Pacific Time on Target

Memoirs of a Marine Artillery Officer, 1943-1945

Christopher Donner, Jack McCall

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781612776262
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Seconde Guerre mondiale

The gritty combat memoir of a Marine Corps artilleryman and forward observer

As a married man and Stanford graduate student nearing thirty, Christopher Donner would likely have qualified for an exemption from the draft. Like most of his generation, however, he responded promptly to the call to arms after Pearl Harbor. His wartime experiences in the Pacific Theater were seared into his consciousness, and in early 1946 he set out to preserve those memories while they were still fresh. Sixty-five years later, Donner's memoir is now available to the public.

During the spring of 1943 Donner joined the Marines' 9th Defense Battalion and saw his first combat service in the campaign for New Georgia in the Solomon Islands. Due to a large Japanese airfield threatening several Allied bases, New Georgia was the next island group targeted for the Allies' post-Guadalcanal operations. Donner's account of the fight for New Georgia is replete with images of lush tropical lagoons and groves shredded by American artillery bombardments and Japanese air raids. With the end of Japanese resistance in the Central Solomons, Donner's battalion was dispatched in June 1944 to serve in the liberation of the U.S. territory of Guam. When his unit was deactivated and its veterans sent home, Donner was not so fortunate.

In early 1945, Donner was reassigned to the 11th Marines, the 1st Marine Division's field artillery. His new commander decreed that Donner would serve as a field artillery forward observer—just in time for the invasion of Okinawa. Teeming with close calls and near misses, frank yet sensitive observations of the brutality visited on Okinawa's civilians, and the horrors of frontline combat, Donner's account of his service with the "Old Breed" on Okinawa forms the core of his memoir. Donner's "FO" team accompanied both Marine and Army infantrymen into the bitter fighting at Wana Ridge, the Dragon's Tooth, and Shuri Castle. Miraculously unscathed by the Okinawa bloodbath, Donner was en route to California for his first opportunity for leave when he learned of the atomic bombs and war's end.

Besides providing a candid, moving contemporary record of the combat experiences of a Marine Corps officer, Pacific Time on Target is an invaluable account of the harrowing life of an artillery forward observer, as few of these men survived to tell their stories. It will appeal to military historians and general readers alike.

CHAPTER 1

April to June 1943

From awaiting orders on New Caledonia to joining the Ninth Defense Battalion on Guadalcanal

It was probably inevitable that I would have the urge to write the following account. To one who has had a habit of writing journals and diaries, the military censorship of mail and prohibition of personal records was repressive, even if fully justified.1 Now that I am off active duty and have some free hours, I want to write a sequential summary of my years overseas. I do not intend to embroider the facts or the presentation. But, I feel that some of the experiences and individuals I met were worthy of clearer remembrance than my own memory will furnish as the years go by. If anyone is so intimately interested in me that he or she reads these pages, please bear in mind that I write to preserve for myself the reality of a recent period in my life.

The gangplank at San Diego on the 17th of April 1943 is a good beginning. When I walked up it about noon of that day, I was already wondering when I might again set foot on U.S. soil and was bearing inside of me the void of being separated from Madge. There would be no use in describing the process, which had begun the preceding August, of transforming a civilian into the outward semblance of a Marine officer. There was nothing at all remarkable about that period of uprooting and training as it applied to me. In common with many others, I obtained very little from it besides the conviction that actual combat could never be much worse. And, in fact, it had proved more of a struggle for me to get through those first twenty weeks at Quantico than it was to keep going through any of the fighting I personally met. There were times in OC when I very much wanted to quit, when my conception of the responsibilities an officer must shoulder seemed mountainous.

The long wait in column on their pier, under a Southern California sun, under transport pack and dressed in greens,2 had put us in a sweat by the time we found our staterooms in the Lurline.3 At that point, we began to meet with the usual wartime conditions aboard transports: very little space, stuffy heat, and limited fresh water. Six of us piled into our small room on “B” deck. I thought that was cramped, until we saw the men sleeping on five-tier bunks with scarcely room enough to move between them. Let’s see: there was Carr, Davis and Davis (not related), Wilson, and another whose face I remember—all of us, second lieutenants of the Fourteenth Replacement Battalion. Carr had come through OC, ROC,4 and Base Defense Weapons School with me. He was a very serious, precise chap who had been nicknamed “Headspace” while we were studying the .30 caliber machine gun.

