Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu (21 page)

Beyond Suicide Creek was a series of Jap-infested hills and
ridges, and the farther the Marines penetrated into them, the stronger the Japs resisted. Over the next few days, the Third Battalion, Fifth, lost both its commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel David McDougal, and its executive officer, Major Joseph Skocczylas, there. McDougal was killed, and Skocczylas was wounded.

On January 8, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis W. “Silent Lew” Walt, a brawny, barrel-chested, square-faced guy who looked more like a prizefighter than a Marine officer, replaced Colonel McDougal as Third Battalion CO. Then, within hours of his appointment, the new commander found himself in the fight of his life at a place known at the time as Aogiri Ridge.

At just after 1:30 AM on January 10, the Japs launched their first banzai charge against 3/5’s position on the opposite side of the ridge, where Walt had personally helped manhandle a 37-millimeter field piece into place earlier that day.

Walt ordered the Marines to hold their fire till the Japs were practically in their faces. Then they opened up with everything they had—rifles, grenades, machine guns, bayonets, Ka-Bar knives, bare hands, and that indispensable 37-millimeter gun. The charge fell apart, and the Japs were thrown back, leaving scores of bodies behind.

Before dawn, the Japs charged four more times, and each time they were beaten off with heavy losses. When daylight came, the Marines counted more than 200 Japanese dead on the slopes below the crest of the ridge.

A couple of hours later, Marine General Lemuel Shepherd, recently appointed assistant commander of the First Marine Division, visited the battlefield and decided the ridge needed a brand-new name.

“We’ll call it Walt’s Ridge,” he said.

T
HE NIGHT OF
January 10 may have been the most memorable one in the history of K/3/5. My Third Platoon and the rest of the company were directly in the path of those five Jap charges, and Captain Haldane, our new company commander, became a legend that night among the Marines who served under him.

“Ack-Ack was right there on the line with us every time the Nips came at us,” one K/3/5 Marine told me. “He had his .45 in one hand and his Ka-Bar in the other, and he knew exactly what to do with both of them. Once when we were almost out of ammo, I saw him ram that Ka-Bar into a Jap and then pick the bastard up and throw him off the ridge the way he used to throw a damn football. He rallied us and inspired us to fight harder than we ever thought we could.”

Haldane had a rare combination of learned skills, natural intelligence, and raw courage that won the respect of everybody in the company and made us proud to have him as our CO. We respected him because we could tell that he really cared about us. He richly deserved the Silver Star he was awarded for “gallantry in action and conspicuous valor” during the savage hand-to-hand combat that night on Walt’s Ridge.

Today, even after all these years, I still regret not being there to fight beside him. On the other hand, maybe that corpsman who insisted that I go to sick bay saved my life.

Who knows?

W
HILE I WAS
in the hospital, I had a visit from Lieutenant Tom O’Neil, an old friend from New Jersey, who’d been with K/3/5
on Guadalcanal but was now with L Company. He brought me some news that hit me like a ton of bricks and left me with a pain inside that was worse than my leg had ever been.

Tom was what they called a “Mustang,” meaning a guy who’d started out as a private and worked his way up through the ranks to become a commissioned officer—something that didn’t happen very often—and he was one of the finest Marines I ever knew. I was pretty sure he hadn’t come all the way back to the hospital just to pass the time of day, and I could tell there was something gnawing at him even before he broke down and told me.

“We lost three real good men a couple of days ago,” he said finally. “It was a freakish thing. They were all hit by a short round fired by one of our own 105s. I thought you’d want to know.”

The tone of Tom’s voice gave me a queasy feeling in my gut. “Well, sure, I do,” I said. “Who was it?”

“Dutch Schantunbach and Norm Thompson had come back to the Third Platoon CP to hand out grenades to guys to take back to their squads when the round hit,” Tom said. “They were both apparently killed instantly, and several other guys were wounded, too, but—”

“You said there were three killed,” I interrupted. “Who was the third one?”

Tom looked away. “Lou Gargano was a few feet away from the others, but he got hit by a bunch of fragments, and . . . well, he didn’t make it, Mac.”

“Oh shit,” I said. As well as I remember, I said it several times.

