- 2 days ago
Japanese staff officers did not need espionage to study the U.S. Army in 1941 — they could buy its doctrine for 35 cents in Washington. That single manual, and the sentence on its first page warning against rigid rules, became the key to a Guadalcanal story that ends in a night assault at Alligator Creek and a brutal lesson in military reading.
This historical war narration follows Marine captain Charles Brush, the captured Japanese maps near Henderson Field, and the intelligence officer Sherwood Moran, who understood exactly how the enemy had misread the American soldier. It then widens into a Pacific War analysis of Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Kwajalein, Peleliu, and Iwo Jima, showing how both armies adapted, failed, and learned under fire.
If you enjoy World War II history, military documentary storytelling, Guadalcanal stories, Pacific theater analysis, and long-form narrated history, this is built for you. It also fits listeners searching for WW2 stories, war history podcasts, battlefield analysis, and documentary-style military history with a strong narrative hook.
This historical war narration follows Marine captain Charles Brush, the captured Japanese maps near Henderson Field, and the intelligence officer Sherwood Moran, who understood exactly how the enemy had misread the American soldier. It then widens into a Pacific War analysis of Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Kwajalein, Peleliu, and Iwo Jima, showing how both armies adapted, failed, and learned under fire.
If you enjoy World War II history, military documentary storytelling, Guadalcanal stories, Pacific theater analysis, and long-form narrated history, this is built for you. It also fits listeners searching for WW2 stories, war history podcasts, battlefield analysis, and documentary-style military history with a strong narrative hook.
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LearningTranscript
00:00August 19, 1942. A jungle track east of Lunga Point on the island of Guadalcanal a little
00:07before noon. Sixty Marines from Company A, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, had been on the move
00:14since morning. Their commander was Captain Charles Brush. Their orders were unremarkable.
00:20Follow the coastal road toward the Coley Point area and find out what was out there.
00:25They stopped to eat. And while they were stopped, several of them looked up through a clump of fruit
00:31trees and saw something that made no sense. A Japanese patrol was coming down the track.
00:37Not moving tactically. Not spread out. Walking in the open. In daylight. Talking.
00:46Brush did not wait. He sent most of his men straight at them and swung one platoon wide
00:51around their right. Inside an hour, it was over. Thirty-one Japanese lay dead along the track.
00:59Brush had lost three men killed and three wounded. Then his Marines began going through the pockets
01:04of the dead. And that is where this story actually begins. Because the papers on those bodies included
01:12maps. Maps of the American positions around Henderson Field. Brush could not read a word
01:19of Japanese. He did not need to. Years later, he said those maps were so clear as to startle
01:26me. They showed where the Marine line was strong. More importantly, they showed where it was
01:32thin. Something else was wrong, too. Brush noticed that this small group of dead men carried far
01:38too much rank for a patrol that size. And their uniforms were clean. New. These were not men who
01:46had been living in a jungle. They had come off a ship within the last day or two. So a
01:51captain
01:52standing on a jungle track was holding two facts at once. And neither one was comfortable. A large
01:58Japanese force had just landed on his island. And that force already knew exactly where the Americans
02:04were weak. He sent a runner back to division headquarters with the papers. If you want more
02:10stories about the Americans who fought this war. The ones whose names never made the newsreels. A like
02:17and a subscribe genuinely helps this find them. That's all I'll ask. Let's keep going.
02:24At division, the documents landed on the desk of a Marine captain named Sherwood Moran. Moran was 57 years
02:32old. He had lived in Osaka from 1916 until 1940. And he read Japanese the way you read this language.
02:40Working in a blacked-out intelligence shack, he came to a conclusion that would decide the next 36 hours.
02:47These men were the advance element of a much larger force that had recently come down from Truk.
02:54Now hold on to something, because we come back to it at the very end of this story.
02:59Those maps were the small secret. They told the Japanese where the American line was.
03:05They said nothing about what the American line would do. And the Japanese colonel, already marching
03:12toward that line, believed he knew the answer to that question. He had a fixed picture of the American
03:18soldier in his mind. And it was not a picture of an enemy. Japanese planners had assured their troops
03:25the Americans were arrogant, soft, and cowardly. Men with no stomach for fighting in rain, in mist,
03:31or in the dark. Where does a professional army get a picture like that? Some of it was contempt.
03:38Some of it was propaganda, pumped through a whole society for a decade. But part of it,
03:44and this is the part almost no one talks about, came from reading. Japanese officers had spent years
03:51studying the United States Army. Attachés, reports, translations. And in that work,
03:58they had one advantage that cost them almost nothing at all. Because the United States Army
04:03published its doctrine. Openly. Printed it, bound it, and put it on sale. Field Manual 100-5.
04:12Field Service Regulations. Operations. War Department, Washington, May 22, 1941. Approved over the signature
04:23of the Chief of Staff, George Marshall. And down at the bottom of the title page, in small, plain type.
