ELEVEN

BITTER PILLS

1942–1943

The deeper I delved into my grandfather’s past, the more I realized how completely whitewashed his life had become since his death. Google “Bonnyman,” and the Wikipedia article about Sandy always pops up on top. The information there isn’t exactly wrong, but it’s so shallow that it’s closer to meme than man. Peering into shadows my family didn’t even know existed, I was slowly chipping the plaster from St. Sandy. I’d always admired my grandfather, but only now was I beginning to mourn him.

The Second Marine Division had a long break from combat between Guadalcanal and Tarawa, in part because most of New Zealand’s defense forces had been shipped off to fight in the Africa campaign.

But there was plenty to do, as men trained to operate new medium Sherman tanks, engineers refined the flame-throwing skills they’d first tested on Guadalcanal, and all worked hard to stay in fighting trim. Finally on September 15, 1943, the division was attached to the Fifth Amphibious Corps, a harbinger that they would soon be in action again.1 They just didn’t know where.

Plans to take Tarawa back from the Japanese had been brewing in earnest since March. Even before the fight for Guadalcanal had been wrapped up, marine and navy commanders were pondering next moves in the Central Pacific. With the Caroline and Marshall islands too far from ground-based bombers stationed in the Ellice Islands, the airfield at Tarawa soon became the next logical step in the island-hopping campaign.2

Commanders believed an assault on Betio would be a relatively painless way to achieve several goals, including capturing an airfield that would be able to provide critical support for successive campaigns and eliminating a potential threat to crucial shipping lanes between Hawaii and Australia. Just as important—maybe even more so—the marines had been looking for a laboratory to test men, equipment, tactics, and strategy in a full-scale amphibious assault on a heavily defended beachhead. Moving north toward the Japanese home islands via a series of enemy-held atolls and islands would be all but impossible without amphibious capabilities, and Tarawa was to be a kind of a laboratory.

By mid-October, the second interlude in New Zealand finally came to an end. Marines began boarding sixteen transport ships in Wellington Harbour, informed that they were going to conduct exercises at Hawkes Bay on New Zealand’s northern tip. But that was a ruse intended to foil Japanese spies, as well as prevent marines going AWOL to remain with brides or girlfriends. In fact, they were headed to Mele Bay on the island of Efate in the French-British administered New Hebrides islands some 1,800 miles to the north, where they would begin practicing amphibious landing.

Sandy boarded the Heywood on October 13, along with the rest of the 2nd Battalion, 18th Marines (or 2/18) Pioneers, which had been attached to Maj. Henry P. “Jungle Jim” Crowe’s 2/8. Built in 1919, the Heywood had sailed between San Francisco and New York as the City of Baltimore for Panama Pacific Lines before being acquired by the Navy in 1940. A massive convoy finally departed November 1. Most of the men would never see New Zealand again.

“Along the rails the Marines watched Wellington, warm and gray and soft with remembered delights, slowly drop astern,” wrote journalist Johnston, who stood beside them. “And in many of the homes on Wellington’s steep hills, moist-eyed girls waved unseen farewells.”3

Despite his enviable record of achievement in just over a year as a marine, the war’s seesaw between action and sheer boredom had taken its toll on my grandfather. He missed his wife, children, and mother, and his old domestic life now didn’t look so bad.

“I would never make a peace-time soldier . . . I have great respect for the discipline and thoroughness of the Marine Corps methods, but it is definitely a grind and of a great sameness,” he wrote. “In action it is all different, one has to deal with the unexpected and things move along fast so it is easier to forget how terribly lonely you really are, lonely even when you can’t turn around without bumping into a Marine.”⁴

Despite all appearances of success in business and the military, Sandy felt burdened by life and feared how he would be affected by the war.

