Heroes Don't Run Page 7

  Part Four

  Home, Summer

  1945

  It was night when our ship reached the United States. Everybody who could walk was up on deck. In the distance I saw the dark mass of the continent, then the lights of San Francisco Harbor. Someone began singing “America the Beautiful.” Another voice joined his and another and then we were all cheering and singing. Tears, too.

  As soon as we docked, I called my mother. “Adam? Is it really you? Are you really all right?”

  “Oh, Mom.” My voice cracked. “I’ll be home soon. I have to go to San Diego. I’ll be getting leave and coming home.”

  “Oh, lord! It’s so good to hear your voice! Wait a moment. Say hello to your sister.”

  Bea came on. “Adam, I’m taller. You’re going to be surprised when you see me. I grew one whole inch. Good-bye.”

  My mother came on again. “Come home quickly. I can’t wait to see you.”

  “Mom, I’ll come as fast as I can.”

  After I hung up with my mother, I got the operator and gave her my grandfather’s number in Watertown, New York. I heard her say, “I have a long distance call for Oskar Pelko.”

  “Who is it?” I heard my grandfather’s voice.

  “Grandpa, it’s me, Adam.”

  “Just a moment, sir. Is this Oskar Pelko?”

  “What else?” my grandfather said. “Adam? Is it you? Where are you?”

  “I’m home, Grandpa. In California. How are you doing?”

  “Good enough. Never mind me. How are you? What happened?”

  “I’m okay. I’m not dead yet, Grandpa.”

  “I can tell that, but I know something happened. I had this dream that you were in a fire.”

  “I took a little shrapnel, Grandpa, but I’m all right now.”

  “The dream was bad. Everything was burning. The whole house. You were trying to get out, but there was no way out. It was terrible. I couldn’t sleep afterward.”

  “Grandpa, I wish I could see you right now.”

  “I thought about you every day.” He started to cry. It made me cry too. “I want to see you with my own eyes.”

  “I’ll come, Grandpa. I promise.”

  In San Diego, at the marine hospital, I was checked over. I was using a cane now. I only had to get my leave papers, and I’d be going home. Everyone in the hospital was talking about a new kind of bomb that we had just used in Japan. The significance of it didn’t register, though, until a few days later, when I was getting ready to go on leave.

  Bells were clanging all over the city. Japan had surrendered. The war was over. People went nuts—me too—hugging and kissing, and dancing in the streets.

  I’d been putting off calling Helen. It was stupid to be scared, but I was. Her father answered the phone, and I almost hung up. Grow up, I said to myself. You’re a marine, you jerk.

  “Sir. My name is Adam Pelko. Will you tell Helen I called? I’m taking the seven fifty-eight morning train to Bakersfield, and I wanted to say hello before I left.”

  “I know about you,” he said. “You’re in the marines. Where are you stationed?”

  “I’m at the marine hospital.”

  “You were wounded?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I want to say thank you, Adam, for everything you men have done for our country.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Helen’s away tonight, but I’ll let her know you called.”

  When I hung up, I stood there banging my head on the wall. Away. I’d waited too long, and there was nobody to blame but me.

  The next morning I was standing on the platform, waiting to board the train, when I saw Helen running toward me. She flung her arms around me, and we had a long, sweet, unbelievable hug.

  “I thought I was going to miss you,” she said.

  I couldn’t stop staring at her. I’d forgotten how perfect she was.

  We both started talking at once, but there was no time. The conductor was calling, “All aboard.”

  “Do you have to go?”

  “I haven’t seen my mother yet. Or my little sister. But I’ll come back, if you want me to.”

  “I want you to.”

  I took her hand. I wanted to kiss her, I didn’t want to leave, but the train was beginning to move.

  The first few days I was home, I slept almost around the clock. I had thought I would do all sorts of things—see who was around that I knew, and at the very least go back to the high school and talk to Mr. Ewing, my old history teacher, and Mr. Leesum, the principal. But I was tired, and I didn’t do anything but sleep and eat and talk to Mom.

  I showed her Nancy’s picture and told her a little bit about Helen. I didn’t talk much about the war. She wanted to know about my wounds, and I told her a little, but I saw how hard it was for her to hear. Mostly we talked about normal stuff. Her work—she was an inspector now in the war plant—and she talked about Bea, how she’d really matured. “She comes home after school, she washes the dishes, she makes a salad—”

  “Wait a second,” I said. “Is that my little sister, Miss Ball of Fire, you’re talking about?”

