Battle Field Angels (12 page)

Duffee and others who were lucky enough to be in another type of landing craft that could cross extremely shallow water plowed ahead. Artillery, small arms-, and machine-gun fire erupted as the amphibious craft climbed up onto the shallow reef for the agonizingly slow sixhundred-yard trip to shore. Explosive bullets pierced the boats’ thin armor, then ricocheted among the Marines, who wore no armor. One man after another slumped to the side, motionless. Soon, hundreds of Marines who had been wading ashore were floating face down among thousands of dead fish. The coral reef turned pink with blood. The smell of burned and torn flesh wafted over the lagoon. Boats smoldered.

Duffee’s landing craft made it to Betio’s twenty-foot-wide beach and tried to climb over a five-foot-high, coconut-log wall that ringed the island. On the other side, the enemy waited. The amphib raised high on its haunches and, belly exposed, stalled. Someone yelled “Everybody out!” Duffee and two others climbed over the side onto the beach. Duffee flattened on the sand. Next to him lay two buddies shot dead as they rolled over the side of the amphib.

The cacophony stunned the corpsman. Screams stretched between the explosions and gunfire bursts. Men only ten feet away moaned, some of them gasping “Doc!” with what might have been their last breaths. As his eyes and ears focused, his training took hold. Duffee, hunched forward with rounded shoulders like a snail, immediately began treating the wounded men on the sand. In the roar of war, treatment became strangely clinical. Duffee didn’t actually see that a teenager from Milwaukee was crippled by shrapnel that exploded his kneecap and shredded a hamstring. It was simply a clear-through wound, so cinch it with something—a belt, anything—sprinkle sulfa, smother the torn flesh with a battle dressing, inject morphine, attach the Syrette to the uniform, stay low, and get to the next man. Fast. Duffee hoped stretcher bearers like Irwin Dunlap and Harry Shanker would find the wounded he had treated and carry them to an aid station up against the coconut-log wall. There was no time to look back.

Nearly invisible enemy machine guns erupted twenty-five yards away as waves of men reached the narrow beach, exhausted and exposed. The Japanese-built coconut-log wall at water’s edge offered scant cover to men unable to advance inland or retreat back to the sea. Hundreds of Marines waded onshore, some of them cut in half in an instant.

It quickly became an assault measured by the length of a dead soldier. Betio was so narrow the Japanese had no place to retreat. Nearly the entire battle would be fought within one hundred yards of the water. The Japanese had positioned concrete gun emplacements, bunkers, trenches, fire pits, machine-gun nests, infantry trenches, and rifle pits with interlocking fields of fire. Men kept falling everywhere. At 1330, the commanding officer ashore, Colonel David Shoup, radioed a status report to the USS
Maryland
: “Still encountering strong resistance, issue in doubt.”
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The last part of the message stung. It contained the same phrase used two years earlier by the Marines at Wake Island just before it fell to the enemy. Operation Galvanic was in trouble.

Duffee dove from one wounded man to the next on the beach with no time for small talk. Those who were conscious usually asked, “Have you seen my buddy?” Duffee’s answer rarely varied: “Sorry. No.” He knew how long a Marine had been ashore. Newcomers slithered on the sand on their bellies. A few minutes later, they scrambled for safety on their hands and knees. Minutes after that, they ran to their positions hunched over, resigned to what fate held in store.

The blood-red summer sun hovered over Betio on the afternoon of November 20. For six hours, wave after wave of Marines had braved horrific enemy fire. By sunset, nearly 1,500 of the 5,000 Americans on Betio had been wounded or killed. Many were corpsmen. A Marine had fallen dead or wounded every twenty-four seconds. Some had been incredibly unlucky. An American dive-bomber had attacked a Japanese ammo dump as an American Sherman tank drove by. The massive ammo explosion blew up the tank, incinerating the men inside. The whirling shrapnel from the blast also gutted a Marine assault that had begun minutes before the dive-bomber struck.

At water’s edge, the narrow slit of beach had become a massive, confused medical ward. Red Cross flags stuck in the sand marked aid stations where emergency operations took place in the open. Corpsmen arranged the wounded in exposed rows, easy targets for Japanese infiltrators with grenades. One Japanese soldier wearing a Marine uniform nearly made it to the rows of bodies before a sharp-witted sentry spotted the impostor by his Japanese lace-up boots and shot him dead.

