Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu (28 page)

“Stop the tank!” I yelled at the driver. “We got two men wounded!”

I jerked my head around to look toward Mace and Levy and asked them where Googe was hit.

“He got it in the arm,” Mace said.

“Well come here and help me with Teskevich,” I told him. “He’s hurt bad. Corpsman! We need a corpsman!”

A medic showed up just as we got Teskevich to the ground. He took one look at John and shook his head.

“The slug went all through his intestines,” he said. “Nothing much I can do.”

“Then see about Googe,” I said. “I think his arm’s busted.”

When I looked back at John, his face was gray and the front of his dungarees was solid blood. The worst part of it was that he was still conscious and looking me straight in the eye. I’ll never forget how he looked at me and how he kind of smiled.

“Guess I’m gonna make my old man rich, after all, Mac,” he whispered.

I tried to think of something to say to him, but I couldn’t. I was afraid I’d bawl if I tried.

I wondered if I ought to inject him with one of the needle-equipped tubes of morphine we all carried, but he didn’t seem to be in that much pain, so I couldn’t see the point.

I stayed with John beside the road till he died a few minutes later. Mace and Levy stayed, too. Quite a few of the guys from K Company turned to look at us as they passed by, then they shook their heads and glanced quickly away.

Teskevich and I had been in the same company since the fall of 1941. It was damn hard to see somebody you’d spent so much time with get his guts blown out a few inches away from you. I remembered how we’d talked just the night before about going home, but after a few seconds I had to force the memory out of my mind.

John’s eyes were still open when I covered him with a poncho, and he still looked like he was smiling a little.

“We better haul ass,” I told Mace and Levy. “We got a long way to go.”

I didn’t look at them when I said it. I couldn’t—I was too choked up. The three of us just stood up and started walking north again.

T
HERE WERE BIGGER
, longer, costlier, and much better known land battles than Peleliu during the Pacific war. Guadalcanal lasted six times as long. Okinawa claimed twenty times as many lives. Iwo Jima involved thousands more American troops.

But Peleliu was uniquely horrible. In terms of savage fighting,
agonizing battlefield conditions, impossible terrain and logistics, physical misery, and psychological heartbreak, it was in a class by itself.

It was thirty days of the meanest, around-the-clock slaughter that desperate men can inflict on each other when the last traces of humanity have been wrung out of them and all that’s left is the blind urge to kill.

And as we found out afterward, the saddest, most sickening thing about Peleliu for the men who lived through it is that it never should’ve happened at all. Admiral Halsey was outspokenly against invading Peleliu. He knew attacks by the U.S. Navy had left the Jap garrison with only a handful of flyable planes and no offensive capability.

Even Admiral Chester Nimitz, the Navy’s commander in chief in the Pacific, who initially approved the Peleliu operation, changed his mind and argued against it when he met at Hawaii with President Roosevelt and Dugout Doug MacArthur. But when MacArthur demanded that Peleliu and its airfield be taken to protect his flank when his Army troops invaded the Philippines, Roosevelt gave in and okayed it.

It was only later that almost all the big brass in Washington realized Peleliu could’ve easily been bypassed and its garrison left to wither.

For me—and every other living survivor of Peleliu—it hurts to know the truth. But as we know now, from a strategic standpoint, the battle was totally pointless. After the war, former Minnesota governor Harold Stassen, who served in the Pacific as assistant chief of staff to Admiral Halsey and later as a special assistant to President
Dwight Eisenhower, called it “a terrible mistake” and “a needless tragedy.”

And it hurts even worse when I think of the 1,252 members of the First Marine Division who were killed in action on Peleliu and the other 5,274 Marines who left their blood there.

W
ITHOUT A DOUBT
, the period between late September and mid-October 1944 was the worst time of my life. It was worse than the weeks we spent under siege at Guadalcanal. It was worse than the Green Hell of Cape Gloucester. It was the nastiest, ugliest, slimiest, nonstop fighting that a human being can experience.

Every day during that stretch was basically the same nightmare all over again. We attacked the underground Jap strongholds in the Umurbrogol Pocket and slaughtered their occupants by every means available. We incinerated them with flamethrowers. We blasted them to bits with artillery rounds fired directly into their caves. We poured grenades by the hundreds into their bunkers and pillboxes. Our planes seared them with napalm from the air. We called in
bulldozers and demolition squads armed with TNT to bury them alive.

The brass at First Marine Division headquarters called it “blowtorch and corkscrew” tactics. I guess that’s as good a description as any.

And, of course, we shot them and bayoneted them and cut their throats and strangled them with our bare hands when they came at us as infiltrators in the night. We gouged their eyes out and pounded their skulls to mush with rocks. We jerked them up and threw them off cliffs like screaming sacks of shit.

And still they fought on. Our intelligence estimated total enemy strength on Peleliu at 10,900 troops. When Jap resistance finally ended, only thirty of their soldiers came out to surrender. That was how hard they fought.

Because the First Marines had been evacuated, and the Seventh Marines were depleted from heavy losses, the main burden of digging, burning, and blasting the Japs out of their caves was now squarely on the shoulders of the Fifth Marines.

Our turn in the cauldron had come. Beginning when we ran the gauntlet up Sniper Alley, it would continue without letup for seventeen straight days. Every one of those days was horribly the same. We were always going uphill, always under a crossfire from Japs we couldn’t see in mutually supporting caves and bunkers above us. Always inching our way up some naked, rocky cliff with Japs shooting at us from distances ranging from a quarter-mile to a few yards.

Before the struggle was over, a lot of us were dead or maimed for life. My grief over John Teskevich’s death soon faded into the background because other friends and comrades were falling around me every day.

