“‘This book started out to be a record of my own company, but I do not want it to be that, now. I want it to be a record of every company in every army’” (March, 1989, 13). So begins William March’s 1933 novel Company K. As the June day lengthens, World War I veteran Joseph Delaney, the narrator, sits with his wife on their suburban porch. As she sews a piece of pink lace for a friend’s wedding, and neighbors pass by, Delaney muses on the book he has just completed. He continues: “‘I wish there were some way to take these stories and pin them to a huge wheel, each story hung on a different peg until the circle was completed. Then I would like to spin the wheel, faster and faster, until the things of which I have written took life and were recreated, and became part of the wheel, flowing toward each other, and into each other; blurring, and then blending together into a composite whole, an unending circle of pain. . . . That would be the picture of war’” (Ibid).
Peter Bowman puts the spinning wheel of war this way in his description of the assault on Beach Red, purportedly Leyte:
Heavy guns blare out their syncopated jazz and abruptly stop
and there is a short pause while the warring spirits
terminate their jitterbugging and stand around to applaud the number.
Then someone puts another nickel in the same old jukebox
and havoc selects a partner and the dance goes on (Bowman, 1945, 17).
Beach Red was published on December 1st, 1945, coming out just a few months after the end of World War II. It might seem a bit odd that the book was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, given that the United States, although relieved at the outcome of the war, was still reckoning with its human costs. The violence and death depicted in the book might have been “too close” for some readers. At any rate, John P. Marquand wrote in the “Book-of-the-Month Club News” that readers “will soon encounter an intellectual quality in Beach Red which often contradicts the illusion of physical conflict. . . . It is a book with a very broad appeal, for its pages give a picture of the thoughts and fears common to everyone who has ever worn a uniform, no matter what role, heroic or otherwise, he may have played in the war.” In Marquand’s view, the book offered psychological depth to the characters and provided the reader with insights into the combat soldier’s mind. Marquand suggests that the narrative reveals the psychological clarity and heightening of the senses that occur in war: “Beach Red is a remarkable piece of work, a sensitive and thrilling interpretation of the mind of a civilian who has become a soldier, and whose hopes and aspirations have not been blurred by battle” (unp.).
Although Marquand might be accused of being too effusive in his praise, as he was writing to ‘sell’ the book to the Club’s members, a review in Time magazine was equally praiseworthy. The unattributed reviewer notes that “In Beach Red Sergeant Peter Bowman has established a literary beachhead. His brief (122-page) book . . . is the first novel by a combat author to describe the seizure of a Pacific island from the Japanese. It is the first time that such an action has been narrated in a medium which looks like unrhymed verse but which Author Bowman stoutly insists is sprung prose. Prose or verse, it is the best form in which to tell Author Bowman’s story—the thoughts that pass through a soldier’s head during one hour of battle” (Anon, 1945, 98).
The unnamed reviewer raises a question, also mentioned by Marquand (“Its style, which is split prose rather than verse, has the staccato flow of introspective thought”), about what exactly is the technique. Is it “sprung prose” (some variation of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sprung rhythm)? Is it “split prose”? Neither reviewer explains what these terms mean or how they would apply to the book, and it does not appear that Bowman offered any elucidation.
I think the salutary approach to Beach Red is to read the work as a narrative poem in free verse, as Bowman employs numerous poetic techniques. It could be said that apostrophe forms the central technique, as the narrator addresses “you” throughout. This has the dual purpose of trying to put the reader in the narrator’s boots to make the experience more immediate, while at the same time functioning as a kind of interior monologue, where the unnamed narrator, a corporal, talks to himself, suggesting a psychological split. “You” also refers to the narrator’s thoughts about what he and other soldiers are doing. I won’t provide a spoiler, but the use of “you” takes on further significance as the poem closes. Further, figurative language is used liberally, and, in some sections, there is Whitmanesque repetition.
The structure of the book also lends itself to a poetic interpretation. There are sixty cantos, each exactly two pages with a concluding line which acts, often ironically, as a comment on the foregoing section. Although the Time reviewer suggests that the sixty cantos represent “one hour of battle,” this time sense does not seem to work, as the totality of the actions described take more than one hour. I think it best to read the poem without trying to compress the action into the supposed time frame. The narration intersperses descriptions of battle with reflections on the narrator’s pre-war life and his place in the “spinning wheel of war.” Additionally, there are interpolated cantos woven throughout the poem which reference a variety of Biblical verses. Some of the references are ironic, some satiric, some are counterpoints to the immediate descriptions.