“I have had to (at least in my own mind) swallow a lot of bitter pills in my thirty-three years. I guess in a way these things, these uncertainties, these disappointments have hardened me,” he confided to Jo. “My recent life has not been one to soften up a person and the eventual results I often wonder about. I do believe Jo that no matter what turns up now I can keep my sense of values. I hope so.”⁵

His regrets were many, from struggles with his father to his sometimes-volatile marriage. But he remained a devoted son, husband, and father, writing letters home almost weekly. Though stiffly formal when addressing both his parents as “Father and Mother,” his frequent letters to his beloved Mumsie were relaxed and warmly conspiratorial.

Alex Bonnyman struggled with his talented son’s rebellious, reckless streak. But Frances almost seemed to live vicariously through Sandy’s high-spirited embrace of life and refusal to live according to anyone else’s expectations. My great-grandmother was herself a non-conformist who scandalized neighbors by inviting poor families to have lunch at posh Bonniefield and attending services at a neighboring synagogue to the outrage of a sniffy local Protestant minister. She not only let her son have his head, but also constantly assured him she was on his side; she even promised to help him buy the horse farm in Kentucky he dreamed of when the war was over.6

Though work at the mine had kept him away from his daughters before the war, Sandy now desperately missed them. His letters to the girls were mostly cheery and chatty, emphasizing school, Catechism, helping their mother, and physical fitness. But with Fran, the only one old enough to read, he could be more vulnerable: “Daddy is expecting his big girl to look after everything while he is gone”; “I hope Alix doesn’t forget her real Dada by the time I get home”; “I thought of you when I went to Mass this morning Baby and realized how much I would have loved taking you to Easter Mass at the Cathedral.”⁷

Sandy’s letters to his wife were full of love and longing, liberally sprinkled with terms of endearment—Baby; my dearest Darling; my favorite gal. Alas, my grandmother was not the best correspondent. “Mail call has not been good to me lately, Jo,” Sandy wrote a few weeks before his death, noting that he had not received a letter from her since summer.⁸

His mother had been writing since the spring that Jo was “distracted” and paying little attention to the girls. He seemed to know all was not well in Santa Fe and understood that that his business partner and erstwhile best friend, Jimmie Russell, was the cause of the trouble. But rather than fume or rage, he and his mother devised a plan, by letter, to lure Jo away from Russell. In June, without judgment, Sandy began urging her to leave the house on East Garcia Street and move in with the Bonnymans in Knoxville for the duration of the war, so she would have more help and “the Babies” would be “one hundred percent on the playlist. . . . I honestly believe you will find the move very constructive too.”9

My Granny Great had always loved Jo, treating her with kindness even as she recognized her deep insecurities. It was with politely controlled fury that she wrote “My Dearest Jimmie” warning him not to take advantage of Jo’s vulnerability.

“While my son is on the other side of the world, having been sent by his Country to kill the betraying little yellow men, do you find what you are doing akin to betrayal? Whatever his shortcomings & faults may be, he, his brand of honor would never permit him to do the thing that you are doing,” she wrote. “You are among those fortunate young Americans who will never know the horrors of this war & who can enjoy in security the peace and plenty of our beloved land. For this you must be very grateful. Could you not in your blessed security make a little sacrifice and let Jo alone while her husband is far away defending this very security? She could then go her way, coordinate her life, put out the Confusion you have brought into it, settle down and give a mother’s thought and care to the little children who need it so profoundly.”¹⁰

Sandy’s campaign may have given Jo courage to end the affair. In June she left the girls in Tennessee as usual, but when she returned in August she informed them that they weren’t going back to Santa Fe. The girls, and the Bonnymans, were thrilled.

But the plan to stay in Knoxville didn’t last long. Jo spent the next couple of months in Florida with baby Alix and her nurse Rosa Dee while Fran attended school in Knoxville and Tina was cared for at Bonniefield. But in November, Jo retrieved Fran and took her to live at Mooney Cottages in Fort Lauderdale, leaving frail Tina behind.

Though Jo’s attempted geographic cure had seemingly ended her affair with Jimmie Russell, it didn’t quiet her gnawing neediness, and she began bringing sailors and soldiers home “to entertain” while living in Florida.11 Her tragic anxiety about living life without a man beside her would continue to shatter lives for decades to come.