We’d hear a shot ring out from a sniper somewhere. One of us would go down, while the rest of us cursed or choked back tears. Or both. We’d try like hell to locate the sniper, but it was hard to do. If we figured out the shots came from a den of Japs in a cave, we could call in mortar or artillery fire. But sometimes the terrain was so crazy that our shells couldn’t reach the target. And when it was an isolated sniper that was doing the damage, he might hit three or four of our guys, maybe more, before we could pinpoint where the son of a bitch was hiding.

None of us who survived the torment of those seventeen days would ever be the same again.

O
N SEPTEMBER 27
(D-plus-12), Colonel Harold “Bucky” Harris, the Fifth Marines CO, assigned our whole Third Battalion—commanded by Major John Gustafson and including all of us in K/3/5—to make yet another amphibious assault on yet another Pacific island.

This time, our objective was a small chunk of coral just off the north coast of Peleliu. It was called Ngesebus (pronounced “Nega-seebus”), and it would be my fourth amphibious operation in the Pacific. In some ways, it was also going to be the roughest.

Major Gustafson made it clear that 3/5 was expected to secure Ngesebus in twenty-four hours or less. That was a tall order because, despite its small size, the island was a miniature of Peleliu itself—with low ridges down its center that were honeycombed with Nip caves and bunkers. It even had its own airstrip that was big enough for Zeros to use to attack our positions on Peleliu.

“At 0800 tomorrow morning, we’ll be boarding amtracks for a
landing on Ngesebus,” Lieutenant Bauerschmidt told K/3/5’s Third Platoon that afternoon. “Regiment estimates that the Nips have over 500 troops in heavy fortifications on the island, plus dozens of mortars, several 75s, and some large-caliber naval guns. They expect us to do the job in one day and without reinforcements, so be prepared for a hard fight.”

Up to this point, we hadn’t had a lot of trouble with sneak attacks by Jap infiltrators, but late that night while we were dug in along the north beach, we lost two Marines to nighttime visitors who crawled into their foxholes and killed them. In one case, the Jap who did the dirty work spoke perfect English and pretended to be a Marine asking about a lost rifle. It reminded me of the time on Guadalcanal when a Nip yelled at me in English across the Matanikau River and invited me to “Come on over.”

I took those two Marines’ deaths as a warning of what lay ahead for us, and I was right. We were entering a phase of the fight for Peleliu where the threat of enemy attack, either at close quarters or from weapons buried in some distant ridge, never let up. From now on, it would always be there—around the clock, twenty-four hours a day.

A
T DAWN ON
September 28 (D-plus-13), we gathered up our gear and moved down to a narrow strip of sand on the extreme north tip of Peleliu, where thirty amtracks were waiting for us.

A thousand yards away across a shallow strait, Navy guns and Marine aircraft were hitting Ngesebus with an awesome array of firepower. The battleship
Mississippi
and the heavy cruisers
Denver
and
Columbus
were raining sixteen- and fourteen-inch shells on the island and raising huge clouds of smoke and dust.

At the same time, Corsairs from Marine Fighter Squadron VMF-114, flying out of the repaired Peleliu airfield, were blasting Jap positions along the beach with bombs and rockets and raking them with machine gun fire.

Unless you’d seen it all before, it was hard to imagine how anything could live through such a massive bombardment. But the memory of the much larger fireworks display before our Peleliu landings was still fresh in our minds, and we remembered that most of the Jap defenders had come through that one untouched.

Still, it was nice to know we were getting so much support. Division had also sent thirteen amphibian tanks to spearhead our landing, and that was encouraging, too, but I had the feeling we were going to need every bit of help we could get.

Less than two weeks earlier, 3/5 had come ashore on Peleliu with 1,000 troops. Now there were only about 700 of us left in the battalion’s three rifle companies. Casualties had claimed the rest.

At the moment, only God knew how many more killed and wounded we’d have before this day was over—but the rest of us would find out soon enough.

At 9 AM, the “softening-up” bombardment along the Ngesebus beaches ended. Then, with our amphibian tanks out front—each packing a 75-millimeter cannon and two .50-caliber machine guns—the tractor drivers revved their engines. Slowly, like giant turtles, our loaded amtracks rumbled down to the water’s edge.

I took the .50-caliber on the right side of the amtrack’s bow, but there was something wrong with it, and it wouldn’t fire properly. I had to reload every few rounds, so I doubt if it did us much good, but I kept trying.

As far as I could tell, there was no return fire from the Japs.
This was a good break for us because it took almost six minutes for those slow-ass amtracks to crawl across the shallow water and reach the beach on Ngesebus. I was still wrestling with the stubborn .50-caliber gun when I discovered everybody else aboard was already ashore.

When I jumped off the tractor and ran after them, the first thing I saw right in front of me was a pillbox. After I hit the deck, I tried throwing a couple of grenades at the pillbox opening, but both of them fell a little short.

Then Corporal Thomas “Nippo” Baxter—who got that nickname from the uncanny way he could spot hiding Jap soldiers—crawled up beside me with a couple of other Marines. One had a bazooka, and another had a flamethrower, and between them they were able to cure the pillbox in short order. Two Nips ran out of it with their clothes on fire, and we put them out of their misery with our rifles.

We penetrated the rest of the Japs’ first line of defenses without much further trouble and ran past the bodies of fifty or sixty dead Japs who’d probably been killed by the strafing Corsairs. We used grenades to silence a couple of Nip machine guns that were still being manned and quickly disposed of another pillbox, using the same combination of weapons as before.

One of my duties as platoon guide was to maintain contact with the units on our flanks. There was nothing but ocean on our left, so I had only our right flank to worry about. That was where the First Platoon was, and I was positioned as close to those Marines as I was to the guys in my own Third Platoon.