The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern by Victor Davis Hanson
Authors: Victor Davis Hanson
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odors.”
The awfulness was not just that the fanatical nature of the Japanese resistance meant that America’s Depression-era draftees were usually forced to kill rather than wound or capture their enemy. Rather, there grew a certain dread or even bewilderment among young draftees about the nature of an ideology that could fuel such elemental hatred of the Americans. On news of the Japanese surrender after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the veteran Sledge remained puzzled: “We thought the Japanese would never surrender. Many refused to believe it. Sitting in stunned silence, we remembered our dead. So many dead. So many maimed. So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past.”
E. B. Sledge’s story begins with his training as a Marine in Company K, Third Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, First Marine Division. The memoir centers on two nightmarish island battles that ultimately ruined the division. The first was at Peleliu, Operation Stalemate II (September 15–November 25, 1944), where in ten weeks of horrific fighting some 8,769 Americans were killed, wounded, or missing. About 11,000 Japanese perished—nearly the entire enemy garrison on the island. Controversy raged about whether General Douglas MacArthur really needed the capture of the Japanese garrison on Peleliu to ensure a safe right flank on his way to the Philippines—and still rages about the wisdom of storming many of the Pacific islands.
Yet such arguments over strategic necessity count less to Sledge. His concern is instead with the survival of his 235 comrades in Company K, which suffered 150 killed, wounded, or missing. And so there is little acrimony over the retrospective folly of taking on Peleliu. Sledge’s resignation might be best summed up as something like, “The enemy held the island; we took it; they lost, and we moved on.”
Operation Iceberg (April 1, 1945–July 2, 1945), launched the next year to capture Okinawa, was far worse. Indeed it was the most nightmarish American experience of the entire Pacific war—with more than 50,000 American casualties, including some 12,500 soldiers and sailors killed, and the greatest number of combat fatigue cases ever recorded in a single American battle.
My namesake, Victor Hanson, of the Sixth Marine Division, Twenty-ninth Regiment, was killed near the Shuri Line in the last assault on the heights, a few hours before its capture on May 19, 1945. His letters, and those of his commanding officer notifying our family of his death, make poignant reading—including the account of his final moments on Sugar Loaf Hill. I continue to wear the ring that was taken off his finger after his death, and mailed to me by his fellow surviving Marines in 2002, some fifty-eight years later. Indeed, the very name Okinawa has haunted the Hanson family, as it had Sledge’s and thousands of other American households, for a half century hence. For decades in the United States no one really knew—or no one wished to know—what really went on at Okinawa.
In fact, neither of Sledge’s two battles, despite their ferocity and the brutal eventual American victories—being in obscure, distant places and in the so-called second theater—garnered the public attention of Normandy Beach or the Battle of the Bulge. In the case of Okinawa, the savagery was overshadowed, first by the April 12 death of Franklin Roosevelt and the May 8 German surrender in Europe, and later by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6 and 9), just over five weeks after the island was declared finally secured on July 2.
Sandwiched in between these momentous events, tens of thousands of Americans in obscurity slowly ground their way down the island. They accepted that they might have to kill everyone in most of the last crack Japanese units, led by the most accomplished officers in the Japanese military, the brilliant but infamous generals Mitsuru Ushijima and Isamu Cho and the gifted tactician Colonel Hiromichi
The awfulness was not just that the fanatical nature of the Japanese resistance meant that America’s Depression-era draftees were usually forced to kill rather than wound or capture their enemy. Rather, there grew a certain dread or even bewilderment among young draftees about the nature of an ideology that could fuel such elemental hatred of the Americans. On news of the Japanese surrender after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the veteran Sledge remained puzzled: “We thought the Japanese would never surrender. Many refused to believe it. Sitting in stunned silence, we remembered our dead. So many dead. So many maimed. So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past.”
E. B. Sledge’s story begins with his training as a Marine in Company K, Third Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, First Marine Division. The memoir centers on two nightmarish island battles that ultimately ruined the division. The first was at Peleliu, Operation Stalemate II (September 15–November 25, 1944), where in ten weeks of horrific fighting some 8,769 Americans were killed, wounded, or missing. About 11,000 Japanese perished—nearly the entire enemy garrison on the island. Controversy raged about whether General Douglas MacArthur really needed the capture of the Japanese garrison on Peleliu to ensure a safe right flank on his way to the Philippines—and still rages about the wisdom of storming many of the Pacific islands.
Yet such arguments over strategic necessity count less to Sledge. His concern is instead with the survival of his 235 comrades in Company K, which suffered 150 killed, wounded, or missing. And so there is little acrimony over the retrospective folly of taking on Peleliu. Sledge’s resignation might be best summed up as something like, “The enemy held the island; we took it; they lost, and we moved on.”
Operation Iceberg (April 1, 1945–July 2, 1945), launched the next year to capture Okinawa, was far worse. Indeed it was the most nightmarish American experience of the entire Pacific war—with more than 50,000 American casualties, including some 12,500 soldiers and sailors killed, and the greatest number of combat fatigue cases ever recorded in a single American battle.
My namesake, Victor Hanson, of the Sixth Marine Division, Twenty-ninth Regiment, was killed near the Shuri Line in the last assault on the heights, a few hours before its capture on May 19, 1945. His letters, and those of his commanding officer notifying our family of his death, make poignant reading—including the account of his final moments on Sugar Loaf Hill. I continue to wear the ring that was taken off his finger after his death, and mailed to me by his fellow surviving Marines in 2002, some fifty-eight years later. Indeed, the very name Okinawa has haunted the Hanson family, as it had Sledge’s and thousands of other American households, for a half century hence. For decades in the United States no one really knew—or no one wished to know—what really went on at Okinawa.
In fact, neither of Sledge’s two battles, despite their ferocity and the brutal eventual American victories—being in obscure, distant places and in the so-called second theater—garnered the public attention of Normandy Beach or the Battle of the Bulge. In the case of Okinawa, the savagery was overshadowed, first by the April 12 death of Franklin Roosevelt and the May 8 German surrender in Europe, and later by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6 and 9), just over five weeks after the island was declared finally secured on July 2.
Sandwiched in between these momentous events, tens of thousands of Americans in obscurity slowly ground their way down the island. They accepted that they might have to kill everyone in most of the last crack Japanese units, led by the most accomplished officers in the Japanese military, the brilliant but infamous generals Mitsuru Ushijima and Isamu Cho and the gifted tactician Colonel Hiromichi
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