Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu (9 page)

“Look at all that beef on the hoof,” one of the guys in my platoon
finally said. “Every time I see that beast, my imagination runs wild, and I think I smell steaks cooking.”

“Well, hell, let’s shoot the son of a bitch and have a barbecue,” somebody else said. “I bet I can drop him from here.”

As far as I remember, we didn’t take a vote of any kind on this suggestion, but a few seconds later three or four of my platoon mates raised their ’03s and started taking pot shots at the steer, more or less in unison. At least one of them hit the steer, and it fell over in its tracks without making a sound. It was still kicking a little when a half-dozen of us ran down and grabbed it and dragged it back to our lines.

We had to cook the steer in daylight because there was a strict ban on fires at night, and instead of barbecuing it, we cut it up in chunks and boiled it in some twenty-gallon GI cans. The Marines who’d done the killing, skinning, and butchering were surprisingly generous with the meat. I think everybody in K Company got a chunk or two, and we even let some of the guys in I Company have a taste.

To me, no prime filet mignon in a fancy restaurant ever tasted as good.

W
ITH FOOD BEING
so scarce, a lot of the guys in the Third Battalion, Fifth, started feasting on rumors—and there were some wild ones going around. One story that made the rounds was about a patrol that came in after half a day in the woods and told an intelligence officer they’d found a batch of cosmetics and toilet articles belonging to women being held by the Japs.

The officer immediately got on the phone to division head quarters
and asked for permission to organize a rescue mission to free the women.

“A fat lot of good freeing them would do an old fart like you,” division told him. “Forget it and stay where you are.”

But after what took place on the evening of August 12 (D-plus-5), a Marine would’ve had to be totally crazy to go chasing off into the no-man’s-land to the west to check out a rumor.

What happened on that date to a twenty-five-man Marine patrol led by Lieutenant Colonel Frank Goettge also didn’t leave us much time—or stomach—for thinking about food.

Those invisible Japs we’d been looking for behind every bush for the past five days were about to get all too real.

O
N THE AFTERNOON
of D-plus-5, word reached our regimental headquarters by way of a captured Jap sailor that a group of enemy soldiers was willing to surrender if the Marines would send out some troops to liberate them and guide them back to our lines.

As I understand it, Colonel Goettge’s patrol included quite a few guys in intelligence, and they’d already been planning a reconnaissance mission into the area west of our Lunga Point perimeter, where most of the Japs on the island were allegedly concentrated.

Since Geottge and his guys were going into the same area where these Japs that claimed they wanted to surrender were, the brass told him to try to make contact with them.

I’ve heard that some of our officers—including Geottge himself—fell for this surrender story hook, line, and sinker. Geottge really believed his men were on some kind of humanitarian mission because the Japs were supposed to be starving and some of them
badly injured. Somebody even claimed to have seen a white flag flying above one of the Jap positions.

Anyway, Goettge took along the assistant First Division surgeon, Lieutenant Commander Malcolm Pratt, to help those that were hurt. He also took one of a handful of language officers in the division to serve as a translator.

The patrol started out just as it was getting dark. This was a silly thing to do in itself because they couldn’t see what they were heading into. It was black as pitch out there. Lots of clouds and no moon. All the guys were packed into a single Higgins boat for the short trip along the coast, which was another dumb move. An enemy machine gun or a couple of well-placed grenades could’ve wiped out the whole lot of them before you could bat your eyes.

I guess because they were so convinced the Nips were going to welcome them with open arms, the only weapons the Marines had were rifles and pistols. There wasn’t a single BAR or machine gun among them. They didn’t even take along any grenades.

The Goettge patrol was nothing but one big, terrible series of mistakes. All of us were naive as hell at that point, but as green as some of our officers were, they should’ve known better.

As time went on, we’d learn the hard way in the Pacific that Japs
never
surrendered. To them, surrender was the worst thing they could imagine, and they’d a whole lot rather die than disgrace their family by doing it. In fact, thousands of them committed suicide when they were surrounded and trapped just to keep from surrendering.

But we didn’t know anything about that in those first days of combat. We didn’t know how sneaky and bloodthirsty the bastards were, either.

The whole thing with the Goettge patrol was a ruse—a carefully laid trap.

Goettge and his men walked straight into an ambush. Only three of the twenty-five Marines escaped alive. The rest were slaughtered before they could get off the beach where they landed. Then the Japs entertained themselves by chopping up the bodies into little pieces.

One of the guys who survived said the last thing he saw early the next morning, when he glanced back at the beach where the massacre took place and swam for his life, was “swords flashing in the sunlight.”

T
WO MORNINGS LATER,
after the three survivors dragged themselves back to our lines and the story of what happened got around, Third Battalion headquarters sent a bunch of patrols into the area where the ambush had taken place. As soon as it was good daylight, Lieutenant Adams called me over and assigned my eight-man rifle squad to one of the sectors to be checked out by these patrols.

We were also supposed to look for an F4F Wildcat fighter that had gone down and bring out the pilot if he was still alive. We never found a trace of the plane or pilot, and after what we
did
find, we forgot all about them.

“Be damn careful out there, Mac,” the lieutenant said. “Don’t take any unnecessary chances.” Then he paused, looked me straight in the eye, and added, “Don’t take any prisoners, either.”

“No chance of that,” I said. “We don’t need no extra mouths to feed.”

Every guy in my squad was mad as hell about what had
happened, and so was I. We were itching for some kind of payback. By now, it was the sixth day since we’d landed, and so far we hadn’t even
seen
a Jap on the ground, much less had a chance to take a shot at one. I think most of us hoped this would be the day we did.

