The Best War Ever by Michael C. C. Adams

Author:Michael C. C. Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

A Jeep Squashes the Torso of a Dead Enemy. Drawing by Howard Brodie.

Courtesy of the U.S. Army Center of Military History

Marines in the central Pacific fought on bleak, hot, cinderlike coral atolls, which shattered like shrapnel when hit by explosives. To the south, forbidding jungles enveloped troops in claustrophobic dark heat. The lush vegetation played host to a legion of natural dangers, from snakes, insects, leeches, and land crabs to tropical diseases such as malaria, cholera, typhus, and even elephantiasis, which attacked the glands—soldiers’ testicles swelled to the size of watermelons. To combat malaria, the troops were given atabrine, which had the side effects of bad taste, nausea, and yellow skin coloration. Many threw the medication away. One 1943 study in the Pacific showed that of 317 fresh wounds, 93 percent showed at least one form of bacterial species, 75 percent had two or more.

Everywhere there was mud. In all theaters, rain turned earth to slime. Men struggled against it in foxholes, where it buried them alive, and drowned in it when shells threw mounds of it upon them. It puckered their skin and rotted their feet. Trench foot accounted for as many as 70 percent of nonbattle casualties during bad weather. When marine Eugene B. Sledge tried to clean up from the fighting on Peleliu, the mud in his hair ripped the teeth from his comb. It had decomposed his socks into slimy webs that pulled the flesh from his feet. Mud acted as a vector for bacteria, such as tetanus and anthrax, that bred in the soil and entered human hosts through cuts and abrasions.

And all around were flies and maggots, for this wasteland of mud and excreta was also a charnel house where the dead lay rotting. In the worst conditions, men ingested insects stuck to their food. Decay accompanied the troops wherever the pace of battle bogged down and bodies could not be removed. On Peleliu, where the opposing lines were so close that it was too dangerous to try reclaiming the dead, bodies oozed into the pervasive slime. Land crabs fed on them.

Stray dogs, hogs, and rats attacked bodies on other fields, such as at Monte Cassino, where they reportedly ate out the tender throats. Insects thrived. An officer stood riveted by the body of a Louisiana boy: “The flies had arrived already and were feasting on the blood in his open mouth” (Gray, 109). The stench from the bodies made eyes run and breathing difficult. Men actually tasted the decay; it made them vomit. Freezing temperatures cut the smell, but then bodies petrified in grotesque contortions of violent death, turning a startling claret color.

Often, there were too many dead for individual burials. On Okinawa, the marines were “stacked like cordwood” awaiting burial in communal graves; so were the Japanese. In Italy, bodies were stuffed in mattress covers and quickly buried. Many corpses were too disintegrated to be reclaimed: vehicles had squashed them into the earth, explosives had blown them apart. At one burial, the only recognizable parts were a scalp and a rib cage.

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