to check things out more, then came back apologetic. “We’re very sorry, we never knew about this.”
So that’s how I got it all home.
WAYBURN HALL
They sent us to Pendleton to get discharged. I got a clean, starched uniform—first new clothes in two years. Everybody was standing around the train depot, and a Marine pulled up in this little old Ford touring car. “Hey, anybody want to go to Texas?” he called out. So I jumped on it. He was going to Fort Worth, so he took me there and then I took a bus to Houston.
I got home to Sugar Land on a Greyhound bus about five o’clock in the afternoon. I got off in front of the little old drugstore there, shouldered my seabag, and walked home about three-quarters of a mile up the hill to my parents’ house.
They knew I was coming home, but they didn’t know when. I didn’t want to promise them something in case something would happen. So I just took it cool.
I went to the back door and walked in. There my mama was, sitting in the kitchen. Ah boy. Man, I tell you, we were just both overcome. Dad came in. It surprised the heck out of my parents. It was a wonderful time. It’d been two years since the last time I’d seen any of my family. I was home for good.
* R. V. Burgin would remember, “After the war, I had malaria on and off for years. Spent time in the VA hospital with it. I think I had my last attack in 1947. A lot of men had that malaria fever. They still won’t take my blood donation, even today.”