Why Japanese Soldiers Were Ordered NEVER to Shoot the American Marine “Guy on the Bulldozer”

On the beaches of the Pacific, American Marines came to believe that Japanese riflemen had been given a very specific order. Do not shoot the man on the bulldozer. No captured document has ever proven that order existed. But the reason the story survives, the reason old CBS, still repeated at reunions 80 years later, was buried in the coral of half a dozen islands.

And it started with one man, one machine, and 90 seconds on a beach most Americans have never heard of. Mono Island, October 27th, 1943. 6:25 in the morning. The Pacific was still black at the horizon. The sun had not yet cleared the palms, and on a strip of coral sand, no wider than a country road, a 24-tonon machine, was grinding out of the surf, its yellow paint dulled by weeks of salt spray and dust.

Its treads chewed through the shallows. Salt water sprayed from the sprockets. On top of it, hunched forward in a canvas seat, sat a man in a wet navy dungaree shirt with no rank insignia visible, no helmet strap tightened, and a cigarette that had gone out somewhere between the landing craft and the beach. His name was Orurelio Tason. He was 28 or 29 years old.

According to the official Silverstar citation, he was rated as a machinist’s mate, second class. He had been a construction worker in civilian life and the machine underneath him was a Caterpillar D8 bulldozer weighing 48,000 lb powered by roughly 140 horsepower of diesel. Ahead of him, less than 200 yd up the beach, a Japanese pillbox was cutting the sand into red lines.

the blade. Before the blade came down, before the metal um met the coconut logs and the coral and the 12 men crouched behind them, the film cuts to black. Because to understand what happened in the next 90 seconds on Phomi Beach, you have to understand something older. Something that begins 2 years earlier on a different island with a different group of men, most of whom were not sailors and none of whom were supposed to die. Wake Island, December 8th, 1941.

More than,00 American civilians were on Wake Island when the Japanese bombers came in from the west. They were not marines. They were not sailors. They were construction workers, carpenters, electricians, welders, heavy equipment operators. They had been sent by the Morrison Kudson Company to build an air base for the United States Navy.

They had families in Idaho and Oregon and Arizona. They had paychecks in dollars. They had no uniforms and no weapons. Under international law in 1941, they were not permitted to have weapons. The rule was simple. A civilian who resisted an enemy military attack was not a prisoner of war.

He was a gorilla, and a gorilla could be shot on site legally by the military that captured him. It was a rule written to protect civilians. On Wake Island in the second week of December 1941, it did the opposite. The garrison of Marines fought for 16 days. The construction workers helped where they could. They dragged wounded men.

They passed ammunition. They dug fighting positions. Some of them picked up rifles from the dead. And when the island fell on December 23rd, the Japanese Navy captured everyone who was still alive. 98 of the American civilians were kept on wake to finish the work they had started. On the 7th of October 1943, the Japanese commander on the island ordered them lined up on the beach. They were machine gunned. All 98.

Dozens more of the wake civilians would die in Japanese prison camps before the war ended. But that was still in the future. In the in the winter of 1941, all that was known in Washington was that a thousand American construction workers had disappeared behind the Japanese line and that the Navy would need a new base on every atal it was about to fight for and that it could not send civilians to build them anymore.

The problem landed on the desk of one man. Rear Admiral Ben Mariel was the chief of the Bureau of Yards and Docks. He had spent his career designing dry docks and fuel depots and the concrete skeletons of naval installations. He was not a combat officer. He had never commanded troops in the field. On the 28th of December 1941, 20 days after Pearl Harbor, 5 days after Wake Island fell, Mariel requested authority to raise a new kind of military unit.

He wanted construction workers who could shoot back. On the 5th of January 1942, the authority came through. And within weeks, the United States Navy had a new organization with a name that would not appear in any pre-war pre-war doctrine. A motto in a language most of its members did not speak and a logo that would eventually be painted on every bulldozer, crane, and dump truck that landed on a Pacific beach for the next 3 and 1/2 years.

Naval Construction Battalions, CBC CBS. The motto was Latin. Constumus Batuimus. We build, we fight. The men who filled those battalions were not what the Navy was used to. The average age was [music] 37. Some were 45. A few were 50. They came from more than 60 construction trades. Steel workers from the yards in Baltimore.