All that first afternoon tied up at the pier, they were handing out duties. The CO of our Battalion had been made officer of the guard, and he chose Jim Dyer, who “polished the apple with him,” to do all the work. Having already been appointed as a censor for my battery to work under Battalion censor Aadnessen, I was handed no other annoying details. A checkup on my platoon of men revealed that they had drawn staterooms near mine and were getting squared away. The good chow was started that night in the prewar elegance of the after-dining salon. Ice cream was served twice a day, and the menu was really excellent throughout the fourteen-day voyage. A lot of pictures of wives and sweethearts were brought out that first evening before we were even under way. I used a precautionary “Mother Sill”5 and turned in early. We were at sea when I woke the next morning.

The Pacific groundswell was already at work. From the first day on, there were certain individuals who always missed their meals when the waters tossed a bit. Fortunately, I had the “Mother Sills,” which I had also bought for the men in my platoon, and I never tossed at all. A routine was established, which included physical drill on deck, rifle inspections, and mad scrambles for abandon-ship drill. But, for the most part, we liked to lie in the sack and “shoot the breeze” about women, or gamble. One officer was the talk of the ship when he ran about $50 up to more than $900 in seven straight passes with the dice. I suppose we carried well over four thousand troops and six or seven hundred officers.

The only women onboard were four Navy nurses, whom Dyer met in his capacity as OD. He introduced them around, and some of the officers were going up on the moonlit boat deck with the ladies until the CO of troops put a stop to it. A show was staged in the enlisted mess about a week out, and one of the plumper nurses lent one chaplain a bra and some other underwear, in order that he might do a burlesque of a striptease. He had great difficulty keeping his grapefruit in the bra. At the end of the performance, the chaplain tried to express his gratitude to the nurse, but she fled up the companionway amid cheers.

The blackouts at night were so complete that one could stand on deck and yet feel very much alone. The Lurline moved swiftly across the waters, by itself, following a zigzag course to elude submarines. There appeared to be little danger, and no one felt particularly concerned. Once, a deck officer confided to me that we had altered our course because of reported subs, but that was the only threat.

The heat became stifling in the crowded staterooms and troop compartments as we approached the equator. Beefy individuals were constantly developing aggravated cases of heat rash. Only the paratroopers and a few enthusiasts continued their body conditioning with vigor. When we “crossed the line” at the equator, the CO would allow few of the customary rites of initiation6 from “fear of incapacitating troops heading for combat.” By now, there was the usual rash of petty thefts to add to the heat rash.

And we had a stowaway, a man who wanted to go overseas so badly with his former buddies that he had secured all the combat gear, moved in line down the pier, had his friends create a diversion to distract the officers checking the sailing roster, and walked up the gangplank. This Marine had even obtained a liberty pass from his other unit at Camp Elliott in order to allow himself time to pull off the feat. He gave himself up three days out, and the whole platoon offered to stand trial en masse for assisting him. The CO reassigned him to his old unit.

It was funny how carefully I read and censored the first letters that were handed in. I even held them to the light to check for invisible writing, and looked under the lining of the envelopes. I could see something scrawled under an airmail stamp on one letter and, taking pains to remove the stamp, found the innocent word “free.” We were all eager beavers about that sort of thing at first.

In the middle of the second week, we steamed into the harbor of Tutuila in American Samoa. I had my first look at a Pacific tropical island. The tall palms and steep, verdure-covered hills were as beautiful as are the mountainous sections of Mexico, but the heat was uninviting and oppressive after the ocean breezes. We were especially interested in the natives who appeared along shore, and we were rather surprised to find that the figures in red skirts, riding bicycles, were really young men.