Duffee moved a few yards inland from the beach. Close to sunset, he joined a mortar squad near Betio’s airstrip. His legs and arms were red and burned from crawling on hot sand for most of the day, moving from one wounded man to the next. He knew dehydration soon would become a concern.

“Duffee! We got a man wounded out there,” an officer yelled. “Maybe thirty-five yards out and to your left. Get out there and see what you can do. Now!”
²⁹

Legs lead-heavy with fatigue, Duffee sprinted out in front of the American line to the man and dove into a shell hole blasted in the coral. The Marine refused morphine. He realized that Duffee couldn’t drag him back to safety, so he needed to stay alert for the inevitable Japanese night assault. The corpsman knew that if the wounded man survived the night in the crater, infection would become the enemy. He tore open an envelope that held five grams of sulfanilamide crystals. He had slowed the bleeding enough to sprinkle the wound with sulfa. After he secured a sterile battle dressing to the red-raw flesh, Duffee opened a small carton containing peppermint-flavored sulfadiazine. “Chew these!”
³⁰
The wounded Marine needed to ingest the anti-infection pills within five minutes of Duffee’s application of the crystals to his wound.

As the light dimmed, Duffee patted his patient on the shoulder. “Keep your eyes peeled tonight.”
³¹
Crouching as low as he could manage, Duffee raced back to his mortar squad. Sometimes a corpsman treated a man only to buy time and hoped it was enough.

Soon another Marine went down forward of the mortar company. Without hesitation, Duffee commandeered several stretcher bearers who ran with him among the splintered palms to rescue the Marine. Japanese gunners waited for the rescuers to load the injured Marine onto the stretcher. Duffee’s team had barely begun the slow trek back to safety when a Japanese grenade detonated near their feet, injuring a stretcher bearer. Duffee grabbed a stretcher handle and helped carry the wounded man forty yards back to his mortar company as Japanese gunners filled the air with fire.

As night fell, Ray Duffee crawled into a shell hole, hoping to sleep. The fighting eased as it grew dark because the flash of a gun revealed a man’s position. A new kind of horror gripped corpsmen in the eerie, black silence. The Japanese began calling for corpsmen in nearly perfect English. Their cries for help tore at American “docs,” lying flat in shallow trenches. The Guadalcanal veterans had reminded everyone to ignore pleas that surely had to be phony.

Hunched down in his shell hole, Duffee discovered the knots of fear and tension in his stomach made it impossible to eat. He and others dozed through the night waiting for the expected predawn Japanese counterattack as Betio’s land crabs crawled over sleeping soldiers. The attack never came. If it had, the Japanese likely could have pushed the mauled landing force back into the sea. Instead, the bloodletting resumed when gunfire greeted the dawn.

Offshore, amphibious craft filled with a second Marine landing force circled. Communication breakdowns had left a group of Marines outside the reef for twenty-four hours without food or water, waiting for the word to hit the beach. Most were seasick, dehydrated, and angry, as their landing craft finally turned toward shore.

They smelled the death on Betio. The bodies of men killed the day before had bloated and reeked. As they headed toward shore, withering enemy fire ripped them apart. During the night, Japanese snipers had sneaked out onto shipwrecks in the lagoon. The Marines coming ashore effectively had been surrounded before they even reached the beach. Badly coordinated American aircraft that drove toward the beach, attacking the shipwrecks with machine-gun fire, also tore into Marines before the pilots aborted the attack. The Japanese continued to shoot from three sides. Within minutes, another two hundred dead bodies floated across the coral flat. Only about half of the six-hundred-man landing force made it to shore intact. Even the Marines who had fought months earlier on Guadalcanal had never seen such sudden, wholesale death.

The cries from men slogging through thigh-high water across the reef reached Ray Duffee on the beach. Some were wounded, many exhausted. Either way, without help they soon would die. Unarmed and with his back to the enemy, Duffee left the relative safety of the coconut log wall. After a few strides, he hit the water and ran toward the bloodied men out in the lagoon. Up, over, and down coral heads, he pushed toward the nearest Marine paled by shock or exhaustion. His every few steps were met with a burst of gunfire. Defenseless, the next burst might boil the water around him or might rip into his back. As his thigh muscles burned, Duffee kept moving toward men out on the reef who had become nearly stationary targets.