Trouble had also been brewing with The Guadalupe Mining Company. The copper mine had made Sandy Bonnyman a wealthy man, but troubles were already bubbling to the surface before he had finished training in California.

Despite enthusiastic reports from Jo—whom Russell had appointed as his bookkeeper despite her lack of experience—the operation was grinding to a halt. The heirs of I.J. Stauber, who owned the property leased by my grandfather, were dissatisfied with ten percent of declining profits and were clamoring to sell off the land, and one thousand tons of low-grade ore was sitting unsold because the market had collapsed.¹² In October, Sandy arranged to begin providing Jo’s income from one of his New York bank accounts because receipts from the mine were no longer adequate.¹³

And despite nearly four years of impressive profits, Sandy had never started repaying his $5,000 loan from the Blue Diamond Investment Company. Russell finally made the first payment of $1,000, on July 1, 1942,¹⁴ but the mine shut down in December and he stopped paying on the debt. Not long after, Frances Bonnyman quietly retired her son’s debt, which amounted to about $56,000 in today’s dollars.

“Mumsie,” Sandy wrote from New Zealand, “paying off my Blue Diamond note was the most wonderful thing for you to do.”¹⁵

And there was one bitter pill that Sandy never revealed to his family. On July 23, 1943, he was arrested in Wellington for “rendering himself unfit for duty by excessive use of intoxicants.” In punishment, he was immediately suspended from all duties and confined to quarters from July 27 to July 31.16

The arrest clearly had a sobering effect on my grandfather, and he had begun to see his alcoholic excesses in a new light. “It is amazing,” he mused, “what extremes one goes to in this life to fool himself into thinking that he is having a wonderful time.”¹⁷

The Marine Corps treated the incident as a minor blip on the record of an otherwise excellent officer, but it would taint my grandfather’s legacy long after death.

The marines of the Second Division had no idea where they were headed on November 8 when they arrived at Mele Bay. But almost from the moment they anchored, they were practicing assaults on the beach with Higgins boats—wood-bottomed transport vehicles used in World War I—rubber rafts and oars, and seventy-five brand-new “landing vehicles, tracked,” or LVT-1 amphibious tractors (aka amtracs), dubbed Alligators. Unfortunately, a shipment of new, rubber-wheeled LVT-2 tractors, known as Water Buffaloes, which had been specially adapted for use in Pacific combat, arrived late in the game, leaving the marines without an opportunity to try them out in the water.¹⁸ Gen. Julian C. Smith, commander of the Second Marine Division, was unhappy with the results of his marines’ first practice landings and ordered them onto the beaches over and over until there was simply no time left.

One pivotal development at Efate would greatly influence the coming invasion of Tarawa: Smith replaced Col. William M. Marshall with thirty-nine-year-old Col. David M. Shoup as commander of the 2nd Marine Regiment.¹⁹ Though twenty years younger than Marshall, Smith and other officers felt more confident in his ability to command.

After six days at Mele Bay, the massive convoy of troop transports, destroyers, support vessels, minesweepers, and carriers known as Task Force 53 steamed away from the New Hebrides. Even then, the marines knew only that they would be attacking a strongly defended atoll, and rumors that they were going to retake Wake Island spread like a virus throughout the convoy. They were gung-ho about that mission, relishing the chance to avenge Maj. James P.S. Devereux and the rest of the marines who had valiantly defended the island before surrendering to the Japanese on December 23, 1941.

