I’d made up my mind that when the draft caught up with me I was going into the Air Force or the Navy or the Marines. Anything but the Army.
I was a year out of high school and the war was on. I’d been on the road with the crew, selling personalized engraved stationery from the company based in Columbus, Ohio. Everywhere we went I saw the Marine recruiting posters in front of post offices. They didn’t show them in their greens. They always had them in dress blues. I thought the Marines looked like a sharp outfit. Disciplined. Elite. I was from a farm. I was used to hard work and discipline. The Army seemed sloppy to me.
Sometimes folks on the road would ask why I wasn’t in the service. The truth was, I wasn’t of draft age. But that was complicated to explain.
So I told them, “I’m going to join the Marines next Friday.” It was always next Friday, no matter what day or week it was. And always the Marines.
When the draft finally did catch me, in September of 1942, our crew was in Kentucky. The notice had arrived several weeks before at my parents’ farm near Jewett. I was ordered to report to the local draft board over in Centerville, the Leon County seat. By now there was no time. So I went to the closest draft board I could find, in Catlettsburg, Kentucky, and explained my situation. They said they couldn’t process me. I pointed out that it was all the same military and the same U.S. government. Why couldn’t they process me and send the papers to my local draft board?
We argued for what seemed like the better part of the day. Finally they gave in and examined me and promised to forward the papers to Centerville. After that I quit selling and went home to the farm and waited. The next notice I got was that I was being drafted into the Army. I was to report November 12 to Centerville.
Instead I went down to Houston on the tenth and bunked overnight with a buddy. The next day the Air Force told me there was a six-week waiting list. The Navy recruiter was a smart aleck. So I walked across the street to the Marine Corps office. They examined me, poked and prodded, and then filled out the forms. But I wasn’t twenty-one yet, and the recruiting sergeant told me I needed written permission from a parent or guardian before I could enlist. I figured I was either in the Marines or I was in trouble with the draft board.
That afternoon the recruiter sent a telegram to my father up on the farm. I spent another night with my friend, then got to the recruiting station the next morning just as the recruiter was turning the key in the lock. We stepped inside together. During the night someone had poked a telegram under the door. It was from Papa: Permission granted.
The Marines fed me breakfast and put me on a train to San Antonio. I may have slept on the train that night; I don’t remember. But I do remember that the next morning, November 13, I was sworn in along with dozens of others, mostly kids like myself from hardscrabble farms and small towns all over south Texas. They fed us breakfast and then put us on another train and shipped us west.
Our second day out, somewhere beyond El Paso, we got our first taste of life in the United States Marine Corps.
We were in New Mexico or Arizona, I figured, rolling through the desert toward California. The whole train was full of recruits. So were dozens of other trains that day, carrying young guys like me to training camps, bases and ports. The railroaders called them “main trains,” because they had priority over everything else on the track.
There were sixty or so of us in our coach, mostly dozing or staring out the windows. We were still wearing our civilian clothes except for one Marine in uniform. He was sitting three seats back from me and across the aisle, and his armband identified him as an MP. A younger man in street clothes was sitting beside him. I assumed he must be some kind of prisoner, because he was doing his best to give the MP a hard time. His mouth had been going since San Antonio. And he was a jitterbug. Every few minutes, it seemed he had to go to the restroom. He’d jump up and the MP would march him to the end of the coach and wait in the aisle while he finished his business, whatever he was doing in there. Then they’d come back down the aisle to their seats. The fellow would flop down and pretty soon his mouth would be running again. If it wasn’t the restroom it was a drink of water or a smoke or some other thing. He had the whole car on edge.
Finally he stood and said something—I didn’t catch what—that pushed the MP over the edge.
“I want you to sit down, shut up and don’t be aggravating me anymore,” the MP snapped. “If you don’t sit down and shut up, I’m going to knock the hell out of you.”
