With the Old Breed (17 page)

Our corpsman then gave him an injection of morphine in the hope of sedating him. It had no effect. More morphine; it had no effect either. Veterans though they were, the men were all getting jittery over the noise they believed would announce our exact location to any enemy in the vicinity.

“Hit him with the flat of that entrenching shovel!” a voice commanded in the CP. A horrid
thud
announced that the command was obeyed. The poor man finally became silent.

“Christ a'mighty, what a pity,” said a Marine in a neighboring foxhole.

“You said that right, but if the goddamn Nips don't know we're here, after all that yellin’, they'll never know,” his buddy said.

A tense silence settled over the patrol. The horror of the whole affair stimulated Haney to check our positions frequently. He acted like some hyperactive demon and cautioned us endlessly to be on the alert.

When welcome dawn finally came after a seemingly endless blackness, we all had frayed nerves. I walked the few paces over to the CP to find out what I could. The man was dead. Covered with his poncho, his body lay next to the bunker. The agony and distress etched on the strong faces of Hillbilly, Hank, and the others in the CP revealed the personal horror of the night. Several of these men had received or would receive decorations for bravery in combat, but I never saw such agonized expressions on their faces as that morning in the swamp. They had done what any of us would have had to do under similar circumstances. Cruel chance had thrust the deed upon them.

Hillbilly looked at the radioman and said, “I'm taking this patrol in. Get battalion for me.”

The radioman tuned his big pack-sized radio and got the battalion CP. Hillbilly told the battalion CO, Major Gustaf-son, that he wanted to bring in the patrol. We could hear the major tell Hillbilly he thought we should stay put for a couple of days until G-2 could determine the disposition of the Japanese. Hillbilly, a first lieutenant, calmly disagreed, saying
we hadn't fired a shot, but because of circumstances we all had a pretty bad case of nerves. He felt strongly that we should come in. I saw several old salts raise their eyebrows and smile as Hillbilly stated his opinion. To our relief, Gus agreed with him; I have always thought it was probably because of his respect for Hillbilly's judgment.

“I'll send a relief column with a tank so you won't have any trouble coming in,” said the major's voice. We all felt comforted. The word went rapidly through the patrol that we were going in. Everyone breathed easier. In about an hour we heard a tank coming. As it forced its way through the thick growth, we saw familiar faces of Company K men with it. We placed the body on the tank, and we returned to the company's lines. I never heard an official word about the death thereafter.

Over the next few days, the 5th Marines patrolled most of the southern “claw.” We had set up defensive positions to prevent any possible counterlanding by the Japanese along the exposed southern beaches.

On about 25 September (D + 10) the battered 1st Marine Regiment was relieved by the U.S. Army's 321st Infantry Regiment of the 81st Infantry Division. The 1st Marines moved into our area where they were to await a ship to return them to Pavuvu. We picked up our gear and moved out from the relative quiet of the beach to board trucks that would speed our regiment to a position straddling the west road. From there we would attack northward along the western side of the ridges.

As we walked along one side of a narrow road, the 1st Marines filed along the other side to take over our area. I saw some familiar faces as the three decimated battalions trudged past us, but I was shocked at the absence of so many others whom I knew in that regiment. During the frequent halts typical to the movement of one unit into the position of another, we exchanged greetings with buddies and asked about the fate of mutual friends. We in the 5th Marines had many a
dead or wounded friend to report about from our ranks, but the men in the 1st Marines had so many it was appalling.

“How many men left in your company?” I asked an old Camp Elliott buddy in the 1st Marines.

He looked at me wearily with bloodshot eyes and choked as he said, “Twenty is all that's left in the whole company, Sledgehammer. They nearly wiped us out. I'm the only one left out of the old bunch in my company that was with us in mortar school at Elliott.”

I could only shake my head and bite my lip to keep from getting choked up. “See you on Pavuvu,” I said.

“Good luck,” he said in a dull resigned tone that sounded as though he thought I might not make it.

What once had been companies in the 1st Marines looked like platoons; platoons looked like squads. I saw few officers. I couldn't help wondering if the same fate awaited the 5th Marines on those dreadful ridges. Twenty bloody, grueling, terrible days and nights later, on 15 October (D + 30) my regiment would be relieved. Its ranks would be just about as decimated as those we were filing past.

