John Birmingham’s proudest achievement as a writer was being published in the Long Bay Bay Prison News. After that it was all downhill. Contributing editor for a bunch of porn mags like Playboy and Penthouse, sleeping on the couch at Rolling Stone while he waited for his dole cheques to clear. Raiding the beer at the cricket and footy while writing for Wisden and Inside Sport. No wonder he shifted to indie comedy in He Died With a Felafel in His Hand and genre writing with the Axis of Time series and his current trilogy which kicked off in Without Warning, and continues really, really soon with After America.
* * * *
Then out spake brave Horatius,
the Captain of the Gate,
‘To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods?’
Thomas Babington, first Baron Macauley.
* * * *
Books like this bear the name of only one author, which is a grave disservice to the many people who bring them into being. My US editor, Betsy Mitchell, and my Australian boss lady, Cate Paterson are both owed a debt I can never hope to repay. So too my agent Russ Galen who first proposed this idea while I was in the US on a Fulbright scholarship in 1998. To them, and to all of the production staff at Random House and Pan MacMillan, I offer thanks.
A number of people from various libraries, universities, research foundations and public and private archives were also embarrassingly generous with their time on this project. I am grateful beyond words to the trustees of the McKinnon Foundation for the unfettered access and unstinting support they provided throughout the research and writing process. The US Library of Congress, the Department of Defense in Washington, the Office of Strategic Services (Archives and Records), the Imperial War Museum in London, the Australian Colonial Office and the Southeast Asian section of the International Criminal Court (War Crimes and Human Rights Division) were all enormously important and supportive of this project.
Finally I must acknowledge the love and counsel of my wife and children who put up with six years of obsessive, irascible, distant and downright unacceptable behavior from me while I brought this book to print.
* * * *
Branch McKinnon exhaled, and with the hot, stale breath, went some of the tension cramping his arms and shoulders. Not that he relaxed. That would have been impossible. But as he saw the end coming, with no chance of escape or redemption, he accepted it for the first time, and some of the fear and the strain of the last few weeks ebbed away.
He waited. The muzzle of his Thompson gun tracked the small group of North Koreans as they cautiously rounded the huge mound of burning rubble at the end of the street. It had been a seafood warehouse, and the stench of burned and rotting fish guts was vile enough to blot out the smells of the harbour city as it died around him. Spoiled meat, slumping piles of garbage alive with carpets of black flies, the unwashed bodies of his platoon, napalm smoke and festering wounds; the evil stink of the warehouse blotted them all out.
Pusan was dying. The little port city that had held out for so long would be overrun, probably in the next few hours, and his small band of brothers was sure to die with her. He was aware, without turning to look at them, of his men in the firing pit next to him. Nate Lundquist was hunkered down over the platoon’s thirty cal. Jimbo Jamieson held a belt of shiny cartridges off the rubble and ash. He had another two boxes of ammo and, most precious of all, a spare barrel ready to go. Never taking his eyes off the enemy as they crept closer, he could still sense the rest of the guys. A patch of red hair peeking out beneath the curve of a helmet. The unnaturally straight line of a bayonet. A muted cough in the next foxhole, barely audible under the freight train scream of sixteen-inch shells arcing overhead. As long as they’d had the Navy at their backs McKinnon had felt there might be a small chance of surviving. But even the brightest optimist couldn’t ignore how thin the cover from the big guns had grown.
Word was, two of the battlewagons had been sunk in the last six hours. McKinnon had heard more than a dozen different rumours as to how, but he paid none of them a scrap of notice. All that mattered was the stone cold reality of those Koreans, or maybe Chinese, down the end of the street. Even yesterday they’d have been blown to pieces miles away from the edge of town. Now they were right in the heart of it. The docks, where the promised evac had descended into an unholy clusterfuck, were only two miles away. Thousands of people were trapped down there — - Americans, Koreans, soldiers and civilians — none of them willing to wait anymore. When the captain had detailed Branch and his men as a rearguard he’d given it to them straight. Everything had gone to shit. Friendlies had turned their guns on each other. ROK forces had shot down women and children to clear a path to the barges for themselves. Marines, our marines, had poured fire on them in turn. It was, said the captain, an unmitigated horror. But what choice did they have? As long as they held the docks, they at least had to try and get some people away. They had to try.
McKinnon found himself shrugging again as he recalled the conversation. The captain hadn’t bothered to insult him by pretending any of his boys were going to get away.