The poem opens with naval transports preparing for an assault on the code-named Beach Red, one of the landing zones on a Japanese-held island. The men watch and wait their turn to hit the beach. Anxiety rises in the chaos as everything is reduced to a thin line between life and death. When his platoon finally disembarks from the Higgins boat, snipers fire on the landing party and the narrator experiences real fear: “Terror cracks its bristling whip . . ./Nothing but the void consciousness/of being relentlessly exposed and caught in a cone of/suction that pulls you helplessly back into its deserted vortex. . . ./A nightmarish hangover is sitting on your eyelids” (Bowman, 1945, 10).
The first four stanzas of canto five begin with quotations from Ecclesiastes 11:9, creating a satiric counterpoint to the action described in the remainder of the stanzas: “Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth (Keep down, down./Rest your body on your legs and on your arms/and for Jesus’ sake don’t let your pimply ass protrude. . . . Walk in the ways of thine heart (Get up, now./This is where you take the tags off your uniform./Watch your step, and remember to shoot when anything moves/and move when anything shoots. . . . “ (Ibid, 11).
As the platoon slowly advances through the sniper fire, Shearer is killed while dead enemy bodies are strewn on the sand: “You see a stray foot with a shoe still on/and a head with a cigarette still between its teeth” (Ibid, 15). In this scene of carnage and death of friend and foe the narrator ponders the effects of combat on his psyche:
Shoot him! Attaboy, you blew his nuts off. Shoot again,
the bastard’s still kicking. You got him! You got him!
You feel like a babbling halfwit, light and unthinking, as
Though you had dipped your reason in flowing blood and
mopped it over your bones . . .
your battered soul becomes a dispossessed and separate self,
forgetting the body that bore it, claiming only remote kinship
with a slobbering mouth and hands ashen with fused hatred . . .
Murder is your sixth sense. You lost the other five . (Ibid, 16)
Canto 14 reflects on the outcome of the initial battle with selections from Genesis 27:39-40 and Nahum 3:3 (“There was a multitude of slain and a great number/of carcasses, and there was no end of their corpses . . .”), followed by Deuteronomy 32:23-24, Jeremiah 4:19, and Isaiah 52:14. The three latter selections connect squad members to Biblical verses and create an antiphonal or responsorial recitation, similar to an interaction between the officiant and the congregation in a church service. The living are part of this congregation: “Whitney! . . . Yea, thou art he whom thy brethren shall praise,/Thy hand shall be in the neck of thine enemies./’Lord, here am I, and thank Thee for all things.’” “Graham! . . . He is the rock and his work is perfect,/for all his ways are the ways of his judgment./Lord, here I am, and thank Thee for all things.’” As are the dead: Mouse, Mason, Simmons, and Shearer: “Shearer! . . . There is no healing of his bruise. His wound/is grievous. Let all the earth keep silence before him.” (Ibid, 29-30).
As the platoon advances, they are relatively safe and start to dig slit trenches. There is a feeling of cautious relaxation after the earlier encounter with snipers. The narrator now expresses another side of combat, the courage, the camaraderie, the pride, the nervous relief, the triumph of survival. He feels “exhilarated and giddy at being part of all this,/and you feel that nothing can stop you now” (Ibid, 35).
The mood stays light when he, along with three others (Whitney, Lindstrom, and Egan), is selected to join a recon patrol to go further into the jungle in search of Japanese positions. They have to lay a communication wire to report back to HQ as they get intel on enemy strength. One of the four, Whitney, sees this as an ‘opportunity to “‘get me a Jap!’” Lindstrom responds: “‘Make your reservations early. There won’t be enough for everyone’” (Ibid, 44).
The feeling of security quickly fades in canto 25, as the four-man patrol heads into the unknown. Psalm 23:1-4 is an ironic counterpoint to the reality of the jungle: the “green pastures” are contrasted to the “jungle growth . . . and greenness is peeled back to reveal its muddy rind/like the core of a rotten fruit from the earth discarded”; “the still waters” are “brackish” and “dank”; the “paths of righteousness” are a “winding trail . . . a ragged ribbon of glue-mouthed mud.” Uncertainty and trepidation arise from the juxtaposition. The environment offers no succor and faith is placed not in the Divine but in one’s self and fellow soldiers.
As they continue into the jungle, they encounter two enemy soldiers guarding an observation post. After a brief confrontation they kill the two, but Lindstrom was bayonetted in the midsection. They decide that Whitney will take Lindstrom back to the beach for treatment. This leaves the narrator, with Egan, in command of the now two-man patrol. At one point the sun breaks through the trees and the narrator is startled by his shadow and draws “back in momentary fear” (Ibid, 77). As he regains his composure he recalls the Bataan Death March, where “theirs/was a shadow they could not escape but which bobbed/crookedly in the relentless gray dust of a scorched road” (Ibid). His anger is understated but he ends the canto with “Do unto Japs as Japs do unto you—but first” (Ibid, 78).
