A Life Disturbed

My Pacific War Revisited

Merrel D. Clubb, Jr.

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780295985367
• eBook ISBN: 9780295800875
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

An exceptional storyteller with an analytical eye, Merrel Clubb has gathered the letters he sent his parents from the Pacific Theater of World War II and his subsequent reflections on that war and on his life into a kind of then-and-now memoir. The letters are a treasure trove of humor, anxiety, and hope, revealing a young man thrust into a war that he does not understand. Through this exceptional portal on the past, we learn of the tragic absurdity of war, of a soldier trained for naval warfare but sent into land battle with weapons he'd never before fired; of command post latrines at which even commanding officers were sitting ducks; of the ghoulish trophies and mementos that soldiers collected from the battlefields. The letters describe a vivid cast of characters, from Clubb's childhood friend who instilled a love of poetry in his comrades to the hillbilly singer and the prostitute with whom the young Clubb had varied amorous adventures. But the most compelling figure in this narrative is, of course, Clubb himself, an intellectual who carried Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad along with his tommy gun; who used books as a fortification for his foxhole, discovering upon waking one morning that "Ouspensky stopped a bullet"; and who, in a darkly humorous moment, wrote home that "Plato is pretty consoling, because I can always think that somewhere there is a perfect hell of a navy of which this is but an imitation or representation." Returning to these letters years later prompts Clubb to look again at the Second World War and at the atomic bomb that ended it. In an analysis as useful to understanding our own historical moment as it is to reconsidering the past, Clubb counters the conventional wisdom shared by veterans and civilians alike, particularly regarding the concept of a "just war." For Clubb, as for so many veterans, the war does not end with the victory over Japan. Despite the intervening years, Clubb finds that the haunting episodes experienced over half a century ago echo still. Even in the solitude of the forest, in the hunting parties he meets, in the animals he himself kills, he hears again the sound of battle, sees again the faces of the victims of war. Part letters, part memoir, and part scholarly analysis, this volume ranges over a vast, colorful, and weighted territory. From the battles and respites in the Pacific Islands, to the night clubs and call girls of mainland San Francisco and San Diego; from the relative quiet of his aptly named hometown, Stillwater, to the similarly quiet Montana backcountry, Clubb's narrative explores the psychological terrain of a life disturbed, and forever changed, by war.

Sixty Years After

IT HAS BEEN ALMOST SIXTY YEARS SINCE my wartime experiences and more than fifteen years since I rediscovered and first read my letters from the war. As I have reread and thought about the letters over the years since, I have begun to understand what reading them has meant to me. For good or ill, reading them the first time set the pattern of my life and thinking since my retirement, because they reawakened a long dormant interest in my war, an interest which has become an all-too-consuming, even compulsive, preoccupation for the past fifteen years. I found myself beginning to examine my thinking and my life, not only during the war years but during the years before and since, in ways I never would have were it not for the letters. I have often wondered about that young man who wrote the letters, wondered in what ways the war affected his life, in what ways the war has affected my life, and especially my thinking.

I began to recall the events of that period of my life, both those that appear in the letters and those that do not. After reliving the war, after reflecting on my wartime experiences, I find that my memories of the war and of wartime—those I have retained over the years and those that have come back to me as a result of reading my letters—are strangely selective. And most of what I remember comes from the letters.

In spite of my struggles to recall all the details, there are huge blanks in the chronology of my experiences during the battles of Makin, Guam, Iwo Jima, even the “battle” of Kiska. Some details I remember vividly, but others simply are not there. I have little clear memory of what took place during the banzai attack that night on Makin with the Japanese soldiers making their way to the very center of our CP. I struggle to recollect what I did during the Japanese counterattacks against my battalion all through the first night on Guam. And I seem to have blotted out all memories of whatever I did in carrying out my duties in calling down and often spotting naval gunfire onto targets during Guam and Iwo Jima. Did I really kill?

Of course. But I refuse to believe it. I remember almost nothing of it. I have never really faced up to the question, “Did I kill?” Nor have I wanted to. I have no desire to remember the worst aspects of my participation in the war.

What I cannot remember frustrates me, and as I have read my letters from the war, I sometimes have felt that in a way I went to war without going to war, that I was essentially untouched by it. I was an observer watching the young man who wrote the letters and others like him wander through the charade. I believe it was Melville who said something to the effect that war is a game for boys. I think I know what he meant.

