WINNING THE WAR AT HOME
Virginia met him at the Washington airport on January 9, 1943, almost speechless with happiness and relief. She saw that he was thin and drawn, his skin yellowed from malaria or atabrine, but there was not an outward sign of his wounds. His walk was brisk.
An aide in the office of the Commandant, General Thomas Holcomb, jolted him with the news: “The General has given you to the Army, Puller—I mean on loan, for three or four months. General Marshall wants you to explain the Guadalcanal fighting to his troops all over the country.
“You needn’t fret about leaving your men. The Division will be in Australia for six months before it can get back into action I expect you’ll rejoin it in time for another big show.”
The Pullers drove home to Saluda that evening, and though it was late when they arrived, he went upstairs to see the baby. Virginia Mac was not quite three years old and it was nearly a year since she had seen him, but she stirred and climbed to her feet, holding out her arms. “Father!” she said.
He was in the village for two or three days and the highlight of his visit, to the neighbors, was the sight of the hero of Guadalcanal skipping down the walks under the huge elms, holding hands with Virginia Mac, who issued imperious commands as if he had been sent home for her entertainment.
The Colonel soon returned to Washington and reported to the Pentagon, to the office of General George C. Marshall, the Chief of Staff. An aide talked with him:
“General Marshall has asked you to come home to help improve the morale of our people. They have the idea that the Japanese are invincible. The General has known you for many years and he believes that no one can do the job better than you. I can’t tell you how important this assignment is—it’s a lot more than a road show, or a Chautauqua. We could easily lose the war, or prolong it for years, if our people lose heart. You’ve no idea how jittery some of our civilian population has become, and the outlook of the troops is sometimes none too good.
“The General has asked several other officers to come from all over the world, and not only Americans. They will work with you in trying to destroy the myth of the invincibility of our enemies. We want you to tour the Army’s camps where divisions are in training. Marshall would like you to visit every one of them, and had asked for you for six months, but the Corps will let you go for no more than three months. It isn’t strange, from what we hear of your work on Guadalcanal.”
“I never made a speech in my life. What do you want me to tell them?”
“The General wants the truth, Puller. There will be no wraps on you. Say what you like about command, men, performance or anything that you think will be helpful. But the one idea he wants you to get across is that we will whip the Japanese in the end.”
“I’m no speaker, but I’ll try.”
“We’re not worried about what you’ll say. It may be rough on you, hopping around the country. We know you’re impatient to get back into action, but try to remember that if we don’t do this job, it’s going to be so much the harder out there in the Pacific. Good luck.”
There was a press conference at the Navy Department, where half a dozen reporters quizzed him, and since he was the first front-line officer fresh from the fighting on the island, the interview furnished headlines. He told them that there were only 4000 Japanese left on the island, and that they could be mopped up in ten days if the commander launched a full-scale offensive. He estimated that 15,000 Japanese had been in the fighting, and that 8000 had been killed in battle, with another 3000 dead of wounds or starvation.
Charles Hurd of the New York Times sensed the value of Puller’s candid message:
Puller’s description of operations on that hard-fought island gave a far more confident picture than any official information heretofore released.… gave the impression of a securely held American base, complete with landing fields and ship anchorages, available at any time for the start of any action northward.
As to the enemy who remained on Guadalcanal: “There should be no trouble in cleaning out the rest. The Japanese on that island have had enough of it.”
Reporters noted that he said nothing about his wounds and little of the action in which his battalion had saved Henderson Field.
The following day, Puller saw General Marshall and General Holcomb, and was off on his tour. There was a preliminary stop at Aberdeen Proving Ground, where he was shown several new weapons, among them the carbine soon to be issued to troops. Puller fired it on the range. “It’s no good,” he said. “Lots of fire, but neither heavy enough nor accurate enough. Give us the Springfield.” Watching officers were crestfallen.
His orders listed stops at Fort Benning; the Army Amphibious Training Center at Carabello, Florida; Fort Sill; Fort Riley; Fort Leavenworth; and Fort Ord—but there were many additions, and he seemed to make almost every post where troop concentrations were in training; he often spoke three times daily, and was on and off planes until he all but lost track of his route. He told the story of his fight for the perimeter, of Basilone pushing the wall of enemy bodies down the hill, of the burials by bulldozer, and of the weapons they used. He told of patrols in the thick growth, but never of his wounds.
