Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu (32 page)

I
T TOOK US
two full weeks to get away from Peleliu because the Navy had a hard time finding transportation for us, but I can’t remember much of anything about that interval. From the time we were pulled off the line for good to the day we boarded ship and left the island is mostly just a blurry space in my memory.

We were all about to collapse from exhaustion, and for the first three or four days, the only thing we did was sleep. We’d wake up long enough to eat a meal or take a shower. Then we’d crawl back in the sack and sleep for another five or six hours. I didn’t think I was ever going to get enough shut-eye.

On October 29, after we finally got rested up, a Marine Corps photographer lined us up on the beach to take pictures of what was
left of K/3/5 and the other companies of the Third Battalion, Fifth. Showing up for the photo session was our last official duty assignment on Peleliu.

In all, only eighty-five of us were available to pose for our company portrait. The 150 others who’d landed with K/3/5 on D-Day had all been killed or wounded.

Twenty-six men from our company were either lying in freshly dug graves in a new cemetery near the airfield or had died aboard Navy hospital ships and been buried at sea, and 124 others were hospitalized with battle wounds at various locations around the Pacific. K/3/5’s casualty rate of 64 percent—almost two-thirds of its D-Day strength—was among the highest in the division.

I was one of just five K/3/5 senior noncommissioned officers still standing. The other four were First Sergeant David Bailey, Sergeant Dick Higgins, Platoon Sergeant John Marmet, and Sergeant Donald Shifla. The only two commissioned officers still with the company were Lieutenant Stumpy Stanley, who took command after Captain Haldane was killed, and Lieutenant Duke Ellington of the mortar section.

Overall, the First Marine Division suffered a total of 6,336 casualties at Peleliu, including 1,121 killed in action, 5,142 wounded in action, and 73 missing in action.

I made a couple of trips down to the new cemetery, looking for the graves of guys I knew—especially John Teskevich’s—but I never found any of them. Lots of graves were still unmarked, and bodies were still being hauled in for burial. It was sheer chaos, and it depressed the hell out of me.

I never knew for sure what happened to all those dead Japs. Quite a few of them were entombed in their caves, and I guess a lot
of others were just left on the battlefield until much later. The impossible terrain of the Umurbrogol Pocket made it almost impossible to retrieve the thousands of enemy bodies, even if we’d had the manpower to do it.

At the time the Fifth Marines were withdrawn, it was estimated that fewer than 1,000 of the 10,900 Jap defenders were still capable of combat. But according to somebody’s calculations at Marine Corps headquarters, it had taken an average of about 1,590 rounds of all types of our ammunition to kill each one of those enemy soldiers.

It would take the Army troops another six weeks—until late November—to wipe out the last Jap resistance. And it wasn’t until April 1947, more than a year and a half after the end of the war, when the last group of twenty-six starving Nip survivors gave up and ventured out of their caves.

When the fighting finally stopped and U.S. forces explored the intricate system of defenses that General Sadae Inoue’s troops had created, they found more than 500 caves, many of them with multiple levels and entrances. Some were equipped with sliding steel doors that opened to allow heavy artillery to fire, then closed again to hide the big guns.

One underground fortress in particular was large enough to house a whole battalion of troops—1,000 men—along with their ammo and other supplies.

As one of my comrades in K/3/5 aptly put it: “The Nips weren’t just on Peleliu; they were
in
Peleliu.”

A
S MUCH AS
I looked forward to it, the details of our long-awaited departure from that terrible island on October 30 are hard
for me to sort out in my mind. I still felt tired and numb, and I didn’t particularly want to talk to anybody. Most of the thoughts I can remember were recollections of friends and comrades who’d died in combat and vague feelings of relief that I hadn’t.

The realization that I might never have to shoot or bayonet or grenade another human being did cross my mind at times. As John Teskevich and I had told each other the night before he was killed, the Marine Corps almost
had
to send men like us back to the States after Peleliu.

