DRESS REHEARSAL
When his battalion returned from the field in late afternoon Puller called a conference of his company officers:
“Gentlemen, my name’s Puller. Your new commander. We have a good deal of work to do together. I’ll be slow to make changes, but one of them begins tomorrow morning. At the first rest period after we leave camp, camouflage every man and piece of equipment.”
“We’ve got no camouflage material, Major.”
“We’ll do it anyway. The best is in the field. Find a mud-hole; smear mud on faces and hands. Twigs on helmets, in blouses, anywhere you can stick ’em. Pine foliage is good. You’ll learn.”
That night when he conferred with his new regimental commander, Puller did so with a cool reserve—his colonel was the same officer who had consistently bungled the affairs of Company M in Nicaragua with his ignorance of field conditions. There was no need for Lewis to mention the ineptness of this officer, for one of the young men of the battalion wrote in his diary: “The Colonel gave all officers a talk today. Meant to be a pep talk, but was flat. He read some of it. Encouraged us to appear ‘bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.’ He waddles like a duck.”
The battalion was camouflaged to Puller’s satisfaction within an hour on the day of their first hike together. Passing troops sniggered, and Lieutenant Zach Cox of A Company heard derisive yells: “Heigho! The Walking Forest!” The self-conscious men soon grew accustomed to the attire and they had little time for reflection. The unit marched all day through forest, swamp and streams, so that company and platoon officers could learn to keep the men properly aligned. After five exhausting hours they turned about and marched to the starting point, still in skirmish line. Some units strayed and Puller solved the problem simply during a halt: “All men who were raised in the country, step out!” He sprinkled several dozen farm boys among the platoons to act as guides in the rough terrain. There was no more straying.
The regimental commander came out in a staff car while the men were at work, and stared at the pine-tufted helmet the Major wore: “Who do you think you are, Puller, Daniel Boone? Looks like a damned Halloween party. Get these men cleaned up and looking like Marines, or I’ll relieve you.”
“Yes, sir,” Puller said. The commander bounced away in the staff car, and the battalion completed the drill.
In the evening the division commander, General Philip Torrey, called Puller into his office: “Major, I saw that camouflage work out there today. Good. Where’d you pick it up?”
“In China. The Japs and Chinese use it to perfection. If you fight in their country, you can’t beat it.”
Torrey questioned Puller, then issued an order for the First Division to use camouflage in the field.
The battalion began with marches of twelve miles daily, was pushed to fifteen and then twenty miles. Puller punctuated drills with fight talks to the men. They were very young, many of them beardless boys under sixteen, who must have lied about their ages. They were the most obscenely profane men Puller had encountered. Edward L. Smith, Jr., a young battalion doctor educated at Yale and Harvard, confessed that the constant flow of filthy language actually sickened him. Puller told his officers that the problem was to toughen these swaggering young men, teach them battle skills—and convince them that they were by no means bullet-proof. He also gave them pride in their outfit. In one talk after a hot, dusty march on which some had fallen from heat prostration, the Major roared at them, “When you were marching this morning, I heard a Marine on the roadside say, ‘There goes the goddam Seventh Regiment.’ I was amazed that one of you didn’t step out of ranks and knock him cold.” Dr. Smith wrote in his diary that night: “I think we are going places now.”
A few days later Puller called together all officers, platoon and first sergeants for a more fiery talk: “Gentlemen, this is not only going to be the first battalion of the Seventh Marines. It’s going to be the first battalion of the whole Marine Corps from now on.… Now, if you want to get the most out of your men, give ’em a break! Make ’em work, but not completely in the dark. If you do, they won’t do a bit more than they absolutely have to do. Get ’em on our side.”
As an afterthought he growled: “And for Christ’s sake, don’t swear at your men!”
Puller drove the men until they were near exhaustion, and on one day when it rained, had them sleep in the downpour, then roused them for a meal at 1:00 A.M. and marched until three o’clock the next afternoon. “For reward,” Dr. Smith noted, “we got two sandwiches and an apple each.”
Smith took note of Puller’s firm, aloof discipline, and also of his scrupulously fair treatment of men. Once when a four-time offender was brought to him, scheduled for court-martial, Puller spent an hour or more in his tent talking with the young Marine, trying to find the reason for his troubles; then he called Dr. Smith, explained that the boy might not be entirely responsible for his behavior and asked his advice on releasing him from the brig for psychiatric study. Smith gave quick agreement to the scheme.
