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
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