Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu (24 page)

The occupants of a half-dozen tents got so sick of the crabs that they formed a crab patrol one morning and tried to exterminate them all. They routed them out of their hiding places, smashing them with sticks and rifle butts and stabbing them with bayonets, Ka-Bars, and trenching tools.

After the massacre, they counted 128 dead crabs in one tent alone. They threw the carcasses into an oil drum, drenched them with gasoline, and set them on fire—and immediately wished they hadn’t.

“It was the most sickening smell in the world,” one Marine said. “It was so bad we couldn’t stay in our tents the rest of the day. It was a Sunday, too, so we lost all our Sunday sack time.”

E
XCEPT WHEN THEY’RE LUCKY
enough to be dining in style aboard Navy ships, Marines always seem to complain about the chow they’re served on duty, and Pavuvu was no exception to this rule.

Since there was no refrigerated storage for fresh meat, fruits, and vegetables on the island, our meals for the first month or two consisted mostly of powdered eggs, dehydrated potatoes and carrots, and three or four kinds of canned meats, all of which we called “Spam.” In other words, they were the equivalent of heated C rations, and all we had to wash them down with was a bright yellow, imitation-lemon-flavored drink known as “battery acid.”

During one period of several days, the cooks varied the menu by serving nothing but oatmeal—morning, noon, and night. It was monotonous, and it didn’t taste all that great, but when I remembered what we survived on at Guadalcanal, I counted my blessings.

The new guys were particularly critical of the bread our cooks turned out. Gene Sledge described it as being “so heavy that when you held a slice by one side, the rest of the slice broke away of its own weight. The flour was so massively infested with weevils that each slice of bread had more of the little beetles than there are seeds in a slice of rye bread.”

When combat veterans heard Sledge and other replacements bitching about the bread, some of them made a joke out of it. “Hey, those bugs are good for you,” they’d say. “They put more protein in your diet.”

Not all of us old hands were quite that polite, though. “What the hell are you griping about?” I remember telling one mouthy replacement. “This ain’t the Waldorf-Astoria. You volunteered to be a Marine, and you’re getting exactly what you asked for. If you’d been at the ’Canal, you’d know how good you’ve got it here.”

Another veteran noncom put it even more bluntly. “Just shut up and quit whining,” he told Sledge. “Things could be a damn sight
worse, and besides, until you’ve been in combat, you got nothing to complain about.”

This put-down left a deep impression on the sensitive young replacement. “He made me thoroughly ashamed,” Sledge said later. “After that, I kept most of my negative remarks to myself.”

I
T WAS UNDENIABLY
true that Pop Haney didn’t have any really close buddies. But for reasons I never fully figured out, Pop did take a liking to me, and I guess I became the closest thing he had to an actual friend in the company.

For one thing, I didn’t mind listening to Pop’s long explanations about the importance of one man staying awake and alert at all times in every foxhole or how to stay ready to fight off an attacker who jumped into your foxhole at night.

“You gotta keep your bayonet sharp and in your hand when there ain’t room to use your rifle,” he’d say. “You gotta grab that fuckin’ Jap and pull him up close and cut his damn throat as quick as you can.”

Usually all I had to do was nod and say “Uh-huh,” and Pop would just go right on talking. But I really did listen to a lot of what he had to say because I knew he knew what he was talking about. After all, he’d been doing it since before I was born.

About once every three or four weeks, Pop came up with a pint bottle of whiskey. I never asked where it came from, and he never told me, but I figured he got it from one of the men who delivered our mail by boat every four or five days.

(The mail came from Banika, the nearest island to Pavuvu, where the Navy maintained a huge supply depot, a hospital staffed
by real, live American nurses, and other major amenities. Only a handful of Pavuvu Marines ever got to go to Banika, and the ones who did talked about it like it was heaven on earth.)

Anyway, whenever Pop got a fresh bottle, he’d invite me to share it with him, and he never had to ask me twice, I can tell you. I mean, the last thing I wanted to do was hurt the old man’s feelings.

