Islands of the Damned (15 page)

We waited an hour or two for a couple Sherman tanks and then started north. We were close enough to the ocean to hear waves slapping the rocks along the shore. Trees closed in on our right, and as the afternoon wore on the shadows of the ridge started to fall across the road. Corporal John Teskevich and several of our riflemen had climbed on board and were riding along when a Jap sniper that nobody ever saw shot Teskevich through the stomach. I was maybe fifty yards away. He died on the spot.

Teskevich was a good Marine. A tough, scrappy coal miner from Pennsylvania with a head of thick black hair and a big handlebar mustache that was his pride and joy, he had been one of our crew that Captain Haldane sent over to guard the beer storehouse on Banika. One morning while he was still sleeping, someone snuck into his tent and shaved off half of his mustache. Teskevich came roaring out, yelling that he’d fight the whole bunch of us. He looked pretty comical with half a mustache. Sergeant Jim Day got him calmed down, but I really do believe he would have taken us all on at once. I don’t know who did that, probably never will know.

Occasional sniper fire continued as we moved on, but nobody else was hit. When we stopped for the evening word was passed along to watch for infiltrators. Our line extended from the road to the shoreline, no more than 150 feet to our left. We were under the eyes of the Japs up in the caves on the ridge, and we knew there were more scattered through the woods to the right of the road. But Captain Haldane thought the Japs might try to wade along the shore and come in on our left. Jim Burke and I scraped out foxholes a few feet apart where we had a clear view of the water. Again it was impossible to dig deep in the hard coral, so we piled up rocks around our positions and waited. Just before dark, Captain Haldane ordered artillery to work over the woods in front of us along the base of the ridge. It was satisfying to hear those incoming 75s. We’d soon find out if they did much good.

A little after dark, Jim whispered that he heard someone splashing out in the water. A low-hanging half-moon cast a long bar of light across the waves. We watched and waited, and pretty soon we heard voices from that direction. I never could figure out why the Japs would jabber when they were trying to sneak around in the dark. But they always did.

Jim saw him first, a silhouette moving along in the moonlight just offshore. He said later all he really saw at first was the head and shoulders.

“Burgin, give me your rifle,” he whispered. He had been carrying only his .45. “I can see that son of a bitch.”

I eased my M1 over to him. I heard the safety softly click.

We waited for five or ten seconds. Then Jim fired and there was a splash.

“Got him,” I said.

Jim handed my rifle back. “Thank you very much,” he said.

Then he shouted, “Heads up, you guys. There’s more of them out there.”

Up closer to the road Sledgehammer and Snafu Shelton were sharing a foxhole. The drill was that one man would sleep while the other kept watch. An hour on, an hour off.

Sledge was on watch a few hours before dawn. Snafu was sleeping, snoring as usual and occasionally muttering to himself. Probably something like “We need more men in here!” That was his constant complaint no matter where we were.

In the moonlight, the coral road was a bright ribbon through the dark wall of trees. While Sledge watched, two figures popped out of the darkness on the other side of the road, yelling something in Japanese and waving their arms. One of them cut to Sledge’s right, ran down the road and disappeared to where Sledge knew another company was dug in.

The other figure ran straight for Sledge, waving a bayonet over his head.

Sledge grabbed his carbine, but hesitated. Other Marines lay in his line of fire.

With a yell, the oncoming Jap disappeared into a nearer foxhole. There was a series of thuds and grunts and yells, the sounds of a wild struggle. Then as Sledge watched, a figure jumped out of the hole and started in the direction of the command post nearby. Just then a Marine stood up and swung his rifle by the barrel, clubbing the running figure and bringing him down in midstride.

Down the road, where the first Jap had disappeared, someone started screaming wildly—Jap or Marine, Sledge couldn’t tell. Then the screaming stopped. The figure clubbed with the rifle lay in the road groaning.

There was a rifle shot from the foxhole just in front of Sledge, and someone yelled, “I got him.”

Everyone was awake now, but nobody knew what had happened.

“How many were there?” somebody asked.

“I saw two,” Sledge said.

“There must have been more,” somebody else said.

No, Sledge insisted. Two. One ran across the road and the other ran down to the right, where he got shot.

Then who was that groaning in the road? the other Marine asked.

“I don’t know,” Sledge said. “I didn’t see but two of them. I’m sure of it.”

“I’ll check it out,” somebody said and crawled out onto the road in the direction the groans were coming from. There was a sharp report of a .45, and the Marine crawled back to his foxhole.

In the graying light before dawn, Sledge looked over at the figure lying in the road. Somehow it didn’t look Jap. He wore Marine leggings. Sledge crawled over for a closer look.

He recognized the fallen man instantly. It was Bill Middlebrook, one of the riflemen. He had a hole in his temple.

“My God,” Sledge gasped.

A sergeant ran over. “Did he get shot by one of the Japs?”

Sledge couldn’t answer.

The man who had crawled into the road to see who was groaning turned pale. With quivering lips, he went straight to the command post to report what had happened.

A little later that morning Captain Haldane appeared and, one by one, questioned the men who had been close enough to have seen at least part of what happened the night before. How many Japs? he wanted to know.

Two, Sledge told him. Only two.

Had Sledge seen who shot Middlebrook?

Yes, he had, Sledge replied.

Captain Haldane nodded. Sledge should keep that information to himself, he said. This had been a tragic mistake, and there was nothing now that would bring Middlebrook back. The Marine who shot him would feel it for the rest of his life.

