Islands of the Damned (9 page)

We were also fighting a more serious problem. We called it “jungle rot.” It was a fungus that would invade your armpits, ankles and crotch, and spread beneath your belt. Damp underwear seemed to promote the fungus, so some stopped wearing underpants—those whose underpants hadn’t already rotted off. The only thing that would relieve the itch was gentian violet, an antifungal medication. The corpsmen would paint all the places you’d scratched raw and the festering rash of pimples under your arms. Everybody had that purple stuff on them. We were a colorful mess.

But at least we were out of combat. We cooked pancakes over an open fire, and I was able to go swimming in the ocean a couple times. It got deep pretty fast twenty-five or thirty yards out. I dove to the bottom and looked around. There were a lot of shells and starfish scattered on the ocean floor, things that seemed strange and wonderful to a boy from an east Texas farm.

One day we were washing our clothes in the ocean and I waded out to where it was waist deep. I looked up and here came two Jap bodies floating along. I guess they’d been killed on airplanes or ships. We got out of the water pretty fast then.

The Japs had pretty much melted into the jungle. In February we climbed into LCMs and made a series of landings eastward along the coast from Borgen Bay. We hoped to catch up with the Japs and cut off their retreat to Rabaul. We’d land and conduct a patrol for a day or two, searching jungle trails for signs of the enemy. Then we’d move on, leapfrogging another unit that had landed farther up the coast.

We found a few stragglers. They’d leave two or three behind with knee mortars and a machine gun. We called them knee mortars because they had a folding arch that looked like it could fit over your knee. They wouldn’t use it that way, of course, because there was too much kick—it would break a man’s leg—but we called it that anyway.

When we’d come up on the Japs they’d open fire. If we didn’t get them, they’d move farther up the trail and set up again. By late in the month we’d captured a major enemy supply dump, meeting only occasional resistance.

When we went on patrol we’d take along war dogs that could sniff out Japs. After a while I realized that I could smell the Japs, too, if they were in the area and the wind was right. It was just like hunting in the woods back home, when I could smell a squirrel or a deer. But the smell of Japs was completely different from anything I’d ever smelled. They told us they could smell us, too. They said we smelled like goats.

We’d have a dog with us, and the Japs would be sleeping in these A-frame lean-tos they made of palm leaves. And the dog would get you in real close, like a bird dog. Japs would be inside, napping or just lying around.

We’d go in both ends at once and bayonet them or slit their throats. We didn’t want to shoot them and let anybody else in the vicinity know we were around.

The first time we went out on patrol we captured three and took them all the way back to battalion headquarters. By then the rain had rotted out our shoes and our clothes were just about falling off our backs.

At the battalion they gave our prisoners fresh underwear and socks, new shoes, new caps, new dungarees, the works. Here we were, wearing the same underwear and socks and shoes for thirty or forty days. We thought, To hell with this. They’re giving the Japs all that, but they won’t give us anything. So we fixed it. We didn’t bring in any more prisoners.

In early March, hoping to cut off the Japs once and for all, the Fifth Marines made a major landing on the west side of the Talasea Peninsula, a long finger of land sticking out about 120 miles into the Bismarck Sea east of Borgen Bay. The Third Battalion was in reserve again. We missed the main landing but sailed around the northern tip of the peninsula, and the next afternoon came ashore on the eastern side, where we relieved the First Battalion.

From what I could see, Talasea was a couple volcanic peaks overlooking abandoned coconut plantations. The Japs had built a small airstrip near the shore, and there was a Jap fighter plane on its back in the middle of the runway. Farther inland at a place called Bitokara there was a German Lutheran mission, also abandoned. The Fifth Regiment had set up headquarters there after driving off the Japs, and we were assigned to guard the headquarters. The defenders had put up a brief fight, killing eight Marines and losing 150 of their own. Then they had moved out.

On March 12, we raised the flag over the mission, the same flag raised in January over the air base at Cape Gloucester. In the three battles I fought during the war, that was the only flag I ever saw raised in victory. When that flag went up I thought, God, I’m glad I’m an American. I had participated in raising the flag in high school a few times. I always felt honored to do that. But seeing that flag go up at Talasea was a different feeling altogether. It was like the feeling you get whenever they play “Taps.” You know—Old Glory.

For the next month and a half the three battalions of the Fifth Marines would scour Talasea Peninsula and beyond, looking for the Japs. K Company was sent south from the mission at Bitokara toward a place on the map called Numundo Plantation, at the base of the peninsula. It was supposed to be a three-day patrol.

We had those little spotter planes—we called them grasshoppers—to help us off and on. One afternoon I saw a Japanese Zero get after one of those planes. The grasshopper was flying along the edge of the ocean, about fifty miles an hour or so. When the Zero showed up, the spotter plane dipped down to tree level and started weaving back and forth. The Zero must have been going more than a hundred, and he couldn’t adjust. He made a pass at that little plane moving in slow motion and overshot his target and went flying by. Then he came around and made another pass—he missed again. As we watched he made pass after pass firing at the grasshopper, which kept zigzagging frantically. Finally I guess the Zero ran out of ammunition and flew off. Never did hit him. We were cheering for that little plane until he flew out of sight.

