Islands of the Damned (13 page)

Santos would lose his steak and eggs on the amtrac.

After breakfast we lined up for the head and then stumbled out onto the deck. The brightest stars still hung in the sky. There was already a soft glow in the east.

About then one of those little Piper Cub-type spotter planes came buzzing along, maybe eight hundred to a thousand yards in front of us and just above the water. One of the forward antiaircraft guns barked, opening fire on him. Tracers went arcing into the darkness.

Everybody started yelling, “You damned idiot! That’s one of ours!”

The plane dodged and wobbled off, not hit, thank goodness.

Just as the sun showed above the horizon, all hell broke loose. Every gun in the Navy started in at once. The sea lit up like flashbulbs. Thunder rolled across the waves and rumbled back at us. A few minutes later the first planes from the carriers flew over, headed north, Hellcat fighters and Dauntless dive-bombers loaded with napalm and five-hundred-pound bombs. We could see pink and orange splashes in the distance and a few seconds later hear the
thump-thump
of the explosions.

In the growing light, smoke spread out into a long, low smudge across the northern horizon, east to west. It was the only cloud in the sky that morning. The bombardment let up long enough for the planes to get in, then picked up again.

The ship’s bell rang, and we got the order to stand by.

We helped one another with our packs and gear, snubbing up straps and making sure everything was secure. M1s and carbines slung over our left shoulders, we stood at the ladders leading down to the tank deck where the amtracs were waiting for us.

I just mumbled, “God, I’m in your hands. Take care of me.” That was always my prayer. I kept it short. I didn’t want to burden Him. He had other people to look after.

You read nowadays that the Battle of Peleliu should never have been fought. We should never have invaded, experts say. And I agree.

We took that island to secure the airfield so the Japs couldn’t use it against MacArthur when he was landing on Mindanao, to the west. But we had already bombed that airfield three months before, and we could have gone on bombing it 24-7. We could have made it absolutely unusable. There was no way the Japs could have rebuilt it in time. They were finished as an air power.

Just days before our landing at Peleliu, Admiral Bull Halsey wanted to pull out, but Admiral Nimitz, his superior, refused. General MacArthur wanted to take the island as well, and President Roosevelt approved it. We were committed.

Those of us on the ground didn’t know anything about all that. Good idea or bad idea, we didn’t have time to dwell on it. The First Marines under Colonel Lewis Puller—nicknamed Chesty—were fighting for their lives on the Point, a hump of coral rock on the northwestern tip of the island. We were lost in the forest east of the airfield, no idea where we were. Every one of us was fighting for his life. We talked about it a lot after the fact. But not while we were there. We were pretty well occupied.

Peleliu would keep us busier than anybody ever imagined. General Rupertus was off the mark when he said we’d be in and out in two or three days. The maps and photographs and the model we’d all studied so carefully didn’t tell the whole story. They didn’t tell us that a lot of that level ground was thick mangrove swamp. They didn’t tell us that beneath the tops of the trees the ridges were steep, and honeycombed with more than five hundred limestone caves and man-made tunnels. One of them was big enough to hide fifteen hundred troops. They didn’t tell us that before it was over we’d have to fight our way from one cave to the next. One of our generals said it was like fighting in Swiss cheese.

The Japs had been on Peleliu since they seized it from the Germans during World War I. They’d had plenty of time to dig in. Starting in the 1930s they’d put the natives to work and brought in hundreds of Korean tunnel diggers, enlarging the caves and connecting them until the whole place was like a termite nest.

The island was coral rock, shaped like a crab claw with two prongs, a larger and a smaller, pointing northeast. A series of parallel ridges ran up the bigger prong of the claw. Roads skirted either side of the ridges and joined at the north end of the island, where the Japs had a phosphate mine. From there, a five-hundred-foot causeway led to a smaller island, Ngesebus. Ngesebus was mostly flat, and the Japs had started building a smaller airfield there. We’d have to take care of that sooner or later.

Peleliu was just north of the equator. We didn’t think about just how hot and dry it would get until we got there. We had no idea how sharp that coral was, how it could shred your clothes and boondockers and tear your skin. How even a minor wound would fester and seem to take weeks to heal.

With all the other things we were to face the first couple of days, the most aggravating was thirst. Most of us had come ashore with two full canteens. By the time K Company dug in that first night, lost somewhere in the scrub and out of touch with the rest of our units, we could shake our canteens and hear the last few drops slosh around. The daytime temperature had been well over a hundred degrees. We’d been gulping water like we had an endless supply.

I didn’t know where the information was coming from, but we were hearing that it had been a bad day for the whole First Division. We had lost more than a thousand men wounded or killed. It’s probably a good thing we didn’t know just how bad the situation was, or that the First Regiment was fighting for their lives, barely clinging to the Point. We knew our battalion commander was out of action, either wounded or killed, and that his executive officer was dead. We didn’t know who was running things.

Just before midnight we found out.

We were expecting Jap infiltrators when two figures walked out of the brush and gave the password. It was Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Walt, our battalion commander on New Britain, and his runner. After Shofner had been taken out to a hospital ship, Walt, who was now the Fifth Regiment’s executive officer, had taken charge of Third Battalion. With communications still down, he set out in the darkness to find his scattered companies and put them back into some kind of order. He’d already rounded up I and L companies. When he found us he led us back toward the airfield and positioned us facing south just behind Second Battalion, which was facing north. We’d be watching one another’s backs through the rest of the night.

