Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu (29 page)

As we inched forward during that first hour ashore, I came across a Thompson submachine gun in perfect condition and about a hundred rounds of ammunition. The gun was just lying there
behind a little knob of rock, and I had no idea at the time how it got there. Someone told me later that it was probably dropped by Sergeant Tom Rigney of the Second Platoon, who’d been killed in that area earlier that morning.

To me, it was almost like a divine gift from above.

I’d been checked out on tommy guns back at New River before the war, but I hadn’t fired one since, and I was excited to have the chance now, especially in the situation we were in. My M-1 was a fine weapon—don’t get me wrong about that—but with a tommy and plenty of ammunition, I could be the equivalent of a whole damn fire team all by myself. The problem was, I
didn’t
have plenty of ammunition. That hundred rounds would go in a hurry in the kind of firefight we were into, but it would be great while it lasted.

The machine gun and small-arms fire that raged on both sides of me that morning were the heaviest I’d seen so far in the Pacific. We were lucky as hell to have our tanks giving us cover and fire support. Otherwise, I’m not sure we could’ve held our ground, much less flushed the Japs out of their pillboxes and caves. The tanks saved our bacon more times than I could count.

There were other times, though, when we infantry guys had to rescue some of the tankers. One of those times was just a few minutes after I found the tommy gun. I spotted a tank up ahead of me with Japs swarming all over it. There must’ve been twenty-five or thirty of them, and the tank crew was obviously in deep trouble.

I turned and saw PFCs Sterling Mace and Bill Leyden, along with two or three other Marines close beside me, and I yelled at them above the roar of the gunfire.

“We gotta get those Nips off that tank! Follow me!”

Luckily, the Japs were too intent on getting at the tankers to
notice us at first. I was about thirty feet away when I turned loose the first long burst from the tommy. Mace, Leyden, and the others opened fire with their rifles at the same moment, and Jap bodies started flying off the tank in all directions.

Several Nips were still on top of the turret and trying to wrest it open when I hit them with a second burst. They all fell without firing a single shot in reply. Within ten or fifteen seconds, every Jap attacking the tank had been blasted off it. They’d all been hit, but some were still jerking around on the ground.

“Hey, you guys,” I told the other Marines. “I’m running low on ammo, but we can’t leave any of those sons of bitches alive. They’re damn good at playing possum, so if any of ’em don’t have their faces or guts blown open, shoot the bastards again.”

When we moved away after a ragged volley of rifle shots, we left nothing but “good Japs” behind us.

We hadn’t gone far when another Marine tank pulled up and stopped beside us. The tank commander opened the hatch and grinned at me.

“I saw what you guys did back there,” he said. “Thanks for the help. Are you short of rounds for your tommy gun?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m practically out.”

“Well, here,” he said. “I got way more than I need.” He started handing box after box of .45-caliber ammunition down to me. By the time he got through, I had enough to kill every Jap on Ngesebus two or three times.

“Thanks, man,” I said. “I promise to put this to good use.”

“Go get ’em, Sergeant,” he said, and closed the hatch.

I noticed that the rest of my Third Platoon had gone up a hill to my left, so I headed in that direction. On the way, I decided to make
sure the ammo the tanker had given me would work in the tommy gun’s magazine. I knew the gun took .45-caliber cartridges, but I wanted to be sure they’d be okay if I loaded them into the magazine manually one at a time, so I fired a few as a test, and they worked fine.

Just at that moment, Captain Haldane came along and saw what I was doing. “Hey, Mac,” he said, “you’d better go slow on that ammo. Before we’re done here, you may need every round you’ve got.”

I remembered how worried I’d been just a few minutes earlier when I was almost out, and I felt kind of guilty. I guess it looked like I was being wasteful.

“Okay, I’ll save the rest for the Japs,” I said.

Ack-Ack waved at me and moved on.

T
HE REST OF
that day was one long, continuous firefight. The hill complex that was the Third Platoon’s major objective was a maze of interconnected caves and pillboxes, all of them crawling with Japs, and the air around them was full of bullets.

Once, when the platoon got bogged down temporarily as K and I Companies moved up together, I saw fifty-year-old Gunnery Sergeant Pop Haney jump up and rally the troops.

