Islands of the Damned (17 page)

How anybody could survive that blast puzzles me to this day. But a Jap suddenly popped up in the hole, waving a grenade over his head and yelling something. Sledge and a couple others fired and he went down still clutching the grenade, which went off where he lay.

Now everybody was firing. “Get that flamethrower up here, Red,” I yelled. “Everyone else, keep shooting!”

Flamethrowers are a wicked weapon, no doubt about it, but we never had any qualms about using them. They would do the job.

While we poured shots into the hole left by the amtrac, Womack and Lewis moved up to about five yards from the bunker. Lewis twisted a valve on one of the tanks. There was a jetlike
whoosh
, and a flash of heat and a torrent of orange flame splashed against the concrete and through the hole. We heard screams, and three more Japs came stumbling out the side, wreathed in flames. They went down in a burst of carbine fire, and as they lay writhing on the ground still burning, a couple of us ran forward to finish them off.

We waited for the smoke to clear, then Redifer and I ducked down and entered. Redifer was the kind of man you want with you in a situation like that.

When our eyes adjusted to the dark we could see why we’d had such a hard time digging them out of there. The whole length of the bunker was divided into a series of compartments separated by low openings. The openings were offset one from another so that a blast in one compartment would not reach the men in the adjoining compartments. Each had a narrow slit to the outside, a firing port. They could probably have holed up in there indefinitely, slipping out at night to bayonet us or slit our throats, like they had on Peleliu.

There were weapons scattered everywhere—a machine gun, rifles, grenades. We could smell charred flesh. In one of the compartments we found three or four blackened bodies heaped in a pile. The one sprawled over the top didn’t look quite right. Something about the way he was lying there caught my attention—maybe I caught a slight movement. I motioned to Redifer to stop. Then I gave the Jap a kick in the ribs just beneath his arm. He grunted. I yanked my .45 out of its holster and fired into the back of his head, point-blank.

Altogether, we counted ten dead in the bunker, including the Jap I’d just shot. Seven bodies lay outside. That was seventeen Japs that we knocked out without losing a man, two only slightly wounded. I felt pretty good about that.

For the rest of the day K Company mopped up the west end of the island, including a small hill north of the runway that was full of caves. We dug in late that afternoon at the foot of the hill, two to a foxhole, taking turns sleeping and watching. I shared a bomb crater with the guy who’d dropped the bazooka back on the first day on Peleliu. I took the first hour’s watch, then he took over. The wind came up, carrying the sharp smell of smoke and burnt flesh. Sometime during the night a rain squall passed over. It was his turn to stand watch again and I gratefully fell asleep. For some reason I awoke in a short time. My companion was sprawled against the side of the crater, peacefully snoring. I sat on him and grabbed him by the lapels and slammed his head against the coral. Before he was half awake I had my hands around his throat.

“You son of a bitch,” I said. “If ever I catch you asleep again when you’re standing guard, you’ll never wake up!”

After we got off Ngesebus, I went to Captain Haldane about the incident. I said, “I don’t want that SOB in my platoon. Not if I can’t depend on him.”

We had one more day of fighting ahead of us, on a narrow peninsula jutting a few hundred yards to the northwest, where the Japs had located the big guns that had been giving us such fits. Three of our tanks knocked them out by early afternoon, and our invasion of Ngesebus was over. We’d faced about five hundred enemy defenders, but they were the best soldiers in the Imperial Japanese Army, veterans hardened by several years fighting in China and Manchuria. Our battalion lost forty-eight Marines—fifteen killed and thirty-three wounded. We’d killed 470 Japs. Only twenty-three had surrendered.

Late in the day the Army came across the island and relieved us. We boarded Higgins boats and went down the east coast of Peleliu to Purple Beach, where we would go into reserves. There we found Chesty Puller’s First Marines, still waiting for a ship to take them to Pavuvu.

As we were starting our rest, the Fifth Regiment’s First and Second battalions were being thrown against the remaining Jap positions on the northern end of Peleliu. Second Battalion mopped up around the phosphate plant. First Battalion attacked and occupied the third of the four hills extending west to east across the island. The next day they turned their attention to the fourth and highest hill, which had a Jap radar on top. By late afternoon they were on the summit. The next day, September 30, they climbed into trucks and amtracs for the ride down the east road to the smaller claw, where they joined us at Purple Beach.

The last concentration of Japs on Peleliu were holed up in the rocky heart of the Umurbrogol, in a hellish jumble of coral rock called the Pocket. The only clear way into the Pocket was through a narrow valley called the Horseshoe that dead-ended in a steep slope, what Texans would call a box canyon. Beyond the Horseshoe was a seemingly endless series of ridges and valleys—Hill 140, Ridge 3, Boyd Ridge, Baldy, Wattie Ridge, Hill 120, Hill 100A. It went on and on.

In the center of the Horseshoe was a large sink that contained the only standing fresh water on the island. Japs would sneak out at night to fill their canteens here. The east wall of the Horseshoe was formed by a steep ridge that was anchored on the south by Hill 100. Hills seemed to be named for their elevation in feet. The ridge had been named for Lieutenant Colonel Walt, the regiment’s executive officer who’d come looking for us the night we were lost in the scrub.

Overlooking the Horseshoe from the west was a row of crags and knobs starting with Five Sisters on the south, then Five Brothers. West of these was another valley, Wildcat Bowl. Beyond that rose a sheer cliff called the China Wall. The other side of that was Death Valley. From most of these ridges, the Japs could fire down on the west road.