The prisoner kept yacking and the MP got up, billy club in hand. There was a loud crack! and the guy went down with a couple bloody teeth in his lap. For the rest of the trip he sat bleeding into a handkerchief. But he didn’t say a thing.
The rest of that day word went up and down that coach among the recruits: “Yeah, you don’t argue with authority.”
Sometime around eight or nine o’clock the second night out the train pulled into boot camp. We were ordered out of the cars and told to stand with our toes touching a white line on the pavement and with our bags on our right. Then they read out our names and marched us to the barracks.
We couldn’t see a thing in the darkness. That’s the way they always tried to do it with recruits, bring you in at night. You’re disoriented, you can’t get your bearings, you don’t know what’s coming. They’re in charge.
I was apprehensive, but I wasn’t scared. I didn’t think they could dish out anything that I couldn’t handle.
Bunks were double stacked along both walls. Beside each bunk was a wooden chest, which we learned was our locker, and a galvanized pail. We’d find out what the pail was for the next morning. We were in our bunks before midnight. It seemed like I had just closed my eyes when they sounded reveille, right inside the door. And it was loud. The drill instructor was hollering, “Hit the deck, you bunch of sorry punks.”
And we did hit the decks. Guys were banging on the floor, metal bunks were rattling. For the next six weeks those were the sounds that started off every day, our alarm clock: reveille and clanging bunks and the DI shouting at us “punks.” We were never Marines. We were the sorriest bunch of human beings they’d ever set eyes on.
It must have been six a.m., still dark outside. I thought, What the hell have I got myself into?
We marched to the chow line and got breakfast. Then we were ordered to pick up our pails and follow the sergeant. Next everybody lined up for a haircut. In those days long hair was not the style, even if you weren’t in the Marines. But one kid did wear his hair curled and hanging down, like he was proud of it. The barber asked him, “Do you want to keep these curls?”
“Yes, sir, I sure do.”
“Okay,” the barber said. With his clippers he sheared up one side of that kid’s head and down the other. Then he handed the kid his locks. “Here, keep these.”
After haircuts, we went to the supply room, pails in hand, to draw our clothes—socks, shoes, underwear, dungarees. The recruits who had already been through the line were yelling at us, “You’ll be sorry.” The guys behind the counter handing out the clothes were giving us a hard time, too. You had to wear what they gave you. You didn’t go back and exchange it. There were only two sizes in the Marine Corps: too big and too damned big.
They did ask what size shoe you wore, so your shoes always fit good for marching. They were high-tops, maybe ankle length. The smooth side of the leather was on the inside, the rough side out. And every cotton-picking day you had to shine those shoes so the DI could see his face in them. By the end of boot camp, you had them gleaming like a new car. The brown polish came in a little tin they issued along with the clothes, shaving gear, toothpaste and toothbrush, and a bar of soap. It all went into the pail. We had to buy a copy of the little red book, the Marine’s Handbook, for $1. The 242-page “Seventh Edition.” Over the weeks ahead we’d just about memorize it. I think they took $10 out of our first month’s pay for the whole bucketful of goodies.
They told us to strip out of our street clothes, put them in a cardboard box, and write our home address on the outside of the box. That was the last we’d see of our street clothes. Then, with pails in hand, Marine uniforms over our left arms, shoes strung around our necks by their laces, they marched us buck naked back to the barracks. Here they gave us padlocks for our lockers. We drew two sheets, two Marine blankets and a pillowcase each. And we got our dog tags. There was a pair of them on the string, one hanging from the other. They were still brass in those days. Later they went to aluminum. Each was stamped with our name and military identification number. Mine was 496798. We were told the dog tags must remain around our necks at all times. They didn’t tell us then that if we died in combat, one of the dog tags would be sent to an office in Washington as a record of our death. The other would stay with our body and eventually hang from the cross over our grave.
We signed all sorts of papers, took some tests, got our shots.
