I helped my father Thurman write his memoir Earned in Blood (originally published by St Martin's Press 2013, 2d ed 2023). It was a Book of the Month Club selection and is now also available as an audiobook, read by Joe Gatton. 4.8/5 Amazon rating
Embedded Files
"Born in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia in 1919, Thurman Miller was the sixteenth of eighteen children in a family so poor, the local coal miner's kids looked down on them. His father was a subsistence farmer and it was rare for the Miller family to have enough food for everyone. But for Thurman, Appalachia was not just a region: it was a culture, a frame of mind, a being. Fighting, playing, and hiding in the hills would soon serve him well.
In 1940 he enlisted and served in World War II with the legendary unit K-3-5 of the First Marine Division. He was involved in some of the most horrific and famous battles in the Pacific Theater, including Guadalcanal and New Britain, where as Gunny Sergeant he sent men to their deaths and narrowly escaped it himself. From harrowing battlefield experiences to the loss of comrades, his powerful combat experiences would stay with him forever.
Upon returning stateside, he taught at the prestigious Officer Candidate School at Camp Lejeune, preparing young officers for the horrific battles to come on Okinawa and Iwo Jima. After the war, suffering badly from the malaria and other diseases he contracted in the Pacific and unable to find work, Miller took a job in the coal mines in his home state of West Virginia, where he toiled in darkness for thirty-seven years.
The blackness of the mines fed the terrors he lived with since the battlefield and the backbreaking labor ate away at his already compromised body. Bowed but unbroken, Miller survived because of his faith and lifelong devotion to his beloved wife of sixty-five years, a relationship that shines brightly in this distinctly American journey.
With uncommon wisdom, intelligence, and humility, this member of the Greatest Generation spins a gripping tale through peace and war, work and family, love and redemption across ten tumultuous decades."
Praise for Earned in Blood:
“A frontline view of a tough-as-nails life―by a man who came out the other end smiling . . . An impressive, riveting, and harrowing addition to the history of the Pacific Theater.” ―The Charleston Gazette
“T.I. Miller is as fine a Marine as ever put on the uniform. In training and in combat, he was my mentor, my example, and my inspiration.” ―R.V. Burgin, author of Islands of the Damned: A Marine at War in the Pacific
“At the end of this book I am left with a profound respect for this man, and filled with awe and gratitude. The levels of horror that he . . . endured in the name of service to country, home, and freedom is simply unimaginable.” ―Marcus Brotherton, bestselling author of A Company of Heroes
“A dramatic and compelling story, one every American should read and ponder.” ―Homer Hickam, author Rocket Boys/October Sky and other novels
“Thurman Miller brings alive the humanity of those who fight our wars and the inhumanity of the wars in which they fight.” ―Lt. Col. Dick Renfro, U.S. Army, Ret.
“In Earned in Blood, Thurman Miller takes us through his hard but rich Appalachian boyhood, his harrowing experience as a Marine in the battles for Guadalcanal and New Britain, and his lifelong struggle with the aftereffects of all he gave to serve his country. In addition to recurring bouts of malaria, he suffered flashbacks so powerful that, when working as a coal miner, he saw his dead buddies piled up on the conveyor belt. Only the sheer strength of his spirit, the support of a loving family, and the reunion with his brother Marines made Mr. Miller's survival possible. His heart-searing story reminds us that a grateful nation is never grateful enough.” ―George Ella Lyon, novelist and former Kentucky Poet Laureate
“Thurman Miller, now in his 90s, tells the iconic story of his generation: Living off the land on a hillside farm in West Virginia during the Great Depression, fighting in the South Pacific during World War II, returning home only to face the difficult life of a coal miner. But at the heart of this searing, honest book is the terrible combat on Guadalcanal and New Britain, and the Marines of K Company, locked in a primal struggle with their Japanese counterparts. Even as he documents the horror, Miller never loses sight of the humanity of all concerned.” ―Denise Giardina, award-winning author of Storming Heaven and Emily’s Ghost
Suicide Creek and the Battle for Cape Gloucester
I compiled Suicide Creek from recently declassified after-action Marine Corps intelligence documents about one of the most ferocious battles of World War II, combining those documents with a Collier's magazine piece on the battle, contemporary military accounts, and a new Introduction. The paperback is available online.