But, of course, John wouldn’t be making that trip now, and there was something unreal about the idea that I would. It was almost like one of those dreams that’s too good to be true. I was afraid I’d wake up and be back in a rocky hole with bullets whining around me and the smell of death in the air.

There was always the chance that somebody in Washington could change the rules, and that worried me a little. It meant I might end up in another killing spree on another damn island, so it was premature to think too much about going home. But it was also hard as hell to keep it off my mind.

One of my few clear images of the day we sailed from Peleliu is the new dock the Navy had built on the east side of the island. It was long and black and about twenty yards wide. But the water wasn’t deep enough for the incoming troopships to reach it, so we had to get on Higgins boats for the short trip out to the SS
Sea Runner
, the merchant ship that was to take us to Pavuvu.

As usual, we were expected to climb cargo nets to board the ship, and even after a dozen days of rest and rehab, lots of our guys were too weak to make it to the top under their own steam. I don’t recall
having as much trouble with the nets as I had at Guadalcanal, but they were a real struggle for some of my comrades.

“I only got halfway before I had to stop and rest,” recalled PFC Jay d’Leau, one of our bazooka men, many years later. “Three feet from the top, I was totally beat, and some sailors had to reach down and help me.”

In his book, Gene Sledge remembered “feeling like a weary insect climbing a vine” and thinking it was fortunate that no Marine lost his grip and fell.

I
THINK I STAYED
in a kind of withdrawal state much of the time during our trip back to Pavuvu. It took us eight days to get there, and we crossed the equator on the way, heading south. We had comfortable quarters below decks, and the
Sea Runner
’s galley served excellent chow. We spent a lot of time on deck, just bullshitting and breathing in the fresh air, and we got in plenty of sack time, too, since we had no duties to perform.

Only a few shipboard incidents stand out in my mind. The main ones I remember were some fights that broke out between members of the Merchant Marine crew and a group of about ten Navy gunners assigned to man the five-inch gun on the aft of the ship. The Navy guys were seriously outnumbered, and they were getting the crap stomped out of them when some of the Marines decided the odds weren’t very fair, and they jumped in and took care of those crew-members.

For once in my life, I went out of my way to keep from getting involved. I just wasn’t in a fighting mood.

I know the Merchant Marine did great work for our country during the war, but those guys on the
Sea Runner
were a bunch of knuckleheads, and they deserved the whipping they got.

W
HEN WE ARRIVED
at Pavuvu on November 7, the palm groves along the shoreline looked familiar from a distance. But as the small boats that took us from the ship to a new steel pier got closer to the beach, we hardly recognized the place.

Several decorated tables were lined up near the water’s edge, and a sleek new canteen/clubhouse building was under construction in the background. There wasn’t a rotten coconut or rat to be seen anywhere.

But the most shocking sight was a group of Red Cross nurses standing behind the tables and handing out doughnuts and paper cups of chilled grapefruit juice.

These were the first young, attractive white women we’d seen since our last leaves in Melbourne close to a year before, and seeing them so unexpectedly scared a bunch of us tough Marines half to death. We’d been isolated from the fair sex for so long that we didn’t know how to act.

A few overeager Marines rushed up to get in line at the tables, but a good many shied away and pretended to ignore the women. They sat down on the beach, kind of sulking and looking the other way. Others just stood and gaped at the nurses like they were creatures from Mars or someplace. But some of us had enough sense just to grin and accept the refreshments they offered—and even remember to say “Thanks.”

These women seemed so out of place to a lot of the guys that they actually resented them being there.

“Well, hell, I guess we’ll have to wear swim trunks from now on when we take a dip,” I heard one Marine say.

To me, such an attitude confirmed the old saying that “some guys will gripe about anything.” The only thing the women’s presence meant to me was that one little hint of civilization had finally made it to Pavuvu.

On the other hand, the odds of any of us getting really chummy with one of those Red Cross girls were as close as you could get to absolute zero. We had a better chance of flying to the moon. After all, there were only half a dozen of them, and there were 15,000 of us.

