Ripples of Battle Read online

  RIPPLES

  OF BATTLE

  How Wars of the Past

  Still Determine How We Fight,

  How We Live, and How We Think

  Victor Davis Hanson

  DOUBLEDAY

  New York London Toronto Sydney Auckland

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List of Maps

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1

  The Wages of Suicide: Okinawa, April 1–July 2, 1945

  CHAPTER 2

  Shiloh’s Ghosts, April 6–7, 1862

  CHAPTER 3

  The Culture of Delium, November 424 B.C.

  Epilogue: The Imprint of Battle

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Also by Victor Davis Hanson

  Copyright Page

  To the memory of Victor Hanson

  F Company, 2nd Battalion, 29th Regiment, 6th Marine Division

  Killed in Action, May 18, 1945—Okinawa

  List of Maps

  Okinawa

  The Southern States

  Events of April 6, 1862

  Delium, 424 B.C.

  Delium: Routes of Retreat

  Introduction

  On my rare visits to the local cemetery, I am always struck by the unremarkable grave of Victor Hanson. The inscription is as spare as the stone itself—name, state, rank, dates of birth and death, and nothing much more except the nondescript “29 Marines / 6 Marine Div / World War II.” Unlike the other impressive tombstones of relatives in the family plot, there are no inscribed res gestae, not even a “loving father” much less a “beloved grandfather.” A man who dies tragically, young, and alone does so without capital, either monetary or human. When he leaves behind no progeny, it is evident in the modesty of his commemoration.

  But then his mother died in childbirth, his father was blinded in the vineyard by a sulfur-machine accident. He was killed at twenty-three, without wife or children, his body eventually shipped back and reinterred in Kingsburg, California. And because Victor was an only child, when he died on Okinawa, his father Victor Hanson’s thin line perished as well. Had his memory vanished as well?

  Certainly there are no Hansons left of Victor’s direct ancestry to appreciate the significance of his modest epitaph, whose calculus—death recorded on May 19, 1945, serving in the 29th Regiment, 2nd Battalion, Company F of the 6th Marine Division—reflected his presence at the nexus of one of the worst days of the bloodiest campaign in the Pacific theater, the final assault and capture of Sugar Loaf Hill and its environs. William Manchester, of the same regiment, wrote of the bloody assaults on Sugar Loaf:

  Infantry couldn’t advance. Every weapon was tried: tanks, Long Toms, rockets, napalm, smoke, naval gunfire, aircraft. None of them worked. If anything, the enemy’s hold on the heights grew stronger. The Japanese artillery never seemed to let up, and every night Ushijima sent fresh troops up his side of the hill. We kept rushing them, moving like somnambulists, the weight of Sugar Loaf pressing down on us, harder and harder. And as we crawled forward, shamming death whenever a flare burst over us, we could almost feel the waves of darkness moving up behind us. In such situations a man has very little control over his destiny.

  Victor was shot as his company beat back the last death-charges of suicidal Japanese to defend the hill, dying on Okinawa on the evening (May 18) before those who were left of his 29th Marines were finally relieved and evacuated from the battle. The official history of American operations on Okinawa reads, “A platoon of Company F also tried to advance along the ridge toward the west, but the leader was killed and the platoon withdrew under heavy mortar fire.” The authors then summarize the sacrifice, “On the next day, 19 May, the 4th Marines relieved the exhausted 29th Marines. During the 10-day period up to and including the capture of Sugar Loaf the 6th Marine Division had lost 2,662 killed or wounded; there were also 1,289 cases of combat fatigue. In the 22nd and 29th Marines three battalion commanders and eleven company commanders had been killed or wounded.”

  In addition, the official history of the 6th Marine Division remarked of the exposed position of Company F on Sugar Loaf on the day of Victor’s death that “heavy fire continued to come from Horseshoe Hill and company F was dispatched in that direction. The assault was perfectly maneuvered; the Marines went right to the crest, where the fight developed into a grenade battle at close quarters with a terrific mortar barrage.”

