Islands of the Damned (18 page)

A little later I found four more in a rock crevice. From their equipment I judged they’d been advance scouts from an intelligence unit. The Japs had hacked them to pieces. They’d cut off heads and hands. One of them, they’d cut off his penis and testicles and stuffed them in his mouth.

It made me dizzy and sick. We’d heard the stories. On New Britain Japs had tied Marines to trees and used them for bayonet practice. So I never had felt any regrets about killing a Jap in combat. Never remorse about any of it. But after the sight of those mutilated bodies, I guessed I’d hate Japs as long as I lived.

While we were throwing ourselves against the Five Sisters, the Seventh Marines walked into a slaughter north of Walt Ridge that cut them up so badly they were pulled out. The regiment had lost 46 percent of its fighting strength and was in no condition to carry on. Trucks picked up the survivors and drove them back to the Purple Beach rest area. The First Marines had already pulled out for Pavuvu with over 70 percent losses. That left us. Peleliu had cost us 36 percent of our men, wounded and killed. But we were the only Marines General Rupertus had left.

Our commander, Colonel Harold “Bucky” Harris, had a well-known philosophy. Expend ammunition, not men. He had been rethinking the whole campaign against the Pocket. Whatever happened next, it wouldn’t be another headlong rush. Under Colonel Harris, the Fifth would move slowly and deliberately, reducing the Pocket ridge by ridge and cave by cave. Foot by foot if necessary.

On October 6 Third Battalion was pulled back from the Five Sisters. At nine o’clock the next morning we went into the Horseshoe behind Army tanks. Twice that day we pounded the lower slopes of Walt Ridge and the Five Brothers. Midmorning, when the tanks ran out of ammo, we withdrew to refuel and rearm. Then we went back in, this time taking demolition teams and amtracs with flamethrowers. We went on until early afternoon, when the tanks ran out of ammo again. Then we pulled out and were sent south for a rest.

About this time a three-day typhoon swept over Peleliu. The temperatures fell into the eighties, which was a blessing. But it turned the coral dust into gumbo. The mud clogged our equipment and everything bogged down. Supplies couldn’t get in over the raging surf. Streams of Curtiss Commando cargo planes from Guam air-dropped essentials. After the storm passed temperatures shot up over a hundred again and the mud turned back into dust. Things were as they had been.

On October 10, K Company was pulled out of reserves and sent to clean out a nest of snipers who had been firing down on the west road. We were well behind the front lines, in territory that was supposed to be secure. But once again the Japs had hunkered down and waited. A week before, at a spot along the road called Dead Man’s Curve, they had fired on an Army convoy and brought it to a stop. Everyone bailed out and ran for cover, ducking down behind trucks or diving behind rocks at the side of the road. Colonel Joseph Hankins, commander of First Division’s Headquarters Company, had come along in his jeep to check on reports of snipers. When the convoy stopped, Colonel Hankins got out and walked forward to see what was holding things up. Just as everyone yelled at him to get down, he was hit in the chest. He died lying there in the roadway, the highest-ranking Marine killed on Peleliu.

We had a couple Army tanks along with us this time to provide cover. We were taking rifle and mortar fire from several places along a cliff, but we couldn’t see where it was coming from. Hillbilly Jones’s rifle squad was just up the road, and as the morning dragged on a couple of his men were hit, and one of them was killed. Hillbilly decided to try to get a better view of the shooters from one of the tanks. I was about 150 feet away directing mortar fire and I didn’t see everything that happened. But after discussing the situation briefly with a staff officer from battalion headquarters, Hillbilly climbed onto the back of the tank and scrambled forward to slap the side of the turret to alert the gunner what he was up to. He was just peeking around the turret when a single shot hit him in the side and knocked him down. He rolled off the tank into the road, and the call went out for a corpsman. While we watched, Hillbilly picked himself up, bleeding from the side, and pulled himself back onto the tank. Then he stood up. The next shot caught him in the chest and knocked him flat again. This time he didn’t move.

Word spread down the line—Hillbilly’s been hit. By the time I got to the tank, stretcher bearers had carried away the body. All the memories came flooding back. Hillbilly carrying his guitar down to our tents on Pavuvu. Lazy days singing and cracking jokes on the deck of a troopship. Guard duty drinking grapefruit juice and alcohol, and afterward the hangover, on Banika.

For the rest of the day and into the next we blasted away with machine guns, mortars, and rifle fire at every crack or opening we could find along the west road. We took plenty of fire in return, until eventually it tapered off. Not once during that time did we see a single live Jap.

The day after Hillbilly was killed, Second Battalion made it south all the way to the foot of Hill 140, at the head of the Horseshoe. By midafternoon they had taken it, and after that they held it against a sharp counterattack. The battalion had fought its way in from the east road past Baldy, where the Seventh Marines had been beaten so badly. This time bulldozers smoothed the way, clearing a path for flame-throwing amtracs and sealing caves as they advanced.

Command viewed Hill 140 as the key to the whole operation. Its west side fell away sharply to the floor of the Horseshoe. The top looked down on four of the Five Brothers, just to the south. K Company’s mortars were rushed back along the west road and let out at a place where we could proceed on foot to Hill 140. There we would rejoin the rest of Third Battalion, which was on its way to relieve the Second Battalion early the next day. First Battalion had already gone into reserve. That left us the last Marine battalion fighting on Peleliu.