Electricians from the power grids of New York. welders from the shipyards in Long Beach, heavy equipment operators from the highway crews of Ohio and Kansas, men who had built the Boulder Dam, men who had dug the tunnels under Manhattan, men who had raised the girders of skyscrapers. They trained at Camp Endicott in Rhode Island for 3 weeks.

In those three weeks, they learned two things. They learned to operate a Caterpillar D8 and they learned to fire a Browning automatic rifle. Orurrelio Tacone was one of them. He was born in 1915. He grew up in the American Neoist. He worked construction. He enlisted in the CBS. Went through Camp Endicott. And by the fall of 1943, he was standing on the deck of a transport ship in the South Pacific, watching an island called Mono grow larger on the horizon.

He had never fired a shot in anger. Neither had most of the men around him. The regulations they served under were explicit. A CB could carry a rifle. A CB could defend himself. A CB could return fire if fired upon. But a CB was not authorized to conduct offensive combat operations. He was not infantry. He was not a marine.

He was on paper a construction worker in a Navy uniform. Which raises a question that the historical record does not comfortably answer. Why? On the morning of October 27th, 1943, was a machinist’s mate secondass awarded the Silver Star, the third highest decoration for valor in the United States military for personally attacking a Japanese fortified position and destroying it with the 12 men inside.

The answer will come, but first, one more piece of the puzzle has to be set on the table. And it is a piece that the Marines who fought alongside the seabbes understood immediately and that Japanese commanders on every island from Tarawa to Euoima would eventually have to reckon with. The bulldozer was not just a construction tool.

The Caterpillar D8 in its 1943 military configuration was one of the most powerful mobile machines the United States had ever put into a combat zone. It weighed 24 tons. It produced roughly 140 horsepower at the draw bar. Its blade could move enormous quantities of earth in a single pass. Its treads were engineered to climb steep grades carrying its own weight.

Its top speed under load was not much more than a jogging pace. By comparison, the standard heavy tractor of the United States Marine Corps in 1943 was the International Harvester TD18. It was a good machine. It was a proven machine. It was noticeably less powerful than the D8, which is why in every amphibious planning conference held in the South Pacific in the second half of 1943, Marine Corps commanders kept doing the same thing.

They kept asking for CBD8s, not TD18s, not their own equipment. They wanted the Navy’s bulldozers on the beach driven by the Navy’s construction workers in the first waves of every assault. because the Marines had figured something out that would not be officially acknowledged in any doctrine manual until well after the war.

The most dangerous vehicle on a Pacific Island landing beach was not always the Sherman tank. Sometimes it was the bulldozer. A tank could kill a pillbox. It required a road to reach one, a driver trained in gunnery, a fiveman crew, a supply of ammunition, and a maintenance echelon behind it.

When the fight was over, a tank went back into reserve. A bulldozer could kill a pillbox. It could also build the road the tank drove in on. It could grade the airfield the fighters landed on. It could dig the graves. It could do all of that with one man on top of it on treads that did not care about coral or mud or blood.

And a bulldozer, if you were a Japanese rifleman in a coconut log bunker on a beach in the Solomons, was a problem that a rifle could not solve. But there was a catch. And the catch was going to matter in a way that no one on Phomi Beach that morning was quite prepared for because the operation that was unfolding on Mono Island on October 27th, 1943 was called Operation Allied Troops.

Six American destroyers, 4,68 New Zealanders in the first opposed landing conducted by New Zealand forces since Gallipoli in 1915. A brigadier named Robert Row commanding on the beach. a rear admiral named George Fort commanding at sea. 12 United States dead by the end of the operation. 40 New Zealanders, more than 200 Japanese.

Operation Good Time was not the reason any of them were there. Operation Good Time was a diversion. The real landing, the one that mattered to the strategic planners, was going to happen 5 days later on the 1st of November at a place called Empress Augusta Bay on the island of Bugenville.

Marines from the third amphibious corps, a full amphibious task force. The beginning of the campaign that would isolate the great Japanese naval fortress at Rabao and eventually reduce it to irrelevance. Falami Beach was a decoy. The pillbox that was pinning down the New Zealand infantry. The pillbox that Aureloton was about to drive his Tassone was about to drive his bulldozer straight in in part to make the Japanese look the wrong direction.