04:30For Sale by the Superintendent of Documents, Washington, D.C. Price. 35 cents. 35 cents.
04:41Remember that number, because it comes back. Not a stolen document. Not a defector's briefcase.
04:48A catalog item. Sold across a counter. Understand what that means. This was not a leak. Nobody stole it.
04:58Nobody was recruited, blackmailed, or hanged for it. The complete operational doctrine of the United
05:04States Army. How it would attack. How it would defend. How it would hold ground. How it would
05:10give orders. Printed by the government printing office. And available to any human being on earth
05:17who could put down the price of a sandwich. The Japanese Army did not have to break into anything.
05:23It only had to read. And here is what makes this story worth your next 40 minutes.
05:30On the very first page, before a single word about tactics, that manual carried one instruction over
05:37Marshall's signature. One sentence. It was the reason the entire book was worthless as a blueprint
05:44for anyone trying to predict the American Army. And it was sitting there, in plain English, in a
05:50document sold to the public. They read that page. They kept reading. And on the night of August 20th,
05:57they walked toward Alligator Creek, still certain the Americans would break.
06:02What that sentence said, and how an army could read it and get it exactly backwards,
06:08is where we go next. Here is the sentence. It sits in the letter of Transmittal,
06:14the short note a chief of staff signs to explain what the book is for. Marshall wrote that set rules
06:21and methods must be avoided. That they limit the imagination and the initiative that win wars.
06:27And then the line that matters most for our story. That fixed rules hand the enemy a pattern of
06:34operations he can more easily counter. Read that again. It is a strange thing to print. The United States
06:43Army had just produced its master doctrine. 280 pages. Everything from how a division marches
06:50to how a river is crossed under fire. And the first thing the chief of staff says about it,
06:57before you reach page 1, is, do not treat this as a set of rules. If you do, the enemy
07:04will learn the
07:05pattern and beat you with it. That is a manual warning you against manuals. Now, put yourself in
07:14the chair I want you in for the next few minutes. You are a Japanese staff officer. It is 1941.
07:22This book is on your desk and your job is to write an assessment of the American army for men
07:28who will
07:28plan a war against it. What do you take from it? You would find the chapter on the exercise of
07:34command,
07:35and there you would find things that are hard to unsee. That the willingness to accept responsibility
07:41is the first quality of a leader. That every man, from the highest commander down to the lowest private,
07:47must remember that doing nothing, missing a chance to act, deserves harsher judgment than making the
07:53wrong decision. Say that slowly. The manual is not warning soldiers against mistakes. It is warning
08:01them against waiting. That a subordinate commander may not use the absence of orders as an excuse for
08:07standing still. If he knows the general plan and cannot reach his superior, he acts and reports afterward.
08:15That an order must not trespass into the business of the man receiving it.
08:19That it should tell him what he must know, and nothing more. That piling up detailed instructions
08:26for every possible contingency does not inspire confidence, and has no place in an order at all.
08:32Now, if you were raised inside the Imperial Japanese Army, what does that sound like? It sounds like an army
08:39that has to beg its junior officers to do something. It sounds like an army so uncertain of its discipline
08:45that it must print in an official document, a reminder that privates should not stand around.
08:52It sounds, and this is the reading that would cost Japan the Pacific, like an army with no method,
08:58no fixed system, nothing solid underneath. And then there is the object itself.
09:05You are holding it. You paid for it. An army that sells its doctrine on a counter in Washington is
09:11either arrogant
09:12beyond words, or it has nothing worth hiding. Either way, weakness.
09:18Hold that assessment for a moment, because I'm about to put something in your other hand.
09:23January 8th, 1941. Four months and two weeks before Marshall signed his manual, the Japanese
09:31army issued its own capstone document, over the signature of the War Minister Hideki Tojo.
09:36It was called the Senjin-kun, the field service code. It was pocket-sized. Every soldier carried one.
09:45And it was not about tactics. It was a moral code. Duty. Honor. Obedience. The subordination of the man
09:54to the emperor. And the instruction that would kill more Japanese soldiers than any American weapon.
10:01Never live to suffer the shame of becoming a prisoner. So set the two books side by side on the
10:08same desk,
10:09in the same year. One army wrote down what its soldiers must be. The other wrote down how its
10:16soldiers should think. And then told them not to follow it too closely. The officers reading in Tokyo
10:22did not see two philosophies. They saw one real army, and one soft one. Which brings us back to
10:31Guadalcanal, and to the last hours before that reading was tested. August 19th, evening.
