You Forget All About Fear
Letter from Harry Joseph Watkins, Jr.
to his parents, Ludwina and Harry Senior.
Harry Joseph Watkins was a telephone lineman attached to the 81mm mortar platoon of First Battalion, 24th Marines. In combat, the youth from Scranton, Pennsylvania was supposed to keep the wires connecting the “tubes” to the battalion command post in good working order. Watkins got his first trial by fire on Namur in February 1944, and naturally wanted to tell his family about his experiences.
A lengthy excerpt from Watkins’ letter about Namur ran in The Scrantonian Sun on 28 May 1944. Staff writer Robert Housen added the following commentary:
We Can Lick Japs, Says Marine Who Has Hunted Among Them
Cpl. Harry Watkins Writes to Parents, Telling Them of Fighting Experience
A six-foot, 210-pound husky, Corporal Watkins is with a mortar unit now. He was active in baseball and football in school. He sent his mother a grass skirt and all mentioned souvenirs.
We had mail call yesterday, and you may laugh, but I received 76 letters. I thought I’d never get through reading them, but they were really welcome. All of them. Those V-mail letters are a good time and paper saver, but they are nothing like a real letter. Tell Jerry thanks.[1]
You spoke in one of your letters that I may have gotten seasick, but no, I didn’t even get a little sick. We were on the water for quite some time, too. When we went ashore, we had to fight for it, and we did pretty well.
Boy, to go through a battle like that really makes a guy a man if he isn’t already one. We had the Navy behind us more than anyone could think. They really plastered the beach before we took over. When we hit the island, we kept the Japs on the run and didn’t give them a chance even to breathe.
In the scrap we got a large number of high-ranking Jap officers, including a vice-admiral.[2] You could tell the moment some were around, either dead or alive.[3] I’ll tell you most of them were dead.
We took them over so fast that our casualties were very light. Our whole platoon came out without a man being scratched.[4] Our worst problem, though, was that of the snipers at night. I’m telling you the first night we were on the island, I said more prayers than I could think of. Some of our boys who never went to church on Sundays said they knew plenty of prayers there.
To make matters worse, it rained most of the night we were under fire. We lay in our foxholes that night, soaked to the skin, like mud rats. But when morning came through trouble broke loose.[5] We secured the whole island around noon of the next day. Well, our job was done and all we did was lay around for almost two weeks. On the evening that we boarded ship, the Japs bombed us, but didn’t do much damage. They came in so high that they couldn’t cause any real trouble. So that was all to that story. Oh yes, a B-24 Liberator that was damaged in a scrap landed the evening before we left. It was the first bomber to land on the air strip. You should have heard the boys cheer the pilot and his crew. He made a perfect landing with a damaged plane on a bad air strip.
After the affair was all over, the boys took off souvenir hunting (I among them). We had Jap beer, saki, pineapples and plenty of canned goods. The Japs lived underground like rats, and incidentally there were plenty of rats also.
I got a Jap flag, a watch, and a piece of a Jap Zero for Jerry. The only thing wrong with the watch is that the crystal is broken and a hand is off it, but otherwise It runs well.
Well, there are plenty of incidents I’d like to tell you about, but it just isn’t possible to do so. All I can say is that a fellow really has to get into it to know what it is. It can’t be described at all. I’m telling you we have plenty of tough boys in our outfit, but there isn’t one of them that will tell you he wasn’t scared because we all were at some time or other. Once you get there, though, you forget all about fear until you get time to think.
I also think that the Japs will admit that the Marines are tough and when they want to be, yes, merciless.
We took a few prisoners, very few, and among them an officer who was plenty scared and said they were merciless. It could be so, because our boys were pretty sore at them after we heard of some of the things they do to our men.
To sum it all up, hunting rats was a field day. We captured one of them and he said, “You may have captured the Marshall Islands, but you’ll never get Pearl Harbor back.” The boys really laughed at him. Why none [sic; probably “some” – ed.] of the Japs even thought they were in California.[6] That shows you what they are told and what they know. All I can say is that they were a bunch of punks. How’s that? We Americans can lick these Japs any time, any day, any place. Send me some pogie bait.[7]
Footnotes
[1] Harry’s younger brother, Gerald Watkins.
[2] Vice-admiral Monzo Akiyama commanded Japanese forces in the Kwajalein atoll. He was killed on Kwajalein itself, not Roi-Namur, on 25 January 1944.
[3] The phenomenon of being able to “smell” Japanese troops starts appearing in letters from the battalion around this time, and is repeated in countless anecdotes from across the Pacific theater.
[4] Ironically, Namur was so small that the 81mm mortars of Watkins’ platoon could not be used effectively without endangering friendly troops. They fired a short mission on the morning of 2 February, but otherwise were largely idle during the short battle.
[5] Likely a reference to a Japanese counterattack that hit the lines of B/1/24 early on the morning of 2 February 1944.
[6] There are some notable similarities in Watkins’ letter and those written by 1Lt. Philip E. Wood, Jr. (A/1/24) – notably the specific phrase “hunting rats” and the anecdote from the prisoner: “Interestingly enough, one of the few Jap prisoners that we took, a lance corporal, said ‘Well you may have taken Kwajalein, but you still haven’t gotten Pearl Harbor and the California coast back yet!'” [Letter #66, 28 April 1944]
[7] “Pogie bait” is Marine slang for candy or sweets.