He’d lead the way to a beat-up old rowboat he kept hidden in some reeds, and we’d row out to a raft anchored about a hundred feet offshore. We’d sit there for a half-hour or so, until the bottle was empty, then get in the boat and row back to shore.

After a couple of snorts from the bottle, all Pop wanted to talk about was the “old Corps” and how things were in France in World War I, where he served with the very same K Company, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines.

He’d left the Corps in the 1920s and taught school in his native Arkansas for a few years before joining back up in 1927 and getting right back in K Company again. I can’t say for certain, but he may have served longer in K/3/5 than any other Marine in history.

“You’d’ve done all right over there, McEnery,” he’d say, “because you’re careful, and you don’t take a lotta stupid chances. Most of these punk kids, though, they’d never of made it in the old Corps.”

I always nodded and said “Thank you” a lot and kind of let it go at that. After two or three drinks of whiskey, Pop could carry on a conversation for an hour or more all by himself without any comments from me. He’d stop now and then to cuss or chuckle at something he’d said, then go right on.

But I never thought the whiskey actually had much of an effect on him. I mean, he said and did all those same things when he was dead sober, too.

One thing Pop
didn’t
talk about—not ever, as far as I know—was the fact that he’d been awarded a Silver Star for heroism at Cape Gloucester. He’d made his way through heavy Jap fire to take a fresh supply of grenades to a group of pinned-down Marines who’d run out, then helped them wipe out a big nest of Nips.

I heard about all this secondhand from several guys while we were on Pavuvu, but I never said anything about it to Haney because I didn’t know for sure till after the war if the story was authentic. It definitely was.

A
S REST CAMPS
and training areas go, Pavuvu had to rank at or near the bottom in a lot of ways. One of the major logistical problems was there was so little usable land area that it was impossible to hold large-scale maneuvers there without our skirmishes overflowing into company streets. But that was the brass’s problem, as far as I could see, and when I stopped to compare Pavuvu to the other Pacific islands I’d done time on so far, I knew it could’ve been a whole lot worse.

To me, fighting rats, crabs, mud, and rotten coconuts was better than fighting Japs any day, but our replacement troops didn’t have enough experience to realize that. They hadn’t been through what the rest of us had, so they complained a lot, and some of them went nutso—“Asiatic,” we called it—like the Marine who beat up the trunk of a coconut tree.

Old hands could go Asiatic, too, and frequently did. But they usually did it in quieter, more controlled ways. Like Pop Haney, for example, who always talked to himself and chuckled at things only he understood.

Stories even circulated about numerous guys getting so depressed they committed suicide on Pavuvu. In
The Old Breed
, George McMillan described how one young private finished up a four-hour stint on guard duty by putting the barrel of his M-1 in his mouth and blowing the top of his head off. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but if it did, it wasn’t in K/3/5’s area.

After the war, the stories got magnified even more with some guys claiming they heard guys shooting themselves almost every night. Personally, though, I think that whole thing about mass suicides was blown way out of proportion.

I never knew for sure of but one incident where somebody at Pavuvu killed himself, and the guy who did it was a young replacement who’d just gotten a “Dear John” letter from his girlfriend.

A
S TIME PASSED
, the situation on Pavuvu gradually became more bearable. Showers and toilets were installed where only the rain and open-pit latrines had been available before. Screened mess halls and up-to-date field kitchens were constructed, so we didn’t have to wade mud as we ate or use stumps for dining tables like we had at first. The engineers also dredged out a nice swimming hole for us on the beach.

When more of the common areas of the camp were wired for electricity, we also got some large refrigerators—“reefers,” we called them—for food storage. After that, we were able to have fresh meat and vegetables several times a week.

We even started having outdoor movies a couple of times a week, and we could buy chocolate bars and other concessions at a
makeshift PX to eat during the show—if we could keep the rats from stealing them out of our pockets.

Toward the end of our stay on Pavuvu, we had a visit by comedian Bob Hope and his troupe of big-name entertainers, including Jerry Colonna, Frances Langford, and Patty Thomas. It was a terrific morale booster for all of us, and most of the division turned out for the show they put on.

Hope was later quoted as saying that seeing all the thousands of Marines cheering and waving from the ground as his small plane came in for a landing was one of the high points of his Pacific tour.

