Liberty magazine, Feb. 5, 1944.
I will be copying the article here.
The Jap-men are specially trained as jungle fighters. But our boys catch on fast and are showing them tricks not in their 'rule book.'
The jungle is a half-lit, dense, and deathly quiet underworld. Some of our men going into it for the first time are frightened by many things there, even by the air, which is green-colored and has the thick smell of stagnant water.
I have seen thousands of the boys who are fighting the war for us make their first entrance into enemy-heldj ungles on different Pacific islands. They were all frightened. Marines were frightened and so was the Army. I have watched men of the Navy coast along jungle shores. They would lean over the rail and stare at the jungle, and you could see they felt glad they were fighting their kind of war, in an open world of waters. And aviators with whom I have flown over jungle were glad, too, that they were fighting their kind of war, in the open world of air.
The jungle stretches for thousands of miles between where our men are now and where they will be when the war in the Pacific ends. Over every inch of these thousands of miles are gloom and green dankness, plant life-nations of it strangling and smothering each other-and silence.
Silence is an empty thing and you can fill it with what you like. The silences of the jungle is like an enemy holding hisbreath. How implacable it is! What an echo it has, and how it mounts and how it lasts! It is the silence of a shut-off cry.
It's an underworld-not for man. The natives do not live in it. They stick to their clearings, and the majority of them locate their clearings along the shore and life ovv the water. There are snakes and lizards as big as dogs; strange, many-legged, warm-bodied, poisonous worms; rabbit-sized, bony, white-toothed, red-eyed rats; yellow-bellied spiders that look like leprous fists,; butterflies as dar as shadows, flitting and flickering in the thin green light; and bats. And a whole gruel of insects, setting up a buzz, crawl and seethe along the earth and in the foliage.
In the winter of 1941-42 the Jap became recognized as the master of this underworld. He had conquered it and was its king, or so we thought. Then a strange thing took place. I watched it happen in the months following October, 1942. These frighteend boys of ours, fresh from training, fresh from the cities and the manicured countrysides of America, going into hostile jungle for the first time, firing their murderous shots, met these lords of the underworld at their own game and beat them at it from the start. I saw it happen on Guadalcanal, on Vanguna and Rendova Islands, and on New Georgia. And it happened elsewhere-on New Guinea and Veila Lavella.
Yes, a strange thing. We are better in the jungle than the Jap is. We live better there and suffer less disease, and our green troops kill more of the Jap's veterans than his veterans kill of our green troops.
The training we give our men is part of the reason. On the way out from the fight for Wickham Anchorage in the Central Solomons-where Yank troops, firing their first shots at the enemy, obliterated overnight a well armed and alerted force of Imperial Marines, inflicting casualties at a rate better than eight to one-I asked a wounded captain how great a part training had played in the victory.
'Well,' he said, 'this outfit was national guard. It's had two years of training, about eight months of it training in jungle fighting. I figure we learned about half of what we needed to know in the two years of training. The other half we learned in the first minute of combat.'
The Jap has certain qualities of temperament that fit him naturally for fighting in the jungle. We lack them. Anybody can outwait our soldiers. Wshen it comes to taking a shot at the enemy, they are like hogs at trough time. but not so the Jap. Jap snipers behind our lines have a valuable tactic which our men are temperamentally incapable of adopting. They do not move their guns to follow a moving target. They wait until it crosses their sights. Movement of the gun might cause a rustle in the leaves or a twitching in the shadow patterns of the tre. So the Jap sniper stays silent and patient as a snake on a limb. You can walk with perfect safety in plain sight of him and he will not wince or cringe or grasp after your life in any way-until you walk where he can shoot you without moving.
An episode on Guadalcanal illustrates the animal-like patience of the Jap. Marines and some Army troops had driven west of the Matanikau River, and the men with whom I put in some time were held up for a day and a half along a narrow sector. They drove out the Japs before noon on a Wednesday and held there the rest of the day and all the following day.
Toward five o'clock on Thursday, a marine, ordered to dig in the for the night, found some soft dirt at the edge of a tree and choose to begin theere. With the first poke of his shovel he hit a Jap body. The Jap was covered over very lightly with a sprinkle of dirt, but his camouflaged uniform had made him look just like the leaves and rotting twigs lying admit the dirt.
