August seventh, 1945 - 'Thy Brother's Blood': Reminiscences of World War II - Cover Story

Christian Century, August 16, 1995 by James M. Gustafson

We had been told that there would be two more years of war after the defeat of the Germans. The day of that defeat had been one to celebrate! Geneloni, the battalion mail clerk who also cut hair, a Cajun from Louisiana, had won the $3,000 battalion pool with his prediction of the day and hour. A long war in China was still anticipated. Of course, we were heartened by the victories of the Americans in the island hopping under MacArthur, and often saddened by letters from home about the deaths of our friends. There were ten persons in my high school graduating class in Scranton, Kansas, in 1942; five of us were boys. One was killed in the army infantry assault on Leyte, another gravely wounded in the marine assault on Iwo Jima; they were first cousins, my best friends, and the star basketball players on Scranton's winning team.

But two more years in Burma? Two more years of many of my friends paying five rupees for sex with the wife, and 15 for sex with the adolescent daughter, of the enterprising Punjabi who had set up a laundry service near the H & S Company area? Two more years of Spam and powdered eggs? One or two more monsoons on that damned road? One or two more monsoons of trying to keep a ground telephone line repaired over the worst mountainous stretch of the road, for convoy control? More months of having to be on guard against stragglers from both enemy and allied armies and gangs of bandits? More monsoons in which your clothing never was really dry, and your boots mildewed under your cot overnight? More months of watching little kids line up to grab garbage from your mess kit to eat? More months with the prospect of a rest-and-recreation leave in Calcutta, of all places? (How one reacts to Calcutta depends upon where one is coming from; from the jungles of Central Burma it seemed at least as good as Chicago did coming from Scranton, Kansas.) More months of drinking Shan sake, which was occasionally laced with gasoline from leaks in the pipeline? More months of private feasts of wild chickens so tough that you boiled the pieces for over an hour in your steel helmet? More months of atabrine to withstand malaria when ones skin was already almost the color of a Shan? More painful monthly booster shots against bubonic plague and other tropical diseases?

Seventh of August. Fox and I came in to the 209th as replacements after the battle of Myitkyina fought in the summer of 1944, when the 209th and the 236th were pressed into service as infantry troops because Merrill's Marauders and the Chinese could not dislodge the Japanese infantry and marines from that strategic place. Myitkyina had a good airstrip, and was the northern terminus of the old Burma rail system. Eberle had a neat crease on the left side of his skull where the ID handle of his helmet had deflected a bullet from penetrating his head. Ehlenfeldt was nursing what we called "jungle rot" - our name for the sores, I suppose a fungus disease, that blackened large areas of skin. Johnson would sit around with a knife from time to time digging out bits of shrapnel that would work their way to the surface of his skin. Figueroa and Maddox had come through Myitkyina unscathed. Fox, a master sergeant, was brought in to replace Eberle during Joe's hospitalization in Shillong and was kept on. I had replaced a man who was the victim of a direct artillery hit, and whose remains had been so scattered that there was hardly a body to be buried. Eberle was often reminded of the guy I replaced, and of his death, by my presence. Myitkyina was rehearsed and relived night after night. Johnson, in the other tent, would scream. Meyer, from St. Mary's, Kansas, came from the company area evening after evening to tell me what he had gone through at Myitkyina. We had no chaplains in Central Burma.