Wheeler: Saipan Island dust worse than that of U.S. prairies
Disintegrated coral coats everything with gritty, yellow stucco
By Keith Wheeler, North American Newspaper Alliance
Saipan, Mariana Islands – (June 22, delayed)
I was born on the edge of the American Midwestern dust bowl and I’ve seen prairie gales lift the granulated top soil and draw it like a curtain across the sky.
But I’ve never seen anything like the dust of the Saipan beachhead.
Probably before we came, Saipan’s roads were no more dusty than coral-surfaced roads ever are – although that’s dusty enough. Now the narrow roads carry more traffic every 24 hours than they ever carried in any previous year.
Amphibious tractors, laden with men, ammunition, guns, water and barbed wire, claw into the coral with their steel-toothed treads. Tanks, halftracks and great track-laying prime movers churn through the dust. Jeeps, trailers, trucks, captured Jap vehicles, bicycles, oxcarts and tramping men crawl back and forth in an endless procession.
Under this pounding, the coral has disintegrated. The roads are eight inches deep in a fine yellow powder and the whole five miles of waterfront lies perpetually hidden under an opaque yellow pall.
“It’s like wading knee-deep in talcum powder,” one gasping Martine said. The dust permeates everything within 1,000 yards of the beach and dictates the life of the men that live there.
You plod 100 yards through the dust and your face is plastered in a gritty, yellow stucco so that not even your abundant sweat wets the outside later. It coats the palms, breadfruit, and papaya trees so thickly that they bend with its weight.
It blinds red-eyed drivers in rolling yellow clouds, picked up by their own vehicles, and all traffic moves at a crawl. It sifts down like a harsh unmalting snow into the faces of sleeping men, flavors their food, fills their clothing and packs and provides a thin burial shroud for the fetid Jap corpses that no one has yet had time to bury.
Neither dust nor bombs nor shells nor snipers can halt the great river of men and tools of war that flows painfully up from the sea to the land. Beach parties have contrived to land thousands of tons of food, water, ammunition, guns, wire, oil, gasoline, trucks and tractors each day. Hardly a day has passed that the pace has not been kept up. It is backbreaking, brutal, dangerous and utterly without glory.