The Captain of the Head: A Shithole Story

Bob Hamant, "A Marine on Tinian"

   A certain word has been much in the news lately, and it reminded me of a story I recorded several years ago during an interview in Cincinnati with Bob Hamant. Bob spent a year with the Marines on the island of Tinian during World War II.
   The story, one of many Bob told during the interview, which was arranged by his daughter, began with a discussion of the atomic bomb.
   "Toward the end of the war," Bob said, "they issued us wool socks, wool pants, jackets, wool sweaters, gloves. Hell, it's 90 degrees on the average [on Tinian], what are they gonna need that for? And nobody knows anything, but they gave you all this survival training for the winter. Hell, the only place they could take would be Alaska and we already owned that. But one thing we did have while we had that stuff, one of the guys says, 'Hey, there's a big plane up there on the airfield,' and he says, 'They're doing something to the bomb bay doors.'
   "Somebody says they're going to take a bigger bomb.' [The Enola Gay, which dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, took off from Tinian.] "Well, if you want to keep something a secret, you put guards around it, so then everybody comes up and looks. And we asked the guards. They didn't know. They just said they're doing something to the bomb bay doors, and that's it. 'We're supposed to keep everybody away.'
   "Hey, the bigger the better that you could drop on them. Well, nobody knew what an atomic [bomb was]. And so we found out. They notified us that they dropped an atomic bomb on Japan, and in the area where it dropped nobody will be able to live for 45 years. And we thought if they drop a couple more, we'll go home and everything will be fine. I don't know how many days it was later on they dropped the second one, and they came down and said, 'Turn in all your winter gear.' And then they told us we were supposed to make an invasion on northern Kyushu, which has snow, and they expected like 85 percent casualties because the Japs were gonna fight to the last man and old woman, and the cold. They said we'll lose almost half the guys from the cold alone, with frostbite.
   "So we were really glad we didn't have to go. But anybody comes along and says we were horrible for dropping the atomic bomb needs their head examined. There are thousands and thousands of guys, maybe millions of them, that are living today because they dropped it. And probably in Japan too, it probably saved a lot of their lives."
   "You mentioned the prospect of frostbite," I said. "What about malaria?"
   I'm not 100 percent sure what made me ask that, but I thought since Tinian was a tropical island, it might have been a problem.
   "That was more or less in the Philippines," Bob said. "There was no malaria on our island."
   "Even with all the mosquitoes?" I asked.
   "No, we had mosquitoes," Bob said. "There's something I forgot to mention was flies. You can't imagine the amount of flies. At night the flies would go and land on a tree, and a little twig would wind up to be a big branch because the flies were on top of flies. And when you went to eat, when you opened that can, the flies were on it like that. Your food disappeared, so we had to figure something out. We had mosquito netting, you'd pull it over your head and try to eat, but after a while you weren't so persnickety, you'd eat flies. When you went to the john, there'd be maybe ten million flies in there and you almost didn't have to wipe your butt because the flies were so thick. It was pitiful.
   "Oh, that's another story I could tell you. I got put on as captain of the head. That means you've got to clean the heads. So I had an oxcart that I would bring around and it had gasoline on it. I'd throw a cup full of gasoline down each one of the holes and roll up some toilet paper, set it on fire, toss it in the hole, step out the door, and it'd go 'Whooooff!' And it would kill all the flies.
   "Well, I ran out of gasoline, so I told the truck driver, 'I need more gasoline.'
   "He said, 'Okay.' He brings out a 55-gallon drum, and we put it on the oxcart, and I went in there and I threw a cup full of gasoline down each one. This was different, it's an eight-holer, and I rolled up the toilet paper, lit it, threw it down there, closed the lid, stepped out, and there was the biggest explosion you'd ever want to see. I got hit by the door, and about two or three hundred feet up in the air there was toilet paper flying. Here they gave me aviation gas. I was just getting the regular old gas. I blew that thing all to hell. But I was just lucky the door hit me, and nothing else. I was clean. That was funny. And they gave me another name for that, I forget what that one was. 'Don't go to the john when Hamant's around!'"

