For his 19th birthday, he [Leon] urged me to send him a handgun.
—WILLIAM URIS, IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY
THE WELL-KNOWN INSIGNIA of the U.S. Marine Corps—an American eagle astride the globe with a fouled anchor behind—symbolizes the three-pronged reach of the corps: on land and sea and air. Semper Fidelis, “always faithful,” adopted as the Marine Corps motto in 1883, is an equally commanding expression of the core value of brotherhood. Originally the title of a march composed by John Philip Sousa, then conductor of the Marine Corps Band (he appears briefly in Uris’s O’Hara’s Choice), the phrase is the lynchpin of the marines, representing fidelity at any cost. Such camaraderie sustained Uris in battle and beyond.
Uris was not slated to fight when he signed up in January 1942. Written clearly at the bottom of his service-record card is “not to be assigned to combat duty,” likely because of his age. He would not turn eighteen until 3 August 1942. This exemption was not to last, however. His outstanding performance at radio operator’s school and his rating as a sharpshooter led to his being assigned to the Second Battalion of the Sixth Marine Regiment, which was sent to the Pacific. Action at Guadalcanal and Tarawa would result in Uris’s promotion to private first class. But the road to such achievements, detailed in a series of vivid letters to his half sister Essie and his mother, tell of a young man’s trials, loneliness, and danger in preparing for battle.
On 23 January 1942, four days after enlisting in Philadelphia for the duration of the national emergency (rather than for a specific number of years), the five-nine, 150-pound Leon Marcus Uris, serial number 359195, arrived as a member of the Twelfth Recruit Battalion at the recruit depot in San Diego, California, with the rank of private.1 His recruit train had crossed the United States, stopping in Buffalo, Chicago, Texas, and California. He had enlisted as a reserve, which meant that after the conflict, he would serve an additional six months but receive a $100 bonus. On 22 February, he transferred to Casual Company at the recruit depot, and on 2 March joined the First Recruit Battalion, then transferred to the signal detachment of the radio company the following month. On that date (1 April 1942), he received his military assessment: a 3.5 out of 5 for military efficiency, a 3.5 for neatness and military bearing, a 4 in intelligence, and 5s for obedience and sobriety.
But the record does not reveal the mixture of anxiety and pride he felt as a young recruit. As he wrote to Essie, he initially believed he was leaving “with bad feelings towards almost everyone, a thing which I don’t want. The fact is I was so run down from worry I was sworn in with over 101 fever and I had to go right to bed.”2 In the same letter, he reveals that he will be training in San Diego, but he does not want his mother to know this until he reaches the West Coast. After he arrived at the recruit depot, he told Essie “it is what I wanted and I love this sort of life and I’m happy, so I guess that’s the most important thing.”3 But three weeks later, he asked why she hasn’t written: “If you are sore at me please write and say so because the suspense of not hearing any word from your family is enough to make a guy sick.”4
A week later, he detailed with pride his hour-by-hour activities in boot camp and included a picture of his platoon, asking that she excuse “how we look as we were all sick from a heavy needle a few hours before.”5 Active days began with reveille at four, followed by cleaning and mopping the barracks, drill, chow, clean up, and more drill. Every other night there were training films, which tended to be about warfare, venereal diseases, or how to clean equipment. Sometimes there were boxing matches, and Uris would both box and manage a boxer during his enlistment. Many of these details appear in the early chapters of Battle Cry. Drill, he explained, included plain and fancy marching, rifle exercises, inspection, field combat, obstacle courses, landing parties, bayoneting, and establishing beachheads. For inspection, the men and their weapons had to be spotless. “Boy! Have I learned to take orders,” he told Essie in February, but he was happy to endure the physical punishment because it proved to himself that he was “man enough to take it.”6 The only thing he couldn’t get used to was getting up in the middle of the night. What he wanted most were letters from home.
Uris switched platoons because he spent a few days in the hospital, moving from the 143rd, his old unit, to a new one, the 236th. But his admiration for the 143rd, the best graduating platoon at the base, remained so high that he made it the recruit platoon of his first novel, Battle Cry. Uris continued to do well in boot camp, reporting on 16 March that he had earned three medals, “one for Expert Bayonetman, one for high completion of Basic Training and the last for Marksmanship with a small bore (.22 cal) rifle. On the latter I shot 211, only four points below Sharpshooter.”7 On record day, however, heavy rain and 24 mph crosswinds interfered with everyone’s shooting score. He managed to make marksman, but when fifteen “invisible points” were added, he rose to sharpshooter, although he would not receive extra pay or an official rating. He also began to write about his buddies and the importance of comradeship.8
Following his test on the rifle range, Uris took exams to become a radio operator. Three hundred took the tests, trying for one of twenty-five spots. He didn’t think he had much of a chance but ended up with an average in the high 90s, “including (get this) 95 in spelling which was my second worse mark.”9 Uris recognized his poor spelling early, a characteristic of his writing throughout his life.
Various leaves allowed him to scout out San Diego, which he did not like, since servicemen were “soaked double” and “a decent female is as scarce as men from Mars. But I always manage to have a good time with my buddies.” And “I will say that the Marines are more respected by the civilians here than the Army or Navy. Drunk or sober, he is always neat and walks down the street with snap.”10 Wearing the patch of the Second Marine Division, a shield with five stars and a torch held aloft and bearing the motto “Silent Second, Second to None,” was for Uris an honor.11
Uris’s pride in the marines spilled over into lectures to his family. A remark by his father about Russian soldiers being better than the marines resulted in a seventeen-page letter filled with facts and clippings. Essie would also be getting one, he added, because she had compared Uris to a dogface (soldier), especially to a draftee: “In our opinion, they are the lowest form of military life that exists.”12 He then went on to document the Marine Corps’s emphasis on spotlessness and the importance of a clean rifle, which was inspected every day “by a major who wears white gloves and you lose liberty for a week if he has a speck on them.” A marine was proud of his rifle, and Uris knew “1000 parts of it and the function of each part,” facts highlighted in Battle Cry. But, he stressed, “don’t ever compare me with a Dogface (I get madder as I go on). More than one fight has started that way.”
In the same letter, he reasserts his pride as proof that his decision to join the marines would do the family proud. To Essie’s husband, Harry Kofsky, he claimed, “I’m awfully proud of the uniform I wear. When I left home I was determined to be a good Marine so my family would change their mind about their worthless brother.”13
Uris’s ten weeks of training to become a radio operator began in late April 1942, and he enjoyed it at once, especially the secret codes. He also saw it as providing him with future employment “anywhere in the world, even the Soviet Union with high pay.” He did well, his 97 percent average earning him the title “hot spark,” first in his group. “A ‘hot spark,’” he told his sister, is “supposed to be a natural at sending and receiving. I can take 12 words and send 20 which the rest of the class is 6 and 12…. I’m shooting at the Gold Seal of Honor on my diploma.”14 By 11 July, he had transferred from the radio company of the signal battalion, pleased with his marks and accomplishments, to the headquarters company of the Second Battalion, Sixth Marines. His signal school rating was 73.20 out of 100, and his official duty was listed as “Radio Operator, 776.”
