The Pacific (78 page)

THE MOPPING UP OF DIE-HARD ENEMY SOLDIERS ON IWO JIMA WAS STILL CONTINUING when the 5th Marine Division dedicated its cemetery. A chaplain stood before them and confessed that he was struggling to find words. "Some of us have buried our closest friends here. . . . Indeed, some of us are alive and breathing at this very moment because men who lie here beneath us had the courage and strength to give their lives for ours." Some of the men buried here had served their country just as their forefathers had in the Revolutionary War. Others "loved her with equal passion because they themselves or their own fathers escaped from oppression to her blessed shores." Rich and poor, black and white, enlisted men and officers, these marines lay here in "the highest and purest democracy." The chaplain asked all to make sure their sacrifice had not been in vain. From the suffering must come "the birth of a new freedom for the sons of men everywhere."
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One of the marines listening to the chaplain was John's brother George Basilone. In mid-May, George wrote Lena a letter from Iwo Jima to let her know that John had had a proper burial. One day he would tell her all about it.
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Lena had heard enough about John. The news of his death had been well reported. It revived interest in his service on Guadalcanal and on the Third War Loan Drive. The kicker to the story was what reporters called "Manila John's choice."
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As a star and a hero "he could have stayed safe in the United States." In the coming months she would receive a kind note from Johnny's commanding officer on Iwo Jima, who referred to himself as John's "friend and fellow worker," and his personal effects.
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It was not much, consisting primarily of a locket of hair, a rosary, his wedding band, and a few photos.

"CHAPEL HILL," SO FAR AS SIDNEY PHILLIPS COULD TELL, "WAS HEAVEN ON EARTH to a Marine private."
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Discipline was lax. The living quarters, though Spartan, were comfortable. The laundry service delighted him and the navy mess hall served great chow. Classes ran six days a week from eight a.m. to five p.m. in an accelerated semester program. He kept his nose in his books, delighted to be earning college course credits. Every two months the semester ended. Sid spent his two weeks in Mobile with Mary Houston. He "was a hopeless basket case of adoration for her." Impressing her parents seemed to go well, but he was concerned about her six older brothers, "four of them in the Navy and three of them officers. I knew they would not care for their beautiful sister to be dating a common disgusting Marine private. I therefore tried to pretend to have good sense."

THE SIEGE IN WHICH THE 1ST DIVISION FOUND ITSELF, REMINISCENT OF THE trenches of World War I, made the job of the provost marshal a bit easier. Few civilians dared show their faces in the maelstrom and therefore collection dropped to near zero in the first few weeks of May.
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Shofner and his team maintained the mobile collection units, trying to alleviate one concern from the battalion commanders' shoulders. His hard work paid off. When one of the division's battalion commanders fell, the commanding general called for Shifty.

Lieutenant Colonel Shofner turned over his duties "as quickly as he could" and reported to headquarters on May 10. He spent several days as the executive officer of the First Regiment in order to get up to speed. The battalion commander he was replacing had been wounded during the attack on Hill 60. His new battalion, the 1st Battalion of the First Marines, had suffered heavy casualties. It had swept over the top of Hill 60 in spite of the losses, however, in an amazing display of courage and teamwork. On May 13, 1945, Austin Shofner received what he had been fighting for since September 1944. He went forward to take command of the 1/1.

The First Regiment assigned Shofner a radioman and the two set off for the 1/1's headquarters, about seven hundred yards away. They had hiked about three hundred yards when a sniper's bullet felled his radioman. The man was dead. Shofner yelled to some engineers nearby and ordered them to take care of the body. He strapped on the radio, picked up the codebooks, and pressed on. As he approached the front line, Shofner spied a large hole and slid into it. He found himself eyeball to eyeball with a marine rifleman.

"Who are you?" asked Shofner.

"I'm Pfc. Roberts, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, First Marines, and who are you?"

