Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu (7 page)

But now the situation was changing fast. One new regiment, the Seventh, was split off from the Fifth, and another one, the First Marines, was activated about that same time. The division’s artillery regiment, the Eleventh, was beefed up with new 105-millimeter field pieces to go with their old 75-millimeter pack howitzers.

The division was sure as hell in no shape to actually fight anybody at this point. All the companies were shorthanded, and none of them had functioning machine gun or mortar sections. We were short of everything, and what equipment we did have was left over from World War I. Those of us in the Fifth were called the “raggedy-ass Marines,” and we lived up to—or down to—that description.

By the time the Japs hit Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Corps was growing at a frenzied pace, and the raid on Pearl kicked it into an even higher gear. On April 10, 1942, the Seventh Marines—with Remi Balduck among them—sailed for American Samoa to defend it against an expected attack by the Jap “supermen,” who couldn’t seem to be stopped anywhere.

Just a day before the Seventh Marines left the States, our forces
on Bataan—over 70,000 American and Filipino troops—had surrendered to the Japs. This left only our guys on Corregidor still holding out, and in less than month, they’d have to surrender, too.

I can’t tell you how much I admired those guys for the stand they put up. But my biggest heroes were the few hundred Marines on Wake Island who held out against a huge Jap force for sixteen days. They fought off a whole enemy invasion fleet and sank or damaged a bunch of enemy ships. I swore right then that I’d do everything I could to uphold the high standards they’d set for the rest of us in the Corps.

The British were catching it even worse in the Pacific than the Americans were. After they lost 180,000 troops at Singapore, Prime Minister Winston Churchill told President Franklin Roosevelt that “Fighting the Japanese soldier on land is like jumping into a pool full of sharks.”

T
HE FIFTH MARINES
were about to be next to take that jump.

On May 17, 1942, we went aboard the USS
Wakefield
, a refitted passenger liner formerly called the SS
Manhattan
. Three days later, we sailed out of Norfolk with a cruiser and four destroyers shielding us from German U-boats. We headed south through the Atlantic and the Caribbean, then took a hard right at the Panama Canal.

As we steamed southwest across the endless expanse of the Pacific, our cruiser and destroyers were nowhere in sight. We had six PT boats as an escort for three days. Then they disappeared, too. We were on our own.

Major General Alexander A. Vandegrift, commander of the First
Marine Division, and his whole division headquarters battalion were aboard the
Wakefield
. So we got the idea that—escort or no escort—wherever we were going was pretty damn important.

On June 14, after riding out a fierce storm in mid-Pacific, we docked at Wellington, New Zealand, where, it was announced, we were to train for six months.

Twelve days later, on June 26, the division received its orders: “Occupy and defend Tulagi and adjacent positions on Guadalcanal, Florida, and Santa Cruz Islands.”

Our debarkation date was initially set for August 1. Then it was grudgingly moved back to August 7.

So, instead of having six months to get ready for the first U.S. offensive ground action of the Pacific war, we were actually getting just six weeks—including travel time.

And that, in so many words, is how I happened to be in that godforsaken place called Guadalcanal.

Along with the rest of K/3/5, I’d be there for a little over four months. They were four months that seemed more like four years.

When they were over, a lot of the guys I’d shared foxholes and swapped stories with were dead, and those of us who managed to leave Guadalcanal alive would never be the same again.

If there was any kid left in me, I lost him right there.

A
T FIRST LIGHT
on August 8 (D-Day-plus-1), Lieutenant Adams got the word from K Company headquarters and passed it along to everybody in the First Platoon. “The whole company’s going on a recon patrol as a unit,” he said. “We’ll check out the area to our immediate front. If everything looks okay, we may form a new line farther west.”

The first thought that popped into my head was:
Oh crap, sounds like we’re in for more digging!

About 9 AM, we moved out and proceeded very cautiously to the southwest. Despite the fact that our mission was supposed to be strictly reconnaissance and not combat, we were all on high alert. But we still didn’t see or hear any sign of enemy ground activity.

We advanced maybe 1,500 yards, using the undergrowth and coconut palms for cover and staying within sight of the beach. After that, we stopped for a break, then started retracing our path back toward our original defense line.

We were nearly there when a formation of Jap Zeros and Betty bombers suddenly showed up.

It was about 12:30 PM, almost exactly the same time as the first Nip air raid the day before. The Zeros were flying real low, and this time we had enough sense to either take cover or hit the deck where we were. But just like on the first raid, these planes didn’t have the slightest interest in us. They were looking for bigger game out in Sealark Channel.

They never slowed down or gave us a second look, but one of the Zeros flew directly over me, and I swear he wasn’t over fifteen or twenty feet above the tops of some of the coconut palms.

For a second, I could see the pilot as clear as if he was sitting across a table from me. He was the first Jap I’d ever gotten a close look at. He was wearing goggles, so I couldn’t see his eyes, but the grin on his face looked like it was a foot wide.

So this is what a Jap looks like,
I thought.
I wonder if the ones on the ground look the same way.