“I can’t tell you the Japs are no damned good,” he said, “because they are good. But we’re better. One American, properly trained, can handle two of the yellow bastards. They have discipline, and they use the jungle cover better than we do, but they can’t think on their own. They never change battle plans once they’re made, regardless of cost. They think they’d lose face.
“They have no artillery to compare with ours, and our guns chew them to pieces. They get the jungle rot just as much as we do.
“They’re not supermen, and we can whip hell out of ’em, and you’ll be helping to do it soon, I suppose. If you take your training seriously there’s nothing to worry about. But you’ll have to be hard—and you can be hard when you write to your families, too. Try to convince ’em we’re in a war to the finish, and that all these strikes and softness and confusion will have to go. I can tell you one more thing: There are worse things than dying for your country.”
His audiences invariably cheered him to the echo, even when he spoke to War Production Board officials in Washington:
“I want to ask you why American troops shouldn’t have the world’s best fighting equipment. On Guadalcanal we saw our trenching shovels break at the first use. All of our men now have Jap shovels, because they’re better and more dependable.
“Jap field glasses are better, too. I have good ones myself, German glasses that I’ve carried for twenty years. Why should American glasses be so poor? Not worth a damn in the tropics. They fog up because they are improperly sealed, and once they get damp, they’re done for. I’ve seen hundreds of pairs tossed away in the jungle or the sea, because men know they can see as well with the naked eye. What kind of American ingenuity—or patriotism—produced those?”
He told them stories of Sergeant Raysbrook and Basilone, and of Tex Conoley and Mitchell Paige, the heroes of the Fifth Marines. He described the rescue of his men with the aid of the destroyer Ballard.
Some men pressed him during the question period: “You don’t really mean American equipment is inferior on the whole?”
“Not all of it, of course—but it makes no sense to me that any of the enemy stuff should be better. It may sound simple and harmless to you here in this room, but there’s the matter of the canteen. They gave us plastic ones, and we found out in a few days in the field that they weren’t worth carrying. They crack and leak under hard use. So we went back to aluminum.
“Now, our ordnance people spent billions, and we went to war with nothing better than the little 37 millimeter as an anti-tank gun. They can outgun us, as little as they know about artillery.
“If you don’t believe me, you can ask the Navy. I understand our first reliable torpedo is being developed only after we captured one from the Japanese.
“I could keep you here longer than you’d like, telling you about how we’ve fallen down on the job. The truth is that war caught us unprepared, as usual. We were supposed to have fine smokeless powder, but on Guadalcanal our guns smoked so badly that they gave away our positions.
“The Japs outthink us in other ways. They developed infiltration tactics that were hard to combat. They’d slip in from several directions, and to avoid casualties to their own men, fired wooden bullets, so that they would burn up after a hundred yards or so—but at short range, they’ll kill you dead as the finest American lead.
“We’ll have to get over the idea that we’re the greatest people on earth in every respect, that we’re infallible and that no one else has ideas worth considering. One of the reasons we had to fight against odds on Guadalcanal was this insufferable American notion of superiority, and our carelessness in face of danger. It goes back to Pearl Harbor and far beyond.”
He got a standing ovation, and a few days later a letter from Frank A. Patterson of the Training Section, Personnel Branch of the War Production Board:
I have never seen such a stirring demonstration as the one the members of the Board’s Operations Training Course recently tendered you.
It was grand of you to appear for us and tell us your story and we like you for it. If I were asked to tell which event of the week was the outstanding one, I would say Colonel Puller’s talk about Guadalcanal. It is too bad that more people could not have heard it.
Colonel Puller, we are proud of you!
He was summoned before the high command of the Marine Corps and gave the same forthright picture of fighting he had seen. He handled ticklish questions without flinching:
“Gentlemen, we have some of the same old troubles: Staff officers, who have never seen a combat, issue unrealistic orders that cost lives, time and money, and ruin morale. For example, we were out there on that island trying to defend a perimeter. When they wanted to send a patrol outside, the command never used a single regiment—but sent out three mixed battalions.
“The logical thing would have been a regular regiment, with one battalion leading and the other two covering. Officers and men would be familiar with each other, and there would never be questions about just who was in command. But when we did go out, it was almost always with mixed battalions. It may look good in a staff officer’s chart here at headquarters, but it didn’t work, brought us only stumbling and confusion and casualties. More than once, when we were out in the jungle, nobody really knew who was in command. I could cite you the names of many a man I lost because of that. It was inexcusable.”
