Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu (23 page)

None of us knew it at the time, but that objective was Peleliu, an obscure chunk of coral in the Palau Islands that nobody in the division had ever heard of and wouldn’t for several months to come. It was a long sail away from either Guadalcanal or Pavuvu—roughly 2,100 miles—but if we’d had to travel from Melbourne, the trip would’ve been more like 5,000.

Personally, I’m glad they kept us in the dark about where we were going next. Dealing with Pavuvu was bad enough.

E
VEN FROM THE DECKS
of the
Elmore
, the island could’ve been mistaken for a tropical paradise. As one Marine put it, “The palm trees were swaying in the breeze, and the lagoon was beautiful. Then we went ashore and found out what it was really like.”

There were no docks for our ships. We had to wade ashore from landing craft through a driving rainstorm. The rainy season on Pavuvu—when more than six feet of rain (that’s seventy-two inches) falls in an average year—was supposed to be over already, but it must’ve been running late that spring.

We expected to find at least a preliminary campsite with roads, bivouac areas, drill fields, water wells, electric generators, and tents already in place. Instead, we found nothing but a wasteland of oozy mud littered with millions of rotten coconuts and besieged by armies of rats and land crabs.

As it turned out, it was a good thing the rainy season hung around longer than usual. There was no fresh water available, and the daily afternoon downpours were our only chance to bathe or wash our muddy dungarees.

According to General Geiger, a full battalion of Seabees was already on the island and ready to assist the Marines “in every way possible.” Actually, only a handful of Seabees were there, and those few were waiting restlessly to be rotated back to the States. Meanwhile, they weren’t exactly eager to do any dirty, sweaty work for a bunch of Marines.

As it stood, our “rest camp” consisted of piles of ragged castoff Army tents and half-rotted canvas cots scattered on the beach, and our designated bivouac areas were under several inches of water.
Underneath a semi-solid crust, the soil was dangerously unstable. A man could sink over his shoe tops without warning. And the more it was walked and driven on, the more the surface dissolved into one giant, knee-deep quagmire.

In this mess, it soon became obvious that we were going to have to build every stinking, saturated inch of our camp from scratch.

We stood around for a while, cussing, kicking things, and shaking our heads while we asked each other the same stupid question over and over: “Whose bright idea was this, anyway?”

As usual, though, bitching and bellyaching didn’t help matters a bit. So we finally started digging holes for tent poles and patching holes in the tents. We used any kind of solid material we could find—palm fronds, scraps of wood, even some of the tents and cots that were in the worst shape—to give us any kind of reliable footing against the mud.

When the sun went down that evening, it got dark in a hurry. And I do mean
dark.
In the confusion of the afternoon, we hadn’t given much thought to the fact that there was no electricity on the island. As night descended, some of us scrambled around to find anything dry enough to burn and make a little light.

This was where Gunnery Sergeant Elmo M. “Pop” Haney, a World War I veteran who was close to fifty years old, came to our rescue. Haney was by far the oldest man in K/3/5. His body was hard and muscular, but he looked almost scrawny in his uniform. He only weighed about 135 pounds and was fairly short—about five-eight, I’d say—but he was as tough as one of my old leather football helmets. He was eccentric as all hell, too, no doubt about it.

Some of the stuff Pop did caused a helluva lot of laughter behind his back. Stuff like jumping up at dawn four or five times a week and
conducting fifteen minutes of bayonet practice all by himself, even aboard ship. Or scrubbing his whole body—genitals included—with a stiff-bristled brush while taking a shower.

He talked to himself more than he talked to anybody else, and every now and then he’d chuckle and nod his head as if he agreed wholeheartedly with what he’d just said.

Because of such peculiar habits, a lot of the young guys in the company thought Pop was crazy as a loon and laughed at him behind his back. But as I found out when night fell that first day on Pavuvu, Haney was smart in ways the rest of us didn’t understand. The longer I was around him, the more I learned.

He could deliver a lecture on hand-to-hand combat that would’ve done justice to any drill instructor at Parris Island—which I had a feeling he might’ve been at one time or another. He was a dead shot on the pistol range, where he was in charge of safety. And heaven pity anybody who tried to sneak up on him from behind. He was as agile as a monkey, and he’d turn the tables on you before you knew what hit you.