We boarded trucks that carried us southward along the east road then some distance northward along the west road. As we bumped and jolted past the airfield, we were amazed at all the work the Seabees (naval construction battalions) had accomplished on the field. Heavy construction equipment was everywhere, and we saw hundreds of service troops living in tents and going about their duties as though they were in Hawaii or Australia. Several groups of men, Army and Marine service troops, watched our dusty truck convoy go by. They wore neat caps and dungarees, were clean-shaven, and seemed relaxed. They eyed us curiously, as though we were wild animals in a circus parade. I looked at my buddies in the truck and saw why. The contrast between us and the onlookers was striking. We were armed, helmeted, unshaven, filthy, tired, and haggard. The sight of clean comfortable noncom-batants was depressing, and we tried to keep up our morale by discussing the show of U.S. material power and technology we saw.

We got off the trucks somewhere up the west road parallel
to the section of the ridges on our right that was in American hands. We heard firing on the closest ridge. The troops I saw along the road as we unloaded were army infantrymen from the 321st Infantry Regiment, veterans of Angaur.

As I exchanged a few remarks with some of these men, I felt a deep comradeship and respect for them. Reporters and historians like to write about interservice rivalry among military men; it certainly exists, but I found that frontline combatants in all branches of the services showed a sincere mutual respect when they faced the same danger and misery. Combat soldiers and sailors might call us “gyrenes,” and we called them “dogfaces” and “swabbies,” but we respected each other completely.

After the relief of 1st Marines, a new phase of the fight for Peleliu began. No longer would the Marines suffer prohibitive casualties in fruitless frontal assaults from the south against the ridges. Rather they would sweep up the western coast around the enemy's last-ditch defenses in search of a better route into the final pocket of resistance.

Although the bitter battle for Peleliu would drag on for another two months, the 1st Marine Division seized all of the terrain of strategic value in the first week of bitter fighting. In a series of exhausting assaults, the division had taken the vital airfield, the commanding terrain above it, and all of the island south and east of Umurbrogol Mountain. Yet the cost had been high: 3,946 casualties. The division had lost one regiment as an effective fighting unit, and had severely depleted the strength of its other two.

The 5th Marines now had the mission to secure the northern part of the island—that is, the upper part of the larger “lobster claw.” Following that chore the regiment was to move south again on the eastern side of the Umurbrogol ridges to complete the isolation and encirclement. Most of us in the ranks never saw a map of Peleliu except during training on Pavuvu, and had never heard the ridge system referred to by its correct name, Umurbrogol Mountain. We usually referred to the whole ridge system as “Bloody Nose,” “Bloody Nose Ridge,” or simply “the ridges.”

As we moved through the army lines, Japanese machine guns were raking the crest of the ridge on our right. The slugs and bluish white tracers pinned down the American troops on the ridge but passed high above us on the road. The terrain was flat and sparsely wooded. Tanks supported us, and we were fired on by small arms, artillery, and mortars from the high coral ridges to our right and from Ngesebus Island a few hundred yards north of Peleliu.

Our battalion turned right at the junction of West Road and East Road, headed south along the latter, and stopped at dusk. As usual, there wasn't much digging in as such, mostly finding some crater or depression and piling rocks around it for what protection we could get.

I was ordered to carry a five-gallon can of water over to the company CP. When I got there, Ack Ack was studying a map by the light of a tiny flashlight that his runner shielded with another folded map. The company's radioman was sitting with him, quietly tuning his radio and calling an artillery battery of the 11th Marines.

Putting the water can down, I sat on it and watched my skipper with admiration. Never before had I regretted so profoundly my lack of artistic talent and inability to draw the scene before me. The tiny flashlight faintly illuminated Captain Haldane's face as he studied the map. His big jaw, covered with a charcoal stubble of beard, jutted out. His heavy brow wrinkled with concentration just below the rim of his helmet.

The radioman handed the phone to Ack Ack. He requested a certain number of rounds of 75mm HE to be fired out to Company K's front. A Marine on the other end of the radio questioned the need for the request.

Haldane answered pleasantly and firmly, “Maybe so, but I want my boys to feel secure.” Shortly the 75s came whining overhead and started bursting in the dark thick growth across the road.

Next day I told several men what Ack Ack had said. “That's the skipper for you, always thinking of the troops’ feelings,” was the way one man summed it up.

Several hours passed. It was my turn to be on watch in our hole. Snafu slept fitfully and ground his teeth audibly, which he usually did during sleep in combat. The white coral road shone brightly in the pale moonlight as I strained my eyes looking across into the wall of dark growth on the other side.

Suddenly two figures sprang up from a shallow ditch directly across the road from me. With arms waving wildly, yelling and babbling hoarsely in Japanese, they came. My heart skipped a beat, then began pounding like a drum as I flipped off the safety of my carbine. One enemy soldier angled to my right, raced down the road a short distance, crossed over, and disappeared into a foxhole in the line of the company on our right flank. I focused on the other. Swinging a bayonet over his head, he headed at me.