In another letter, typed on a special typewriter at his radio school—in all capital letters, a style duplicated in his later prose, notably in QB VII—he noted that he could say nothing about what he was learning; it was to be “kept in strictest confidence so please don’t ask any questions about what I am doing in classes.”15 In a rare sentimental moment, he admitted, “You know Mom, since I’ve been away, I appreciate a lot of things that I took for granted when I was back home. And I am ashamed to say that it took the Marines to show me what a swell mother I have.” He confidently added that “you can be sure when I come back you’ll have a son to be proud of.”
On a form that asked for “Duty Desired,” Uris wrote “Public Relations.” He also took nine and a half hours of training in chemical warfare, and in October 1942, he was promoted to private first class.
Of course, none of these details indicate the excitement or anxiety brought about by his training, or the overall importance of the Marine Corps for Uris. Only his letters to Essie and his father—and the fictionalized account in Battle Cry—tell of how marine life and combat reinforced his ideas of justice, patriotism, courage, and the urge to write. Further, his novels are marked by research, preparation, and detail, three elements that describe the readiness of marines for combat. As he later explained, “The Marine Corps pushed me into finding strengths I never knew I had. Perhaps I would have never known. I owe them my becoming a man, and the ordeals I underwent laid a foundation of stamina I had to have later as a novelist.”16
At radio school, Uris also read, notably an unusual novel by William Blake titled The Copperheads. He received the book, he told Essie, “from the Front Line Fighters Fund of the I.W.O. [International Workers Order]. On the bookplate it said ‘with sincerest appreciation to your contribution to victory.’ Well I sure was proud. My picture is also going to appear in their magazine shortly so look out for it.”17
What Uris did not know was that William Blake was the pseudonym of William James Blech, a Jewish communist from New York who had lived with the Australian writer Christina Stead in London. They immigrated to the United States, settling in Hollywood, where she became a screenwriter, and mixing in communist circles. During the McCarthy era, they returned to Britain. Blake published The Copperheads, a novel of the Civil War, in 1941. Focusing on the manipulative money dealings of several shady New York stockbrokers who were eager to make a quick fortune during the war, the novel appealed to Uris’s developing sense of outrage at injustice. Its style and focus may have influenced Uris’s later writing. On the dust jacket of the first edition, Uris would have read that Blake “led a baroque existence, hence his predilection for the picturesque and the social in fiction.”18 The comment anticipated Uris’s own life and career.
According to the jacket flap, the Civil War was “fought on the battlefields of Bull Run and Gettysburg but it was first lost and then won in the money marts of NY’s Wall Street … The Copperheads [is] the story of the first organized fifth column in America … The facts, extraordinary as they may at first appear, are absolutely authentic.” Again, the blend of politics and history fascinated Uris.
The colorful writing appealed to him, and he would later imitate its style. The first sentence reads, “My heart leaped as high as the gulp in my throat when I read the telegraphic news item ‘South Carolina has seceded from the Union.’” This is followed by a swift move in time—“five days later”—a technique Uris would employ. In fact, the opening of Mila 18 is parallel, beginning with a journal entry, a date, and a character expressing anxiety about the impending invasion of Poland by Germany (M18, 3). But the active prose is what perhaps made the greatest impression on Uris. Several paragraphs later is this sentence: “The rookery at 10 Wall Street buzzed with excitement as the clatter drowned the locust clicks of telegraph keys” (9).
During his training in San Diego, Uris also accelerated his pursuit of women, which was relentless throughout his military service (1942–1945). First, there was Pearl, the girl “back home.” Uris wrote to Essie that he broke off their relationship before he left “because I told her I wanted no obligations from her,” but it didn’t work.19 She got his address from his father, and their letters became serious, “even though I keep telling her she don’t have to be faithful. She won’t accept it. I only thought I was doing what was fair, things being as they are, so uncertain.” He thought they would marry when he came back, but Pearl was threatening to come to California to marry him.
A marine chaplain supported the idea of Uris marrying before he went overseas, but he was hesitant because of his age. His toughness as a marine and his role as a radio operator reinforced his independence and courage: “This is no kid’s game and I don’t think you’ve realized the change in me. I’ve learned to love a fight. When I come back I’ll be a man who can support myself, a good provider, and will be able to look anyone square in the eyes. And I can see I did it all myself.”20 This resolve and determination would characterize not only much of Uris’s later life but also the characters he created.
Two weeks later, things changed (as they always did between Uris and women). He told Essie that he had a girl in Los Angeles who was in her early twenties “and just about as gorgeous as they come. 5’2”—106 lbs and she doesn’t claim to be a goody goody.”21 She wanted to pay his way up for a weekend at Capistrano beach; “as I said, I hope I’m not cheating [on Pearl] but I wasn’t born brainless.” Pearl wrote everyday, and things still looked the same, but, he told Essie, “I like this girl in L.A. very much.” “You might think I’m an unsettled kid,” but “this is the first time I’ve gone out with a woman (she is 22) and, well, frankly, I like it very much this way.”
In June, he revealed to Essie that he actually had two women, one in Los Angeles and one in Mission Beach, just outside San Diego, with whom he had been involved for two months. Both girls were in such a relationship “for the first time and both of them think I’m going to marry them. Well I should be sweating blood but [am] not even worried frankly. In six weeks I’ll get my transfer and I’ll be safe (I hope).”22 He tried to justify his cavalier attitude: “I’ve gotten some pretty rugged treatment in the last few months [and] I don’t know how long I’ll be able to enjoy it so I’m making it while it’s good.” As for Pearl, he called it off. She wrote threatening letters for weeks. He responded by saying he loved her very much but “figures that she can do a lot better for herself.” Three days later, he wrote to Essie that he and Hannah, the woman from Los Angeles, were also drifting apart, although he admitted that “she is the best I’ve ever had.”23
To impress women, Uris added two years to his age, mentioned his young career as an actor, and highlighted his loneliness. His special come-on? “Dying doesn’t frighten me as much as the thought of never seeing you again—(that always does the trick). I know I’m crazy to think I have a chance with you but I just had to tell you—I couldn’t keep in any longer.”24
What makes his monologue remarkable is the tone and fictional authenticity. It sounds right, and Uris displays here, and in other letters, the style and narrative energy that will characterize his later writing. He was one month shy of his eighteenth birthday, but didn’t hesitate to offer advice to fellow marines on how to romance young women: go easy on the first date. Let them believe they are morale builders, “then comes the big climax—you have to pick them untouched because a girl who has been out with too many Marines knows the lines like a book.”25 And yet, at the end of this display, Uris could still say that he loved Pearl—“maybe because I never wanted to pull any of that stuff on her. And she is about the only girl I never tried to get a screw out of. Sometimes I think I’ll go nuts thinking about her.”
