Grunts (5 page)

Between 0830 and 0900 the first waves landed on their respective beaches against varying levels of resistance. To the south, at Agat, the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade took intense fire at Yellow and White Beaches. “The beach defenses were well organized and consisted of numerous concrete pillboxes built in coral cliffs and an elaborate trench system extending inland from the water’s edge with many well-concealed machine gun emplacements and tank traps,” the brigade’s war diary vividly recorded. “Heavy resistance was encountered from enemy small arms, machine gun and mortar fire.” At Gaan Point, right in the middle of the landing beaches, a substantial blockhouse with one 37-millimeter gun and two 75-millimeter pieces savaged the approaching LVTs with enfilade (flanking) fire. “The blockhouse was covered by earth to form a large mound, and was well camouflaged,” Lieutenant Colonel Robert Shaw, the brigade’s intelligence officer, wrote. Protected by a four-foot-thick roof, and built into the very nose of the point, the blockhouse’s guns picked off one LVT after another. The shells tore through the thin American armor, igniting fuel tanks, spreading deadly shards, burning men and tearing them apart. Staff Sergeant John O’Neill, a platoon sergeant in L Company, 22nd Marines, was riding in an LVT that churned right into the kill zone. He could see six nearby LVTs already burning and could hear enemy fire above the engine noise. “There was a sudden explosion, a searing blast of heat. The heat and acid smell of black powder was in the air.” The LVT had taken a direct hit on the left side, igniting the driver’s compartment into flames. One of the crewmen was badly wounded, blood pouring from open wounds. Staff Sergeant O’Neill ordered everyone to inflate their life vests and hop over the side. They waded through waist-high water, under fire, some five hundred yards to the beach.

The blockhouse guns continued pumping shells into the LVTs. They torched one boat carrying the 3rd Battalion, 22nd Marines, headquarters group, killing the battalion’s executive officer. In total, the Americans lost two dozen landing craft from enemy fire and mechanical problems. Because of the way the enemy position was built, the Navy could not get a clear enough shot at it, meaning that the ground troops had to take it out. Those Marines who made it to the beach found themselves on the sloping ground just inland, involved in close-quarters firefights with entrenched groups of Japanese, killing the enemy soldiers at hand grenade range, then pushing farther inland as fast as possible. In one such firefight, Staff Sergeant O’Neill was organizing his platoon’s movement when the man next to him suddenly got hit by enemy machine-gun fire. “I stood frozen to the ground and watched the burst take the top of his head off. It seemed like I stood there a lifetime before I could take my eyes from the horrid sight before me. I regained my senses and hit the deck.” With the help of another platoon, they poured fire on the Japanese position, enveloped it, and killed the enemy soldiers.

The Americans also had to assault enemy-held caves, often with the help of tanks. One such cave contained a two-man machine-gun nest whose fire wounded thirteen Marines. American small-arms fire and grenades did nothing to the crew. A newly landed tank rumbled up and pumped three rounds into the cave entrance. One of the enemy soldiers ran out of the cave and sprinted successfully for the safety of another cave. His partner killed himself with a grenade rather than be taken alive. Behind Gaan Point, another group of Marines, augmented by Sherman tanks, maneuvered behind the infamous blockhouse and destroyed it from behind, mainly with tank fire. By early afternoon, the brigade had suffered 350 casualties but had carved out a lodgment a few hundred yards deep. The 77th Division’s 305th Regimental Combat Team stood offshore, ready to reinforce the Marines. Burial parties later counted 75 Marine bodies at Yellow Beach alone.
¹⁰

The northern landings were a mixed bag. Generally speaking, the bitterest fighting was in the middle to northern portion of the landing area, from Asan village to the Chonito cliffs near Adelup Point. On the southern end of the two-thousand-yard stretch of beach, near Asan Point, the 9th Marines enjoyed a reasonably smooth landing, although the initial waves were at times pinned down by withering Japanese machine-gun and mortar fire. “The best we could do was crawl forward until we could see an enemy position, then shoot, throw grenades, use flamethrowers, and any other method available to overrun or push back the enemy,” Private First Class Welch recalled. According to one witness, the Japanese “clung tenaciously to installations such as caves, roadblocks, or dug-in positions. Very few surrendered, and it was necessary to destroy each individual in his position.” Fighting in this fashion, the regiment secured most of its W-day objectives, including Asan Point.
¹¹

In the middle, at Green Beach, the 21st Marines assaulted in the shadow of an imposing cliff, some one hundred feet high, that loomed menacingly over the water and posed a seemingly impenetrable barrier. Regimental commander Colonel Arthur Butler and his staff had studied, in their preinvasion planning, photographs of two defiles that cut into either side of the cliff. Butler planned to envelop and scale the cliff by sending his 2nd Battalion to the left defile and his 3rd Battalion to the right. “It took ingenuity, back-breaking work under a blazing tropical sun, and a hell of a lot of fighting to do the job,” one regimental officer said.

Indeed it did. When the first waves of the 21st waded ashore, they dodged in and out of shell holes made by the Navy’s bombardment and took shelter in the lee of the cliff. The water from the reef to the edge of the beach was under constant mortar and machine-gun fire from unseen Japanese soldiers on the high ground. LVT coxswains, dodging the intense fire, gunned their engines to the beach, dropped ramps, and practically threw their Marines ashore. It took nearly two hours for Butler’s officers to organize the battalions and make the movement up the cliffs. In that time, the fire grew more intense as the Japanese figured out where the Americans were hiding.

