READING, WRITING, AND HISTORY

The Jungle Trail

By ERIC LARRABEE

The Marauders were a hard-luck outfit from the start. They were conceived in haste, with no past and a dubious future, yet they managed in the face of appalling odds to provide the Second World War with one of its most heroic demonstrations of courage and endurance. These three thousand men were the only American infantry between Italy and New Guinea and the first American ground troops to go into battle on the continent of Asia since the Boxer Rebellion. In a period of three months during 1944 they marched six hundred miles into the jungles of northern Burma, fought five major engagements and seventeen minor ones, and more than amply earned a Distinguished Unit Citation for their “brilliant operation” in capturing the Japanese airfield at Myitkyina.

The Marauders, by Charlton Ogburn, Jr. Harper & Brothers. 307 pp. $4.50.

A terrible price was exacted for their triumph. Less than half of the Marauders finally reached Myitkyina, and these were soon being withdrawn from combat by the medics, as unfit to fight, at a daily rate of seventyfive to a hundred men. To be considered unfit a Marauder then had to be running a fever of over 102 degrees for three consecutive days, and yet at the end only two hundred of them could be defined as fit. During their last battle several “fell asleep from sheer exhaustion,” writes Charles Ogburn, Jr., and their commanding officer “lost consciousness three times while directing it.” More had been asked of them than they were able to give.

Whatever it is that makes self-sacrifice of this kind possible, you would not have looked for it in the Marauders’ origins and organization. They were an impromptu collection of miscellaneous “volunteers,” a word of ironic connotations in the military vocabulary, which meant, in effect, that they could be spared. “The only thing stupider than volunteering is asking for volunteers,” said one of their officers. “We’ve got the misfits of half the divisions in the country.” Some were there because they could think of nowhere better to be, and yet some were also there because they simply liked combat. Mr. Ogburn, a Marauder himself, tells with awe of the First Battalion commander who suggested, during one of the few lulls between battles, that if nothing else was going to happen they might cross the ridge and fight with the Second Battalion. “He gave a half-laugh, and of course he was joking, but all the same — the idea had occurred to him.”

The Marauders came into being at the Quebec Conference, to which Winston Churchill had cannily decided at the last moment to bring that devout, bearded eccentric, Major General Orde C. Wingate, the apostle of guerrilla warfare by elite troops. Wingate, as Churchill knew he would, made a deep impression on the Americans, and nothing would do but that we too should have a “long-range penetration group,” like Wingate’s Chindits, and fight alongside them in Burma. In creating these forces the Allied leaders were giving in to the temptation, perilous but understandable, to seek cheap victories. The China-Burma-India theater of war could have only a low priority (initially lower than that of the Caribbean), but perhaps the investment of a small, highly-trained, mobile unit—as Wingate argued—would pay a return there out of all proportion. They decided to chance it, and thus were set in motion the circumstances that brought a number of Americans to places with strange names like Shaduzup and Nhpum Ga and Myitkyina.

The Marauders’ worst enemy was their own apprehension, the condition of uninterrupted suspense imposed by a jungle march into enemy country. There is nothing on either side of you, and ahead there is only the next bend in the trail, and after that the next bend, and so on for six hundred miles. Sooner or later, or any moment now, the silence would be broken by the sudden pup-pup-pup — pup-pup-pup-pup of a Japanese machine gun, and the column would come to a halt. There would be a cry of “Weapons platoon forward — clear the trail!” Then perhaps there would be the sound of mortar fire—yours or theirs?—and, shortly, “Medics forward!” until the trail-block was cleared and the column could move on again.

The Marauders lived through this, as Ogburn writes, “not just when it happened but a hundred times a day” in anticipation of it. “Ahead the view was always closed by a bend in the trail. Always there was a bend to be rounded. Each one had to be sweated out. From first to last that was probably the worst part of the campaign for those who had to endure it: what was around the next bend?”

Disease was their other enemy, the sores and fevers and dysentery that incapacitated more of the men than Japanese action. “For in the end,” as the medical historian of the theater wrote, “amoebas, bacteria, rickettsiae and viruses rather than Japanese soldiers and guns, vanquished the most aggressive, bravest and toughest outfit that fought in the Far East in the Second World War.”

Eventually the Marauders came apart, in a fashion considered disgraceful in some higher quarters, and yet Mr. Ogburn’s account leaves no question but that they were very poorly treated and that their disintegration was in good part brought about by their superiors. And this is especially paradoxical, inasmuch as they came under the command of “Vinegar Joe,” the one American senior officer who should have been expected to sympathize with them the most. Of all American generals, Joseph W. Stilwell was the most demonstrably sympathetic to the ordinary infantry soldier. He tried to comport himself like one, even when this made little sense in a general, and his devotion to the doughboy way-of-war was no façade; it was part and parcel of his professional experience. But all of this got him nowhere with the Marauders, and it helped them not at all.