The marine uncovered the Jap, not too gently, and through the whole process the Jap did not move, except when he was jostled. But our men do not take anything about the Japs for granted any more. The marine grasped the Jap by the wrist, lifted the man's arm high and let it dropped. It dropped limpy and the face remained motionless, as in death.
The marine was puzzled. He knew the body must have been lying where it was for at least twenty-eight hours. He was not a doctor, but he had read detective stories and knew about rigor mortis. That was where the Jap had made his mistake-he had forgotten to feign rigor mortis. Maybe the oversight occurred to him now. Anyway, the Jap, who had done the inhuman and lain motionless under a sprinkle of dirt for longer than a day, feigning death to get behind our lines and snipe at us, now suffered a spasm of very human emotion. One of his eyelids twitched uncontrollably. The marine was so startled he brained the Jap with the shovel before he could make another move.
Our men are taught patience in training. They are taught the value of it and they are carefully rehearsed in it, but it is against their temperament. It takes about two days in the jungle for them to learn not to shoot unless they can see or have definitely seen what they are shooting at.
Yet what we lack in patience we make up for in other ways. Late in july on New Georgia, I remember, I lay in a shallow foxhole that had been turned into a command post, and watched an Army major arrange for a tank assault on some pillboxes about 100 yards ahead. A Jap sniper had been picking at us steadily for some time and finally began to get annoying. The major looked around and saw two Signal Corps men taking it easy. 'Would you mind going out and getting that baby, please? he said. 'If you don't mind-if you're not doing anyting else at the moment?' The two lads crawled off impatiently.
I had noting else to do at the moment, either-the tank attack had not yeat been launched-and I watched the Signal Corps men at their hunt. They crawled abou five yards to a fallen coconut log and began peering about cautiously. The sniper held his fire, but they did not have the patience to wait until he gave himself away. One of them took off his helmet and walked it alongside the coconut log with a slow, bobbing movement, th top of it sticking slightly above the log.
The sniper fired. The boy dropped his helmet. 'Did you see him?' he asked excitedly.
His companion had not seen the sniper, but the sound of the shot, he said, had seemed to come from a clutter of trees, a flocked-together, swollen mass of them in which a single coconut tree stood like a needle in a haystack.
All the boys had to do was wait. They had located the general area, and if they held still awhile the sniper would shoot at something else and they could locate him more definitely.
So they waited. They waited about a minute, I think-certainly not two minutes. Then one of them used his helmet again to draw fire. The sniper had a choice of two actions. He knew now he was being hunted. He could remain quiet, and outwait the hunter, or he could take a chance and try to kill him. The Jap elected the latter course. Under the circumstances, with an attacking shaping up, time was against him, and perhaps he believed his hiding place was so secure it could not be discovered from the ground. so he fired again at the helmet-and missed again. Japs are poor shots.
The two Signal Corps men decided the sniper was firiing from the coconut tree buried among all the other trees. Then began a fight that was like a play in a foreign language but whose meanings are so plain that he language is no bar to understanding them.
The two soldiers were sprawled belly down behind the log, their faces blank as workingmen engaged on a familiar job, only their eyes squinting a little as they looked through their sights. They aimed at the fronds of the coconut tree and shot them off one by one. Beyond them I could see the jungle stretching dimly for perhaps thirty feet, piling up into a whole thunderhead of foliage. One of our rifles would speak with a real barroom roar. Then there would be an instant of silence while the echo of the roar would curl in my earls like smoke an drift slowly away. And as the echo cleared I could hear the slow scrape, and hesitant slither of a palm frond falling heavily through the foliage to the earth.
The Jap's automatic rifle would answerer, terrified. It was a light rifle and had a high skinny whistle typical of Jap ordinance, and when it fired a burst it was like a chatter of teeth in fear. The bursts became longer and wilder. He had never expected the Americans to peel the cover from his hiding place. Now he was throwing away his life in paroxysms of fear. He couldn't even hit the log.
