The Skull

By Robert Balcomb ©2005

I’m about one-half through a book entitled Flags of Our Fathers (May 2000, Bantam), by James Bradley with Ron Powers. Bradley is the son of John Henry Bradley, one of the six United States Marines who raised the flag atop Mount Suribachi on the Japanese island Iwo Jima, February 1945. That incident stays with us in one of the most memorable and significant photographs in history.

At this time, I’m not sure I can finish the book, horribly graphic, but I probably will. My ambivalence is due to my emotions—emotions flooding back from my own experiences during those same times in the same war in that same part of the world—albeit microscopic compared with what the Marines went through in the Pacific battles.

John Bradley had signed up in the Navy on the advice of his father, who had gone through the horrors of Army duty in WWI in France, and advised him that in the Navy he would be involved, but at least away from battlefronts and actual fighting. However as it turned out, John, who had gone through training as a Navy Medical Corpsman, was transferred to the Marines to be on battlefronts tending to the wounded. Of the six flag-raisers he and Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian from Arizona, were the only survivors of that flag-raising group.

I, too, joined the Navy. In 1943, between my junior and senior high school years, I was 17 and would turn 18 the next year in March, at which time I would have been drafted; and at that time all New Mexico draftees were sent to the Army. As with father Bradley, my father had been in the WWI Army and did not want me to become “cannon-fodder” on any battlefield, and therefore reluctantly signed parents’ permission for this seventeen-year-old kid to join the Navy. I attended summer classes in 1943 to be able to graduate the next February instead of April and then sign up in the Navy. I was son number three to don uniform: two Navy, one Marine. All three returned unscathed. Son four was too young for WWII.

In my case, what John Bradley’s father had wanted for his son was fairly close to what my Navy duty turned out to be: what I considered the best duty of all, Signalman. I had attended boot camp in Farragut, Idaho, then Signal School there, then Advanced Signal School at Treasure Island, San Francisco, thence to the merchant ship Haiti Victory, up on the bridge in Officer’s country, in on all of what was going on. A good, clean position.

On our first trip, part of a large convoy, loaded with all manner of materials for delivery to Saipan, the island had only recently been secured, a fact driven home to us about two days downwind from the island, when we noticed the smell. As we steamed nearer, it grew stronger. We instinctively knew what it was—after all, we were in a war—the smell of rotting flesh. It took several days before we became enough used to it to pretend to ignore it, and were relieved that our harbor destination was upwind from wherever the smell was emanating. As Haiti entered the island’s only harbor area, we saw many hulks of burned-out Japanese ships of various kinds sunk, lying at awkward angles in the shallow water of the harbor approach. They were still there on our last trip.

The floating docks, tied to the shore, were made of large steel tanks bolted together to form loading and unloading platforms to which ships tied up on each side. Black Army soldiers were used to unload cargo and put it into trucks lined up on the docks; I was impressed with how they continually joked and laughed while doing this most menial, backbreaking work, work that went on 24 hours a day.

During our unloading, several of us went sightseeing. We saw the cliff that many natives had thrown themselves from, terrified by the stories about what would be done to them by the invading enemy—the ones who did not jump were fed, clothed, and protected by that “enemy” and received their island back when the war was over. But now, the air was clean and bright. We saw an island beautiful beyond imagination; jungles so thick to be impossible to penetrate; ripe fruit hanging on trees, waiting to be picked. Then about six of us intrepid sailors decided to venture up into the hills to look for souvenirs, a common thought in those times for young ignorant minds. So off we went, headed by a Gunner 3rd Class who carried a rifle from ship’s stores. Nobody questioned us. We struggled several miles uphill into the jungle. Now and then we came across open groves of coconut and banana trees. We bayoneted holes in the coconuts, picked tropical bananas, and had the most memorable meal I can remember: fresh coconut milk and ripe tropical bananas. I even saw the most brilliantly beautiful toucan I have ever seen, but it disappeared before anyone else could see it (they didn’t believe me, because it was said that the noise and concussions of battle had run off all birds to other islands). Up to that point it was a delightful romp.