The 12 men inside it did not know that. Neither did Aurelio Tason. The blade came up and now the blade comes down. The first thing that comes through the palms is not gunfire. It is the smell. Cordite from the naval bombardment that has been walking up and down the shoreline since before dawn. Wet coral dust hanging in the air like fog.

Diesel from the landing craft. And underneath all of it, the sweet green smell of jungle that has been chopped open by naval shellfire. Then the gunfire starts. It comes from a bunker inland from the water line. The bunker is built of coconut logs packed with coral rubble and wet earth between the layers. The firing slit is no wider than a man’s belt.

Behind it are a Japanese heavy weapon and a crew of 12. They have been in the bunker for weeks. They have practiced their fire lanes. They know exactly where the water meets the sand, and they know that anything crossing that line is exposed. The New Zealanders come off the ramps at 6:25. They are battalions of the eighth brigade. Their brigadier, Robert row, is a career soldier to who knows better than most men on that beach what an opposed landing costs.

He is watching his men die. The heavy machine gun opens up first. The rounds walk across the sand in a long diagonal line. Men from the leading platoon go down before they clear the shallows. Two of their mates try to drag a wounded rifleman. One of them is killed by the same gun in the same second. The other keeps pulling. The bunker cannot be flanked.

It has been placed at the elbow of the beach where the coral shelf turns inland and its fire lanes cover a wide arc of open ground. Grenades will not reach it. A satchel charge would require a man to crawl within a few yards of the firing slit and the firing slit is watching every inch of that ground.

Somewhere on the waterline, a New Zealand officer signals the second wave. He is signaling for the bulldozer. Lieutenant Charles Turnbull of the Civil Engineer Corps, United States Naval Reserve, is close by. He is not a combat officer. He has spent the war designing fuel farms and Quanet huts. He has a carbine in his hands.

He turns to the man on the bulldozer behind him. He points at the bunker. Hit that damn gun. Smash it. Orurelio Tassone lifts the blade of the D8 to shoulder height. He pushes the throttle forward. The tractor rolls off the ramp and into shallow water and the sea parts around its treads like it does not exist.

Turnbull walks behind the bulldozer on foot in the open with his carbine at his shoulder. He is not covered by anything. He is going to walk the entire distance to the bunker up an exposed beach using nothing but the width of a bulldozer blade to shield himself and firing his carbine at a bunker that has already cut down the leading rank of the New Zealand infantry.

If the bulldozer stops, they both die. The first rifle round hits the blade. It rings like a hammer on an anvil. The second and third come in a burst. They walk across the raised blade in three separate impacts. And each one makes a sound that Turnbull, who is walking behind the blade, will hear in his sleep for the rest of his life.

He keeps firing. He is not aiming at the bunker. He is aiming at the tree line where he has seen movement and where a Japanese rifleman with a clear angle on Tasson’s exposed head could end this entire attack with one round. The D8 does not sat accelerate. It cannot accelerate. Tasson is holding it well under its top speed because he needs the torque and because the sand is soft under the treads and because if he loses momentum in front of the bunker, he will not get it back.

Inside the bunker, the heavy gun shifts its fire. The gunner has realized that his rounds are doing nothing. He ras the blade in a long sustained burst and then he stops. He is trying to save ammunition. He is waiting for a better target. He believes, and this is one of the last decisions he will ever make, that the bulldozer is going to stop or turn or throw a track.

Does not do any of those things. Close in, Tasson yanks the steering clutch and pivots the D8 to one side. He is going around the bunker. He is not attacking the firing slit. He is going to come at it from behind, from the roof, from the one direction. The men inside cannot shoot. Turn follows, still firing.

At the back of the bunker, Tone drops the blade. He does not drop it onto the men. He drops it onto the roof. Tons of steel driven downward by the full hydraulic pressure of the D8, comes down on top of layered coconut logs and packed coral fill, and the structure caves in on itself.

The heavy gun fires one more burst. The burst goes into the roof of the bunker from the inside. It comes out through the collapsed logs in a spray of splinters. Then the bunker is quiet. Tasson raises the blade. He backs the tractor up. He drops the blade a second time. He is not attacking anymore. He is grading.