We learned that Marines had their own name for everything. The floors were the deck. The walls were bulkheads, the ceiling was the overhead, stairs were ladders. The bathroom was the head, and was to be kept spotless at all times. We were not to leave the barracks unless we had permission. We were taught how to make up the bunks and how to stow our gear in the lockers. You had to get down on your hands and knees to open them because the key was on the same string as your dog tags, and we were forbidden to take that string off. There was a place for everything and everything had to be in its place.
Two corporals took charge of sixty of us. They were our DIs, and they were to be obeyed. When one of them entered the squad room, whoever saw him first yelled “Attention!” and we all snapped to.
Our rifles were issued a few days later. The M1903 Springfield weighed eight pounds and eleven ounces. We did physical drill every day, and we’d stand holding that heavy rifle at arm’s length, shoulder high—and hold it and hold it. When they got through with us, our arms were so tired that the rifle felt like it weighed eighty pounds.
We drilled with them, but we didn’t fire them yet.
One of the few times I got in trouble was over my rifle. During rifle inspection, you hold the weapon up and the DI grabs it and inspects it. I guess.
I hung on to mine a little too tight. At least that’s what he thought.
“Oh, you love that rifle, do you?” he said.
I said, “Yes, sir!”
Our DIs were corporals, but it was always “Yes, sir!” and “No, sir!”
“Okay, you can sleep with it tonight,” he said. “You put that right in your bunk when you go to bed and you take it out when you get up in the morning. You sleep with that rifle tonight if you like it so well.”
“Yes, sir!”
Sure enough, sometime during the night—I don’t know exactly what time it was—he came around to check if that rifle was in the bunk with me. And it was there, right beside me.
We “dry fired” the rifle for days, practicing the same sequence over and over—align the sight, adjust for wind and distance, breath control, gentle trigger squeeze, follow-through—before we got to shoot live ammunition. On the range some of the guys couldn’t get their arm positioned where the instructor wanted it. When you’re shooting they want that arm squarely under that rifle, straight up and down. Some guys were just not flexible. They couldn’t bring their arm over that far. They had a helluva time. So the DI would take their arm and yank it—uh!—and finally get it where it belonged.
There were three rankings, from Marksman to Sharpshooter up to Expert: I shot Sharpshooter with the .45 pistol and Springfield.
They worked us day and night. They’d come into the barracks at eleven o’clock at night. You hadn’t been in bed maybe an hour, and they’d shout, “We’re moving out! We’re shipping overseas. Get it all together.” We had to get our seabag, our full transport pack, our shelter half, the whole nine yards. We’d hit the streets and they’d march us for an hour and a half. Then we’d come back and get a little sleep and maybe at three o’clock they’d get us up again. We did a lot of running in the sand, and if you weren’t in pretty good shape that was tough. Your foot was slipping back every time it hit the sand. It was like trying to run in one of those dreams where your feet move but you don’t get anywhere.
Our DIs were named Stallings and Simon. Stallings stood about five feet eleven and straight as an arrow. He was an athletic type, and you knew not to mess with him.
Simon was soft-spoken and wore dark glasses. I had a little trouble with him one time in the chow line. When you’re in the chow line you’re at ease. You can move around but you can’t talk.
Fighter planes were buzzing off the runway on North Island, sometimes two at a time and flying real low. I was standing there stargazing at those airplanes, and I said, half to myself, “My God, watch them go!”
Simon walked up to me and stuck his face right up in mine. “You are at ease. Do you understand that?”
Whenever he had something to say to you, Simon got right up in your face and looked you straight in the eye and spoke very softly. I doubt if the third man down the line heard what he said. But you heard what he said. And you knew he meant business.
I thought then, That’s a good tactic. You don’t need to yell and scream at somebody to get something done. Later on I was to make good use of that lesson.
We had school and if anybody dozed off during class, it was so many laps around the parade ground.
Whenever the sleeper would get back, the DI would say, “Are you tired?”
“No, sir!”
“Well, go again.”
He’d come back with his tongue hanging, absolutely give out. And the DI would say, “Are you tired now?”