After the Marauders had made their approach march down the Ledo Road, from India into northern Burma, they pitched camp on an island in the Tarung River, and General Stilwell came wading across to see them. He made a good impression, but there had already been a bad omen. When they had passed his headquarters, having marched 140 miles with full equipment, they had thought he might at least come out and take a few salutes from his only American combat outfit, specially spruced up for the occasion. But he did not do so, thus missing—as Ogburn writes—“the chance for an inexpensive gesture that could have repaid him in days to come.”

Later their disappointment turned to unrelieved bitterness. Rightly or wrongly, the heavy moral pressure “just short of outright orders” from his headquarters, to keep in the firing line every American who could pull a trigger, was associated by the Marauders with Stilwell personally. They thought him a small man in a job too large for him, utterly bloodless and lacking in human kindness; and only when the war was long over, and the story of Stilwell’s own troubles had begun to be published, did Ogburn himself realize how badly they had misjudged their commander.

The trouble was that he took them for granted. All his life Stilwell had looked forward to leading American troops in combat, but now that the chance had come to him there was too much else for him to do. He was preoccupied, as he saw his mission, with getting the British and the Chinese to fight the Japanese in Burma, and he was filled with a considerable mistrust of their desire to do so. The one thing in his tangled and frustrating existence that he knew he could rely on was American infantry. The Marauders at least he could trust—especially since they were a “picked” unit, led by one of his own best officers—and so he gave them the dirty jobs to do, and pushed them beyond their limit, and wore them out.

The Marauders were then retired to a so-called “rest camp” in India, a totally unprepared pasture surrounded by “bashas” they considered unfit for cattle. They had been told to expect shower baths. One morning some lengths of rusty pipe and a few oil drums were kicked off a truck, and those were their showers, while a few miles away soldiers who had never heard the whine of a hostile’s bullet enjoyed comfortable quarters and concrete shower stalls, and in New Delhi officers had electric fans and refrigerators. The Marauders blew up. With the assistance of a local distilled product called Bull-Fight Brandy—proscribed, unsuccessfully, by the medics—they began to tear apart hospitals, Red Cross canteens, and their own quarters. Orders were impossible to enforce, threats meant nothing, and they went AWOL in quantity. The strain of the disreputable, which had been their strength, now did them in.

There is the question of how valuable a specialpurpose organization like the Marauders can ever be. The British Field Marshal Sir William Slim, who was in practice Stilwell’s superior officer and understood him better than did many Americans, thought that neither the Marauders nor Orde Wingate’s Chindits ever quite justified their moral and physical cost: “Both forces — had been subjected to intense strain, both had unwisely been promised that their ordeal would be short, and both were asked to do more than was possible.” Slim believes that these corps d’élite, while they may give a magnificent account of themselves, are wrong in principle. “The level of initiative, individual training, and weapon skill required in, say, a commando, is admirable; what is not admirable is that it should be confined to a few small units—. Armies do not win wars by means of a few bodies of super-soldiers but by the average quality of their standard units. Anything, whatever short cuts to victory it may promise, which thus weakens the Army spirit, is dangerous.”

The fate of the Marauders can be interpreted as support for this hard doctrine, yet that would not be the whole story. True, they were formed in defiance of the rules. They did not even have the consolation of a glamorous name, like the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment, or of the military tinsel—promotions and decorations—that can mean so much to men in danger. “Merrill’s Marauders” was the subsequent invention of a journalist, and they knew only that they belonged to something with the absurd and clumsy title of sgoyth Composite Unit (Provisional)—hardly an inspiring device to bear on one’s banner (it led one Marauder to inquire, in a moment of stress, what had happened to the other five-thousand-three-hundredand-six composite units). They had no sense of continuity, and they were terrifyingly alone—as though the Army, not to mention the nation, had forgotten them. Virtually their only assets, from the orthodox point of view, were their officers and a well-conceived tactical plan. For the rest, they had only themselves, and the true moral of their private victory over the orthodox is that in the balance this was enough.

On the Far Shore

By ERIC LARRABEE

While the issue at Myitkyina was still in doubt, there began on the other side of the world a contest of a wholly different character—the Normandy invasion, the seaborne assault across the English Channel now known by the generic name of D Day. This was the largest and most carefully planned military operation in history. There had never been, and there will never be again, anything quite like it. For the number of men, aircraft, and ships involved; for the bulk and complexity of their equipment; for the calculation and intelligent control required to employ them—for these and more the invasion has no equal. D Day was the supreme expression of the classic military art.

D Day, the Sixth of June, 1944, by David Howarth. McGraw-Hill. 251 pp. $4.95.

The requirements of a modern soldier in the field, with the proper weapons and clothing, in themselves demand a large industrial capacity; and on D Day they were multiplied by the many thousands. The statistics are so far out of the ordinary as to seem unreal. On the American beaches alone, on the first day, we were planning to land the equivalent of two hundred train-loads of troops. These would be followed, in the next two weeks, by enough vehicles to form a double line from Pittsburgh to Chicago, and by twice as many American soldiers as there had been in the entire United States Army in 1939. Fitting together the pieces of this enormous jigsaw puzzle was so complicated that an early operational order of the First Army alone had more words in it than Gone with the Wind.