One of his privates, Gerald White, a Yale man from East-port, Maine, also a diarist, began to take note of Puller: “He is never obscene, remarkably, for the vigor with which he handles us. He is tough and demands the utmost, but there is always a kindly approach even when he is chewing you out that displays a touching sympathy with the miscreant.”
There was an increasing firmness in the Major. At the end of one talk, Puller said: “One more thing. Wherever we are at chow time, the privates will be fed first. Then the noncoms, and the officers last of all.”
To those who grumbled afterward an old gunnery sergeant said: “You’re lucky. When I was with the Old Man down in Nicaragua, the order was mules even before privates, and brother, them mules could eat! You’ll find out there’s method in the Old Man’s madness.”
The battalion was soon isolated from others. Puller snatched them from the comforts of tent camp, and for most of the training time left to them they spent their weeks, from Monday morning until Friday afternoon, in the wilds. They slept in pup tents, or in the open, in the winter’s bitter weather.
The men felled trees, built rifle ranges and cleared firing lanes. All hands were at work, including medical corpsmen, who also wore heavy battle gear and walked on every hike. They were up with the others before dawn, went through calisthenics dancing with cold and often marched twenty miles through the woodlands to spend the night in snow banks. When they were toughened to that, Puller put them through a series of night marches, beginning after midnight. The doctors, like others, learned to read maps and compasses and to handle weapons, including mortars. The practice of identifying ships and planes, a joke in most units, became a serious business in 1/7. Some medics learned Morse code, and Manila John Basilone, an Army-trained veteran machine gunner, traded semaphore lessons for instruction in first aid.
The cooks were dragged from comfortable mess hall kitchens into the woods, where they were sent to companies, platoons, and even squads, to learn field cooking. Puller clung to the notion even at the end of his career: “What will we do for good cooking in the field in the next war? We have no cooks for units smaller than battalions, and they are used to electric stoves and dishwashers and every kind of gadget. How the devil can such men switch to field cooking? The troops will starve.”
Few details escaped Puller’s eye. One day he watched a platoon under Lieutenant Willie Dumas practice an assault on a hilltop position and became impatient with an elaborate flanking maneuver which wasted time.
“Old man, there’s mighty little room for fancy tactics below division level. The enemy are on the hill. You go get ’em. In the end you’ll save men. There are times when you’ll have to flank, but don’t forget that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.”
Lieutenant David Condon, who heard the tale as it spread among junior officers that night, summed it up: “Well, we know now. He’s going to be hey, diddle diddle, right down the middle. Somebody’s going to get hurt—but when the real stuff starts, I want to be with the Old Man, myself.”
Puller gave a practical lesson in field communications to his runners that they never forgot. He lined up a couple of dozen message-bearers in two groups, about a hundred yards apart, and had them count off. He whispered a message into the ear of the first runner: “Find Captain Jones of C Company. Tell him to pull out and come in on the right flank and hook on at a 45-degree angle. Have him move at 1100.”
He slapped the runner on the rump and yelled: “Hustle! Take it to Number 2! All of you make top speed!”
The young men sprinted over the open in sequence, passing the message down the line, until it had passed to the last man. “Let me hear what you got, old man,” Puller said.
“B Company comes in off the right flank at 1145. Order from Captain Jones.”
Puller shouted the original message to them, and put them to the exercise again: “Open your ears. You’ll have to do this until you learn. When you carry a message in combat, the life of every man in the outfit may ride with you.”
Training came to a climax with Puller’s battle against the battalion of Lieutenant Colonel Herman H. Hanneken, who was also a hero of the Haitian campaigns. Puller entered the exercise as if it were war to the death. He led his men to the tip of a peninsula overgrown with brush. They were assumed to have landed by boats on this point and were to drive inland against Hanneken’s line and attempt to capture the small town of Verona, North Carolina, in the enemy’s rear.
The distinguishing marks between the warring battalions were arm bands, white for Puller, red for Hanneken. Lewis opened his assault by tying red bands on half a dozen of his men and sending them through enemy lines to the rear—where they cut the communications wire.
Puller sent a handful of men forward to distract the attention of Hanneken’s main line by firing rapidly, then led his force through the flanking swamp, overcoming briars, vines and cypress stumps until the column was in rear of Hanneken’s lone tank. The vanguard approached so swiftly that the tank commander was pulled through his hatch, a captive. The leaders dashed toward the enemy command post.