Had anyone bet on the actual destination, a tiny islet named Betio on an unheard-of atoll called Tarawa, his wallet would have been fat indeed on the eve of battle. “Wake,” journalist Johnston wrote, “might have been easier, at that.”20

But after nine months of boredom interrupted by bouts of malaria, loneliness, and an embarrassing arrest, Sandy Bonnyman was eager to get back into the fight. Lt. Ed Bridgeford, a navy corpsman sailing aboard the Heywood as it zigzagged along a northwesterly course toward Tarawa, “had never seen Sandy so happy or more excited and there was never a more enthusiastic Marine. . . . He raved over the Corps, his three blondes, and Santa Fe.”²¹

Roy Holland Elrod, who would later retire from the Marine Corps as a lieutenant colonel after a long career, was a first lieutenant with the 8th Marines weapons company who got to know my grandfather during their twenty-six days together on the Heywood. At twenty-four, Elrod was also considered an “old man” by most of the marines.

“We were both sort of outsiders, so we fell in and did a lot of talking,” Roy said at age ninety-six. “I found out he roamed around northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, and so had I. We’d even been to some of the same Navajo turquoise mines. . . . He told me he was a real, old-time prospector.”²²

Sandy was hopeful that the coming battle might be the Second Division’s last before respite in Hawaii and maybe even a trip home for Christmas. Navy Capt. Harry Price, a doctor and family friend from Knoxville who had visited my grandfather in the hospital that summer, had assured him that officer rotations all but guaranteed him a trip home within three to six months.23

“I am counting like everything on Christmas ’43 at home and can already taste that ham and hominy,” my grandfather wrote his Mumsie.²⁴

On November 14, Navy Adm. Harry Hill sent a message to the transports in Task Force 53: “This is the first American attack of a strongly defended atoll and with northern attack and covering forces, the largest Pacific operation to date.” The transmission included maps of a bird-shaped island, code-named Helen, with landing beaches designated Red Beach No. 1, Red Beach No. 2, Red Beach No. 3, Green Beach, and Black Beach.

Five days later, Sandy took Communion and made his last confession on the decks of the Heywood. While they lay on their bunks late that night, he told his friend 1st Lt. Tracy Griswold that “a lot of shooting” had shown him that he “hadn’t been as good as possible to all his family.”²⁵ After the war, he said, he was going to change his life.

“Baby, there is a day coming when we can make up for the unnatural lives we have been living,” he had written to Jo, “when we can relax and really feel some deep emotions besides hate, fear, anger.”²⁶

“I can’t imagine . . . that Sandy ever did a mean thing in his life, but then, we all have our moments of remorse,” wrote Griswold²⁷ (who was to become a tiny footnote to history years later, when a researcher offered evidence purporting to show that he had exhumed the bones of Amelia Earhart on Saipan).²⁸

The first shift for the marines’ pre-battle “breakfast”—by tradition, steak and eggs, though that wasn’t always the case for everyone—arrived at ten o’clock on the night of the nineteenth, and there was little time for sleep. At 0320 on D-day, marines aboard the twenty transport ships of Task Force 53 anchored a mile beyond the narrow channel into Tarawa’s lagoon assembled on deck. They descended hemp nets to waiting Higgins boats and LVTs as another seventeen fire-support vessels prepared to move into position.

Since November 13, heavy bombers from bases in the Ellice Islands, carrier-based fighter planes, and light bombers had been doing their best to “soften up” Betio’s defenses, dropping some six million pounds of explosives on a square kilometer of sand.29 Many marines were relieved to hear their officers’ assurances that the engagement would be over quickly: “Before we started it was great fun. We grinned and chortled. We said, ‘There won’t be a Jap alive when we get ashore.’”³⁰

“The Navy . . . made it sound pretty simple, so many tons of naval shells, aerial bombs, straffing [sic], Destroyer support and so on,” Griswold recalled. “The night before we landed I can remember our tactical meeting in the wardroom and Col. Bill Amie [sic; Amey, commanding officer of 2/2] telling us that he’d see us across the island in three hours after the landing.”³¹

First Lt. Alexander Bonnyman, Jr. was eager to fight the enemy he’d seen coming from a decade away, get back home and turn over a new leaf. With the brilliant spray of the Milky Way overhead and the Southern Cross tilting on the horizon, my grandfather swung over the edge of the Heywood and climbed down to a Higgins boat bobbing on the black sea below.