AFTER TWO YEARS

Home after landing with the Marines on Tarawa in the bloodiest battle U.S. soldiers ever fought, TIME Correspondent Robert Sherrod wrote an office memo:

When I came back from Australia in August 1942, everybody said I was crazy, and perhaps I was. I went around Cassandra-fashion, crying: "We are losing the war--you don't realize it, but we are losing the war!''

I knew we could make the machines of war. But I didn't know whether we had the heart to fight a war. Our men didn't want to fight. Their generation had been told in its teens and at the voting age that it was not necessary to fight, that peace was the most important thing in the world. Our men just wanted to go home.

Attu and a Sergeant. Then last spring I went to the Aleutians. In its early stages, the Battle of Attu was probably the worst bungled job of this war, barring New Georgia. But the Battle of Attu didn't make me feel any worse. In this primitive, man-against-man fighting, enough of our men rose up to win. The stupid little brown men finally cinched the battle for us by taking out their hand grenades and blowing their own guts out.

I think Attu can be told in the story of the Sergeant. On top of one of those snowy, marrow-chilling peaks the platoon leader, a second lieutenant, ordered the Sergeant to take a squad and go over there and knock out that Jap machine-gun nest. The Sergeant just stared. His mouth was open. He was horrified. He had been in the Army two years; now all of a sudden he was told to go out and risk his life.

In disgust the second lieutenant said: "All right, Sergeant, you just sit here. If any of you bastards have got the guts, follow me. A lot of our men are getting killed by that machine gun."

Well, about ten men followed the second lieutenant. That machine gun didn't kill any more Americans.

That afternoon the Sergeant went to the second lieutenant and said: "Sir, I am ashamed of myself. Give me another chance." There was another ma chine gun to be knocked out by then. So the second lieutenant ordered the Sergeant to take a squad and knock it out. The Sergeant did just that. In fact, he knocked it out personally. The necessity of risking his life had finally been demonstrated to him.

The soldiers who were on Attu will do a much better job next time because they know now what war is like. They know that men get killed.

Amateur to Pro. That leads me up to the point I want to make upon returning from the Pacific again: slowly but definitely we are becoming professionals in war. It has taken us a long time but we are beginning to learn.

Therefore, we will win the war. We have the best machines. We needed only to have the necessity of fighting demonstrated to us. One reason the press has fallen down so very badly in this war: it has failed to demonstrate to the people--and to the soldiers--the necessity of fighting.

I have often wondered, even in the middle of a battle, why men fight. Why didn't the Sergeant on Attu do as he was told? Why did he volunteer the next time?

I think men fight for two reasons: 1) ideals, 2) esprit de corps. Since we in the U.S. have done such an abom inable job of educating a generation, few of our men fight for things they believe in--they don't know what to believe in.

The Marine Corps, which must be the finest organization of fighting men the world has ever seen, does not know what to believe in either--except the Marine Corps. The marines fight solely on esprit de corps. It simply is inconceivable to a marine that he would let another marine down.

Most men are afraid to die. That was not true of the marines who went into Tarawa. They spent their lives recklessly. When I got back to Pearl Harbor some Army officers asked me whether the doctors hadn't doped the marines before they waded ashore through that machine-gun fire. I couldn't help being amused.

Last Post. On the morning of the third day at Tarawa we had begun burying our own dead, many of whom had been in the water for two days. It was more gruesome than I can describe. This was no dignified burial--a man's last ceremony should be dignified but this wasn't. The bulldozer, whose driver paid scant attention to the sniper who fired at him all the while, scooped a hole three feet deep. The marines, not even covered by a blanket, were laid in the hole. The bulldozer pushed some more dirt over them and that was all there was to it (until burial parties got around later to a formal funeral). Lines of medical corpsmen were bringing the bodies in as fast as they could find stretchers and wade into the shallow water.

One marine taken from the water had suffered the greatest indignity of them all. His head had been blown off completely; both his arms were gone. I was nauseated, although I had become inured to almost anything by that time. I turned to the big, red-bearded marine gunner who stood beside me and I said: "What a hell of a way to die." The gunner looked me in the eye and said: "No, it's not. You can't pick any better way."

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