“Come on! Come on!” he yelled at Lieutenant Bauerschmidt. “We gotta keep movin’! We gotta move up!”

Bauerschmidt did what Pop told him, and we fought our way on up the hill, but guys were falling all around us. PFC Walter Stay was killed, and Corporal Richard Van Trump was evacuated with most of his lower jaw blown away.

I must’ve thrown forty or fifty grenades that day and had at least
that many thrown at me. I also gave the tommy gun one helluva workout. One of our tanks would pull up close and fire its 75 straight into the opening in the side of a pillbox or Nip Baxter would call in Marines with flamethrowers and bazookas. Then, if any Japs ran out, I’d spray them with the tommy.

We repeated the process over and over. Only the Lord knows how many I killed that day. But we had plenty of casualties, too. One I remember most vividly happened after Bill Leyden and I saw four or five Japs run out of a cave and start throwing grenades at us as fast as they could pull the pins.

I dropped two of them with the tommy gun, but one Nip was a daring son of a bitch. He stopped right in front of Leyden and hollered “Kill me, Marine! Kill me!”

Well, Leyden killed him, all right, with a quick burst from his M-1. But the Jap got a grenade off just as he went down, and fragments hit Leyden square in the face. The last Jap still standing drew back his arm to throw a grenade at me, but I cut him in half with the tommy before he could release it.

Leyden’s face was a bloody mess, especially the area around his left eye. As soon as we could get a corpsman to him, he was evacuated to the rear. The last thing I heard him say was, “Oh shit, oh shit, I think I’m blind!”

I said a little prayer for him right there.

Bill was barely eighteen, and he could be a wise guy at times, but he was also a damn good Marine who fought as hard and well that day as any man I ever knew. (I was glad when I learned after the war that the medics had managed to save his eyes. He recovered fast enough to get wounded even worse at Okinawa by a Jap 75, but he lived through that, too.)

B
Y DUSK ON
September 28, we had Ngesebus 90 percent secured, except for a few small pockets of Nips that were still holding out, so we dug in for the night and left the mopping up until the next morning.

It took us an hour or so to wipe out the last of the Jap caves. I called up a bazooka man and a flamethrower guy to help. Then, to make dead certain the cave was really cured, a demolition team moved in and sealed up the entrance with TNT charges.

After that, we turned over the rest of the cleanup chores to some Army troops and went back to the beach where the amtracks were supposed to pick us up and take us back to Peleliu.

By the time we left, 470 of the estimated 500 Jap troops on Ngesebus were either dead or captured. It seemed to me like we’d had to kill all the dead ones three or four times before they’d stay dead.

In about thirty hours on Ngesebus, K/3/5 had suffered two-thirds of the Third Battalion’s total casualties there—eight men killed and twenty-four wounded.

We earned a big round of applause from division headquarters for the job we’d done. Colonel Lew Walt, who served as overall on-site commander of the operation, praised our “excellent tactics,” and Major Gustafson, CO of the Third Battalion, called our tank-infantry assault “perfectly coordinated.”

The division’s battle diary summed up our victory on Ngesebus in these words: “Infantry and armor performed with a ruthless efficiency unequaled in any previous Pacific operation.”

We weren’t given much time to enjoy all this recognition, though. Two days after finishing up on Ngesebus, we were sent into
the enemy-infested heart of Peleliu’s Pocket to try for an encore. We’d stay there for two weeks of around-the-clock combat—until Peleliu itself was secured. Many more of K/3/5’s bravest and best would give their lives before that happened.

B
Y EARLY OCTOBER
, what was left of the Seventh Marines was locked in a stalemate with the Japs in the Umurbrogol’s southern ridges and along the West Road. But the Seventh’s lines were stretched thin as tissue paper. It was all they could do to hold the ground they had and keep the Nips from scoring a breakthrough.

They could measure any advances they made in feet, sometimes inches. In many places, their lines were within ten or twelve yards of the enemy’s. There was no time for them to eat and no way for them to sleep. Except for brief, infrequent lulls, the firing never stopped.

