The Pacific (63 page)

Sledge looked north, across the great distance of the airfield. He saw some vehicles moving amid the explosions. "What are all those amtracs doing out there next to the jap lines?"

"Hey, you idiot," Snafu replied, "those are jap tanks." Sledge felt his heart nearly stop at the thought of enemy tanks.
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AS LATE AS FIVE P.M., SHOFNER WAS STILL STRUGGLING WITH A FAULTY COMMUNICATIONS network to get his men tied in properly. The communications officer of the Fifth Regiment arrived. The two began to sort out a solution when a mortar shell exploded near them. Shofner's "mouth was dry and his breath was short, he had no feeling in his left arm and he looked down and could see the bones of his forearm, the skin and muscle torn away by shrapnel. He looked up and tried to speak but there is no one to speak to. Then as if in slow motion, he saw Marines from the adjacent units spill over into the shell crater. He heard the cry for Corpsman, and he heard some Marine yell that 'the damned japs had got Shifty.' Then things went black."

He awoke on a stretcher, being carried across the beach and onto a Higgins boat. His arm had been bandaged and he was receiving plasma. Shofner "tried to protest, but his head was in a cloud, and he suspected he [had] received a shot of morphine." A marine said, "Don't worry, Mac. You be OK." Unconsciousness slipped over Shifty again. When his eyes opened again, he saw he was lying in the cavernous amtrac deck of an LST. His head ached badly. He "felt the sheets under him. He was naked except for his bed linen. His left arm throbbed." The navy's medical teams moved quickly to handle a lot of wounded men. A corpsman noticed he had awakened and called over to his supervisor, "Well, Colonel Shofner, you are a lucky man"; he would make a full recovery. Austin wanted to know what had happened and was told he "was the sole survivor of his command group." Colonel Shofner asked about returning to his unit. The corpsman "became evasive and suggested that he rest for a while."

THE ENEMY TANKS NEVER GOT VERY FAR SOUTH. THE GREAT WHITE AIRFIELD AND the plain that encompassed it were mostly empty. Although the sound of the big guns filled the air, Sledge and his mortar team were threatened mostly by small-arms fire. With his rifle platoons already committed, King Company's skipper, Captain Haldane, ordered his headquarters personnel to help tie his line in with the Seventh Marines, but to no avail. The skipper ordered his company into a perimeter defense. The hard white coral could not be dug out by hand. Marines picked up what chunks of coral they could to provide some small cover for their bodies. Darkness found King Company still in an exposed position, still not tied in with either the left or the right, but ready to hold their ground.
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The big fear was a banzai attack. King had strung its barbed wire, the mortars and machine guns had registered sound rounds, and Captain Haldane had a telephone line back to the artillery. As far as Eugene Sledge could tell, though, "we were alone and confused in the middle of a rumbling chaos with snipers everywhere and with no contact with any other units. I thought all of us would be lost."
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The small-arms fire slackened as it grew dark. After a couple hours, the word came to pack up, King was pulling back. Battalion wanted it tied in with Item on the left and the unit of the Seventh on the right before the banzai began. Stumbling in the dark through the wild thickets and scrub jungle along the edge of the field made for a lot of cursing, but they moved close enough to the right spot to be allowed to dig in.
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Although not properly tied in with Item, Love Company, or the Seventh Marines, King Company marines began to string barbed wire along the edge of the airfield to hold off the banzai attack.
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The sound of howitzers and the naval gunfire and heavy mortars and machine guns continued all night long. Much of it emanated from the north end of the airfield and from the ships offshore, although enemy mortars rained on the beach. The navy ships also fired huge flares, which swung slowly in the sky as they fell, skittering shadows across a broken and burning landscape.
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The marines of the #2 gun squad piled rocks around themselves and slid into shell holes to get below the line of fire. In the darkness, Sledge took off his boots because his feet were sloshing in his sweat. Snafu yelled, "What the hell you doing, you better get those damn boots back on . . . By God, you don't never know when you're going to have to take off [running]."
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Lying nearby, Burgin laughed as Snafu cursed the new guy for being "a stupid son of a bitch." Corporal Burgin expected the enemy charge to come, just like on Gloucester. He worried about the dwindling levels of water in his squad's canteens and began chewing on a salt tablet.

In the early hours of September 16, Burgin was proved right: a charge did come. A ferocious concentration of machine-gun fire on his left, the guns of the 2/5, knocked down the dark shapes of running men.
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The #2 gun shot up a lot of illumination rounds, each lasting about thirty seconds. With a few flares hanging up there, it was light enough to see that no hordes of Japanese were running at King. The cacophony of hard fighting continued on both sides of them.

When dawn broke, those still trying to sleep had to abandon it. The canteens of Burgin's mortar crew were empty. The support teams brought up water in five- gallon cans and fifty-gallon drums and everyone was mad to get it. The first sip brought a nasty shock to the #2 gun. It tasted like diesel. Some of the guys around them drank it anyway. Burgin joked that he could blow on a match and be a flamethrower. Stomach cramps followed and a few puked. As usual, though, a trooper's fate hung in the luck of the draw. Other squads in King Company received two canteens of clean water.
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The task facing them was to cross the airfield. It looked like a long way. Burgin guessed it was over three hundred yards. At the signal, the skirmish lines of marines ran out into the open field and across the hard white coral runway. The Japanese unleashed a barrage upon them as expected. Large shells, mortars, and machine- gun bullets cut the air around them as the marines ran east for all they were worth. Much of the enemy's fire came from its positions on the northern end of the airfield, to King's left. Most of their regiment and all of the First Marines, therefore, stood between King and the guns. Love Company ran on their immediate left. Every step felt like their last. As he ran, Gene "was reciting the 23 Psalm and Snafu was right next to me and I couldn't hear what he was saying, but most of it was cussing."
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Burgin watched the white tracers flash past him until he found cover on the far side. "I don't know how we didn't all get killed--I really don't."
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No one else did either.