Two and a half weeks later, Pearl was back in the picture. They talked formally about an engagement, although her mother was taken by surprise and wanted to know their plans. He asked his sister for help in acquiring a ring, but before matters got too far along, his transfer overseas came through. His attitude toward marriage quickly changed: “I’m not going to get married for a hell of a long time … They are much sweeter when you can leave ’em.”26
Six months later in New Zealand, he offered this reflection, while in the midst of several relationships: “As for liberty—I still hang around from gal to gal. I just can’t get situated—they either try to get serious or I tire of them. I gave up Mary as hopeless—I can’t stand the ritz she tried to sling. I prefer just a plain old home spun Wave to her. Right now my interest is in Barbara Ferguson, a red head (something new).”27 In summing up his attitude, he told his mother, with bravado, that he would still play the field, although this ignored his deep, ongoing relationship with Betty Cogswell, a New Zealander.28 In Battle Cry, the relationships between several marines and New Zealand women are central to the story.
Uris’s first overseas stop was Wellington, New Zealand, where he remained from 9 November until 26 December 1942. His unit then set off for their first combat, on Guadalcanal, arriving on 4 January 1943 and fighting, with brief breaks, until 19 February 1943. He departed on the 20th, returning to Wellington on 25 February 1943 to begin a long period of rest and recovery, which was marked by new romance and the chance for him to follow another, early love: theatre. He would not go back into combat for some nine months (1 November 1943).
Uris turned nineteen during this time, and for his birthday, he asked his father for a handgun. His optimistic letters, his father writes, were cheerful but tinged with a sense of foreboding about the war. But he definitely wanted a gun: “He specified the size, the caliber and the quality. Anna and I had a problem to find one, then obtain a permit from the Police department, and permission from the military command to send it to him. After a few days of intensive search, I finally bought one, secured the necessary permits, and mailed it to him” (AUTO, 143).
During this period, Uris told Essie that he had been reading See Here, Private Hargrove, an amusing set of columns stitched into a book by Marion Hargrove. The comic tales retold the author’s humorous adjustment to army basic training at Fort Bragg, South Carolina, and how his hapless behavior led to constant missteps and confusions. Yet it also recorded how the green recruits became soldiers who were proud of their accomplishments, despite the looming war. The book became a number one best seller in 1942. Most importantly, perhaps, it was a record of a young soldier writing about his experiences in the service, which may have planted the idea for Uris to someday write up his own adventures. The novel went through twelve hardcover printings in 1942, selling 410,000 copies; in paperback, it sold 2.2 million copies, figures that Uris would himself attain with Battle Cry and exceed with Exodus and Trinity. In 1944, See Here, Private Hargrove became a popular movie starring Robert Walker, Donna Reed, and Robert Benchley.
Another title that would impress Uris was Yama (The Pit) by the Russian author Aleksandr Kuprin. “Read it,” he wrote to his mother in May 1943, “it’s light and will leave you thinking. I really enjoyed it.”29 The novel is anything but light. In the tradition of Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut or Emile Zola’s Nana, the book is a vivid account of life in a brothel, in this case in a region of Odessa known as Yamskaya Sloboda, or Yama. The work describes the prostitutes and their clients in a style that mixes realism and romance. Kuprin, called by his translator the enfant terrible of Russian literature, wrote in the tradition of Russian critical realism. Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, and Maxim Gorky admired his work. Kuprin’s first popular success was Poyedinok (The Duel; 1905), an indictment of military life (he was a former officer). Publication of the first part of Yama created a sensation in 1909, as did parts two and three (1914, 1915). An English translation appeared in 1922. In the author’s postscript, Kuprin notes that some two million copies of his work circulated worldwide.
The sensationalism of Kuprin’s topic appealed to the young Uris, the style even more so. Kuprin used informal speech and often created neologisms or outlandish words: “Not only does he resort to colloquialisms and slang, but to dialect, cant, and even actual argot. Therein is his glory—and perhaps his weakness.”30 The nonliterary writing and the emphasis on experience and detail appealed to Uris, whose own style would reflect this method.
Kuprin also wrote against injustice, much the way Uris would. Furthermore, his characters analyze why they act the way they do, showing Uris that ideas have a place in fiction’s treatment of social history. The philosophical Yarchenko, for example, acknowledges that prostitution is “one of the greatest calamities of humanity,” but clarifies “that in this evil not the women are guilty, but the men, because the demand gives birth to the offer.”31 This leads to an indictment of a deep-seated Russian immorality regarding not only prostitution but also government, the military, and personal behavior. Kuprin also believed that authors had to experience what they wrote about; only in that way could they establish authenticity for their readers. To Essie, Uris said of Yama, “It’s a killer—read it. The thing only leaves the ‘whore’ house twice in 400 pages but of course it was [for] educational purposes I sought it. I’ve also knocked off a few more books—what’s coming over me?”32
In his letters home, Uris reported very little about his combat experiences, partly because of censorship and partly because of fear of creating worry. Only indefinite references to hardships—something was a “grind” or there was illness—pepper his letters. On the day his unit arrived on Guadalcanal, however, he wrote this mysterious paragraph to Essie, foretelling what would emerge as the finished novel Battle Cry: “There is a story—I can’t tell it to you now but someday all your mystery will end. I doubt if you’ll believe what I tell you. Orson Welles wouldn’t dare write it, but someday you’ll know.”33 Only once in his correspondence does he refer to the loss of life, the death of a platoon member on Guadalcanal, and only occasionally does he mention the wounded.34 His pal Red Garvis was hit with shrapnel in his leg and had to be flown to the States, but there were no further details. To find out more about the fighting, one must turn to its accurate portrayal in Battle Cry (originally titled The Beachhead); chapters 6–10 of part three describe the physical horrors of battle in special detail.
Guadalcanal was as brutal as its depiction in James Jones’s The Thin Red Line (1962). The novel re-creates the shock and struggle of a group of raw infantry recruits battling for the island. Uris’s battalion, however, did not see action on Guadalcanal until the end of the six-month conflict. More specifically, Uris and his headquarters company arrived on Guadalcanal on 4 January 1943, after the marines had established a foothold and an airfield. But the Japanese were equally determined to retake the island, sending numerous naval expeditions to bombard it, at one time in late October 1942 ordering two battleships to shell the airfield. By 4 January 1943, Uris’s group was part of a reinforcement-and-replacement plan for making a final push to eliminate any Japanese still dug in. The entire marine contingent, including the Second Battalion, totaled 16,351 men.35 A major offensive by the marines on 10 January initiated a six-week final effort.
