Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu (19 page)

The second day was constant maneuvers with tanks, artillery, and machine guns firing live ammo over our heads as we crawled on our bellies and planes bombing and strafing the area immediately in front of us. Finally, about 4 PM, all the firing stopped, and we started hiking back to camp.

On the way, I spotted an apple orchard where the trees were loaded with fruit, and I led my squad into it. We were relaxing in the shade and eating apples when the owner of the orchard came along. I expected him to tell us to get the hell off his property, but he surprised me.

“You Yanks are welcome to anything I have,” he said. “I’ve got a son in America, and everyone treats him marvelously over there. You can bed down here for the night if you want. I’ll get you some blankets.”

When we got back to Camp Balcombe, considerably later than the rest of the company, Lieutenant Daniel Dykstra, our new platoon leader, wasn’t nearly so charitable or understanding.

O
N SEPTEMBER 27,
the Fifth Marines left Melbourne and sailed north through the Great Barrier Reef and around the broad curve of Australia’s east coast. General Rupertus and his staff had expected the division to travel aboard APAs, the Navy’s new, specially designed assault transports, but we were in for a big disappointment.

The First Marine Division was now part of the U.S. Sixth Army, and Army brass didn’t give a hoot in hell about our comfort or convenience. So we ended up spending two weeks aboard a cramped
Liberty ship named the SS
B. F. Shaw
. It was a Merchant Marine vessel that was never meant to carry troops, and we were crammed into quarters that ranged from primitive to nonexistent.

We shared the cargo hold with hundreds of crates, artillery pieces, trucks, jeeps, deflated rafts, and other equipment. We had two sleeping choices—we could either hang hammocks between steel bulkheads and girders in the hold, or we could bed down on deck under ponchos and the sections of two-man tents we called “shelter halves.”

Our makeshift showers, toilets, and galley were located out on the weather decks, which were sure to be awash with garbage, sewage, and seawater in rough weather. Food had to be served and eaten on open decks, regardless of weather conditions.

Of course, we had no idea where we were going or how long it would take to get there. We had no specific information on our ultimate destination, but most of us from Guadalcanal could guess that it was “another damn island with another damn airfield.”

We were right on both counts.

On October 11, the Fifth Marines landed at Milne Bay on the eastern tip of New Guinea. Meanwhile, for reasons only the Army knew, the Seventh Marines went on past Milne to Oro Bay, eighty miles away on the northwestern coast of New Guinea, and the First Marines and division headquarters ended up on Goodenough Island, about fifty miles off the eastern tip of New Guinea.

Milne reminded me of Guadalcanal in more ways than one. Our home there was a tent camp that Marine engineers had gouged out of the jungle along with a narrow street composed mostly of shin-deep mud.

The rain poured down in sheets for hours at a time. Then it
rained some more. The legs of our cots sank into the mud until we were practically lying on the ground.

It was a grim, gloomy, depressing place, and we were destined to be there for two and a half months while Army and Marine Corps brass butted heads over the plans for our next invasion.

It was almost Christmas when we finally learned where we were headed. It was a place called Cape Gloucester on the island of New Britain, some 600 miles away.

“The Cape,” as we came to call it, would make our interlude at Camp Balcombe seem like a vacation in paradise. By comparison, even Milne Bay would look like the garden spot of the Pacific.

T
HE FIRST MARINE
Division was given the day off on Christmas Day 1943. But the very next morning—December 26—troops of the Seventh and Fifth Marines hit the beaches at Cape Gloucester. Once again, just as we’d expected, taking a Jap airfield was the division’s prime objective.

This one was at the southwestern tip of New Britain, a large island east of New Guinea. The big Nip air and naval base at Rabaul was at the extreme eastern tip of New Britain, but it was 300 miles away from our objective and in a separate combat zone where Admiral Bull Halsey was in charge. Our zone was under the jurisdiction of Dugout Doug MacArthur and General Walter Krueger, commander of the U.S. Sixth Army.