Over the decades, those of us who know about the incident, who know who shot Middlebrook, have kept faith. Like those of us who know who killed the dog handler, it’s never spoken of. When we get together, the last few of us, we don’t talk about it.

Headquarters had sent our regiment north along the west road because there was a change in strategy. Instead of tackling the Umurbrogols head-on, they had decided to move around behind them and come down from the north. Our job was now to secure the north end of Peleliu. Once this was done we’d start working our way down the ridges and valleys, digging the Japs out of their caves as we went.

The morning after the terrible night along the west road, we moved through the ruins of a small village that Second Battalion had taken the day before. Then we attacked and overran a steep hill that overlooked a trail connecting the island’s west and east roads across a broad saddle. All the time we were taking Jap artillery fire from somewhere north of us and from a big gun over on Ngesebus Island. Every time it went off you could hear the
whump!
all over Peleliu.

North of our hill, a row of four round-topped hills extended across the island to the eastern shore. At right angles to these hills a ridge continued along the west road, overlooking the narrow channel that separated Peleliu from Ngesebus. Once the hills had been covered with thick trees, but we’d blasted them until they looked like they’d had a bad haircut. Still, they were full of hidden caves, and the caves were full of Japs. As long as they stood in front of us, there was no way to get at Ngesebus.

From the top of our hill we looked across a sixty-foot drop-off to the valley floor. On the hills opposite we could watch for Japs to appear in the cave openings and pick them off. And they could pick us off. There was a man on my left that afternoon, sitting about three or four feet away. I heard the
whack
of the bullet even before I heard the rifle shot. I knew instantly he was dead. I’d shot enough deer on the farm to know what a bullet sounds like when it hits. It got him about half an inch above his eyes, dead center.

There was no way to dig two-man foxholes, so once again we piled up rocks and hoped for the best. Normally we’d stay about six feet apart, almost at arm’s length so we could reach out and touch one another. Through the night we’d take turns sleeping. I’d watch and the next man over would sleep. The man beyond him would watch and the next one would sleep, and so on.

When the Japs came calling at night they wore these rubber-soled canvas shoes, a little like sneakers. They didn’t make a sound. You’d look out and not see a thing. You’d look the other way for a second and turn back. And there’d be a Jap right in front of you. Twenty feet away, where there was nothing at all before.

The fourth man down the line from me was sleeping. All of a sudden I heard this scuffle, these grunts, and then a long, drawn-out scream.

The guy had been sleeping flat on his back when he felt a weight on his chest and woke up with fingers around his throat. Afterward, when he was able to tell us what happened, he said he found this Jap sitting on him, choking him. He said he could feel himself going under, losing consciousness. He knew the man was going to kill him.

“Everything I was ever taught in training about judo, jujitsu, how to defend yourself ran through my mind like a streak of lightning,” he told us. “I just went through everything.

“I knew what I was going to do. I reached up and put my left hand behind his head and with my right hand I poked two fingers in his eyes. Hard.”

The Jap instantly released his hold and fell back.

“I grabbed him by the neck and the seat of the pants and threw him off the cliff.”

I heard that Jap screaming all the way down, from the second his eyes were gouged until he hit the bottom. I’ve never heard such a bloodcurdling sound in my life.

The next day the Army moved into our places on top of the hill. We got word that evening that Third Battalion had been picked for a special operation. We were going across to Ngesebus.

Ngesebus lay in plain sight. The channel separating it from the northern tip of Peleliu was about five hundred yards across and only four feet deep in places. There had been a wooden causeway between the two islands, but we’d bombed that out.

There was a small Japanese air base on Ngesebus, barely big enough for a Piper Cub, as well as the pair of big guns that had been pounding us across the strait. There was a chance that the Japs would barge reinforcements down from Babelthuap some night. At low tide they could easily wade across to Peleliu and surprise us like they had at Guadalcanal.

But for us, getting across was not going to be that easy.

The west road was the only approach. It ran to a phosphate refinery at the north end of Peleliu, passing along the foot of a low ridge. At right angles to the ridge a series of four round-top hills ran across Peleliu to the east coast. These hills were going to be a problem. But the real barrier to getting to Ngesebus was the ridge. Inside its northernmost tip the Japanese Navy had dug the granddaddy of all the cave-and-tunnel complexes. Entrances looked out in three directions with all sorts of cross tunnels and connections on several levels. It was equipped with electric lighting, communication lines, storerooms, and an infirmary. Everything the one thousand Japs inside would need to keep the west road bottled up and to survive an attack. Our planes and artillery hit that ridge over and over until we thought there was nothing left to hit. When the first of our tanks went clanking up the west road and into full view of the cave, the Japs fired down on it and stopped it dead. All this time the guns over on Ngesebus were also raining shells down on the north end of Peleliu. We had no way to launch an attack on the smaller island until we gained control of the ridge, the west road, and the channel beyond.

Someone at battalion headquarters hit on an idea—they blanketed the beach on Ngesebus with smoke shells, letting the clouds drift across the channel. Then five amtracs waded into the channel and turned their 75s on the hill. They targeted the largest cave entrance with round after round until return fire was silenced. Then, with tanks leading the way, an amtrac with a mounted flamethrower moved in and torched every cave opening they could find. As a final touch a team of engineers blasted the entrances shut.

Meanwhile we were waiting back at the junction of the west and east roads. Late in the afternoon we got word that the way was clear. We’d cross to Ngesebus at nine the next morning, September 28.