10:39Russia's captured papers are on Vandegrift's desk, and Vandegrift has a decision to make with almost
10:45nothing to work with. The documents prove a force has landed. They do not say how big or where it
10:52will
10:52hit. He can push out and hunt it, or he can pull his line tight and wait. He is short
10:59of fuel, short of
11:00ammunition, and the navy has gone. He chooses to hold. Colonel Clifton Cates gets the order to extend his
11:09lines. Cates hands it to Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Pollock, whose battalion now has to cover 2,700 yards,
11:17a mile and a half of jungle, beach, and riverbank, for one battalion. Men string barbed wire with bare
11:25hands because nobody has gloves. Machine guns and 37mm guns go in behind sandbags and coconut logs on a
11:33sandbar barely 50 feet wide. And late on the night of August 20th, two marines in a listening post out
11:40in the dark hear movement, fire a few rounds, and pull back to report it to a sergeant named Anthony
11:47Conti. Conti passed it up. The officer on watch was unimpressed. Noises in the dark were a nightly
11:55event on that island, and the division's own after-action report would later say exactly that.
12:01What Conti did next, with no orders and no authority to give any, is the first time in this story
12:08that a
12:09page from a 35-cent manual walks out of the book and into the jungle. What Conti did was nothing
12:15dramatic at all. He went along his section of the line and told his men to stay awake and stay
12:20ready.
12:21That is the whole action. A sergeant, told by an officer that his report did not matter,
12:27decided on his own authority that it did, and quietly prepared his corner of the perimeter
12:32for something nobody above him believed was coming. Nowhere in the Japanese field service code
12:39is there a paragraph covering that. In the American manual there is. And no one on that riverbank had
12:46read it. Not long after, another man came out of the dark. Jacob Vooza, a retired police sergeant
12:53major of the Solomon Islands Constabulary, crawled into Pollock's lines cut open and bleeding.
12:58He had been caught by the Japanese and worked over with blades because he would not tell them where
13:03the marine positions were. Before he would let anyone take him to the aid station, he told Pollock what was
13:09coming and roughly when. So the Americans on that sandbar now knew. And here is the thing that should
13:16stop you. So did the Japanese. Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki knew his advance party had been wiped out.
13:23He knew the Americans had his documents. He knew he had lost surprise entirely. His unit had originally
13:30been earmarked to take Midway. And when that operation died at sea, they were rerouted here,
13:35put on destroyers, and landed near Taivu on August 18th with roughly 900 men. Against a division.
13:43Which he did not know and did not particularly care to find out. On the afternoon of August 20th,
13:49he gathered his officers in a hamlet called Rengo and gave out the plan. Move west after dark. Take
13:56the ground between the creek and Lunga Point. He expected to brush the defenders aside. Understand what
14:03is happening here because it is the hinge of the entire story. Ichiki has new information. The situation
14:10on which his plan was built no longer exists. And the plan does not change. Around two in the morning
14:17on August 21st, a marine fired a green flare and the sandbar lit up. There were hundreds of men on
14:25it.
14:26Coming across in a mass. Marines up and down that line later described the same detail with a kind of
14:33disbelief. The Japanese were talking as they came. No scouts out front. No spacing. The Americans held their
14:43fire until the leading men were halfway across the spit. Then the whole line went off at once. Rifles,
14:50machine guns, and 37mm guns firing canister, which turns an anti-tank gun into an enormous shotgun.
14:58In the space of a few seconds, the front of that assault ceased to exist. But the fighting on the
15:05sandbar
15:06came down to individual men in the dark. Private John Joseph of George Company watched a shape rise
15:13out of the creek in front of his hole and crawl toward him. When the Japanese soldier lifted his head
15:19over the lip, Joseph swung his 1903 Springfield and hit him in the face with the butt of it.
15:26Corporal Dean Wilson put his Browning automatic rifle on a group coming at him, squeezed, and got a click.
15:33The weapon was dead. He picked up a machete and went at them with it, and killed three men before
15:39the line
15:39closed back up. Some of the Japanese got across and took a stretch of the American positions.
15:45Pollack did not draw up a detailed scheme to get them back. He sent Lieutenant George Cordea's platoon
15:51and told him to take those positions. Cordea, from Ohio, then did something no manual prescribes.
15:59He broke his platoon into three pieces and gave each a different job. He took one group forward himself,
16:05to the strong point on the spit the Marines would come to call Hell's Point. He sent Sergeant James
16:12Hancock to a 37mm gun position, and he sent Sergeant Charles Spakes out onto the sandbar itself. Not to
16:20attack, but to sit there as a block and cut down anyone trying to go back. That last decision is
16:26the
16:26one to notice. A sergeant was placed to close the enemy's exit. Nobody senior ordered it. A lieutenant looked
16:34at the ground and worked out that the fight would be decided by who could leave. Cordea took a bullet
16:40through the arm and stayed with his men. He received the Navy Cross. The citation credits his leadership
16:46with stopping the most serious threat of the night. On the far bank, Ichiki was being asked by at least
16:52one
16:52of his own company commanders to stop. He refused. He ordered his first and third companies to work around
17:00the American flank, then cancelled it, and instead brought up a 70mm gun and his machine
17:06guns to blast the emplacements head on. When that failed, he scraped together a provisional company from what
17:13was left of four others and sent them wading chest deep through the surf along the beach to come in
17:18from the
17:19seaside. The Marines put water-cooled brownings and 75mm artillery on them in the water. That was the end
17:27of the flanking attempt. By first light on August 21st, the sandbar and the water around it were carpeted,
17:35and the survivors of Ichiki's command, several hundred men, did not withdraw. They dug into a
17:41coconut grove on the east bank and waited for dark so they could do it all again. Which handed the
17:48Americans a problem and about four hours to solve it. What Colonel Cates decided in his command post
17:54that morning is the reason a general in Rabaul would shortly refuse to believe his own reports.