We were out more than ten days. And every day, it seemed, we would run into an ambush. As usual they’d leave a few guys behind with knee mortars and a machine gun. Before we could flank them they’d disappear. It was just aggravating. The few we came upon were in about as bad a shape as we were in, and they’d been there a lot longer. They were sick with malaria and were starving. Their wounds weren’t healing. We tried to take them with us, but sometimes we had to leave them behind.

Along the way we ran into groups of dark-skinned natives who had come down out of the mountains, where they’d been hiding out with their wives and children after the Japs had started raiding their villages and plundering their gardens. Whenever we needed working parties they were there, about fifteen or twenty of them ready to carry ammunition and supplies.

Every so often we came upon a deserted village or coconut plantation. At one of them I saw this kid who looked like he could have been twelve to fifteen years old, maybe sixteen. It was hard to tell. He put his hands and feet on a coconut tree, with a machete tied around his waist, and he just walked up that thing. Climbed all the way to the top with his hands and feet. When he got to the top he took his machete and lopped the coconuts off. Then he came down the same way he went up.

We didn’t eat a lot of coconuts, but we’d slash the ends of them off and drink the milk and throw the rest away.

One afternoon we stopped in a clearing around an abandoned hut. Some of our guys went to fill their canteens down by a creek, where the Japs opened up with machine guns. Everybody got the hell out of there, but they may have hit a couple of natives.

Later in the evening we were digging foxholes and the Japs started shelling us with knee mortars. We started digging faster. The natives grabbed sticks, tin can lids, or chunks of metal, or used just their hands, and started digging a long trench about a foot to eighteen inches deep. They were digging faster than we were with our entrenching tools. When they finished they just lay down in that thing, head to foot, head to foot.

We moved on, continuing to encounter rain-swollen streams. The wider ones we would follow down to the beach, where the flood had pushed up an apron of sand, and we’d wade across in the shallow water. A tree had fallen across one stream and we could hang on to the branches to cross over. Most of us had made it to the other side when the man in front of me, Andrew Geglein, slipped and went down on the upstream side. He disappeared into the chocolate-colored water with his rifle and all of his gear, just vanished. We thought he’d be washed underneath the fallen tree, and one of the guys got in on that side and searched along the log, and then farther downstream. Time was of the essence. Then another guy jumped in on the upstream side and groped along until he found Andrew hung up on the branches underneath. We hauled him up out of the water, but he was already gone.

I thought, That’s a terrible way to lose your life when you’re fighting a war.

After ten days out on patrol we got word to return to Bitokara. I don’t know why, and I don’t know what happened, but we were glad to get out. We just hauled ass. By then we had a lot of men wounded and a lot of men killed. I figure we were down to about three-quarters of a company. Around 235 men went in and about 175 or 180 came out.

It was the last combat we were to see on New Britain.

I had a souvenir to take with me. I had found a fine hara-kiri knife, a beautiful thing with an ivory handle and sheath.

Hara-kiri—they would do that. About thirty yards beyond one of the creeks we’d crossed, we came upon a Jap officer lying on his back with his knees up. I don’t know whether he had been standing or kneeling when he had stabbed himself, but he had a bayonet stuck in his belly, and his hands were still curled around the grip. We didn’t know how long he had been there. His face and body were black and bloated. I didn’t take that bayonet.

Somebody else beat me to it.

After we came off the Numundo patrol we hung around Bitokara for a month. The mission was on a hill overlooking a small harbor, where we swam and fished. There were broad lawns and flowers and fruit trees, including a pepper tree. I’d never seen one before. It was about eight or ten feet high and absolutely loaded with those little tabasco peppers. We also saw banana trees, though no bananas. Nearby there was a native village. The place must have been a tropical paradise before the war.

We swam in the local hot springs, in water as clear and soothing as in a bathtub. For most of us it was the first hot bath we’d had since Melbourne.

But the food situation didn’t improve that much. There was never enough of it. About a month or so after we’d landed they brought out hot field-cooked meals to the front lines. There was a little piece of ham about three inches wide and a quarter inch thick, some potatoes, some cabbage. And a big navel orange. I looked at my mess tin and thought, What the hell? Do they think they’re feeding a canary?

And do you know? I couldn’t eat all of it. My stomach had shrunk so much, I could not clean my plate. I saved the orange for later on but I never did eat it. I went into New Britain weighing 180 pounds. I came out weighing 140.

We’d go in for lunch and they’d serve soup so thin you could read a newspaper through it. At night we’d designate one man to go down to the chow dump, where they stockpiled all the food, and he’d bring something back to the battalion, a gallon can of peaches or fruit cocktail or something like that. Everybody got their canteens out to have some, including our lieutenant. I’ll call him “Legs,” because he was a tall, gawky guy.

I guess we weren’t the only ones raiding the chow dump, because headquarters finally came out with an order that anyone caught stealing food would be court-martialed.

When that order came down, Legs called us together and chewed our butts. He got real indignant about the whole thing. “
You
guys are going to have to stop stealing that food! They’re going to court-martial
your
ass!” A real big shot.