“A little bit, sir!”
“Do you think you can stay awake, now?”
“Yes, sir!”
We had two sets of fatigues, and whenever we quit for the day we went to the laundry, where there were scrub benches, brushes and soap. We washed the clothes we had worn that day, and put on the fresh set.
One kid thought he could get away with something. He would just wet one set of clothes and hang them out to dry and wear the old set again. The DI caught him and made him strip down to his underwear. Then he lined up the whole platoon in formation out in the street. He took both sets of that guy’s clothes, soaked them, and laid them in the sand and marched us down and about-face and back over those clothes maybe ten times. Then he made the kid go wash them.
Another morning, a guy didn’t shave. Or maybe he shaved, but it wasn’t a close shave. His jaw bristled. The DI got up in his face. “Oh, you forgot to shave this morning.”
He said, “No, sir. I shaved but my face was sore and I didn’t do too good a job.”
“I don’t think you did, either,” the DI said. “Come down and see me this afternoon whenever we get through.”
That afternoon he went in and the DI was sitting there whittling on a piece of wood with a razor blade. He snapped that blade in the razor and tightened it down. Then he said, “Crawl under that bunk.” He handed him the razor and he made him dry shave lying on the floor beneath that bunk.
No doubt about it. They had ways to get our attention. They broke us down. They didn’t only train us physically. They trained us mentally. Boot camp was normally a twelve-week course. They put us through it in six weeks. We were an experiment. They worked us, as this younger generation likes to say, 24-7.
When I went into the Marines, I never thought about killing anybody. By the time that six weeks was up I was lean and I was mean. I can honestly say I could have cut a Jap’s throat and never blinked an eye.
When we graduated from boot camp we were given the Marine Corps Globe and Anchor to wear on our collars. Only after that did they finally call us Marines. Later classes got a week’s leave to go home and show off to the folks after graduation, but we never got a leave, and my folks never got to see me in uniform. Instead we were trucked twenty or thirty miles over to Camp Elliott, an old Navy base the Marines were using for advanced training. We were assigned to the Ninth Replacement Brigade. The first day or so someone came along and told me, “You’re going to be in the sixty mortars. Report to that tent over there.”
The mortar. I didn’t even know there was such a weapon. That first day they had it set up behind a tent, and we all got acquainted.
The M2 60mm mortar—the 60—is a deadly weapon. One mortar shell can pretty much be depended on to kill everyone within a forty-five-foot radius. It’s a little slower than an artillery shell, but it’s reliable and very effective. The biggest battlefield killer is not the rifle, and not artillery. It’s the mortar. If you’re firing artillery, you fire straight to the target, and it hits at a low angle. But you can fire a mortar at a high angle and it comes almost straight down. It can get into places that artillery and rifle fire can’t. A man can’t hide from a mortar. They said that on Guadalcanal a gunnery sergeant named Lou Diamond put one right down the smokestack of a Japanese ship.
Our classroom was in an open pavilion about thirty feet long, with a metal roof and rows of picnic tables. They had set up a mortar just outside, and the instructor started by giving us the breakdown on the weapon: the base plate, the firing tube, the bipod, the M4 sight, and the rounds themselves. We learned there were six men in a mortar squad— three ammo carriers, a gunner, assistant gunner and the squad leader, who is usually a corporal. In battle the gunner carries the base plate, which weighs about twelve pounds. His assistant carries the tube, which is eight or ten pounds. The squad leader carries the sight, which has a level indicator and is marked for degrees right and left.
A 60mm round weighs three pounds. Around the base of the round there are four firing charges, or increments, tabs of propellant about the size of postage stamps and maybe an eighth of an inch thick. You leave the increments on or pull them off depending on how far you want to fire the round. If your target is, say, fifteen hundred yards away, you leave all four of them on. If it’s fifty yards, you take off all but one.