We tied up to the dockside in the quiet harbor. I was given a detail of twenty-five men to unload one of the forward holds. Thus, I had a chance to go ashore and observe some of the native gangs of bulky, slow-moving, brown-skinned fellows who were working the cargo nets expertly, but with the least expenditure of effort. They seemed happy and carefree, constantly joking and laughing at one another in the Polynesian tongue. Some of the women who appeared, always under parasols, were colorful and also inclined to portliness. An ambulance was brought up to the ship at one point, and into the vehicle were loaded the corpses of two men who had died of spinal meningitis during the voyage.

Rain squalls developed quickly in the midafternoon, and we were drenched as the unloading progressed. I had an opportunity, however, to talk to Kent Bush and Joe Drexler, who had left the States a week ahead of me. They said that they and Hollingsworth were awaiting transportation to British Samoa and Funafuti, our most recently captured outpost to the north of Samoa. When we left Tutuila the following morning, we had taken aboard additional troops who had been garrisoning Samoa. Hunt and Honeycutt, both ROC classmates of mine, were among the officers. It seemed evident by now that we were headed for New Caledonia and Australia or New Zealand, but where our orders would take us off, we did not know.

We disembarked five days later in the picturesque colonial harbor of Noumea, New Caledonia, which was crammed with warships, troopships, and freighters. We saw what we thought were the battleships Washington and North Carolina and a large aircraft carrier. Barges made of pontoons carried us ashore. We loaded into trucks and wound through the wildly colored town, dominated by a large Catholic church and the old French barracks.7 We looked in amazement at the blacks with their hair bleached to a bright orange. Young, attractive French girls moved through the streets, and everywhere were small-statured Malayans, the women resembling little dolls. The road led out to the country, past the nickel works, and became a heavily rutted dirt trail. The rain had done its work when we pulled up to the Replacement Center at St. Louis. It was a great mud hole, lying near the ocean in a valley between two mountains. One of the first things we noticed there was the terrific stench of the latrines. That was May 2, 1943.

Within two weeks, at least 50 percent of us had the “trots.” The wet weather had severely complicated the water and sanitation problems. When the “heads” filled up, they were pumped out in old gasoline drums, which were then hauled away in a truck called the “Honey Wagon.” That was not a popular detail. All hands were called out every day to work on roads, ditches, tent areas, movie areas, and a built-in shower for the shack of the CO. The permanent personnel of the camp used our men to construct their screened-in tents, giving us, as transient officers, old tents. They took the mess hall for themselves, along with the choice food and the beer supply. We transients had no rights, except to handle the work on the growing camp.

A few visits to town convinced men fresh from the States that good liberty did not exist. The French were almost hostile; the stores charged outrageous prices; wine was $15 a bottle, whisky, $20. Officers could, however, buy a good dinner at the Pacific Club and beer at the bar until 7:00 P.M. Hard liquor was scarce. We took some pleasure on sunny days in the beauty of the land outside the camp, the “rivers” with good swimming holes, and the villages of Melanesians. These natives were said to have slit the throats of white men who had tried to get into their women. Whether or not there was any truth in that, the blacks made a fortune on laundry and invested their money in as many American blankets as they could buy at $20 apiece on the black market. To cap the recreation program and make liberty worth the effort, before I left, the French had reopened one of their whorehouses, at $5 a crack. The truck that took me to the dock went about a block from the brothel, and in early afternoon there was already a line of soldiers, sailors, and Marines a hundred yards long, policed by MPs.

The serious side of this replacement camp was the distribution of men and officers to units in the field. I entered it as a platoon leader and censor. Before long, I was spending all day bringing all enlisted personnel of our battalion up to scratch in clothing and equipment. (A lot of men preferred to throw underwear away rather than wash it.) Later, I had command of three companies, while other officers of our group sat in their tents with nothing to do. Then came the offer of a temporary job as headquarters company commander for the camp, succeeding a Captain Wenban, who was heading for the Ninth Defense Battalion instead of going home as he thought he deserved after a few months on Guadalcanal. I mentioned that I wanted no such temporary job, and I did not get it.