I guess that’s one reason the new canteen/clubhouse building never got used very much by the Marines. After what we’d been through, maybe it was just a little too spiffy for us to be comfortable in. But all the other changes that had taken place on Pavuvu during the months we’d been gone got our full approval.

Marine engineers and Seabees had built very comfortable bivouac areas for us, complete with brand-new tents with wooden decks and electric lights. We also had access to modern showers, laundries, screened and well-lighted mess halls, plus a large PX stocked with all kinds of stateside goods.

Instead of a sea of mud, there were neatly laid-out streets and roads built of packed coral, a fifteen-acre parade ground, ball fields, and other recreational facilities. There were plenty of sodas, ice cream, candy bars, and other half-forgotten treats—including a three-can-a-week-per-man beer ration.

One of our few disappointments was that a big batch of that notorious alcoholic brew called “jungle juice,” prepared by the healing wounded men from Peleliu who’d reached Pavuvu weeks before we
did, had sat too long and turned to vinegar by the time we finally got there.

T
O MY RELIEF
, I received official word a few days after reaching Pavuvu that I was scheduled for rotation back to the States within a few weeks—and a thirty-day leave once I got there. Major Gustafson, the Third Battalion commander, signed the paperwork, and it was a done deal. My departure date was originally set for November 19, but it was actually December 1 before we embarked.

Once this was settled, I went over to battalion headquarters and told the sergeant major who ran the office there that I wanted to extend my enlistment for another two years.

“You need to wait till you get stateside,” the sergeant major told me.

“No way,” I said. “I want to do it now, before I leave.”

This may sound a little weird, but I had what I thought were good reasons for wanting to speed up the reenlistment process a little.

My current enlistment was already finished, but there was no way the Marine Corps was going to discharge a healthy NCO with my seniority and combat experience until the war was over. And, like most other Marines I knew, I expected the war to last at least another two years. (Obviously, we’d never heard of the atom bomb.)

So I figured if I extended now instead of waiting till I got state-side and wound up a thirty-day leave, it meant I might get my discharge that much earlier. In the meantime, unless I formally requested more overseas duty, I could probably serve out my time in the good old U.S.A.

Even halfway around the world, we’d heard how the Corps was now drafting guys by the tens of thousands—it was the first time in history that all Marines hadn’t been volunteers—and we’d also heard how urgently they needed seasoned NCOs to train all these new boots.

I’d already completed the requirements for promotion to platoon sergeant, and I hoped I could get assigned as a drill instructor at Parris Island or some other training camp. In its own way, it would be a job that was just as vital to the war effort as shooting at Nips and getting grenades thrown at you. But at the same time, it wouldn’t be nearly as dangerous and dirty as the one I’d been doing for the past twenty-eight months.

I spent the rest of my time on Pavuvu hanging around with some of the wounded Marines who’d been there a while and talking about mutual friends who didn’t make it. Some of the guys from K/3/5 were trying to recover from terrible, disfiguring wounds. It almost hurt me to look at them.

One man in particular couldn’t seem to get his mind off all the horrible things he’d been through. He just kept reliving them over and over. I’d try to switch the subject to something else, but he’d always come back to the bad stuff. It was like his memory was holding him prisoner.

We didn’t know much about post-traumatic stress syndrome in those days, but I’m sure that’s what this poor guy had. I really felt sorry for him, but I have to admit it was a relief to get away from the haunted look in his eyes when the time came for me to leave. I don’t know what happened to him after that.

O
N DECEMBER 1
, a large group of us boarded a Navy transport called the USS
Wharton
, and we sailed from Pavuvu that same day. Our first stop was at Guadalcanal, which was only sixty miles away. I was amazed at how peaceful and calm Iron Bottom Sound was. Not a single sea battle or air raid was going on.

I’d heard that some of the kids I’d played football with back in Gerritsen Beach were stationed at the ’Canal now, and I tried hard to find them in the short time we were there, but I didn’t have any luck.