18:00Cates called his commanders together while the shooting was still going on. The division operations
18:05officer, Colonel Gerald Thomas, was there. And the mood in that tent was not defensive. Nobody intended
18:12to let several hundred armed men sit in a grove until nightfall and pick their own moment. The
18:18decision took minutes. Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Cresswell would take the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines,
18:25upstream, cross the creek well inland where nobody was watching, and swing north, coming down on the
18:31rear and the inland flank of the Japanese position. Not to push them. To close the box. Think about what
18:40the men on the far bank had been told to expect. Americans who could not fight in the dark. Americans
18:47who would fold when pressed. Instead, some seven hours after being attacked, the Americans were the
18:55ones maneuvering. By mid-morning, Cresswell had three rifle companies moving north through the jungle,
19:01with a fourth working along the riverbank. Lieutenant Nick Stevenson's Charlie Company ran into a
19:07Japanese platoon near a place the Marines called Block 4 Village. The Japanese fixed bayonets and charged
19:14them across open ground in daylight. Stevenson's men shot them down and kept walking. In the early
19:22afternoon, four light tanks came over the sandbar into the grove. M3 Stuarts from Company B of the 1st Tank
19:30Battalion led by Lieutenant Leo Case. Small vehicles, a 37mm gun apiece, and against infantry with no
19:39anti-tank weapons, decisive. Richard Tragaskis, the war correspondent, watched them working among the
19:46palms and described it as something almost impossible to believe. The Japanese had no answer except to run
19:53at the tanks with mines and grenades, which cost them men and stopped nothing. When Kate sent word for
20:01Case to pull his tanks back, Case argued with him and stayed because he was in the middle of finishing
20:07it.
20:08One Japanese Sergeant, Saranobu Okada, lived through the afternoon by lying absolutely still
20:14while a steward drove over him. The root of a coconut tree took the weight of the tracks. He waited
20:21until
20:21dark and slipped away. By late afternoon on August 21st, it was done. Of the roughly 917 men
20:30in Ichiki's first element, all but about 128 were dead. 15 were taken prisoner. The Marines lost 34 men
20:40killed and 75 wounded. Stay with those numbers a moment, because the ratio is the whole point.
20:47This was not American mass. There was no fleet offshore. The Navy had left. There was no air armada.
20:55The Marines were short of food and short of ammunition, and they had been on that island
21:00exactly two weeks. What they had was a defensive line that had been extended on a hunch,
21:06a sergeant who kept his men awake against instructions, a lieutenant who divided his
21:11platoon three ways, and a battalion that went around the flank before lunch.
21:16The Marines also collected the wreckage of a regiment. 70-millimeter guns, some 20 mortars,
21:23around two dozen Nambu machine guns, 700 rifles, and a dozen flamethrowers that had been brought
21:29along to burn Americans out of positions the Japanese never reached.
21:34Now, the part of this that I most want you to remember. When the report reached Japanese
21:39headquarters, a general's reaction was that it had to be a false report. Not an exaggeration. False.
21:47When it was confirmed, the officers around him could not process it either. Imperial General
21:53Headquarters went on belittling the enemy on Guadalcanal, still assuming that once enough
21:58Japanese troops got ashore, the Americans would give up. Look closely at the shape of that reaction,
22:05because it is the most important intellectual event of this entire story. Japan had just received perfect,
22:12unambiguous, blood-written evidence that its assessment of the American soldier was wrong.
22:18And it did not revise the assessment. It revised everything else. Ichiki must have blundered.
22:25The terrain must have been bad. The numbers must be inflated. Why would a professional general staff
22:31do that? Because what they had concluded from reading the Americans was never really an intelligence
22:37judgment. It was a moral one. Their entire theory of war rested on the idea that spirit beats material,
22:44that a disciplined man who does not fear death overcomes a better equipped man who does.
22:50If the Americans on that creek were what the manual said they were, an army where a sergeant acts
22:56without permission and a lieutenant redesigns a fight in the dark, then that theory was not damaged.
23:02It was dead. And with it, the justification for the war they had already started.
23:08It is much easier to disbelieve a casualty report. On the American side, the reaction was the exact
23:15opposite. And it is worth sitting with the contrast. Vandegrift wrote to the commandant of the Marine
23:20Corps and told him plainly that he had never heard of or read about fighting like this. Men who would
23:27not surrender. Wounded who waited for a Marine to come close and then killed them both with a grenade.