The Fighting Quaker
The Fighting Quaker
Updated: Dec 26, 2023
It's late 1934. Major General Smedley Butler—nicknamed "The Fighting Hell-Devil" and "Old Gimlet Eye"—was the most decorated Marine of all time and has just retired. Now he's sitting in a closed committee hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives. He's no longer in uniform, so no one sees his two Medals of Honor or countless battle ribbons, but everyone knows he is.
He's there to be questioned about claims he's made on his recent speaking tour, where he said he was "trying to educate the soldiers out of the sucker class." In speech after speech he railed against war profiteers, claiming that "war is a racket" and the U.S. had no business getting into so many foreign entanglements. Butler had fought in Honduras, Mexico, Venezuela, and Haiti, and in his view gigantic corporate interests had co-opted the American military to protect their profits, not the public interest. (For a video of Butler speaking click here)
Butler made the speech dozens of times, often before veteran groups such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars but rarely before the rival American Legion, saying that it was controlled by big business.
What really caught the House committee's attention weren't his broadsides against war in general but his claim that he'd been approached by a cabal of corporate leaders plotting to overthrow the U.S. government and establish a pro-business Fascist regime. They allegedly wanted Butler to help lead an "army" of disgruntled World War I veterans to do it.
The special House committee, formed to investigate "Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities," was led by representatives John W. McCormick of Massachusetts and Samuel Dickstein of New York. McCormick was a strong supporter of President Roosevelt, while Dickstein had been a major player in the corrupt Tammany Hall machine of the early 1900s.
Butler testified that he'd been asked to lead such a "veteran army" to oust President Roosevelt, and he named names of those he understood to be behind the plot. In Butler's telling, the cabal promised him vast powers over the federal government, with Roosevelt remaining president in name only.
Many of those he named were either not called as witnesses by the committee or were eventually scrubbed from the committee's final report. They included Wall Street financiers such as bankers Grayson Murphy and J.P. Morgan, the DuPonts, Remington Arms, and a dozen others supposedly in on the plan. Butler called Morgan one of the main plotters and claimed the group had pooled $3 million to fund the coup.
There was little need to speculate on their motive—business interests hated Roosevelt and his economic policies. And, considering what was then happening in Germany and Italy, the idea of America becoming a Fascist state wasn't far-fetched.
The vehicle for the coup would be the World War I veterans who hadn't gotten the pensions or bonuses they were promised; in the depths of the Depression, the government didn't have the money. Hundreds of thousands had already marched on Washington, and they respected Butler. He visited them at their tent camps and encouraged them to keep standing up for what they were due.
Butler would have been the perfect leader for a coup, universally admired by both servicemen and the public, with a chest full of medals and the gravitas to lead a squad, a battalion, or ad-hoc army of vets.
Instead, he went public, detailing the plot in his speeches.
At first, The New York Times called Butler's claims a hoax dreamed up by a crackpot. But the House committee took notice and called him to testify. It refused to subpoena some of the business leaders who'd been implicated—"The committee will not take cognizance of names brought into the testimony which constitute mere hearsay." All of those who did testify said under oath said that they were aware of no such plot.
But the evidence began to mount. When the leader of the VFW testified that he'd been approached about organizing a Fascist-friendly veterans' group to descend on Washington, the Times and other papers began to change their mocking tone to a more sober one. Eventually, the Times reversed course entirely, saying it was "convinced that General Butler's story of a Fascist march on Washington was alarmingly true."
The Committee eventually issued a report, hedging its conclusions in line with its mandate to focus on foreign influence: "In the last few weeks of the committee's official life it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a Fascist organization in this country. No evidence was presented and this committee had none to show a connection between this effort and any Fascist activity of any European country."
But it concluded that there was a plot to overthrow the government--it just hadn't been carried out. "There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient," according to the committee report.
The New York Times was forced to acknowledge that there was both smoke and fire in Butler's story, concluding that "definite proof had been found that the much-publicized Fascist march on Washington, which was to have been led by Major Gen. Smedley D. Butler, retired, according to testimony at a hearing, was actually contemplated."
It's still debated how far the plot actually got, and the march on Washington never happened.
