Portable War

The scene was like many U.S. countrysides in summer--except for the bananas ripening and the big black beans on the low-spreading trees. The lazy day was sunny; the air was warm. A cock crew. Chickens sputtered. A voice sarcastically admonished somebody headed the wrong way: "Where you goin'?" Then the artillery let go.

This was Saipan, as recorded by Lieut. Loyal ("Larry") B. Hays and Technical Sergeant Keene Hepburn of the U.S. Marines. After 13 days there, they were back in the U.S. last week, editing 15 to 20 hours of the best portable wire and disc recordings of battle action made during World War II. They put home-fronters (CBS, We, the People) just about as close to the battle as they could get without participating in it.

The Hays-Hepburn recordings are notable for: 1) their extreme clarity; 2)their naturalness, which is the result of letting battle sounds speak pretty much for themselves. Says Lieut. Hays: "I don't believe that war is any place for histrionics. I don't believe in yelling 'here they're coming down the stretch!' "

"I'm Gonna Die." Hays & Hepburn began their recording aboard ship with the Amphibious Corps on the way to Saipan, setting the battle scene by casual conversations with privates and admirals, by recording 250 men singing Abide With Me (and obviously meaning it) in the ship's sweaty hold, led by a sweating chaplain. The recorders were near the beachhead in a landing craft as the first wave of Marines went in, Hays quietly telling what he saw, Hepburn manipulating the controls and making one anxious comment for all to hear: "If that's not recording, I'm gonna die."

The push to Garapan gave Hays & Hepburn special problems. It was so hot that the fluid in their batteries boiled while charging. Their equipment was frequently choked by clouds of coral dust from the roads. But they managed to stay with the foot soldiers, pausing to explain the action, letting the microphone gather the battle noises: wounded groaning, Jap bullets pinging against metal, the sharp splat of mortar shells exploding, the high hum of planes, artillery in the background, and the cries of men giving battle directions.

"You Got to Walk." Through this bloody action, Hays kept on recording conversations with Marines: talk, constant nervous laughter and incoherence. "Sometimes you laugh, sometimes you're scared, run," says a Flatbush, Brooklyn, boy. "Are you scared?" asks Hays. "Well, I couldn't sleep." Says one Texas Marine, wounded by fire from undisclosed Japanese pillboxes on a knoll: "You just got to walk till you find them."

Hays & Hepburn plan to return to the South Pacific soon with new equipment. Hays worries about the necessity of using words to describe action. Says he: "The whole thing doesn't come through a radio. If you turn the radio on full blast in a live-walled room, something of the sound is there. But try as I will, you can never get it. Your throat becomes a bottleneck and the words jell in your mouth." Even so, his warcasting is the best to date.

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