The fighting in this last drive up the coast was fierce, compounded by malaria as well as other jungle diseases such as dysentery and dengue fever. As early as October 1942, malaria was claiming as many U.S. casualties as Japanese artillery, bombs, and naval gunfire. But reinforcements made the difference, which culminated in the pincer movement that ended successfully on 9 February.
When Battle Cry narrates the arrival of the Sixth Marine Regiment on Guadalcanal, Uris switches to a diary style to convey both urgency and chronology. But he underscores the irony of their activities: at first they do not fight but carry supplies. They miss the chance for a battle landing (as would happen at Tarawa) and have to wade ashore with equipment. As the narrator of the novel (Mac) reports, they had been in the mud for six days, helping with the drive forward but not fighting. The company was more effective at transporting supplies from the beach to the command post, two miles inland over ridges.
The next diary entry in the novel, for 22 January 1943, depicts several violent encounters Uris witnessed, notably marines using flamethrowers to destroy the Japanese hiding in caves. This was the first time those weapons were employed in the war (BC, 255–256). The writing here becomes vivid and violent. When the marines are attacked the next day, Danny Forrester shoots and then bayonets a Japanese soldier—but when he can’t pull his bayonet out of the soldier’s chest, he fires off another round, “which splattered him with blood and insides of the Jap”; then, because the dead man’s eyes were still open, Forrester smashes the face in with his rifle butt (BC, 260). Brutality takes control as violence becomes endemic. Further scenes reveal Japanese tactics, including imitating injured marines and engaging in hand-to-hand combat (BC, 266). And in an assault scene, Uris adopts a famous marine line as an officer, pointing to a gully they must take, shouts to his men, “Come on, you Whores—you’ll never get a Purple Heart up here. Follow me!” (BC, 270).
Uris saw action and likely faced several dangers, not least of which was “jungle rot,” a skin infection caused by the damp, insects, and bacteria. Ten days after Guadalcanal was secured, Uris and his debilitated unit left. The capture of the island was a turning point in the war, marking not only the first Allied land offensive in the Pacific but also the end of Japanese advances beyond the Pacific positions they held at that time.36 But the cost was high: 1,752 soldiers and marines were killed or missing in action. The Sixth Marine Division, which was formed on Guadalcanal, suffered 1,200 casualties.37
In a letter to Essie, Uris wrote nothing about the fighting, only that he had a cute beard, was very black from the sun, and had “a swell collection of souvenirs and a bunch of fantastic stories to tell.”38 Eight days later, he reported that he had been in the hospital for four days and back on the line again, but was now upset because he learned that Red Garvis had a shrapnel wound in the right knee. But “I can announce,” he claimed with bravado, “that I and the rest of us weren’t as afraid as we thought we’d be. We only got madder than hell. When the going gets hot we stand up and yell ‘f——Tojo’ and let ’em have it.” “The 6th Marines,” he added, “are [the] calmest deadliest and fightingest gang of men in this war. We are the pride of [the] Marines and we have the best and most competent officers in the world.”39
Uris returned from Guadalcanal ill: he weighed only 118 pounds and suffered from rheumatism, malaria, and blood poisoning. “On top of that,” he told his sister, “all of us were mentally sick. Yes honey, I picked up a lot of grey hair.”40 He was not alone: according to one account, 95 percent of the surviving troops of the Second Battalion, Sixth Marines had some form of tropical disease, principally malaria.41
On his return from the “Canal,” 25 February 1943, Uris began a lengthy stay in New Zealand that mixed recovery with recreation. Frequent furloughs and adventures meant a remarkable change from the deprivation and devastation of Guadalcanal. Many of these adventures found their way into Battle Cry, including the rescue of fellow marines being “rolled” by pimps and whores, and the separation of one of his important romances into two stories: that of the marine Andy Hookans, who falls in love with and marries a New Zealand widow, Pat Rogers, and that of Lamont Jones, known as L. Q., who befriends a married woman (BC, 299–308). Uris based this adventure on his own experience, but with a significant difference. In the novel, L. Q. does not have an affair with the wife, Grace, nor anything serious with Gale Bond, a woman with whom he is fixed up at a tennis club. Uris, however, did.
Like L. Q., Uris met a well-meaning New Zealander on a train who immediately invited him home to meet his wife and nine-year-old son. This was in April 1943 in the midst of Uris’s nine-month recovery in New Zealand after Guadalcanal. John and Betty Cogswell instantly welcomed Uris, and he was often their guest, although they lived some distance from Wellington, where he was stationed. To his half sister, he admitted that he fell in love with Betty, who was playful, caring, and clearly enamored of the young American, who was charming, entertaining, and a trifle vain.42 Physical contact was at first good natured, but he implied it quickly became more serious, and he enclosed a letter from Betty to Essie in order to illustrate her fondness for him. Earlier that month, he had ironically written to Essie that he was instituting a new policy of not getting too serious with women: “Freedom is too damn swell. I’ve seen too many guys get that letter from the most precious girl in the world—who just forgot about them as soon as another pair of pants came into view. Boy I almost made the fatal mistake once—it was a close call.”43
Food, rest, the races, movies, and dancing were among his activities with Betty; Vera and Grace, Betty’s two sisters who lived in Wellington, were equally kind hosts. He became accustomed to visiting them three or four times a week. The domestic scene appealed to him greatly: it was order, comfort, and pleasure: “These are real people who just through simple homespun ‘dinkness’ make a guy feel like he is a human being again.”44
On several occasions, Betty Cogswell came to visit her sisters, although her trips were in reality excuses to see Uris, who always entertained. In a letter to Uris (“Dear Fideles”), she expressed how much she missed him and how upset she was at not being able to see him off on the train back to Wellington: “I did want to say goodbye and weep on your shoulder; they wouldn’t keep you in the Elite Corps after I had finished mussing you up. But as you say, perhaps it was just as well.”45 The letter ends with her writing “we miss you a whole lot, most of all, because my foot has nothing to kick beneath the table, and so au revoir.”
In May 1943, Uris told his mother that New Zealand might seem to be a bed of roses, “with good living conditions—good food—the show and most of all Betty and her family, [but] I still feel restless and want only one thing and you know what that is. No matter how wonderful things may be I can never really be happy until I can return.”46 By 9 November 1943, some three weeks before he would ship out to Tarawa, Uris told Essie that he might not come back to the States. He loved New Zealand, and his and Betty’s affair had become intense.47 He did not tell Essie that Betty was married. Ironically, when Uris did finally marry for the first time, his wife’s name was Betty.