“Come here, Sergeant McEnery,” he said, “and I’ll show you a little trick I picked up over there in France in 1918. We didn’t have much electric light in them trenches, neither.”

He led me inside a tent where he had a canteen cup filled with beach sand. I watched while he cut off a piece of tent rope about six inches long and poked it down into the sand in the cup, then pressed the sand tightly around it. Next he poured a few ounces of gasoline into the cup and let it soak in good. Finally, he struck a match and touched it to the rope.

And—
poof!
—like magic, Pop Haney had made a crude little lamp that put out a fair amount of light—at least enough to eat by
or write a letter by, maybe even play cards by. It sure beat stumbling around in the dark like a bunch of moles.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said.

He grinned at me and winked. “No, you won’t,” he told me, “not if you watch your step and learn a few more tricks.”

I
T WOULD TAKE
about a week even to get power to the division command post, and we never had electricity in the bivouac areas during the whole three and a half months we were on Pavuvu. With enough of Haney’s lamps, we had enough light to get by, but there were some dangers involved with the lamps, too.

About a month after we veterans arrived, we got a shipload of green recruits of the 46th Replacement Battalion. Many of these new guys turned out to be top-notch Marines, but I swear some of them acted like real chowderheads when they first arrived.

There was seventeen-year-old PFC Seymour Levy, for example. He was a fresh-faced Jewish boy from my hometown of Brooklyn, assigned as a rifleman in my Third Platoon. His mother had damn near disowned him for lying about his age to get in the Marines, and I could see why. He was book-smart enough that he probably made high grades in school, but in a lot of ways he was still wet behind the ears.

One of his favorite pastimes was reciting poetry by Rudyard Kipling in what he thought was a Limey accent. You know, like:

You may talk o’ gin and beer

When you’re quartered safe out ’ere. . .

Anyhow, when Levy heard about the gasoline lamps that Pop Haney and a few other old-timers had made, he decided to build one on his own. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to locate a wide-mouthed metal container, so he decided to use a Coke bottle instead.

Bad, bad idea.

The bottle exploded and set Levy’s tent on fire. He was lucky it didn’t do the same to him.

“Levy was a bright kid, but he just didn’t have much common sense,” said PFC Sterling Mace, another New Yorker, who was Levy’s best buddy in the replacement battalion. “Other guys were a little wary of bunking with him after that.”

I liked Levy. Almost all of us in the platoon liked him in spite of ourselves. He was a nice kid and a dedicated Marine who served as a morale booster for his fellow replacements and even for older guys like me. But I had serious doubts about how he was going to stack up in combat, and I spent some extra time briefing him on stuff I figured he needed to know.

Maybe it helped, because Levy turned out to be a whole lot tougher than he looked. So did PFC Bill Leyden, another boy wonder from New York City, who was as Irish as I was and a bit of a smartass, too.

Personality-wise, Leyden was as different from Levy as two people could be. Levy did some dumb things because he’d led a sheltered life and didn’t know better. Leyden, on the other hand, did dumb stuff because he always wanted to see how far he could push the limits.

To get him out of the house and out of trouble, I honestly think Leyden’s parents may have picked him up and carried him to the nearest Marine recruiting office the day he turned seventeen. After
some of the stunts he’d already pulled, like trying to ride across Brooklyn on top of a subway train at the age of twelve—and fracturing his skull in the process—they may have thought he’d be safer in the Marine Corps than he was at home.

Leyden liked to think of himself as a daredevil, and he took pride in taking risks that other guys wouldn’t. This made me kind of nervous because risk takers have a habit of dying young on a battlefield, and I knew he’d have plenty of chances to show how daring he was in the months ahead.

Also among the new replacements was PFC Eugene B. Sledge, future author of the best-selling book
With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa.
Sledge was a quiet, studious young man from Alabama, who was assigned as an ammo handler in K/3/5’s mortar section.