By this time, a group of our officers had been sent over to the newly formed Fourth Base Depot for supply echelon work. Baker, Bo, and Callahan were three of them. Jim Dyer was pushed forward by the major for second-in-command of Admiral Halsey’s Marine guard. Jim was suited for that spot, both by temperament and by virtue of his years of enlisted service as a “sea-going bellhop.” By the end of a week, he was sporting a jeep and a $50 membership in a beautiful liquor mess at Quonset Village over the harbor: really, a man to be envied. Larry Bangarer had a yen for real fighting: he persuaded the authorities to overlook his base defense specialty and was accepted by the Third Raider Battalion. Zorthian went to the Eleventh Marines, Les Bateman to Second Division’s Special Weapons, Joe Foulds to the Fourteenth Defense Battalion at Tulagi, and McJunkin to a barrage balloon outfit in Noumea. The last three were in the tent with me and did not leave until after I had gone, but they had gotten their assignments earlier than me.

Meanwhile, the big lists had come in, and I was working until late at night seeing contingents of men off to the ships. Most of my three companies were headed for the Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Fourteenth Defense Battalions, all in the Solomons. We heard that the Tenth and Fourteenth were getting plenty of bombing at the Russell Islands and Tulagi, respectively. I said good-bye to most of the good men and NCOs, who seemed pretty close friends to me after the voyage from the States. I began to wonder if I would be allowed to settle comfortably in New Caledonia while they went into the danger area.

Buck went into Marine Guard Mail Service, and Charlie Beck, my battery CO in the Fourteenth Replacement, transferred to the Casual Camp to help the major there. At that point, other officers had been sent to us from the code room of First MAC8 in Noumea. They were Sandager and Townsend. No sooner had they arrived than word was passed around that orders were in the office for almost all the remaining officers. When the runner brought my copy to the tent, my breath seemed to leave my body until I had a look. Those orders to our first permanent unit loomed pretty large. I was going to the Ninth Defense Battalion, Seacoast Artillery Group, at Guadalcanal.

A large group left almost immediately. Carr and Caldwell headed for the Tenth Defense; many others left for the Fourteenth Defense; and Townsend, Sandager, and Joe La Cesa, a mild, good boy who had come all the way from OC with me, shoved off for the Ninth. I was glad to know that Joe would be in the same outfit. The word was immediately passed that the Ninth had had a long stretch in the tropics and were due for a rest in New Zealand. What a lucky assignment: to see Guadalcanal and then the Anzacs.9 Four weeks in New Caledonia, in any case, had rested me so that I weighed about 155, was tanned, and felt some confidence in my ability to handle troops.

Late in the afternoon on the 29th of May, I heaved my gear onto the deck of the USS Talbot. She had been one of the old four-stacker destroyers, the “Holy Rollers,” now converted for troop-carrying with two stacks and boilers cut out. Second Lt. Charlie Kohn was the only other Marine onboard, and like me, he was headed for the Ninth Defense. We made our bunks in the wardroom and introduced ourselves to the Army and Navy personnel who were both crew and passengers. Only a short time after we hit the open sea outside Noumea harbor, mal de mer hit the Army Ordnance first lieutenant who had been placed in command of troops onboard. The skipper therefore handed me that assignment and asked me to organize the gun watches. We had a three-inch AA gun, with plenty of 20 mm and .50 caliber guns. This was considerably different from that luxury liner, the Lurline, and the old Talbot lived up to her name of being a roller. In those first two days and nights before I learned the ropes, she banged me up plenty against bulkheads and on the ladders. Since the job looked important to me, I spent a good deal of time, day and night, checking the crews at the guns. In the stormy weather we experienced there in the Coral Sea, the decks were pitch black, but it was better to be topside than in the terrific heat of the small wardroom.

The Talbot carried about 128 passengers, primarily male nurses for the Army and Signal Corps men for the Army and Navy. Few of them knew anything at all about weapons, but we worked up a training program in coordination with the ship’s crew. The idea was that the passengers would stand watch until they spotted trouble and would then be relieved as quickly as possible by the regular gun crews. One blond, high-voiced kid among the Army nurses came up to me and announced he could not take the position that I had assigned to him. Then, he went on to state that he was a conscientious objector and would not handle guns. I was surprised to find one in that setup, bu...