They call mortars “hip pocket artillery.” The whole deal—base, bipod, tube and sight—sets up in seconds. The most complicated thing is getting the round on target. When you’re dug in, you set an aiming stake out in front of the mortar and zero in the sight on that. The squad leader is probably twenty-five or thirty yards ahead, on the front lines with the riflemen. He’s wired in to the gunner by what we called a sound-powered phone. He calls in the range to the target, number of degrees right or left of the aiming stake, and gives the commands to fire. The gunner makes adjustments on the tube and his assistant drops in the round. The kill radius is about forty-five feet.
At Camp Elliott they trained us and trained us. I got to where I could set up the mortar in my sleep. But I didn’t get to fire the 60 but once or twice all the time I was in the States. I began to wonder if we would ever get to put this skill to use.
The Marines never gave you advance warning when they were about to send you someplace. You were the last to know. One morning at Camp Elliott we got word, “Fall out. We’re shipping out.” For all we knew, it might have been another drill, but this time it wasn’t. We rode trucks down to the San Diego docks and climbed aboard the USS Mount Vernon.
The next day, March 12, 1943, we sailed.
The ship stopped off in Honolulu, Fiji, and New Caledonia, but we never went ashore. I figured they were pulling in for supplies or more troops. It was an uneventful trip. For lack of anything better to do, we spent a lot of time just standing on deck trading rumors. At Fiji I looked over the side and watched dark hammerhead sharks swarming around the ship. I got to be pretty good friends with another Marine, Jim Burke. He was from Clinton, Iowa, where his brother owned a bar.
On the last day of March, we pulled into Port Melbourne, Australia. We were trucked forty miles southeast of the city to Camp Balcombe. It was a pretty place with green fields and gentle hills that reminded me of Texas. The camp was full of Marines from the First Division’s Fifth Regiment, resting up and retraining after the Battle of Guadalcanal. We were just raw recruits from the Ninth Replacement Battalion, the newcomers. They put us in with the veterans. In the months ahead they became our teachers.
For the first week or so we didn’t do much. We were assigned to occasional work parties, policing the grounds, picking up trash, dumping the garbage, doing whatever needed to be done. Then I was sent to the Fifth Regiment Headquarters and Service Company, where I was put on KP. Not as punishment for anything I’d done, but just to keep me busy and because somebody had to do the work.
One of the sights around camp was Lou Diamond, the legendary 60mm sharpshooter and one of the Marines’ Old Breed. He had fought in World War I and after that at Shanghai and finally at Guadalcanal. Now he was assigned as sergeant of the guard at the brig while awaiting shipment home because he was too old to fight. He wore a little goatee and the word was he drank Australian beer by the case.
Diamond had an old cat, and every morning you’d hear that foghorn voice of his calling, “Come on, Tom. Come on, Tom.” That cat would follow him everywhere, all day, like a dog.
After I’d been on KP for about three months, they pulled me out and said, “You’re going up to Third Battalion, K Company. Mortars.”
It was my specialty, but in the Marines you never know where they’ll put you. You just wait.
I moved a couple hundred yards from headquarters. The barracks was large enough to hold both the machine gun and mortar sections. Jim Burke was there.
They began to train us constantly. At the rifle range, I shot poorly with the BAR—Browning Automatic Rifle—but finally shot Expert with the M1, which was just being issued. Shortly after that I was promoted to private first class.
We marched. We would head out in the mornings, early, head up the road twenty miles and get back in the afternoons, late, carrying a full pack and our weapons.
One day we had a competition to detail strip a machine gun, an M1, and mortar, see who could tear it down and put it back together the fastest. I could put that mortar together and get it on target faster than anybody. I mean, I was the head dog. I made gunner immediately and was issued a .45, which I wore from then on.
I think that competition was when I was first noticed. I was a gunner on New Britain. On Peleliu I was a corporal, an observer and squad leader. By Okinawa I would be sergeant in charge of the mortar section.
