Islands of the Damned (12 page)

One Saturday night on Banika four of us were sitting around—Hillbilly Jones, Yarborough, myself, and somebody else. Maybe Sarrett. I can’t recall. We were pouring 190-proof alcohol in the bottom of a canteen cup and filling the rest with grapefruit juice. We were singing and telling jokes and drinking that stuff, and by ten thirty we started to run low on grapefruit juice, and so we poured in more alcohol.

Oh, my God. You talk about drunk. I had to put all three of them to bed, I mean every single one. Haul him to his feet. There was a jeep outside that had a 250-gallon water tank on the back, with a spigot on the side. I’d wrestle each one out there and stick his head under the spigot and run water over him until I thought he could make it to the tent more or less upright. I’d get him there and put him on his cot. Tuck him in. All three of them.

And I was thinking, Man, I’m doing okay, you know? Here I’ve put these three drunks to bed and I’m still walking straight.

About three o’clock that morning I woke up vomiting. I want to tell you, I never vomited so hard in my life. I got up the next morning and looked over the side of my cot. And there was blood everywhere. I’d vomited so hard I’d vomited blood.

That was on Sunday morning. My first meal after that was on Thursday.

Toward the end of our stay on Pavuvu we had a visitor from Banika.

Bob Hope had been entertaining troops across the South Pacific. He had taken his whole USO troupe with him—singer Frances Langford, comedian Jerry Colonna, Tony Romano, who played the guitar. And a lively, pretty little blond dancer named Patty Thomas.

We weren’t on their schedule. They’d been to Christmas Island, Tarawa, Kwajalein, Saipan, Bougainville, Tulagi. A Catalina flying boat that was taking them to Australia had made a crash-landing in a river bar, but they’d made it out okay. In late July they were putting on a show over on Banika.

Somebody had flown over and told Hope there was a whole division stuck on this little island, about to go into battle. We hadn’t seen an outsider for months, much less a female outsider.

“Where are they?” he asked. Pavuvu, somebody told him.

Hope had never heard of it. “Where in the hell is that?” he asked.

We had no runway, but our one road could accommodate the occasional Piper Cub that flew in with messages or visiting officers. If the troupe could be ready the next morning, they could be flown over one by one.

We got word the same day and by next morning we had put up a makeshift stage down by the beach, at the end of an open area where we played baseball and drilled. By the time the first of the planes appeared, there must have been fifteen thousand of us standing in that field, all of us yelling our heads off. The pilot cut the engine on Jerry Colonna’s plane as it circled over and we heard him let out that famous Colonna howl: “Yee . . . ow . . . ow.” Even from the ground we could see his handlebar mustache and those shining white teeth.

The show lasted about ninety minutes, but it seemed shorter. Patty Thomas, who was wearing a skimpy skirt and a halter top, invited guys from the front rows to come up onstage and jitterbug with her. Hope and Colonna traded jokes.

Hope asked Colonna how he had enjoyed the flight from Banika.

“Tough sledding,” Colonna said.

“Why tough sledding?” Hope asked.

“No snow.”

We roared with laughter.

Somebody must have briefed them on Pavuvu, because Hope even got in a joke about our land crabs. He said they reminded him of Bing Crosby’s racehorses—“they run sideways.”

Pavuvu was so small, he said, “the gophers have to take turns coming up.”

At the end of the show, Hope sang his theme song, “Thanks for the Memories.” Then they got into their Piper Cubs and, one by one, took off. We stood alongside the road cheering.

For days afterward we’d talk about that show. It really lifted our spirits.

Years later, on one of his last television broadcasts, Hope called that appearance on Pavuvu one of the most moving shows he ever played.

“You knew when you walked out there that a lot of those guys you’d never see again,” he said. “And as it worked out sixty percent of these kids were knocked off.”

It was not quite as bad as that. But almost. Thirty percent of the First Division would be wounded or killed on Peleliu.

They passed around some maps and some fuzzy photographs taken from planes or through a submarine periscope. None of them showed any useful detail. It just looked like a lot of trees and some hills.

They’d also made a model. The island was even smaller than Pavuvu. We’d be landing across a wide beach stretching north to south. Two hundred yards beyond was the Jap airfield that was our first day’s objective. Behind the airfield, mountains rose up and continued almost the whole length of the island. Except for the hills, they told us, most of the place was flat.

They didn’t tell us the name yet.

Our training wrapped up with a couple big landing exercises. We didn’t have our amtracs. They were still busy on Guam. So we used Higgins boats. They told us to come out of the amtracs ready for anything. Have bayonets fixed, a round chambered in our rifles and the safety on. Locked and loaded. Our ammo carriers were to have a couple mortar shells unfastened and ready to go.

They repeated over and over again the lesson learned on Guadalcanal:

“Get off the beach! Get your ass off the beach! Move in!”

Late on August 26, we filed on board LST 661. The next morning we were under way.

An LST was the largest ship the Navy could actually put right up on a beach. The hold would be full of amtracs and the amtracs would be full of troops. The big clamshell doors in the front of the ship would open and you’d just roll ashore. If there was a coral reef off the beach, the LST would stay farther out and the amtracs would rumble down the ramp into the water, form up and move to the beach in waves. That’s how it was supposed to work. Every now and then, we’d heard, an amtrac would go down the ramp, nose into the water, and sink. Just disappear.