Despite the committee refusing to call the biggest business leaders in for testimony or name them in its report, Butler's experience before the committee encouraged him to double down on his claim that business interests drove much of American foreign policy.
For the rest of his life he warned anyone who'd listen that big-money capitalists would drive America into Fascism if they could. He produced a short book, also called "War is a Racket," based on his speeches, arguing that "[o]nly a small 'inside' group knows what [war] is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
Butler remained popular with veterans even as he spoke out against war. In his view, soldiers are often just cannon fodder. "I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers," he said. "In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism."
Butler listed all the Marine Corps actions he'd been involved in, calling out the oil, sugar, fruit and other corporate interests pushing for each. "Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."
He often spoke to pacifist groups, earning him a new nickname, "The Fighting Quaker." He argued that the military should be limited to national self-defense, with the Navy operating no more than 200 miles off the coast and the Army restricted to America's territorial limits.
Butler continued to give such speeches until his death at age 58 in 1940, just a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor pulled America into the most expansive war in history.
Butler's allegations about a Fascist cabal came to be known as "The Business Plot" and the hearing and report left many loose threads that are still being explored.
For example, according to later research by the BBC, Prescott Bush, father of one U.S. president and grandfather of another, was reportedly a "key liaison" between the American business plotters and the rising Nazi regime in Germany.
For example, according to later research by the BBC, Prescott Bush, father of one U.S. president and grandfather of another, was reportedly a "key liaison" between the American business plotters and the rising Nazi regime in Germany.
Some historians have disputed this claim, with one, Jonathan Katz, arguing that "Prescott Bush was too involved with actual Nazis to be involved with something as homegrown as the business plot."
Some historians have disputed this claim, with one, Jonathan Katz, arguing that "Prescott Bush was too involved with actual Nazis to be involved with something as homegrown as the business plot."
Many years later, when Soviet-era files were made public, the staunchly anti-Fascist Congressman Dickstein was revealed to have been a paid secret agent for Russia during the time of the Business Plot hearings.
In a few years that special House committee would be made permanent and rechristened as the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee.
According to an analysis by The Guardian, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars cost the United States as much as $5 trillion dollars in total, and stocks of the Big Five defense contractors outperformed the stock market by 60% during those conflicts.
For more on the Business Plot, see "Gangsters of Capitalism": Jonathan Katz on the Parallels Between Jan. 6 and 1934 Anti-FDR Coup Plot. Democracy Now!. Retrieved 26 January 2022.
The below is an unsold magazine piece. Football has overtaken baseball as our national sport, which I think says something about America. As George Carlin put it: "Football represents something we are--we are Europe, Jr. What was the Europe game? 'Let's take their land away from them!... Of course, we only do it ten yards at a time. That’s the way we did it with the Indians, little by little. First down in Ohio–Midwest to go!" It's not surprising that American football has always been identified with the military. And, Frank Goettge (pronounced GET-chee) is one of the main reasons.
The Great Goettge Part I
The Devil Dogs were coming. The Marines were going to invade Ann Arbor.
At Quantico, Virginia, two thousand young Marines prepared to board five trains in forty-two Pullman coaches bound for Ann Arbor on a cold November 8, 1923.[i] The men were there by choice: many had spent a month’s paycheck to travel to the game.[ii]
The Corps’ football team was only in its third year but had been undefeated each of the first two, and again dominated in 1923, with only a season-opening loss to Virginia Military Institute to mar their record. Other than VMI, no opponent had scored a point, against 117 for the Marines. Coach John “Jack” Beckett had built a powerhouse team and he knew it.
Service teams had dominated football since America entered the First World War and drafted all able-bodied men. Many took up football there and service teams racked up win after win against college teams in the few years following the war. Inter-service rivalries took precedence over games against civilians.
The great Marine Corps teams of the early 1920s drew on the best players in the entire Corps, some of them recruited just to play football. Brigadier General Smedley Butler—"Old Gimlet Eye"—“ordered the Marine Corps to field winning football teams and build a stadium good enough for those teams... Football is like war. Who in hell wants to lose a war?”[iii]
Butler reportedly “scoured the Corps from 1921 to 1924 in his effort to secure team players. Every battleship detachment, Navy yard barracks and Marine post was urged to send its best.”[v] It was a canny move. Every away game became a fresh recruiting tool for the Corps, and Butler attended every game.[iv]
Frank Goettge was clearly the star of the Corps teams. At 6'2" and 220 pounds, he was a dominant fullback, tough as nails and hard to bring down. He quickly became known as "The Great Goettge," the best football player on any of the service teams and arguably the best player in the country.
