Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu (27 page)

When daylight came and the Japs broke off their attacks, only nine of the twenty-five Marines who’d reached the crest of Hill 100 were still alive, and most of them were wounded. Battalion finally got through to Pope by radio and ordered him to withdraw, but his radio operator was killed by Jap machine gun fire on the way down, and Pope had to throw himself behind a stone wall to keep from being killed, too. He’d already been hit in the leg by several chunks of shrapnel, which he later pulled out with a pair of pliers.

On September 22, a week and a day after our landing on Peleliu, the First Marines were finally pulled off the line. By that time, the regiment had lost over 1,600 killed and wounded—56 percent of
its total strength—and Captain Pope was the only company commander who wasn’t dead or seriously wounded.

Chesty Puller’s reputation was permanently tarnished by the slaughter of his Marines in those ridges. In
The Old Breed
, George McMillan called Puller “a tragic caricature of Marine aggressiveness,” who “crossed the line that separates courage and wasteful expenditure of lives.”

Captain Pope was awarded the Medal of Honor for his valor and resourcefulness on Hill 100, but he never forgave Puller for sending his men there.

“I had no use for Puller,” Pope said many years after the war. “He didn’t know what was going on, and why he wanted me and my men dead on top of that hill, I don’t know.”

A
FTER MAKING IT
across the airfield, the Fifth Marines pushed on through thick jungle and swampy terrain toward the east coast of Peleliu and wound up in an area designated as Purple Beach. Along the way, we hardly encountered any Jap resistance at all—certainly nothing compared to what the First and Seventh Marines were running into. There was plenty of evidence that Nips were in the vicinity, but they seemed to be playing a cat-and-mouse game with us, at least for the time being.

On the morning of September 17 (D-plus-2) my Third Platoon was picking its way through a jungle thicket when we came across the decomposing bodies of some Japs who’d apparently been killed by our pre-invasion bombs or naval gunfire.

It doesn’t take long in the tropical heat for dead bodies to start rotting and stinking like hell, so we were trying to put some distance
between ourselves and those dead Nips when a sudden explosion splattered us with mud and sent us ducking for cover.

“What the hell was that?” yelled PFC Sterling Mace, swinging his BAR in the direction of the blast.

“Sounded like a grenade or maybe a booby trap,” I said.

“Hey, we got a man hit over here!” somebody else hollered. “Corpsman! We need a corpsman!”

As Mace and I pushed the brush aside and moved together toward the sound, we saw PFC Seymour Levy squatting on his knees a few yards away. He was holding the lower part of his face with both hands, and I saw blood running down his neck. He was mumbling something I couldn’t hear, and he seemed to be in shock.

“What happened to you, Sy?” Mace said, but Levy didn’t respond.

A corpsman came up and covered Levy’s chin and lower jaw with a field dressing. “There’s shrapnel in there,” he said. “Looks like several fragments. He needs to go to an aid station, maybe a hospital ship.”

While we waited for a stretcher, Levy was barely conscious and still losing quite a bit of blood, but the shrapnel had missed his jugular vein—although not by much.

“Hey, cheer up, man,” Mace said, trying to console his friend. “That looks like a million-dollar wound to me. I think you just got yourself a ticket home.”

After Levy was evacuated, the platoon moved on. We were checking our route carefully now in case the Nips had left some more surprises for us, but I couldn’t help noticing that Mace seemed gloomy and downcast.

“You worried about your pal?” I asked, moving up beside him.

“Nah, he’ll be okay, I guess,” he said. “Actually I kind of envy him, but I’m gonna miss him, too, Mac. I mean, Christ, I may never see the crazy so-and-so again.”

I sort of shrugged. “Yeah, well, probably not till after the war, anyway.”

For the record, Mace and I were both wrong.

A
FTER JUST TEN DAYS
on Peleliu, the surviving troops of the First Marines were ordered evacuated and sent back to Pavuvu to recuperate and regroup. The Seventh Marines had also taken a lot of casualties while eliminating a bunch of heavily fortified Jap bunkers down at the south end of the island. (PFC Arthur J. Jackson, a nineteen-year-old BAR man with 1/7, would earn another Medal of Honor for wiping out an even dozen enemy pillboxes.)

