US Marines saved our butts

THE PACIFIC THEATRE. W.W.2 (New Zealands 'Backyard')

Familiar but strange-sounding names fill the story of the Pacific war.. Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Guam, Peleliu, Iwu Jima, Okinawa, Saipan, Bataan & Corregidor & the Kokoda Trail Papua New Guinea, - So many landings on fortress islands, so many deaths on both sides – and so many mistakes. I'm quoting below a couple of paragraphs where New Zealand is specifically recalled – but the stories told by William Manchester are personal and horrifyingly candid.

-'GOODBY DARKNESS -A Memoir Of The Pacific War' by William Manchester, graphically tells of the extreme conditions under which hundreds of thousands of American Marines fought and died in their struggle to take the islands of the Pacific away from the Japanese and save Australia & New Zealand from invasion and occupation – suffering massive losses as they clawed their way northwards up the chains of islands towards Japan – a story of K rations and Ka-bar knives, black Zippo lighters, flame-throwers, stench and gore:

- " Vandegrifts men were in wretched shape. Most were suffering from dysentery, - rations condemmed as unfit in Panama, and returned to the United States for destruction, had inexplicably been shipped to the Marines." - "In Wellington, New Zealand, where their advanced echelon landed, the annual rains had begun. Wellingtons longshoremen chose this astonishing moment to go on strike. Drenched, sick Marines, – New Zealand was in the middle of a flu epidemic – had to load their own ships in eight hour shifts under dim lights, wrestling with soaked cardboard cartons which frequently burst open, leaving a swamp of soggy cornflakes, beans, clothing and miscelleneous debris. Because of the strike they would have to attack with only ten days of ammunition and, in the words of a divisional order, other ïtems actually required to live and fight."Äll wharfees is bastards" one Marine wrote on the wall of a dockworkers toilet.

The attacking force of Marines headed to GUADALCANAL had little information of the island or the strength of its Japanese defenders – nobody had heard of it. - One of Vandegrifts colonals, desperate for intelligence, had studied seventeenth-century sailing charts, interviewed missionaries, traders, schooner captains and LEVER BROTHERS employees, all refugees from the Solomons. Based on what they told him, he had drawn a rough map of Guadalcanals northern coast, where the airfield was being built by the Japs. It proved to be unreliable. - "MacArthurs G-2 (intelligence), having completed a photo-map of Guadalcanal three weeks earlier, mailed it to Ghormley. -The package was improperly addressed and lost in the Auckland post office.

"That familiar image of the twenty-eighth Marines raising the flag atop Mount Suribachi (Iwo Jima) - "the most familiar photograph of the Pacific war", was taken early in the struggle, on the fifth day of battle, before the Americans confronted the enormity of the challenge before them" - "three of the six men who had anchored the pipe bearing the US colors were killed in action before the annihilation of enemy troops in and around Mount Suribachi."

Cheyenne