He is moving earth over the wreckage of the bunker the way he would move earth over a bad patch of road in civilian life. [music] He works methodically. He does not look at what he is covering. When Allied troops secure the position, they find the remains of the bunker under packed earth. They pull 12 Japanese soldiers from the wreckage.

They also find, twisted around the collapsed logs, the barrel of a large caliber gun. Both Aurelio Tone and Charles Turnbull will be awarded the Silver Star for what happens on Phomami Beach that morning. Neither man will talk about it much for the rest of his life. The tactic worked once. That did not mean it would work again.

And what happened in the 14 months that followed the landing on Mono Island proved something that the Marine Corps and the Cabbes would spend the rest of the war trying to industrialize. The bulldozer could kill a bunker. But the man on top of it was made of meat. Cape Gloucester, New Britain. Early January 1944. About 10 weeks after Phalami, the First Marine Division is trying to push inland from the beach head.

And a creek that does not have a name on any American map is bleeding them dry. The Marines who are dying in it will name it themselves before the week is over. They will call it Suicide Creek. The creek runs through a corridor of jungle where every tree has been notched with a Japanese firing lane. On the far bank, dug into the roots, is a heavy machine gun.

behind it and on either flank of it are more positions with interlocking fields of fire. To get a Sherman tank across the creek, the Marines need a foring point. To make a foring point, they need to grade both banks down to a slope a tank can climb. To grade the banks, they need a bulldozer. The 19th Naval Construction Battalion has been attached to the First Marine Division for this operation.

Their bulldozer is a Caterpillar D8, unarmored with a canvas seat and no protection for the driver whatsoever. The first operator climbs into the seat. He is shot before for he has moved the D8 far. Marines drag him off. The second operator climbs into the seat. He gets the blade down and takes the first cut out of the nearbank before a rifle round hits him.

He does not survive at the controls. The third operator climbs into the seat. He is shot before he can complete his work. At this point, the Marines have run out of CBS willing to climb onto the machine. What happens next appears in the afteraction record in language so bureaucratic that you have to read it twice to understand what it is describing.

An unnamed operator working from a position of cover alongside the bulldozer using improvised tools completed the grading of both banks under continuous small arms fire. According to afteraction accounts of the first marine division, what that sentence describes is this. An unnamed marine engineer whose name never made it into any citation walked alongside the D8 on foot using the 24 ton steel bulk of the bulldozer as a walking shield.

He worked the throttle and the steering clutches from the outside. In his hand, according to the accounts that survived, was a shovel and the handle of an axe. He completed the foring point. He was not decorated. His name does not appear in the divisional records. He is one of the reasons the story survives at all.

Because after Suicide Creek, the CBS stopped waiting for the Navy to send them armor. Nobody drew a blueprint. There was no engineering study. There was no design competition at the Bureau of Ships. There was no patent. There was in the winter of 1944 an operational need that had become intolerable. And there was a network of CB welding shops scattered across half a dozen Pacific islands.

And in those shops, men who had spent their civilian lives welding fire escapes to the sides of tenement buildings started cutting flat steel plate to fit the operators stations of Caterpillar D8s. Every battalion did it differently. Some built their armor as a full cage welded to the frame of the tractor with a vision slit cut across the front.

Others built theirs as a bolted on kit that could be removed for maintenance. Some cut louvers into the top plate for ventilation because the operators were passing out from the heat inside the boxes. Some built armor with a rear opening so the operator could bail out if the machine caught fire. There was no standardization.

There was no central specification. No two armored D8s in the Pacific looked exactly alike. There is also no man’s name attached to the invention. The historical record contains veteran accounts in which someone remembers who did the welding, but the accounts do not agree. It is one of the largest anonymous military engineering programs of the Second World War, and it was carried out by tradesmen in canvas roofed workshops on islands that most of them could not have found on a map 2 years earlier.

By the middle of 1944, armored bulldozers were common equipment in naval construction battalions in the Pacific. By the end of 1944, the Marines were demanding them. At the beginning of 1945, on an island called Ewima, they would find out what the armor could and could not do. But before Ewima, there were two other islands, Tarawa Atal.