The Australians had been in the war longer than we had. They sent their Diggers—as they called soldiers—to fight the Germans in 1940 when I was still picking cotton and playing high school football. The day before the Japanese bombed us at Pearl Harbor, Australian airplanes fired on a Jap convoy off the coast of Malaya. Two months later, Japanese planes bombed Darwin on Australia’s northern coast. In March 1943, they were expecting a Jap invasion at any time.
Even at Melbourne, on the southern coast, the war seemed pretty close. U.S. Marines were everywhere—the First Marine Division had taken over the new Royal Melbourne Hospital for the wounded and malaria cases from Guadalcanal. The division’s First Marine Regiment was quartered on the city’s cricket grounds, and the Seventh Marines were out at Mount Martha, right up the hill from Camp Balcombe. On weekends and leave days we poured into the city to enjoy the beautiful parks and broad streets, the bars and sweetshops. And to tell the truth, the girls, who were at least as pretty as American girls.
Once I was assigned to KP duty I lost no time working out a deal with the mess sergeant. I would work a straight twenty-four hours, then get twenty-four hours off to go into town. As soon as I was free, I’d shower, put on a fresh uniform, find Jim Burke, and we’d head out.
We’d catch what we called the cattle car, an eighteen-wheeler with a trailer that had board benches along the sides and down the middle. You could sit on that or straddle it—neither was comfortable—for the ride to Frankston, where we’d catch the train into Melbourne.
The city had streetcars and buses, the first double-decker buses I ever saw. Trains left for the suburbs every three or four minutes. You could go anywhere and you didn’t have to wait all day to do it.
We’d pull into the big Flinders Street Station about ten a.m. Jim usually spent the day across the street in the bar at the Young & Jackson Hotel, where the big attraction, other than strong beer, was Chloe, a very big and very pink painting of a naked young lady. Every GI in Melbourne had to pay his respects to Chloe at least once.
I might have a couple beers with Jim, but then I would go sightseeing. But first we would have some business to attend to.
Jim had requested that the Marines send his allotment home to Clinton so his folks could bank it for him. But for some reason, the Corps went on paying him full salary, too. By the time someone caught the mix-up, he owed the Marines a lot of money. So they cut him to $5 a payday until it was paid off. That wasn’t enough to go on liberty.
Before we went out on the town, Jim and I would go to the PX and each buy three cartons of cigarettes at fifty cents per carton. We were getting good American brands—Lucky Strikes, Camels and Chesterfields—not those wartime cigarettes like Fleetwoods. We’d hide them in the short wool jackets they’d issued us—Eisenhower jackets—take them into Melbourne and walk down the street until we sold them. We were getting two and a half Australian pounds a carton, and the exchange rate was about two and a half American dollars on the pound. You could buy a pint of beer for about twelve cents. Steak and eggs cost fifty cents. About thirty cents would get you into a movie. So six cartons would get Jim through liberty that weekend.
Late one Sunday afternoon in April, Jim and I were walking down Collins Street when we found ourselves following two young women, a blonde and a brunette, both very pretty. When they stepped into a milk bar—a combination sweetshop and soda fountain very popular in Melbourne—Jim and I stopped and looked at each other.
“The brunette’s mine,” I said.
“I’ll take the blonde,” he said.
We stepped inside, where the salesgirl was just weighing the candy the girls bought. “I’ll wait on you next,” she said.
“Never mind,” Jim said, nodding at the two girls. “We’re with them.”
“I’ll have what she’s having,” I said, indicating the brunette.
Outside the shop we asked their names. The brunette was Florence Riseley and her friend was Doris Moran. They said they were eighteen. They had come downtown from Albert Park, a suburb, to meet Florence’s mother and three-year-old brother, who were from Tasmania and would be taking a train that evening. Since none of us had anything to do for a couple hours, the girls offered to show us the Melbourne Museum, which was a few blocks away.
The museum’s main attraction turned out to be a stuffed racehorse named Phar Lap, which Doris informed us had been poisoned by “you Yanks” while racing in the United States. After about thirty minutes in the museum, staring at exhibits, Jim complained that everything in the place was starting to smell as dead as the horse.