The American and Australian navies and air forces pounded the daylights out of our target area for ten days before the Marines went in. This was more than twenty times the advance preparation we’d gotten at Guadalcanal, but I was still thankful that K/3/5 wasn’t in the first wave on this landing. Actually, the whole Third Battalion, Fifth, was still at Oro Bay when the invasion started. This may have been because of the logistical mess the Army had created when it broke up our division and scattered the various regiments out in different camps up to eighty miles apart.

This time around, it was men of the Third Battalion, Seventh Marines, that got the “honor” of going ashore first. They landed at 7:46 AM on December 26, and two minutes later they were followed by the First Battalion, Seventh. The First and Second Battalions, Fifth were next in line.

I’m sure all these guys were nervous as hell because they couldn’t even see the beach ahead of them for all the smoke raised by the bombardment.

As it turned out, though, Jap opposition to the landing was exactly the same as we’d seen at the ’Canal—meaning it was zero. There was no opposition at all, and the coxswains on the landing craft came back to the LSTs (landing ship, tank) offshore yelling, “Landing unopposed! Landing unopposed!”

The reason for this was that, instead of hitting the beach closest to the airfield, the Marines surprised the Japs by landing a few miles to the southeast, in an area called Beach Yellow near the shores of Borgen Bay. Not a single enemy shot was fired at them that morning.

But just as they did at Guadalcanal, foul-ups by our mapmakers set up some dangerous booby traps for those first guys ashore. The
maps were based on aerial photographs made on a cloudy day—which most days were at Cape Gloucester—and the areas covered by clouds were simply left blank on the maps. So there was no way to tell what was there.

Beach Yellow itself was swallowed up in a wild tangle of jungle growth that came almost to the edge of the surf. Then came the big shock. Just a few feet farther inland, an area described on the maps as “damp flats” was actually an impassable swamp.

“Time and again, members of our column would fall into waist-deep sinkholes and have to be pulled out,” one Marine said of the swamp. “Any slip could mean a broken leg, a sprained knee, or a twisted ankle.”

Despite all this, the Marines advanced west along the coast toward the airfield with surprising ease on the morning of D-plus-1, meeting only scattered opposition. By that night, they were at a position they hadn’t expected to reach until D-plus-3, but from that point on, the going got tougher.

About 2 PM on D-plus-2, with Sherman tanks leading the way, men of the Third Battalion, First Marines broke through a Jap defensive line of pillboxes, machine gun bunkers, and 75-millimeter field pieces. None of the Nips’ weapons even fazed the heavily armored Shermans.

“We turned a corner and ran right into a Jap 75,” said a Marine tanker. “I saw one Jap walk calmly over and pull the lanyard. The shell . . . hardly scratched the tank. They were so astonished they just stood there while we mowed ’em down and smashed the piece.”

At almost the same time that afternoon, the Second Battalion, Seventh was repelling a determined Jap charge in a swampy area
near the beach. When it was over, our troops counted 466 enemy bodies in the mud. Marine losses in the fight were 25 killed and 75 wounded.

A series of firefights continued over the next couple of days, but at 1 PM on December 30 (D-plus-4), General Rupertus, our division commander, notified General Krueger that the airfield was secure.

“First Marine Division presents to you as an early New Year gift the complete airdrome of Cape Gloucester,” Rupertus’s message read. “Situation in hand due to fighting spirit of troops, the usual Marine luck, and the help of God.”

At that point, a lot of people probably thought the battle for the Cape was as good as over. They were sadly mistaken.

B
Y THE TIME
K/3/5 landed on New Year’s Day, Marine engineers had used hundreds of logs to build a road of sorts across the swamp so supplies could be moved inland, and we didn’t have it nearly as tough as our first troops had. But it was obvious from our first few minutes ashore that Cape Gloucester was one of the most miserable places on the face of the earth. In the mornings, a heavy blue-green mist rose from the jungle like steam. It shrouded the sun so it looked like twilight until about the middle of the day.