November 20th through 23rd, 1943. About 3 weeks after Phomi Beach, the second marine division loses more than a,000 men killed in 76 hours. Some 4,500 Japanese defenders die. Approximately 1,000 Korean laborers brought to Beio by the Japanese to build the defenses die with them. The lagoon runs red.

The reef is choked with bodies. When the guns stop firing, the 74th and 98th Naval Construction Battalions come ashore to rebuild the airfield the Japanese had called Hawkins Field. They rebuild it in a matter of weeks. To do that, they have to drive their Caterpillar tractors across a surface that Marine Corps photographers would describe in the captions of the pictures they took as looking like the surface of the moon.

It is not a metaphor. The naval bombardment has created the runway. Between the craters are Japanese bunkers that have not been fully cleared. Between the bunkers are the bodies of the men who died defending them and the men who died taking them. The bulldozers gradeed over all of it. The bulldozers do not always distinguish between shattered concrete and shattered coconut logs and shattered human beings.

Nobody has time. The airfield has to be operational for a fighter squadron in a matter of weeks or the entire timetable of the central Pacific campaign slips. The CBS grade they compact. [music] They lay coral fill. They pack the fill down with rollers. They build a runway on top of ground that also holds the dead.

Veterans of that airfield work when they spoke about it decades later usually said the same thing. They said it was the smell that stayed with them not the site. Pelu Palao Islands September 15th through late November 1944. The Ummeral Ridge ridge is a spine of coral that the first marine division and later the United States Army’s 81st wildcat division will need weeks to clear.

Inside the ridge are more than 500 natural and artificial caves connected by tunnels ventilated by shafts drilled through the coral. Some of the caves hold a handful of men. Some hold many more. Every mouth of every cave has interlocking fire from at least two other cave mouths. It cannot be flanked. It cannot be shelled into submission.

Naval gunfire bounces off the coral like pebbles. Roomby room clearance would cost the Americans an unbearable number of additional casualties. At some point in the fighting on the piece of ground that has been renamed the Amurbal Pocket, a decision is made. The decision exists in the afteraction records in language that is remarkable in the whole literature of the Pacific War for what it does not try to soften.

The Americans had decided to seal them in. The tactic worked like this. Smoke and incendiary charges were used against the mouth of a cave. The men inside had two options. They could come out into small arms fire or they could stay inside. Then a CB bulldozer, armored, moved forward and sealed the entrance under tons of pulverized coral fill.

The bulldozer graded the fill flat. Then it moved to the next cave. By the end of the campaign, more than a thousand Japanese soldiers had been killed on the Ummeral. Only a small number were captured. The bodies of the dead were not fully recovered. Not most of them. They were still inside the ridge behind the coral fill that the seabbes had graded over them.

Decades later in the 21st century, archaeological survey teams began working on Pelu. They surveyed wartime caves inside sealed ones behind coral that not been disturbed since the autumn of 1944. They found what the bulldozers had left behind. bones, sake bottles, the brass buttons of Imperial Japanese uniforms, rice tins, personal effects, weapons still in place, they photographed, they cataloged.

In many cases, they resealed the caves the coral held. Which brings us at last to the island where the CBS would pay the highest bill of the war for what they had learned on the beaches of Mono and Cape Gloucester and Terawa and Pelu. The island was called Ewoima. The Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Tatamichi Kuribayashi, had honeycombed the eight square miles of black volcanic rock with more than 11 miles of tunnels and hundreds of pillboxes.

And he had ordered his roughly 21,000 defenders to fight from those tunnels until they were dead. Almost all of them would obey the order. into that ground. On February 19th, 1945, the United States Navy sent naval construction battalions with the assault waves. The 133rd Naval Construction Battalion came ashore attached to the fourth Marine Division.

The 31st landed with the fifth Marine Division. The 62nd came in a few days later with the third. According to CB historical accounts, the 133rd was ordered by direct instruction from Marine Corps headquarters to land in United States Marine Corps utilities. Not Navy dungarees, Marine dungarees. It remains in the memory of the Naval Construction Force the only non-marine unit ordered to land in Marine uniform at full battalion strength in a firstwave assault.