Goettge’s reputation preceded him. Before one inter-service game a newspaper columnist described the atmosphere: “Streetwide banners generously distributed throughout the city blatantly exclaimed how Army would stop Goettge. Stop Goettge! It was a mighty cry and a courageous attempt. But Goettge was not to be denied, and neither were the team nor the faithful on the sidelines and in the stands."[vi]
Goettge and his 1922 team dispatched the Army’s Third Corps 13 to 12 in that game, with the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Navy, society leaders, and military brass all in attendance, along with "the father of American football," Walter Camp, and the sixty thousand civilians who crowded Baltimore Stadium.
Goettge would play four nearly-unbeaten years for the Marine Corps. He earned his nickname “the Great” with masterful play against the best of the other service branches and eastern college teams. He was “even better than Jim Thorpe” in the words of a New York Times columnist, and Walter Camp declared him the “all-time greatest football player.” Goettge was unstoppable.
The 1922 team is considered the Corps’ finest, and the last season when the Marines could still be considered underdogs. The perfection it neared would get further out of reach the next two seasons.
The pendulum that had made the service teams so powerful a few years earlier, during and just after the war, was beginning to swing back to college teams, as a fresh crop of young men became available. Notre Dame’s legendary Four Horsemen backfield was formed the same year that Harold “Red” Grange at Illinois started his long coaching career.
The balance of football began to shift away from service teams and the Ivy League toward middle America and then California, establishing it as a truly national sport.
But today, November 8, 1923, the Corps team looked unstoppable. It would see what it could do against the best college team, the Michigan Wolverines, in the first non-collegiate game the Wolverines had played in a quarter-century. It wouldn't be easy for the Corps--Michigan was unbeaten and untied.
From the start, it was a very personal game for both sides. Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby was a Michigan grad and had played center for the team in 1895. He and Michigan athletic director Fielding Yost arranged the match with the Marines and it immediately became an informal championship between the military and civilians.
Denby sat with Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. and not far away were Michigan’s governor and one of its senators, along with Henry Ford and Marine Corps Commandant John A. Lejeune. Forty thousand fans packed Ferry Field, including the Marine Corps marching band.
A little after two p.m. two thousand Marines marched in in in tight formation and formed a capital-letter M on the center of the field to honor their hosts. The Marines’ very large bulldog mascot—the Detroit Free Press said "his mother must have been a hippopotamus”[vii] —marched in alongside them. The Marines broke ranks and filed to their seats.
The apparently ever-cheerful Goettge—nicknamed "the Smiling Lieutenant”[viii]—pulled on his leather helmet. (The face-guard hadn't been invented, and helmets were not even required in college football until 1939[ix].) He immediately made his presence known, helping drive the ball 89 yards from the opening kickoff and scoring a touchdown on a short run. It was the first time the Wolverines had been scored on all season.
Goettge was everywhere, playing both offense and defense and punting and returning kicks. It looked as though he would be as commanding against Michigan as he had been in the Corps’ previous games.
Most of the Marines’ offense was built around running him from a few simple formations, for good reason. At almost two hundred pounds, tall and broad, Goettge “when in motion travels fast and hard enough so that it looks from the sidelines as though no single human being—perhaps no pair of them—could ever stop him….His method was to pick out a distant spot and charge for it with a fine disregard for all that stood in his path.”[x]
But if Michigan could stop Goettge, it could stop the Corps, it was as simple as that.
The Marines’ dependence on Goettge was their Achilles’ heel, as the first half became a war of attrition. Goettge gave it his all: “He did all the passing and kicking and carried the ball more than all of the other backs combined. Once Michigan figured out how stop him they stymied the Quantico team.”[xi] Michigan kept Goettge out of the end zone after that first score.