Order the full two-hour audio interview with Bob Hamant from my eBay store:
 

Bob's interview is included along with three other interviews in the audiobook "Four Marines."

Hear Bob Hamant tell the story

Semper Four: An Oral History

 

  Today I published a collection of four interviews with Marine Corps veterans as an ebook, available for Kindle only. Audio of the interviews is available in my eBay store. A print version of the book will be available soon. This is the introduction and a portion of the first interview.

Introduction

 

This is neither a comprehensive picture of the Marines in World War II nor even a portrait of one particular battle. My father served in a tank battalion in the European Theater of Operations. In 1994 I self-published  a collection of stories told to me by veterans of his battalion. I turned to the still-young Internet to promote the book, and in 1997 I launched the World War II Oral History Web Site @ tankbooks.com.

Because it was rich in World War II “content,” my web site took on a life of its own. The son of a 1st Infantry Division veteran asked if I’d like to interview his father, who was in the first wave on Omaha Beach. Lyn Barenbrugge sent me some stories she’d helped her father-in-law, a veteran of the 10th Armored Division, put down on paper. Margie Hoffman contributed some stories about her childhood in England during the Blitz.

In 1992 I met Bob Levine, a former prisoner of war, who encouraged me to interview American ex-POWs. Then in 1994, with the 50th anniversary of D-Day approaching, I interviewed several local D-Day veterans. And in 1999, while on a trip to Germany to visit the town where a buddy of my father was killed, I met the German historian Walter Hassenpflug, who got me interested in the Kassel Mission, a tragic air battle.

Being just one person with a full time job on the side, I chose to focus on these four areas: my father’s tank battalion, former prisoners of war, D-Day veterans, and survivors of the Kassel Mission.

Every so often I would get an email saying, in effect, “Where are the Marines?” “What about the Pacific?”

Then I got lucky. In 1998 Kurt Pfaff, director of the Eldred, Pa., World War II Museum, invited me out to interview local veterans on Memorial Day. There I met my first two Marines – Jerome Auman, who served as an MP in Samoa and later witnessed one of World War II’s iconic moments, when, “by the grace of God and a few Marines, MacArthur returned to the Philippines”; and Bill Scheiterle, who was a lieutenant during the invasion of Peleliu.

In 2002, at a Memorial Day barbecue, I met Nick Paciullo, a neighbor. Nick was a veteran of the 4^th Marine Division and was wounded twice on Iwo Jima. And in 2007, I received an email from Diann Hamant asking how she could find somebody to interview her father, who’d spent a year on the island of Tinian and saw the Enola Gay before it took off on its mission to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. I asked Diann where her father lived and she said Cincinnati. The 712^th Tank Battalion was having its annual reunion in Cincinnati that year, so I suggested that Diann bring her father by the hotel and I’d be happy to interview him. She did, and I had my fourth Marine.

There are far more comprehensive books about what it was like to be a Marine in World War II. But I will say one thing: Each of the four Marines in this book has a remarkable story to tell.

Nick Paciullo

4^th Marine Division

Iwo Jima

Hackensack, N.J., Sept. 4, 2002

 

Aaron Elson: Did you grow up in New Jersey?

Nick Paciullo: No, on Long Island. Queens.

Aaron Elson: Was your father an immigrant?

Nick Paciullo: Yes. He came to this country when he was nine years old. And my mother was born practically here.

Gladys Paciullo: On the way over?

Nick Paciullo: Yes.

Aaron Elson: Really? She was born on the ship?

Nick Paciullo: Yeah. Isn’t that something?

Aaron Elson: So she met your father over here, naturally.

Nick Paciullo: Yes, and what went between them, that I can’t tell you. I wasn’t born yet.

Aaron Elson: Did you have brothers and sisters?

Nick Paciullo: Yes. I had one brother and three sisters. Actually, 11, my mother had miscarriages in between. My sister Rose is a twin, but she died at childbirth.