The next few cantos alternate the narrator’s interior monologue and his reports back to HQ about what he observes. As he and Egan penetrate more deeply into enemy-held territory the fear of capture or death increases. They see Japanese soldiers in U.S. Army helmets preparing for infiltration. As they discuss the situation with HQ the communication wire is cut and they are discovered. The narrator and Egan dodge gunfire as they scramble into the jungle for cover but Egan is shot and killed while the narrator is shot in the hip. Shell fire from the beach gives the narrator a bit of protection from the Japanese searching for him, but as the Japanese approach he lies next to Egan and feigns death.
In cantos 49-54, after this narrow escape, the narrator’s thoughts become more fatalistic and gradually delirious and take a turn away from describing the action to pondering the meaning of war, life, and death. About the war dead: “And who here can place any value whatever on life/when the mere incidence of oblivion can reduce it from/the pinnacle of pricelessness to a few coppers’ worth of/minerals and dross, salt and fertilizer?” (Ibid, 100). His tone becomes increasingly bitter as he thinks of the disparity between the sanitized image of war (“If/all there was to it was just swinging down a/road while the Public Relations Office photographer took his picture — . . .”) (Ibid, 101) and the reality: “It’s seeing your buddy shot/and listening to him breathe and watching his final moments. . . .
It’s a compound fracture of the illusions, an intimate hell
where a corpse dances on a firelit wall, a lonely
night that sobs itself to sleep, a demented hunchback babbling
to himself in the dark, a tuneless piano with half
of its keys missing, . . . (Ibid, 102).
He continues this bitter strain when he thinks of war memorials. The comforting, but spurious, monument “will be made of marble with/bronze statuary and a high-sounding inscription cut into the side” (Ibid). But the truthful monument would be erected by the survivors of war: “It would be a little plot of ground/in the middle of the main drag, fenced in by/barbed wire, and in the center of it there would/be a drainage ditch dug with a pole over it/and a crudely lettered sign saying ‘Latrine.’ And all the/Joes would come and urinate in it and empty their/bowels in it and throw their garbage in it and fill/it with red liquid that looks like blood. And people/would watch it flowing like a public fountain and they/would smell it and they would be reminded of war” (Ibid).
In canto 55 the narrator returns to the present. His wound is worsening and thoughts of impending death emerge. He is reconciled to death, and as he feels his life slipping away, “he is alone in this penultimate solitude”; reflecting on Ecclesiastes 3:1-2, 5, and 8, it is time for “the summing up, the thumbing over, the sorting/out” (Ibid, 111). He begins to review his life, recalling “an ordinary house,” a “broken toy and the bright penny in/the tight fist for the square of chocolate . . . /Voices. . . . a game, a book, a friendship” (Ibid, 113), the memories that define each one’s existence. These memories are then ironically linked to his predicament. Now he is in “an ordinary foxhole near an ordinary palm in an/ordinary jungle” (Ibid, 113). Now the “broken toy” is a rifle out of ammo, the bar of chocolate comes from K-rations, the voices are cursing, growling, terror-filled, the game of tag is played with bullets, and any friendship has been sundered by death.
His delirium leads him to thoughts of his wife and the return home, but he comes to the realization that this is an impossible dream. He realizes, too, that if he did somehow return home, life would not be the same. There will always be a schism between the veteran and the civilian, even his wife: “There will be words spoken and words left unsaid. It/will be a peacetime war that will go on and/on and on and you will never really get it/out of you. . . ./she has conditioned/herself to your absence, and you, in turn, have found/her physical presence not entirely indispensable. And so there will/be a little block of strangeness . . .” (Ibid, 117-18).
In the final canto, in the moments preceding death, his last thoughts are hopeful, as he recognizes that, after all the death and destruction, any meaning of life resides in “the knotting together of man/to man. . . . /One of you fell down/and another picked him up and carried him in the/simple compulsion of linked survival, and that is the parallel/transcending tribe and race in the utter need of existence” (Ibid, 121). However, the poem ends on an inescapable reality of war: one man’s death is just that. There is no time for sympathy, for sorrow, for grieving, as any distraction could lead to one’s own death. When the narrator’s body is found, the lieutenant asks Whitney if he is still alive. “’Lieutenant,’ he replies, ‘there is nothing moving but his watch’” (Ibid, 122).
In his January 18th, 1944 dispatch Ernie Pyle writes that “to any individual the war is seldom any bigger than the space of a few hundred yards on each side of him. All the war in the world is concentrated down into his own personal fight” (Pyle in Nichols, 1986, 200). Beach Red reflects Pyle’s observation, with the proviso that the narrator’s war is gradually reduced to the immediate space of his corpse.