And then Lieutenant Branch McKinnon was flying. Turning slowly, impossibly through the air, like a Baltimore Oriole. His mind, detached from the dead, stringless puppet of his body pulled free with a discernible tug. He watched himself falling back to earth with bricks and clods of dirt, with the disembodied arms and legs of his friends and enemies, with clattering pieces of steel and burning splinters of wood. Lieutenant Branch McKinnon of Macon, Georgia, twisted oh so slowly through clear air, up so high he imagined could see the entire city below him. The savage close-quarter battle that still raged around the spot where he had been blown clear out of his hole. The burning, ruined block he had been tasked with defending. The hundreds of communist soldiers running towards his position. And beyond that. He could see the Nakdong River curling its way around the mountains within which the city nestled. The beaches, on which thousands of people had gathered like dumb migrating animals, waiting to step off into the water. The port at which thousands more clawed at each other with hands and teeth for a spot on the handful of barges pulling away to sea. He could see the surviving ships of the US fleet as they poured on speed to escape the ignominious end.
Branch McKinnon saw all of these things. Or thought he did before he fell back to earth and into darkness.
* * * *
To watch a city die is a rare and terrible thing. Great capitals rise and fall across the long arc of history, but relatively few men attend their last hours. Fewer still have witnessed the death of more than one, and for the most part such men are found in the service of tyrants and conquerors. Branch McKinnon, firstborn of Elsie and Lester, a humble son of the great state of Georgia, served no such master, but he was well acquainted with their kind. He fought them for most of his fifty-nine years, and saw them consume one city, one country after another.
Pusan did not kill him. Nor did Saigon, or Jakarta. Having survived the taking of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo in 1946, he would have been entitled to call that his lot and to retire from the field. Millions of others did. In a sense, the whole country shrank away from any more violence after Tokyo. McKinnon was a keen carpenter and sometimes spoke of the quieter life he might have lived building schoolhouses and barns and children’s toys back home. Instead he was drawn to those places where things fall apart and men contend with each other to do their worst. He died, famously, in Singapore, another fallen city, but for once a loss that meant something; one that actually changed the world for the better.
He rests now in Arlington, probably content, if not quite at peace. Each day brings a new host of mourners to disturb his repose and they come in numbers rivalling those visiting the Kennedy and Eisenhower memorials. A visitor who knew nothing of American history might still understand why two popular Presidents both cut down in their prime would each day attract many hundreds of people wishing to pay their respects. But McKinnon’s simple marble headstone, buried in a mound of flowers that often spills over to cover the graves that surround it, could well confuse them. They might imagine that only a great man could command such affection, but surely a great man would not be interred so humbly, not if he were the favored son of such a proud and powerful republic.
McKinnon, a great man by any measure, flawed as are all men, celebrated and reviled, a creator-destroyer of the first order, lies beneath a simple tombstone because he demanded it be so. He is with his friends, and they lie as they fell: together. It is all too easy, away from the insensate horror of battle, to glorify the deaths of otherwise ordinary men, to forget that death in combat is always squalid and mean, and worse, to view their lives through a prism in which they were only ever brave and wise. McKinnon, like every other man and woman buried at Arlington, had his moments of bravery and wisdom, more so than most. But he was mortal and while it is true that his courage never failed him, at least on the battlefield, his wisdom and his judgment sometimes did.
When pressed for introspection he invariably described himself as ‘just a free man’, but he chose to fight for his freedom and for others’ in a time when that made him unusual, if not unique. During the long years when America withdrew from the world, flinching away from confrontation, Branch McKinnon sought it out. It made him in turns a pariah and a hero. He was famously denounced on the floor of the Senate as a murderer, a fraud and, most painfully of all, as ‘a traitor’.
But times will change, as Dylan sang, and when President Clinton spoke at the dedication of the Singapore Memorial he undoubtedly did so for all Americans when he said, ‘When these men fought, they saved the world.’
* * * *
And so the world comes to pay homage.