On that first morning, a driving rain began, and once it started, it never seemed to end. By the time we’d been ashore ten minutes, all of us were soaked to the bone, and I don’t think we ever dried out completely in the nearly four months we were there.

I’d thought Guadalcanal was bad, but the weather at Cape Gloucester was the worst—and wettest—I ever saw anywhere. Absolutely
and without a doubt. The ground—when you could find it for the water—was nothing but squishy red mud. It stuck to everything like glue—to our skin, our rifles, our packs, our uniforms, our boondocker shoes. Within a few minutes after we landed, we were covered in it so thick you could hardly tell a Marine from a Jap.

A pair of socks would turn to mush in your boots in less than a week from the constant moisture, but not many of us noticed because we’d go for days without ever seeing our feet. We had cases of trench foot and jungle rot by the hundreds.

It didn’t take us long to get into some heavy action. I heard rifle fire the minute we landed, but it was hard to tell where it was coming from. The Seventh Marines were somewhere up ahead of us, and we were supposed to pass through their right flank and take the lead position in the day’s advance.

Late that afternoon, we started to dig in for the night when a dozen or so Japs suddenly charged out of the jungle, waving their bayonets and yelling. Our riflemen killed most of them, but a few melted back into the undergrowth.

The next morning, after a nervous night, we were heading downhill through a fairly open area—one of the few we’d seen—when another group of about ten Japs popped out of some brush to challenge us. PFC Slim Somerville hit them with short bursts from his BAR, and Corporal Leland Paine and I joined in with our M-1s until all the Japs went down.

We thought at first it was just another brief skirmish like the one the night before. We were wrong.

Just as we approached another strip of dripping-wet, livid-green jungle along the bank of a creek, our platoon leader, Lieutenant Dykstra, was hit by a volley of automatic weapons fire that damn
near chewed his right arm off. At least four or five rounds tore through it between his shoulder and his wrist.

“Down! Down!” a couple of guys hollered as a corpsman ran to the lieutenant and tried to get a tourniquet on his mangled arm. He was in bad shape, and I said a quick “Our Father” for him after I hit the dirt and rolled behind a large tree. It was the first of at least a dozen times I said the Lord’s Prayer that day.

Then, before I could blink my eyes, all hell broke loose. Gunfire erupted all around me, but I couldn’t see a damn thing to shoot at. Just to my right, no more than an arm’s length away, Corporal Horace E. “Tex” Goodwin of K/3/5’s machine gun section had just set his .30-caliber weapon on its tripod when a bullet struck him squarely in the chest.

His eyes were wide open, and he looked straight at me for a second. It seemed like he was trying to say something, but then he fell without making a sound, and I could tell he was dead before he hit the ground. The sniper who got him must’ve been in one of the trees right above us, and I felt the need to move to safer ground in a hurry.

As I scrambled away, a corpsman jumped up and ran toward Goodwin’s body, but I tackled him before he got there and pulled him down.

“It’s no use, Doc,” I said. “He’s gone. You can’t help him. You’ll only get yourself killed if you try.”

The corpsman nodded and backed off. He’d have plenty of other wounded to deal with soon enough. Out of nowhere, we were caught up in one of the hottest firefights any of us had ever seen.

A few seconds later, my buddy Lou Gargano, who was hunkered down right next to me, took a sniper’s bullet through his canteen. Before we left Oro Bay, Lou had been promoted to platoon sergeant
and taken over as our platoon guide, replacing Sergeant John Kelly, who’d been severely wounded in one of our last scraps on Guadalcanal.

Now, with Lieutenant Dykstra wounded, we couldn’t afford to lose Lou, too.

Luckily, he wasn’t hurt, just stunned a little and with a good-sized bruise on his backside. But the force of the bullet had knocked him down, and he’d dropped his carbine as he fell. Now it was lying out in the open a few feet from where I was crouching.