COMMENT ⊗   VALID 00002 PAGES
C REC  PAGE   DESCRIPTION
C00001 00001
C00002 00002	n043  1218  05 Aug 80
C00012 ENDMK
C⊗;
n043  1218  05 Aug 80
 
View From the Hollow, a column of commentary suggested for use on the
35th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing (Aug. 6), Nagasaki bombing
(Aug. 9) or Japanese surrender (Aug. 14)
By DAVID J. JACOBS
Newhouse News Service
    GOODRICH HOLLOW, N.Y. - The night the war ended 35 Augusts ago, two
of our men were killed by .50-caliber tracer bullets fired by
celebrating GIs who had never gotten off a single round in combat.
That was on Tinian, a 39-square-mile island 6,000 miles west of San
Francisco and 120 miles north of Guam.
    A few weeks ago, I stopped off there on a journey through
Micronesia, the Philippines and China, mostly places I never saw
before. Tinian, however, was something else; I knew it well, having
served a year there during World War II. I spent a day driving around
the island with Alvin Hofschneider, a young Chamorro born in the
Marianas 12 years after we left there early in 1946. (His grandfather
was German.)
    Looking for the spot where my unit was stationed in August of 1945,
I found that the Tinian I knew is gone. The papaya and banana trees
and the tangantangan, a plant grown to stop erosion of the land we
cleared, have taken over.
    We paused briefly near where I estimated Tom Laforest and I, more
than 12,000 days before, waited outside our plywood bakamikazes. We were convin-
ced they'd blow the island by guiding their
suicide planes into the atomic bombs we assumed were stored at the
north end. We didn't know that the atomic bombs which had just been
dropped by B-29s flown from Tinian's North Field were the only two
there were.
    A few weeks before the Aug. 6 Hiroshima bomb and Aug. 9 Nagasaki
bomb, I had met a civilian at the island post office who told me he
had just arrived with the 509th Composite Group, a special outfit
that would ''end the war for you guys in a couple of week.'' The next
day, Tom and I drove up there to see what was going on, but were
chased by guards with machine guns.
    We soon found out what the civilian meant. Right after the second
bomb was dropped we went on alert. For the first time since Iwo Jima
was secured the previous February, we were blacked out, and for the
first time since Tinian was secured months before that, we were
issued weapons and gas masks, wherever they could be found. (We had
replaced the cannisters on many of the masks with blocks of wood
attached to the end of the hoses as floats, transforming them into
snorkels with which to observe the sea life on the reef.)
    Most of the men went to sleep, but Tom and I were too worried to hit
the sack, convinced the Kamikazes would get through. Sometimes after
dark Aug. 14, we saw flares go up near the beach. Then we heard
shouts. We ran down to see what was going on. The guys who ran the
bomb dump had just heard Guam Radio announce the Japanese had
accepted the Potsdam Declaration. The fighting was over.
    Tom and I ran back to our barracks, turned on the lights and shouted
out the news.
    ''Turn the damn lights off!'' they shouted back. ''It's just another
bunch of rumors.''
    None of them got up until the chaplain rigged a loudspeaker to the
radio repeating the Guam braodcast. All that night guns and flares
were fired in a paroxysm of joy. A few days later, Tom and I again
drove up to the 509th. The gates were open, the watchtowers unmanned,
and the barracks and offices deserted. Even the waste baskets were
empty.
    Alvin and I drove through tunnels of tangan tangan looking for that
spot, too, but could find no sign of that previous presence until we
burst into the open on one of the runways of North Field, appearing
to me ready for takeoffs. We turned into a large clearing that looked
like a parking lot at a shopping center. But all we saw were two
small clusters of coconut palms and plumeria trees.
    We drove over to one, a neat rectangle about 8-by-10 feet, with
little birds hopping about. An engraved bronze plate on top of a
three-foot concrete pylon noted this was the loading pit for the
Hiroshima bomb. On the other one, for the Nagasaki bomb, someone had
taped a card reading in English and Japanese, ''May Peace Reign on
Earth.'' A sprig of a wild magenta flower grew out of a crack at the
base of the Hiroshima pylon.
    I cannot sort out what I felt standing there in that lonely place
which for a few hours had been the point of the greatest striking
force in the history of wars. Later, I thought how no nation before
or since has ever had such an exclusive grasp on so much power. ad
the Caesars and the Napoleons, the Alexanders and the Hitlers such a
weapon to themselves, and such an army and navy, mobilized and battle
tested as we had there and then, they'd have marched on.
    But there is something in the American soul that, for all the glory
of battles won, resists such arrogance. That we did not so march, has
been condemned by some as sentimental shortsightedness, but is seen
by those who can find glory in battles not fought as our abiding
grace. For better or worse, we had had enough. Within six months of
that August, on Tinian and other outposts from Tokyo to Manila,
American soldiers marched in protests bordering on mutiny, demanding
to be sent home.
    We could have conquered the world. Instead, we shoved our equipment
off the cliffs, into the sea, packed our duffel, and went home.
    Alvin, who had waited discreetly for me on the far side of the
clearing as I lingered at the bomb pits, slowly drove over. I hopped
into the cab. And then down the same runway from which the Enola Gay
left on its flight to Hiroshima, we sped off in the little pickup
truck with ''Toyota'' emblazoned on its tailgate.