23:32He was not congratulating himself on a victory. He was reporting, upward, that his understanding of the
23:39enemy was incomplete and needed fixing. One army had its beliefs contradicted and defended them.
23:46The other had its beliefs contradicted and wrote a letter. And that difference, not the machine guns,
23:54not the canister, not the 37mm guns, is what actually decided the Pacific.
24:01Which brings us to the man in the blacked-out shack with the captured papers. Because within a year,
24:08Sherwood Moran would produce a document of his own. And it would do something to the American war effort
24:13that no Japanese officer holding any manual bought in any bookshop in Washington would ever have predicted.
24:20July 17, 1943. Division Intelligence Section. Headquarters. 1st Marine Division.
24:29Sherwood Moran sat down and typed out a letter to a young interpreter who was just starting the job.
24:34It ran to a few pages. It had no official standing. It was, on its face, one older man giving
24:41advice to a
24:42younger one. It is still taught in the American military today. Moran had spent nearly a quarter of
24:48a century in Osaka before the war, doing missionary and social work, which is a strange background for
24:53a Marine captain in his 50s on a malarial island. But it gave him something no training course could.
25:00He knew the country these prisoners came from. He knew the rivers and the bridges and the neighborhoods.
25:06And what he had worked out on Guadalcanal, by trial and error, with men who were supposed to be
25:11unbreakable, was this. Do not stand the prisoner at attention. Do not shout. Sit down with him.
25:21Ask him which village he is from. And then say that you know that village, that you know the river
25:26there,
25:26and the bridge at the end of his street. Men talked. Not a few of them. Most of them.
25:33Now here is where this connects straight back to that pocket-sized code with Tojo's name on it.
25:39So hold the two things together. The Japanese soldier had been instructed that capture was a
25:45disgrace worse than death. So the Imperial Army never seriously trained its men for what to do if
25:51they were taken. Why prepare a soldier for a situation that must never occur? There was no drill for
25:58resisting interrogation. No rehearsed story. Nothing. A man who found himself alive and in
26:05American hands had already fallen off the edge of everything he had been taught. And often had no
26:11framework left except gratitude toward the first person who treated him decently. Japan's greatest
26:17source of discipline had produced its greatest intelligence vulnerability. And an elderly marine
26:23captain in a hut found the hole by being kind. Which is not a sentence you expect in a war
26:28story.
26:29But the part that matters most for us is what happened next. Moran did not keep his method to
26:35himself. He wrote it down and it went up the chain. And rather than being filed, it spread. He was
26:43eventually brought to Washington to retrain interrogators and to revise the interrogation manual itself.
26:48A manual which, until then, had required every prisoner to be kept standing at attention.
26:55Read that again. A 57-year-old captain, working out of a shack on an island the Navy had abandoned,
27:03rewrote a United States manual from below. Nothing remotely comparable was happening on the other side.
27:10And Moran was not alone eccentric. Look at what the Americans had already built to read the enemy.
27:15On November 1, 1941, five weeks before Pearl Harbor, the Army opened a secret Japanese
27:24language school in an abandoned aircraft hangar at Crissy Field in San Francisco. The budget for it was
27:30$2,000. It had four instructors and 60 students, and 58 of those students were Nisei, American-born
27:38sons of Japanese immigrants. Many of them would go on translating captured documents for the rest of the war,
27:45while their own families sat behind wire in American camps. More than 6,000 men would pass
27:52through that school. $2,000 and a borrowed hangar. That is what the entire American effort to read the
27:59Japanese Army looked like at the start. Then came the other half, and this is the part that should
28:05really land. Beginning in 1944, the War Department started printing a series of pamphlets under a title that
28:13tells you everything. Combat lessons. Rank and file in combat. What they're doing. How they do it.
28:22Not lessons from generals. Rank and file. Inside are battalion commanders, describing what a German rear
28:29guard actually does on a mountain road. Sergeants explaining how to patrol and how not to. Engineers
28:37passing on field improvisations. Notes on what worked at Okinawa. A whole section on Japanese
28:43tricks. Written by men who had just survived them. Comments printed alongside. Sometimes correcting the
28:51soldier. Sometimes warning that this was one man's experience in one theater. They were prepared by
28:57direction of the chief of staff. Drawn straight from combat reports. Printed by the government printing
29:02office and pushed back down to the men in the line. Nine issues of them. Now put that beside the
29:09picture
29:09we built earlier. Of a staff officer in Tokyo with a 35-cent book open on his desk. He was
29:17not wrong
29:18about what was in the manual. He read it correctly. His mistake was thinking the manual was the army.