  To read accounts of those savage uphill assaults against entrenched Japanese is to wonder not why Victor was killed on May 18, but how in God’s name had he lived that long? After all, in just a few days, three thousand Marines were killed or gravely wounded in and around Sugar Loaf Hill, more Allied soldier casualties than lost on Monte Cassino and about the same number as on Tarawa. His 29th Regiment suffered 82 percent casualties on Okinawa and for all practical purposes had ceased to exist.

  Yet without ostentatious stones, lasting works of fame, or any surviving immediate family, had the childless, young Victor Hanson really perished on that godforsaken hill with dozens of his friends on May 18? Surely not. Growing up, I heard his name nearly daily. My father was his first cousin, but the two were more like brothers, given their near-identical ages and lifelong companionship; for a time they lived side-by-side on adjoining farms, went to the same college, and joined the Marines. And so it was that the last half century our parents talked often about this mysterious dead man. “If only Vic had lived,” the refrain went, followed by all sorts of counterfactuals concerning the subsequent sad fate of his father, his high school and college prospects, whom he might have married, children reared, partnerships entered with my father, grandparents consoled, college work that presaged future success, farms saved—rather than people saddened, sickened, and cast adrift, and homesteads soon to be sold or lost. I began as a child almost to resent this shadowy moral exemplar, who had died without making a mistake, thus leaving his namesake with the burden of emulating such character.

  My mother and father both offered these what-ifs, since all three of them had left farms in central California to attend the College of the Pacific together up in Stockton. “He was a wonderful man,” I would hear from her as a youth. After my mother’s death, Victor’s high school girlfriend, now widowed in her eighties, with great-grandchildren, often emerged from the past to keep up the refrain of praise and honor; she has now supervised the construction of a small memorial to the four fighting Hansons in the center of Kingsburg Memorial Park, once the site of their ancestral homestead. She visits still, and just a few weeks ago left me a formal handwritten note that ended:

  Cpl. Hanson, only son and child of Victor Sr. and grandson of Nels and Cecilia Hanson, was killed in action on May 19, 1945—age 23 years and 3 months, along with another 12,500 valiant young men. The Kingsburg Recorder said of Victor Jr.—“He reflected the gentility emanating from his grandmother Cecilia (reared by her when he became a motherless infant). Those who knew him, all apprised him as a gentle man.” Victor Hanson, Jr. never returned to his home on 1965 18th Avenue, Kingsburg, California—Hanson Corner. He was awarded the Purple Heart posthumously.

  From his surviving yellow letters on Marine stationery, I had already sensed just that humility, unusual even for the accepted modesty of that better age. And then recently I received a phone call from eighty-year-old Michael Senko, who occupied the foxhole where Victor died, and without warning had replied to my efforts in learning about Victor’s last moments. He too emphasized his “gentleness,” adding that he was a “perfect guy”—this remembrance from over a half century later. In a letter to his grandparents from basic training at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, after briefly and nonchala
ntly detailing all sorts of trial amphibious landings, marathon marches, and assorted tests of endurance, Victor was far more concerned with the health and safety of his octogenarian surrogate parents back home here in the 1940s small farming town of Kingsburg. The final paragraph reads: “I’m really glad to hear that you are all fine, because I wonder all the time if you are all O.K. I’m just fine, couldn’t be better and never weighed more. I guess I weigh over 200—not enough hard work I guess. Well I guess I better close for now. Hoping this letter finds you all well and fine, Love Victor.”

  Occasionally a few sketchy details would emerge about his demise. “A damn machine gun got him from when he wasn’t looking,” my Swedish grandfather offered twenty years after Victor’s death, before coughing in midsentence and in anger—his own lungs had been ruined from gas in the Argonne. Other vague accounts mentioned his company being cut off and surrounded. Until this May I have often wondered how anyone knew of his last moments.

  “They had no business putting those boys there on Okinawa in that way,” my dad also on occasion spit out at the end of one of his angry monologues. “They played right into Jap hands. Hell, we were bombing Japan to bits anyway, and they could have just passed that damn island by. But no, that was not the Marine idea of how to get things done.” What an odd thought: my generation who knew no battle had thought that we bombed too severely and unduly punished the Japanese; my father’s who fought the war was convinced that the air war was too late and not enough—and thus did not prevent the Japanese from punishing fellow Americans on places like Okinawa.

