ONE OF MY MOST gut- wrenching experiences in New Georgia (with a happy ending) came out of my diary and my subconscious as I reconstructed the action 45 years later:
Four perspiring litterbearers lugged Sergeant Copenhaver into the Regimental Aid Station, using a ragged shelter half for a litter. He was terribly shot up, and the blood puddled in the shelter half and seeped through the tiny holes, dotting the ground with red. With a disciplined gentleness, the litterbearers laid him across two medical supply chests that had been rigged up into a surgeon’s work bench. Captain William Welker, the Regimental Dentist from a little Ohio town, expertly needled him a shot of morphine. Then he probed for the vein in the soldier’s arm through which the plasma would flow. The wounded man was conscious but in shock. He had been slugged in the back, the right leg, the right arm and the buttocks. His right ear, cheek and neck had been nicked. There, the blood dripped, didn’t spurt.
Copenhaver was the driver of our company’s three- quarter ton truck which I had sent to the 37th Division water point, about 2000 yards back from our CP, to fill twenty- five five gallon cans with desperately needed water. That was two hours ago. The five guards I had sent along were not back. Only Copie. I tried to talk to the sergeant as he lay there moaning and staring, with the doc holding the plasma bottle high above him. ‘‘ What happened, Cope? Where are the others? ’’ He twisted his head back and forth a few times and bit his lip, then that blank look. I rounded up the litterbearers and plied them with frantic questions. Copenhaver’s truck had been ambushed about 1000 yards away by an infiltrating Nip patrol. The men in the truck, said the litterbearers, must have died fast. Cope had literally been shot out of the driver’s seat, nose diving into the mud. The others just slumped over where they were sitting. The truck had begun to burn and the Nips, whooping and hollering, had run to the cremating bodies just to make sure. Probably had poked bayonets into the doubtfuls. Copenhaver feigned death, but had to bite a hunk of mud to keep from groaning. The Japanese kicked him a couple of times, satisfied, took off. Cope was able to pull himself to the side of the road and drag himself 100 yards in the direction of the command post. The litterbearers stumbled across him, pieced together his story of the grisly picture nearby.
The six guards? Dead. I winced, coughed, choked. A sledgehammer cracked the pit of my stomach and kept pounding. This was the minute I had anticipated and dreaded for the past five months. I knew on maneuvers in Fiji and on routine patrols on Guadalcanal that this would come. Yes, the time was here, five days after we had landed for our first real brush with the enemy. I had sent six men to their death. Six soldiers died carrying out a mission that I ordered. Good platoon leaders get killed and bad ones get their men killed. Yes bad platoon leaders get their men killed. Whenever I had blundered over the crest of the hill back in the practice maneuvers on the Russell Islands, my commanding officer had laughed at me for taking it so much to heart. This is just a dry run, he used to say. I knew better. I realized that such blunders cost lives in battle. The payoff is a thirty- caliber bullet in the chest, not a little chagrin and wisecrack. Here it was. Nobody’s fault. Could have happened to any officer. Occurs every day, every hour. One of those things. No consolation. Why hadn’t I gone on that detail myself? The supply road was reported safe. How could I know? The Nips always sneak through our flanks and harass the supply line. Why wasn’t I there when the Nips cut loose? Better to have a few slugs in the gut than to live with this the rest of my life.
Today it was my men who were the statistically reckoned three percent who were destined to die. Three percent, hell. Those kids weren’t percentages. They were Private Roy Wenland, the lovable, garrulous tub- of- lard who could talk his way out of a KP assignment with the savoir faire of a One- Eyed Connolly. And Private Max Aaronson, a tiny Jewish lad with an MA from Columbia University who taught the fourth grade back home and never once complained about his low rank in the army. They were Beans Simpson, the pale, shy farm boy who wrote his Mom every day in a childlike scrawl, so damn tough for us censors to read. The same letter all the time. ‘‘ I’m good. Hope you are the same. I love you, Mom. ’’ Awfully corny, huh? Private Scottino with a BS in Economics and a reflective gripe about everything from the taste of coffee to the smell around the latrine. Private Elmer Underwood, an Arkansas hillbilly, who was good for more laughs accidentally than the USO comedians elicited on purpose. Private Oscar Anderson, an officer’s orderly, who worked in the Bureau of Internal Revenue in Washington before the draft. He could talk rings around the Colonel, but was from hunger when it came to shooting a gun. These six equal three percent? These guys weren’t statistics, they were men with whom I had eaten and slept, whom I had drilled, led, insulted, commanded for the last five months.
I stumbled around the CP like a man spaced out on drugs. My stomach was upset and my head spun a little. The war had finally struck Stan Frankel.
Just then Captain Edward Nicely, the Regimented S2 yelled for me, and I sleep- walked over to him. A phone call had come through from the wire chief. He and his wire- laying crew were caught in the same ambush area, cut off by the same Nip patrol which had hit my boys. There were just five of them, in the crew and by the grace of God their wireline was still intact, and they were able to beg for help. Nicely excitedly told me to round up the rest of my platoon and ‘‘ get ’em. ’’ My platoon couldn’t be located. The men had been assigned to special missions, patrols, outposts. I was able to rout out six men: two officer’s orderlies, an old supply sergeant, a grounded truck driver, and two of my tommy- gunners. They responded slowly to my frantic orders to get their tails moving. I yelled insults, screamed at them to follow me. Didn’t even explain the mission. If I had, they would have taken more time.