29:24It wasn't. It was a snapshot of a moving object. The real American system was a loop. A private
29:33does something clever in a jungle. A captain writes it down. It goes up. It gets printed. It comes back
29:40down. And every unit in the theater has it within weeks. The book on his desk was simply where that
29:46loop happened to be standing in May of 1941. By the time he had finished translating it, the thing it
29:53described had already moved. You cannot steal a process by buying its output. But before you
30:00decide this was tidy, understand what the loop actually cost, and who paid. Because the American
30:06system did not learn by thinking. It learned by bleeding, then reading its own wounds. And in November
30:13of 1943, on a coral island of less than 300 acres, the United States Marine Corps was about to pay
30:20for a
30:20set of lessons in 76 hours. A bill that came to more than 3,000 men.
30:27August 1943, New Zealand.
30:30Vice Admiral Raymond Spruance flew in from Pearl Harbor to meet Major General Julian Smith
30:35and the senior staff of the 2nd Marine Division in secret, and told them to prepare an assault on
30:41the Gilbert Islands in November. The target was Baishio, a flat splinter of coral in Tarawa Atoll,
30:49with a bomber strip on it and elite Japanese naval troops dug in around it.
30:54The division's operations officer was a lieutenant colonel named David Shoup, and he did what the men
31:00in this story keep doing. He looked at the chart, saw the barrier reef running around the island,
31:06and understood immediately that landing craft would ground on it. That his marines would be
31:11dumped in open water hundreds of yards from the beach. Then he remembered something he had watched at
31:18Guadalcanal. The landing vehicle tract. The alligator. It was not an assault vehicle. It was an unarmored
31:26truck that happened to swim, built to haul supplies over the surf. Nobody had designed it to carry
31:33riflemen into fire. But it had tracks, and tracks would climb a reef. So Shoup went to Major Henry
31:41Drews of the 2nd Amphibian Tractor Battalion and started working out whether a logistics vehicle
31:46could be turned into an assault craft in the time available. That conversation, two officers deciding to
31:53repurpose the wrong machine because the right one did not exist, is the reason anyone got ashore at
31:58Basio at all. And it still went catastrophically wrong. November 20th, 1943. The naval bombardment
32:08stopped, and the air strike that was supposed to follow it did not appear for another half hour,
32:13leaving the defenders half an hour of quiet to come out and man their guns.
32:18Boats collided in the dark before dawn. Salt water shorted out the radios in the Amtraks,
32:24so units that landed could not talk to each other or to the ships. Men came ashore on the wrong
32:30beaches.
32:32Companies were separated, platoons scattered, and thousands of marines, who had to come the last
32:38several hundred yards on foot, did it wading chest deep across a reef, with machine guns firing down the
32:44length of it. 76 hours later, Basio was taken. The cost? 997 marines and 30 navy corpsmen and doctors
32:55dead. 88 more missing and presumed dead. 2,233 marines wounded. 3,407 casualties on an island you could
33:08walk the length of in an hour. Set that against the campaign we started with. Guadalcanal cost the
33:15marines a comparable number of casualties, over six months. Tarawa did it in three days.
33:23Shoup's amphibian tractor battalion lost more than half its men, and all but 35 of its 125 vehicles.
33:31Now watch what the Americans did with that, and watch the calendar while you do,
33:36because the calendar is the whole argument. The battle ended on November 23rd. On November 30th,
33:43seven days later, Rear Admiral Richmond Turner completed a study of what had gone wrong.
33:50Not a defense of the operation. A list of what had to change. More aerial reconnaissance. More submarine
33:58scouting. Reconnaissance and demolition of obstacles before the landing, not after. More destroyers
34:05standing by for gunfire on call. More landing craft. And three times the pre-landing bombardment,
34:12with three times the ammunition to sustain it. Meanwhile, Admiral Nimitz's own planning officer,
34:19Captain James Steele, was compiling a separate document. Its title was A Hundred Mistakes Made on
34:27Tarawa. Stop on that title for a second. A Hundred Mistakes. Written down, numbered, circulated inside
34:35a service that had just lost a thousand men taking the objective. Nobody was court-martialed for writing
34:42it. It was the point of writing it. Now ask yourself what that document would have been called
34:48in an army whose founding text instructed every soldier that he must never live to experience
34:53shame. It would not have been called anything. It would not have existed.
34:58Ten weeks later, the Americans went into the Marshall Islands. January 31st and February 1st, 1944.
35:07Kwajaleen Atoll. The 7th Infantry Division of the Army on Kwajaleen Island. The 4th Marine Division on
35:14ROI and Namur to the north. New and redesigned Amtraks. Vastly heavier and longer. Preliminary
35:22bombardment. Reconnaissance done properly beforehand. In four days, they killed more than 8,000 Japanese
35:30defenders. American dead, 372. 3,400 casualties in November. Ten weeks of reading their own failure.
35:40Then, a fortified atoll taken, for a fraction of the price. And here, finally, we can start answering
35:48the question we opened with. What the Japanese staff officers found in that manual was a sentence
35:54telling the American army not to have a fixed pattern. They read it as an admission. An army
36:01with no method, no system, nothing underneath. But it was the method. The method was revision.
