∞
∞

Guadalcanal, part 3.

∞

pre-dawn

∞

Guadalcanal: 3

The above is a drawing by Howard Brodie, an artist James Jones much admired. 

The distinctive way the Allied commanders organized the campaign for Guadalcanal, coupled with certain features intrinsic to island warfare, shaped the structure of Jones’s The Thin Red Line. Here’s how the novel begins:

The two transports had sneaked up from the south in the first graying flush of dawn, their cumbersome mass cutting smoothly through the water whose still greater mass bore them silently, themselves as gray as the dawn which camouflaged them. Now, in the fresh early morning of a lovely tropic day they lay quietly at anchor in the channel, nearer to the one island than to the other which was only a cloud on the horizon. To their crews, this was a routine mission and one they knew well: that of delivering fresh reinforcement troops. But to the men who comprised the cargo of infantry this trip was neither routine nor known and was composed of a mixture of dense anxiety and tense excitement. 

In this respect the story of these soldiers resembles the Normandy invasion: it begins with a sea crossing. You must get on a ship and traverse the ocean to get to the place where you will fight. 

But the attackers on D-Day in Normandy didn’t finish their war that way, not collectively anyway. Of course, some of them returned the way they came; but many others pushed deeper and deeper into Europe, and when they were done, made their way back home by airplane, or in transport ships with highly miscellaneous passengers. 

What’s distinctive about The Thin Red Line is that C-for-Charlie Company travels to the island on a ship and then step onto the beach from landing craft — and then when it is relieved it returns in precisely the way it came. (“Ahead of them the LCIs waited to take them aboard, and slowly they began to file into them to be taken out to climb the cargo nets up into the big ships.”) It’s like entering and leaving a gladiatorial arena, except that there are these long sea journeys, crossings of empty liminal space, a space that radically separates what happens on the island from everything else in life, before and after. It’s more like Purgatory, then, than an arena — except for those who die. For them, I suppose, it’s Hell. 

That some of them die while others survive means that C-for-Charlie Company is not precisely the same on its arrival and its departure. But the way Jones tells his story, the deaths are not presented as the deaths of individual whole persons but rather as the loss of appendages. Jones repeatedly speaks of the Company as a single entity: “But before that happened the whole of C-for-Charlie had gotten blind, crazy drunk in a wild mass bacchanalian orgy which lasted twenty-eight hours and used up all the available whiskey….” “Meanwhile back at the bivouac C-for-Charlie was still trying desperately to solve its liquor shortage.” When the Company comes across a dead soldier: “D Company had found him while pursuing the Japanese patrol and had placed him on the ledge behind C-for-Charlie for safekeeping at a time when C-for-Charlie was too engrossed in its firing to notice….” When stretcher-bearers take the dead man away: “C-for-Charlie had watched all this action wide-eyed and with sheepish faces.” One entity that happens to have many faces. 

All of this is deeply relevant to the film Terrence Malick would make from James Jones’s novel. 

∞
∞

Google’s search deal with Reddit is yet another of the thousand ways in which the open web is closing.

∞
∞
∞
∞

I’m reading Robert Richardson’s biography of William James and I’m struggling: almost every male person in it is named either William or Henry.

∞
∞

Here is the second in a series of posts about the battle for Guadalcanal and some artistic responses to it.

∞

Guadalcanal: 2

How vividly did the Guadalcanal campaign impress itself on the American imagination? Well, this movie was released around nine months after the last Japanese soldiers were driven from the island.

But all the media were moving at fast pace in those days. In propaganda, as in so many other things — internment of undesirables, terror-bombing of civilians —, the Nazis established the standard that their enemies emulated. The Wehrmacht invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and by November the official documentary film, Sieg in Polen, was being shown in New York City, where it was seen by, among many others, W. H. Auden and Thomas Merton. (This was the subject of one of my first scholarly articles.) Likewise, in June of 1942 John Ford carried a camera with him to record what would become known as the Battle of Midway, and the edited footage appeared as a short film in September, with a score by Alfred Newman and narration by Henry Fonda.