Hanneken escaped by fleetness of foot but confusion was so great that two colonels, who were on hand merely as observers, broke into a run themselves at sight of the oncoming troops and were “captured.”
Puller’s young men pounded into the road in rear, toward their village objective, as Puller bellowed from the roadside: “On to Verona!” First Battalion, Seventh Marines, returned to camp in triumph.
Not all the lessons were in combat techniques. Lewis came upon a strange sight in a company street one day: A private at rigid attention saluted over and over, like a robot, a beardless second lieutenant who stood before him, hands on hips.
“What’s going on, old man?” Puller asked.
“This Marine, sir. He neglected to salute me as we passed, and I’ve ordered him to salute one hundred times.”
“You’re right, Lieutenant. So right. But you know that an officer must return every salute he receives—now let me see you get to it, and do your share.”
He stood nearby until he had seen justice done, and thereby won the heart of every enlisted man in the unit and put junior officers on their guard. Dr. Smith made note of the Major’s control: “Puller becomes so angry sometimes that words seem to stick in his throat, and he has to cool off—but he is very fair, and every man knows it.”
Sunday, December 7, 1941, found Puller on leave in Saluda, in the home of Mrs. Puller’s mother. When breathless announcers interrupted radio programs to shout news of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the women noted that the Major behaved as if he had heard the news long before, and this was only confirmation. He hung about the radio with his family for an hour or more, until it became clear that they would learn few more details of the disastrous strike, and then became impatient to return to his troops.
“Why don’t they say something about the Marines in China?” he growled. “I know they got the Fourth out in time—they’re down in the Philippines. But you know they’ve nabbed everybody left in Peking! How can people be so blind?”
He drove back to New River during the night, leaving the instant his wife returned from an early evening meeting at church. He had no radio in the car, and learned little more news from the Pacific until he was back in camp. Men of his battalion thought that he was the only officer at New River who had always been certain that war with Japan had been coming; training methods in the First Battalion, Seventh Marines, remained unchanged except for their tempo. There was a kind of inner calm in Puller’s ranks, despite the national frenzy of preparation for war in these days.
After Pearl Harbor, Lewis drove the men as if his battalion were destined to halt the onward march of the Japanese alone. The only warm place in the camp after dark was the shower buildings, and Puller’s officers congregated there often, to hear their commander’s tales of combat in the tropics and stories of the Russian Revolution gleaned from Czarist officers in China. He never failed to speak of the disquieting news from the Pacific and gave them a candid view of the growing list of American defeats.
As the tragic drama of the Philippines unfolded he explained the situation to the new officers:
“Our plans were based on the existence of the Pacific fleet. Since it is no more and there’s no sea power to help General MacArthur, he will develop a plan as he goes.”
But as weeks passed and Japanese victories continued unbroken, Puller expressed his amazement: “MacArthur is following the old plan to the letter. He’s not adapting to the situation at all. He has enough troops to fight, but we’re headed for a terrible licking.”
Bad news only increased the tempo of Puller’s training. He cornered Colonel Pedro Del Valle, the great gunner who commanded the 11th Marines: “Colonel, you’ll be starting artillery training next week. I want you to let me know when you’ll fire. I want to get my troops under it as often as I can.”
Del Valle understood Puller’s need for actual battle conditions, but warned: “There may be accidents.”
“We can chance those. What I won’t chance is taking a bunch of green kids to war before they know the sound of big guns. I know shells aren’t the same, going out and coming in—but this will help.”
“You’re the only one who’s asked me. They’re all yours.”
Every day afterward, when the men of 1/7 were in the field and the 11th Marines were firing, shells streamed overhead, until the whoosh of flying metal became as familiar as rifle fire. There were many bursts nearby but no accidents. Puller’s was the only battalion with such training.
Lieutenant Cox, now the executive of A Company, was impressed by Puller’s thoroughness: “Major Puller never stood aside and said, ‘Carry on. Sergeant,’ and most other officers did. He was in there with us, pack and all. He could walk down the best of us, even the kids. Other commanders rode cars in the woods, but not Puller.”
The Seventh Marines, including Puller’s battalion, were combined with a battalion of the 11th Marine Artillery into a new unit—the Third Marine Brigade. It was the first expeditionary force to leave the United States during the war; its men began boarding ships in Norfolk, Virginia, on Easter Sunday, April 5, 1942. The rest of the First Marine Division was soon to follow.