Aaron Elson: You had a twin who died at childbirth?

Nick Paciullo: Yes. We didn’t know about it. We were all too young. We heard about this later on.

Aaron Elson: What did you feel when you heard about it?

Nick Paciullo: It felt funny. It was brought up like in a conversation. And we didn’t even realize it. But those days, I guess it wasn’t an outspoken thing, they kept everything to themselves. And I had a pretty good life with my father. I worked with him.

Aaron Elson: What did he do?

Nick Paciullo: He was an ice and coal man. He had his own business for many years, and I woke up the horse in the morning. While my father was having his breakfast I used to have breakfast with my horse and his name was Nickie, the same as mine. And then I used to get all the stuff ready, polish the reins and all that because everything had to be nice and clean. Then I came home and he went back to work. I went to school, and he did his route and came back and he had lunch ready for us.

Aaron Elson: Where did you go to school?

Nick Paciullo: PS 155 in South Ozone Park.

Aaron Elson: And high school?

Nick Paciullo: John Adams. I was there four years but I did not graduate. I joined the service instead of graduating. I was only 17 years old when I enlisted.

Aaron Elson: You were only 17?

Nick Paciullo: Nineteen forty-two.

Aaron Elson: Did you have to lie about your age?

Nick Paciullo: No. I fought with my mother because I wanted to join when I was 16. There was a man that lived like the next block but behind us, he was a sergeant in the Marine Corps. And, you know, talking to a Marine and I loved the Marines, and I wanted to join the Marines.

He says, “You join the Marines, and I will fix it up, after boot training you’ll spend the rest of the war at 90 Broadway.”

I says, “Are you kidding? I don’t want that. I want to go overseas and fight the Japanese.”

And that was the beginning of it. Then I went to boot training. I joined in ’42 but they didn’t take me in until January of ’43.

Aaron Elson: When did you turn 18?

Nick Paciullo: April the 13^th the following year, in 1943.

Aaron Elson: So you went to boot camp in January of ’43?

Nick Paciullo: Right. And graduated there and I was attached to the 3^rd Marine Division. One day in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, “Line up!”

We all lined up.

“Split in half. This side and this side, every other man.” This was the 3^rd Marine Division, and we started the 4^th Marine Division, and I grew up with the 4^th Marine Division.

Aaron Elson: So you were in from the very beginning of the 4^th Division?

Nick Paciullo: Yes, I’m the original.

Aaron Elson: And what was your rank?

Nick Paciullo: I was a private, Pfc, corporal, private, Pfc, corporal ... I was a little bad in the service. I was with two gentlemen – two Marines I should say – from Chicago, Pudlow and McDowell. They were two crazy guys and I joined them too. They were in my squad, and we had a lot of fun. We were always in trouble. But we got away with it.

Aaron Elson: Now you and Nat [Nat Rubin, a veteran of the Merchant Marine], were reminiscing about Swabbies and the Shore Patrol. Is that who you got into trouble with?

Nick Paciullo: Yeah, a little bit in San Diego.

Aaron Elson: Tell me what kind of trouble you would get into, if you can with your wife here.

Nick Paciullo: No, it wasn’t dirty or anything else like that. I’ll give you an incident, what happened one night. The three of us – in fact, there were about five or six of us, walking, and we see this big door open. A big office. We walked in. We’re talking the pencils, and I took a chair with rollers on it, and I put one of the guys on the chair and we were rolling him around in San Diego. All of a sudden I’m pushing and I can’t go nowhere. They had my duty belt. It was an MP Marine, oh God, where’d these guys get this stuff? And we had a court martial. And we got away with it, because we didn’t rob anything, all we took was pencils and that one chair, and we were having a good time.

The following week, we went from Camp Lejeune to California. And then just before we get to California, they were having the zoot suiters terrorizing in California.

Aaron Elson: Zoot suiters?

Nick Paciullo: Yes, the Mexicans, that’s what they were called.