On an unusually bleak October day one year and one month after the atrocity of 9-11, with a cold rain threatening, and an ill-tempered, contrary wind jagging through the long rows of headstones, a line of mourners wound down from the small, tree-covered knoll in Section 1 of the Arlington National Cemetery, a short walk from the grand colonnade of the Memorial Amphitheatre. At the somewhat ragged start of the line, maybe three hundred yards away from the first gentle rise of McKinnon’s Hill, a regular smattering of new arrivals joined those who would spend the next hour shuffling forward to say a prayer, lay flowers, or just stand quietly with their heads bowed. There is a point about a hundred yards from the grave where everyone stops talking as though they have entered the nave of a church. No marker signals exactly where this transition is made, and no instructions are ever issued to the visiting public, but those soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Regiment who tend the gardens of stone avow that every day the same thing happens. People fall silent at about the same point as they approach the hill.
Back down on the road, however, where the queue began on this unremarkable day, most folks were chatting quietly and possessed of good if not high spirits, given the solemnity of their surroundings. A few muttered darkly about the anniversary just passed. Two young men, cousins studying at the Catholic University, discussed the war in Iran with a young, pretty woman wearing an FBI windcheater. But mostly conversation never strayed far beyond private concerns, as strangers swapped details of their hometowns, their journeys and, more often than not, their family connection with the National Cemetery.
Some had distant ancestors buried there, men and women who died in the Civil War. Daytona Anderson, a young archaeology graduate at George Washington had come to visit her great, great, great grandmother, one of nearly four thousand former slaves and residents of Freedman’s Village who are buried in the cemetery. Anderson felt that while she was there, she should also pay her respects on McKinnon’s Hill.
‘My Auntie Desire served with Admiral Houston,’ she said, by way of explanation for the detour.
Others had come to acknowledge great grandfathers who fought with Pershing during World War One, and uncles and fathers lost on the Kanto Plain, in the bloodbath of Tokyo, or later at Inchon and Pusan. Like Anderson, they too had felt the need to make a show of public reverence in addition to whatever private calling had drawn them to Arlington. Separated from the Singapore Memorial by the vastness of the Pacific, they had chosen to visit what is now an accepted ‘unofficial’ site for those wishing to commemorate the South East Asian War, McKinnon’s Hill.
Other mourners, whose loss was more immediate, and whose grief was still raw, spilled quiet tears onto the freshly clipped grass for sons and daughters lost in what very nearly became the Third World War. Ruth Ramshaw of Boise, Idaho, used one gloved finger to trace gently over a photograph of her only son, Michael, whose life ended thirty thousand feet above the South China Sea when the Chinese jet fighters he had drawn away from Admiral Houston’s relief force finally put three missiles into his F-16, long after he had spent the last of his munitions, and two minutes before he would have run out of fuel. On either side of her, supporting a woman they had not met until today, Frank and Karen Muesburger of Council Bluffs, Iowa, had spent the morning at the Tomb of the Unknowns. Their son, Master Chief David Muesburger, is officially listed as Missing in Action, but Frank and Karen have laid him to rest in their hearts. He was a Navy Seal, working the island chains in the northern reaches of the former People’s Democratic Republic of Indonesia, operating with Sumatran freedom fighters — or ‘pirates ‘n’ cutthroats’, as Frank Muesburger, himself a 20-year Navy man, calls them with a wry grin
‘He never came home,’ said Frank, clutching a handful of letters from his missing child. ‘And he won’t. Ever. We know that. But he’s our boy and we love him every bit as much now as on the day the Good Lord sent him to us.’
Ruth, Frank and Karen would stand patiently for most of that morning, protected from the elements by cheap, collapsible umbrellas and thin plastic rain slickers, shuffling forward in their old Hush Puppies and trainers, talking quietly with each other and with those around them, supporting anyone in need of a strong shoulder, and perhaps taking comfort and solace themselves when necessary. Given the day’s dreary, inclement conditions you could understand why they might have taken leave of Arlington beforehand. Ruth Ramshaw had already visited the grave of her own son, and the Muesburgers had laid a wreath at the memorial dedicated to the spirit of their lost boy. But they did not leave. Like hundreds of others they waited unhurriedly to wind their way up the gentle climb to the Hill, there to exchange whatever private thoughts they might have with the man who, in any analysis, had played a large part in precipitating the war which claimed the lives of their children.
A cynic might shrug off such dedication as the inevitable result of myth making by the champion cynics of the former Reagan and Bush Administrations. The increasingly shrill, partisan tone of national politics will not admit to high ideals on either side of the great divide, and the legacy of a figure such as McKinnon, who at times inspired extreme feelings and rhetoric from both left and right, will always be contested. Undeniably though, he remains admired and even loved by the many Americans who visit his grave every day, and even more tellingly by those who have travelled even further, across tens of thousands of miles, to pay their respects.