The bombers did a little better job this time around than they had on their first raid. They brought the unloading of our supply ships to a standstill and scored a major hit on the USS
George Elliott
, a transport carrying most of the supplies intended for the Second Battalion, First Marines. They left the
Elliott
blazing from stem to stern. It was damaged too bad to be saved and finally had to be scuttled.

Except for that, nothing much happened on our patrol that second morning. We did manage to pick up a few supplies off the beach, but otherwise it was a dry run. By 1 PM, we were back at our original line and still waiting to see something happen on the ground.

W
HILE WE WERE
patrolling the beach, the First Marines were moving toward the airfield. Along the way, they made a couple of very important discoveries.

For one thing, the jungle undergrowth was almost impenetrable in some places. You could chop at it for hours and never seem to make any headway. There were giant trees in it with trunks as tough as steel and as wide as a tank was long with vines as thick as a man’s thigh wrapped around them.

For another thing, the maps we’d been given were all fouled up. They weren’t worth a damn for anything, except maybe toilet paper. If you tried to follow them, you were sure to get lost.

The First Marines’ mission that day of seizing the airfield was a lot more critical than ours was in K/3/5. But because of the thick jungle and bad maps, the First got seriously bogged down on the way to their objective. That “Grassy Knoll” they were supposed to use as a landmark was actually a mountain named Mount Austen. It was four or five miles from where the maps showed it, and the area they were trying to march through was crisscrossed with rivers and streams that didn’t show up on the maps at all.

Because of the delays, it was 4 PM by the time the First got the airfield secured, but what they found when they got there was real encouraging. The work the Japs had been doing on the field was almost finished. That meant our planes might be able to start flying
missions from it in about a week, which was good news. The Marines also captured a lot of heavy equipment and supplies the Japs had left behind. They even took some prisoners, but most of them turned out to be Korean construction workers, not actual Nip combat troops.

The Koreans didn’t have any great love for the Japs because they’d been brought to Guadalcanal by force and then had to work their butts off carving that airfield out of the jungle. So the Koreans didn’t mind a bit telling our intelligence people everything they knew about how many Japs were on the island and where they’d gone. As a result, we got some very interesting information before the day was over.

According to the Koreans, there was nowhere near the 5,000 Nip troops—including a regiment of 2,100 infantry—we’d been told to expect on Guadalcanal. Except for two naval construction battalions with a total of around 1,800 men, there were actually fewer than 500 enemy combat soldiers there. And when our planes and ships started blasting the island, those had panicked and hauled ass to the west as fast as they could go.

What it added up to was the Marines’ first victory on Guadalcanal. But we knew it was way too early to celebrate, and we didn’t have time to do much of that, anyway.

After the news about the small number of Japs on the island reached Fifth Marines headquarters, Colonel Hunt got orders to contract our beachhead and advance west toward where the Japs were supposed to be. There was a road near the beach we could follow, and we were supposed to leave early the next morning, D-plus-2. En route, we were told to check out a village called Kukum and flush out any Japs that might be hiding there.

Suddenly, everything started looking a lot simpler—and easier—than it had that morning. We felt like we’d gotten a big break. All we had to do now to finish our job on Guadalcanal was find and take care of those few hundred Jap combat troops and get the airfield into operation. Then we could kiss this damn island goodbye and turn it over to the Army.

Boy, it looks like we’ve got this one made!
we thought.

We never stopped to consider what might happen if the Japs launched an all-out naval attack on our ships in Sealark Channel. In two major air raids, they’d only put one of our ships out of commission, and we heard they’d lost twenty-five or thirty planes in the bargain. So with all the firepower our task force had available, we just assumed it wouldn’t have much problem holding the Nip navy at bay.

But, my God, were we ever wrong!

On the night of August 8–9—before K/3/5 and the rest of the Third Battalion, Fifth, even got started on our new assignment—a powerful strike force of enemy ships left the Jap base at Rabaul and slipped down a sea lane through the Solomon Islands called the Slot. An hour or so before midnight, they attacked the task force of Allied cruisers and destroyers supporting our landings. Then all hell broke loose.

Those of us ashore thought at first it was a great American victory. That’s how out of touch we were. We cheered like crazy when we saw the big guns flashing and heard the explosions far out in the channel. We were convinced our Navy brothers were giving the Japs an ass-kicking they’d never forget.

Instead, what we were watching was the worst American naval defeat since Pearl Harbor.

B
Y LATE AFTERNOON
on August 9, D-plus-2, we found out what really happened. As I remember hearing it, it went like this:

After the Jap air raid on August 8, Admiral Frank J. Fletcher, commander of the carrier task force providing air cover for the Guadalcanal operation, received some news that got him seriously worried. Reliable reports from Navy reconnaissance pilots to the northwest warned Fletcher about that large, mean-looking Jap strike force that was headed our way.

Fletcher notified Admiral Richmond K. Turner, the man in charge of the landings on Guadalcanal and the other islands, and told him that all U.S. aircraft carriers supporting the landings were going to be withdrawn that night. Fletcher said the carriers had to leave because they’d lost a bunch of planes and their supply of gasoline was running low.