  “You’re not the only one who’s changed, Adam. We’ve all gone through a lot.”

  “I know, Mom. I’m sorry.”

  She was quiet, and I was too. I thought of myself a year ago, how much I’d wanted it, wanted to go in, to fight, to be tough and invincible. I knew I might get hurt or even die, but they were just words. Which was strange, considering what I’d seen at Pearl Harbor. And yet, until Okinawa, I didn’t really believe that I could die, or that Ben would, or Rosie.

  And another thing I’d never realized—how hard it had been for Mom. Dad dying. And then me, her never knowing where I was or if I was even alive. I thought when they gave me the Purple Heart, I was going to give it to her. I was going to say, It’s for you too, Mom.

  Every day I’d go downtown. I needed to walk a lot to keep my leg from stiffening up. It looked to me like nothing had changed in Bakersfield. I liked that now. I drank up the ordinariness of it.

  People stopped to talk to me. They’d shake my hand, call me hero, and tell me how proud they were of me. And then they’d ask me what it had been like, what it had “really” been like.

  At first I’d stand there and talk. I told them things—things I’d seen, things that had really happened to me—and they’d say, “Awful … oh, my goodness … Is that so?” I talked and talked. I talked too much. I came home from those walks feeling like a phony, like all that talk had obliterated Rosie and Ben.

  Civilians didn’t understand. They thought that battle was about bravery and heroes and raising the flag on top of Mount Surabachi. They didn’t see the dead scattered over the hillsides, stacked in ditches, our men, their men. Dead on dead. How could I ever explain? There was just no connection between the battlefield and Bakersfield. Between that meat grinder and this peaceful little town.

  “Just be glad you weren’t there,” I’d say. That’s one thing I did say. And about being a hero, I said, “There were a lot of heroes. Most of them never got a medal or came home.”

  And later, when I got home, I’d be so tired I wouldn’t even get up the stairs. I’d just hit the deck outside and be asleep in a minute.

  One day I was down at the creek with Bea. We squatted at the water’s edge. She caught a frog and handed it to me. “What do I do with this?” I said.

  “Hold it,” she said. “I have to catch her boyfriend.”

  I sat down on a rock. I had my boondockers off and my pants rolled up. The sun felt good on my leg, and I thought, Here I am … here I am with my sister. I cried a little, and I couldn’t wipe my eyes because of the frog, which made me laugh. The willows at the side of the river shone in the sun. I sat there, holding Bea’s frog, and feeling the wind, and watching the leaves dance in the light, and thinking how beautiful the world was, how it was full of wind and sunlight and frogs.

  There was another world, a dark world of guns a
nd death, but that world was over, maybe forever. We’d made a better world. It was the only way to understand why my father had died and Ben and Rosie and all the others. I watched Bea squatting at the edge of the water, the sun striking her hair, and I was so glad that she would never have to know anything about war.

  The Battle for Okinawa—

  An Historical Note

  “You’re an old-timer if you survive twenty-four hours.”

  —World War II combat soldier

  Okinawa is some three hundred nautical miles from Japan, the largest of the Ryukyu chain of islands. From it, the Allies launched the final assault on the Japanese mainland. But as it happened, the battle for Okinawa was the last major battle of World War II.

  The U.S. attack force approaching Okinawa consisted of 1,381 ships, and carried 746,000 tons of supplies and 183,000 troops. Altogether, nearly half a million men were involved in moving cargo to Okinawa from ports all around the Pacific Ocean.

  The Japanese naval forces that might have opposed the Americans had been largely destroyed. Their only hope of slowing the approaching American armada was their kamikaze suicide planes. Kamikaze means “divine wind,” a reference to a typhoon in the year 1281 that drove back Kublai Khan’s armada and kept it from invading Japan, as the Americans were now. Kamikaze pilots were young volunteers, long on courage and short on experience, who were eager to give their lives for their country. They wore white headbands signifying death, and before their final suicide flights they attended their own funerals, sending farewell letters to their families along with little white boxes containing bits of their hair and nails, all that would remain of them after they crashed into the American ships. The Japanese war had become a suicide war.

  Close to two thousand separate kamikaze attacks were launched during the Okinawa campaign. They sank or damaged 368 American ships, killing or wounding 9,700 sailors, the greatest one-battle loss in U.S. Naval history.