Salted throughout the line of mourners at Arlington were visitors from much farther afield than Council Bluffs or Boise, Idaho. Not five steps from where Frank Muesburger stood talking with a former Marine of comparable vintage was a most remarkable sight, two Papuan chieftains in full ceremonial dress, attended by expensively suited diplomats from the State Department and the Australian Colonial Office. Chiefs Somare and Wingti, resplendent in cassowary feathers, bone necklaces and penile gourds, stood motionless and utterly silent, stirring only when a pulse of movement passed along the queue, requiring of them one or two steps in the direction of their goal. Their presence elicited some comment and a considerable degree of curiosity, but not nearly as much as those confronting penile gourds demanded.
Branch McKinnon was known to millions of Americans indirectly, through the stories they read of him, or the news bulletins in which he featured. People from some of the farthest corners of the globe knew him personally and, to hear them speak of it, owed him a blood debt. The Papuan Chiefs were not alone in having travelled so far to make good on the balance. A little further up the queue stood four elders of the Kayan people of Borneo, while two Laotian monks waited under an oak tree about halfway up the hill to take their turn at the graveside. Less ostentatious, but no less sincere in wishing to pay homage were nearly two-dozen visitors from a broad fan of nations and peoples, among them ethnic Chinese businessmen from Java, three nuns from Luzon, and one stooped and white-bearded gentleman from Nippon, Yuki Moritake.
Supported by two granddaughters, one on each arm, the former Japanese Army officer stared resolutely forward as he approached his destination in hobbling fits and starts. His deeply lined face, seemingly carved from oil-stained teak, remained largely hidden beneath the brim of a Chicago Cubs baseball cap. His granddaughters, Miko and Satomi, tried to keep him dry beneath their own umbrellas, but never quite settled on a suitable arrangement of the cover, allowing the drizzle that built up over the morning to soak him through.
Moritake was unusual, if not unique that morning. A former enemy who became a close and treasured friend of McKinnon, he had once been sworn to kill the American and all of his comrades. He labored mightily towards that end but failed, a cause of unutterable shame at the time, but now a reason for contentment if not celebration. McKinnon was the first American he had ever seen in the flesh, the first and last he ever met in close combat, and, according to the stooped and frail grandfather who had long ago led the defence of the Emporer’s inner sanctum, a man of giri.
The personal story of Branch McKinnon does not begin with their meeting of course. He arrived in the world in 1925, born at a quarter past five in the afternoon, following a twenty-hour labor, during which his mother, Elsina Grace McKinnon, nee Wilmott, half bit through one of her husband Lester’s old leather belts. Baby Branch was a big boy at 10.3 pounds, and he took his own good time in getting here. He enjoyed an unremarkable, if straightened childhood, his daddy always managing to find just enough work to see the family, which soon enough grew to three children, through the hardest days of the Great Depression.
We’ll return to Macon, Georgia, in due course, and spend a little time with the McKinnon clan, but it is Branch’s public life, his American story, to crib from the title of his own, unfinished memoir, which most concerns us. For in that life, so violent, so conflicted and chaotic at times, we find a parable of what might have been these past years, if only we had not shied away from the world and all its discontents.
Is there a point in time of which one can say, there is where it started to go wrong?
It’s impossible to know with certainty, but had the Manhattan Project delivered the atomic bomb in time to use before the invasion of Japan it’s most likely that half a million Americans would have lived, instead of dying in the dreadful meatgrinder of Operation Downfall. What then might have been different? What life might McKinnon, and millions of others have lived? But these are questions for those privileged to live a soft existence, away from bomb burst and rocket fire. They were a long way from McKinnon’s thoughts on March 1st, 1946, as he rode an armoured landing craft toward Buick Beach, Sagami Bay, twenty-five miles southwest of Tokyo.
* * * *
02
The Earth my Hell
The invasion was never going to be a surprise. Operation Olympic, the allied attack on Kyushu, five months earlier, had not caught the Japanese unaware. They had known it was coming for more than a year, and had prepared as best they could. Indeed, they had prepared a much more formidable defence than anyone on Douglas MacArthur’s staff had thought likely. While the Japanese could only guess at the forces that would come upon them, they were intimately familiar with the terrain upon which battle would be joined, in southern Kyushu, below the line of the central ranges. The gaijin were constrained in their choice of landing site, almost certainly having to come ashore at Miyazaki and Ariake Bay, and more than likely on the Satsuma Peninsula near the town of Kushikino as well.