He even managed to make us laugh when he told a joke onstage comparing our slimy land crabs to his friend Bing Crosby’s perennially losing racehorses.

“I notice they both run sideways,” he said.

I
SPENT TIME WITH
a lot of different guys at Pavuvu. They ranged from young replacements like Seymour Levy, Sterling Mace, and Bill Leyden, to veterans like Slim Sommerville and old-timers like Pop Haney.

I also struck up a friendly relationship with Lieutenant Bill Bauerschmidt, our new platoon leader. He’d drop by my tent every day or two just to shoot the breeze, and we’d joke about how grateful we were to the good old American taxpayers for sending us on this great tropical vacation.

Bauerschmidt was a good guy and a good Marine. I liked him better than any platoon leader I’d had since Scoop Adams. But I never developed any really close friendships with anybody like I’d
had with Lou Gargano or Remi Balduck or Weldon Delong. I don’t exactly know why I didn’t, but in a way I think it was what they call a defense mechanism on my part. I just didn’t want to have to go through what I’d felt when I found out Lou and Remi were dead and Weldon was killed a few feet from me. Never again, if I could help it. It hurt too much.

I was almost glad I didn’t know where Charlie Smith, my old friend from Brooklyn, was—or whether he was alive or dead, for that matter. Sometimes it was just better not to know.

Since we didn’t get any liberties at Pavuvu, there weren’t any special places to go, and you didn’t feel as much need for special friends to go with. I spent a good bit of time writing letters home to Mom and my sister.

I even wrote some letters to my little brother, Peter Jr., who’d just turned ten. “I just hope this war’s over,” I told him, “before you’re old enough to go.”

I didn’t have any regular routine assignment on Pavuvu, and sometimes it was hard to keep from getting bored. When I heard that Corporal John Teskevich, my K/3/5 comrade since 1941, was among a group of guys that Captain Haldane had picked for a two-week stay on the island paradise of Banika, I was downright envious.

If you can believe it, their only duty was to keep watch over a supply dump containing several thousand cases of beer and soft drinks. They stayed in floored tents with electric lights and took their meals on a Navy ship, where they ordered off menus and ate steaks, ice cream, and other restaurant-caliber food off real china.

As one of them told me, “We worked in shifts of about four hours on and forty-eight hours off, and we drank all the beer we could hold.”

This cushy duty was intended as a reward for exceptional service at Cape Gloucester, Haldane told the guys he selected. In Teskevich’s case, it was for saving the life of a wounded Marine under heavy enemy fire at Hill 660.

PFC R. R. “Railroad” Kelly was badly hit and not able to move under his own power when John found him and came to his aid while Jap bullets were hitting all around them.

“Can you put your arms around me and hang on?” Teskevich asked. “If you can, I’ll pull you out of here.”

“I think so,” Kelly said, “but I’m pretty weak.”

With Kelly clinging to him, John somehow managed to drag him to safety through a volley of Nip fire. Along the way, Kelly was hit again, but he survived.

I always thought Teskevich should’ve gotten a medal for rescuing Kelly like that, but I guess two weeks at Banika was better than nothing.

The only time I saw John on Pavuvu was sometime in early August 1944, after both of us were assigned to the Third Platoon of K/3/5—me as platoon guide and John as a squad leader.

The last time I’d seen him before that, he was sporting a handlebar mustache about a foot wide that he’d been cultivating for months. Now it was gone, and he was so clean-shaven I barely recognized him.

I didn’t say anything about the missing mustache, and I guess it was a good thing I didn’t. Another Marine told me later what had happened.

“He said some sneaky bastard slipped up on him while he was asleep and shaved half his mustache off,” this other guy said. “He said he couldn’t go around with just one side of it, so he shaved the
other side off, too. He said, ‘If I ever catch the asshole that did it, I’ll kill him. I swear to God I will.’”

At that point, John and I had both been in the Pacific for twenty-six months, and if the so-called twenty-four-month rule was still in effect, I thought there was an outside chance we might get shipped stateside before our next Jap scrap came along.