President Roosevelt's death in early 1945 made no impression on me at all, and when the war ended in Europe, I barely noticed it—my war was still going on in the Pacific. Even Honolulu, where I was at the time, took no notice of V-E Day and went on its usual busy way, no holiday or celebrations at all, at least that I recall. For reasons I do not understand, I can barely remember reports of the atomic bombs dropping on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the war while I was in San Diego, events which, or so I thought at the time, almost certainly saved my life, as I believed they did the lives of thousands upon thousands of other young men destined to land on the main islands of Japan—and, ironically, the lives of thousands upon thousands of the Japanese who would oppose those landings. References to the atomic bombs and the capitulation of Japan are curiously absent from my letters, and I have only the vaguest memory of V-J Day, and none of any celebrations or parades in San Diego.

In an attempt to fill in the gaps in my memories and to understand my war, I began to read widely, compulsively: at first histories of the campaigns in which I participated, then books about other campaigns and about the larger picture of the war in the Pacific. Then books about the origins of the war in Europe and the events leading the United States into the war, books about the ending of the war in the Pacific, books questioning the unprovoked surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor, and books questioning why the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Finally, more general histories, memoirs, novels—not only of World War II but also of the Civil War, World War I, and the Vietnam War. But especially memoirs of World War II, such as Robert Leckie's Helmet for My Pillow, William Manchester's Goodby, Darkness, E. B. Sledge's The Old Breed, Samuel Hynes's Flights of Passage, Sy Kahn's Between Tedium and Terror, and many others.¹ I wanted to see how other men had reacted to their wartime experiences on islands in the Pacific, how those experiences affected them, affected their memories, their thoughts, their attitudes, perhaps their lives. I wanted to compare their beliefs—not only about the “good war” but about the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the need for atomic bombs to end the war—to mine.

What I found after reading many memoirs was that my views about war are often quite different from those of most veterans. And it is evident, too, from what appears in the media and many books, that most Americans are all too often influenced by what many of these veterans have said over the years since World War II.

My views about war are essentially the same as they were when I went to war, only reinforced and expanded by my own experiences in the war and now by a lifetime observing latter-day wars, and by wide reading about war. I still see no sense in war—although I am aware of complexities such a statement seems to ignore. There may be, and probably are, valid reasons for fighting a war, but there are few wars that have been fought for those reasons. Most wars are fought for wrong reasons, are unnecessary and a terrible waste of human life: World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf war, and other recent “wars” in Grenada, in Panama, in Serbia-Kosovo, and in Iraq. I am not particularly proud of participating in World War II; it was something I could not escape. I now see my life in San Diego, and especially my life with Shirley the prostitute, as a fitting end to my war. I see her life as a metaphor of my wartime experience: For three years, I had been living in a demimonde by rules that differed from those of the society in which I was brought up; I had been prostituting myself for a government pimp.

Perhaps my views about war, and especially World War II, appear overly simplistic, but certainly no more simplistic than those of the average veteran of World War II—only different. I was amused some time ago when I read a statement by James Michener in a popular national magazine: “Not once in the years 1941–1945 did I hear a single American inveigh against the war.”² And five pages later, Gore Vidal, another well-known writer: “In the three years that I spent in the army, I heard no soldier express a patriotic sentiment, rather the reverse. …”³

Mitchener served in the South Pacific and Vidal in the Aleutian Islands, but both were wrong in their memories. Eighty-six-year-old Michener may have thought he remembered accurately what Americans said about the war, but although there were many who believed in the war, in my experience in the South Pacific, the North Pacific, and most extensively in the Central Pacific, I heard large numbers of Americans constantly “inveigh against the war.” Yet most veterans of the war today, sixty or so years after the war, would probably agree with Mitchener—time plays wonderful tricks on people's memories.

Gore Vidal also was partly wrong, for there were many servicemen in the Pacific who were patriotic and who believed in the rightness of the war. But in my experience Vidal was also partly correct, for there was a sizeable number of service men (not to mention civilians in the United States), perhaps even a majority overseas in the Pacific, who at the time were not particularly patriotic, or who cursed the war and wondered what the hell they were doing on those godforsaken islands out there—I was one, and I knew many, as my letters from the time show.