We dug mortar emplacements, registered the two guns with a couple test rounds, laid out our KA-BARS where they’d be handy, and settled in for a long, restless night.

The water situation hadn’t improved, and by dawn there were a lot of empty canteens. The coral never cooled during all the time we were on Peleliu. Even at night it stayed warm, and the morning sun soon turned it into a griddle. Some of our guys went searching and found a cistern at the edge of the airstrip with a little pool of stagnant water about ten or twelve feet down. Word spread and guys started to gather around, passing their canteens down to be filled. We were an excellent target. The water didn’t look too good to me, silty and probably polluted. But none of us were picky at that point. Before long they managed to bring up a couple of the fifty-gallon drums from the beach, old diesel containers that were supposed to have been steam-cleaned on Pavuvu before they were filled with water. We lined up to fill our canteens, but it was even worse than the water from the cistern, tea-colored and smelling strongly of fuel oil. Guys would take a mouthful and spit it out. Those that swallowed it would throw up a few minutes later. Some of them had the dry heaves all morning.

I thought, If anyone lights a match around us we’ll all be turned into human flamethrowers.

About this time the Japs opened up on us from the high ground overlooking the airfield. We called it Bloody Nose Ridge, and it bloodied us good. They could see us in the morning light, but we couldn’t see them. The Navy’s guns and our own heavy artillery on the beach answered, but I don’t think we had much effect. The Japs were shooting from the mouths of caves a couple hundred feet up, where we couldn’t get at them. They’d wheel a gun to the entrance, fire, and wheel it back out of sight.

As the enemy poured steel down on us, we got the word to prepare to move out. The whole Fifth Regiment was to attack straight across the airfield, then swing north. We’d be on the right, moving across the southern end. Second Battalion was on our left. They’d take the middle. Then on their left, First Battalion, which had hooked up with elements of the First Marines’ Second Battalion. Off on our right in the scrub jungle were the Seventh Marines.

We’d practiced the drill on Pavuvu. Stay down until the signal. Keep a distance between one another so we present a scattered target. Move fast and don’t stop until we get to the far side. A moving target is harder to hit. We crouched in the underbrush, listening to the guns bang away at one another. Then the word came: “Move out!”

That was the longest walk I ever took in my life. We were on the go. We were moving, bent over at a trot. Everything was coming at us—mortars, artillery, machine-gun and rifle fire. You heard the hiss and zing of shrapnel and bullets all around you. We were as exposed as bugs on a breakfast table. I kept yelling, “Keep moving! Keep moving!”

The field was littered with scraps from the tank battle the day before, empty ammo boxes, chunks of shrapnel bouncing and skittering along. There were a couple wrecked Jap warplanes, including one of their twin-engine “Betty” bombers.

I saw Merriel “Snafu” Shelton go down, carrying the mortar tube. Sledgehammer went down right behind him, cradling a bag of mortar shells in his arms. Neither was hit and both got up and started off again.

We couldn’t fire back at our tormentors because we were on the run. We didn’t want to expose ourselves any longer than we had to. But it was frustrating. After what seemed like ages, a line of brush appeared in front of us. We dove into the shade, panting and sweating. For the first time I realized how hot we had been coming across. It was like the Japs had one more weapon on their side, the sun.

Everyone was accounted for. Mortar section hadn’t lost a man in the mad dash. But K Company lost two dead and five wounded. One of them was Private First Class Robert Oswalt, shot through the head. He was the one I had almost shot between the eyes myself on New Britain when he came crawling out of his foxhole at night begging for a drink of water. Suddenly I felt awful.

Once we were across the airfield, our orders were to swing north and head for the low area east of Bloody Nose Ridge, near the coast. There we’d link up with the Second Battalion. As we started north we found our battalion getting squeezed between the Second Battalion and the Seventh Marines, who were still clearing out the swamps.

At the north edge of the field, a few yards on our left, we passed a two-story concrete shell, evidently the air base headquarters. By the time we saw it, one of the battleships had blasted it with fourteen-inch guns, but the walls were at least a foot thick with steel reinforcing, and it was still standing. Some other Marine unit had dislodged the Japs there and moved in.

Beyond the northeast corner of the airfield, we found ourselves in dense scrub again. Beyond lay a patch of swamp with the sea shimmering in the distance. The main road running north along the east side of the island cut through here, but we stayed out of sight. We found a clear space where we could set up the mortars and pound in the aiming stakes to orient the weapons. Late in the afternoon we fired a few rounds to register the guns and scraped out foxholes in the hard coral, piling up rocks and logs around them. All the time we kept our eyes on the wall of scrub around us, expecting a banzai attack any minute. It never came. In fact, the Japs never charged us banzai-style on Peleliu like they had on New Britain. They knew better. Now they waited until dark. Then they came creeping out of their caves to slit our throats.

As it happened, our second night passed quietly. Orders for the next day were to continue to advance north and relieve First Battalion. They had been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the Japs all afternoon, working their way along the lower slopes of the ridge. Whenever they moved forward, Jap mortars and artillery shells would come pouring down on them from the hills. Whenever they stopped, the fire stopped.