To keep this so-called quickie battle from lasting the rest of the year, it was obvious that the Seventh Marines needed to be relieved in the ridges by fresher troops. And it was equally obvious that if the First Marine Division was going to break the Japs’ grip on the Pocket, it would be up to us in the Fifth Regiment to do the job.

On the maps, most of the major ridges and rocky knobs had names—the Five Sisters, the Five Brothers, the Horseshoe, the China Wall—but they all looked the same to us. Inside each one was an anthill of Japs and stockpiles of weapons and ammo. When we managed to take one, there were always three or four more just like it looming ahead of us. They seemed to go on forever.

Lots of guys who lived to get out of those damn ridges later tried to describe them to the folks back home, but it was impossible. I think PFC Sterling Mace may have come up with the best
description when he said, “This terrain’s like the surface of a waffle iron, only magnified about a million times.”

At this point, the stench of death hung over Peleliu like an invisible, suffocating fog. Our Marine pilots said the smell was overpowering even at 1,500 feet above the island. The Japs never made an effort to collect or bury their corpses. They just left them to rot where they fell. There was one dead enemy soldier in a sitting position just above a trail that I traveled pretty often, and I must’ve shot his corpse on at least a dozen different occasions. Whenever I rounded a bend in the trail and saw him sitting there, I’d hit him with a few rounds just as a reflex. Finally his corpse decomposed to the point where he didn’t even look like a man anymore, and I quit shooting him.

Although we Marines took pride in taking proper care of our dead comrades, the intensity of the fighting in the ridges made any attempt to send out burial details a suicide mission. For one of the few times in Corps history, our dead were left on the field for days, even weeks. The bodies of some of Chesty Puller’s men who were killed on D-plus-2 still hadn’t been recovered by early October.

All these hundreds of decomposing bodies drew huge clouds of blowflies. They were so thick at times that they actually blotted out the sun, and you had to fight them for every bite of food you ate. If there was any Marine on Peleliu who didn’t swallow a few flies along with his C rations, I never met him.

Meanwhile, the heat continued unabated—up to 115 degrees in the afternoons. In all the history of warfare, I don’t think men have ever fought each other under more brutal conditions.

O
N THE MORNING
of October 1 (D-plus-16), all three battalions of the Fifth Marines climbed aboard a convoy of trucks and amtracks at a bivouac area south of the Jap stronghold known as the Five Sisters.

The first assignment for K/3/5 and the rest of the Third Battalion was to get rid of a bunch of enemy snipers who were threatening a stretch of the West Road called Dead Man’s Curve. It was the same area where John Teskevich had been killed and Jesse Googe had been wounded less than a week earlier, so we figured we had a score to settle.

Within a few minutes after we got off the trucks and started moving up into the nearest ridges east of the road, we began drawing fire. It was nothing heavy or concentrated; it was just an isolated shot now and then, but almost every time it happened one of our guys fell. The Nips had obviously been watching us unload and waiting till we made the best possible targets before opening up on us.

The scariest part of all was how well the bastards seemed to see us. It didn’t take but a split second of exposure to draw their fire. Fifteen or twenty minutes would go by without a shot being fired. Then some Marine would make a bad move—and
Bam!
—he’d be dead in his tracks.

My Third Platoon was inching its way along a jagged ridge—and I literally mean “inching”—when I got really worried. It had been quiet for a few minutes, but I just had a gut feeling that something was about to happen.

“Watch it now, you guys,” I said. “There’s no such thing as a comfort zone out here. Just take it easy and keep your heads down. Play it safe, and you’ll be all right.”

PFC Sterling Mace was crouching just to my left. I could tell he was itching to get a shot at something with his BAR, but I trusted him not to do anything stupid, and so far he hadn’t. He was stuffing his pack and pockets with extra ammo and patiently waiting for a chance to use some of it.

“Oh, crap, I didn’t leave any room for my cigs,” he said, then turned to his left and nudged his buddy Seymour Levy. “Hey, Sy, you got room in your pack for this fresh pack of butts? I got no place to put ’em where they won’t get mashed.”

Levy had been quieter than usual since he’d gotten the wound in his chin. He hadn’t even been quoting much Kipling poetry lately, and sometimes I thought he acted a little irritable, but he seemed okay at the moment.