Combat Engineer, Pacific Theater: Daily Life in an Army Construction Battalion in World War Ii

By Jay Divine

Combat Engineer, Pacific Theater looks at the daily lives of ordinary young men who found themselves with a unique job to do at an extraordinary time and place in history.

It tells the mostly untold story of the armys combat engineering battalions in the Pacific in World War II.

As their name implies, the role of these soldiers was unique. They were trained both in construction and in combat, and were called upon to do both. With every step of the way contested, their job was to build an infrastructure for crossing the worlds biggest ocean, to take the fight to an implacable enemy where he lived.

The focus is the experiences of the men in the ranks of the Thirty-Fourth Engineer Combat Battalion. Part of the Armys Twenty-Seventh Infantry Division, the battalion participated in two of the three largest and bloodiest amphibious assaults in military history, those of Saipan and Okinawa.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514491171

Jay Divine

Jay Divine is a career science and technology writer and business journalist whose work has mostly supported the defense and aerospace industries. He lives in St. Louis.

Book preview

COMBAT ENGINEER

PACIFIC THEATER

Daily Life in an Army Construction Battalion in World War II

Jay Divine

Copyright © 2016 by Jay Divine.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 05/18/2016

Xlibris

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CONTENTS

Foreword

A Meager Proportion Of Glory

A World Away From War

Welcome To The Combat Engineers

Basic Training In Paradise

Assault Landing In The Ellice Islands

The Battalion And The Men

The Folks Back Home

The New Face Of Amphibious Warfare

The Assault On Saipan

Island In The Heat Of Battle

Operations On Saipan After The Battle

Rest And Recreation On Espiritu Santo

The Battle Of Okinawa: April Fool’s Day, 1945

The Assault Landing On Tsugen Shima

Fighting For Okinawa Foot By Foot

Okinawa After The Battle

Coming Home

Afterword After 70 Years

FOREWORD

T his book began in the late 1990s when my ten year old son and I started interviewing my father, Ned Divine, for what we thought would be an oral history project. The focus was my father’s years as an enlisted man in the 34 th Engineer Combat Battalion, part of the 27 th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army in the Pacific Theater during World War II.

Almost 80 years old when the project began, my father had always been silent about his years in the Pacific. We knew he had been in the horrific amphibious landings on the islands of Saipan and Okinawa but that was all we knew. In his late 70s, however, we began to see signs that the dam was coming down, that some of the story needed to be told. Over almost 20 years the narrative fragments emerged and grew, and more and more telling details accumulated.

The result is this short narrative. It is not, and is not intended to be, a military history. Its objective is simply to tell of the daily lives of ordinary men who found themselves with a unique job to do at an extraordinary time and place in history.

I am the author of record. But the story comes directly out of my father’s experiences and was shaped in almost all respects by his insistence on an unadorned presentation of the facts. Like all the men of his generation who fought in the War, he was deeply scored by it. He came away not hardened, but humbled. And with a great reluctance to see the miracles and horrors of the experience diminished by glorifying or romanticizing.

In the end, the only real way we can thank these men for their service is to have listened to them, and to have heard.

Jay Divine,

Summer, 2016

A MEAGER PROPORTION OF GLORY

O n the one hand, World War II required our fighting men to cross a vast ocean and do battle in Europe.

On the other hand, World War II required our men not just to cross but to build and battle their way across a much larger ocean, wresting it from the enemy’s grip island by island, and taking the battle to his homeland.

Military historians have worked hard to provide a clear explanation of what made the Pacific War different.

The struggle for victory in the Pacific required an amphibious war of unprecedented proportions, says Marine Corps historian Joseph Alexander.¹ The long coastlines in Europe and the lack of coral reefs made it possible to execute surprise landings, or even night landings, with less concentrated opposition. Assault troops could be delivered directly to the beach. The beach landings in Europe could be supported by paratroops dropped in land, but dense jungle and mountainous terrain made this unworkable in the Pacific. The military culture of the enemy in the Pacific placed a premium on fighting to the last man with no surrender. It might even include orchestrated suicide tactics.

The battles of the Pacific war, as John Costello has noted, would be fought across a third of the earth’s surface, and all together they constituted the largest amphibious warfare operation in history.²

For the individual soldier, author George Feifer tells us, the war in the Pacific was worse for many reasons than in the European theater and there was more of it, since the average tours of duty in the Pacific lasted much longer.

War’s meager proportion of glory to misery was much lower for Americans fighting in the Pacific, Feifer says, with some irony. Location alone assured them the worst fighting and the least recognition.³

• • • • • • • •

On October 28, 1942, just before daylight Ned Divine climbed onto a bus in front of the county courthouse in the small town of Greenville in western Kentucky. He was headed for the big city of Evansville, Indiana, 75 miles away. There in Evansville, in the space of one day, he would complete a military physical and be sworn in to the United States Army. Late that night he arrived back home on another bus. It was more than 10 months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, six months to the day after his marriage to a willowy Ohio girl named Freda Neptune, and only a few weeks after the wrenching suicide of his father, a beloved country preacher. The nation was in the war in earnest now, and at 21 years old Ned was about to be swept up in it.

He had grown up on Kentucky farmland, harvesting wheat, corn, and soybeans that fall, with a small hemp crop still in the fields. And even as a young man he was already highly skilled in the construction trades that would be his life’s work. Taught the building trades by his father, he had served as a well-paid union carpenter on big, demanding jobs in Kentucky, up north in Ohio and Michigan, and back east. But the promising life that lay before him and millions of other boys like him would now be subject to some epic interruptions. The next two weeks, between his swearing in and his induction, would be his only time out of uniform for the next three years, until the war came to an end in 1945.

All but a few weeks of that three years he spent in the Pacific, and a lot of it he spent very much in harm’s way. As a skilled carpenter and construction crew chief, he was assigned to the 34th Engineer Combat Battalion, part of the U.S. Tenth Army’s 27th Infantry Division. The combat engineers were called on for building as well as fighting, and as part of the 34th Ned would cross the equator six times, participate in four island campaigns, take part in two of the three largest and bloodiest amphibious assaults in military history, land on beaches under heavy enemy fire, face machine guns and snipers and Japanese tanks, and lose buddies in close combat. He would help build ammunition dumps on assault beaches, carve out roads to move troops deeper into mountainous combat zones, and develop runways that could accommodate island landings by bombers and fighter aircraft for the continuing push toward Japan.

Throughout the war, except in two small black and white photographs he mailed home from Hawaii, his young wife and his family never saw Ned in uniform. During his basic training at Schofield Barracks on Oahu he managed to have the pictures taken at a wait-in-line Honolulu studio. The