Dutch and Norm had been in K/3/5 ever since I joined the company, and they were part of its heart and soul. I could never forget Schantunbach leading a Higgins boat full of scared young Marines
in singing “Roll Out the Barrel” as we headed into shore at Guadalcanal. And no squad leader I ever knew was more respected by the men he led than Thompson.

But Lou Gargano’s death was something my mind refused to accept for a few seconds. I wanted to yell at Tom O’Neil and tell him to quit kidding around.

Lou can’t be dead
, I told myself.
How could a guy who went through what he did at Suicide Creek be cut down by a short round from one of our own howitzers? Tom’s got to be wrong!

Only he wasn’t. Lou was gone, and the realization hit me as hard as anything that ever happened to me. I couldn’t stand to think about the wife and the baby daughter he’d never seen waiting for him at home. I thought I’d go nuts if I did, so I forced myself to think about something else.

O
N JANUARY 12, 1944,
I was released from the field hospital and rejoined K/3/5 and the Third Platoon. The doctors at the field hospital had worked wonders on my bum leg. When they took the thigh-to-toes bandage off, the pain and swelling were almost gone.

Physically, I was feeling better than I had since we’d left Melbourne. My malaria was dormant, at least for the time being, and my budding case of jungle rot had cleared up. Even the overall situation on Cape Gloucester was looking brighter than it had since we got there. Walt’s Ridge was secure, and the only remaining Jap stronghold around Borgen Bay was a rocky knob designated as Hill 660. By January 16, the Japs’ last attempt at a counterattack had been wiped out, and the hill belonged to the Marines.

But there was no jubilation on my part. There was only an emptiness inside me that would take a long time to go away.

When I got back to where K/3/5 was bivouacked, I was named Lou’s replacement as platoon guide. It was a promotion that once would’ve made me feel good, but as it was I didn’t feel much of anything.

Our platoon guides weren’t lasting long these days. It was like being handed a time bomb to wear around your neck.

With so many good friends in the company dead now, I couldn’t help but wonder what would come first for me. Would it be a trip home or a bullet—or maybe a short artillery round—with my name on it?

I tried not to waste my time and energy thinking about stuff like that. If you dwelled on it too much, it’d mess up your mind really bad.

I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to make any more close friends like Lou Gargano and Remi Balduck had been. It hurt too damn much when you lost them.

I was almost afraid to think about Charlie Smith, my boyhood friend from Brooklyn who’d joined the Marines with me on a day that seemed like a lifetime ago. I could only hope Charlie was okay—wherever he was.

Right now, all I wanted was to do my job at Cape Gloucester, get it over with as soon as possible, and get the hell out of there.

For reasons that those of us who were there never fully under-stood—and still don’t to this day—it would take three and a half more miserable months in that “Green Hell” to complete this assignment.

O
N FEBRUARY 3,
General Rupertus informed the Army that the Japs on our end of New Britain were no longer capable of mounting a counterattack against the Cape Gloucester airfield—or, for that matter, any of the area west of Borgen Bay that they’d fought so hard to hold in January.

At this point, the Japs were in general retreat to the east, and the only thing left for us to do was hunt down and destroy as many of them as we could.

Personally, I think if we’d just left the bastards alone, most of them would’ve probably died on their own without any help from us. They were in that bad shape. Most of them were sick with tropical diseases, and a lot of them were wounded. All of them were starving and dead on their feet from exhaustion, so they weren’t capable of putting up much of a fight.

They’d demonstrate that fact again and again in the weeks ahead, but unfortunately for K/3/5, General Rupertus had other ideas. He wanted the Fifth Marines to give the Nips as much assistance as possible in the dying process, and he assigned all three battalions of us—more than 5,000 troops—to go after them.

The first problem we had, though, was that the brass couldn’t decide how we were supposed to travel. At first, we were told we’d be using Higgins boats to sail along the coast to a point east of Borgen Bay, then go ashore and try to find somebody to fight, but this plan was dumped before it could happen.

Instead, we marched overland on a government trail that more or less followed the northern coastline of New Britain. K/3/5 went
without its machine gun and mortar sections, and, of course, with no artillery support. BARs, M-1s, and hand grenades were the strongest weapons we had, and a group of natives went along to carry extra ammo for us.