  Both cousins had, in fact, joined the Marines; for an altercation with his officer my father was drummed out of basic training but not formally charged—the embarrassing details were never revealed to us—on the stipulation that he join the Army Air Corps, which eventually led him to something as equally horrific as Okinawa. Still, even armed with that disclosure I never quite understood why his anger was sometimes turned inward; surely it was not from a failure to fight on Okinawa side-by-side with Vic. At his other outbursts the remorse appeared even more bizarre, as he hinted that had the murderous B-29s—he had flown on thirty-nine missions from Tinian over Japan as a central fire-control gunner—firebombed Japan earlier and harder, Okinawa would have been irrelevant. In his logic, if a three-hundred-plane B-29 aerial armada had carpeted Japan in 1944 rather than in the spring and summer of 1945, Victor would perhaps have had garrison duty only, mopping up a few stalwart resisters on the charred island of Kyushu. Given the dreadful incendiary missions he had flown—only his crew and one other of the sixteen bombers in his original squadron survived—I, the solicitous and embarrassed college student in the mid-1970s, had once tried to offer solace. “Well, Dad, it’s hard to think you guys were slow; after all, you just about burned down the entire country in two months as it was.”

  Most of my fellow university students at the time—to the degree they even knew or thought of World War II—in lockstep condemned the bombing, both conventional and atomic, as barbaric an act as Vietnam was then. My strange father, alone in the world, I gathered, felt that the horrific firestorms had been too little and too late! Such are the lifelong wages of rage when farm boys reluctantly leave their homesteads to kill those who have killed their own.

  Victor’s Marine picture was—and still is—on our wall. Where his effects of a half century earlier went I don’t know. Only a few were apparently given to my late father. They usually turned up only by accident when I was a child. One day in 1962 in the barn I pulled out of the rafters a massive thirty-five-ounce Louisville Slugger with “Victor Hanson” burned into the wood; we used it for five years, put in screws, tape, and resin until at last it shattered with age and overuse. It was a massive bat, fitting seventeen years earlier for a young Swede of well over six feet three inches and 200 pounds.

  When I went to UC Santa Cruz in the early 1970s, I took his college briefcase, then already thirty years old, with “VH” stamped in two places. Its age and queer construction on occasion brought offers of purchase from affluent would-be renegades from Los Angeles, who found its strange canvas and leather bindings, now stuffed with Greek and Latin books, either exotic or perhaps even organic. “His grandmother bought it for him,” my father explained, adding, “With his degree he was supposed to be an officer, not join the Marines at the front.” Even at eighteen I had been aware of the ludicrous contrast between the two Victor Hansons leaving the farm with that same satchel—one halfheartedly entering the indolent, self-absorbed culture of UC Santa Cruz, the other eagerly departing for the inferno of the United States Marine Corps of 1944.

  Despite the daily reminder of the monogrammed briefcase, I tried to forget about Victor, but he nevertheless seemed to return on the most unlikely of occasions. Four years later at graduation, the pleasant parents of a Japanese friend from Okinawa ate with us at a postbaccalaureate dinner. I spotted my father sitting nearby and grimaced at what I knew would—had to—follow; this was, remember, Santa Cruz in 1975 (nearly thirty years to the month after Victor’s death). Our roommate’s mother made a perfectly sensible remark about the Americans and the hardships of her childhood growing up in wartime Japan; her husband from Okinawa also mentioned the war and the American bloodletting on the island.

  In the smiling, laid-back atmosphere of a June graduation on Monterey Bay, everybody became more candid amid the white wine, the polite chatting, and the table talk. Could we not all agree about what the Americans had done? Comfortable in the university climate of rising diversity, attuned to what they saw as the new American enlightenment of shame and remorse over the recent bombing in Vietnam, someone let slip the B-29s, the firebombings, the suicides on Okinawa, and all those regrettable acts of American barbarity.