Most veterans and Americans today want to believe that World War II was an unambiguous struggle between good and evil, that everyone believed in that war: Michener declared that after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, “We sprang to arms” against “two enemies threatening to destroy us and other democracies.” “Moral dedication and incredible bravery assured victory [and] … saved the free world.” “It was a total national [effort].”

But although many young men “sprang to arms” in support of their country after Pearl Harbor and volunteered for service out of a strong feeling of patriotism, many others joined up to have an adventure, to escape the draft, to break a routine, to escape the Depression, to find a job, or because of social pressures of various kinds—everybody else was doing it. And huge numbers of men did not volunteer at all; they went to war because they were forced to by the draft.

Of course, to a degree, it was true that the war was a “national effort”; however, the war, particularly in Europe but also in the Pacific, was not, despite current conventional wisdom, consistently supported by the American people in agreement with their president. Steven Casey's relatively new book shows that the American public and President Roosevelt never consistently saw eye-to-eye during the war, that the public blew hot and cold with respect to both the war in Europe and in the Pacific; Americans ranged from apathetic to overconfident and did not always agree with the actions of the administration.⁴ Michener seemed to remember what he wanted to remember, as is often the case when we remember the past.

For those veterans who look back forty or fifty or more years, often through rose-colored glasses, to the “good old days” on TV or in oral histories, in Sunday supplements, in magazines, in memoirs and books, World War II was the “good war,” the “last good war we can all be proud of.” But I wonder in what way it was a “good” war,⁵ especially in view of the experiences of many to the contrary and of books documenting the savagery of World War II, not only of the Germans and Japanese, but of Americans as well. And I wonder, too, how it could be a war to be proud of, a war that led to the slaughter of 400,000 Americans over almost four years, not to mention the deaths of millions of other people throughout the world.

Many who lived the horrors of the war say now they were motivated by the conviction that the war was “just,” a war we all “believed in.” For many there was a feeling that we were all in the war “together”—a sense for many of belonging,⁶ a sense of family, of comradeship, of esprit de corps. They believed they knew what they were fighting for. But I, and many others I knew during the fighting on Makin, on Guam, on Iwo Jima had no faith in the justness of the war, no notion of what we were fighting for—except to stay alive. And I never developed a sense of comradeship or a sense of esprit de corps, except in a very vague way. My wartime job as naval gunfire liaison officer did not allow me a “family”—though I wish it had. When I was assigned to an army or marine unit for amphibious landings and joined one of those units, all the officers and men had been training together for months, even years, and had become comrades, members of a “family.” I was an outsider, a guest, joining them for the occasion—I barely knew any of my associates when I landed on the beaches, even the members of my own radio teams. I was alone.

Many veterans who write memoirs or talk on TV about the war in the Pacific seem to have a personal interest now in justifying their participation in the war. They romanticize, sentimentalize, glorify the war and their war experiences, even when depicting war's horrors: It was a “transcendent” experience. It was the “high point of my life;” “everything after was anti-climactic.” It was “a test” of oneself, a “rite of passage” from childhood to adulthood. The “days of our innocence” were over—the “best years of our lives.”⁷

But the war was not a transcendent experience for me. Although I at times romanticize some of my wartime experiences, I can neither sentimentalize the war nor glorify it. It was not the high point of my life; it was only one major experience among many: the feel of Yale University library; the moment I looked into the wide blue eyes of my first child minutes after his birth; the two years I lived in Italy when the Renaissance I had known only through literature and photographs in art books came to glorious life; the first time I saw Michelangelo's Moses in the marble flesh in Rome; the year I spent living with my wife and four children among the Burmese people; a year in Colombia; the birth of my first grandchild; and others. All after the war, as I built my career as a university professor, first of literature, later of linguistics.