****
Peter Bowman (1918-1985) was a correspondent for Air Force magazine when he wrote Beach Red. He based the novel on his experiences while serving with the United States Army Corps of Engineers in the Pacific Theater of World War II, where he received extensive training in amphibious landings. His final military rank was sergeant. After the war, he wrote a second novel, Condition Three, in 1962. Later, he became a magazine editor for Popular Science and Mechanics Today. 1
WORKS CITED
Basinger, Jeanine. “Translating War: The Combat Film Genre and Saving Private Ryan.” Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, vol. 36, no. 7, October 1, 1998.
“‘Beach Red’ is Not Just a War Movie.” https://en.kinorium.com/57491/.
Bowman, Peter. Beach Red. Random House, 1945.
Clark, Graeme. Beach Red. https://www.thespinningimage.co.uk/cultfilms/displaycultfilm.asp?reviewid=10528.
Nichols, David (Ed), Ernie’s War: The Best of Ernie Pyle’s World War II Dispatches, Random House, 1986.
March, William. Company K. Introduction by Phillip D. Beidler. The University of Alabama Press, 1989.
Marquand, John P. Beach Red. “Book-of-the-Month Club Newsletter,” November, 1945.
Thompson, Howard. “Screen: Strong War Film: Cornel Wilde’s ‘Beach Red’ Opens Here. The New York Times, August 4, 1967.
Time Magazine, vol. XLVI, no. 24, Dec. 10, 1945.
NOTES
1 see New York Times obituary, January 15, 1985, Section B, p. 6, and https://www.listal.com/peter-bowman
APPENDIX
Cornel Wilde produced, directed, and starred in a 1967 film version of Beach Red. The film follows the plot lines fairly closely; however, like any film adaptation, there are differences. Wilde plays Captain MacDonald, a peripheral character in the book, as the narrator. Unlike the book, other characters have interior monologues, and they are more fully developed, with flashbacks to civilian life. The advertising poster claims that “‘Beach Red’ is Not Just a War Movie,” while the perhaps overheated tag line avers that “It waves no flags and beats no drums. It just pulls the pin on a grenade and throws it.”
The film was well-received, with New York Times critic Howard Thompson praising the film’s realism and connections to the Vietnam War: “‘BEACH RED’ is an admirable war movie that says a bit and suggests even more, thanks to Cornel Wilde. At a time when random violence is splattering all over the screen, the actor-director-producer has meaningly incorporated it in a graphic, unflinching and honest drama of men in combat that has moments of real power. . . . The trick, of course, was to turn out a war drama unlike dozens of others and Mr. Wilde’s wise solution has been simple, unrestrained and stinging honesty. . . . The most striking aspect of the entire film is its tough sensitivity. The carnage and the savage hand-to-hand fighting are murderously immediate. The point is that war is hell for everybody, no exclusions, and Mr. Wilde balances this beautifully with flashbacks of the Japanese soldiers” (Thompson, 1967, 18).
Jeanine Basinger discusseed the film some three decades later. She notes that “the film which seems most akin to Saving Private Ryan is the little-known 1967 Pacific combat story, Beach Red. . . . [it]is a classic example of genre updating. Using World War II movie situations from the past, it reconstitutes them as a bloody nightmare, larding into its images all the gore, dismemberment, and ugly death that was previously missing. It’s a 1960s update of a 1940 genre, a forerunner of Saving Private Ryan” (Basinger, 1998, 1, 43-47). Her essay attests to the “staying power” of the work, both the written and filmic versions.
Similarly, Graeme Clark writes that the film “was a fairly obscure war movie from the era when such subjects were growing ever more contentious as there was a far more controversial conflict occurring in Vietnam. There was no mention of any of that here, yet it would have been on the minds of everyone who watched it in 1967 since director and star Wilde was presenting the heat of battle in a manner that could not help but make the audience contemplate what it would actually be like to be fighting. As with many a Hollywood Vietnam war flick from then on, this was shot in the American productions-friendly Philippines, so there was another connection to have us ponder whether lives had been wasted in that particular turmoil.
In fact, when Beach Red was released it was not controversial for its parallels with current conflicts, but because it was depicting that with more brutality than had really been much seen on the big screen before, at least in Western movies, with limbs blown off and gory wounds to be confronted with. For that reason, among others, what had become a rather forgotten effort for most of its life between then and the late nineties suddenly became a genuine cult movie, because it had patently influenced two major motion pictures based around the Second World War, Terrence Malick‘s The Thin Red Line and Saving Private Ryan from Steven Speilberg. The latter especially featured a lengthy opening that looked very like a template taken from this” (Clark, n.p).