The LST had a long deck for cargo. It could carry up to three hundred troops belowdecks and a couple dozen more in the forecastle, which was about two-thirds of the way back.

Our mortar section got lucky. The platoon leaders drew straws, and we were assigned to the troop quarters in the forecastle. Everyone else went belowdecks. All day long those steel sides and the deck soaked up that tropical sun, and all night they radiated the heat back into the compartments. Belowdecks was hot, cramped, stuffy. Pretty soon everyone was scrambling for any available place to sleep in and around the crates and equipment in the cargo area.

While we were at sea the division held landing rehearsals off Guadalcanal. Our amtracs and DUKWs had finally arrived, and they needed to practice launching them off the LSTs and getting them across a reef onto the beach. During one of these exercises, Major General William Rupertus, First Division’s commander, slipped while boarding an amtrac. He fell back on the coral, breaking his ankle. His foot would be in a cast during the whole invasion.

When we arrived at Guadalcanal, other ships were pulling in from Banika, Tulagi, Espirito Santo. From all over the southwest Pacific it seemed. Some of the Old Breed, the Guadalcanal veterans, wanted to go ashore to see where they’d fought and visit the military cemetery.

We got a pep talk from one of them, First Sergeant Paul Bailey. He was soft-spoken, down to earth. A helluva good Marine. He’d joined us on Pavuvu.

He told us for the first time where we were going—Peleliu. He said it wouldn’t be easy, that a lot of us wouldn’t be coming back. But we were going in and we were going to take it as quickly as possible with as few casualties as possible.

“Don’t be dumb,” Sergeant Bailey said. “We want to go in there and play it smart.” The faster we killed Japs, the sooner we’d get off that i sland.

I don’t know if those pep talks they always gave us before a battle helped or hindered. Those of us who had been through it already knew a lot of us weren’t coming back, that a lot of us would be killed, a lot would be wounded or maimed for the rest of our lives.

We knew any time you go into combat, it’s not pretty.

On September 4, we filed back on board LST 661 and weighed anchor. There were more than sixteen thousand of us, aboard thirty LSTs and a handful of troop transports. LSTs are slow, about seven knots. So we got a head start. The faster transport ships sailed four days later and gradually caught up with us. We headed northwest through the Solomon Islands, then along the east coast of New Guinea toward the equator. We passed through a couple rain squalls, but otherwise we were on a calm, beautiful sea. We sat on the deck cleaning and recleaning salt corrosion off our weapons. We took our ammo out of the clips, polished it and reloaded. We sharpened our KA-BARS, packed and re-packed our gear. Sometimes the Navy would throw a couple barrels overboard and their gunners would practice shooting at them.

Afternoons some of us gathered around Hillbilly Jones. We sang “Red River Valley” or some other favorite.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I liked to stand at the railing and watch the porpoises play in the wake of the ship, the flying fish glide over the crests of the waves. Off on the horizon I could see dozens of other ships. Aircraft carriers. Battleships. We had the
Pennsylvania
,
Idaho
,
Maryland
,
Mississippi
, and
Tennessee
with us. And smaller ships. Cruisers, I assumed. Closer in, destroyers and PT boats were escorting us. We were all zigzagging as we sailed along, changing direction every fifteen minutes or so. One afternoon the sirens sounded, a signal that there was a sub somewhere around us. The PT boats circled trying to locate him. They dropped some depth charges. I don’t know if they found him, but we got by without any of our ships being damaged.

I always loved those PT boats, ever since I saw them at Talasea. They were the Corsair fighter planes of the sea, sleek and agile. They were something else.

I read years later that somewhere along the way sealed envelopes were passed out to all the unit commanders and to the war correspondents that accompanied the fleet. The envelopes were not to be opened until September 14, the day before the invasion.

Inside was a message from General Rupertus. He predicted the battle for Peleliu would be rough but short. “A quickie,” he wrote. In and out in three days. Maybe in two.

Almost all the correspondents decided then and there that the invasion of Peleliu would not be worth their time. Most of them decided to stay with the ships and eventually move on to something more newsworthy.

I am convinced that’s why Peleliu never got the attention it deserves. The big battles that everyone’s heard of—Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal—they were highly publicized. But Peleliu, nobody’s ever heard of that.

We sailed twenty-one hundred miles in eleven days. Sometime after midnight September 14, I could feel the ship slow, then stop. As usual, I was up early—always the country boy. In the darkness I felt around for the ankle-high combat shoes we called boondockers, pulled them on and laced them up. I sat there for a few minutes. Then Johnny Marmet came in.

“Okay, Burgin. Let’s get ’em up.”

We yelled for everyone to hit the deck. In minutes there were men dressing, shaving, waiting for the toilets. We could already smell the steak and eggs from the galley, the traditional Marine Corps breakfast before battle. Some of us could eat, some of us couldn’t.

Private Vincent Santos could.

“When’s the last time you got steak and eggs?” he asked. “And when’s the next time you’re going to get steak and eggs? So I’m making the best of it.”