Michigan's offense depended more on slashing off-tackle runs than direct attacks at the Marines’ strong center line. (Passing wasn't yet much of a factor in football—since its introduction in 1906 it had been discouraged by rules such as giving any ball that went out of bounds to the defense at that yard line.) The Maize and Blue simply ran the ball outside again and again.
The first quarter seemed to go on long past fifteen minutes, and in fact it did—a bizarre error by the timekeeper extended it to an official 33 minutes, for a total first half of 52 minutes.
With a great kicking game the Wolverines pressed the Corps team back to its own end again and again and Michigan scored just before halftime to lead 7-6.
The Marine Corps is actually a part of the Navy, and the Corps considered Secretary Denby one of their own. At halftime the Marine Corps band marched across the field to his box seat in front of the Quantico cheering stand at the north end of the stadium. A sergeant addressed Denby directly: “Edwin Denby, the Marines want you to come home.”[xii]
Lejeune and Butler also moved to the Marines’ side of the gridiron at halftime.
Goettge had no better luck in the second half, and Michigan found some unlikely heroes. In the fourth quarter, on his first play as a Big Ten football player, Michigan substitute quarterback Tod Rockwell scored a touchdown on a fake field goal. To add insult, Goettge’s pass was intercepted late in the game and run back for a touchdown, setting the final score at 26-6.
With the lengthened first quarter, the game had lasted 78 minutes; the Marines probably thought it would never end.
General Butler’s reaction to the stunning loss isn’t recorded but Secretary Denby pronounced it “A great day, boys, and a great game, even if I did want to see the Marines win!”[xiii]
Not only did Michigan beat the Marines, it finished that year with a perfect record, 8-0, winning the Big Ten and national championships while outscoring other teams 150-12.
The Corps, meanwhile, would win the rest of the season’s games except for a tie, and finish 7-2-1. (The tie would come the following week against the “powerhouse of the west,” Lawrence, Kansas’ redundantly named "Native American Haskell Indian Nations Fighting Indians.")
The almighty Corps was no longer so almighty. The Great Goettge was still great, but at 28 maybe losing a step, and the game was changing around him.
His “coming out” for Marine Corps football had been in 1921, when he was called back from Haiti, but he had been playing since 1911 at Barberton High School, then semi-pro in Barberton in 1915, and then for a year at Ohio University. He did all this with little protective padding and ther than a thin
leather helmet.
But Goettge wasn't done. He would play one last season for the Marines, in the fall of 1924. The Corps command ruled that four years of playing eligibility was enough. His final team racked up seven wins and another tie.
The New York Giants reportedly offered Goettge a pro football contract for $10,000, which would have made him the highest-paid player in the fledgling NFL. Goettge chose to remain in the Corps.
The Quantico Marines would continue to field strong teams for a few years, until the Depression and the rise of the San Diego-based Marine Corps as the top service team. Control of the Quantico team passed from Smedley Butler to a nameless major in Washington, DC, and Jack Beckett coached his last Quantico team in 1924 before heading west to San Diego.
By 1929 the Corps was facing off against not the best college teams but a gallimaufry of opponents such as the Seaman Gunners, the Baltimore Firemen, and the Navy Pharmacists. The Corps still beat them, but it wasn’t the same. And they'd lost their star player.
Goettge would stay on as an assistant coach for the Corps team one more year before shipping out to the American Legation in Peking, where he served as detachment athletic officer, among other roles.
Soon he would be back stateside as an aide to the Commandant of the Marine Corps and then man aide in Herbert Hoover's White House. He did a tour in China before becoming Commanding Officer of the Marine detachment at Annapolis, Maryland.
He was destined for great things, everyone agreed. Probably a career in politics. He would still be a young man when his time in the Corps was up in a few years. The handsome, quiet Goettge had a lot of admirers in Washington and everyone remembered his football career. In June, 1941, Goettge was assigned to the 1st Marine Division as chief intelligence officer. War was on the horizon. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor it became clear that the entire South Pacific would become a theater of war, as Japan sought to establish bases and airfields throughout the southern hemisphere.
When Washington decided that the First Marine Division would be sent to interrupt the Japanese construction of an airfield on the tiny but strategically essential island of Guadalcanal, Goettge was sent ahead to prepare maps and plan the Marines' counter-offensive. But on Guadalcanal Goettge made a big mistake—one that could have meant disaster for the US and threatened the entire Pacific Theater counter-offensive. That's next week.