Aaron Elson: Terrorizing?

Nick Paciullo: Yes. And when we got to California in what, Union Station, is that in California? “Everybody put on duty belts, rifles and bayonets.”

What the hell is going on?

At the time we didn’t know what was going on, and we were ready to clean out the streets. And then something must have happened, and instead of fighting the Mexicans they took us to Camp Pendleton.

Aaron Elson: There were riots?

Nick Paciullo: Rioting, and they were doing a lot of crazy things. Zoot suiters. And then Camp Pendleton, and we spent a couple of months there. And in ’43, we hit the Marshall Islands. The first time a fresh Marine division ever hit an island from the States to the enemy.

Aaron Elson: What were your thoughts crossing the ocean?

Nick Paciullo: I didn’t have much thought. I didn’t think of getting killed, shot or anything. We all talked and had a good time, we didn’t say “You’re gonna die” or anything like that.  ... (thumbing through a book on the 4^th Marine Division) ... this is my buddy.

Aaron Elson: Richard D. Anderson?

Nick Paciullo: Yeah. That story.

Aaron Elson: (reading) “... gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while serving with the 4^th Marine Division during action against enemy Japanese forces on Roi Island, Kwajalein Atoll, Mariana Islands, Feb. 1, 1944. Entering a shell crater occupied by three other Marines, Private First Class Anderson” – were you one of the Marines?

Nick Paciullo: Yes.

Aaron Elson: “...Private First Class Anderson was preparing to throw a grenade at an enemy position and it slipped from his hands and rolled toward the men at the bottom of the hole. With insufficient time to retrieve the armed weapon and throw it Private First Class Anderson fearlessly chose to sacrifice himself and save his companions by hurling his body upon the grenade and taking the full impact of the explosion. His personal valor and exceptional spirit of loyalty in the face of almost certain death were in keeping with the highest traditions of the U.S. Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life for his country.”

Nick Paciullo: By the way, our last reunion, a couple of buddies of mine, they live in Washington State, Anderson lived in Washington State, and he was buried at Kwajalein. And they took his body and brought it back to Washington State where his family is.

Aaron Elson: Was he in your platoon?

Nick Paciullo: My squad, yes. And he was the fourth guy that we used to go out with. Very nice guy. Pudlow was killed on Iwo, and McDowell lost his leg on Saipan. I almost lost my eye on Kwajalein, right after that.

 

---

 

Order "Semper Four: An Oral History" for Kindle

 

Order the audiobook "4 Marines"

 

 