Two of its bulldozer operators were Petty Officer Marvin Noddingham and Petty Officer Clint Trefan. They rode ashore on top of an armored D8. The ramp came down in the morning. Mortar rounds began landing on the beach almost at once. The volcanic sand was so soft that a man’s boots sank on every step. The treads of a D8 sank [music] to the sprockets.

When the tractor bogged down in ash, the color and consistency of graphite dust, it could not move. Shrapnell from the mortars rang off the armored cab like church bells. Nottingham would later describe how aware he became of the sound of his own breathing. His spotter climbed out of the cab and went for the Marston matting, the perforated steel planking that could give the D8 traction.

Without those steel sheets under the treads, they were going to die where they sat. He got the matting in place. The tread caught. The tractor lurched forward out of the crater and up the lowrise off the beach. Behind them, the surf was already closing over the place where they had almost died. Neither one of them looked back.

Neither one of them stopped for days. For the next long stretch of the campaign, Nottingham drove that D8 with barely any sleep. He drank water when someone handed it to him. He ate cold rations one-handed. He worked in the seat. His spotter worked alongside on foot with a carbine over his shoulder, learning to read the sound of incoming mortar fire well enough to shout a warning before impact.

By the end of the first week, the naval construction battalions had put Motoyama airfield number one back into operation. The 133rd, working alone, moved more than a million cubic yards of earth in that time. They crushed more than 100,000 tons of volcanic rock for runway subgrade. They did this while under artillery fire from positions on the north end of the island that would not be silenced for weeks.

The cost is a number. 245 casualties in the 133rd. 42 killed, 203 wounded, roughly 31% of the battalion. It remains the highest casualty rate suffered by any single naval construction battalion in the entire Pacific War. It is also, if you look at it a certain way, the answer to the question this whole story was built to ask.

Because somewhere in the wet coral of Pelu or in the volcanic ash of Ewima or in the coconut logs of Falami Beach, an old story got started. It got started among the seabbees themselves in tents at night on islands the men had names for that never made it onto any map. It got repeated at reunions in Kansas City and Providence and Long Beach for the next 60 years.

And it went like this. The Japanese, the old CBS would tell each other, learned a lesson on those beaches. They learned never to shoot the guy on the bulldozer. The story is repeated in veteran memoirs. It appears in family histories written by the children and grandchildren of CBS who never talked about the war until the last years of their lives.

It shows up in the shooting scripts of documentary films. It is in the folklore of the United States Navy, one of the durable legends of the Pacific War. There is no captured Japanese order that says it. There is no line in the interrogation transcripts of Japanese staff officers. There is no bulletin from the Imperial General Headquarters.

There is no confirmed reference in the monograph volumes produced by the United States Marine Corps Historical Division after the war. There is no clean reference in the strategic bombing survey interviews conducted in Tokyo in the autumn of 1945. The order, if it ever existed, was never written down. It was never captured. It was never translated.

It exists in the archival record of the Second World War. Exactly nowhere. And yet, if you were a Japanese rifleman in a coconut log bunker on a Pacific beach in 1944, watching a 24-tonon machine climb out of the surf and start walking toward you, and you had a rifle in your hands, and you had been trained to conserve ammunition, and you had watched the rounds from the man next to you bounce off the raised blade of the bulldozer like hail off a tin roof.

And you had understood that shooting at the bulldozer would only reveal the location of your position without accomplishing anything else. And you had also understood that if the bulldozer kept coming, the last thing you would ever see was the blade coming down on the roof of your bunker. You would have figured it out.

You would not have needed an order. You would have made the same calculation the men in the pillbox at Falomi made and [music] did not survive. The legend does not need a document to be true. The tactical logic underneath it needs no signature. There is a second story. It is less often told. It is the other half of the legend, and it is the part that the men who lived through it were most careful about repeating.

The armor did not always work. A direct hit from a Japanese anti-tank gun at close range would go through the armor plate and through the operator and out the other side. A satchel charge tossed by a soldier who had waited in a spider hole for the bulldozer to pass would detonate on top of the cab and kill everyone inside it.

A mortar round dropped into an open topped operator’s station would leave nothing to bury. The vision slits were only a few inches high. An operator inside a fully enclosed cab could see forward in a narrow cone and nothing else. He could not see the ground beside his treads. He could not see the men behind him.

