War Stories II (54 page)

PRIVATE FIRST CLASS FRED FOX, USMC
1st Marine Division
Peleliu, Palau Islands
22 September 1944

I was seventeen when I joined the Marines in New Orleans. We got on a train to San Diego for boot camp.

At that time, the Battle of Tarawa was in the news. Everybody wanted to do something. I wanted to be a Marine.

I'd taken machine gun training at Camp Elliott in San Diego, but company commander George Hunt said, “We are getting a new weapon called a flame-thrower, and you seem like you're pretty good at things, so you're going to take over and run the flame-throwers in my company.”

The flame-throwers and bazookas were two special weapons that they were just getting into a rifle company. While we were aboard an LST, Captain Hunt said, “We're going to an island called Peleliu.” He had a map and explained to us what we were going to do. “This is ‘the point,'” he said, “and there's a little cliff about thirty feet high. They can sit inside that cliff and shoot down on our units, so we have take this from the Japs.”

A few people had feelings they were going to get killed at Peleliu. I didn't ever have that, but a strange thing about it, a good percentage of the people who say those things do get killed. I had a sergeant that was in the tent with me. He had been at Guadalcanal and New Britain. He said, “I know I'm gonna get killed this time. I don't wanna go—I don't wanna go.”

We got an order: “All personnel that have special equipment—machine guns, flame-throwers—go down to your Amtracs in the hull of the ship.”

We were in the first wave. As soon as we got ashore, I had the flame-thrower on, and the assistant flame-thrower had a shotgun, and we ran down the beach to the left.

He shot a couple of times with his shotgun, and I tried to shoot the flame-thrower, but it wouldn't light, so we went back.

The first thing I saw was the platoon commander, and he had blood coming out of his shoulder, so I ran over to him and started to bandage up his shoulder, and a Japanese machine gun started shooting at us.

He said, “Don't worry about me, just throw me a pistol.” I had a .45 automatic in a scabbard with the flame-thrower, so I took it and tossed it to him with two magazines. He gave me his Thompson submachine gun and some full magazines.

The place they called “the point” was a cliff about thirty feet high with Japanese gun emplacements in it. We almost took the point on the first day, but we lost thirty men when the Japanese counter-attacked. That counter-attack wouldn't have succeeded if our flame-thrower had been working.

If you wanted to get somebody with your flame-thrower, you had to get close, but you could almost always throw hand grenades at 'em.

We were getting dehydrated the first afternoon. I crawled out to where two Jap officers were, or where their bodies were, and they had canteens on 'em. So I cut off the two canteens, and brought 'em back, and drank nice, clear water. Later everybody was getting canteens off a dead Jap to get water.

The second day the CO said, “We have to know if the Japanese are gonna do a banzai charge.” I told him, “I've been out there to cut the canteens off those two Jap officers, so I can crawl out there.”

So as soon as it got dark, I got rid of everything I had that would make noise, took only a new .45 pistol. I'm on the edge of the cliff, on top of it well past the point.

Just before dawn I could hear Japs trying to get around us out in the water. So I had to get back and report. I climbed down the cliff and took about three steps and there were Japs right under me. As soon as I turned, a bayonet hit me right in the chest. I grabbed the bayonet where it's attached to the rifle, and I had this pistol cocked, loaded, and all I had to do was pull the trigger. I just slammed it right in his face, as hard as I could. I didn't shoot, but he dropped everything, and I dropped the pistol, grabbed his rifle, and jabbed its bayonet into him.

Then I got a hit several times with a saber, which cut me up real bad so I fell to the ground and played dead.

While all this was going on, our guys picked up a machine gun and started shooting at the Japanese who had attacked me. While the Japanese were dodging the fire from our machine gun, I jumped into the water. As soon as I got down to where I figured our lines were, I yelled for a corpsman. A voice said, “I'll come and get you.” I found out later on it was Andy Byrnes, the guy who had the machine gun, and he came into the surf and pulled me out of the water. By now it was daylight and as Andy carried me up to our lines, the Japs started shooting at us. Thankfully, Andy got me back safely. He was awarded the Silver Star for this act of valor.

I had a big cut across my back from the saber. I remember lying there on my stomach as the corpsman bandaged me up.

Later that afternoon they brought an Amtrac in and picked up all the wounded. They took me out to a ship called
Tryon,
not a hospital ship but rigged like one. Five or six days later we got to the Admiralty Islands, where there was a naval hospital. We went from there to a hospital on Guadalcanal and then they put me on a ship back to the United States.

1ST MARINE DIVISION
PELELIU, PALAU ISLANDS
26 SEPTEMBER 1944

CAPTAIN EVERETT POPE, USMC
C Company, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines
Peleliu, Palau Islands
28 September 1944

We landed on Peleliu on 15 September 1944. We were told the operation would take two or three days to clean up a few Japanese. No one told us
the Japanese had been there since 1930. Or that they knew what they were doing, and were very good at it.

I took over Charlie Company when we were getting ready for the Peleliu landing. We went in on an LVT. When we got to the reef, we ground to a halt and got pounded. There were twelve or more LVTs afire on the shore.

The first instinct is to get off the beach. The landing craft attracted a lot of unwanted attention. We got to the beach as fast as we could, but still got shot at wherever we moved. I lost my first Marine right there on the beach.

They didn't waste any of their people on banzai attacks on Peleliu. In fact, they had a very tactically serious defense.

The morning of the second day we were charged with taking Hill 100. We ran into this blockhouse that was not supposed to have been there, and we had to pull back until naval gunfire reached in and damaged it. Shortly thereafter, my company, Charlie Company, reached the first objective. It was supposed to have been reached within an hour of the landing. We only reached it the second night.

We were ordered to take that hill, and we moved forward through a swamp and met some very serious opposition—not from the top of the hill, but from the other side of the swampy area. We couldn't get through to get at the machine guns that were firing at us. We couldn't get a flame-thrower up, and we couldn't mount a charge.

Then the decision was made to cross that causeway. After a very tough fight, we managed to get across the causeway and up the slope, and by late that night we got to the top of the hill. We just barely managed to hang on while the Japanese threw everything they had at us. It got to be hand-to-hand combat and sharp raining fire by rifles and grenades.

We ended up at dawn the next morning with no ammunition. We could fight for a couple hours, no more. The Japanese sent in a company of troops as dawn broke, and we were assailed from high ground we couldn't even see. On our maps it showed Hill 100 to be the highest piece of terrain, but it wasn't. There was another hill, higher than ours, about 150 yards away. We didn't hold the key terrain—the Japanese did.

For twelve days and nights we fought, buried our dead, and waited. Nobody could get in there. Every day and night we took casualties, including two lieutenants killed in action. Everybody else was wounded. Our rifle company had taken 95 percent casualties counting killed and wounded.

I was wounded. When I went down to the battalion aid station, they pulled some shrapnel out and told me it wasn't serious. Only eight of us came off that hill. It was the closest I ever came to being killed.