At last the two boys shot away enough fronds to see him. Then they killed him. I remember he fell like one of the palm fronds, with a scraping slither, leaves twirling slowly and silently downward for some time after his limp dead body had hit the ground.
Ingenuity had won out, the ability to think under pressure-along, of course, with the marksmanship a man can acquire in training. These had been enough to prevail over what might have been a fatal lack of patience.
Perhaps the most important quality in which we excel the Japanese jungle fighter stems from a feel for machines-including the machines of war. We get it `almost in the cradle, and grow up with it, so that when we are men, it is deep in our reflexes. The Japanese do not have our way of life. When they get into the Army they are schooled in machines, very skillfully, too, but when the pitch comes and victory depends on a machine's doing more than the engineers built into it, the Japanese do not have the instinct or feeling that tells them whether to go ahead or not. They work by the book; when they do not, they suffer disaster. Our men throw the book away when necessary.
There are, in my experience, many examples of this quality. In fact, I owe what is left of my life to the feeling of a pilot in a Flying Fortress that he could extend his machine beyond the limits the engineers believed they had built into it. The Jap we were up against was resourceful and brave, but he wouldn't take his plane past the pages of the book of instructions. Our jockey did, and the Jap burned and we got home.
Another time I watched marines 'solve a problem' consisting of four Jap machines guns in a cluster that were holding up an advance of one of our companies. The colonel in charge of the operation worked like a surgeon probing for an ulcer.
The company lay pinned down only a little more than fifty yards from the machine guns. The men could not retreat or advance. They could not even lift their heads to throw a hand grenade, lest they have their heads shot off. For some reason there were neither mortars nor howitzers available immediately. I think they were being used elsewhere. Anyway, relief was needed at once, and the colonel decided to use what he had-75s, a battery of them known as 'the George Battery' in token of the expression 'Let George Do It.'
Because of the nature of the terrain-steep ridges separated by narrow draws-the 75s had to be pointed straight up into the air The shells had to be lobbed up at an angle and dropped straight down. It was like shooting for a basket with a basketball. but there was a difference. The basket was four miles away-and a shot a millimeter of a degre off angle would kill Americans.
The 75 is a wonderful gun, but it was not built for that kind of shooting. I don't believe it would have occurred to the Japs to use it for that purpose. Or, if they had, they would have suffered a catastrophe. Guns undergo fractions of change, from shot to shot, due to differences in temperature and expansion and contraction of metal under heat. These differences can't be measured. A man must have a feeling for them.
The colonel worked with two telephones. One connected him with a forward observation post right on the line of fire. The other connected him with the 'George Battery.' He let an operator talk to the battery and he himself talked to the forward observation post. The lad there was very nervous.
'Now just take it easy,' the colonel said soothingly. 'You're not expected to do anything more than the best you can.'
I could hear the man's nervous voice come squaking back over the telephone. 'Yes, sir,' he said, and gave a target from his grid.
'Tell George to use the same gun all the time,' the colonel instructed the operator.
We waited a moment and heard a distant explosion. Then, overhead, came the high feathered whistle of a shell on its way.
'Now watch carefully,' the colonel said. 'It's passing over my head now. It ought to land in about three seconds.'
I had my watch out. The seconds passed very slowly. On the third one, I jumped. There had been an explosion very near by.
'How was that?' asked the colonel into the telephone.
'Try-,' came the squeaking voice, giving another number on the grid.
In all, thjere were four ranging shots fired. Each time the procedure ws the same-the observer making the gun overshoot a little less as he 'walked it' slowly back toward the target; the colonel soothing him and announcing the shells as if they were trains going by; the men back at 'George' working with their instincts and praying for the best.
'On target,sir,' squeaked the boyish voice in the telephone after the fourt shot.
'I am going to tell George to let go with a salvo,' replied the colonel. 'One salvo, now. Watch for it.'
There was a rumbling, bursting boom back of us, like a brass-lunged giant clearing his throat. The feathered whistles of the shells passing overhead wer all run together. The explosion of them was like one long explosion.
'Do you want any more?' asked the colonel.
'That's enough, sir' shrilled the observer exultantly.
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