Islands of the Damned (2 page)

The Japs had planted mines all over the beach, but most of them were duds. They’d even buried bombs in the sand with the fuse end pointed up. We picked our way around them, but they took out some of our amtracs and DUKWs.

About thirty yards off the beach we found ourselves in what must have been a small coconut grove. Fire from both sides had shredded the trees and left a low forest of ragged stumps. Still, they gave us some kind of cover. You couldn’t dig in the hard coral, but there were plenty of shell craters, and we hunkered down to catch our breath. Bullets were singing over our heads. The small Jap grenade launchers we called knee mortars were popping and artillery was rolling.

Our battalion had already lost its executive officer. Major Robert Ash was just stepping ashore when he was hit by artillery. The amtrac carrying our field telephones and communications personnel was burning out on the reef. We’d be without communications a good part of the day.

But K/3/5 had made it this far. Nobody in the mortar section had been hit.

Private First Class Eugene Sledge, one of my ammo carriers, was just behind me.

“Hey, Burgin,” he said, “you got a cigarette?”

Sledge was a college kid who had given up officer training to become an enlisted man. I knew he was a nonsmoker.

“You’re crazy, Sledgehammer,” I said. “You don’t smoke.”

“I want a cigarette,” he repeated.

I dug one out and handed it back to him.

A little bit later I looked around. He hadn’t lit the thing. He was chewing on it. In fact, he had chewed it down to shreds.

The mortars and machine guns slacked off a bit and we got orders to move out.

We didn’t know it at the time, but up on the north end of the beachhead, a thousand yards to our left, the First Marines’ Third Battalion were getting the hell beat out of them. They’d landed on White Beach One with orders to take the high ground north of the airfield, and then got caught up in a bloody struggle for a foothold on a coral outcrop called the Point. Just south of them, Second Battalion had landed on White Beach Two. They were to link up with the Fifth Marines’ First Battalion, which came ashore to their right, on Orange Beach One, with intentions to sweep across the airfield. As the Fifth Marines’ Third Battalion, we’d be farther right, pushing across the south end of the field from Orange Beach Two. From the coconut grove we could see the south end of the runway a few dozen yards in front of us.

The Seventh Marines were supposed to land on our right, on Orange Beach Three. Their plan was to mop up resistance on the southeast corner of the island, then link up with us and swing north.

But the Seventh was already in trouble. Coming into shore, their Third Battalion ran into heavy fire from their right, and a number of their LVTs had to swing leftward and come in on our beach. Now there were two different Third Battalions where there should have been only one. To make it worse, both battalions had K companies.

For half an hour NCOs barked orders to find out who was who, trying to get things sorted out. The Seventh’s K Company was shifted to our right, but now we were behind schedule. It would be another hour before we caught up with our own I Company, which was to our left. The morning’s confusion would ripple through the rest of the day and by nightfall leave us in danger.

On the east side of the airfield, on the edge of a dense scrub forest, we came up on a Jap artillery piece firing away at the beach. They had a strange way of doing things. The six men working that gun were lined up, and as each took a turn firing it, that man would move off and the next man would step up, take his place, and fire. They just rotated around like ducks in a shooting gallery. We watched in amazement. Then we started shooting, picking them off one by one. As each one rotated around, we’d fire and he’d go down. Then the next one, and the next until there weren’t any left. They never seemed to catch on.

Afterward, we dropped a grenade down the barrel of the gun. That seemed to finish it. Then we moved off into the forest. This was not the tropical jungle we’d fought through on New Britain. Peleliu was a thick tangle of stunted trees and vines that was the devil to get through but that screened our movements from the Japs who were up in the hills pounding everyone else. As we advanced we expected them to come screaming out of the trees in a banzai attack at any minute, like they had on New Britain. Instead we found only scattered snipers and bunkers. The bunkers weren’t much more than piles of logs and rock, but they were impossible to see until you’d almost stepped on them. We had to knock out each one before we could move on.

Deep in the woods we came across the trail where we were supposed to turn north. Some of our riflemen pushed beyond and came out on the edge of a bay. The Seventh Marines, which were supposed to be on our right, were nowhere in sight.

Our riflemen shot some Japs who were thrashing across the mouth of the bay from one shore to the other. Then we were all ordered to head out and move north along the trail.

Peleliu has always been turned around in my mind. I never was able to get it straight, north and south, east and west, all the time we were on that island. I guess our sergeant, Johnny Marmet, may have had a map. The lieutenant had one. It turned out the maps were full of mistakes. They showed the mountains and the trees. They didn’t show what was on the ground, or underneath it.

By early afternoon we lost contact with I Company on our left. A big gap opened up. L Company was moved forward with part of the Second Battalion that had been in reserve. But they couldn’t find us. To tell the truth, we weren’t sure where we were either. All we knew was that we were on a north-south trail somewhere in this scrub jungle.

We bumped into another nest of pillboxes and bunkers and had to wait for a tank to come forward and blast them out of our way.

By now communications had been reestablished. The Seventh Marines’ Third Battalion—the same outfit that had got tangled up with us on Orange Beach Two—finally called in their position to headquarters. They were somewhere off to our right, on a trail. We had already reported we were on a trail running north through the scrub. We all assumed we were on the same trail, but they were a couple hundred yards ahead of us.