In the same letter to Essie, Uris added that he thought his father “spread it a bit thick about the Battle flag. I didn’t like it.” Uris was referring to a bloodstained Japanese flag that he sent his father from Guadalcanal. A story in the Philadelphia Record (2 October 1943) reported that a “back-the-attack” show and dance with film star Victor Mature had had as its centerpiece a “blood-stained and tattered Japanese battle flag,” which drew the attention of 50,000 at town hall. The flag had been received, the paper went on to say, by “William Uris of 4130 Parkside Ave. yesterday from his son, Private First Class Leon M. Uris of the Marines.” A letter from William to Essie included a photo of him holding up the flag; the picture had been published along with an article in Yiddish in the Morning Freiheit (17 October 1943).48
In his letter to Essie, William asked whether he should send the clipping to his son; he had already sent an account in English, adding that his picture had also been taken for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Ending the letter is reference to his son’s “ambition to continue writing” and his own promise to help in anyway to get Leon’s “writing published. Leon loved and still loves to write.” This is one of the earliest statements confirming Uris’s ambition.
When not training for beach landings, enjoying a furlough, or chasing women, Uris learned how to play the harmonica and managed a Native American boxer named Johnny Gates, a former middleweight amateur champion. On 9 April 1943, Uris reported that his boxer had won the regimental light heavyweight title “in a breeze and is now in training for the Division Championship.”49 His interest in this sport derived in part from his own experience. While in San Diego in late June 1942, Uris had stepped into the ring and boxed twenty two-minute rounds in the company gym: “Had a date to box this Sunday from a week ago and the next thing I knew it was a grudge fight. So I warmed up 5 rounds and the guy didn’t show up so I warmed up another 5 slow rounds and then he shows up.” In the ensuing match, the smaller Uris was knocked down six times in the first four rounds, but then “I got mad and it took 6 more rounds before I tagged him but he finally quit.”50 Boxing appears in Battle Cry, and in 1954 one of Uris’s unproduced screenplays was Ringside, the story of a boxer’s rise and fall.
Other than Betty, the big event in New Zealand was the production of Uris’s play Fourragere Follies, named for the fourragère, the shoulder braid worn by the Sixth Marines to honor their valor in France in the First World War. To his mother, he wrote that he was “back in my old racket again. P. G. Smith, Johnny Etheridge (two buddies) and I are writing a show which will be put on shortly in a big theatre in town. All three of us have had big roles to slaughter and that grease paint will sure feel good again.”51 The theatre was the Wellington Opera House, and the enthusiasm was so great that the division recreation officer reported that the general and his staff would have a box, “so it’s really a big thing. As it stands now, we will have a smash hit on our hands—I hope.”
The revue was a group effort between Uris, Etheridge, and Smith. Uris wrote the finale, in which he stressed the solidarity between the marines and their New Zealand compatriots as they joined to defeat the Japanese. The finale, he told his mother, featured a set that represented the barracks at night, as well as crosscut dialogue from soldiers from all over America, each voice with a different accent. Uris took the part of a Brooklynite representing “the City.” Relying on idiomatic language, the final speech was a ringing endorsement of the united effort to defeat the Japanese. Creating a tapestry in sound for the revue encouraged Uris in his use of different narrators and shifting points of view to distinguish the marines in Battle Cry.
A performance at the St. James Theater received this headline in the New Zealand Free Lance (2 June 1943): “American Marines Entertain with Hot Numbers and Riotous Fun.” Photos of the cast in performance exhibit exuberance and professionalism, one caption praising the “1 hr. and 15 minutes of high pressure entertainment.” An earlier headline had read: “Marines Put it Over Excellently, Unrehearsed Frolics on Wellington Stage” (New Zealand Free Lance, 31 May 1943).
The show was a hit despite only three weeks of partial rehearsals and no complete run-through until the first night.52 To Essie, Uris wrote that the show was a “thunderbolt and is being acclaimed. For two hours … they split their sides on the comedy, cheered the music and were deathly silent in the serious scenes and it was a thrilling experience.”53 The show was to be repeated, but Uris gave up his part to “remain a writer, as well as director and … business manger.” But there was also a down side. Working hard meant the return of malaria for many, including Uris. But recovery was quick.
The show was an indisputable sensation. Uris’s excitement over its triumph renewed his enthusiasm for the theatre, which he decided to pursue upon his return to the States—not only in a new revue, Situation Out of Hand, but also in his efforts to mount a touring production of Fourragere Follies with veterans of the show. He would also attempt to get the text published.
While in New Zealand, he rapidly impressed an acting family and their daughter. After their first formal meeting, he turned on his charm, and “they listened up and I had things going my way before long. Mary [their daughter] is a sweet gal but I’m afraid they try to be too high hat. I cut them down a few notches but I like to go somewhere where I can take off my shoes and unbutton my collar.”54 Later, he wrote: “I still see Mary on occasion but I expressed my view of her before (too high brow). Every time we get together, I give her hell and she loves it. Strange, there is very little sex interest. Just a nice and intelligent friendship … But as I said, it’s best not to see any one girl too often. I enjoy her company and she got out of the habit of putting on airs on me—I call her Maggie—but I don’t want to get to like her too much.”55 The next month he was back with Betty.
In mid-October 1943, he reported that he and Betty were getting serious, adding “I can’t say that I’m sorry … It was hard to keep fighting against it. Now we are trying to make plans and believe me it’s mighty hard too. But, nevertheless, we are both taking it slow and easy and wisely. Right now she is making me sane—and we aren’t doing badly either.”56 Yet within three weeks, he told Essie that at last he was “coming to my sense about Betty—Boy was that close—another month or so there and I might have married.”57
By the end of October 1943, the New Zealand idyll was coming to an end. Uris and the Second Marine Division shipped out for one of the bloodiest and most difficult battles of the war, Tarawa. The three-day battle for this small atoll, part of the Gilbert Islands, was a near massacre, a story of confusion and bloodshed. Uris departed on 1 November 1943 and would remain in the Gilberts until 28 November 1943, when he was sent to Hawaii to recuperate from malaria and dengue fever.
Tarawa was the first test of the U.S. amphibious doctrine of assaulting a heavily defended beach in daylight; it also marked the Pacific debut of the Sherman tank, although few of them survived the intense, seventy-six-hour battle. Tremendous tactical problems, which created congestion on the beach, death in the water, and confusion at sea during the 20–23 November landing, resulted in heavy casualties. On the morning of the landing, it was not clear whether the tides would be high enough to get the heavy landing craft over a dangerous barrier reef and deposit the men on the beach. The assault plan unraveled when many marines had to wade ashore some hundreds of yards from behind the reef, making them easy targets for the dug-in Japanese gunners. Entire platoons were lost as Japanese heavy guns targeted navy landing craft, making it impossible for the tanks they carried to get ashore. Betio Island, the key island in the Tarawa atoll, seemed impregnable.