“We told you that you Yanks killed him,” the girls said and laughed.
We walked them back to Flinders Street Station, where Florence’s mother and little brother had already arrived and were waiting to catch a local to the suburbs in an hour.
While Florence and her mother talked, Jim and I took turns entertaining her brother with train sounds and piggyback rides up and down the platform. It was the right move.
“They seem to be nice,” Florence’s mother whispered to her daughter. “Anybody who plays with a child like that can’t be all bad.”
When it came time to go and we said our good-byes, Florence’s mother slipped her a twenty-pound note. “I was wondering where we were going to eat,” Jim muttered to me. Florence heard him.
We found another milk bar nearby and the four of us had a pretty good meal by Australian standards—meat pies and milk shakes. When the waitress brought the bill, Jim and I pointed to Florence.
“It’s hers,” we said.
As we got up to go I saw Florence’s eyes flash and her jaw tighten. Just as we got to the cash register, I slipped the bill out of her hand and, as I’d planned all along, paid it myself. We all had a good laugh over that.
The evening was young. The train back to Frankston didn’t leave until 11:55 and the girls’ train to the suburbs left at midnight. So we took a boat ride on the Yarra River. If you get a bunch of Australians together, no matter where, pretty soon they’ll start to sing. So we drifted down the Yarra River, passengers singing “A Boy in Khaki” and “Bye for Now,” and, of course, “Waltzing Matilda.”
At the station, they gave us big hugs, and we agreed to meet the following Saturday at seven p.m. under the station clocks. At six minutes to midnight, Jim and I climbed aboard the train to Frankston, which started rolling almost as soon as we took our seats. Through the window we could see Florence and Doris take off on a dead run. Their train was several platforms over and it left in just five minutes. I noticed Florence had long legs.
Almost every Saturday for the next three months, Jim and I would meet Florence and Doris at Flinders Street. We’d ride around in one of the city’s horse-drawn buggies, cracking American jokes, which the girls seemed to enjoy. Sometimes, we’d pay six pence and walk downstairs to a movie house where they showed continuous newsreels of the war, or we’d go out to Luna Park, an amusement park by the river.
Florence and I spent a lot of time just sitting on benches in the city’s gardens—Melbourne had some of the most beautiful flower gardens in the world—talking about our families, about what was going on in the world and about life before the war. And after. She was easy to talk with.
I found out her father operated a steam shovel in the coal mines at Yollourn North, about ninety miles from Melbourne, and that he had fought in France during World War I, where he had been gassed. I also found out that she was sixteen, not eighteen. She had lied about her age to get a job at a factory making biscuits for the troops. Her boss had been so impressed by her work that he made her assistant floor supervisor over twenty-four other girls, and the company was sending her to night school to study management. So I knew she was smart.
One weekend I rode the train with her to Albert Park, where she lived with her uncle. At her front yard, she stepped inside the gate and swung it closed between us. Then she leaned forward and gave me my first kiss.
We’ve laughed about that over the years—that she had to put the gate between us.
On August 13, my birthday, Jim and I met the girls, and since it was a special day, we had some drinks. Then we all went to the Tivoli Theatre, where they had beautiful dancing girls wearing big feathers and not much else. The show was almost sold out, but we got tickets for the third balcony. I remember stumbling up the stairs, Florence in front of me, counting steps and trying to remember if we had passed the second balcony. I also remember we finished the evening in a movie theater, where Florence held my dizzy head in her lap and gently kissed me.
Something was in the wind. They were picking up the pace of training over the whole division. We started pulling field exercises with the Guadalcanal vets, crawling under barbed wire with our rifles, live ammunition zinging a few feet over our heads. We’d run, hit the deck, get up and run again. We’d practice making landings in rubber boats, all of it as if the enemy were right in front of us. The Guadalcanal vets had already been through it with real Japs. Just hanging around the barracks listening to those guys was an education. They’d tell stories about how they nearly starved to death on Guadalcanal, how they came down with malaria or dysentery, how they had to fight the Japs stationed on the island and then had to fight the reinforcements the Japs brought in. Just good talk between fighting men.