The Japanese had known that the Allies would amass the greatest fleet ever seen, far larger even than the armada that accompanied the D-Day landings in 1944. And so it had been. On November 1, 1945, more than 500 warships had appeared over the horizon to the south of the home islands, among them forty-two aircraft carriers, twenty-four battleships and hundreds of cruisers and destroyers. Behind them came even more vessels, troop transports and supply ships. Thousands of aircraft filled the skies, flying from bases in the Ryukus. British Bombers, protected by Australian fighters, pounded dozens of hastily constructed airstrips all over Kyushu. US Navy Corsairs flew in dense blue swarms above the slow moving fleet, ready to throw themselves at the waves of sacrificial kamikaze that the Allied high command knew would form a lynchpin of the defense.
And still the losses had been horrific. Eleven carriers sunk, including the venerable Enterprise, and that had been the least of the damage. Eighty-nine troop transports had been struck by suicide bombers. Nearly 43,000 men had died without setting foot on Japanese soil. When the landing had been forced, those losses spiralled up to 100,000 inside two weeks. The optimists on MacArthur’s staff had argued that there were unlikely to be more than eight divisions opposing the lodgement. The pessimists thought ten. In the end, there were fourteen, all of them fighting to the death. Of the 140,000 Japanese soldiers massed in these divisions, only 1902 were captured, almost all of them rendered incapable of resistance by their wounds or shell shock. Every other man gave his life for the Emperor.
The American soldiers and marines who fought on the beaches and across the plains of southern Kyushu drank from a deep well of horror which even their comrades who had liberated the Nazis’ concentration camps had not known. For not only did they fight against the men of the Imperial Japanese Army, but every step of their advance was resisted by the Japanese people themselves. An 80-year-old farmer, a small schoolboy, a pregnant woman, any one of them might suddenly spring at you from the door of a hut armed with nothing more than a sharpened stick, or a farming implement. The official history of the campaign, published in 1954, listed Staff Sergeant Tom Rilke as the first recorded casualty of just such a ‘non-combatant’ attack. After a firefight in a small hamlet outside of Kushikino, Rilke had been trying to lure a schoolroom full of frightened children out into the open with an offer of chocolate, when he was set upon and inexpertly beheaded by their teacher, a nineteen-year-old girl wielding an awl. After hundreds of such attacks General Walter Kreuger, commandant of the US 6th Army, sought and received presidential approval for one of the most controversial orders in American military history. As of March 13, all civilians in the Kyushu theatre of operations were deemed to be combatants unless they immediately surrendered upon being challenged to do so. Entire villages were razed by artillery and aerial bombardment when the occupants refused to show themselves. [The policy was credited with saving thousands of American lives but it remains a sticking point in relations between the two countries, with some ultranationalist Japanese politicians still demanding fifty years later that the US apologise for its ‘war crimes’. Throughout the 1970s some American diplomats maintained that they could tell how difficult any given set of trade negotiations were likely to be by the fervour with which, in the weeks beforehand, the Japanese Foreign Ministry pressed the issue of ‘reparations’ to make good civilian losses during Operation Downfall.]
By the end of major combat operations more than a million Japanese, both civilian and military, were dead. American losses stood at nearly one hundred and twenty thousand killed in action. The second half of Operation Downfall, the invasion of Honshu, was infinitely worse.
* * * *
McKinnon missed Kyushu. He arrived in Japan as the lieutenant in charge of the second platoon, A Company, 3rd Battalion, 24th Infantry Division. It is a truism of popular fiction that all lieutenants are gangly, thin-limbed, and wet behind the ears, barely able to find their own asses with a good map in a small, well-lit room. Their men merely tolerate them, grizzled non-coms work around them, and they almost inevitably die in the first ten seconds of any engagement, leaving the real men to get on with the business of war. It works well as a dramatic device, but if it held true as often in real life as it does in Hollywood, all battles would quickly devolve into chaos and madness as any semblance of command disappeared. Branch McKinnon was not a green officer, wet behind the ears, and awestruck in the presence of his senior NCOs. He had been promoted from the ranks. Fighting with the 3rd Battalion through the Indonesian archipelago, in the Philippines at Breakneck Ridge where he won a Silver Star and his third stripe, and on Luzon where he was commissioned in the field after the savage hand-to-hand combat at Zig Zag Pass.
