Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu (16 page)

Anyway, within a minute or two, we’d chased all the Japs that were still able to move out of the ditch. They left their howitzers behind in a wild scramble to find some other cover. They also left about 400 bodies behind. They were scattered all over, in and out of the ditch.

Now there was only some mopping up to do, but it turned out to be almost as dangerous as the charge had been. Jap survivors were scattered over a wide area singly and in small groups. Some were wounded, but they all had weapons of some kind, and they were more than willing to use them.

After the ditch was clear of live Japs, Weldon Delong started running back and forth with nothing but a pistol and firing whenever he saw a downed Jap make a move. I guess he’d dropped his rifle in the heat of the charge instead of trying to reload.

Delong had put several enemy wounded out of their misery
when Slim Somerville spotted three or four Japs hiding in some water behind a log. They thought we couldn’t see them, but Somerville noticed their reflections in the water.

The first thing Slim did was try to warn Delong, who was out in the open and unprotected.

“Get down! Get down!” Slim yelled.

I’d always liked going on patrols with Delong because he was always so alert to everything around us. Always looking up in the trees and behind the bushes. Always checking out anything that looked suspicious. Other guys in my squad were good, too; they just weren’t as good as Weldon Delong.

But on this particular afternoon, he was too intent on looking for Japs to hear Somerville’s warning. One of the Japs in the water fired, and the bullet slammed into Delong’s chest. He went down without a sound, and never moved again.

After some other Marines took care of the Japs behind the log, I ran over to Delong. He was lying in a puddle of blood with his eyes wide open and his pistol still in his hand. The bullet had gone straight through his heart. He was as dead as a man could get.

By now, the adrenaline that had kept me going was drying up, and I felt like somebody had kicked me in the gut. Delong’s death left me shaken as bad as I’ve ever been. I considered him the best Marine in my former squad and maybe the best in the whole platoon. I could trust him with any job, no matter how tough it was. But now, one moment of carelessness had cost him his life.

He was posthumously awarded a Navy Cross for outstanding valor that day in leading the charge against one of those Jap field pieces and then wrecking the gun. He also had a ship named in his honor.

But even more important than that, he was my friend.

“Don’t beat yourself up about it, Mac,” said Private Lou Bors, another member of the squad I’d led. “If you hadn’t warned me to keep my head down, I wouldn’t be alive now, either.”

I nodded numbly. I didn’t even remember warning him.

“Yeah, God knows every one of us damn nearly bought it right here,” said John Teskevich. Then he laughed. “I almost made my old man $20,000 richer today, but I guess he’ll have to wait a while.”

I felt like total crap, but I tried to stay busy to keep from thinking.

Sergeant John Kelly, our third in command as platoon guide in the First Platoon, had just made lieutenant the day before. Now he was unconscious on the ground, shot through the body and bleeding like a stuck hog.

A corpsman did his best to stop the bleeding and patch up Kelly’s wound, and I went over to see about him.

“Is he gonna make it?” I asked.

“Hard to tell,” the corpsman said. “He don’t look too good, but I’d say he’s got a chance.”

I stayed with Kelly (who I learned years later did survive his wound, by the way) until the stretcher-bearers came to pick him up. By then, it was after dark, and a day I knew I’d never forget was almost over.

In one way, it was the worst day of my life so far. I was sick at heart about the friends I’d lost, and I spent a long time that night with their faces floating through my mind, thinking about them and praying for them. But buried somewhere underneath my grief for Delong and Landrum and the others was the feeling we’d really accomplished something that day.

The Japs never advanced east of the Matanikau again, and after a few more halfhearted attempts, they quit trying.

Their three-month offensive to drive us off Guadalcanal had hit a wall, and now they were running out of gas.

As it turned out, I was, too.

I
T WASN’T MORE THAN
a week after that last big fight along the Matanikau when I came down with a sudden, nasty case of malaria. And when I say “came down,” I mean that literally.

I didn’t even know I was sick until it hit me out of the blue; I thought I was just tired and weak from hunger. I was walking along in the K/3/5 bivouac area on my way back to the CP one morning when I passed out cold and fell flat on the ground.

The next thing I knew, I was in sick bay burning up with fever, and the medics were cramming quinine down me. I had a lot of company in that field hospital, too. The place was running over with malaria patients.

When the malaria outbreak on the ’Canal first got serious, the
medical officers had made a standing rule that guys with the disease should be hospitalized for at least ten days. But after a few weeks, there were so many cases they had to scrap that rule and start discharging malaria patients a lot sooner.

After three or four days in the field hospital, they gave me a handful of quinine tablets and sent me back to the company. I felt okay for a while, but the malaria bug kept coming back on me from time to time for as long as I was in the Pacific. Actually, I even had a few flare-ups with it after I got back to the States.

Following the action of November 2–3, K/3/5 was pulled off the line and sent to a rest area in the rear, and as it turned out we never went back on the line on Guadalcanal again. Our company hadn’t been in the thick of the action as much as we’d expected when we landed in August, but we’d had a baptism of fire on the ’Canal that would serve as a useful dress rehearsal for what lay ahead of us on New Britain and Peleliu.

Along about this same time, beginning the second week in November, we started hearing a lot of scuttlebutt about the whole First Marine Division being relieved and shipped to Australia. The Japs were still sending platoon-size patrols to probe our lines along the Matanikau, but it seemed like they’d lost interest in any more all-out fights.

What we didn’t know was that a large Jap convoy, accompanied by an escort force of cruisers and destroyers, was heading our way with thousands of fresh troops and plans to launch a whole new invasion of Guadalcanal. The Nips who’d been taking it on the chin from us during October and early November may have been ready to call it quits, but Imperial Army headquarters obviously had other ideas.