  It was all downhill from there. I have tuned out everything of my beet-red father’s response to these gracious middle-aged Japanese except his last crude sentence: “It was not enough for what the Japanese did.” In their defense, who at such a place and at such a time—the students and their folk at Santa Cruz were not of the warrior class—could anticipate Victor’s ghost?

  His letters to his grandparents mostly worried that he might not be good enough for the Marines, that should he fail various endurance tests, he might not make the cut for jungle fighting overseas, that through some imagined lapse of muscular strength—he was a highly sought-after scholarship college athlete who, with my father, played for Amos Alonzo Stagg at the College of the Pacific—he might not be a good enough Marine and so be replaced by someone more deserving, someone better. In one note to his grandparents, he expressed concern that the Marine-issue rifles might be insufficient for jungle warfare:

  Could you be on the lookout for a .45 cal. Automatic Pistol? The model is 1911 or 1911A1. They don’t issue them to you any more but they are desirable to have besides a rifle in combat. They come in handy in case your rifle or carbine fails to fire. They look something like this [a sketch follows]—that’s a rough idea. If you happen to run across one and it is a good one we’ll buy it; you can use the money I sent you to put in the bank. I think you can get a new one from $45 to $60, but I don’t believe you’ll be able to find a new one. Let me know if you have any luck. . . . Today it is sure a beautiful day, nice and spring like. We still have cold mornings. Well I guess I better close for now. Love, Victor

  I imagine that his two eighty-five-year-old immigrant grandparents immediately left their small Swedish farm to drive up to Fresno in search of a .45 pistol for their grandson so that he might kill, rather than be killed by, the Japanese. To no avail; whether they found one or not, I have no knowledge.

  As I said, in the spring of 2002 I made efforts over six decades later to discover whether a single man from F Company was still alive—anyone who had either survived the hell of Okinawa or sixty years of life subsequent, or might have known Victor Hanson. For nearly sixty years, what was left of my family had known about Victor’s last hours apparently only from the official Marine letter of cond
olences. A first lieutenant, Robert J. Sherer, had written our family of Victor’s death on July 26, 1945: “Our Company had attacked and seized Crescent Ridge on the enemy held Naha-Shuri line on 18 May and we were digging in for the night when we began to receive heavy fire from an enemy machine-gun to our left. It was at this time that Corporal Hanson was wounded. He was given medical attention immediately, but lived only a short time. He was given a fitting burial. . . .”

  What I soon discovered was quite startling. There were indeed survivors of Company F—and their recollections left me quite stunned. Richard Whitaker—a veteran of F Company, 2nd Battalion, 29th Marines who was wounded on Sugar Loaf Hill the night Victor was killed, and a prominent hero in George Feifer’s moving Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb—helped me locate a few surviving members of Fox Company. Among them was none other than Robert J. Sherer!

  After last writing the Hanson family fifty-seven years ago, now in his eighties he once more, on February 28, 2002, kindly sent me a second letter about Victor in the same elegant and dignified prose: “Victor Hanson, Jr. had been trained and was serving as a Fire Team Leader. He was a Corporal and was recognized as an outstanding Marine and leader. . . . I can recall seeing Corporal Hanson standing to hurl a grenade and being hit by fire from the enemy machine gun. My ‘Runner,’ PFC Ryan in the foxhole next to me was similarly hit by machine gun fire. Both died immediately, as did PFC Madigan. Sgt. Bill Twigger was wounded in the thigh and was ordered evacuated.”

  Just a few days after the letter from Robert Sherer came the previously mentioned phone call from a 6th Marine Division veteran, Mike Senko, with a wealth of detail about Sugar Loaf and accounts as moving as Sherer’s. And then arrived the next day an unbelievably dignified narrative from none other than once-wounded Bill Twigger, who, like Robert Sherer, six decades later shed more particulars upon Victor’s death not before known to any in our family. “The news came down the line that Vic Hanson had caught an enemy machine-gun burst in his right thigh, and, before a corpsman could reach him to administer aid, he bled to death. The report was quickly confirmed that by reason of the shock of so massive a wound, Vic did not endure prolonged suffering, but died virtually instantly.”