36:08The instruction on the first page was not describing a gap in American doctrine.
36:13It was describing the mechanism by which American doctrine would be replaced,
36:17repeatedly, at speed, by the men who had just been shot at. You could buy the manual. You could
36:23translate every word of it. What you could not buy was an institution capable of printing a document
36:29called A Hundred Mistakes and mailing it to itself. And yet, and this is the part that keeps this from
36:37being a comfortable story, Japan did eventually change. In the middle of August 1944, two years after
36:44Guadalcanal, the High Command issued a new provisional manual for the defense of islands. When the Marines
36:51met what was in it, at a place called Pelelu, it very nearly broke them. September 15, 1944. Pelelu in
37:00the
37:00Palau Islands. The man who had built the defenses there was Colonel Kunio Nakagawa of the 2nd Regiment,
37:0614th Division, 14th Division, and he had thrown away almost everything Ichiki had believed. No mass
37:12charge. No attempt to destroy the invaders at the water's edge. No spiritual sweep of the armored sleeve.
37:19Nakagawa took the ridge in the middle of the island, the Umur Brogol, and turned it into a honeycomb.
37:25More than 500 limestone caves, connected by tunnels, with firing positions cited to cover each other,
37:31and steel doors that could be rolled shut when the bombardment came. The Japanese called this
37:37approach fukaku. Let the Americans land. Let them come inland into ground you have measured.
37:43Then make every yard cost. And it worked. The Marines came ashore expecting a few days.
37:50The high ground opened up on the beach and on the water behind it, and around 60 amphibious vehicles
37:55were destroyed getting men to the sand. The few days became weeks. Marine and army casualties in that
38:03battle ran to roughly 40 percent of the men engaged. I want to give you one company, because a battle
38:10of
38:10that size stops meaning anything otherwise. On the far left of the American landing was a piece of coral
38:17called the Point, and Captain George Hunt's Company K was given the job of taking it. They took it.
38:25Then they held it. And by dusk, that company was down to the strength of a platoon, with no friendly
38:32unit
38:33in contact on either side, and radios that worked only well enough to beg for help.
38:39Just before dark, one amphibious tractor made it into them. It carried grenades, mortar rounds, and water.
38:48It took their wounded out when it left. That was the entire resupply. A single vehicle,
38:55a handful of ammunition, and a company that had already lost most of its men holding the flank of
39:02the whole landing, through the night, on what it was given. Nobody in Washington wrote a paragraph
39:09telling George Hunt to do that. Nobody could have. Five months later, at Iwo Jima, Lieutenant General
39:17Tadamichi Kuribayashi took the same idea further. He forbade the Banzai Charge outright. He refused to
39:25let his officers throw men away in glorious frontal attacks. He dug his garrison into volcanic rock and
39:32told each of his soldiers to kill ten Americans before dying. On the first night, the American
39:39commanders offshore sat waiting for the great suicidal counterattack that always came. And it did not come.
39:46So here is the uncomfortable truth in this story. And I am not going to dodge it. Japan did finally
39:54learn.
39:55And when it did, it inflicted the two most expensive battles of the Pacific on the United States.
40:02But look very carefully at what Japan actually learned. Because this is where the whole thing
40:08resolves. Nakagawa and Kuribayashi did not find a way to win. They were not trying to. The purpose of
40:17that new doctrine was not to defeat the American forces, or hold the islands, or restore the position.
40:23Its purpose was to make the price of each island high enough that the United States might decide the
40:29war was not worth finishing. That is what two years of Japanese adaptation produced. Not a theory of
40:35victory. A theory of cost. Meanwhile, the American loop was doing something structurally different.
40:43Every American revision we have looked at, the Amtrak used as an assault craft, the demolition team sent in
40:49ahead, tripling the bombardment, the tank and infantry teams that came later, the interrogator who sat down
40:56instead of shouting. Every one of them was an attempt to accomplish the mission and bring more men home.
41:03One system was optimizing for winning. The other, by 1944, was optimizing for dying expensively.
41:11And there is one more turn, and it is the sharpest one. Look at what Kuribayashi actually did.
41:18He rejected the fixed doctrinal pattern that his own army had followed since Manchuria.
41:23He judged his ground and built his defense around that ground, rather than around the approved method.
41:29He refused to let a prescribed form of attack override his reading of the situation.
41:34He was, in other words, doing exactly what the letter at the front of that 35-cent manual had told
41:41American
41:41commanders to do in May of 1941. Set rules and methods must be avoided. They hand the enemy a pattern
41:49he can counter.
41:51Japan had that sentence. Japan had it in translation, legally, years before the first shot.
