One Foot, Then the Other

THE MARAUDERS (307 pp.)--Charlton Ogburn Jr.--Harper ($4.50).

Into the jungle clearing in northern Burma came a squad of seven Japanese soldiers carrying a wounded officer on a litter. A machine-gun nest of Merrill's Marauders cut them down like wheat; one of the Marauders was later rumored to have slit the throat of the helpless Japanese officer. But, says Author Ogburn, 48, who was there as a second lieutenant, "no one had the stomach to try to establish the facts." From the pockets of one of the slain Japanese spilled two objects common to men at war: a cheap gilt Buddha and a contraceptive device. "It is hard to say which is the more unnerving." reflects Ogburn on seeing these evidences of sacred and profane love, "the thought of your enemy's inhumanity when he is alive or the spectacle of his humanity when he lies dead."

The incident catches much of the quality of this fine book, a counterpoise of violence and reflection. Ogburn was one of 3,000 officers and men who volunteered for "dangerous and hazardous" duty overseas. Under command of Brigadier General Frank D. Merrill, they were formed into the 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional), a name more appropriate to a laundry battalion than to a detachment trained to fight far behind the Japanese lines in Burma. TIME-LIFE Correspondent James Shepley salved the unit's pride by christening it "Merrill's Marauders."

Around the Bend. They were all sorts --religious idealists, graduates of Army guardhouses, drunkards, professional bad-men, adolescent adventurers; their one unifying trait was that they seemed to care little for this world. The mission assigned them sounded simple. While General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell's Chinese divisions held the Japanese in position, the Marauders were to slice around end in long flanking attacks and set up roadblocks in the rear. The technique worked at Walawbum and Shaduzup; at Myitkyina it ended in disaster for the 5307th.

The war they fought was a savage succession of small actions, of blundering encounters around bends in the jungle paths, of ambushes, surprise dawn attacks, endless forced marches. More than by Japanese bullets, the Marauders were brought low by mite-borne typhus, malaria, amoebic dysentery, fatigue and mental breakdowns. A battalion of Marauders, after seven weeks of marching through mountains, mud and water, was surrounded at Nhpum Ga; most of the survivors were red-eyed, hollow-cheeked, scarcely functioning by the time the siege was lifted.

The British guerrilla expert, General Orde Wingate, had made it axiomatic that troops could not be expected to operate efficiently in enemy territory longer than three months at a time. When the remnants of the Marauders, dragging themselves over the 6,000-foot passes of the Kumon Range in the monsoon rains, made the assault on Myitkyina airfield, they had been five months behind the Japanese lines. They gained their objective, and then simply fell apart as an organization.

Troubling Puzzle. Recalling these events in tranquillity 15 years later, Author Ogburn pays a decent respect to the Japanese foemen, states the pros as well as the cons concerning General Stilwell's part in the destruction of the Marauders. A Southerner nurtured on Confederate glories, Ogburn was cured of romanticism by the Burma experience. The Civil War battles "now meant nothing to me but the terror and agony of the men caught up in them."

One puzzle still troubles Veteran Ogburn: Why do soldiers persevere? What is courage and how is it achieved? A fellow veteran of the Marauders supplies one answer: "There was one ability I found I did have. I could command one foot to move out in front of the other one. There's no great trick in that, is there? What's a step? A child can take one! You advance one foot, so ... and then the other . . . and now the first again. And that is all you have to do, except wipe your hands off from time to time so they won't be too slippery to hold your gun."

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