The men he led into battle on the Kanto Plain were likewise, for the most part, survivors and veterans of MacArthur’s island hopping campaign that took the Allies from their last bastion in Australia all the way to the inner sanctum of Emperor Hirohito’s Imperial Palace in Tokyo. The Battalion, McKinnon’s home for the previous three years, had suffered close to 4000% casualties in that time. Indeed, it is likely McKinnon would have stepped onto the Kanto Plain as a company commander or possibly even a battalion level officer had he not spent at least 18 months of those three years recuperating in hospital from his various wounds. It is also possible, of course, that had he not been out of action for so long and so often, his name would have been etched into the Battalion’s honor roll as yet another of the glorious dead.
* * * *
We know from McKinnon’s own unfinished autobiography that he was not a commander who played favorites with his men. Although there were three men in the second platoon, with whom he had fought since the Battalion’s first operations in New Guinea, he was no more mindful of their safety or care that he was of the freshly minted privates who had joined the platoon straight out of basic training, two days before the Division shipped out for Downfall. In a letter written to his mother on the eve of the invasion, McKinnon worried more about his untested charges and what might befall them in the meat grinder of Tokyo,
‘It would be such a terrible shame, Mom,’ he wrote, ‘if anything were to happen to those kids this late in the game. I just don’t know that I could forgive myself.’ [McKinnon had ample chance to find out whether he could forgive himself over the next two weeks, as three of the four new recruits were killed. Pvt. Andrew Forster, from Delaware, stepped on a mine less than a mile from the beach where the platoon disembarked from their landing craft. Pvt. Michael Hall, Sioux Falls, was cut down while approaching a Japanese pillbox on the outskirts of Tokyo. And Pvt. Greg Beck, Kansas City, was cut down by a pitchfork wielding gardener in the grounds of the Imperial Palace.]
* * * *
Given the much greater casualty toll of the first phase of Downfall, everyone involved in Coronet, the second half of the operation, from President Truman to the humblest foot soldier, had reason to fear what was waiting for them on Honshu. The geography of the island virtually wrote the operational concept for the Allied planners. That same geography could be read by its Japanese defenders, of course. Estimates varied on both sides with, for instance, British and Australian military authorities advising their respective War Cabinets to expect Allied casualties of nearly 2,000,000, and Japanese casualties of a staggering 10 to 15,000,000, depending on the extent to which strategic bombing and unconventional weapons such as gas and germ bombs were deployed, an option the new British Labour Party government ruled out within a week of being elected. It remains a matter for conjecture how the following sixty years may have played out had Churchill’s conservative government retained office in 1945. Declassified documents from the Imperial war office (see appendix 1) indicate that Sir Winston was solidly behind a USAF plan to carpet bomb the urban area of greater Tokyo with a mix of incendiary, high explosive, biological and chemical warheads. A War Cabinet memo from February 1945 went so far as to authorize Bomber Command to begin planning to shift strategic assets to the Pacific Theatre in August 1945 with this very plan in mind.
* * * *
At that stage, of course, nobody outside the very highest councils of the Allied command had any idea of the failure of the Manhattan Project. It was not until 1964, nearly a full decade after the first successful atomic test was carried out in New Mexico, that the US government released any information related to the Allies’ wartime atomic program. While Truman’s frustration with the lack of progress at Los Alamos has been well-documented by his biographer, Stephen F. Murphy, he was not the only American, or indeed the only person on the Allied side, praying for deliverance via the agency of a miracle weapon. The archives of all the victors contained many examples of correspondence from private soldiers and junior officers such as McKinnon, fervently hoping that an invasion of the Home Islands might be made unnecessary by the unveiling of some super weapon. McKinnon himself made reference more than once to news articles he had read about the German rocket program and how rumors had spread through his platoon that the Navy had developed massive ‘rocket barges as big as aircraft carriers’ but carrying no planes, only hundreds of V2-style missiles.
‘I don’t believe it for a minute myself,’ he wrote to his sister on Christmas Eve 1945, ‘but the boys have been very excited this week by talk that the whole show might be called off because Halsey and Nimitz are planning to steal MacArthur’s thunder by parking hundreds of these things offshore and just raining them down on top of Tokyo until there’s not enough of the nips left to scrape up and put in a bucket.’
