Growing up a Soldier

I was nineteen years old and an infantry rifleman in the Twelfth Regiment of the First Cavalry Division during World War II. We fought in the South  Pacific and two campaigns of the Philippines, the Battle of Leyte and Luzon. I was wounded in the fight to liberate Manila from the Japanese occupation. I wasn’t seriously wounded so returned to combat on Luzon for the final liberation of the island. Soon, at the end of the war the Division left Luzon and landed at Yokohama the day the peace treaty was signed on the Battleship Missouri on September 2, 1945. Ours was the first infantry division to occupy Tokyo.

In a trackless jungle during the Battle of Leyte I felt the haunting tragedy of a rifle thrust in the ground by its bayonet at the head of a shallow grave with an American helmet hung on the butt. When the place was secure, the graves registration people would attempt to find the grave and take the soldier to a American grave yard. If they couldn’t he would be missing in action. I wouldn’t have thought it at the time, or even less, to have dared to suggest  that the tragedy was the same for the countless Japanese soldiers who never were honored by so much as a shallow grave, and for their families from whom their loved ones disappeared on some remote island never to be heard of again. Because of the hatred toward the enemy that is deliberately generated by indoctrination, we forget the tragedy is on both sides. Which of us were at fault, we or the enemy soldiers facing us, both not much more than on the threshold of our lives and many of us hardly knowing why we were there. It wasn’t until my hostility toward the enemy had faded that I could begin to think of such things. But in the situation of war where you find yourself, the last thing that enters your mind is sympathy for the enemy.

During the Battle of Luzon I went through a refugee camp as we approached the outskirts of Manila. The refugees who had been driven out of Manila by the bombardment and the Japanese, mistook us for Germans  because of the shape of our helmets. They only knew the flat pancake helmets the Americans wore who were stationed in the Philippines before and at the beginning of the war. When they found out we were their liberators, a grizzled old Filipino man stationed himself at a small stream that we were stepping over in a single file and kissed every one of us.

All of war is brutality and tragedy, but rarely liberation. But the people who are the cause of war never pay the price for what they have caused in terror, hardship, death and injury. If those who are responsible for war, as soon as it started, had to walk the point like I did or come forward if the point falls, there would be no more wars. 

 

 

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