Rumours of War: Guadalcanal Diary and the Combat Movie

Steyn Online ^ | 18 Nov 2023 | Rick McGinnis

[Rummyfan]

Guadalcanal Diary is the first real American combat document of World War Two, written by a war correspondent who had gone ashore with the Marines in the first U.S. ground offensive in the Pacific. Richard Tregaskis wrote it for an audience who were desperate to know what their sons, husbands, brothers and friends were experiencing as soldiers, fighting an enemy they probably hadn't given much though to just over a year earlier.

It's an actual diary, compiled from Tregaskis' notes, and amidst the accounts of encounters and movement and excitement and discomfort you'd expect from a diary, it has occasional moments of insight about what it's like to, say, emerge from your shelter after a bombing or an artillery barrage:

"When you finally get up to look around, you have butterflies in your chest and your breath is noticeably short and your hands feel a bit shaky. Those feelings do not seem to be avoidable by any conscious effort."

[Chainmail]

But maybe audiences should hear the real sounds - and in the case of the M79, would finally understand why we called it the Blooper.

[rxh4n1]

My uncle was a bomber pilot in WWII. His plane was shot up by a German fighter. he said it wasn’t a neat line of bullet holes like the movies show. He said the bullets came in all at once in a clump, blew a big hole in the side of the plane and sounded like someone threw a bucket of bolts through a tin roof.

[Texas resident]

My grandfather was in the trenches in WW 1. He was 23 and a captain in the US Army. He had to order men to go over the top and go with them. He never spoke of his time in France to anyone. My uncle prodded him several times to talk about it, but he refused. He went on to live a prosperous life and died at 90 years old.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

My dad saw things in Europe he would never talk about. After the war he had a neighbor who constantly bragged about things he had seen. It made dad so mad because he knew that neighbor had never been out of the USA.

[RCFlyer]

...

[pfflier]

I’ve noticed big differences in the rifle sound when fired

I am irritated most when TV shows and movies make it when every other shot sound is a ricochet whine.

I remember many thuds when the bullets hit the dirt but rarely a ricochet.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

My uncle was a bomber pilot, too, in WW II. I only saw him a couple times a year at Christmas and Easter. I was born in ‘51, so I became aware that he was a bomber pilot probably around 1957 or 1958. Like so many WW II vets, he never once talked about his war experiences. Too bad he didn’t leave any memoirs behind.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Yes, those ridiculous ricochet sounds crack me up. I do recall that sound when we were plinking with my .22 on the Missouri River back around 1970. We had cans and targets set up with the river behind them. Sometimes a miss would result in that sound as the bullet bounced off the water. We were REALLY stupid for not considering what was on the other side of the river. It was well over a mile wide at that point, though.

I also like western movies where you hear the lonesome wind howling in the trees but no branches are moving.

[Chainmail]

Your Uncle was cool - flying bombers was really dangerous business in WWII: people rarely got their 25 combat missions to rotate home.

My uncle was a P-51 pilot who flew out of Iwo Jima, escorting B-29s to Japan and back. He used to say that he had "Three enemies: the plane, the ocean, and the Japanese - in that order".

[Chainmail]

In compliance with your wishes:

Interesting choice of words: “gruesome behavior”. What does that imply? That we were war criminals?

We were young American men, reasonably well trained and ethical. We fought a dangerous enemy, we protected nice, worthwhile people, 10,000 miles away from friends and family.

We saw gruesome events, including many of our buddies dead and wounded, plane crashes, even traffic accidents. We also saw day-to-day heroism from our fellow Marines.

Do you think that our experiences shouldn’t be memorialized? How are our experiences less worthy than the previous generations?

Comparing our memories to pornography?

Really?

[cymbeline]

“Living through the real rigors of combat are just fine for men like me and my friends”

The rigors you lived through are “just fine”?

Anyway, I imagine watching gory video isn’t the same as being there.

A friend passed by a freeway accident where an individual was splattered over the pavement. He very briefly described it to me shortly after it happened, was uncomfortable with those few words, and I think he hasn’t mentioned it to anyone again.

[Chainmail]

"I’ve noticed big differences in the rifle sound when fired in western movies.

My "aha" moment was when I finally found a decent 1873 Winchester 1873 in .38-40 a bought it, then located some ammo for it. I had watched Winchester '73starring Jimmy Stewart as a kid and fully expected that rifle roar like a cannon, like in that movie.

I showed up at the range, loaded it (to the admiring glances of those around me), ran the lever and chambered the round - and "ptah" - not much loader than a pellet gun! I tried again and the same quiet pop, not a thundering boom.

Then I figured it out: .38-40 or .440-40 are pistol rounds and when you fire them out of a 26 inch barrel, there's not a whole lot of propellant gas pressure left when that bullet leaves the barrel.

Hollywood!

[Paal Gulli]

Guadalcanal Diary has several scenes to jingle any gun nuts berries.

There are two scenes on the troop transport before the landing that show the Jirenes using both of the devices issued for loading the cloth ammunition belts for the .30-06 M1917 Browning water-cooled machine gun.

Two Marines feed single cartridges into the hopper while a third turns the crank handle that stuffs them into the belt one round at a time

First lay nine cartridges with the tip of the bullet slightly in the loop in the belt, then pull the lever over to seat all nine to the proper depth

Until I saw this movie I had never considered how they loaded the cloth belts, or that the Marines in the field loaded them themselves. Which makes sense, since M1917 Browning used the same cartridge as their M1903 Springfield rifles (they didn't get M1 Garands until later in the war).