"My name is Shifty Shofner, and I'm your new battalion commander, and you are my new radioman." Shofner led them to the battalion HQ, where he met his XO and his operations officer. He was told the 1/1 was in reserve. The big news of the day was that a code book had been found that identified the enemy unit facing the 1/1 as the Twelfth Independent Infantry Battalion.
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Shofner went to find his company commanders and scout the terrain. The other battalions of the First Marines had destroyed a Japanese counterattack that morning. The chance to see the enemy in large numbers in the open and kill them had given all hands a grim satisfaction. In the afternoon, just before Shofner's arrival, the 2/1 and 3/1 had attacked Wana Ridge, in support of the Seventh Marines' assault on Dakeshi. They had not advanced very close to the mouth of Wana Draw. It was after dark when Shofner made it back to his HQ. He sent his new radioman, Private First Class Roberts, back to his squad. The radio operators of the 1/1 were Navajo Indians, Shifty would have learned that day, "who spoke their own language openly on the radio, confident that it was completely unintelligible to the enemy."
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The scouting work was a part of Shifty's determination "to use every trick in the book to continue the advance and yet save as many American lives as possible." He wanted to avoid the mistake of Colonel Chesty Puller, who Shofner felt had relied exclusively "on the frontal assault" on Peleliu. The ridges of high ground he confronted, however, stretched beyond his zone of action into the areas of other divisions, thus offering few opportunities for flanking maneuvers. The enemy seemed to have every avenue covered. The advance of the Tenth Army relied on massed firepower to break open a path for the riflemen.

The 1/1 led the attack on May 14 and it went well. The 1st Battalion reached its objective, the western tip of Wana Ridge. One of Shofner's companies, Charlie, had made the most progress. It began digging in to defend the gain. He sent Charlie their mail as a reward. Charlie could not, however, tie in to the Seventh Marines on the left. The gap left the company dangerously exposed. The first sign of danger came when four Sherman tanks tried to drive around the western tip of the ridge and were knocked out by a gun buried somewhere on the southern side of it.
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Just after seven p.m. the Japanese launched a rare daylight counterattack, swarming down the ridge to cut Charlie Company off and destroy it. Mortars crashed in Shofner's CP. The skipper called Shifty and asked for permission to pull back. The colonel assented, mostly because he could not get reinforcements up to help, and called for smoke rounds.
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The skipper of Charlie Company was wounded while getting his men and their wounded off Wana Ridge. The First Marines came out of the line on May 15, allowing the Fifth Marines to take the lead.

Moving into regimental reserve put the First back far enough for its men to take a hot shower, get hot chow, and be issued clean uniforms.
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For the moment, though, the men were happy to collapse wherever they were.
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THE FIFTH MARINES' ASSAULT ON WANA RIDGE AND WANA DRAW INVOLVED vast amounts of gunfire and napalm. Flamethrowing tanks, no longer the old Ronson but a more powerful version called a Satan, supported the infantry. The riflemen also enjoyed the support of the rocket platoon--one twelve-ton truck carrying the M7 rocket launcher firing the navy's 4.5- inch rocket. Eugene Sledge and the rest of the 3/5 were in reserve, though. The 3rd Battalion received replacements and waited as the other two battalions fought on one of the dominating features of the defensive system around Wana, Hill 55. On the afternoon of May 14, the enemy counterattacked toward King Company's position.

Scotty could see that the mortar squads needed ammo badly. He formed a working party with some of the replacements. The enemy's 90mm mortars and 105mm howitzers began to fire at the mortar section in support of the assault. In his foxhole, Gene heard the 105 shells approach and felt like he was "being called to Jesus right there."
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The working party had picked up the boxes of mortar shells and was returning when the rounds started landing close. Scotty yelled, "We're all gonna be killed. Throw that stuff down and hit the deck." The men responded. Sledge noticed Snafu running out to the working party. Snafu's return was good news. Snafu was short, and because he had almost no neck, "when he had his helmet on he looked like a turtle but he was the meanest son of a gun" Sledge had ever known. Snafu pulled the clip out of his tommy gun and stuck it in his jacket. As he approached Scotty, he held his gun by its barrel. Sledge could not hear what he said, but Scotty got the men under way. The ammo came up and the 60mm mortars played their role in beating off the enemy. Later, Sledge asked Snafu what he had told Scotty. "I told him, 'God damn your soul, if you don't get your ass on the ball and get them people to move this ammo up to the front, I'm gonna bust your brains out with this tommy gun.' " Sledge considered the incident more proof about Mad Mack. Sergeant Burgin, however, had come to respect Scotty. Unlike his predecessor, Duke Ellington, Scotty spent his time on the front line. Although he had made the wrong choice at that moment, he was learning.

