Islands of the Damned (14 page)

Next morning we set out for our rendezvous with First Battalion, still picking our way through dense scrub. I could tell it was going to be a hot one. As the sun climbed higher guys started dropping out with heat prostration, and we had to stop more and more frequently. We were burning through our salt tablets.

The east flank of Bloody Nose Ridge rose up on our right, and as we advanced we started coming under vicious artillery and mortar fire from the heights. We couldn’t use our own mortars for fear of dropping them on First Battalion, which was somewhere between us and the ridge. By noon we had linked up with them and we took their place in the front lines. When we started forward again we almost immediately ran into a wall of fire that kept pinning us down all afternoon. When we tried to move forward, the Japs would open up on us. There’s no feeling on earth as vulnerable as having somebody fire shells down on you from up above.

Second Battalion had pulled to our right and was making better progress through the mangroves. Behind them somewhere was the Seventh Marines. Our company finally found our own little patch of mangroves and pushed through until we came out in a coconut grove and, on the far side, an open area. This had once been a native village, but the Japs had taken over and built rows of barracks. During the landing we had bombed and shelled the area pretty thoroughly, and there wasn’t much left but piles of charred lumber.

Our supplies caught up with us by late afternoon, including some precious water. Things seemed about to take a turn for the better.

The next morning Second Battalion was ordered east across a narrow neck of land that joined the larger of Peleliu’s crab claws to the smaller. Japs had been spotted in that area. The Marines had just started across when a group of Navy fighters came roaring over, strafing the column from one end to the other. This mistake cost the Corps almost three dozen men. Our battalion was hurried forward to reinforce them. We were coming up on the same neck of land, following a crude road with swamp on either side of us, when shells—
big
shells—started raining down on us. I knew they were ours because they were screaming right over our backs and crashing just in front, showering us with mud and coral rock. We could feel the thump of the concussions on our dungarees before we all hit the ground.

We’d been stringing out communication wire as we went. I grabbed the sound-powered phone to the command post.

“We’re taking fire from behind us up here!” I shouted.

“No, that can’t be ours!”

“Don’t by God tell me it’s not ours! It’s coming from the damned airfield, and we’ve
got
the airfield. I’m telling you what the hell it is! It’s our damned artillery and it’s a 155. I’m looking at it as it lands. Get word back to them to cut it out. They’re too damned close.”

That was the first time I ever experienced an airburst. Those things are wicked. The shell comes in and explodes before it hits the ground, and the shrapnel slices down through anything that isn’t under cover. A foxhole or a trench—it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference where you’re at. There’s no place to hide from an airburst. I thought for sure that stuff was going to eat us up. But by some miracle, nobody was hit.

After the artillery let up we moved on. By early afternoon we dug in south of the Second Battalion.

The Japs had their main base up on Babelthuap, a larger island about forty miles north of Peleliu. Our intelligence had information that they might send a force across to relieve their Peleliu garrison and drive us off the island. It wasn’t clear to us what a couple hundred Marines could do to stop a major landing, but at least we could sound the alarm and hold them off for a while. As we pushed through the swamps on the smaller claw we ran into an occasional sniper. But the next day or two was about the quietest we were to experience on Peleliu.

The third day they sent about forty of us on an extended patrol down to the tip of a long, narrow peninsula running along the southeast coast of the island. Hillbilly Jones was in charge and we had an Army man with a war dog, a big Doberman that could smell the Japs.

There were a couple of islands off the tip, and we were told about two thousand Japs were hidden there. When the tide went out it would be easy for them to wade across, come up the peninsula and catch us by surprise. We were supposed to set up and watch for them.

It was a spooky place to start with, gloomy and dark, with dense trees and thick vines snaking all over the place and tangles of roots that looked like the legs of some giant spider. Sledge was goggling at the birds, and I had to remind him to keep his mind on business. We settled near an abandoned Jap bunker, where Hillbilly set up his command post. The rest of us spread out and dug in. For a change the ground was soft enough to dig real foxholes. We set up our gun at the water’s edge and pointed it where we thought they’d try to cross. We didn’t dare fire a register round because every sound would carry right across the water. In fact, we were ordered to stay quiet, not light up a smoke, not advertise our presence in any way.

The sun went down, leaving us to our rations and to the mosquitoes. Sergeant Elmo Haney, who’d amused us with his antics on Pavuvu, had come along. He was more Asiatic than usual that night. He kept moving up and down the line urging everyone in a hoarse whisper to check their weapons, lock and load, stay alert. The Japs might come across at any minute with fixed bayonets, he warned. He disappeared, but pretty soon he was back again to see if we knew the password. Check your weapons. Stay alert. He was starting to get to us.

Fact is, we were more than alert. We were forty twitching bundles of nerves. We jumped at every sound. A fish splashing out in the water, some animal snapping a twig or some bird ruffling its feathers—anything could set us off. Nobody was getting any sleep.

I was near the command post around midnight when we all heard someone start to moan. “Ooooooooooh. Ooooooooh. Dog! They’re gonna kill me, dog! Help me! Ooooooooooooh!” It was the dog handler. He went on and on, getting louder, like some siren. Somebody shushed him, then somebody tackled him in the darkness. I could hear them thrashing around, grunts and moans.

“Quiet that man!” Hillbilly ordered. Someone else called for our corpsman.

The dog handler was screaming louder. “Help me. Oh, dog! God! Help me! Help me!”

“Shut that man up!” Hillbilly hissed.

Several of us were wrestling him now, while the corpsman got out his syringe. He gave him a shot of morphine, but it just seemed to egg him on. He howled louder, calling on his dog, or God, to save him.

“The Japs have got me! The Japs have got me! Save me, dog!”

