“What did you do in the big war?” his grandchildren asked. Ralph Walker Willis has answered them in My Life as a Jarhead: USMC 1941-45, a valuable book for anyone interested in the subjects of history and heroism. His is not the memoir of a politician or military officer, nor a polished work of self-promotion penned by a ghostwriter. This is the raw and gripping story of an American boy who enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps ten days after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and chronicled his experiences during four years of war in the Pacific—including the Battle of Iwo Jima and the U.S. occupation of Japan.

My Life as a Jarhead is the antidote to Tom Brokaw’s highly publicized The Greatest Generation, which includes World War II recollections of ordinary and famous Americans as a marketing device. Ignoring standards of scholarly research and even of journalistic integrity, The Greatest Generation portrays Americans who grew up in the Depression and then won World War II—as well as their society and government—as shamefully racist, particularly in regard to Japanese-Americans. Today, more than ever before, the dominant news media do not report the news; they manufacture it, recreating the past—as Brokaw attempted to do—so that history, too, may conform to their prejudices.

Mr. Willis is an excellent observer who uses words as a painter uses paint to create powerful images of his experiences. He writes honestly about World War II, the Japanese, and U.S. military bureaucracies. He began his hitch in the Marine Corps on December 17, 1941, in San Diego; there, four years and two weeks later, it officially ended. In between came the adventures and misadventures that are the subject of his book.

In boot camp, Willis survived his first Marine haircut, an exercise during which a young Marine threw a grenade the wrong way, and an attempt by Navy doctors to improve his health by removing his tonsils in an operation that nearly killed him. His observations, as a member of the 5th Marine Division, of the reaction of Hawaiians before and after the Iwo Jima campaign to the arrival of U.S. Marines in Hilo, Hawaii, raise questions concerning the depth of their loyalty to the United States. The Battle for Iwo Jima, however, is the heart and soul of this book. A volcanic island (the name means Sulfur Island), Iwo Jima is five miles long by two-and-a-half wide. Situated halfway between Tokyo and the U.S. air base on the Pacific island of Saipan, it was crucial to the effort to launch more frequent and deadlier air raids against Japan. Iwo Jima, however, was heavily fortified and defended by 20,000 Japanese troops. The ensuing battle, which lasted from February to March 1944, was one of the bloodiest in the Pacific theater, costing the United States over 6,800 dead Marines and more than 17,000 wounded.

Willis was there from beginning to end. He writes of being in the fourth wave of the invasion force and watching as most of the first three waves—men and machines—were blown to smithereens. American military intelligence had misjudged the location and size of the Japanese guns, as well as the effectiveness of Army Air Force bombing and Navy shelling in weakening the enemy.

The sea and beach quickly ran red with blood. Hulks of destroyed landing craft and bodies of dead Marines clogged the waters and choked the beach. The wounded had to endure their pain until the second day, since wreckage and debris prevented evacuation. That first night, the surviving Marines remained pinned down on the beach, shivering in the rain. Only the shooting by the Navy of illuminating starburst shells prevented the Japanese troops from launching a banzai charge to exterminate the vulnerable Marines. Willis vividly describes the scene the second day as demolition crews worked feverishly to blast openings through the wreckage to enable bulldozer tanks to come ashore and clear the beach so the wounded could be removed and reinforcements landed.

He was there on February 23, 1944, when Marines raised the American flag on Mount Suribachi, although more than two weeks of heavy fighting lay ahead of them. Willis recounts his experiences during that month of hell and how he was nearly killed more than once. The Japanese used dum-dum (known today as “black talon”) bullets against the Marines to rip out as much flesh as possible with each shot. He was present when U.S. military leaders decided to declare victory in March, ordering ammo collected, rifles unloaded, and him to take several squads back to a troop ship lying off the coast of the island. This “victory” turned out to be a fatal illusion for those Marines left unarmed on Iwo Jima: Many were butchered in their sleep by several hundred Japanese troops who had been hiding out in caves. When victory truly was achieved, Willis’s battalion had been reduced to the size of a company.

After Iwo Jima, the battalion was shipped back to Hawaii. But it soon boarded another troop ship, sailing east again and stopping at Midway, Guam, Kwajalein, and Saipan, where it was joined by more troop ships and several destroyer escorts. This armada had been assembled for “Operation Olympia”—the invasion of Japan.

Willis powerfully conveys the relief that he and his fellow Marines felt when the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—not the planned amphibious invasion—ended the Pacific war. Had the bomb not been dropped, the invasion of Japan would have required at least 36 U.S. combat divisions plus support forces—a total of four-and-a-half million men or 40 percent of all servicemen in uniform in 1945. By conservative estimates, the invasion would have resulted in over one quarter of a million Americans dead and another million casualties. These estimates were based on the assumption that, in August 1945, the Japanese had no more than 2,500 aircraft (of which only 300 were believed to be operational) to repel an invasion. It was later discovered that Japan had 12,725 planes available and was prepared to launch continuous kamikaze attacks on U.S. troop ships for ten days. The Japanese also possessed rocket-propelled bombs similar to Germany’s V-1; 40 conventional submarines; over 200 two-man suicide subs and more than 100 five-man suicide subs; 4,000 military motorboats wired with explosives; 120 special torpedoes more than 60 feet long and capable of sinking the largest U.S. warships; 23 destroyers; and two cruisers. Had the invasion occurred, the carnage would have been unimaginable.

Willis’s account of his time in Sasebo, Japan, as part of the U.S. occupation force—his adventures ranged from confronting rats nearly the size of cats to guarding millions of cases of Coca-Cola that arrived in lieu of winter clothing—is hilarious. His return to San Diego aboard the U.S.S. Mobile, his subsequent discharge, and his experience as a civilian still in Marine green are alternately funny, heartwarming, and insightful.

“In a time of universal deceit,” George Orwell wrote, “telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” My Life as a Jarhead: USMC 1941-45 is one of those revolutionary acts, and Ralph Walker Willis is, in that sense, a “revolutionary.” Today, as our republic is being replaced by an empire and history is in danger of becoming “a lie agreed upon,” America desperately needs more “revolutionaries” like Ralph Walker Willis, U.S.M.C.

 

[My Life as a Jarhead: USMC 1941-45, by Ralph Walker Willis (Tucson: Patrice Press) 120 pp., $9.95]