Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu (20 page)

Lou turned to me and frowned. “Hey, Mac,” he said, “can you grab my carbine for me? I can’t reach it.”

I barely heard him above the rising roar of rifle fire, but I hugged the muddy ground and slithered forward on my belly.

I was reaching for the carbine when I heard a Marine yell from behind me. “Don’t go there, Mac! They’ve got the range on you!”

I grabbed the carbine anyway, made a fast retreat without getting hit, and handed the weapon back to Lou.

“You okay?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, still sounding a little dazed. “But I don’t know what the hell I’m doing sitting here. Jesus, with the lieutenant down, I’m the platoon leader now. Let’s go!”

Lou got to his feet and waved us forward toward the trees lining the bank of a stream about twenty yards ahead of us. “Stay low and take cover in the creek,” he yelled.

The stream was designated on our maps as Suicide Creek. After what happened there over the rest of that day and into the next, I decided maybe the guy who drew up the maps knew something we didn’t.

I jumped up and ran for the creek bank as hard as I could go,
staying in a crouch. To get out of the line of fire, I went over the bank without slowing down and hardly looking where I was going. In my hurry, I tripped on some rocks in the bottom of the creek and fell, spraining my left ankle and twisting my knee really bad.

A jolt of pain stabbed through my leg, and I could almost hear the tendons popping in there. It hurt like crazy, and I could barely walk. Even worse, my M-1 got messed up when it fell in the water.

Just to my left, Corporal Leonard Ahner, a lanky farm boy from rural Indiana, crawled up to take a look over the creek bank, and a rifle slug ripped through the shoulder of his dungaree jacket. Somehow, though, it didn’t leave a wound.

“Well, that was a close shave,” Ahner said quietly after he jerked his head back down behind the bank. I always admired those Hoosier boys. They hardly ever seemed to get rattled. As for me, I was rattled as hell—and hurting, too.

To my right, Corporal Paine was hugging his rifle and breathing hard as he eased up to take a look over the bank. “Now right about here,” he panted, “is where I’d like to see John Wayne ride up and hit ’em with both barrels.”

The words were hardly out of his mouth when a Jap bullet grazed Paine’s cheek. He reached up to touch the wound, then looked down and frowned at the blood on his fingers.

“Well, hell, Mac,” he said, “I don’t think old John’s gonna show up, do you?”

“No, man,” I said. “Looks like we gotta fight this one on our own. Open your mouth and let me check that wound.”

I looked to see if the bullet had gone all the way through Paine’s cheek, but despite the blood running down the side of his face, there was none in his mouth that I could see.

“You’re okay,” I said. “Just keep your head down.”

Over near where Ahner had almost been hit, I heard Gargano yelling instructions to me.

“We’ve got to get in position to return fire on these bastards,” Lou hollered. “Start sending the men up the creek bank one at a time, and have them follow me.”

The firing was so heavy by now you could hardly pick out individual shots, but I did what Lou said. Buddy or no buddy, he was the platoon leader now, and he was giving the orders.

Of the fifteen or so guys I sent over the creek bank, close to half of them came back wounded. I sent the worst cases back toward the rear and told them to leave their rifles. My leg was giving me such pain I could hardly move, but I started disabling the wounded guys’ M-1s so if the Japs overran our position, they wouldn’t be able to use them against us.

The Jap rifles were puny and inferior compared to ours, but they sure as hell caused us plenty of agony that day. We had at least ten guys wounded in the Third Platoon—about a third of our total strength—and it was a miracle there weren’t more.

After about an hour, the Japs pulled back, and we got a little breather. I managed to haul myself out of the creek and limp back toward the company CP. On the way, I passed a wounded Marine lying unconscious and unattended on a stretcher, and a minute later, I spotted Sergeant Jim Day of K/3/5 and told him about the wounded guy.

“Don’t worry, Mac, I’ll take care of him,” Day said. He was one of the most trustworthy guys in the company, and I knew he’d do what he said. “What’s the matter with your leg?” he asked me. “Did you get hit, too?”

“Nah, hell, I fell in the creek and screwed up my knee and my rifle both,” I said.

“Here, take my rifle,” Day said. “I’ll pick up another one at the CP.”