  On April 1, 1945, L Day, the U.S. attack was launched. Assault boats rushed to the beach, loaded with men expecting fierce resistance. But there was almost none. At the end of the first day, sixty thousand troops were on the beaches. The land shone with peaceful fields and crops and bright wild flowers. The veterans of the bloody battles of Palau, Guadalcanal, and Iwo Jima looked around in amazement. They thought it was an April Fools’ joke.

  Okinawa is a large island, sixty miles long and, in places, ten miles wide, the most populated of the Ryukyu Islands; a land of small farms cultivating rice, sugar, and sweet potatoes. It’s shaped like a barbell, wide at either end, with a two-mile-wide isthmus in the middle, where the landings occurred. Two nearby airfields were quickly overrun. By the end of the second day, units of the First Marine Division had separated the southern third of the island from the northern two thirds. Uncertain where the enemy was, the U.S. commander, Lt. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, sent troops to both ends of the island. It took nearly a week to find the enemy.

  The Japanese commander, Lt. Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima, was waiting. He knew the U.S. forces could not be stopped. His only hope was to delay and perhaps thwart an invasion of Japan itself. Abandoning the beaches and open ground as indefensible, he had, instead, dug in on the southern end of the island, where the land flared up into steep fortress-like hills and jagged limestone cliffs, forming a natural, nearly impenetrable wall.

  At the foot of these hills, the Japanese had laid mine fields and dug trenches where riflemen armed with grenades and mortars waited. Behind them, in the hills, were machine gun nests and, higher still, heavy artillery. The limestone cliffs were honeycombed with natural caves that the Japanese expanded, using Okinawan laborers, into intricate tunnels and caverns, some large enough to hold an entire company of men. These fortifications stretched across the island, making it difficult and sometimes impossible for tanks and trucks to maneuver. Behind these fortifications were more than 100,000 battle-hardened veterans of the Japanese Thirty-second Army.

  General Ushijima’s plan was to separate the Americans from their machines, their supporting tanks and armor, and force them into bloody and costly hand-to-hand combat. Delay the Americans, slow them, chew them up, make them pay a high price for every inch of ground.

  By the middle of April, the U.S. forces had reached the southern hills and were on the offensive. Sugar Loaf Hill, Horseshoe and Half Moon Hills, and Conical Hill stood like fortresses. The Americans were out in the open under a constant barrage of machine guns and mortars spewing shrapnel and broken rock. Advances were counted in yards.

  Then, in May, the rain started falling steadily. Roads became sticky with mud and jammed with traffic. Tanks and trucks stalled in muddy sinkholes. Soon no man went forward without carrying fuel, ammo, or food, and on the return bringing back the wounded and the dead.

  Five weeks after the campaign began, the war that had been going on in Europe for almost six years ended. But there was hardly a moment to celebrate. The Pacific war against the Japanese went on.

  It took eighty-three days, nearly three months, before the bloodiest fighting of the Pacific war ended. The U.S. losses: 11,933 men killed, 39,119 wounded, and more than 26,000 other casualties, mostly victims of battle fatigue, too traumatized to go on fighting.

  The Japanese losses included 110,000 killed and 10,550 taken prisoner. Rather than surrender, on June 22, the day the campaign officially ended, the Japanese commander, General Ushijima, ordered his own decapitation in a ceremonial suicide. A few days earlier, General Buckner, the American commander, had been struck by a piece of shrapnel from a nearby artillery burst and died within minutes. In all, our Okinawan victory resulted in the deaths of more than 207,000 people, including thousands of civilian Okinawans. These terrible losses led to outcries in the American press. General Douglas Macarthur, who had conducted most of his Pacific campaigns with little loss of life, accused the generals and admirals in charge of the Okinawan campaign of “sacrificing thousands of American soldiers because they insisted on driving the Japanese off the island.” Instead, he said, they should have cordoned off the southern end of the island and waited for the Japanese to surrender.

  In Japan, the stunning loss of Okinawa left no doubt about the end of the war, and their leaders began to consider the unthinkable—surrender. On August 6, 1945, the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. That single bomb killed 66,000 people and injured 69,000. Ten thousand people were never found. Three days later, another atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki resulted in the deaths and injury of 64,000 people.

  The Japanese surrendered and World War II ended. The official ceremony took place on September 2, 1945, on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay, exactly three years, eight months, and one week after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  Harry Mazer is the author of many books for young readers, including A Boy at War and A Boy No More, which introduced Adam Pelko; The Wild Kid; and Snow Bound. His books have won numerous honors, including the Horn Book Honor List and the American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults citations. He is the recipient of the ALAN Award. Harry Mazer lives in New York City and Montpelier, Vermont.