And when the Guadalcanal campaign began shortly afterward, a young journalist for Life magazine named John Hersey accompanied the American troops, as did Richard Tregaskis, a reporter for the International News Service. Both of them sent dispatches from the front which were published immediately, and then quickly turned them into books: Hersey’s Into the Valley and Tregaskis’s Guadalcanal Diary were both published on the first day of 1943. The latter was, in a vague sort of way, the basis for the movie. 

Tregaskis’s book — and this is a point to which I will return in later installments of this series — is bookended, as any account of an island battle is likely to be, by sea journeys: an arrival and a departure. Landing craft deliver soldiers to the island; the soldiers enter the hell of battle; eventually those who survive, relieved by new soldiers, return to the landing craft and are conveyed to a place of rest. (The First Marine Division, who had begun the invasion in August, were relieved in early December and taken to Melbourne, where they were greeted, quite properly, as great heroes.) There’s something intrinsically ritualistic, almost mythic, about this pattern. 

But there’s also, in the context, something consoling about it.

The movie of Guadalcanal Diary maintains this structure: the first twenty minutes show the Marines on ship headed towards battle, demonstrating camaraderie among regions and races: a very young black soldier has a speaking part! One of the chief characters is a Mexican-American! (One of the few times in his career that Anthony Quinn played his own ethnicity.) They grow slightly more anxious, though, before landing on … an undefended beach. (This is one of the better effects of the movie — the anticlimax of arriving for battle and finding no one to fight.)

Eventually they encounter the enemy first in small numbers — the initial battle set-piece enacts an event Tregaskis made famous, the Goettge patrol — and then in larger numbers, until we approach a final battle, preceded by prayers, confessions of dis-ease, and letters home to families. In that battle one of the leading characters — it had to be Alvarez, didn’t it? — is killed, and then the Marines are relieved. At the end they’re marching towards the ships that will take them away, and the narrator — a version of Tregaskis — is pleased to say that they’ll receive “a well-earned rest, the job superbly done. The Army is coming in to take over. Into their hands we commit the job, with full confidence in their ability to perform it.” 

And that’s the consoling message, for soldiers but perhaps especially for the families of soldiers: the fighting will be tough, but it won’t last too long, and almost everyone will survive. No need to get too anxious. 

When the movie came out, James Agee wrote that it “is unusually serious, simple, and honest, as far as it goes; but it would be a shame and worse if those who made or will see it got the idea that it is a remotely adequate image of the first months on that island.… I think it is to be rather respected, and recommended, but with very qualified enthusiasm.” In that note Agee said that he hoped to write at greater length about the move, but, alas, it appears that he did not. I would very much have enjoyed hearing what his reservations were. Mine, as the above summary suggests, are significant. I thought it clichéd and profoundly unrealistic in every respect; though perhaps in comparison to still-more-jingoistic endeavors it was not. 

(Also: the movie has quite a number of Asian or Asian-American actors playing Japanese soldiers — not one of whom is named. I would give quite a lot to know who those men were, how they were cast, and what they thought about the whole business.) 

Now, back to real life: one of those Army men who relieved the Marines on Guadalcanal was James Jones, and he wrote about his experience in the novel The Thin Red Line (1962). Soon after that book’s publication, Jones wrote an essay for the Saturday Evening Post called “Phony War Films.” He explains how, after his return from the war — he was discharged from the Army in 1944 because of a bad ankle, an experience that he gives to Corporal Fife in The Thin Red Line — he found himself laughing incredulously at war movies. Sometimes he even walked out on them. Then, almost two decades later and in preparation for writing his article, he watched a bunch of more recent films about the war he had fought in. His verdict: 

When I finished, I was not only almost cross-eyed from watching film, near death from explosive sound effects, I was more depressed with the essential adolescence of America (maybe I should say of the race) then I have perhaps ever been. If our war films are indication of our social maturity in an age when we have the capacity of destroying ourselves, there is little hope for us….