In fact they were south of us, where the trail branched and one part turned east.

Headquarters ordered their Third Battalion to stay put until we closed the gap. We started forward again. It was midafternoon. The heat was suffocating. We were dripping with sweat, sucking our canteens dry and popping salt tablets. We stumbled along expecting to encounter the Seventh Marines around the next bend in the trail. But by four p.m. we still hadn’t run into them. We got further orders to keep moving until the scrub thinned out, east of the airfield.

We were all now stretched out like a rubber band. If a Jap counterattack hit us in the right spot, we’d snap.

We came out of the woods within full view of the airfield. On the far side, Jap artillery and mortar fire were building up to something, but we weren’t their target. Most of their fire seemed to be landing to our left, back in the direction of Orange Beach Two, where the First and Second battalions had come ashore. A few shells sailed over our heads, landing somewhere behind us.

As we watched, a line of what we first thought were amtracs appeared from behind the hangars and barracks on the far side of the field and started rolling southwest, parallel to the main runway. Behind them we could see large groups of men moving forward. The firing picked up on both sides, and we realized we were watching Jap tanks and infantry. They had begun their expected counterattack.

We got orders to dig in and concentrate our fire on the infantry. Digging in the rock-hard coral was impossible, so we found craters and set up the mortars and began lobbing shells into the field.

The tank battle was no contest. Those little Jap tanks were thin-skinned and fragile, and our own Shermans, plus fire from bazookas and artillery, just tore the whole column apart in minutes. The foot soldiers melted away. We blinked and they were gone. Afterward, pieces of their tanks were scattered across the airfield like insect parts under a spiderweb.

But strung out along the edge of the scrub, we now had a fresh problem.

Sledge was holding a 60mm shell, just ready to drop it down the tube, when bullets started whining over our heads. They were coming from behind us. A stream of tracers passed over, close enough to dust his knuckles.

I turned in time to look down the barrel of a Sherman tank, its turret swiveling in our direction. He was parked in a clearing a hundred yards to our right. Beyond him came more tanks, and behind them, Marine riflemen, and they were shooting. Not past us, but
at
us!

Someone yelled at Sledge, and he froze. If a bullet hit that shell we’d all be blown to hell.

It was instantly clear to me what had happened. While we had been trying to catch up with the Seventh’s Third Battalion in the woods, they had been behind us, waiting. Then they saw our mortar squad in front and assumed we were part of the Jap counterattack and opened fire. Those bright .50-caliber tracers that the Sherman tank was spitting would soon be followed by a 75mm shell from its cannon.

Everyone scrambled for cover. A shell crashed into the scrub just ahead of us.

I shouted, “Secure the mortars!” and took off toward the tanks, dodging from tree to tree and waving my arms. “Knock it off! Knock it off! You’re gonna kill the whole damn bunch!”

Somehow over the racket I caught someone’s attention and the firing died away.

In all the panic and confusion after the Seventh Marines had started firing at us, I did something that I’m not particularly proud of. Or I came very close to doing it.

One particular lieutenant had been making our lives miserable ever since we were on New Britain. Not that he was strict—he was worse. He was two-faced. He’d lie and cover up. He’d order us to do something, then when someone higher up came down on him, he’d come down on us for doing what he’d told us to do in the first place. When he was needed, he could never be found. He had a way of disappearing when things got nasty. I’d already had one set-to with him that morning over a mortar emplacement.

When the Seventh Marines opened fire, I saw him do something no Marine should ever do: He turned and flat out ran. That yellow son of a bitch, I thought, running like that. I brought my M1 rifle up and got him in my sights. My finger was on the trigger. He vanished behind a log.

That yellow bastard, I thought. But I didn’t shoot. Am I proud? Not particularly. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t shoot him. It’s a good thing I didn’t.

It got dark pretty quickly. We still had no idea where I Company or L Company were situated, nor where we were supposed to be. Back at our battalion command post, behind the front lines, nobody knew where any of us were.

Sometime after the tank battle, a Jap mortar round had landed squarely on the post, spraying our commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Austin Shofner, with shrapnel and taking off the head of his communications officer, Captain R. F. Kehoe, Jr.

Shofner’s wounds were serious enough to force his evacuation to a hospital ship. In the confusion word spread that he had been killed. He was almost a legend to us. He had been fighting on Corregidor when they surrendered to the Japs. They took him prisoner and he survived the Bataan Death March. After almost a year in a prison camp he organized a successful escape party and came back to the Marines to fight again.

Now, at the end of the first day of the invasion, Third Battalion’s commanding officer lay wounded and out of commission. Our executive officer and communications officer were both dead. There was no longer any effective command. And we were scattered along a thin line through scrub jungle, out of touch with everyone else and surrounded by the enemy.

Our canteens were almost empty. We’d used up most of our ammunition. It was impossible to dig shelters, so we piled up rocks and logs and set up a perimeter defense. Machine guns rattled in the darkness and we fired off a few mortar rounds, more to make us feel good than to make the Japs feel bad.