The death of Hillbilly Jones had been a blow. Soon we would absorb another.

Command’s idea had been to plant a 75mm pack howitzer on the top of the hill. But the crest was too sharp and narrow for a gun emplacement, and soon both gun and crew had been dislodged by Japanese fire.

When the Third Battalion arrived, Second Battalion was taking fire from three sides. Where the hill dropped into the Horseshoe, there was no protecting flank. In effect, they held the hill on just three sides. The other was exposed. Orders for Third Battalion were to secure the south side and take the bend out of the line.

In the morning they started working their way up the hill to where Second Battalion was dug in just short of the crest. Everybody was warning them not to show their heads over the top. Jap snipers on the far side were alert, and deadly. But someone needed to see what was beyond the hill in order to direct the battalion’s fire.

Captain Haldane, Johnny Marmet, Sergeant Jim McEnery and a couple other NCOs had made their way to the top and were flat on their bellies trying to figure out how to get a look at the other side. Second Battalion’s own machine gunners were dug in so low, they could hardly see what they were shooting at. They had to sight their guns by looking under the barrels.

This was not satisfactory to Captain Haldane, who was himself an old machine gunner. He slithered forward a few feet and cautiously raised his head.

Everybody heard a sharp
thwack
and knew instantly what it meant. Those who were close enough said his head just exploded. There was no point in even calling for a corpsman.

We had just arrived at the foot of the hill, looking for our new positions, when Sergeant Marmet came stumbling down the slope, a Thompson submachine gun dangling from his hand by the strap. I knew the moment I saw his face something had happened.

“Hey, Johnny,” I said. “What’s going on?”

He shuffled his feet and gazed off for a moment. “Okay, guys, let’s get squared away here,” he said. Then silence. We looked at one another.

“What the hell’s wrong?” I asked.

“The Japs got the skipper a few minutes ago on the ridge,” he said. It was like a kick in the stomach. Somebody threw down the base plate and the mortar tube. Somebody said, “Goddamn.” Sledge turned away. We stood there paralyzed and silent.

Finally Marmet pulled himself together. “All right,” he said. “All right. Let’s move out.” And we did.

It was more than a death in the family, losing Hillbilly Jones and Andy Haldane like that. They had been on Guadalcanal together, on New Britain and Peleliu. I found out later Haldane had been about to recommend me for the Silver Star for our action at the bunker on Ngesebus. He was killed before he could write it up. It didn’t make things any better and it didn’t make things any worse, as far as I was concerned. Hillbilly and Ack-Ack had been the core of our officers, leaders of men. Leaders of Marines.

First Lieutenant Thomas “Stumpy” Stanley was brought in from the battalion command post to take charge. The mortar squads were lobbing shells over the rim of Hill 140 into the northern end of the Horseshoe and at Walt Ridge beyond.

Jap artillery was answering us less and less. We got the feeling they were just waiting in their holes, like spiders. It rained off and on, and when the sun came out the rain turned to steam. The smell of death and the flies hung over everything, worse than ever. From where we looked out there wasn’t a speck of green anywhere on the island. We’d stripped it bare. All that was left was gray rock and rolling smoke.

On the thirteenth, K Company advanced 150 yards and straightened out the lines. We spent part of the next day with demo squads, sealing caves and stringing communication wire to hinder infiltrators. We figured the more pressure we put on them, the more determined the Japs would be to infiltrate, or even to break out. We heard that the Eighty-first Army Division, the “Wildcat” Division, was on its way from Angaur to relieve us. We also heard that command had declared the assault phase of the invasion—whatever that meant—officially ended. It had been twenty-eight days since we came ashore on Orange Beach Two.

This is where we finished our war on Peleliu. At dawn on October 15, the Army troops marched in, looking grim. They had six more weeks of combat ahead of them. We were headed out. We boarded trucks to the north end of the island, where the Seabees had set up a new bivouac area. For the first time in months we slept in tents, and the tents had plywood decks, which we hadn’t even had on Pavuvu. There were showers, a cookhouse, a mess tent where we could eat sitting down at tables. They had hung a sheet between trees where they could show movies. We shaved, washed our hair, brushed our teeth. Then we brushed our teeth again, just because we could do it.

This idyllic life didn’t last long for the mortar section. We were sent out to the east road and told to set up our guns facing the sea, just in case the Japs tried a landing. (It was not such a far-fetched idea. We heard later the Japs sent a small force over from Babelthuap in mid-January. It was intercepted and all but two of the eighty or so invaders were killed.) A few miles to the south we could hear the Army’s guns pounding away at the Pocket.

Finally they sent us down to Purple Beach to await transport back to Pavuvu. We were issued fresh uniforms, new boondockers, and that wonder of wonders, clean white socks. We burned the rags of our old uniforms and slept in hammocks, our sleep occasionally disturbed by tracers from the distant fighting. I dreamed of Florence, of the little bungalow we’d set up someday, of children running around the house.

A new cemetery appeared alongside the main runway at the airfield. Somewhere among the crosses Hillbilly Jones and Andrew Haldane were at rest. Altogether, the First Marine Division had lost more than 1,250 Marines on Peleliu. More than 5,400 had been wounded. There was no way to count the Japs, but we had killed more than ten thousand for certain. I read somewhere afterward that we had fired almost 16 million rounds of ammunition of all kinds during our time on Peleliu. That works out to more than 1,500 rounds per Jap. That seems about right.