More than anything, we learned about tactics, both ours and the enemy’s. Of course, they’d taught us all that in boot camp and at Camp Elliott—we knew enough that when someone called out “Hit the deck!” we shouldn’t stand there asking questions. But the men from Guadalcanal were an advanced course. They’d been there and they’d done it.
Jap snipers would tie themselves in the treetops. You couldn’t see them, but they were there, watching and waiting. They’d cut fire lanes through the trees, narrow breaks about three or four feet wide at right angles to our line of march. They’d set up a machine gun and when a line of Marines would come along they’d open fire. You’d be like pins in a bowling alley.
Or you’d be moving along a trail, single file, and a Jap would get in behind the last man in the column and bayonet him or slit his throat. You’d never hear him go down. Then they’d get the next man, and the next, picking them off one by one.
I sat and listened whenever they were telling war stories, and I’d ask questions. What happened, when did it happen, how did it happen? I paid attention because I knew that we were soon going into the same situation, or something as bad.
They canceled all leaves, and we could no longer go into the city. I wrote Florence a long letter: “We are pretty busy getting ready for you know what. But from what I can find out we are going to be here for another 3 to 6 weeks…. We are making rubber boat landings up until Friday, I know, but I don’t know what is beyond that.”
We’d been at Camp Balcombe five months. One evening they told us to get our gear together. We were moving out.
We marched out of camp about dusk and hiked all that night. We’d walk for fifty minutes and break for ten, walk fifty minutes and break for ten. In the morning, field cooks met us and had breakfast ready. Then we took off again and hiked all day, fifty and ten all the way. That night we stopped and ate again. Me and Jim Burke figured we were going to spend the night, so we pitched our pup tent. About the time we got it up, someone yelled “Fall in!”
You never saw two Marines tear down a pup tent and get back in formation so fast in your life.
We had a pace we had to maintain, and we wore our full transport packs, upper and lower part, with a bedroll. The whole thing weighed about forty pounds. We were carrying our M1s and I had that .45 strapped to my side and was carrying the butt plate for the mortar. Whenever they hollered “break,” I’d just lean back on that pack and instantly I was gone. I must have slept nine minutes out of every ten-minute break.
We hiked all that second night, and starting the next morning we pulled maneuvers all day long. Sherman tanks, artillery, machine guns, all firing live ammunition, aircraft bombing and strafing out ahead of us. We’d be crawling along on our bellies and they were firing right over our heads. You’d hear the bullets zinging. It was as near combat as you could get.
About four o’clock in the afternoon we started hiking back. Somewhere along the way, they sent trucks out to pick us up, and what a blessing that was. It was Friday afternoon. We’d been at it since Wednesday. And as tired as everyone was, we still went into town on Saturday.
By now Florence and I had most of six months together. I don’t know that there was one moment when I could have said that we were in love. It was just a slow process in which we began to care for each other. We talked about me going into the war. We knew that it was going to happen sooner or later. We didn’t know when.
Toward the end of September they took our dress uniforms, our greens and hats and shoes. We went on liberty wearing our khakis and combat boots. We called them “boondockers.” Florence hadn’t even been expecting me. I looked all over town for her and finally found her with a bunch of her girlfriends in St. Kilda Park, where we had sat and talked so often.
She knew the minute she saw me.
We just hung on to each other. I kept saying, “I’ll be all right. I’ll be all right.”
I would have loved to have married her right then. But I had sense enough to know what was ahead of me. I didn’t have a clue how long it would last. I knew I couldn’t even think about marrying her and going off and getting killed and leaving her a widow.
“I’ll be all right,” I said. “I’ll come back for you when it’s over.”
But I was wrong.