Most war movies make you forget that guns have to be reloaded now and again. GCD even showed how they loaded the belts for the belt-fed machine gun.

JMB's M1917, BTW, was the gun that that John Basilone employed so successfully en route to earning his Medal of Honor on Guadalcanal. His section (probably about 16 men and four Browning MGs) got cut off and surrounded by an entire Japanese regiment, about 3000 (three THOUSAND) men.

Whenever ammo ran low (which was often) Basilone would run straight at the flanking Japanese and through their positions to get to the Marine resupply point. Most of the time he'd pick up six 250-round belts of ammo (at about 15 lbs ea.), drape all 90 lbs of it around his neck, then run back through the Japanese lines to get back to his section. With 90-lbs of shiny brass cartridges around his neck jingling like Santa's sleigh bells. It's incredible he didn't get killed on the first trip.

Basilone and his men held for two days until they were relieved, by which time the Japanese were decimated and Basilone was one of only three Marines still standing.

After receiving the MOH he was sent home to do War Bond tours. But he couldn't stand not being with his Marines and kept complaining until he got what he wanted. About two and a half years after being the hero of Guadalcanal, he was killed by an artillery round on Iwo Jima.

And a little later in the movie you see a Marine officer carrying an M50 Reising .45 ACP submachine gun.

The Reising is an obscure piece now but the Marines fielded it because they wanted something lighter than the Tommy gun, which was a couple of pounds heavier than the M1 Garand battle rifle. The Reising was about five lbs lighter than the Thompson but it wasn't adequately jungle-tested before issue and it failed because in a tropical rain forest it was a hopeless jam-o-matic.

If you're a gun guy, GCD is a must-see.

[Chainmail]

"The rigors you lived through are “just fine”?

Allow me to walk you through my sentence again for you: "Living through the real rigors of combat are just fine for men like me and my friends - but civilians who ask us to risk our lives going to war are too soft and sheltered to see what we went through?"

That means that we - the soldiers, Marines, airmen, and sailors risked our lives and bodies every day, day after day. while we served in Vietnam. We underwent whatever experiences that we had and those luckier of us made it home again. You seem to be saying that those experiences, those memories are too horrible for civilians - that is, those who did not experience what we did shouldn't have to see any of that, because it was too awful to endure for them?

First, let me tell you that those young men I served with were finest Americans I have ever known - and while we have tough memories, we also have funny memories, embarrassing memories, and fond memories. My friends who survived with me are still the best friends I ever had and we still talk/email/and occasionally visit each other, these 56 years later. War is like that: we lived on the same hills, ate the same (lousy) food, smacked the same biting bugs and caught the same tropical diseases and nearly all of us got Dear John letters around the same time. We went on patrols together, hit the same evil booby traps, received mortar fire together and lost our fellow Marines together.

Our memories shouldn't be lost to time and deceptive propaganda - and rather than avoiding an accurate depiction of our time in Vietnam, you should fervently hope that a good, solid, and realistic movie about our war does come out, so you could see who we really were, what we experienced for our country - and remember us.

[rxh4n1]

“Like so many WW II vets, he never once talked about his war experiences. Too bad he didn’t leave any memoirs behind.”

My dad talked about them some. When we were small, he told us about the stupid and goofy things that they did in the army. Later on, when we got near draft age and the Viet Nam War was at its peak, he told us some of the bad things he saw. He didn’t want his sons to go. He was proud of his service but hated all of it and was trying to keep us out of it.

[SunkenCiv]

[ProtectOurFreedom]

My dad didn’t see combat. He was a Marine on an invasion ship in summer ‘45 headed to Japan when we dropped the bombs and ended the war. He became part of the occupation force and spent two years in Japan. Dad often talked of his training at Cornell University, his radioman training at Treasure Island in San Francisco, and shipping out of SF. He brought home a Japanese Rising Sun Flag and a silk parachute that mom had made into her wedding dress for their October 1947 wedding. But Dad never even talked about what he did in Japan during his time there.

His brother (my uncle) ran a uranium enrichment line at Oak Ridge, TN and contributed to the war effort that way.

Dad’s sister’s husband (my other uncle) was the bomber pilot over Europe.

I was draft age during the run-up to Viet Nam. Dad never really talked one way or the other about that war and didn’t encourage or discourage me. I had a student deferment and when I was a sophomore they instituted the draft lottery and I drew a high enough number that I didn’t have to go.

[PLMerite]

War is a rough thing. I knew a guy some years ago, who had just happened to be in the middle of one of the African civil wars, I don’t remember which. He and a colleague got stopped at a guerrilla roadblock. He said there was a 10-year-old boy with an AK, who was waving it around and randomly pointing it. My friend said he was never so certain he was going to die in his life. Eventually, they got passed through the roadblock without any gunplay.

In the randomness of war, I’m reluctant to criticize split-second decisions.

I’m glad you helped your guy.

[minnesota_bound]

The difference between hollywood actors in a war movie and the real soldiers in battle is how old the soldiers looks after being in combat. The soldiers being 18, maybe a few years older while many of these actors are 30+ and still look soft.

[cymbeline]

You wrote a couple of posts that make your point that the rest of us should be thankful for and respectful of our soldiers. You did it without including gruesome details.

My original post wondered whether soldiers that saw gruesome things want to talk about them. I wondered whether they are personal experiences that the average listener would not properly understand or be comfortable with hearing.

By the way, cops, first responders, soldiers, nurses, etc., are, according to the media, heroes by their mere classification. The rest of us are schmucks.

However, we schmucks are out there doing our jobs, and we work hard do and do very good work that helps others. Some of us, that is. Just like some soldiers, cops, etc.