He told them that malaria had been badly handled, and of his futile proposal for the quinine injections: “If I’d been commanding, I’d have accepted the lesser casualties on behalf of those boys and the American people. The death rate from malaria was perhaps ten times greater than it should have been, the way we handled it. I take atabrine myself, every day, and I know that when I stop it. I’ll go down with malaria again.”
General Holcomb asked: “Puller, what do you think of the Raiders?”
“Nothing special about them, sir. They’re just ordinary Marines, when they’re good. No better than our good men in the ranks. There’s too much guff about them, I mean too much Hollywood stuff. It isn’t good for the Raiders, and it’s mighty bad for the regular Marines. The First Raider Battalion is just a battalion of the Fifth Marines. The Raider idea should be abandoned.”
A few minutes later, as Holcomb went down the hall, an officer overheard him rumble to a friend: “I must be getting old. I ought to know better than ask Puller a question like that.”
Soon afterward Puller faced a board which was planning changes in Marine Corps organization. On this day it was dealing with the problem of handling machine guns. The senior officer explained:
“We’ve decided to do away with machine gun companies, and have machine gun platoons instead, as an integral part of each rifle company. That order is already out. What do you think?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think, if the order is out. I’d like to have been asked about it before the decision was made, because it shows an utter lack of knowledge of the art of machine gunnery.
“These guns are the most important fire power to infantry, and after World War I, when they were in battalions, and their commander was a senior lieutenant colonel or major, the system was ideal. The officer had rank enough to demand sufficient time to train his gunners. You need time for this, as much as for artillery, and you need officers with seniority in order to get it.
“These platoons of yours will be commanded by lieutenants who can’t demand anything, and the guns will be treated more or less as toys.”
“Puller, isn’t it a fact that on Guadalcanal the First Division habitually had machine gun platoons attached to each rifle company?”
“Yes, but you don’t realize the reason. The terrain and close jungle growth dictated it. Overhead machine gun fire is feasible in open country, but not in the jungle, so the guns were not massed on Guadalcanal.
“I understand there is a plan to land in China before we land in Japan. If so, we’ll operate on a great open land mass and machine gunnery will come back into its own.
“Our staff officers have never served on Guadalcanal, or plains like those of China. I can tell you one thing, you’re one hundred per cent wrong. When this order goes into effect the Marine Corps will never afterward have properly trained machine gunners, and the art will disappear from this country—and don’t think for a moment that it isn’t an art.”
Among other command groups, Puller sat with that of General Walter Krueger, the Sixth Army chief, who was planning for Pacific operations with his staff. Puller advised them on problems in the area, and was impressed by Krueger’s direct and common-sense approach to his assignment.
Mrs. Puller was with him in Washington for two weeks but saw little of him, for he was seldom home before 11:00 P.M. One evening they called on the widow of Major Otho Rogers. Puller spoke gently to her of the service of her husband and his death at Point Cruz. Mrs. Rogers handed him a package.
“They’re yours,” she said. “Otho asked me to send them to you for Christmas, not long before he was killed. Your favorite cigars. Please take them.”
Mrs. Puller barely escaped the door before she burst into sobs.
Puller went back on the road, covering Army posts in the Midwest and Far West. As usual, he did not shun sacred military precincts, and he expanded on previous talks:
“We just don’t know all we ought to know about warfare, on land or sea. Just off Guadalcanal, not long ago, we lost three cruisers, blasted down by Jap guns as they sat there—sitting ducks, that’s all. I’ll tell you exactly why we lost ’em. The admiral in charge got a plane report that a Jap force was approaching at fourteen knots, by daylight. So he figured that, at this speed, the enemy couldn’t arrive in his waters before the next dawn. After dark, of course, the Japs stepped up their speed to twenty-eight knots, and got to the scene at 3:00 A.M., when our men were not even at battle stations.
“It happened like that, I’m positive. And instead of keeping such things secret, we ought to have ’em emblazoned on the gate at every naval station. We must not be too proud or too stupid to profit by our mistakes—and God knows we make ’em.”
He also dared to speak in a rather critical vein of American prisoners of war, but the force of his logic won his audiences:
“Japanese soldiers aren’t allowed to return home if they are taken prisoner. They have made captivity the ultimate disgrace for a soldier. It would be a good thing if we thought about our own policy—which is just the opposite. We double the pay of men who are taken prisoner, and we’re the only nation doing that. Not even the British go that far—in fact, they stop the pay of captured men. In a way, Americans make it profitable to be captured, and remove the onus from it.