[i] The Michigan Alumnus, Vol. 30, November 15, 1923, p. 171. [ii] http://www.quantico.usmc.mil/Sentry/StoryView.aspx?SID=776 [iii] Gunn “The Old Core” [iv] Ashman [v] Gunn [vi] https://archive.org/stream/marinebarracksqu00unit/marinebarracksqu00unit_djvu.txt [vii] Detroit Free Press, Sports/Financial Section, November 11, 1923, at 1. [viii] The nickname is quoted in The Leatherneck, Vol. 15, 1932. [ix] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_football_helmet [x] Michigan Alumnus at 171. [xi] DFP 11/11/23 at 1. [xii] Detroit Free Press, November 11, 1923, at 22, 25. [xiii] Michigan Alumnus November 15, 1923.
Photos courtesy Library of Congress.
The Great Goettge - Part 2
The Great Goettge - Part 2
This is the second of two parts about football star Frank Goettge ("GET-chee"). You may want to read last Wednesday's post for context.
August, 1942. America was trying for a comeback. The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor wiped out much of US air power and opened the South Pacific to the Japanese as a stepping stone toward Australia and New Zealand.
Without footholds in the region for supplies and refueling, American influence in the entire hemisphere would be boxed in. In football terms, the US’s passing game had been shut down, and its ground game wasn’t much better.
Despite some victories, such as the Battle of Midway, America was clearly in a race against time and began gearing up companies from its prestigious 1st Marine Division to begin the struggle for control of the long archipelago that seemed to lead directly to Japan’s doorstep. [i]
A massive shipbuilding, armament, and amphibious assault training effort was underway, and the Marine Corps was expecting to be deployed to the South Pacific very late in 1942 or early 1943.
Instead, ready or not, the Division was pulled from their training in New Zealand to land on the tiny island of Guadalcanal on August 7 of '42.
Intelligence had detected that Japan was building an airstrip on the small island and aerial photographs showed it close to being completed much more quickly than America's military leaders had anticipated. The First Marine Division was ordered to retrain and resupply at breakneck speed. The Marines gave the chaotic planning their own code name: Operation Shoestring.
Frank Goettge, by now a Lieutenant Colonel,[ii] was in Philadelphia that July when he got his new orders: He was to become the Chief Intelligence Officer for the 1st Marine Division, assigned to Headquarters Company. The assignment made sense—Goettge had intelligence experience from his time in Haiti. The new job came with a promotion to full colonel.
Just as the Marines had their training and preparation reduced from months to weeks, so too had intelligence officers been given little time to gather information. No one knew the first thing about the island. Reconnaissance flights were risky and almost no Westerner spoke the native ghari language.
The Division's landing on Guadalcanal was eerily quiet; they knew the island was held by the Japanese, but there were no mortars or machine guns to repel them. The Marines crept ashore and began to set up camp and gingerly probe the edges of the Japanese force.
The first few days it must have seemed to the Marines that the Japanese didn’t want to fight. In fact, the Japanese had outrun their support and were desperately low on food and morale, as their captured diaries would later attest.
But they still had mortars and their long-gun ships just offshore and the Bushido warrior code on their side. Bushido required that they die rather than surrender.
The Marines would soon come to understand the same hunger the Japanese felt. Two days after the Marines landed, and before more than a fraction of their supplies and ammunition could be offloaded to the island, Japanese battleships and mortars attacked the Navy ships, driving them away from the island. America couldn’t stand to lose any more ships.
The Marines watched the boats pull away. It would be four months before new supplies could be brought in and the first wave of Marines relieved. By then many had lost forty or fifty pounds and were wasting away from malaria and the many other diseases endemic to the tropics.
Goettge arrived on the island a few days after the First Division that August. He and his photographic officer, Lieutenant Karl Thayer Soule, drove a jeep around as much of the island as they safely could, looking at the natives' rough shacks and the few artifacts the Japanese had left behind when they abandoned the area for higher ground as the Marines came ashore. [iii]
The 6'2" Goettge hadn’t lost his commanding presence. Soule describes meeting him for the first time: “Colonel Frank Bryan Goettge was as big as an ox. Rising from behind his desk, he looked like a mountain, a huge mass of a man towering above me. He had gray hair, glasses, a garden of ribbons on his shirt, and an almost fatherly look in his eyes. ‘Welcome aboard, Lieutenant.’ The voice fitted the man, firm and heavy, but friendly and warm. We shook hands with a tight, firm grip.”[iv] They began making maps from the few aerial photos the Corps had been able to obtain.