At last, the infantry Marines began their arduous climb, blending in, as best they could, with the thick green foliage and jagged brown ridges that ringed the defiles. Colonel Butler, from a ditch on the beach where he had set up his command post (CP) to avoid mortar fire, raised binoculars to his eyes and watched his men. One of his intelligence officers did the same: “Through field glasses they looked like so many flies crawling up the side of the living room wall. [They] slowly pulled themselves up the cliff, clinging to scrub growth, resting in crevices, sweating profusely in the broiling tropical sun.” Private First Class Frank “Blackie” Hall, a twenty-one-year-old New Jersey native and first scout in F Company, was in the lead of the 2nd Battalion advance. “It was not all cliff. I don’t mean we were hanging by our toenails and fingernails but there were times it was quite steep.” The opposition was lighter than he expected, mostly just small-arms fire from handfuls of enemy soldiers in caves or gullies. The battalion did not reach the top until several hours later, well into the afternoon.

On the right, the 3rd Battalion Marines worked their way up the southern defile, across a small road, along the Asan River. Here too opposition consisted of small, disorganized groups of enemy soldiers. “They were dug in . . . under the ground everywhere,” Private First Class Frank Goodwin said. “They had . . . trap doors that they could throw open and start shooting. We were taking mortar fire from the hills.” A machine-gun nest opened up. Two bullets tore into Goodwin’s buddy, hitting him in the chest, killing him instantly. Everyone else hit the ground. As was so common in these situations, most of the men hugged the ground and merely waited for things to quiet down, or someone to take charge. In the meantime, a few brave individuals maneuvered around, figured out the guns’ location, and killed the enemy soldiers at close range, with grenades and small arms. In this manner, with plenty of stops and starts, the battalion reached the top of the cliff by midafternoon.

The 21st Marines had accomplished the amazing feat of taking the cliff in the face of enemy opposition. But they were exhausted from the heat, the sheer physical challenge of climbing such steep ground, and dealing with the stress of fighting groups of Japanese who could pop up anywhere. They were thirsty. They already missed buddies who had been killed or wounded in the course of the day. They were bruised and scraped from diving for cover and crawling along the earth. Their trousers and fatigue blouses were disheveled and torn. Even so, they knew they had to hold this newly won high ground. If the Japanese got it back, they could “place observed fire on all our beach installations, the Division command post and the Regimental Command Post,” one officer later wrote. Tired or not, the Americans dug in a few hundred yards inland, along a prominent ridge that overlooked the cliff. Whether they liked it or not, they knew that modern combat was about physical endurance as much as anything else.
¹²

Butler’s Marines would have been chagrined to learn that their 3rd Marine Regiment comrades a few hundred yards to the left had an even rougher landing. Here too the terrain presented a major obstacle. To the left of Red Beach, Adelup Point (referred to as “the Devil’s Left Horn” by the Americans) jutted gracefully into the sea, flanking the landing beaches. A massive seaside red-clay ridge, known as the Chonito Cliff, towered over much of Red Beach. Not far from the waterline, a seawall offered a bit of cover but also restricted movement for men and vehicles alike. Japanese mortar and artillery observers, augmented by machine gunners and riflemen, were holed up in caves within Chonito Cliff, overlooking the water. They had even built tunnel systems to connect caves. This afforded them protection from the preinvasion bombardment along with excellent sight lines and fields of fire. Farther inland, the cliff gave way to a dizzying array of rice paddies and ridges (the most prominent of which was named Bundschu Ridge after a company commander) that typified much of the terrain behind all the invasion beaches. “The innumerable gulleys [
sic
], valleys and ridges might as well have been gorges and mountains,” the division after action report sardonically commented.

Colonel W. Carvel Hall, the regimental commander, planned a quick two-battalion attack, designed to get inland, envelop the cliff, and neutralize the ridge, all before the Japanese could recover from the shock of the bombardment. The problem was that the enemy soldiers had not been particularly hard hit by the barrage. They were alert and ready, waiting for the most advantageous moment to open fire. Artillery pieces on Adelup Point menaced the Marine LVTs as they closed in on Red Beach. Mortar shells and Nambu machine-gun fire greeted boats as they inched onto the bracketed beach. In one LVT, Corporal Pete Gilhooly, a squad leader in I Company, hurled himself over the side, steadied himself under the weight of his sixty-pound pack, and ran up the beach. “I was looking right into a Japanese bunker, right on the beach. Without further ado, I threw a hand grenade in there and took off.” He and his comrades crossed a beach road, then turned to ascend the side of the cliff. At this point, I Company and the whole 3rd Battalion ran right into the cross fire of the concealed Japanese defenders. They were taking fire from cliff-side caves as well as the distant ridges. The result was horrible. “They attacked up a 60-degree slope,” a Marine correspondent wrote, “protected only by sword grass, and were met by a storm of grenades and heavy rifle, machine-gun, and mortar fire. The physical act of forward motion required the use of both hands.” In one company alone, half of the Marines were killed. “You could see little black figures crawling up the slope,” one Marine witness later wrote. “You could see little black puffs of smoke coming out around them, which were grenades the Japanese were throwing at them. You could see the guys tumble up and roll back down the hill.”

The beach itself was also under withering mortar, artillery, and machine-gun fire. Troops who were unloading supplies, litter bearers who were hauling wounded men, and carrying parties that were attempting to get ammo, equipment, and water to the forward Marines found that any movement could bring death. Pinned-down men lay in clumps, waiting out the shelling, resting, or steeling themselves for the courage to get up and move forward. The rotting, humid smell of death hung over the beach. In the tropical air, the dead were decomposing quickly. “Shore parties were working over the bodies as fast as they could under enemy fire, but it was a difficult job just to stay alive yourself, let alone identify a corpse and dig a grave in the beach for it,” one Marine observed. Navy corpsmen scurried around, treating the growing number of wounded men lying on litters. Many were at the waterline, waiting to be picked up by LVTs that were themselves still under fire. In one part of the beach, a wounded Marine with a destroyed foot limped around, in a daze, whimpering for a corpsman.