Monday, February 1, 2021

Beware of Booby Trapped Sake


From Ray, Nicholas, John Wayne, Robert Ryan, Don Taylor, and Janis Carter. Flying Leathernecks. Warner Home Video, 2007







[Men talking excitedly]


















Lt. Vern "Cowboy" Blithe : [holding 'requisitioned' bottles] Hey, fellas! Hey! Clancy found it. He says he found it.


















Clancy: One of them mud Marines give me a big beef. Said he had it stashed up in back of a palm tree after he took it off a nip officer which he killed.  I gave him a smash in the kisser -- this mud Marine, that is.  He was smaller than me.  Them guys will lie about anything.

Sake, huh? Now, you gentlemen know the regulations.

Oh, why don't you knock it off?



















Beware of booby traps -- particularly foodstuff or potables.

Potables?


That means booze, gentlemen.


















Lt. Vern "Cowboy" Blithe: I think we can find a little regulation that will allow us to open the bottle.  Who will volunteer?

I will! I will!

Blithe: Eeny, meeny, miney, moe, catch a cowboy by -- [stops & points towards himself] Well,,what do you know?

Attaboy!

















Blithe: You know, this stuff could be booby-trapped [takes a swig] [jokingly] it is! [laughing]









Narrator: On August 6th, Japanese workers set up beacons their nearly finished airstrip then drank sake in celebration.  Martin Clemens despaired; in his diary he wrote, "Is nothing going to happen after all?" The next morning, August 7, 1942, Allied ships began shelling the beach at Guadalcanal.  Neither side really wanted this island.  To the Japanese, Guadalcanal was just another step South; but the Allies could not let them take it.  And so Harry Horsman and 11,000 other Marines found themselves heading toward shore -- to fight a battle that had to be won on an island that didn't really matter. 

Horsman: We were greatly relieved to find out that nobody was firing at us.  Once we got a foot on shore.  Where the hell was the enemy? 

Narrator: The landing was a cakewalk.  The Japanese construction units at the airstrip ran for the hills leaving the Marines to unload their supplies in what seemed like peace.  Thayer Soule was the Marine documentary filmmaker on Guadalcanal. 

Soule: We came in with the first wave, no opposition, of course. And then some officer said, "Here, you aren't doing anything, put that camera down and come and help move these boxes." We came up here with the absolute, irreducible minimum of supplies. We were desperately in need of food, ammunition, everything else.  Fortunately, the Naval bombardment had done only superficial damage and scared the Japs out but they left a whole great big locker full of all kind of canned goods, tons of rice, of course, and then, also,  I have to tell you about the beer that we found.  There were cases and cases of the stuff in one-liter bottles and the fellows tried it and they said it was terrible and the language officer looked at it and he said, "well, I'm not surprised, it's fly spray."

Narrator: From his hideout in the hills, Martin Clemens watched the Marines swarming over the beach.  His months of starvation and fear were finally over. 

Clemens: It took me an awful lot of thought to realize that I really had come down and I wasn't stuck in the bush forever.  But we then had to face up to the problem of how we managed to contact the Americans.  And, uh, I said, "Well, there's only one thing to do and that's to form up in two lines and we'll fly our Union Jack and we'll just march down the beach."

Narrator:  One morning a Marine sentry beheld an amazing sight: two ranks of minimally clad islanders, rifles on shoulders, led by one starving white man in tattered clothing and one small dog. 

Clemens:  The sentry ... raised his rifle but he didn't shoot and ... I tried to say something to him but nothing happened. My mouth wouldn't speak.

Narrator: Clemens was soon given the job of supplying the Marines with scouts.  His days as a spy were over.  The Marines occupied only a small fraction of the island, but it was the crucial fraction: they had the unfinished airstrip.  Vandergrift wrote home: "We have the place we set out to take.  The fighting is over."  But the fighting was not over; it would last for six full months.  [airplane] At the Japanese base in Rabaul, 600 miles away, life was not greatly disturbed by the landing.  Yamamoto expected to wipe the Marines off the island with one brush of the armored sleeve.  He immediately ordered a decisive counterattack by both sea and air




Posted by adagioforstrings at 7:25:00 PM

No comments :

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments ( Atom )