We knew one thing for sure. If we found the murdering bastards, they wouldn’t have any luck pretending to surrender this time.

Moving in single file, we waded across a knee-deep stream and climbed the three-foot-high mud bank on the other side. Then we made our way through dense undergrowth and a thick grove of coconut palms. Our feet squished in our boots. Before long, we’d get used to that feeling.

Over the next twenty minutes or so, we covered several hundred yards, gradually circling back toward the beach. That’s when we spotted the bodies—or what was left of them—scattered in pieces near the water’s edge.

We’d stumbled across the exact spot where the Goettge patrol had been ambushed by the Japs and where they’d been butchered afterward like a bunch of pigs.

The first thing I saw was the severed head of a Marine. I almost let out a yell because the head was moving back and forth in the water and looked like it was alive. Then I realized it was just bobbing in the small waves lapping at the shore. They would wash it up onto the sand a few inches, then it would float back out again when the waves receded.

The next thing I noticed was a leg that had been hacked off at the knee. It was still wearing its dead owner’s boondocker shoe with its laces neatly tied. A few feet away was part of a bloody sleeve from a Marine first sergeant’s shirt with the chevrons still attached. Other chunks of rotting flesh that had once been human body parts were
floating in the water and lying on the sand. The smell was overpowering.

“Holy shit!” I heard a guy behind me groan. “I think I’m gonna puke!”

He stumbled over to a clump of brush and I heard him gag. I almost gagged myself. None of us had ever seen anything like this before. If I’d had something besides black coffee in my stomach, I probably would’ve been as sick as a dog.

It still kind of surprises me that none of the guys in my squad started screaming or cussing or otherwise going hysterical. Mostly, they just stood there frozen in their tracks, like their brains couldn’t process what they were seeing. When I think back on it, I figure they were all thinking something similar to what I was thinking.

I won’t ever forget this—not ever!
I told myself.
I’ll never see a Jap in my life without thinking about it.

Over the next two-plus years, I saw a lot of gruesome sights in the Pacific, but I can’t remember anything worse than what we saw that morning.

As best we could tell, there were pieces of at least four bodies scattered along the beach, and there may have been several others in some bushes a few yards in from the water. We didn’t bother making a detailed search. It was totally obvious what had happened to Goettge and his men.

When I got hold of myself and looked around, the first member of my squad I saw was PFC Kenneth Blakesley, a skinny blond kid not quite eighteen years old. He was standing a couple of feet from me and staring wide-eyed at the bodies and shaking his head. When he tried to talk, it sounded like he was choking on his own words.

“For God’s sake, Mac,” he said, “why would anybody do this?
Wasn’t killing ’em enough? Did they have to make mincemeat out of ’em, too?”

I put my hand on Blakesley’s shoulder. The kid was a good Marine who was always willing to go out on a work detail when I needed somebody. But right now, he looked like he was about ten years old.

“They just want to scare us, Kenny,” I said. “They want to show us how tough and mean they are so we’ll think they’re a bunch of damn supermen. But we’re gonna show them a few things, too, before this shit’s all said and done.”

A minute or two later, Lieutenant Adams showed up with the rest of the platoon. They’d been moving parallel to my squad on our left, and they’d come across some dead Marines, too.

“What should we do with these bodies, Scoop?” I asked him. “You want us to try and bury them?”

He shook his head, and there was a look of pure misery on his face. “Just leave ’em where they are, Mac,” he said. “There’s no time for it right now. Maybe we can send back a burial detail later, but frankly I’d hate to risk it.”

I got my squad together and the whole platoon moved out. Later on, First Marine Division headquarters refused to confirm that the slaughter of the Goettge patrol had ever actually happened. But I never really understood why. Any man who’d seen what we saw that morning knew better.

Patrols from two other companies—L/3/5 and I/3/5—also reported finding mutilated body parts. But the bodies of Goettge himself and other members of his party were never recovered or officially identified. As a result, as far as I know, all of the dead Marines are still listed as “missing in action.”

The fact that all three of the survivors, Platoon Sergeant Frank
L. Few, Sergeant Charles C. “Monk” Arndt, and Corporal Joseph A. Spaulding, described the slaughter in detail in interviews, magazine articles, and official reports didn’t seem to make any difference.

Sometimes I think the brass were just too embarrassed by the whole thing to admit the truth because Goettge and his men were naive and gullible enough to walk right into a trap. I guess United States Marines were supposed to be too smart and tough to make mistakes like that.

Maybe the brass just wished everybody would forget it, but I knew I wouldn’t. And I don’t think any of the other guys who were there that morning ever forgot it, either. We still had an awful lot to learn about the Japs—but we
were
learning.

As we marched away that morning, I could hear a voice inside my head repeating the same words over and over:
I won’t forget! I won’t forget! I won’t forget!

That afternoon, mostly just to take my mind off the things I’d seen that day, I took a few sheets of Jap paper I’d found out of my pack and wrote my mom a letter.

Even if the censors had let me get away with it, I wouldn’t have mentioned anything about what happened to Colonel Goettge and his party or anything else about the situation on Guadalcanal because it would’ve worried Mom and my sister, Lil, too much. Instead, I tried to make it sound as cheerful as I could.

At the time, I really had my doubts that they’d ever get to read what I was writing, anyway. Our mail service wasn’t too reliable, to say the least.

But after all these years, I still remember how I started the letter.

“Well, here we are on this beautiful tropical island,” I wrote, “and everything’s just fine . . .”