Unfortunately for Second Platoon there would be no deliverance from above. A Company were lucky to avoid the fate that befell the first wave of attackers on Honshu, where casualties in some units topped out at 90%. By the time McKinnon and his men came ashore on March 3, 1946, fatigued and seasick from having sat in the heaving, untidy swell and cross chop of Sagami Bay for two days, the lead elements of the Eighth Army had pushed the beachhead in six miles. The dreadful wrack and ruin of modern industrial-scale slaughter had not been cleared away, however, and the platoon were greeted upon stepping ashore with a hellish mound of disembodied arms, legs, heads, torsos and various slabs and chunks of unidentifiable human refuse piled into a huge funeral mound for burning by the Army Corps of Engineers later that day. McKinnon’s platoon sergeant, Elmore Greaves of Flagstaff, Arizona, one of those three men who had been with the young officer from the very first days of the war, roared abuse at anybody who stopped to stare, but was himself delayed on the beach by having to take a minute to vomit up the remains of the tinned fruit he had had for breakfast on the armored landing craft.
The Battalion history records the first casualty as occurring less than 15 minutes later when Pvt. Forster was killed by a ‘Jumping Jack’ style mine a few hundred yards in from the high water mark. Forster receives just that one line acknowledgment in the official documentation, but McKinnon recorded the incident in some detail in his notebook later that day, expanding on it at some length in the manuscript of his unpublished memoirs [The Fall of Giants, unpublished manuscript, McKinnon, B. 1953. Original copy held by The McKinnon Foundation, Washington DC.] a few years later.
* * * *
‘We could clearly hear the rumble and thunder of the frontline a few miles away,’ he wrote.
‘The Navy was still sitting close in shore, hundreds of destroyers and cruisers and even a couple of big battle wagons like the Missouri and Tennessee punching giant 15-inch shells twenty miles inland. They screeched overhead like birds of prey and landed only God knew where somewhere up ahead, probably in the middle of some Tokyo suburb. Planes roared overhead constantly, fleets of heavy bombers, British Lancasters by the look of them, US and Canadian Liberators and Flying Fortresses, and hundreds, maybe thousands of small buzzing fighters. Australian Spitfires. US Corsairs and Mustangs, some of them loaded out with rockets and bombs under their wings for ground attack missions and close support.
‘Perhaps there was too much going on. There was so much traffic in the landing zone, so many thousands of men moving to and fro. Trucks and jeeps and tanks everywhere. Sergeants bellowing at privates, officers yelling at each other. For some of the boys in my platoon it was overwhelming. They just didn’t have their mind in the game. But I should have, and I didn’t, and Forster died because of that. We were walking in single file up a steep valley that had been clearly marked out with white stakes by the engineers. As long as you stayed between the stakes you were safe. But, as Elmer told me later, Forster wasn’t paying attention. He was too busy gazing up into the heavens, hypnotized by the vapor trails which crosshatched the sky like thousands of woolen threads. I was leading from the front of the column, trying to get a signal back to Battalion on our new radio. It was on the fritz of course. Damn thing seemed to be out of action more often than not. I had assigned each of the new guys a buddy from one of the older hands in his squad, and Forster was supposed to be teamed up with Bob Whitelock, who’d been with us for over a year. Unfortunately, Bob had the sea sickness something terrible and at the very moment Forster wandered off the marked trail, his buddy was bent over about 25 yards back, up chucking into the sand.
‘Even with all that noise and chaos on the beach, I recognized the click click sound off one of the Jumping Jack mines the Japanese had developed from the famous German ‘Betty’ design. I was already dropping to the ground with the words ‘take cover’ at the back of my throat when it detonated. The blast seemed louder than I remembered, but then I hadn’t been in action for a few months. The ringing in my ears faded after a few seconds and all I could hear was Forster screaming that his legs were gone. He screamed for less than a minute until Doc Waters got the morphine into him and put him to sleep. That was the only thing for it unfortunately. It wasn’t just his legs he lost. Half of his innards had splashed out over the rest of the platoon. He had no chance ...’
The platoon was delayed between the sand dunes for all of ten minutes before the demands of their timetable saw them leave the mortally wounded soldier behind in the care of two Navy corpsmen. McKinnon’s men met up with their sister platoons at the rendezvous point a mile inland, at the site of what had been a small fishing village. First Platoon had been sniped on the way in, but without casualties. Their radio was working fine and they called in close air support from a pair of P-51 Mustangs which unloaded a volley of rocket and cannon fire on the small hill from which the fire was judged to have come. Third Platoon, by way of contrast, came up five minutes behind McKinnon and reported no incidents at all.