To help us sniff out Japs, we were also joined by some Army war dogs and their trainers, and I have to admit they knew their business.

I worked directly with one of those dogs for a day or two. It was a Doberman, and I was amazed at how it could pinpoint Nips who were doing their best to hide. It was almost like a bird dog setting a covey of quail, except that when the dog spotted the Japs, it let out this loud howl like a coonhound on the scent.

At one point, that howling dog flushed over a dozen Nips out of a single hole. They didn’t shoot at us or anything. They just tried to get away, but we killed them all, mostly with our bayonets.

At times, it seemed like we ran across small groups of Nips at nearly every turn in the trail, and we were always wary of ambushes. Usually, they were either too lazy or worn out to try to surprise us, but a few times they did—and one of those times cost the life of Lieutenant James Lynch, who’d just taken over as our platoon leader.

The lieutenant was a replacement who hadn’t seen much action, and he made the mistake of walking right up to a line of Jap foxholes, thinking they were all empty. One of them wasn’t, and the Jap inside shot Lynch dead.

After that, Lieutenant Bill Bauerschmidt took over as our platoon leader. He was another one of many green officers who were joining our ranks at that time. Most of them came in as platoon leaders, who as I said were by far the likeliest officers to be killed in action.

Bauerschmidt was the son of a World War I veteran, and he carried the “hog-leg” revolver that his father had carried in France. He developed into a damn fine Marine officer, but during his first few days with the platoon, he sent me out on a mission that could’ve easily gotten me killed.

We were moving into a native village when we came on a bunch of foxholes. The villagers assured us they were all empty, that the Japs who’d used them had all left, but Bauerschmidt wasn’t so sure, and I wasn’t either.

“Hey, Mac,” he told me. “Go up there and check out those foxholes. I’ll cover you.”

I didn’t relish going up there by myself, and I was sweating a little, but I did as Bauerschmidt ordered. Sure enough, the holes were empty, and the Nips were long gone.

Later, the lieutenant called me aside and apologized. “That was a bad move on my part, Mac,” he said, “and I’m sorry. I put you at risk, and I shouldn’t have done it. We should’ve just grenaded the damn holes to be on the safe side.”

E
VEN WHEN THE NIPS
did try to pull an ambush on us, they seemed almost halfhearted about it. More often, they just scattered into the jungle without firing a shot. Sometimes they just sat there and let us kill them or did us a favor by killing themselves.

We didn’t take any prisoners, mainly because almost none of them chose to surrender. If their situation was hopeless, they preferred to blow themselves up with grenades or fall on their own bayonets. Usually, only the wounded fell into our hands while they were still alive, and we made short work of them. We knew better
than to leave any Jap wounded lying around because as long as they had breath in their bodies, they’d do their damnedest to kill us. We’d learned that lesson the hard way at Guadalcanal. I got to the point where I could shoot them without feeling anything.

To a Jap soldier, surrender was the worst disgrace imaginable. Never in any of the fights I was in did I see one drop his weapon and raise his hands, clearly signaling that he was giving up. If I ever had, I’m not sure what I would’ve done, but I’d probably have shot him, anyway. Most of the time, we had no secure place to put prisoners and no time to deal with them—and we knew they couldn’t be trusted. If the situation was reversed, we know they’d treat us the same way.

During one of our skirmishes, a Marine scout dropped his rifle, and when he went back to get it after we finished the Japs off, he found it booby-trapped. A land mine was attached to the rifle, and a grenade was attached to the land mine.

“I think I can dismantle that thing,” I told Captain Haldane. “Do you want me to try?”

“No, Mac, just stay away from it. It’s safer to leave it alone,” he said. So I did.

Another time, I passed the body of a Jap who had his pants pulled down and his genitals exposed. I had no idea how he’d ended up that way unless he’d died or been killed while he was trying to relieve himself.

T
HE PLAN WAS
to rotate the Fifth Marines’ three battalions so that fresh troops were going out every day. While a couple of companies marched, another one boarded landing craft to try to leapfrog the retreating Japs and get ahead of them.