On May 17 Sledge put pen to paper to send a letter to his parents and thereby avoid the heartache they had all endured during Peleliu. After a "pretty tough" period, he admitted, the last few days had been okay and the good weather had held. He had been getting mail pretty frequently--surprising enough given the situation--and kept waiting to get the letter that said his brother Edward was on his way home. Gene sought to allay Dr. and Mrs. Sledge's worry that Ed would be sent "over here" by telling them that Ed's three Purple Hearts and Silver and Bronze stars meant a ticket home. As for himself, Gene was succinct: "I couldn't ask for a better name or finer heritage, and I know my parents are the two most lovable Christians in the world . . . when we are together at Georgia Cottage again, God will have filled my prayers."

The 3/5 would have heard that the other battalions of the Fifth Marines had nearly cracked Hill 55 and Wana Ridge "after intense hand-to-hand fighting," and that marines had begun to peer up the road to Shuri Castle when the rains came on May 21.
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It began as a light rain that chilled the bones. Rather than pass, the rain clouds settled in. Gene's unit got the word that it would be moving up to relieve a battalion of the Fourth Marines. The rain slowed everything, as did the enemy's shelling.

The shelling began as it normally did. The heavy artillery, what men called the God of War, began to fire. R. V. Burgin was manning the forward observation post with his friend Jimmy. As the rounds started to get close, they threw themselves into a shell hole. They only just made it. Burgin landed on his stomach at the bottom and felt the concussion of the explosion, then the weight of the earth falling on top of him. He had been buried. Jimmy dug him out. Things got a little hazy after that. "They were shelling the hell out of us . . . it was one hell of a deal."

The U.S. approach to Shuri Castle had touched off a maniacal fury of artillery.
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Apparently the enemy's concerns about keeping his guns hidden or managing his dwindling supply of shells no longer mattered. To the men of the 3/5, "it seemed to some that the japs were no longer aiming at the marines' artillery, as one might expect. They were trying to destroy the very morale of the marines on the front line, and they were doing a pretty good job of it, because you just can't stand to be actually shelled like this day-in-and-day-out."
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The constant explosions disassociated the cause from the effect: trees disappeared in flashes of fire and smoke but the ear could not discern any Doppler effect, any directional sense, or even the sound of the shell destroying the tree. The pounding robbed the senses, disorienting the mind. "The artillery was going most directions and men was getting hit . . . and shrapnel was flying everywhere," when a brief pause came. Burgin heard Katz "just praying up a storm, out loud you know." Burgin yelled, "Katz! Shut the hell up. If you're going to pray, pray . . . silently. Don't be praying out loud like that . . . it unnerves my troops."

Not unnerved so much as deadened by the concussions, R.V."sat down on my helmet and was eating a can of ham and lima beans, and a piece of shrapnel about three and a half inches long hit me in the neck." He touched the jagged metal and burned his fingers. So he picked up something to knock it out of his flesh and put the piece in his pocket. "Katz put some sulfur and a bandage on the wound and I walked back to an army field hospital, about a half mile back." An ambulance then took him back to a larger hospital.

ALONG WITH THE NEW CLOTHES, THE MARINES IN SHOFNER'S UNIT RECEIVED replacements. The replacements were actually an extra 10 percent of men that the 1st Division HQ had trained on Pavuvu and stuck into various "work parties" unloading ships until needed. The replacements had two days to get assigned and trained. "Intensive training of these men began immediately," as the division commander decreed. "Use of weapons, as well as squad and platoon tactics were emphasized."
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On May 18 Shofner went with the regimental commander to scout the positions of the Seventh Marines because the next day they would relieve the Seventh. Shofner's 1/1 took the place of the 1/7, which was in "static situation." The 3/1 pulled the difficult duty of going directly on to Wana Ridge. Within twenty-four hours, though, all three battalions of the First Marines began seizing Hill 55 and Wana Ridge yard by yard, exchanging gunfire and grenades with the enemy at close range.