Of all the newcomers, Sledge seemed to be the most fascinated by Pop Haney. He was always watching Haney out of the corner of his eye and, I guess, trying to figure out what was going on inside the old guy’s head.

One day on the pistol range, Sledge was stunned to see Haney throw a handful of gravel squarely in the face of a green second lieutenant who’d accidentally pointed his loaded .45 in the direction of another Marine.

Any other noncom in the company might’ve gotten busted or even court-martialed for a stunt like that. But the green lieutenant just blushed and left the range, rubbing his eyes, and Haney went back to supervising the marksmen like nothing had happened.

“Haney was the only man I ever knew in the outfit who didn’t seem to have a buddy,” Sledge would later write. “He wasn’t a loner in the sense that he was sullen or unfriendly. He simply lived in a world all his own. . . .

“We all cleaned our weapons daily, but Haney cleaned his M-1 before muster, at noon chow, and after dismissal in the afternoon. . . . He would sit by himself, light a cigarette, field strip his rifle, and meticulously clean every inch of it. Then he cleaned his bayonet. . . . He was like Robinson Crusoe on an island by himself.”

B
EFORE THE WAR
, Pavuvu had been the site of a big copra plantation, but when we landed there, its coconut crops hadn’t been harvested for nearly two years, and the ground in the palm groves was several feet deep in rotten coconuts.

The smell wasn’t as bad as the smell of decomposing corpses on a week-old battlefield, but it came pretty damn close, and there was no way to escape from it for the first several weeks we were there.

Every day, we sent out work details to load up and haul away the putrified coconuts. They trucked them through the quagmires that passed for streets and dumped them in the huge swamp that covered about three-fourths of the island. Eventually, the smell subsided. But even Marines who’d lived on almost nothing but coconuts and rice on Guadalcanal reached the point where the very sight of a coconut made them gag.

Some guys developed such an aversion to coconuts that they started venting their anger against the trees that produced them. One classic story that made the rounds on Pavuvu was about a Marine who ran out of his tent screaming at dusk one night and threw himself against the trunk of a coconut palm and started beating it savagely with his fists.

“I hate you, goddamn it,” he sobbed. “I hate you! I hate you!”

“Hit the son of a bitch once for me,” somebody yelled from a
nearby tent. Otherwise, there was no reaction to the screamer’s outburst. It was just another typical evening on Pavuvu.

O
THER WORK PARTIES
carried crushed coral from a large vein that Marine engineers located and quarried, using whatever containers they could find—pails, helmets, even mess kits—to pave walkways and streets in the endless sea of mud. Still others dug drainage ditches and collection pools to carry off and contain the rains that fell every day.

According to Marine regulations, tents in rest camps were supposed to have wooden decks, but lumber was about as scarce as gold nuggets on Pavuvu. To keep us from sinking up to our knees in the muck inside our tents, we scrounged every scrap of wood, sheet metal, or pasteboard we could find to keep at least some of our gear dry.

And then there were the tens of thousands of uninvited guests—the rats and land crabs—that invaded our tents every night.

Nobody was sure where the rats went in the daytime, but at night, they were everywhere. Herds of them ran across the tops of our tents and down the tent ropes to the ground, where they scattered in all directions, screeching wildly, darting over sleeping Marines, and devouring anything remotely edible in their path. Judging from the number of guys who were bitten by them, human flesh definitely fell into that category.

Men tried in various ways to fight back. Some made traps by placing bait in five-pound coffee cans and incinerating the rats who got caught in them with gasoline. Others created booby traps by putting percussion caps into packages of crackers.
One company commander armed his men with flamethrowers and declared all-out war against the little devils. They killed over 400 rats in a single night, but the next night there were just as many as ever, and the CO decided his offensive was wasted effort.

The land crabs also came out to prowl every night. They weren’t as vicious as the rats, but they were just as repulsive and infuriating. They especially liked to crawl into our boondocker combat boots and make themselves at home. You learned pretty fast to shake out your boots in the morning before you put them on or suffer the consequences. Once I found three of the things in one of my boots. Because of the crabs and mud, some guys quit wearing shoes altogether and just squished around barefoot.