The corpsman gave him another shot, enough morphine by now to kill a horse. Anything to shut him up. He went on yelling, kicking and punching at anyone who came near. If the Japs couldn’t hear him, we were sure they were deaf.

Hillbilly was trying to talk him down in low, soothing tones. “It’s okay, son. You’re going to be okay.”

He kept yelling.

Someone said, “Hit him! Shut him the hell up!” And someone else grabbed an entrenching tool and swung.

We heard a sharp
whang!
, and then silence.

We sat there for a long time, nobody talking. To tell the truth, we were more rattled than if the Japs had come.

Hillbilly got on the phone to battalion headquarters. Major John Gustafson had taken over from Colonel Walt as commander.

“John, we need to come out of here,” Hillbilly said.

We couldn’t hear the other side of the conversation.

“No, John. I’m telling you, we need to come out of here. We’ve had a situation here and everybody’s nerves are shot. We need to get the hell out.”

By daybreak a tank found its way to us through the jungle. We’d covered the body of the dog handler with his poncho and loaded it on the tank and started back, through the dripping trees.

Later we learned two barges full of Japs tried to land farther north that night and the night after. A Navy ship intercepted them and sank both vessels. But no Japs crossed over where we had been watching.

It was another one of those nights we didn’t talk about afterward. None of us was proud of it, but that dog handler had endangered all of us, the whole crew that was there in the jungle. We’d done what we had to do. I was as close as anybody to what happened, three or four feet away. I’d seen who’d swung the shovel. I knew who did it. He did something that needed to be done. As long as any of us is alive, none of us will reveal who it was.

The strange thing is that the Doberman was silent during the whole deal.

We continued our patrols for a couple of days until the smaller claw was declared secure. K Company dug in along the shore near an area that had been designated Purple Beach, where we’d been expecting a Jap landing. We had fared pretty well so far compared to other units. We lost thirty-seven men, killed or wounded. The mortar section hadn’t lost anybody.

But on the opposite side of Peleliu the First Marines were in terrible shape. After the bitter down-to-the-last-man fight for the Point, Chesty Puller had pushed them on to fight for the high ground beyond the airfield. Bloody Nose Ridge was just the start of it. Behind that and continuing halfway up the island was a series of steep-sided coral ridges, the tallest about five hundred feet, with narrow canyons between. These were the Umurbrogol Mountains. The photographs had shown only a thick carpet of trees. Even after we’d bombed and napalmed most of the cover, you couldn’t make sense of the terrain. The slopes tilted every which way and they were shot through with cracks, crevices, caves and tunnels where the Japs were dug in and waiting. This was our nightmare for the rest of the time we fought on Peleliu, and long after we’d left.

The First Marines’ Third Battalion was on the west side, the coastal flats. But their First and Second battalions had tackled the Umurbrogols head-on. No sooner had they fought to the top of one ridge than the Japs on the ridge behind had thrown them back. It was cave-to-cave fighting. There was no way they could dig them out. They’d seal up one entrance with a satchel charge and the Japs would fire at them from two other entrances. There wasn’t anything you could call a front line, like we’d had on New Britain and we’d have on Okinawa. It was a different kind of warfare.

Out in the mangrove jungle, we’d escaped the worst of it. But we’d get our own taste soon enough.

After a week fighting on the Point and then on the ridges, there was hardly anything left of the First Marines. Puller was ordered to pull the First Regiment back. Over the protests of General Rupertus, who wanted Peleliu to be an all-Marine show, the Army’s 321st Regimental Combat Team was brought in. They’d just come off a brief but successful fight for Angaur, a small island about six miles south of Peleliu.

This was the start of a whole different approach to the fight for the Umurbrogols, and the Fifth Marines were going to play our part.

About September 25, elements of the First Marines started settling in our area out on the smaller claw, waiting for a ship to take them back to Pavuvu for a well-earned rest. We got an order to withdraw to the east road, where trucks would be waiting for us. We gathered all our gear and started back the way we’d come. Somewhere near the neck where we’d taken friendly fire, we were marching along single file on the side of the road when we met the raggedest bunch of Marines I’d ever seen, coming our direction along the other side of the road. They were all that was left of Puller’s First Regiment. We stopped and swapped news. We found out they had lost about three-quarters of their regiment. What was left looked like ghosts of Marines. They went their way and we went ours, wondering what we were getting into.

The trucks were waiting. We slung our gear aboard, climbed on and headed south, back toward the airfield. Things had changed. We no longer came under sustained fire from the ridge. The trucks turned west across the northern edge of the field, and we got a look at what had been going on since we had crossed it the week before.

The Seabees had arrived and gone to work. Bulldozers and graders were all over the place, and a cloud of fine coral dust hung over the scene. The carcasses of Jap planes had been dragged off the field and the pockmarked runways had been filled in and smoothed out. Little spotter planes were flitting around. As frogmen had blasted passages through the reef so the LSTs could come ashore, the grasshoppers had arrived on the beach in crates. Crews had put them together in a day or two, and now they were spotting for artillery. A group of stubby Hellcat fighters had flown in and taken up residence, even though the edge of the field was still within range of Jap mortars. The Seabees and aircrews were living in neat rows of tents, and they’d set up a mess hall. It was downright luxurious.

We went our dusty, bouncing way to the west road and turned north. The farther we rode, the closer the shore came in on our left and the rugged ridges of the Umurbrogols on our right. We’d gone just a short distance before we started seeing dogfaces, Army troops from the 321st. The trucks stopped and let us out. We exchanged scuttlebutt with the soldiers, who were going to stay behind while we moved through them. The road already had a reputation. They were calling it Sniper’s Alley.