Until suddenly we stumbled upon an immense field of bodies, all dead Japanese soldiers having lain in the South Pacific sun for two or three months. The bodies of Americans had been removed. Our first taste of real war. Up until then, from the harbor on, we were upwind, so that we had forgotten the smell we had detected on our approach to the island. But now, it was incredible, unreal. I remember the face of a cliff into which countless holes eighteen or twenty inches in diameter, about five feet above the ground, had been dug about five feet deep horizontally. And in each hole lay the remains of a Japanese soldier with his rifle, facing outward, crammed in there no doubt by the officers to ambush the enemy. The snipers had been shot, or incinerated with flame-throwers, but the toll they inflicted on Americans must have been severe. We found several such fields before we decided to head back. However, direction in a jungle is difficult except in clearings, and in those, impossible around noontime. We circled around and around until we found a hut in which we sat until we could see enough sun to determine direction. Then suddenly we heard shots and felt bullets singing into the hut over our heads, splintering into the far walls. Not knowing where they were coming from, and not knowing who was shooting, obviously at us, we decided to get out of there. Stay and be shot or run and be shot—better chances in running.

At this point my mind raced back to my old high school Coach Wilson. Coach had been in WWI in France, as we were all told, and as we were also told could shoot ducks out of the air with his 45 automatic. Seeing him as a veteran Army officer with credentials, we were impressed with his obvious authority. And since this was 1940, a year with war raging in Europe and threatening us with a heavy possibility that we, too, would be drawn into it, we were given training designed to prepare us with a semblance of what it was to be in a war. Examples were a lot of close-order marching and for us to be lined up at one end of the football field and ordered to run to the other end as fast as we could, vigorously zigzagging to prevent any shooters behind us from hitting us.

Because many Japanese survivors still remained hidden in the hills, taking potshots at the Americans (and especially at the outdoor movie screens during night shows), I zigzagged for all I was worth. Of course there was the possibility that our own Marines were having sport with stupid souvenir hunters, but we were too busy getting out of there to worry about who was shooting at us. Finally a bunch of sheepish sailors returned to our ship, still hanging on to our souvenirs, too embarrassed to say anything to anybody.

During that sojourn up into the hills, I collected a few souvenirs, including an American carbine and a Japanese rifle, both with ammunition, a child’s sandal made of wood and a strip of red rubber, a Japanese soldier’s wallet with family photographs, and . . . uh, yes, a skull. Of a Japanese soldier. On the trip back Stateside, I cleaned it, soaked it in a bucket of saltwater, and set it in the sun to bleach. “What are you going to do with it,” said the guys. “I’m going to take it home and put it on the mantle,” proudly said I.

I know it doesn’t make it right, but in those days such was the thinking of a lot of us. In retrospect it seems crazy, if not downright inhuman; but then, in those wartime circumstances, thinking was much different from that in more rational times. In the early forties, we heard statements such as “Those savages a hundred years ago lived in trees!” then I went around saying it myself as if it were true. The word “Japs” had innumerable strong, foul adjectives in front of it. The deportation of “Japs” was the only sensible thing to do “to protect us from them.” Rumors flew from all directions, and we believed them. Yes, I know better now: I know now that in the early 1930’s the Japanese military took over the entire country of Japan and ingrained fiercely into the whole populace the fanatical doctrines of Japanese superiority over everyone else, especially the hated, decadent Americans. The populace virtually could do nothing about it. Two generations of Japanese citizens, all of them, were forcefully brainwashed into the militaristic way of thinking and acting. “Fight for Japanese victory to the death! Be merciless!” Those who resisted were said to be imprisoned or executed.

Yeah, here was Sammy Sailor triumphantly bringing home a solid piece of proof of our victory—over Japanese Imperialism. But going into Honolulu the Gunner’s Mate 2 found me with the skull and ordered me to dispose of it. So when we had anchored in Pearl Harbor, I marched to the fantail and, solemnly and standing at full attention, dropped the skull into the water—where, just a few years before, the Japanese had killed thousands of Americans and destroyed most of our Pacific fleet in one of the most dastardly attacks in history—on the “Day of Infamy.”

In Flags of our Fathers James Bradley tells us how, after the war, United States Marine Ira Hayes, the Pima Indian, returned to his home in southern Arizona and, tortured with memories of Guadalcanal, Bouganville, Tarawa, and Iwo Jima, spent his final six years in and out of jails, slowly drinking himself to death.

Now that I have read some of what John Bradley and his five fellow flag-raisers experienced in their war, I have become a bit ambivalent about that skull and my war. On the one hand, I am ashamed for putting my life at unnecessary risk and doing such a stupid thing as violating a fellow human being, who after all was doing his duty as he was trained, as he had no other way; but on the other hand, I can’t help wondering whether America would be pleased to know that a Japanese skull lies in revenge at the bottom of Pearl Harbor.

I still cannot answer that, but even to this day my emotions somehow prevent me from deciding one way or the other—to put it to rest. And I still haven’t been able to finish the book.

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