By now it was pretty obvious that the Fifth Marines’ turn on the hot seat was coming up. We weren’t exactly overjoyed about it, but we knew it was only fair. In the fighting so far, only thirty-seven members of K/3/5 had been killed or wounded in action while K/3/1, our sister company in the First Marines, had lost about 175 men.

This time, though, because of the heavy casualties the division had already suffered, the brass decided to try a different approach from the one that had bloodied Puller’s regiment so badly.

And this time, the Fifth Marines would be spearheading the attack.

“We’re going to the north end of the island and circle behind the main Jap defenses so we can hit them from a new direction,” Captain Haldane told us. “Trucks are coming to pick us up and take us to the main road along the coast, but we’ll have to hoof it from there
through some pretty tough territory. The Marines who’ve already traveled that route have nicknamed it Sniper Alley, so be careful, and good luck.”

When I looked at our maps, I could see what Ack-Ack was talking about. The narrow West Road passed within 300 yards or so of the heart of Japanese fortifications—an area called the Pocket—carved into the maze of ridges identified on our maps as the Umurbrogol Plateau.

For a distance of more than half a mile, the ocean was only a few yards to the left of the road, and the first of the ridges veered up sharply just a few yards to the right. This made it a perfect killing ground for snipers. Infantry passing that way was caught, literally, between the devil and the deep blue sea. There was almost no place to take cover.

From all indications, it was going to be a more dangerous half-mile than the one across the airport had been.

T
HE MOST SURPRISING THING
that happened while we were on Purple Beach was that Seymour Levy suddenly showed up back in camp. His wounded chin was wrapped up in white bandages and he still had a little problem eating and talking. He looked tired and a little pale, but he seemed to feel okay.

Sterling Mace could hardly believe his eyes when the platoon came back from a patrol and he saw Levy sitting there waiting for him.

“What the heck’re you doing here?” Mace said. “I thought you’d be halfway to the States by now.”

“Aw, I sneaked off the hospital ship and bummed a ride to the
beach on a ferry,” Levy mumbled through the bandages. “I just wanted to be back with the company. I missed you guys. Besides, it’s where I belong.”

Mace just grinned and shook his head. “Jeez, Sy, you must be nuts. You know that?”

It was hard to tell because of the bandages, but I think Levy grinned back. Then, just like old times, he started reciting a Rudyard Kipling poem.

“It was Din! Din! Din! You ’eathen, where the mischief ’ave you been . . .”

T
HE EVENING BEFORE
we moved out, my friend John Teskevich and I were lying on our backs beside the foxhole we were sharing and bullshitting about all the stuff we’d been through together in the past and what might happen after we finished up at Peleliu. We both agreed we’d seen some tough times but it could’ve been worse.

“This one hasn’t been all that rough so far,” John said, “and once we get done here, we’ll be heading home. My God, Mac, even the Marine Corps can’t put it off forever. They’ll
have
to send us stateside after this crapshoot.”

“Damn straight,” I said. “They won’t have any choice. What’s the first thing you’ll do when you get back to Pennsylvania?”

He laughed. “Call up my friends. Drink some beer. Hustle some broads. Maybe get in a fistfight or two. It sure as hell won’t be working in no damn coal mine, I can tell you that.”

“It’s hard to believe,” I said, “but in a week or two, this whole mess could be over, and we could actually be on our way.”

“Yeah,” he said, “time’s runnin’ low for my old man to collect that twenty grand in GI insurance, and my luck’s been holdin’ pretty good lately. If he gets it, the Japs’re gonna have to hurry.”

O
N THE MORNING
of September 25 (D-plus-10), K/3/5 and the rest of the Third Battalion loaded up our gear and got ready to move out. Our semi-holiday on Purple Beach was over. It was the last break we’d get at Peleliu.

As we hiked toward a rendezvous point on the East Road where some trucks were supposed to pick us up, we passed a column of men from the First Marines as they filed slowly down the other side of the road on their way to Purple Beach to board boats and begin their trip to Pavuvu.

They looked so pitiful that I couldn’t help stopping for a minute to watch them. Their uniforms were torn, filthy, and bloodstained in many cases, and their faces were blank and hollow-eyed. They shambled along like walking dead men.