Before he got word about this new threat, Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey, commander of the Navy’s South Pacific Area—a man I truly admired and still do—had also sent a major force of U.S. warships and transports toward Guadalcanal. There were four transports carrying the Army’s 182nd Infantry Regiment to reinforce our garrison on the ’Canal, and they were escorted by six cruisers and fourteen destroyers. There were also three cargo ships loaded with all kinds of equipment and supplies.

Halsey had a second, even bigger task force standing by down at Noumea, New Caledonia, including the battleships
Washington
and
South Dakota.
The aircraft carrier
Enterprise
was there, too, but she was still undergoing repairs by a crew of eighty-five Seabees for heavy damage inflicted by the Japs.

(The “Big E,” as she was known, was now the only U.S. flattop afloat in the South Pacific. The gallant old carrier
Hornet
, which had launched Colonel Jimmy Doolittle’s bombing raid on Tokyo the previous April, had joined her sister ship, the
Wasp
, at the bottom of the ocean on October 26 after being hit by Jap torpedo planes during the Battle of Santa Cruz Island.)

Meanwhile, the Japs had two battleships of their own, the
Hiei
and the
Kirishima,
in the southern Solomons, and the two opposing forces were on a collision course as they steamed toward Guadalcanal.

The U.S. Navy’s main goal was to get our new troops onto the ’Canal ahead of the Japs and then get our transports and cargo ships out safely. Once that was done, Halsey’s fighting ships were ready to take on the enemy force jaw-to-jaw.

Far out to sea, one of the most furious sea battles ever fought was rapidly taking shape. None of us ashore had any idea what
was about to happen, but the fate of every sick, battle-worn, half-starved Marine already on Guadalcanal was hanging on that battle’s outcome.

A
S LUCK WOULD
have it, the first group of U.S. ships did beat the Japs to the island—but not by much. They anchored at Lunga Point at 5:30 AM on November 11. Just four hours later, while they were still unloading, they came under their first attack by enemy planes, and the transport
Zeilin
was damaged. A second air attack soon followed, but the unloading was completed that afternoon.

The second group of transports came in on the morning of the 12th and their escorts fought off another Jap air raid while they unloaded. But the only damage was to the cruiser
San Francisco
, caused when an enemy plane dived on her kamikaze-style. (Suicide attacks were rare by Jap pilots at that time, but within a couple of years they’d be crashing into our ships by the hundreds.)

So far, our side was doing okay, but it wasn’t over yet. Far from it. As the cruisers and destroyers escorting the transports started withdrawing from the area early on the morning of November 13, inadequate radar caused them to move directly into the path of the approaching enemy naval force.

It was only when some of the Jap ships turned on their searchlights that the Americans realized what they’d stumbled into. Then, in the confusion, several of the American ships may have actually opened fire on each other.

It turned into one helluva bloody mess. Our cruisers
Atlanta
and
Juneau
were sunk along with four of our destroyers. Two other U.S. cruisers and three other destroyers were damaged.

Still, we got in some good licks, too. We sent the Jap battleship
Hiei
to the bottom with over eighty shell holes in her, and we also sank two Jap destroyers and damaged four others.

But our Navy’s biggest challenge was still ahead. Those enemy transports carrying an estimated 15,000 reinforcements—roughly a whole division—had to be stopped before they could land those troops. Otherwise, the Marines on Guadalcanal would be in deep shit, and everything we’d gained over three-plus months of hard fighting could go down the drain overnight.

To Halsey, the stakes couldn’t have been any higher, but he didn’t admit publicly how desperate he considered the situation to be until he wrote his memoirs in 1947.

“If our ships and planes had been routed in this battle,” he said then, “our troops on Guadalcanal would have been trapped as were our troops on Bataan. We could not have reinforced them or relieved them. . . . Unobstructed, the enemy would have driven south, cut our lines to New Zealand and Australia, and enveloped them.”

Halsey knew the ships he’d lost were much less important than keeping those 15,000 fresh Jap troops from joining the fight for the ’Canal, and he pulled out all the stops. He ordered his battleships and the Big E north from New Caledonia at top speed. In the meantime, he sent every available plane aboard the
Enterprise
and at Henderson Field, along with a squadron of PT boats already in our area, to attack the Jap shipping.

At 11 AM on November 14, our search planes found the enemy transports, and what became known as the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal finally exploded full force. As Halsey remembered it later: “We threw in every plane that could take the air—planes from the
Enterprise
, Marine planes from Henderson, B-17s . . . fighters, dive
bombers, and torpedo planes. They would strike, return to base, rearm and refuel, and strike again.”

Six of the ten Jap transports were sunk outright. The other four were destroyed by Marine artillery and planes after they ran aground on Guadalcanal. Most of the troops aboard them were killed.

In a duel with the
South Dakota
and
Washington
, that other Jap battleship, the
Kirishima
, was also sunk, along with one enemy destroyer. We lost three destroyers, while the
South Dakota
and another destroyer were damaged.

After the remnants of the Jap invasion armada struck out for safer waters, Halsey summed up the situation in a five-word dispatch to Pacific Fleet headquarters in Hawaii.

“We’ve got the bastards licked!” it said.

B
AD AS I
hate to admit it, the First Marine Division itself was pretty well whipped by this time, too. Not by the Japs but by a combination of exhaustion, stress, malnutrition, hard labor, and those damn malaria mosquitoes. We’d lived with almost constant rain and mud for close to three and a half months. Our socks had long since rotted and fallen to pieces in our shoes.