He could not see the sniper in the treeine or the anti-tank team in the tall grass or the sapper crawling toward his blind spot on hands and knees. Every operator inside armor depended on a spotter walking alongside him on foot in the open with a carbine. The way Charles Turnbull had walked behind Aurelio Tassone at Phalomi. The way an unnamed marine engineer had walked beside a D8 at Suicide Creek with a shovel and the handle of an axe.

The way spotters walked next to armored bulldozers on the black sand of Eoima for days without stopping. The man in the armor was famous. The man on foot beside him most of the time was not. If there is an honest answer to who the hero of this story is, it is not only the man the Silver Star citation was written for.

It is also the man walking beside him with nothing. CB veterans who spoke about their war when they spoke at all often did so only late in life. Many did not talk about it for decades. What they said when they finally did tended to come out in small pieces. Wives and sons and grandchildren wrote it down. They talked about the machines.

They talked about the airfields they had helped grade and the roads they had cut and the cave mouths they had sealed. They talked about the noise of coral fill coming down. They said in different words that they had helped bury a great many men. Some of those men they were never entirely sure may still have been breathing when the fill went in.

They lived with that for the rest of their lives. Orurelio Tason was rotated home from the Pacific in 1944. He was promoted to machinists mate first class. He was ordered to Peoria, Illinois to visit the Caterpillar plant where he stood in front of the assembly line workers who built the machine he had ridden into the bunker and thanked them for what they had built.

He appeared at a war bond rally. Photographs of him from that period show him in a Navy uniform standing next to a bulldozer. In late January 1944, Republic Pictures released a film called The Fighting Cabbies. It starred John Wayne. The climactic scene of the film shows John Wayne playing a construction foreman driving a bulldozer straight into a Japanese fortified position and crushing it.

The screenwriters had read wire service coverage of what a CBI had done on Phomi Beach. They had written the scene without ever meeting him. The specific bulldozer that Aurelio Tassone drove up the beach at Phalomi no longer exists as a specific machine. Wartime construction equipment was cannibalized, worn out, or scrapped at the end of the war.

What remains of that day is the photograph of the wrecked bunker taken by an American photographer while New Zealand troops and CBS stood on top of the collapsed logs. The Silver Star Citation on file and the memory carried by the men who saw it happen. A D8 of the same model is preserved today at the United States Navy CB Museum in Port Hunim, California.

The museum’s exhibits include material on Aurelio Tassone and his action on Mono Island. There is a lineage. The armored Caterpillar D7 mounted with the Rome plow cut jungle in Vietnam. And the men who drove it were the professional descendants of the CBS who had welded steel plate to a D8 in a shop on a Pacific island in 1944. Armored bulldozers were used to breach Iraqi BMS at the start of the ground war in 1991.

The Israeli D9 in service today is a Caterpillar under heavy armor. American military engineering equipment has continued to evolve along the same line. They are in their engineering ancestry the direct grandchildren of a piece of scrap plate welded to a canvas seat by a CB whose name is not in any record. The tactic did [music] not change. The trade did not change.

The machine updated in a 100 small ways is still recognizably the same machine. On the beach at Phomi in October of 1943, Orurelio Tason raised his blade and drove at the guns. He was not a warrior. He was not a marine. He had not been trained to fight. He was a construction worker in a Navy uniform who had been asked by a lieutenant who was not much of a soldier either to silence a machine gun that was killing New Zealand infantry with an efficiency that no other weapon on the beach could match.

He said yes. Charles Turnbull walked behind him with a carbine. They did what they were asked to do. They lived. They came home. They did not talk about it very much for the rest of their lives. The CBS built the roads and the runways and the fuel farms and the naval bases that carried the United States and its allies from the Solomons to the doorstep of Japan.

They built hundreds of advanced bases in a matter of years. They laid enormous quantities of coral and steel and concrete across the widest ocean on Earth. They graded over the bones of men they had never met. And they went home to towns in Ohio and Vermont and Oregon and California. And they built the suburbs and the interstates and the schools of the country they came back to.

And when something was in the way, they buried it. They were construction workers. They still are.