With the Company gathered together at its first staging point, McKinnon and the other platoon commanders wanted to press on, but had to wait for orders from Battalion HQ before they could move any further inland. The situation across the southern reaches of Honshu was still in violent flux. In contrast with the operation at Normandy, which involved twelve divisions, the invasion of the main Japanese island required twenty-five divisions, two separate US armies, the Eighth and the First, and a Commonwealth Corps made up of forces from Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand under the command of Lieutenant General Leslie Morshead. The British Empire forces, in-line with a strong recommendation from Gen. Douglas MacArthur, had trained in the United States for six months before the operation and deployed using only US equipment and logistics. They came ashore with the US First Army at Kujukuri Beach on the Boso Peninsula. Even so, there were significant and occasionally calamitous breakdowns of communication between the armies.
Over one million Allied troops were ashore and engaged with the enemy by the time McKinnon’s platoon disembarked from their armored landing craft. Opposing them were 800,000 Japanese soldiers, many brought home from the occupation of China in the previous six months. Allied planning had allowed for an opposing force of up to 600,000 men, up to half of whom were expected to be low-quality personnel from home defense units. The disparity in these numbers was one of the great intelligence failures of the Second World War and as a direct consequence the casualty figures for Operation Coronet skewed wildly towards the upper limit of the worst-case scenarios, in spite of all the lessons learned on Kyushu.
Complicating matters at a tactical level were hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians who abandoned their noncombatant status. As before, they were not organized in any sense that a military mind would recognize. No poorly trained, poorly equipped regiments of home defense troops or civilian militia joined their uniformed colleagues on the frontline. Rather thousands of Allied soldiers died at the hands of women, children, the old and infirm who had been wired up with explosives and left behind as human bombs. After the Allies changed tactics on Kyushu and began engaging any civilian who did not immediately surrender, the enemy responded by having its civilian kamikaze do just that, before blowing themselves up as their surrender was taken.
Of course not every civilian was ‘booby-trapped’ in that way, but the uncertainty created a tactical nightmare for the advancing Allies, who never knew whether the small child or aged refugee crying out for assistance with their hands held high was swathed in a bomb belt, packed with ball bearings, rusty nails, scrap metal and even handfuls of gravel. Every single human being they encountered thus became a potentially lethal adversary. Add to that the efforts of the main force Japanese military, which included not only the Army units returned from China, but thousands upon thousands of ‘special units’ trained and equipped for more ‘conventional’ kamikaze operations, and the utter chaos and insensate savagery of those first days of combat become a little clearer. Ten thousand Allied Naval personnel alone died as Japanese pilots, their fragile, obsolete aircraft packed with high explosive, threw themselves on the invasion fleet. Over a dozen capital ships, including three aircraft carriers, succumbed to attacks by ‘suicide submarines’.
‘Thou earnest on earth to make the earth my hell,’ quoted Admiral Fraser, Commander, of the British Pacific Fleet as he witnessed near simultaneous detonations of underwater kamikaze beneath the keel of the USS Iowa at the very moment that Lieutenant Branch McKinnon back on shore ordered Sergeant Greaves to gather the men and prepare for a double time march to the frontline where the Battalion was urgently needed to bulk up a collapsing flank.
The men of Second Platoon, still daubed in the remains of Private Forster, shouldered their packs and weapons without complaint, but with a grim and somber frame of mind as they prepared to push deeper into their own small corner of the earth, their hell.
* * * *
This is an idea I had a few years ago, that I’m still working on, for an alternate history of the Cold War. There were a couple of what-ifs in the back of it. What if the A-Bomb didn’t work, at first? What if the slaughter of invading Japan pushed America back into isolationism? What if, and this my favourite, the Domino Theory then came true? ASEAN becomes the Association of Socialist East Asian Nations, a third communist bloc. The fag end of the British Empire is wheezing along as the world’s policeman. And then Ronald Reagan gets elected and everything changes. The idea was to write the history of the period via a biography of one of its players, an adventurer by the name of Branch McKinnon. If I ever go ahead and do it, a big if, it would look exactly like a work of non-fiction, with footnotes, appendices etc, but of course, it’d all be total bullshit.
— John Birmingham