We started down the Jeep trail, and I half- ran for several hundred yards. I stopped, looked back, and found I had outdistanced my cautious crew. I commented loudly on their yellow streak, but thereafter kept my own pace down, retaining a tiny bit of discretion. At 1000 yards we ran smack into the fatal clearing. In the middle was this burnt- out truck. Contrary to the litterbearers’ report, the men had tried to jump out of the truck, and they sprawled all around the side, stiffened by death into crazy poses. I thought I recognized ‘‘ Fat’’ Wenland with his heavy jowls in the mud and his limp right hand on the running board. He was facing the safe side of the road, shot in the back.
We stopped cold. The odor of burning rubber and men cleared my emotionally unbalanced head like a whiff of ammonia. I was completely sober. The Nips might still be over in those bushes to the right, waiting for the suckers who were sure to come after their dead. Fishing with human bait. Maybe, please God, they had departed on another murder mission an hour ago. I didn’t know. And if they were still there with their slant eyes patiently searching the avenues of approach, I couldn’t tackle them with my small crew. Even if we made a run for it, some of us would get shot. I mulled over sending back for more men. Would have been logical. Safe. Those dead men up ahead said no. We had five men to save, and a delay might add five to five. To hell with stalling. And, then, it would be embarrassing as hell if the Nips had actually taken off. So I conceived a plan, a boy scout plan. Simple, but the best I could do. I told my tommygunners to move around to the right, circle to the Nips’ flank, or what would be their flank if they were there. They were to take good covered positions and start firing like hell in the direction of our little yellow brothers. Fifteen seconds after they opened up, the rest of us would dash across the clearing, hoping that the Nips were bluffed into thinking that a heavy force had discovered them and was closing in. Or, hoping that they would be diverted for five seconds . . . five seconds for us to get across the clearing. Then the tommygunners would run like the devil back to the CP for help while we five found the wire chief, dug in with him, and helped fight off the Nips until that help came.
The tommygunners stalked off, and our hearts pounded in unison for the next five minutes. Suddenly, that crack- crackcrack which we sometimes confused with the Nambu light machine gun. This was ours. Fifteen seconds, and then we took off. I dashed like a goosed rabbit across the clearing and even the old supply sergeant found a bit of youth and passed me up as we made the other side. We were safe. We had outfoxed the enemy. Maybe. Maybe we had shadow boxed with ghosts . . . but at least we had made it. We kept on at top speed until we ran into our ‘‘ embattled’’ wire crew. Only they weren’t so helpless now. A whole 200- man company, the advance guard of a battalion moving up from the beach, was all around them. Warrant Officer Elmer Hyter was bitterly cursing a bulldozer operator who had torn down his wire lines. Belligerent now. A couple of his crew were sitting by the side of the road munching C rations. I was damn glad to see them, especially surrounded by so many of our ‘‘ allies. ’’ I hadn’t relished a fire fight with my pick- up crew, most of whom were better at draw poker than fire and movement. And frankly, I was no one- man army myself.
While I readjusted my pack, I blinked about four times, rubbed my eyes, and then jumped for joy. It was ‘‘ Fat’’ Wenland, probing a few cans of C rations in order to mix hash with meat and beans. This boy was alive. He was fingering that chow with the old- time vitality. I ran over and kissed him on both cheeks. (Later Colonel Stuart A. Baxter, of Toledo, Ohio, my regimental commander and a two- war hero, told me with a wink that this was conduct ‘‘ unbecoming an officer. ’’) Wenland ducked back defensively and said with his eyes: ‘‘ The looie has gone bats. ’’ ‘‘ Where are the rest, Wendy? Are they still alive? ’’ ‘‘ Naturally, ’’ intoned Wenland in between half- mouthfuls of hash and beans. ‘‘ The boys are over behind that big tree playing rummy with Scottino’s marked deck. ’’ I dashed over to the tree just in time to find them arguing heatedly over the appearance of a fifth ace. ‘‘ Yippee’’ I hollered exultantly. They all stared at me incredulously. ‘‘ Combat fatigue’’ whispered Scottino out of the side of his mouth.
Here was their story: Copenhaver had left them at the water point to take a much needed bath while he delivered a few stragglers and the water to the CP. He was to pick them up in an hour. When he didn’t show, they started walking, worried about catching hell for being late. They joined the wire chief, Hyter, and decided to stay with him until the road ahead was clear. They weren’t taking any chances.
We trekked back to the CP. On the way we loaded the four dead boys on our own shelter halves and lugged them back to the CP for Chaplain Wareing to bury. This didn’t dim my elation. These four were the three percent. Not my boys. These four men were what the next day’s communique would mention in ‘‘ Our losses were light. ’’ My guys were all right. We strolled back to the CP and reported in to Captain William Leathers, of Hornbeak, Tennessee, a fighting man who used to drop baskets in for LSU . . . and who swore by Huey Long. The whole company crowded around. Not only had Lieutenant Frankel ‘‘ rescued’’ the wiremen from the enemy; he had also brought six other of our boys back from the dead. Leathers commended me as much as he ever did: ‘‘ Christ, are you back alive? ’’
I’m not modest, but I had to disclaim any resemblance between me and Colin Kelly. The men would have none of it. Several weeks later when the fighting had subsided the adjutant, Captain Cotterell, tried to build my 2000 yard round trip walk into an award recommendation. After unearthing the real facts, he trimmed the recommendation down a bit and it later became a combat infantry- man’s badge.
Copenhaver was evacuated that evening. Before he left I told him the men were all OK, and he smiled. ‘‘ Hell, Lieutenant, I could have told you that. Did you ever see Fat Wenland get into anything he couldn’t talk his way out of? ’’ Of course not. He was one of my boys. Not any damn statistic.