All of southern England had become an armed camp. So many were the miles of military stores, of tanks and trucks lined up, that the island seemed weighted down with them and, as someone suggested at the time, but for the barrage balloons, would have sunk. The writers who have described the build-up for D Day frequently fall back on one particular phrase for it—they speak of the coiling of a great spring. D Day was a mechanism being wound up, a repository of condensed and organized energy waiting to be released. Surely it is this that gives such drama to General Eisenhower’s final decision whether or not to go: the fact that so much accumulated power could wait on a single word.

Hardest of all to recapture now is the feeling that D Day might have failed. Yet it might have. We see the industrial potential of Great Britain and North America matched against that of German Europe, which was exhausting itself in the struggle with Russia, and we wonder how we could have doubted the outcome. We know now that the Germans’ “Atlantic Wall” was weak, and forget that the Normandy beaches were nonetheless more heavily defended than Iwo Jima, Tarawa, or Peleliu. Something could always go wrong. Plans have to be made in the expectation of sloth, inaccuracy, the eternal cussedness of things, or that inherent military tendency toward chaos expressed by the word “snafu.” And the commander, most of all, must be so prepared for this that the possibility of it is constantly within his perspective. Fortunately, General Eisenhower allowed to be preserved the dispatch he privately wrote out for himself beforehand, and kept in his wallet, for it is a most valuable and characteristic document:
Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air, and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

For a commander of Elsenhower’s caliber must never forget that everything finally hinges on the single soldier. The D-Day juggernaut was overpowering in the abstract; but in reality, on Omaha Beach on D-Day morning, it was a cluster of demoralized and disorganized men, huddled in the shelter of a shallow ridge of gravel from the vicious fire of well-protected defenders. The fine, forward cutting edge of the great machine was wet and scared and sick and wounded and dying; and now all the orderly, impressive planning had come to nothing but risk and ignorance and makeshift. Something did go wrong. There were more German troops than expected, the neutralizing barrage didn’t neutralize, the floatable tanks didn’t float, the boats came in on the wrong beaches, the engineers didn’t get time to clear away the obstacles—and before long there was disaster in the making.

This is the D Day to which David Howarth has devoted his book, not the D Day of strategy and logistics but of individuals and what happened to them. He has chosen to pick several dozen—American, British, German, French—and follow them through a range of experiences that in sum describes that day, at least to the extent that anything so vast and varied can be described at all. For example, we see it momentarily through the eyes of a German soldier named Erwin M’fcller, who had been posted on guard that night, and was peering over a garden gate, when suddenly the whole sky to the south and west was filled with parachutes and he knew that the war was lost. Later he and three other Germans captured two of the chutists, and a third who was badly hurt. “How far is it to Paris, fella?” asked one of them, and gave him a bar of chocolate. Then the Americans closed the eyes of their companion and crossed his arms on his chest, and the six men from the two armies, in their respective languages, said the Lord’s Prayer for him.

Howarth has a nice sense of military realism, which enables him to see how even mistakes and confusion can have their uses. The American air-drop was badly scattered, which should have been wrong, but its effect was right: during about eight hours that night and morning the Germans at one end of the beachhead were virtually paralyzed. Their telephones were going dead, their dispatch riders were riding off into the dark and disappearing. Howarth describes this as a “gigantic and lethal game of hide and seek,” in which “the Americans knew what was happening, but few of them knew where they were; the Germans knew where they were, but none of them knew what was happening. — Of course, the German divisions were more heavily armed than the Americans, but their artillery and even their tanks, in these early hours, were useless. Ten thousand Americans, spread over a hundred square miles of country and constantly moving, never offered a target worth a shell.”

Howarth also has a warm and deep sympathy for the human aspect of D Day, and for what it meant to people back home in England. He is not ashamed of sentiment, which is a fortunate thing in a writer who must tell you how the invasion was announced during the day in the English factories, and how the women—few of whom were without a husband or son or brother they had not recently heard from—wept over their work. There is an inalterable drama about the expenditure of wealth and daring on so large a scale that even the most tame and depleted account cannot diminish, and Mr. Howarth’s is not tame. Best of all, he gives the sense of what it felt like, anywhere in southern England on the night before that decisive dawn, to wake up and hear passing overhead the greatest fleet of aircraft that anyone had ever heard, or is likely to hear again.

There will be no more D Days; the atomic bomb will see to that. An invasion fleet is one of the few targets that “justifies,” in the amoral military sense, a nuclear weapon; and against an enemy so armed, any such concentrated effort will in the future be suicidal. But the quality of it will endure. From the Marauders to the D-Day invasion fleet is only a step of magnitude, just as it is only a step of magnitude from the invasion fleet to the terrible forces poised today. What is memorable about the men on Omaha Beach is that eventually they moved forward. A lieutenant stood up and said, to nobody in particular, “Are you going to lay there and get killed, or get up and do something about it?” and before long scattered groups had begun to work their way inland. “Nobody will ever know how many groups started and failed,” writes Mr. Howarth. “Roughly a dozen succeeded.” In the balance, they were enough.