In their last meeting Puller tried to reassure Virginia that all would be well and told her that his battalion was the best in existence. He could truthfully report morale at a peak, for when word of the embarkation leaked out two deserters returned and there were miraculous overnight cures in the base hospital. Mrs. Puller gave him a last-minute gift, a bathrobe. He thanked her tenderly, but growled to his staff: “I’ve got the world’s greatest wife, but my God, what do you do when she sends you off to war with a new red flannel bathrobe?” He had it secretly stowed away before boarding his transport, the U.S.S. Fuller.
His final act ashore was to turn over a sizable bank account to his young brother-in-law, Bill Evans, with simple instructions: “Please see that Virginia gets a dozen red roses on the thirteenth of every month. If you have to leave, make sure some florist keeps it up until I get back home.”
The troops lay just off Norfolk for several days as their convoy gathered, including the battleship Texas, the cruiser Brooklyn, half a dozen destroyers, four troopships and a number of supply vessels. They left Hampton Roads early on April 10, in heavy seas which made half the men ill.
On the first day they passed a foundered freighter with only her superstructure visible, the victim of a submarine just off the Virginia coast. There were blackouts at night and abandon ship drills by day. Rumors of submarine sightings were frequent as they sailed southward; planes were catapulted aloft to search nearby waters. Dr. Smith coped with cases of German measles, scarlet fever, mumps, colds, gonorrhea; on one day, medics on the Fuller gave 1300 cholera shots. They passed through the Panama Canal under a covey of barrage balloons, and were far into the Pacific before accurate word of their destination reached the lower echelons: Samoa.
There were weapons drills, especially on machine guns, and endless inspections. Fresh water was rationed. A ship broke down, and the convoy slowed to a crawl. An albatross hung over the Fuller for the last few days and nights. On the evening of May 7, when the ships lay within sight of their Samoan island, Puller wrote Virginia:
One month ago today I left you and you have not been out of my thoughts for a moment during those days.… Heretofore I have always been eager to go on an expedition. But that was before we were married. The only thing I want now is happiness with you.… Please do not worry. I am coming back, and then we will have the home with two chimneys.…
Germany and Japan must be stopped, and then perhaps I can retire.… I am well but I do miss you dreadfully. I have a fair sunburn, but there has not been much room for exercise. Last night the stars seemed very near.
I have re-read “Jackson”; remember when you bought a new copy for me in 1937? Thirty-seven was a great year for me. I know how hard it is to tell Virginia Mac of me, but do not let her forget me. I love you, Virginia, and I always will.
The Major drove them so relentlessly on Samoa that the men forgot the hardships of New River. For two days after docking at Apia the men acted as stevedores, working in relays with only three hours’ sleep each night. When they were off that duty, they carried heavy machine guns in advanced gun drill. Only the most observant, like Dr. Smith, noted the beauties of the place: “Mountains come gently down to meet the sea. In Apia, low houses with red or green roofs. Few stores. No hurry. Flowers and trees blooming, few autos with right hand drive, horses ridden bareback. We march down quiet streets, carrying packs and rolls, natives laughing and giggling. We stare at bare feet, handsome draped bodies, graceful carriage. Camped under banyan tree on the shore.… In the moonlight could hear guitars in huts where Marines had gathered with natives to sing and dance.”
Training was uninterrupted. Their first march was ordered by a directive which said that Puller’s old nemesis, the regimental commander, would march at the head of the column. Junior officers were so amused by this unlikely announcement that they made a pool, guessing when the commander would drop out. The man who held First Mile won, for the colonel rode in a station wagon all the way. In the camp men were soon singing an irreverent ditty: “Roll Out the Wagon, We’re Off to War Again.”
Puller led many marches, but on one broiling day he pushed them near the limit: “I want nobody to fall out today unless he falls on his face, unconscious. You’re going to need every ounce of endurance you can build up, when you get into combat. Anyone who staggers to the roadside, and then sits down, will be court-martialed or surveyed out as medically unfit.”
The march was twenty-two miles under a searing sun, over an asphalt highway. Many strong youngsters were felled, including Captain Regan Fuller, who was only two weeks out of bed from a shipboard appendectomy; Puller stopped by to congratulate him on his courage in keeping up for so long, for there were then only two miles to go. Captain Jack Stafford lost consciousness, and was carried in.