The battle for Tarawa continued for three and a half bloody days at an immense cost: 1,115 marines and sailors killed or missing, and 2,292 wounded. All told, some 6,000 Japanese and Americans died in the space of three hundred acres. Nearly ninety hospital corpsmen for the Second Marine Division alone suffered casualties (out of a total casualty count of 3,097 for the division), a mark of the severity of the fighting. At one point, a blackened, derelict landing vehicle tracked (LVT) drifted ashore, filled with dead marines. When the battle was finally over, burial parties could not dig a grave without exposing another body.58
Tarawa was also where Uris, who had come under fire before, had what he referred to as his most dangerous wartime experience. During a break in the midst of the mop-up operation, he was sleeping on the beach and was nearly run over by an amtrack (amphibious tracked vehicle) that failed to see him—the “closest I came to being killed.”59
Of his time on Tarawa, Uris was candid—forty-four years after the battle. Speaking at the dedication of the Tarawa Monument at Long Beach, California, he said that on 20 November 1943, while with a marine task force just off Tarawa, “I was neither hero or coward, I was able to do what was expected of me.”60 After the battle for Betio, “my memories of Tarawa were rather romantic…. As the last reserve battalion, we had drawn few casualties at the main battle site.” He was in the last reserve battalion assigned to chase the remnants of the Japanese garrison across a couple of dozen linked islands that made up the rest of the atoll. Forty-five miles and three days later, they trapped them and “fought our own intimate little war. We remained on Tarawa for several weeks to garrison and defend against a possible counter-attack from the Marshals.”
After an unfit Uris returned to the United States, his “buddies, the 2nd Battalion of the Sixth Marines, were cut to pieces on Red Beach on Saipan. I was filled with guilt and remorse for not having been there.”61 Years later, he met Colonel Ray Murray, of his former battalion, in Marin Country. To Uris’s shock, Murray turned to him said, “Oh, hello Uris. Did you ever get around to writing that book?” Uris then explained:
I realized that my commitment to the corps could not be fulfilled until I had earned their respect at the typewriter. And believe me, the typewriter is the worst weapon ever created against the soul of man. I am proud to be here because so many of the writers out of the second world war wrote bitter novels, damning their branch of the service, damning America, and damning the officers and men they fought with.
Well, I hated war as much as any of these authors, but I love my fellow Marines as brothers and I respected and trusted my officers.62
In three days at Tarawa, the Second Marine Division took more casualties than U.S. troops had incurred at Belleau Wood (during the First World War in 1918) in three weeks: “At Tarawa, we had almost as many casualties as we had taken in six months on Guadalcanal. [But] just as the battle of Belleau Wood stopped the great German onslaught on Paris in WWI, so did the bravery at Tarawa shatter Japanese illusions.”63 Uris ended his speech with a gung ho tribute: “On that terrible day in November of 1943, what kept them coming through chest high water when their only armor was the thickness of their dungarees? Faith in the Corps, faith in each other and love of their country. Each man said to himself, silently, ‘I am a Marine.’ and they were Marines, every one of them. They were the finest ever seen.”
One of the more important aspects of the marines, which Uris underplayed, was anti-Semitism. But when asked directly about that sort of prejudice, he was evasive: “I had no real Jewish Background and half the guys knew I was Jewish and half didn’t. It bothered me because I didn’t want my friends turning on me. So I just kept quiet about it. I didn’t go to Catholic services and I didn’t go to Protestant services and I didn’t even know if there was a Jewish service. That’s what I meant by denying.”64
Ill with malaria, dengue fever, and a recurrence of asthma, Pfc. Leon Uris shipped out from Tarawa on the USS Prince Georges on 8 January 1944, arriving in Hilo, Hawaii, on the 20th. He transferred to Pearl Harbor, where he left on the MS Bloemfontein on 12 March 1944 for San Francisco, arriving six days later. He recuperated at the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California, his combat days over.65
Uris officially remained with the Sixth Marines until he received a transfer on 2 March 1944 to the V Amphibious Corps, which transported him back to San Francisco. He remained at Oak Knoll until 12 August. When fully recovered, he joined the supply depot in San Francisco for two months; he then transferred to the Second Separation Company on Mare Island and was honorably discharged on 27 October 1945. He had continued his enlistment until 1945 partly to meet requirements for disability pay.
Uris’s return to the States was bittersweet. In a letter to his mother, he told her of the joy as well as the pain of first sighting land: “I don’t guess I can even be really happy until all my buddies are back too.”66 He didn’t know what the future held or how long he would spend recovering. He was eating and sleeping well, and there were a “bunch of Waves around here too—living right on the compound[.] They are OK in the Army and Navy but the name ‘Lady Marine’ makes me very sick in the stomach. I fear I’m narrow minded.”
The Oak Knoll Naval Hospital was a large facility accustomed to treating tropical diseases. Uris made a quick recovery, reassuring his family that he was rapidly improving. One measure of his regained energy was his renewed pursuit of women. He reported to his mother that he was dating a colonel’s daughter who went to an exclusive school here: “She’s an awful nice kid and I enjoy her company. We are going to see ‘The Student Prince’ next week.”67 He added: “I’m now a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars…. If I might, Darling, I’d like to give you a citation for bravery. You’ve conducted yourself in the best tradition of Mothers. I know the burdens you’ve carried for the past two years.”
Most importantly, his hospitalization encouraged him to renew his principal literary pursuit at the time, playwriting. Two and a half months after his return, Uris organized a revue that he wrote and codirected with R. D. Mayfield, and that was to be performed at Oak Knoll on 29 May 1944. An article in the base paper, the Oak Leaf (27 May 1944), previewed what would be the first original play at the new central auditorium: “‘Situation Out of Hand’ [is] a real side-splitter. It’s what happens when two daughters of an Army Colonel are in love, one with a marine and the other with a sailor.”68 The plot of the two-act comedy, however, is slightly more complicated. One of the two daughters is secretly married to a sailor, but the colonel favors another suitor, an army lieutenant. To add to the complications, the other daughter is in love with a marine—played by Uris—suspected of being a spy. What happens behind the colonel’s back forms the action, which was all the more interesting because Uris was involved with a colonel’s daughter at the time.
In one of his many scrapbooks, Uris included a black-and-white photo from the play and scribbled beneath it “172 laughs in 55 minutes.” Coverage of the revue appeared in the Oakland, San Francisco, and Baltimore papers. An article in the Chevron, a marine paper on the West Coast, headlined its feature with “Second Play in Year produced by Marine.” It described Uris as recovering after eighteen months of overseas duty and noted that he wrote his first play, “Fourragere Follies … in his off hours while he was stationed in New Zealand. It played with great success before Marine audiences there.” A story with Uris’s photo in the arms of an actor, Pat Connel, appeared in the Leatherneck (the official marine magazine), with the welcome headline “Marine Playwright.”69
Earlier, in July 1944, while working on Situation Out of Hand, Uris also drafted a new play to enter into a national serviceman’s contest. He called it The Parent Spark; no copy of it appears to have survived. At that time, he and his girlfriend Marilyn had reached a stalemate, but he handled it with characteristic panache: “Well—her misfortune. Women around here are plentiful and they all make nice salaries and know how much I make so I’m not too unhappy.”70
Uris was also developing another skill: writing radio scripts for the War Bond Office. Preparations for these publicity broadcasts included scripting all the interview material. One of them, dated 20 November 1944, opened the sixth war-loan drive and noted that the date was the first anniversary of the Battle of Tarawa. Uris wrote the introductions plus the interviews, beginning with a talk by Mr. W. W. Crocker, the chairman of the drive, who told listeners that the war was not over. There was a need for more cargo planes, cargo vessels, superfortresses, and amphibious equipment for the beachheads that had to be taken. He urged listeners to buy at least one extra hundred-dollar bond during the drive. The dramatic tone foreshadowed some of Uris’s later, urgent prose.