A juxtaposition of events

   A few weeks ago through Facebook Cleo Coleman's granddaughter asked if I had the interview I did with Cleo and her uncle Doug on CD, as she would love to hear Cleo's voice again (he passed away in 2006). I searched my computer, and even picked it up, turned it over and shook it a few times, but no audio fell out. Since I did the interview in 1996 and used a transcript for my third book, "A Mile in Their Shoes," I figured the audio is on the hard drive that I rescued from my old computer. Unfortunately, that hard drive is more corrupted than Whitey Bulger and his FBI handlers put together.
   Not one to be easily deterred, I promised Cleo's granddaughter I would re-digitize the original tape, which usually means searching through about 30 cases of 15 cassettes and cursing my lack of organizational ability, except I knew Cleo was in B Company and because I only interviewed a handful of B Company veterans from the 712th, I'd put them all in one case, unlike my A and C Company interviews, which are scattered throughout the three bookshelves which call themselves my archive.
   Around the same time, as I attempt to increase my presence in the Amazon on-demand and Kindle catalogues, I began transcribing one of the four interviews I did with Marine veterans of World War II. Two of the four were already transcribed, and I figured if I transcribed the other two and carefully edited all four, I could put them together in a book and call it "Semper Four."
   And then an odd thing happened. In listening to my interview with Cleo -- in addition to the interview with Cleo and his son I also re-digitized a kind of informal 1994 interview I did with Cleo poolside at the Drawbridge Estates Inn in Fort Mitchell, Ky. -- I heard a passage that was, on an emotional level, eerily similar to an incident described by Bob Hamant that took place on the other side of the world, and which, I daresay, was repeated countless times in countless variations throughout the Second World War.
   Cleo was describing the death of Stanley Muhich, a sergeant in his platoon. Muhich had a bit of a short temper, and this was toward the end of the war, during the battle for Mainz, so it was probably in March of 1945. A round jammed in the barrel of the tank's 75-millimeter cannon, and the only way to free it was to stand in front of the tank and push a long wooden pole with a bell shaped thing called a rammer staff down the barrel. Instead of maneuvering the tank into a relatively safe area, like behind a building or beside a copse of woods, Sergeant Muhich jumped out of the tank, began the process of freeing the round, and was killed by a sniper.
   Sometime that evening, an infantryman marched two young Germans, one of whom may have been the sniper, past the tank. A fellow tanker who'd been a buddy of Muhich's since their days in the horse cavalry in 1941, through three years of training and almost a year of combat, took the two prisoners and shot them both. Coleman recalled that after doing this, the tanker was visibly shaken and his face was white as a sheet.
   Cleo named the tanker who did this but I won't disclose it here, as it's not something the person's descendants should maybe ought to find if they google his name.
   At about the same time as I was digitizing the Coleman interviews, I was transcribing the audio of my interview with Bob Hamant, conducted in 2000 in Cincinnati. Bob was a Marine on the island of Tinian, and I made that interview into a separate two-CD audiobook simply titled "A Marine on Tinian," and then included it in the four-interview audiobook called "Four Marines," the name of which I'm also going to change to "Semper Four."
   Early in the interview, Bob described witnessing the famous "Marianas Turkey Shoot" from on board ship off Saipan. He witnessed an incident close to his ship in which a Japanese plane shot down an American P-38, and the pilot bailed out. As he helplessly headed toward the sea, the Japanese pilot came down to his level and machine gunned him to death in his parachute. Then "about 15" American fighter planes converged on the one Japanese fighter, shot it down, and multiple times raked the sea with their machine guns.
   One of these events occurred in the European Theater of Operations, one in the Pacific, and yet it seemed as if there was a purpose in my processing them at about the same time, as if it were a hint that I should make a blog entry out of them. And so I did!

Four Marines

  It began with a simple, straightforward question, one I've asked in a hundred different interviews.
  "What was your rank?"
  The answer started out fairly simple. "Private ..."  Then it escalated.
  "...Pfc. ... Corporal ... Private ... Pfc. ... Corporal!"
  Followed by a burst of laughter.
  What ensued was a poignant story, involving a small group of rowdy Marines having some fun in San Diego, a Congressional Medal of Honor, Iwo Jima and Kwajalein. The speaker was Nick Paciullo, whom I interviewed in 2002. I didn't realize just how poignant the story was until I edited the interview for my latest oral history audiobook, "Four Marines." It lacks the details an author might add: the weather, the sounds, the scenery, the dialogue, but to me the story is just like out of a movie.
  Nick Paciullo (real audio)
  On Memorial Day in 1998, I participated in a program at a new World War II museum in Eldred, Pa., and interviewed several veterans who attended. Two of those veterans, William M. Scheiterle and Jerome Auman, are included in "Four Marines."
  Paciullo, a veteran of Iwo Jima who also fought in Saipan and the Marianas and was wounded three times, was a neighbor of mine in New Jersey. I interviewed him shortly before the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, an event that triggered serious episodes of post traumatic stress in Paciullo.
  In 2005, Diann Hamant of Cincinnati contacted me through my web site, tankbooks.com, and asked how she could find someone to do an oral history interview with her father. A few months later I attended a reunion of the 712th Tank Battalion in Cincinnati, so I interviewed him myself. Bob Hamant spent a year on the island of Tinian, and witnessed the Enola Gay being prepared for its mission to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
  For more information about World War II Oral History Audiobooks, please visit www.audiomurphy.com