Goettge’s team began to analyze what little was known about the Japanese on the island, frustrated that they didn’t have better intelligence on the size and location of the Japanese force. The short-handed and badly-supplied Marines weren't ready for a full-on assault on the near-complete airfield. But despite the Navy’s departure, a lack of food and other supplies, and a force of uncertain size between them and that airfield, the Marines had to take the initiative somehow.
If the Japanese held the island long enough to make the airfield operational, their air power could cut off American supply lines and give them control of the Solomon Island chain. The entire American effort in the South Pacific could be for naught. Japanese aircraft taking off from the field could rain bullets directly down on the Americans, by land and by sea.
On August 12, 1942, Goettge received word that a patrol had come upon two stray Japanese soldiers. The first they killed. The second raised his hands in surrender and they captured him.
He was a warrant officer by the name of Tsuneto Sakado.[v] After the Americans had given him food and a liberal supply of alcohol, he told them, via one of the few Japanese-speaking Marines on the island, that just west of a sandspit at the mouth of the Matanikau River was a big group of Japanese who were starving and would surrender. Goettge recalled that in fact, a few days earlier a patrol had spotted a large white flag at that position.
Goettge believed Sakado and thought the captured Japanese could be an intelligence goldmine. He and a First Sergeant organized a 25-member patrol to capture the starving Japanese.
The patrol included most of Headquarters' intelligence officers, the only surgeon on the island, a handful of riflemen, and the Marines' only Japanese interpreter. The intelligence officers went because more infantrymen couldn’t be spared from the Marines’ fragile beachhead.[vi]
The Division Commander, Lieutenant General Alexander Vandegrift, wasn’t at all sure Goettge's plan was a good idea. Goettge had to persuade him that the captured Sakado was telling the truth and that the Japanese could be taken by a small squad of Marines.
Vandegrift relented but warned Goettge not to land near the Matanikau River (see map below) because scouts had spotted a large Japanese contingent there. Goettge was ordered to land well west of Point Cruz and the river.
The patrol got a late start, setting out in a small "Higgins" boat the next evening. Sakado led the way with a rope around his neck. Goettge's plan was to land beyond the river, shelter for the night, and close on the enemy in the morning.
Because of the late start, unfamiliar tides, and difficulty seeing the coast in the dark, they didn't land at the site originally planned. Instead, just as they'd been warned not to do, they went ashore too early, just 200 yards from the mouth of the Matanikau, rather than west of Point Cruz.
The prisoner Sakado told them not to land there, saying No! in Japanese: Iie! [vii] By allowing himself to be captured he'd broken the Bushido code and knew he would be killed by his own soldiers.
Goettge's small boat ran aground on a sandbar and the Japanese heard the coxswain gunning the engine back and forth in a vain attempt to free it. The Marines piled out and ran for a stand of banyan trees just beyond the beach, directly toward the Japanese.
The Japanese saw what must have seemed a gift from God: an American colonel still wearing his insignia, leading a traitor on a leash.
This would be the first contact between Japanese and American forces on the island.
Goettge was shot in the head and died instantly, as were Sakado and a sergeant. The rest of the patrol stayed close to the boat all day and returned fire through the night, falling one by one to the spray of hidden machine guns.
That night the stranded Marines threw up tracer bullets and the Marines back at the base saw them but had no idea of the carnage taking place four miles away.
Two men escaped the beached Higgins boat in the night, swimming back to the base through shark-infested waters and concertinas of sharp coral.
Three of the last remaining men trapped at the sandspit were killed just as the sun came up the next morning. One of the remaining few at the boat hit the water and began swimming back to the base. That sergeant, "Monk" Arndt, described looking back at Japanese swords “flashing in the sun” as they dismembered the dead and wounded Marines.
Patrols the next day searched the area where Goettge was supposed to have landed, finding nothing. Over the next few days other patrols looked closer to the Matanikau and found torsos and feet with boots still on them.