As his relationship with the colonel’s daughter waned, Uris began to court a twenty-two-year-old marine staff sergeant at supply depot headquarters: Betty Beck from Iowa. A December 1944 letter to his mother provided the details in his best battlefield style:
First, and I think you know your sonny boy, she is a very attractive girl, has a beautiful figure and the best pair of legs in Frisco. Lovely hair, a beautiful set of white teeth and light complexion and dark blond hair. She … comes from the town of Waterloo, Iowa, from a middle class family. Both of her parents are from Denmark and her father is a successful builder…. Betty is very quiet except in her own circle of friends but has lots of good stuff on the inside and lots of common sense. And a very wonderful sense of devotion. Mostly, she has lots of faith in me and my work.71
What the letter didn’t outline was Betty Beck’s love of books or her enlistment in the marines at age twenty after two years of college (and never having left Iowa). She was in the first company of female marines, and because of her college experience, she was made sergeant and sent to San Francisco to work at the supply depot headquarters, where she would meet Uris. Three months after meeting this eastern-bred young man of Russian-Polish origin, she married him.
Betty’s family, who thought less of Uris’s plans, raised objections. Candidly, he wrote that her family was
really blowing the roof off the house. Her father says that if she marries me she never need to come home again and they want to send her Mother out here to stop us. For my own part, I’d like to tell them all where to go, but there is Betty to consider. No matter what I think of them, they are still her parents and she loves them. I just have to take her feelings into it. But I’m not going to give her up—nor am I going to let them rule and ruin her life. She is taking it very hard and it’s a trying period but things will work out for the best I’m sure. As soon as things cool down a little I’ll have Betty write to you.72
The situation troubled Uris, but they married while they were both still in the service, her commanding officer warning her that he won’t go far. She responded by declaring he would be a great writer.73
Uris enjoyed married life, which unexpectedly became entangled with marine politics. On the night of 27 February 1945, Uris was one of several marines who led a protest at the offices of William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner for its printing of an editorial that day that praised General Douglas MacArthur as a strategist and hero. The article criticized the marines for the high loss of life at the Battle of Iwo Jima, drawing comparisons to the deaths at Tarawa and Saipan. Heavy assaults against fortified beach positions seem foolhardy, especially when compared with how MacArthur won back the Philippines without the “decimation or exhaustion of American forces.” MacArthur, the paper declared, is “our BEST strategist. He also SAVES THE LIVES OF HIS OWN MEN … why do we not USE him more … why do we not give him the supreme command of the Pacific war?” The marines took offense: the editorial implied that they did not know how to fight, protect their men, or win battles.
Uris and a group of marines confronted the managing editor in his office. He tried to stall them when they demanded space for a response: no one but Hearst could grant that. They demanded to speak to him. At that moment, the shore patrol and the police riot squad arrived. Uris and the other seventy-five marines refused to budge. A committee of three, including Uris, then met in the managing editor’s office and pressured him to call Hearst. Through his secretary, Hearst guaranteed space for a response, and the next day Uris, Betty (a marine sergeant), and three others returned with their own editorial, which clarified the marines’ actions and corrected the sinister implications that the marines acted carelessly. One sentence expressed the tone of the whole: “To hint that the Marines die fast and move slowly on Iwo Jima because Marine and Naval leadership in that assault was incompetent is an attempt at a damnable swindle of the American people.” That day, 28 February 1945, a version of it appeared in the paper.
Uris made sure the incident was well covered, providing an account to the Associated Press and Time magazine. The opening sentence dramatically conveyed the action and foreshadowed the style he would apply in his own fiction: “Police and Navy Shore Patrol answered a riot call to William Randolph Hearst’s Examiner tonight when a group of 60–70 U.S. Marines—identified as Pacific veterans—crowded into the editorial rooms, protesting an editorial which said the Marine Corps is paying ‘perhaps too heavily’ in lives for Iwo Jima.”74
Most of the San Francisco dailies suppressed the story, however. Only the “courageous little Daily Peoples’ World” gave the event any attention, declaring that the marines had “roared” into the office to demand a retraction. On Thursday, 1 March 1945, the San Francisco Examiner printed a letter to the editor signed by the marines, but not a retraction. The edited letter rationally showed that MacArthur often landed at unopposed beaches and islands, while the marines faced heavily dug-in defenders relying on small but effective forces. The original letter also criticized MacArthur for his self-serving actions. The incident passed, and the Hearst papers continued to demand that MacArthur be given full command of U.S. forces in the Pacific. Nevertheless, the event demonstrated Uris’s activism when faced with injustice, especially against his beloved marines.
In an April 1945 letter to his mother, Uris continued his account of political life. He and Betty lived at 909 Franklin Street, only three blocks from the peace conference, and “since the death of Roosevelt, we have all felt the urgency of this meeting succeeding.”75 But he urged his mother not to count on their coming east “till the war is over,” although they hoped then “to able to get a nice car and travel across the country in our own good time.” Most importantly, “we are undecided what to do after the war but you can be assured that we will go into business for ourselves, whatever it is.”
In an earlier letter, he noted that they had participated in San Francisco culture by seeing a production of Othello with Paul Robeson and attending concerts. “Married life,” he continued, “is sure wonderful and we are both very happy and contented.”76 The apartment looked great, and “Betty is a wonderful, loveable girl and I consider myself damn lucky.” Life also had a regularity to it that he appreciated: “We both put in a big day’s work and usually eat and go to sleep or go out someplace—I’ve fallen so far behind in all my writing that everyone is sore at me but I’ll honestly try to do better in the future.”
Uris later reported that he was given a column in a new base paper that was scheduled to start in a month or so: “So now I’m launching a career on newspaper work. Anyhow, it seems like a lot of fun. Also, I’ve put in a request to start a dramatic group.”77 He also told his mother that he was preparing an article titled “Blood on the Beaches” for a new magazine, Opportunities on Parade, which would have a circulation of a hundred thousand.78 The magazine published its first issue in May 1946, although Uris’s piece was not in it. The article is an early draft of several scenes in Battle Cry.