“Hold on! Hold on! I’m coming,” he yelled to each Marine as he drew close. Gunfire often cut him short. Then, “Come on! Let’s go! We can do it!”
³²
Duffee yelled as he looped the man’s arm over his shoulder and pulled him back to shore, closer to enemy fire. He brought the Marine to other corpsmen hunkered down in the sand. Duffee sucked a couple breaths of salty humid air, turned, then headed back out onto the reef.
No time to treat, others had to do that. Just get those guys out of the water!
Duffee kept telling himself.
³³

The Marines, many of them wounded and lying on the beach, marveled at Duffee’s bravery and determination. Many were tethered to a plasma bag that had been attached to the butt of a rifle that was stuck bayonet down into the coral grit. More than a dozen times Duffee dared the enemy as he made his way out across the reef to a Marine, grabbed him around the upper chest, and hauled him back to shore. No time for reflection.
There’s another one! Gotta go
, thought the young man who had wanted to be a veterinarian.
³⁴
Torn, bleeding men needed him.

After nearly two days of rescuing and treating wounded Marines, Duffee reported to an aid station, exhausted. He stopped for his first cigarette in more than twenty-four hours. But he shook so badly, he couldn’t smoke. He ground the cigarette into the coral before he gathered his gear. He knew his place was back out there with the Marines.

“You! Duffee!” yelled an officer. “Get over to that mortar squad at the wall. They’re going to cross over to the other side of the airstrip to the south, cleanin’ out those friggin’ snipers. Get going!”
³⁵

As Duffee moved across the airstrip, he spotted a dead Marine’s K-rations. A putrid, gassy smell surrounded the bloated body. It was the first and last time Duffee thought of food until the battle ended.

By 1600 hours the second day, the Americans were beginning to gain the upper hand. After thirty-six hours of devastating losses, a landing force had secured the western beach so reinforcements and badly needed supplies could come ashore. A U.S. troop ship finally sailed into the lagoon to take aboard the wounded. Its five-man surgical team treated more than five hundred fifty critically injured men during the next three days, using ether when they ran out of sodium pentothal.

On land, the Marines’ noose tightened around the remaining Japanese soldiers. Admiral Shibasaki had been isolated in his bunker. The Navy’s bombardment had destroyed his hardwire communications system, eliminating his ability to coordinate Japanese counterattacks. He sent his final message to Japan: “Our weapons have been destroyed and from now on everyone is attempting a final charge. May Japan exist for ten thousand years!”
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Meanwhile, the first genuinely positive American report was radioed out to the command ship: “Casualties: many. Percentage dead: unknown. Combat efficiency: we are winning.”
³⁷

By the third day, Ray Duffee was unrecognizable. Black grime mixed with coral dust had caked on his arms, hands, and face. His shoulders hung low from numbing fatigue. He and thousands of Marines had gone without food and very little water because poorly cleaned oil drums contaminated the water they held. While mop-up operations continued at the eastern edge, the battle for Tarawa Atoll had been won as the final elements of Japanese resistance melted on Betio and the surrounding islands. By that point, more than eighty corpsmen had been killed, and nearly three dozen more had been wounded in action.

The worst had passed for the surviving corpsmen. Some were lucky. At one point, a corpsman walked toward a regimental aid station. He flinched as if he had been shot. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a Japanese bullet that had lodged in his pack of cigarettes. It didn’t even leave a bruise on the humbled corpsman.

Another found a body next to the pier near where Duffee had landed. The corpsman took a pack of Lucky Strikes, a soaked wallet, ID card, and stamped letter from the body. He risked needless grief because it would confuse his identification if he were killed later. But for many corpsmen, the risk was worth it if they could send something home to a grieving family.

Single gunshots periodically broke the sullen silence that hung over the dead bodies lying on the beach. Japanese survivors committed suicide in their bunkers, wedging their Arisaka 7.7mm rifles against their foreheads and firing them with their big toes. The Japanese had not been trained to improvise. They had expected to repel the Marines at water’s edge. When that failed, a lack of communication and an inability to adjust tactics doomed them to the only defeat they could accept: death.