For two weeks, the First Marines then Seventh Marines had thrown themselves at the Pocket, carving away slices from one side or the other until the Japs were pushed into an area no more than five hundred by a thousand yards. But this area was shot through with caves, most of them screened by thick brush. Our Shermans had advanced into the Horseshoe with the Seventh Marines and blasted every cave opening they could find. Then for some reason we never understood, headquarters had ordered the tanks withdrawn and sent back to Pavuvu. In their place came Shermans from the Army’s 710th Tank Battalion. They went in and pounded the same caves. Marine Corsairs dropped napalm, which burned off the covering trees until the ridges were as bare and scruffy as a mangy dog. That helped some.

On October 1 we got word to stand by to join the Seventh Marines for a final assault on the Pocket. The morning of October 3, trucks dumped us north of the airfield, where the east and west roads came together. We started west toward the Five Sisters. Our move on the Five Sisters was supposed to divert the Japs’ attention from the Seventh Marines. Far to our right, they were moving down the east road to make another attack on Walt Ridge.

We led off with a heavy artillery barrage, then our Corsairs took over. They’d leave the airstrip, which was just behind us, and drop napalm on the rocky spires just in front of us. Then they’d wheel around, return to the airstrip and reload. The whole circuit couldn’t have taken more than a minute or two. Most of the pilots didn’t even bother to draw up their landing gear. It must have been the shortest bombing mission in the war.

Meanwhile we set up our guns and laid down heavy mortar fire in front of the advancing riflemen. They got to the first of the pinnacles about noon and within a few hours had taken four of the five. Their problem was the second pinnacle in the chain, which lay north of the others. To get to it, we had to squeeze between two of the other Sisters into Death Valley. We soon found out where it got its name.

Two weeks of fighting had stripped the trees bare and littered the ground with a knotted mess of tree limbs and rock. As we advanced, the Japs had a clear view from their caves up in the crags to our right. Our mortars were dug in a few dozen yards behind the riflemen, who were making good progress until, late in the afternoon, rifle and machine-gun fire started hitting them from everywhere at once. I’ll say this about the Japs, they were disciplined. They’d hold their fire until we walked right into them.

The whole company was thrown back. There were calls for corpsmen everywhere. It got so bad that ammo carriers ran forward to help carry stretchers, leaving just a few of us to man the guns. Jap snipers seemed to single out corpsmen and stretcher carriers, and we tried to shield them by throwing smoke grenades. Every man’s worst nightmare was that he would be hit while carrying a stretcher and dump a wounded Marine on the ground.

Before we got out of there, we’d lost five killed and fifteen wounded. It was K Company’s worst day on Peleliu. We fell back and set up a new line just before sunset and waited for them to come creeping out of their caves. We were only a few hundred yards ahead of where we’d started out that morning. But we were in the open, where it would make it easier to spot infiltrators. During the night artillery fired star shells, which burst overhead, catching our visitors like a flashbulb. They came single or in pairs all through the night. At sunup we counted twenty-one dead Japs around us.

The next two days were the same story. We moved forward into the Five Sisters, ran into intense fire and fell back. We lost nine more men, one of them killed.

All the time we kept up the mortar fire. George Sarrett and I were on the front lines, observing. Neither of us had caught a wink of sleep in three days. Just before it got dark I found I couldn’t focus my eyes anymore. I called John Marmet on the phone.

“John, I gotta come in. I’m absolutely dead.”

“Okay, come on in.”

George and I scrambled back through the twilight until we got to where we’d set up the guns. There were two of them, each firing a round every two or three minutes, for harassment as much as anything. In front of one of the guns was a shell crater, and I flopped in. You get in front of a 60mm mortar, it’s loud. The guns were firing right over my head every couple minutes all night long.

I don’t even remember falling asleep. The next thing I knew Marmet was nudging me awake. It was eight o’clock the next morning. I’d slept in all that racket for twelve hours.

You get that way. You get to the point that you don’t give a damn if you live or die, you’re so exhausted. You’re living in a nightmare. It’s impossible to imagine the look and smell of a battlefield if you’ve never been on one, and impossible to forget if you have. The ground where we now found ourselves was littered with discarded combat gear, Jap rifles that we’d smashed so they couldn’t be used again, spent shells, empty ammo boxes, bloody dressings, half-eaten rations rotting in the sun.

Half of us had diarrhea. You tried to dispose of it in empty ration cans and the like, but you were never far from the stink of shit. We and the Japs both tried to retrieve our dead, but too many times they were left where they fell. In the heat and humidity it didn’t take them long to go sour, decaying and rotting and adding to the stench. Big metallic-green blowflies swarmed over everything. If you saw a corpse move, it would be maggots. Throw a rock into a bush and a cloud of flies would rise up thick enough to cast a shadow. They buzzed from the bodies and the shit. They were even crawling into our rations and into our canteen cups.

I don’t know when it was that they finally started coming over in planes, spraying everything with DDT to keep down the flies. If it had any effect, we didn’t notice. They were still thick as raisins.

Late one afternoon Sergeant Jim McEnery came upon the blackened and bloated bodies of four Marines in a ravine at the foot of one of the Five Sisters. They were laid out on stretchers as though somebody was carrying them to first aid. They’d been there at least two weeks.