But with the war over, Uris began to think of moving with Betty to larger quarters and to considers different careers, including that of producer-dramatist for the Veterans Drama League. The pressing issue was housing. He noted that Henry Kaiser was putting up houses that came equipped with refrigerators, stoves, landscaping, health benefits, dishwashers, and “everything.”79 They were very cheap, and the financing terms were “swell.” He wrote to inquire and perhaps “grab one off and get established. Well, I’ve been married over four months now and find my wife sweeter and more lovable every day.”
To further himself, he signed up for several English courses through a correspondence school. He and Betty improved their lot by ordering a new car, which they would pay for with war bonds. And although they had no income for the few months after Uris’s discharge, he nonetheless offered to help his mother with expenses for Uncle Eddie’s illness as soon as he was able.80 In a postscript, he added that there would be “no grandchildren for a while.”
During this time, he also tried to get a play produced. A rejection letter from Laura Wilck in Hollywood reads: “Sorry but SITUATION OUT OF HAND by Leon Uris won’t do. I appreciate your thinking of me but the script is too amateurish.”81 A rejection letter from the New York story department of Twentieth Century–Fox explained that the work didn’t qualify as filmable material.82 Exhibiting his early reaction to critics, Uris wrote in ink across the bottom of the letter: “This guy is nuts.”
The year 1945 did see the publication of Uris’s first work, however: five letters in Jewish Youth at War: Letters from American Soldiers, a volume published in New York by Marstin Press, which had been started by Israel London, a Yiddish publisher, printer, and journalist.83 Edited by the Yiddish poet and critic Isaac E. Rontch, Jewish Youth at War contains excerpts from ninety-three Jewish men and women who served during the Second World War. Almost all the letters are by the children of Jewish immigrants whose parents “came to America by choice” and for whom there was no confusion of identity: “The American Jewish soldier fights as an American and as a Jew,” Rontch asserts.84 It is likely that William Uris sent Rontch letters from his son; Rontch had printed Yiddish poetry in Freiheit and may have published a request for material there.
Introducing “This Is My War—Personally,” the title of Uris’s three-page contribution, is a biographical note, which incorrectly states he was wounded at Tarawa. A thumbnail photo shows a grainy but youthful Uris in uniform. The dates of the letters, all to his father, are from March 1943 to May 1944 and begin with a summary of conditions on Guadalcanal: “bugs, mud to your waist, and sun so hot you nearly burned. Then there were snipers, planes, machine guns and artillery…. But we’d do it again and again until we can come home” (Jewish Youth at War, 223). Patriotism mixed with bravery is underscored in his letter of 6 July 1943, in which he tells his father he will soon send him a Japanese battle flag. Uris proudly states that “the Jap it was taken from won’t be around to claim it—I saw to that” (223). He suggests that the flag be used for fund-raising. In November of that year, he announces that he wants to stay in the Pacific until the job is done: “This is my war—personally and I am glad to be in it. Not only for my grandmother but for Joe and Sam Stone who died in Spain—for Red who is now a cripple for life from the leg wound on Guadalcanal” (224). Proud of his contribution, he reminds his father that two cousins have also joined up.
A May 1943 letter, however, reveals that he is homesick and unhappy partly because his play Fourragere Follies will not be seen by his family. He stresses its theme: the Yanks are as sentimental and home loving as those they are fighting with, the New Zealanders, against the Japanese. He then quotes his overly romantic speech in the finale, beginning with “It’s the little things in life that we will fight and die for” and then moving on to even larger sentimentalities (224–225).
The final letter, dated 14 May 1944, is from the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital. For the first time he mentions suffering nightmares from the Tarawa landing: only six in his landing craft reached the beach. He also suffers from knowing that his buddies are still out there fighting while he is recovering in the hospital. He ends with a ringing endorsement of American democracy and the marines, for whom it is not the religion but the man that counts. The paragraph, summarizing his view of the fighting, is a valuable summary of his war and identity:
America, my country, is my love. I’ve fought beside Catholics, Protestants and Mormons, Indians, Irish, Italians, Poles. They liked me because I was a good man and a regular fellow. And I’ve seen 750 out of 900 of us who left the States die or be shot up at Guadalcanal and Tarawa. There was a Jewish boy in my platoon—who was well hated. He was a coward, a general no good. We made his life miserable, not because he was a Jew, but because he was a rat. And another Jew, Captain Bill Scherewin—I worked for him. He has won three Navy Crosses. He led a glorious assault which I was in. We loved him and would follow him to hell. (225)
In this paragraph are the themes Uris will develop in Battle Cry, the behavior and testing of a mixed group of young men sent to war. And in the tone of this letter is the sincerity and conviction that would stand behind his constant efforts to oppose injustice and discrimination.
A review of Jewish Youth at War in Commentary magazine singles out only one writer for comment. The reviewer, critical of the pious and sanctimonious tone of the letters and the awkward, juvenile style of the writing, nonetheless highlights one account for its honestly felt experience of the most frightening event of any war: death. He then quotes the letter about nightmares, the Tarawa landing, and the changes it brought about. The unidentified author was Leon Uris.85
For six months after leaving the service, Uris organized and was president of the U.S. Marines Veterans’ Association of the Pacific Coast. In August 1945, he assisted in the production of a Guadalcanal memorial show performed at the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. Uris wrote and directed the blackout sketches and was master of ceremonies for that segment. The Tommy Tucker band played. He also took on the editorship of Pacific Veteran, the association’s newsletter. There was also an effort to remount Situation Out of Hand for a five-day run.
The slightly altered play (the plot involved the daughters of a college professor rather than a colonel) would be sponsored by the War Finance Committee, which would tour the play for the fifth war-loan drive with Steve Courtleigh of the New York stage playing the lead. At the last minute, however, a protest from army public relations canceled the production: “Fun was poked between the services in the script and at that time, Army and Marine Relations were strained over an incident on Saipan.”86 Nevertheless, the play was a success in a San Francisco production.
Many ads and several short articles about the performance appeared in the San Francisco papers. An advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle (18 March 1946) described the work as an “An Original Farce in 3 Acts” with this blurb: “Only fault with play is it has too many laffs—if such a thing is possible.—J. Shelley.” Listed as a performer on the handbill for a March 22 production was “Lee M. Uris.”87
Herb Caen, “the [Walter] Winchell of San Francisco,” plugged the show in his 19 March 1946 column, which was headed “It’s news to me.” “Try to catch ‘Situation out of Hand’ staged by Vets Drama League,” he wrote. “The league was formed by Leon Uris, a Tarawa campaigner[,] and all the gents in the cast have miles of campaign ribbons battle stars, etc.”88
But the failure to tour the play and declining support for the Veterans Drama League meant Uris had to turn to other employment. After several attempts, he landed a job at the San Francisco Call-Bulletin as a district sales manager, first in San Francisco and then in Marin County. A new stage in his life began. He and Betty would soon move to a small house across the bay in Larkspur, await the arrival of their first child, and a few months later adjust to the nightly sounds of Uris typing in the attic as he began to draft and redraft his first novel.