So we traded M-1s. I’d disabled at least seven or eight weapons left by wounded men in the past hour or so without even realizing I could’ve replaced my own ruined rifle with one of them. That’s how addled I was.

W
HEN I HEADED BACK
to where I’d been earlier, I could still hear quite a bit of firing in the distance, although things seemed quiet in the immediate area. But as I started downhill toward the creek, I saw Lou at the bottom, motioning me to stop.

He was giving me a thumbs-down sign and waving me away, and I knew he meant the route I was taking wasn’t safe. So I stayed where I was and took cover.

It was a damn good thing I did, but nobody apparently warned the guys in the machine gun platoon from M Company. As they approached the creek, they came straight down the hill instead of following an angle that would have given them some protection, and the Japs cut them to pieces. I don’t know how many casualties they took, but they were badly hurt. Their section leader, Lieutenant Elisha Atkins, was severely wounded and weak from loss of blood, but he ordered his men to leave him in the water where he’d fallen and get across the creek to safety.

Later, two enlisted men decided to go back for him, but they couldn’t find him. They crouched neck-deep in the water and listened, but they couldn’t hear a thing. They were afraid to call out to him for two reasons. First, the Nips might hear them and start
shooting, and second, the lieutenant might think they were Nips themselves and refuse to answer. Some enemy soldiers knew a little English and were good at imitating American voices, as I’d learned firsthand at the Matanikau River on Guadalcanal.

Fortunately, the two Marines remembered a nickname that some of the machine gunners called the lieutenant—mostly behind his back—because of the Ivy League university he’d attended.

“Tommy Harvard,” they started whispering. “Tommy Harvard.”

After a long silence, they heard a faint voice coming from an inlet in the creek bank: “I’m down here.”

“What’s your real name?” they asked cautiously.

“Elisha Atkins,” he said, and they hauled him out. He was in bad shape, but he made it okay.

A
LL DAY ON
January 2, the Third Battalions of the Fifth and Seventh Marines fought back and forth across Suicide Creek. Some of our guys crossed the stream as many as four times, but neither battalion was able to gain a solid foothold on the opposite bank.

By late afternoon, we were back on the same side of the creek where we’d started, and my sore leg was giving me fits. It was pretty swollen by now, and I had shooting pains from my knee to my toes. Since it looked like we’d be setting up right where we were for the night—and to get my mind off the leg as much as possible—I took out my trenching tool and started digging in.

I was trying to enlarge a good-sized shell crater enough to serve as a two-man foxhole, figuring Lou Gargano and I would share it that night.

And that was when the shit suddenly hit the fan all over again.

A bunch of Japs—I’d say there were at least twenty-five of them—had somehow crept up and hidden in some high grass and bushes no more than ten or fifteen yards from where I was digging. None of the Marines knew the Japs were there until one of them jumped up and screamed like a damn banshee. It didn’t sound like he was hollering “Banzai!” It was more like just “Yaaaahh!”

Then the rest of the bastards jumped up, too, and they all started shooting.

I flung my shovel away and grabbed the M-1 I’d gotten from Jim Day. Then I hunkered down into that shell crater as low as I could and opened fire. I emptied a seven-round clip at the bunched-up Japs and saw a couple of them tumble. The empty clip popped out automatically, and I stuck another one in its place and got off a few more rounds.

On both sides of me, Marines were firing from crouched positions, and off to my left, one of our machine gunners started spraying the tall grass shielding the Nips with his .30-caliber weapon. I could see bodies jerking and flopping around in the grass as the slugs tore into them. He must’ve gotten at least four or five of them, but those that were still able to move slithered away and took cover behind a small hill.

“Come on, you guys!” I heard somebody yell from behind me and to the right. “Don’t let ’em get in the creek bed. We gotta cut ’em off!”

After a second or two, I recognized the guy yelling as Lieutenant Andy Chisick, K/3/5’s executive officer. I felt relieved when I realized it was him. He was a good officer, and he knew what he was doing.

I had a hard time putting weight on my bum leg, but I crawled as fast as I could through the mud and grass along with fifteen or twenty other guys until we had the Nips pretty well encircled. Then
we reloaded and opened up on them again, keeping our aim low so we didn’t shoot each other.