41:58It was the single most valuable line in the entire book. And it was free and public, and their officers
42:06read
42:06straight past it. Because an army whose capstone document was a code of obedience could not imagine
42:13that a description of flexibility was a description of strength. By the time they came around to the idea,
42:20it had cost them the Solomons, the Gilberts, the Marshalls, the Marianas, and the Philippines.
42:26And they arrived at it in caves, with no supply, doing arithmetic on how many Americans each of their
42:33men could take with him. One more detail, and it closes the circle on the document itself.
42:39The manual those officers studied, Field Manual 100-5, May 22, 1941, was superseded on June 15, 1944.
42:51Replaced. Rewritten by an army that had spent three years finding out what was wrong with it.
42:58Which means that in August of 1944, when the Imperial High Command finally issued its new
43:04manual for defending islands, the American doctrine it had spent a decade studying had already been dead
43:11for two months. Nobody had told them. It had been on sale the whole time.
43:17Go back to the jungle track east of Lunga Point. August 19, 1942, a little before noon.
43:24Sixty men stopped to eat. A captain, who could not read Japanese, turning over papers he did not
43:30understand, working out from the cleanliness of a dead man's uniform, that something very large had
43:36just come ashore. Everything in this story runs through that hour. Not because it was decisive,
43:42it was a skirmish, thirty-one men killed on a jungle path. But because of what happened afterward.
43:50Brush did not sit on it. He sent it up. It reached a man who could read it. That man
43:56reached a general,
43:57who changed his line. A sergeant, told he was imagining things, kept his men awake anyway.
44:04A lieutenant broke his platoon into three and put a man behind the enemy to close the door.
44:10None of those men had orders covering their situation. All of them acted. And that, in the end,
44:18is the entire answer to the question we started with. What became of them?
44:23Jacob Vooza, who crawled into the marine lines with his throat and chest opened, was decorated by
44:29Vandegrift with the Silver Star, and later received the Legion of Merit, and from the British, the George
44:34Medal. He served his own people for the rest of his life. District headman, president of the Guadalcanal
44:41Council, a member of the Protectorate's Advisory Council. In 1979, the Queen knighted him.
44:49He died in March of 1984, at somewhere past 80 years old, and he was buried in his United States
44:56Marine Corps tunic. Sherwood Moran went back to Japan after the war, back to Osaka, back to the
45:03same work he had been doing since 1916, among the same people whose sons he had interviewed on Guadalcanal.
45:10He lived until 1983. The letter he typed in that intelligence section,
45:15advice from one man to a younger one, is still issued to American interrogators today.
45:21Clifton Cates, who decided that morning that the Japanese would not be allowed to lie in that grove
45:27until dark, went on to command a division at Iwo Jima and became the 19th Commandant of the Marine Corps.
45:36David Shoup, who worked out that an unarmored supply vehicle could climb a reef,
45:41was wounded at Baishio, refused to leave, and received the Medal of Honor.
45:47He became the 22nd Commandant, and then spent his last years as one of the most prominent critics
45:53of another American war, which is its own kind of proof about the institution that raised him.
46:01Kiyonao Ichiki died on the sandbar or near it. Kunio Nakagawa died in his caves on Pelelu.
46:11Tadamichi Kuribayashi died on Iwo Jima. Between them, they commanded some of the most capable soldiers
46:18in the world, and not one of them was ever permitted to say out loud in an official document that
46:26the army
46:26had been wrong about something. That was not their failing. It was the system they served.
46:35And most of the Americans in this story survive in the record as a line or two.
46:40Anthony Conti, who told his men to stay awake. John Joseph, who met a man climbing into his foxhole
46:47with the butt of a Springfield. Dean Wilson, whose rifle failed and who picked up a machete.
46:53James Hancock and Charles Spakes, sent to a gun and to a sandbar by a lieutenant who was bleeding from
47:00the arm. They appear for a sentence each, and then they are gone, into other islands or home, to lives
47:07the record
47:07does not follow. That is what the loop was actually made of. Not doctrine. Them. And the manual?
47:16Field Manual 100-5, 1941, the one that sold for 35 cents to anyone on earth who wanted a copy,
47:24was reprinted in 1992 by the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth as a military classic.
47:33Half a century after it was written, the American army was still handing it to its own officers,
47:39not as a set of rules to follow, but as an example of how to think. The historian who introduced
47:46that
47:46reprint called it a classic piece of doctrine writing, remarkable for the clarity of its prose.
47:53It is also, quietly, the most misread document of the Pacific War.
47:59So, what did Japanese staff officers find in an American manual anyone could buy?
48:06They found the truth, printed plainly and priced at pocket change. An army that had written down,
48:13and published, its own instructions for not relying on written instructions.
48:19They read it as weakness, and in their own army, it would have been. That was the whole mistake. Not
48:27a
48:27failure of intelligence. A failure of imagination. The information was never hidden from them. What
48:35was hidden from them was that such an army could exist at all.
48:41A failure of intelligence. A failure of intelligence. A failure of intelligence.
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