World War II was not a “good” or “just” war, because it was not necessary, at least for the United States. Some historians see World War II as a continuation of World War I, partly because the Versailles Peace Treaty in effect destroyed Germany economically and led ultimately to the rise to power of Hitler and eventually to World War II. There is an interesting book by Murray Eiland entitled Woodrow Wilson: Architect of World War II, that underscores the futility of World War II. And many facts have emerged in the last ten years or so that complicate what appeared to be a simple good-or-evil situation sixty-five years ago. Although Roosevelt, along with many in Great Britain, believed that Hitler's expansions had to be stopped, the American people remained isolationists in their views and saw no point in entering the war in Europe, until it was forced upon them by the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And Hitler was stopped by Russia well before we entered the war.⁸

Most veterans and younger Americans today seem to think we went to war for high and noble causes in Europe, but if that were so why did we not enter the war earlier to save countries in Europe from Nazi onslaughts? After Hitler declared war on the United States in December 1941, we believed we were fighting for our liberty, our way of life in America. But there is considerable evidence to show that for several months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and our official entry into the war, Hitler wanted the US to stay out of the war, and that the president misled Congress and the American people as he was attempting to maneuver the United States into the war, that he was hoping to create an “incident” in the Atlantic which would arouse the American people, that in effect we were already in the war with our destroyers convoying ships loaded with war materials destined to England.

It is also clear that the United States did not enter the war to defend the rights and lives of Jews in Germany and Europe. Anti-Semitic feelings were rampant in the United States in 1940 and 1941, and it has been shown that the State Department consistently refused to grant entry to Jewish refugees from Europe. Nor did the American Jewish community welcome immigration of Jews into the country.⁹ Shiploads of European Jewish refugees, looking for haven in the western world, were refused entry—The SS St. Louis perhaps the most notorious example. Turned back by many countries, some of these refugees were eventually taken to gas ovens in Germany. Railways leading to those ovens were never bombed—either by the British or by the Americans as they flew over them time after time—because, according to the War Department, bombing “might provoke more vindictive action by the Germans.”¹⁰

Many believe, even today, that Hitler would have invaded the United States if we had not gone to war, but there is evidence that military commanders in Washington believed that the western hemisphere was in no danger at all of a military invasion by Hitler. He already had his hands full with Russia and could not even cross the channel, much less the Atlantic for an invasion.¹¹ But the belief that we were fighting Hitler to preclude an invasion soon became an article of propaganda throughout the war. We were never fighting for high-minded principles at any time during the war; yet that we were fighting for “freedom” and “our way of life” became articles of propaganda and continue in popular belief even today.

As Roosevelt was attempting to do his secretive best to propel the United States into the European war, he often reassured Congress and the American people that we would never, fight on foreign soil. In the course of his third-term campaign he addressed the nation: “[I tell] you mothers and fathers … your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”¹² And most people believed their president at the time.

For most veterans and Americans, even today, the Japanese bombing of our military bases on Oahu in December 1941 was a surprise attack, a sneak attack, “unprovoked and dastardly.” But expressions such as “sneak attack” and “that day of infamy,” and so on, are but the rhetoric of propaganda. The purpose of war is to win, to destroy, and to kill. Surprise is one way to accomplish those purposes. Recall that President Theodore Roosevelt and Wall Street applauded the strategic shrewdness of the Japanese in 1904 when they caught the Russians by surprise and shelled their fleet anchored off what was once known as Port Arthur at the foot of the Darien Peninsula.¹³

The bombing of Pearl Harbor, of course, was a surprise to the naval and army personnel who underwent it and to most Americans at home, but there is considerable evidence that the attack on American territory, including the possibility of Pearl Harbor, was not a surprise to the administration in Washington. A conflict with Japan had been brewing since the beginning of the twentieth century, primarily for economic reasons. In the 1930s the U.S. began conducting yearly naval war games (one including a successful surprise air attack on Pearl Harbor by war planes from the US aircraft carrier Saratoga) in the seas to the north of Oahu on the supposition that an enemy would approach and attack from that direction, as in fact the Japanese did the morning of December, 7, 1941. In 1940, Roosevelt had cut off exports of scrap iron to Japan, and, although he did not intend a total ban on oil to Japan in 1941 when he ordered a cutback on gasoline and oil exports, it was interpreted in Japan as a total freeze, or embargo.¹⁴ This had the effect of forcing Japan to look s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Preface
• The Life Disturbed
• Preparation for Battle
• Kiska
• Makin
• Honolulu Interlude
• Guam
• Iwo Jima
• San Diego
• Sixty Years After
• The War and My Life
• Abbreviations
• Notes