Over the next ten or fifteen minutes, we picked off most of the Nips, but there were still some left. I swear I could hear them breathing hard and rustling the grass. They were that close.

“For God’s sake,” Lieutenant Chisick hollered. He sounded mad and disgusted as hell. “Everybody fix bayonets, and let’s get rid of these bastards!”

We trusted Chisick, and we did exactly as he ordered. All of us stayed low while we locked our bayonets into place. Then the fifteen or twenty of us—most of the unwounded guys in the Second and Third Platoons—jumped up and lunged into the tall grass where the Japs were hiding.

As we charged, we were screaming like banshees ourselves.

We shot some of the Japs, but mostly we took care of them with our bayonets. I didn’t feel much of anything but the pain in my leg when I drove my bayonet into the belly of a Jap, then jerked the blade upward into his chest. I felt detached, like I was watching someone else doing it. At that moment, killing a man with a bayonet was just another hard, dirty job to me. I could’ve been digging another foxhole for all the emotion I felt.

In less than a minute, tops, not a single Jap was left alive.

When it was over, we just stood there panting and exhausted, covered with red blood, red mud, and sweat. It seemed impossible, but somehow, in the whole melee, we hadn’t lost a man.

I
LOOKED ALL AROUND
for my shovel to finish the foxhole I’d been working on, but it was nowhere in sight. I never did find it,
but Lou and I managed to squeeze into the hole that night the way it was. By that time, my leg was hurting so bad I couldn’t bend it.

We argued over who’d take the first watch. It was an ironclad rule for Marines in combat that one guy in every two-man foxhole stayed awake at all times.

“Listen,” I said, “you almost got killed today, and you led the platoon when I couldn’t do shit to help you. Now go to sleep. I’m wide awake anyway.”

“No way,” he said. “I can tell your leg’s killing you, and you gotta get some rest. So I’m standing watch, and that’s that.”

“But—” I started.

“Shut up, Mac,” he told me. “I’m your platoon leader, remember, and that’s a damn order.”

I was too tired to argue anymore. I hugged my rifle with both arms and finally drifted off to sleep with my leg hanging out over the edge of the hole.

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
January 3, the Japs opened up with mortars to start the day, giving the area a good pounding and letting us know for sure that they hadn’t gone away.

If the two Marine infantry battalions drawn up along Suicide Creek were ever going to get across the stream to stay, the brass figured we were going to have to have tank support.

The problem was, the banks of the creek were too steep for tanks to negotiate, so our engineers had to bring in a bulldozer, first to cut a path through the tangled undergrowth on our side of the creek, then to shave down the banks so the tanks could cross.

The bulldozer was unarmored, and the Nip snipers started firing
at it the minute they spotted it. The driver, Corporal John Capito, was brutally exposed in the ’dozer’s high seat, and as he tried to push his fourth load of creek bank into the stream, a bullet hit him in the mouth.

Two other volunteers, Sergeant Kerry Lane and PFC Randall Johnson, took Capito’s place and tried at first to operate the ’dozer from the side by using an axe handle to work the levers. When this failed, Lane climbed into the driver’s seat. He was soon hit by Jap fire, but he stuck with the job until the bank was cut down enough for the tanks to cross. The whole operation took most of the day.

Both Capito and Lane survived their wounds and were awarded Silver Stars for their work.

On the morning of January 4, three Sherman tanks made the crossing with rounds from Jap field pieces and machine guns bouncing off them like Ping-Pong balls. They pulverized the enemy bunkers on the other side of the stream, clearing the way for the riflemen of 3/5 and 3/7 to finally make it across.

I was sorry that I wasn’t able to go with them. About noon the previous day, I’d struggled back to an aid station and asked a corps-man to take a look at my leg. He didn’t like what he saw at all.

“Man, you need to go to sick bay and get some treatment for this thing,” he said. “Looks like you’ve got torn ligaments in there, and the more you try to walk on it, the worse it’s gonna get. You ain’t worth a damn on the line in the shape you’re in anyhow.”

He sent me to a hospital tent in the rear, where they gave me some painkiller and bandaged my leg from mid-thigh all the way down to my toes. I was there for over a week, so I missed the rest of the Suicide Creek action and some of the hard fighting that followed.