Now, why is this? Why, after so much soul-searching by Americans, so many advances in so many other fields during the past twenty years, have war films remained at the same, essentially adolescent level as the war films of 1943?

Jones's basic answer is that the film studios are giving people what they want. 

By the way, that essay — which as far as I can discover is not available online — is reprinted in the booklet that accompanies the magnificent Criterion Collection edition of Terrence Malick’s film The Thin Red Line. And yes, that’s where this series is headed … but we still have business with James Jones and his novel. 

∞

rainy morning in the canyon

∞
∞

For the Princeton University Press Ideas blog, I wrote about my critical edition of Auden’s collection The Shield of Achilles.

∞

Guadalcanal: 1

From December of 1941 through the middle of the next year, the Japanese Army and Navy enjoyed an unbroken series of victories that carried them to the doorstep of Australia. The conquest of Australia was indeed their next major endeavor. They planned to begin it by taking Port Moresby, on the southern coast of New Guinea, from which the whole of northern and eastern Australia would be easily reachable.

Their first setback came in early June 1942 at the Battle of Midway, which John Keegan called “the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare.” It was that; but the Japanese forces still held all the territory they had conquered in the previous seven months. What Midway did, more than anything else, was to demonstrate with an absolute conclusiveness that Japan was not invincible — indeed was quite vulnerable.

Two steps followed for the Allied forces. (By Allied forces I mean Americans and Australians; the division of labor had left the British to focus on China, India, and Burma.) One was to prevent the taking of Port Moresby; the second was to begin reclaiming territory that had great strategic importance. From the Allied perspective, a key piece of land was Guadalcanal, the largest of the Solomon Islands, east of New Guinea. The Japanese, having occupied the island in May, had immediately begun constructing an airfield from which they would be able to send aircraft to disrupt, or prevent altogether, shipping between the United States and Australia. Since the Japanese already had a major air and sea base at Rabual on New Britain, a functioning airfield on Guadalcanal would establish dominance over a large chunk of the south Pacific.

It was vital, the Allied commanders believed, to drive the Japanese off Guadalcanal, complete the airfield for their own use, and thereby (a) protect shipping lanes and (b) establish a staging ground for an assault on Rabual and New Britain more generally. Guadalcanal was, then, the first island in the island-hopping strategy that would eventually lead the Allied forces to Japan.

When Allied troops landed on Guadalcanal in the early morning of 7 August, the Japanese soldiers and workers at the airfield abandoned it immediately, having been taken wholly by surprise. Indeed, the Japanese command had not expected an Allied counterattack of this size for some time. One of the first consequences of the Allied landing on Guadalcanal was the shifting of Japanese troops from the assault on Port Moresby — where Australian forces had been holding off Japanese forces in terrible conditions and with extraordinary determination — to the Solomons. So Port Moresby was safe, at least for a while.

The Japanese were determined to show the Allies that the re-taking of territory was impossible; the Allies were equally determined to make their first major counter-attack a successful one. The consequences of failure on Guadalcanal were, for both sides, too dire even to contemplate.

In the battle for the island — a battle which did not definitively end until February of 1943 — three points were established that dictated the remainder of the war. First: that the resources, in personnel and equipment, that the Allies could bring to bear on the conflict were unprecedentedly enormous. Second: that, Japanese assumptions to the contrary, American soldiers would fight bravely and indeed relentlessly. Third: that Japanese soldiers would fight to the death — death by the enemy’s hand or by their own or by starvation — rather than be taken prisoner. These were the lessons of Guadalcanal and they were learned with great pain on all sides. The Japanese came to call Guadalcanal “Starvation Island” and “Death Island”; to the Americans, William Manchester says, it was “that fucking island,” and the fighting there “worse than Stalingrad” — though (or therefore) to this day the insignia of the First Marine Division bears the single word “Guadalcanal.”

Something about the War in the Pacific was, and still is, summed up in that one campaign for that one not-obviously-important island. It has resonated in memories and minds through the decades. It seems to have something it wants to tell us about war.

Sources:

∞
∞
∞