“Man, look at those guys,” said Lieutenant Bauerschmidt, pausing beside me and shaking his head. “You can tell they’ve been through hell.”

“Yeah, I’d been kind of envying the First Marines because they were getting relieved and we weren’t,” I told the lieutenant. “But now that I see the poor devils, I sure as hell don’t envy ’em anymore.”

“Well, don’t envy us, either,” Bauerschmidt said. “In a few days, we may be in the same shape. The Nips are still in firm control of those ridges where the First got beaten bloody. Now it’s our job to come at ’em from a different direction and dislodge ’em, but it’s still the same Japs in the same kind of ridges.”

A few minutes later, we climbed onto the trucks and headed toward the West Road. On the way, we passed just north of the airfield and saw it for the first time since we’d crossed it under fire on D-plus-1. It had changed so much we could hardly tell it was the same place. All the wreckage from Jap planes and other debris had been hauled away, and all the shell craters had been filled. Crews of Seabees and service personnel in clean uniforms were calmly going about their business, using heavy equipment to grade and repair the runways.

Since the field was no longer within range of enemy mortars and artillery, our own planes would soon be flying missions from it against the Japs in the ridges. That was the most encouraging part of all.

I had a feeling we were going to need all the help we could get.

O
UR CONVOY OF
trucks stopped a short distance up the West Road, where the drivers told us to get off, that this was as far as they went. A bunch of Army troops—the first ones we’d seen on Peleliu—were congregated along the side of the road where we stopped. They were with the 321st Regiment of the 81st Infantry Division, and I asked a couple of them if they were going north with us.

“No, man,” they said, “they told us we’re relieving the First Marines, and we’re staying right here in this area.” They’d obviously heard the same scuttlebutt about Sniper Alley that we’d heard.

“Looks like we’ll be walkin’ the rest of the way from here by ourselves,” said John Teskevich as he and I sat down beside the road to wait for the order to move out. “That don’t sound like such a hot idea to me.”

“Bauerschmidt says they’re sending up some tanks to go with us,” I told him, repeating something the lieutenant had just told me. “He says maybe we can hitch a ride on one of them, but that doesn’t strike me as such a great idea, either.”

“Beats walkin’, though,” John said.

“Maybe so,” I said, “but it makes you a good target, too, sittin’ there on the deck of a tank.”

It was past noon when a platoon of Shermans showed up, and we got the order to move out. No one suggested that we bum a ride on any of the tanks, so we grabbed our weapons and started plodding up the road, which seemed to get narrower the farther we went. About a stone’s throw to our left was a rocky beach and the ocean, and roughly the same distance to our right was the first of the ridges.

Some low undergrowth off to the right was about the only available cover, but it also could be the hiding place for a Jap sniper if one was nervy enough to set up that close.

We could hear the chatter of Jap machine guns in the distance, and occasionally we’d see a stream of their blue tracer bullets passing high above our heads and bound for some target in the ridges. There were also sporadic rifle shots that sounded a lot nearer.

Sure enough, it didn’t take the Japs long to start picking our guys off. Before you could even hear the shot, you’d see somebody go stiff and fall. We almost never spotted a target to shoot back at, but some Marines would always fire a few rounds in the direction they thought the shot had come from.

Despite my misgivings about riding on a tank, we were sweating buckets by now, and I felt kind of relieved when Lieutenant Bauerschmidt waved one of the Shermans over and motioned to a group of us to climb aboard.

Teskevich and I climbed up on the platform to the left of the turret, putting it between us and those Jap-infested ridges. PFCs Jesse Googe, Sterling Mace, and Seymour Levy got aboard, too. Then Bauerschmidt signaled the tank driver to go on, and the big Sherman started to roll again.

We hadn’t gone more than about thirty yards when I heard a shot that sounded like it came from ahead of us and to the right. I ducked instinctively and glanced at John, who was sitting about a foot from me toward the front of the tank. I thought for a second he was ducking, too. Then I realized he was doubled up with pain and clutching his belly. Blood was running out between his fingers.

Then I heard a second shot, and I heard Googe let out a howl from the other side of the tank. “God, I’m hit! I’m hit!”