“I know you soldiers can see the effect of this on morale, when you’re in a hard fight. There is less pressure to resist. Lots of our boys who were captured on Bataan were lieutenants. Under our policy, they will become lieutenant colonels or even colonels when they are released at the end of the war—with their only qualifying experience that of living hi a prison compound. Does that make sense to you?
“God knows I have sympathy for a prisoner of war, and I know all of you have, but we’re not following an intelligent line on this. It sounds like a policy dreamed up by inexperienced staff officers to me. From the field commander’s point of view, it is ruinous.”
He then attacked an even more sacrosanct topic—the problem of the thousands of American troops suffering from shell shock:
“I know something about the strain of combat. For five years, in Nicaragua, I marched at least twenty days a month, under the constant threat of ambush. But I never saw in those Indian troops any sign of battle fatigue, or anything resembling it. In the Pacific, I saw a lot of our people break down.
“My reaction is this: What does it matter how you’re killed, if you’re killed in battle? Why does the louder noise of a fight with heavy artillery and bombs make such a difference? I think the difference is entirely in the mind, in the preparation of men for combat. In the constabulary actions I fought, the men were all picked volunteers, professionals, who were paid to fight and realized that they might have to die in the trade.
“I’m sure from my own experience that it’s the mental attitude. I went through the worst days they had on Guadalcanal, and I didn’t suffer a bit. I lost some weight, but that was because we didn’t get the proper food. If we make our men tough in mind, before they go to war, and give them an honest idea of what war is like, we won’t have so much of this trouble. Why do we have to baby them with all this crap about careers and opportunity and foreign travel?”
At Fort Leavenworth, the Army staff college, Puller opened his talk cautiously: “Anything I say in criticism is meant only for the Marine Corps, and in Marine Corps terms, since I know nothing at all about the Army, and I don’t want to insult anybody.”
The atmosphere became heated in a questioning period when an officer asked: “What’s the most serious military problem we face?”
“The practice of having command post exercises,” Puller said—though he realized that he was treading on prominent toes in his audience. “We take skeleton forces of headquarters troops and the like, just a handful, and go through exercises so often that we forget we aren’t simulating actual warfare. It has become so bad that even platoons are carrying out command post exercises. In battle, of course, once you set up a CP, you stop all forward motion, because the commanders sit on their duffs in its relative security. And when you halt forward motion you get into trouble, immediately. I admit we have to learn to handle commands, but we’ve carried it to a ridiculous extreme.”
Later, when the commanding general took Puller home to dinner, he said to the Marine: “Today you cut the ground clean out from under us at Leavenworth. Everything we’ve been teaching is swept away if you’re right.”
Puller protested his innocence of purpose, but the general brushed him aside: “No. You’re right. That’s the hell of it, how right you are—and yet we won’t stop it. We’ll keep on, building right on top of our mistakes.”
One of Puller’s companions at Leavenworth was a British brigadier who had been imported from Africa by Marshall to speak on desert warfare. He was not a glib speaker, but Puller was fascinated, and heard him lecture three times. One thing stuck in his memory:
“When I left North Africa,” the Briton said, “half the equipment the Germans had—tanks, guns and vehicles, too—was British-made. They snagged everything they could capture from us, and made good use of it. On the other hand, we never captured anything from them intact. The Germans had destructive charges built in or attached as part of the equipment, so that before its capture it was blown to bits. Sensible warfare, that.”
When it was all over and Puller was ready to fly back to the Pacific, he had had more than enough of this duty, but he was touched by the letter he got from General Marshall, who was not given to flattery:
I want you to know of our appreciation for your splendid services.
You were given a very heavy and tiring schedule but reports from every organization you visited indicate that your inspirational talks and first-hand information which you brought from actual combat with the Japanese have been of tremendous value in preparing our soldiers for the type of enemy they will soon face.
Undoubtedly you have saved the lives of a good many soldiers and have given the veteran’s touch to some of our training. I am sure every soldier is grateful.
On March 23 Puller flew westward from San Francisco, bound for the First Division in Australia. He had grown tired of taking his daily dosage of atabrine before leaving the States, and when he reached the Division at Mount Martha, Victoria, he went down with malaria. He spent two weeks in bed.