A tropical storm soon washed the mouth of the river clean of all evidence of the Goettge patrol.
Word spread rapidly that the Japanese weren’t waging the kind of war most Marines had been trained in; therefore, neither would the Marines feel bound by the Articles of War on how to treat prisoners.
No white flag of surrender as had been described to Geottge was ever found. It may have been a regular Japanese flag, which is all white except for the rising sun in its center. On a windless day it could easily be mistaken for a flag of surrender.
The Marines charged with taking Guadalcanal had been in a hole, and Goettge's misadventure dug them in further. The loss of many of their intelligence officers, their surgeon, and their interpreter made a dire situation worse. The decision to leave at night, to land in the wrong place, and to face an enemy of unknown size or position was the kind of error few would have expected from the golden boy, Goettge the Great, the Unstoppable.
As word of the doomed patrol spread, the Marines were stunned that they had lost the first skirmish in the battle for control of the island.
The Marine Corps hushed up the Goettge mistake for years, since it would have been terrible for morale, but word of Japanese atrocities quickly got around the island. Marines resolved that they would be equally bloodthirsty and inhumane. The Guadalcanal fight became fueled by a “brutish, primitive hatred, as characteristic of the horror of war in the Pacific as the palm trees and the islands.”[viii]
Goettge’s decision to undertake the patrol is still debated today. Was his intelligence simply outdated? Was he wrong to believe Sakado’s story? Was Sakado lying? Was it Vandegrift’s fault for acceding to Goettge’s argument? We'll never know.
In the end, the near-starving Marines took the unfinished airfield and held it against fierce Japanese assaults. There is no way to gauge how much more difficult the loss of the divisional intelligence officers made their job.
The Goettge Patrol accomplished two things. First, it demonstrated to the Marines, and to America, that they were fighting a new kind of war. The enemy was no longer another human being but a sub-human, evil personified.
Japanese bones became trinkets for Marines to send back home as souvenirs. Life magazine in May 1944 featured a smiling young woman contemplating the lovely skull her boyfriend sent to her from the South Pacific.[ix]
The second thing the patrol accomplished was to forever link the name of a small-town boy, once the country's best football player, to a single pivotal and potentially disastrous wartime decision.
The Army, Navy, and US Air Force all still field football teams. The Marine Corps dropped its football program after the 1972 season.
Frank Goettge isn't forgotten--the Field House at the Marine Corps' Camp Lejeune is named for him.
[i] For an after-action summary of the events on Guadalcanal, see https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USMC/USMC-C-Guadalcanal.html
[ii] For a summary of Goettge’s assignments, see https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=86192455
[iii] Thayer’s story is briefly covered in https://marines.togetherweserved.com/usmc/servlet/tws.webapp.WebApp?cmd=ShadowBoxProfile&type=Person&ID=102305
[iv] Soule went on to become one of the war’s best photographers and a collection of his work appears in the Thayer Soule Collection (COLL/2266) at the Archives Branch, Marine Corps History Division. The University Press of Kentucky published a collection of his work, Shooting the Pacific War: Marine Corps Combat Photography in WWII in 2000.
[v] https://marines.togetherweserved.com/usmc/servlet/tws.webapp.WebApp?cmd=ShadowBoxProfile&type=Person&ID=102305
[vi] The patrol has been written about widely. A slightly fictionalized account was featured in Richard Tregaskis’ bestseller Guadalcanal Diary.
[vii] This is quoted in https://marines.togetherweserved.com/usmc/servlet/tws.webapp.WebApp?cmd=ShadowBoxProfile&type=Person&ID=102305
[viii] Eugene Sledge, With the Old Breed,
[ix] Life Magazine, May 22, 1944. “When he said goodbye two years ago to Natalie Nickerson, 20, a war worker of Phoenix, Ariz., a big, handsome Navy lieutenant promised her a Jap. Last week Natalie received a human skull, autographed by her lieutenant and 13 friends, and inscribed: ‘This is a good Jap—a dead one picked up on the New Guinea beach.’ Natalie, surprised at the gift, named it Tojo.”
Photos courtesy US Marine Corps Museum and Life Magazine. Map courtesy RememberedSky.com
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