Private Gerald White wrote for his diary: “Puller must have marched twice the distance we did, for all day long he kept marching up and down the column, jaunty as a bantam rooster, pipe clenched in his teeth, ever alert to see that men who were succumbing to the heat, exhaustion or blisters were taken care of by corpsmen. Many times today I saw him take a BAR, machine gun or mortar off the shoulder of some Marine whose fanny was dragging and carry it to give the poor guy some respite.”
Dr. Smith looked at the Major expectantly at the end of the march, but got a surprise: “Puller never even batted an eye over the march. He came steaming into camp as fresh as when he started.”
Lieutenant James Hayes, the battalion judge advocate, never forgot the day:
“When we got to Apia my feet were so blistered that I could hear them squooshing. Almost all the men fell in their tracks when we were dismissed, and fell asleep without chow. Some of the younger officers were critical of Puller the next day. They thought he was too tough.”
Puller explained once more to his company officers, when, he had seen the worn men: “Gentlemen, remember to have every man carry a one-inch square of beef suet in his pack. If they’ll grease their feet daily, and avoid so much washing, they’ll have no blisters. An old trick from the Haitian soldiers, and it never fails. You can’t march men without feet, gentlemen.”
There were other hard marches and the battalion became tougher as the weeks passed. Private White, who went AWOL briefly one day to climb a mountain and find the overgrown grave of Robert Louis Stevenson, wrote of Puller’s unexpected kindness to a boy he caught asleep on guard duty at an ammunition dump. Puller shook the boy awake: “Old man, it’s dangerous to pull a trick like this. Suppose Captain Rogers had caught you. He’d have made a big fuss, and then I’d have to court-martial you and slap you in the brig. Maybe that’s what I should do—but I’ll give you another chance. Pretty soon, now, we’ll be fighting for keeps, and you’ll stay awake, or risk the lives of every one of us. You understand me?”
“Yes, sir, Major.”
Puller began to mourn his fate to staff officers: “Here I am, stuck out here to rot on this damned island while other people fight the war. They’ve marooned us. Did you know the Division landed on Guadalcanal yesterday?”
It was true. The first offensive blow of the war against the victorious Japanese had been taken by the landing of Marines under General A. A. Vandegrift, Puller’s old chief in Haiti. There was no opposition to these August landings, but the Division was soon fighting desperately to hang on to an air strip, Henderson Field. The enemy still controlled the sea, and to a large extent the air. From Samoa the news had a strange, unreal sound, and every day made Puller more impatient to join the action.
Morale on Samoa was high. There was a beer ration, two cans a day and more from the underground; there was a well-stocked ice house and plenty of hot food from the galleys. But the favorite pastime of the Seventh Regiment, or at least of its First Battalion, was keeping watch on Major Puller.
Private Bob Cornely, a twenty-year-old machine gunner from Philadelphia in Dog Company, was impressed by Puller on the Softball field: “He got in there and played like a kid himself. He was catcher on a team one day, and when he came to the plate the pitchers hesitated to knock him down like they did the other guys, and that made the Old Man sore. He yelled at ’em: ‘I’m as tough as the next one, old man. Go ahead and dust me off if you can.’ They did, and he took it okay. He wasn’t such a bad hitter, either.”
Lieutenant Hayes took careful notice: “Puller was more peremptory with his officers, and expected more of them than of enlisted men. He always saw to it that the men were fed first, and many a time I saw him hang around a chow line, watching to see that the men got what they needed. He never took a bite until all had been fed.”
Puller was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel on Samoa, and his first move was to increase the allotment sent monthly to his wife—from $250 to $300.
… I am just living for our life together when this war is won and I will return to you and Virginia Mac.… Please do not worry, even a little bit, sweet.… I would give anything that I may ever have, except your happiness, to see you smile at me again.
Life is so short. And when I was a child, I thought it would last forever and ever. My love for you will, Virginia, even into the next life, and then on. The hardest thing that I have ever done was to tell you goodbye. That was a black Tuesday and I pray there will never be another separation.…
One evening in early September when Puller was playing bridge in his hut with his executive officer, Captain Otho Rogers, and the doctors, Smith and Schuster, he was unusually inattentive to the cards. He had heard by radio in the afternoon of a battle on Guadalcanal, in which one unit had counted 670 dead Japanese before its position: “Think of that,” Puller said over and over. “Six hundred and seventy! They mowed ’em down. One of these days we’ll be giving ’em hell like that, too. Better than that.”
In the second week of September, at last, they sailed for Guadalcanal.