Books: Twelve Days of Battle

The ASSAULT (216 pp.] — Allen R. Matthews—Simon & Schuster ($2.50).

At 32, Allen Matthews was the oldest man in his Marine company, and known to the rest as “Pop.” By the twelfth day of the battle for Iwo Jima, only three men were left of his 32-man platoon. Then, from Iwo’s craggy, ridge-locked plateau came the whee-ee-eet-whee-ee-eet of the moaning Minnies.* There was a moment of blackness, a scream, and then silence.

Private Matthews, lying alongside a shipmate, picked himself up and found that the odds had narrowed once more. “I got out of the hole. The man was lying just outside. He moaned horribly and he clutched at the ground with his ringers and rubbed his face back and forth across the sand. A great hole almost the size of a man’s head opened below his belt. … I noticed that his canteen was gone from one of his carriers but the cup was still there and . . . was half filled with blood.”

Later that day, Private Matthews collapsed from fatigue and was evacuated. The Assault is the story of his own participation in one of history’s bitterest battles, in which 20,860 out of 71,245 troops who took part were casualties. Unavoidably, it covers much old ground without revealing anything new about war. Yet in its almost tedious realism and painful authenticity it plows deeper into the meaning of combat than many a more artfully written book.

Few accounts of World War II are seared with so much brutality and suffering, or depict more starkly the sullen impact of war on the common soldier. Writes Matthews: “Perhaps somewhere on somebody’s map the actions of our company made a pretty pattern against the whole picture, but what the readers of those maps probably didn’t know was that it was a pretty pattern of desperate little confusions.” On Iwo, the “desperate little confusions” prodded many a marine into heroism, many more into death. Author Matthews sums up: “It was easier to go forward than to go back.”

*Marine slang for Japanese rocket bombs.