The thick scrub they entered slowed their progress toward the ocean, but resistance was light. They came to a wild thicket of mangrove swamp that marked the shoreline. King tied in with the Seventh Marines on their right. The Seventh had its hands full with securing the southern tip of the island. To their left, farther north along the eastern shore, Love Company tied in with them. Item Company, the other component of the 3/5, marched still farther north. King Company dug in as ordered, out of sight and away from the battle.
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With time to catch his breath and reflect, Sledge realized the last thirty-six hours had been "the defining moment in my life."
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Much of what he thought he knew--from the Civil War books he had read to the "Barrack-Room Ballads" he had memorized--had had nothing to do with the carnage, the chaos, the electric fear threatening to engulf him. Gene had watched a wounded marine die and was aghast at the waste and inhumanity. He had watched two marines pluck souvenirs from two dead Japanese and wondered whether the war would "dehumanize me." He needed to process these experiences. He felt a duty to document his battle for his family, so they would know what the future books about Peleliu left out. Eugene B. Sledge decided to write himself notes in his pocket Bible so that he would not forget the horrors he witnessed.
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"The attack across Peleliu's airfield," E. B. Sledge later wrote from those notes, "was the worst combat experience I had during the entire war."
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He had seen marines fall during his run across the airfield, even though he had tried to look straight ahead as he ran. The number of wounded went uncounted because the invasion day's tally and the fierce battle the First Marines were having up north had overwhelmed the system.
^ac
One marine had been killed for sure, though. Private First Class Robert Oswalt, Gene's friend, had been hit in the head by a bullet or a fragment from a shell.

The big guns found King's position before dark. Burgin lay on his stomach, hugging the earth and listening to the quick swishing noises and feeling the concussions. He thought those shells were so big he could see them. Chunks of coral, mud, and mangrove splattered down upon the men of #2 gun. The size of the explosions left them sick with fear. A line of communication wire had been tied to a phone in Burgin's foxhole. It connected him to the other platoons, Haldane's company CP, and from there further back to battalion. Burgin got on the phone, heard someone answer (he wasn't sure who), and reported that his position was taking friendly fire. He heard the man reply, "No, that's not ours--that's jap."

"No, that's ours," Burgin replied, and began cursing. "I know where we just came from, and that artillery is coming where we've already been, so I know it's ours. So get it ceased." The other marine remained unconvinced. Burgin could tell the shells were 155s and yelled, "If you're going to fire . . . go out a little further than that because you're going to kill my whole damn bunch."
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The barrage increased and worsened. Shells burst about twenty or thirty feet above the ground, sending searing shards of metal down upon them. King had had almost no cover. They could only hold on and wait till it ended.

As the shelling, both U.S. and Japanese, slackened, the marines tried to get water. Some found a grayish liquid in the bottom of some of the deeper shell holes--the water table was very high on Peleliu. The men who drank it became sick, even the ones who strained out the big particles by keeping their teeth closed. In the mortar squads, Stepnowski, a big guy from Georgia they called Ski, dropped out. The heat and the dehydration were too much. He was turned over to the medics, who took him back. Lack of water caused one-third of the casualties.
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Sledge noted that the big men tended to give in to heat exhaustion more often than those of slighter build. The day ended with stringing barbed wire in preparation for a banzai attack.

When the night passed without an attack, King Company had so far gotten off easier than others and some of them knew it--not E. B. Sledge, however. The dead and wounded men he had seen and the punishing concussions of high explosives left him terrified. He hung on gamely, lugging mortar shells and preparing to fire the #2 gun. During the next day, they watched as the ridge to the north took a horrendous pounding from the ships' guns, from navy planes, and from the howitzers of the Eleventh Marines. King marched toward the ridge that morning, behind the rest of the 3/5. Along the east side of the airfield, they saw millions of jagged shards of metal-- shrapnel--covering it.
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The wreckage of airplanes included more than two dozen medium bombers and dozens of fighters.
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King arrived at the junction of the cross runway. Item Company dug in there, inexplicably, while Love and King closed with the village that draped around the north end of the airfield. The volume of small-arms fire picked up precipitously. They were not on the front line yet, though. The 2/5 was ahead of them and, beyond them, units of the First Marines.
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King soon moved along the eastern edge of a mad jumble of craters, airstrip, and demolished buildings. Most buildings were farther west, on their left. Love Company was over there, tied in with units of the First Marines, in the thick of the fighting by the sounds of it. Item Company remained behind them. By the end of the day, #2 gun had advanced through the small collection of buildings to a point where they could see the northern ridges. King tied in with elements of the 2/5.
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To their left, west, were the ridges; to the north and to the east, roads led into terra incognita. They watched the other units attempt to move north. "Anytime anybody got up, the Japanese started throwing not just machine- gun or rifle fire, but shell fire."
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Watching it happen, Gene could not see the enemy positions, only a riot of confusion, fear, and pain. The Japanese fired so many weapons, the coral ridges were so impregnable, he thought, "we had absolutely hit a stone wall." The soft malice of the incoming mortar rounds sounded to him like "some goulish witch telling you that 'Well, I may not get you this time, but I'll get you next time.' " The sound of combat never ceased that night, although the enemy again failed to mount a banzai charge. Burgin began to think "there was something up. They were fighting with different tactics altogether."