War Stories II

by Oliver L. North

  To make matters worse, MacArthur decided to bypass Mindanao and proceed directly with an assault on Leyte, advancing the timetable for when Oldendorf’s bombardment group would be needed. That decided the matter: Instead of five days’ pre-assault bombardment requested by the Marines landing on Peleliu, the island would be treated to three days of bombing and shelling unless new targets were identified. By the morning of 15 September, no new targets had been found, and Oldendorf departed to link up with MacArthur’s Philippine invasion force.

  For the veterans of the 1st Marine Division, 15 September 1944 began well before dawn with a traditional breakfast of steak and eggs. After returning to their troop compartments to draw ammunition and grenades from the armorers, they donned their field transport packs and proceeded up to the weather decks of their ships for a hasty prayer service led by unit chaplains. As dawn was breaking, those assigned to the assault waves went over the side, climbing down cargo nets into the waiting LVTs and landing craft bobbing in a gentle swell beside the assault ships. Churning toward shore, the troops could hear the sound of the battleships’ sixteen-inch shells ripping through the air above them. Those who could look over the gunwales of their boats could see the flash and smoke of the big shells as they exploded ashore.

  The survivors of that first assault wave recall that there was no sign of life on the island until the naval gunfire had ceased and the LVTs and armored amphibians reached the coral reef some 600 to 700 yards from shore. Then all hell broke loose.

  Japanese gunners, protected from the U.S. barrage by their deep caves and tunnels high above the landing beaches, rolled their artillery, mortars, and even German 88 mm guns out as soon as the naval gunfire stopped raining down on the island. Strafing by carrier aircraft and rockets fired from the LCIs, both delivering suppression fire on the beach, did nothing to deter the Japanese gunners who were, in most cases, 800 to 1,000 meters back from the water’s edge. The delivery of a last-minute smokescreen by the rocket ships didn’t protect the Marines either, since the Japanese didn’t need to see their targets. Their aiming points had all been pre-registered.

  Most of the first wave of LVTs that did manage to make it ashore at 0832 were promptly struck by fire plunging from the cliffs above. The assault beach quickly took on the appearance of a junkyard. Scores of Marines exiting their Amtracs were felled by flying shrapnel as they tried to press forward out of the killing zone and into the scarce cover. As the second assault wave hit the beach five minutes later, they piled in atop the wreckage of the first wave. The Marines rushing out of their vehicles were greeted by Japanese shellfire and screams of “Corpsman up!”

  For Marines in combat, the courage and skill of their Navy medical corpsmen are often the determining factors in who crosses that thin line between life and death on the battlefield. For those in B Company, 1st Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment that terrible morning on Peleliu, one of those who answered the call was eighteen-year-old Pharmacist Mate Third Class John Hayes. It was his baptism by fire.

  PHARMACIST MATE THIRD CLASS

  JOHN HAYES, USN

  B Company, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines

  Peleliu, Palau Islands

  15 September 1944

  We went to the galley and had our first decent meal, steak and eggs—the last meal until we got off of the island. About seven o’clock, we started climbing down the cargo nets into the landing craft. I climbed over the side with all of my medical gear and six rounds of 60 mm mortar ammunition.

  As we headed into the beach, it was apparent that things weren’t going as planned. We got hung up on the reef and had to go into the water well off the beach. It was bad when we went over the side of the landing craft. I’m six-foot-seven and the water was over my head. I went right to the bottom and finally got up so that my head was above water and we all walked to shore as fast as we could. But when we waded out of the surf, everybody was backed up. Bodies were floating in the surf and body parts were everywhere. It was real carnage.

  The first wave of shelled Amtracs were burning on the beach. Some had gotten hung up on the reef and others were shot on the way in.

  Every soldier, airman, sailor, and Marine thinks that his battle is the worst and that’s what we were thinking when we got on to Peleliu.

  I guess, of course, in every serious episode of life there’s a little humor. One of my platoon members had called for a corpsman, so I picked up my bag and I ran to him. And he says, “Doc, I’m hit.”

  I said, “Where are you hit?” He says, “I’m hit in the butt.” And so I looked him over and I couldn’t see any blood. He said, “I feel the blood running down my butt.”

  I said, “Well I don’t see any blood.”

  A sniper had put a round through his canteen, and the hot water was running down the cheeks of his butt, so he thought he was hit.

  So I told him, “You’re not getting out of here that easy.”

  Peleliu was a battle of inches. They stopped us on the beach and we had to fight for every inch after we got there.

  A platoon sergeant was near me and I said, “You know, I’m scared.”

  He said, “So am I.”

  I said, “You can’t be scared, you’re a veteran of Guadalcanal. He said, “You’re gonna be a veteran in five minutes.” And I was.

  That first night ashore we expected banzai attacks but there weren’t any. Still, nobody got any sleep. We dug in the sand, threw flares up all night long, and exchanged fire. It was a long night, but we didn’t have the heavy casualties we’d had during the day.

  We had a lot of wounded. We’d do what we could for them, keep them from going into shock, bandage their wounds, and evacuate them out to the hospital ship. Our battalion surgeon, Dr. Robert Haggerty, did a masterful job under those circumstances.

  We were told to attack up Bloody Nose Ridge, but got kicked back every day. We just couldn’t seem to get a foothold because we didn’t have enough artillery support to get into those caves. The Japanese had German 88 mm guns mounted in those caves on tracks with armor protecting the entrance. They’d roll back that armor door and roll the eighty-eights out and fire at any group of more than two Marines. Those guns took a heavy toll. Then they’d pull the gun back in and close the door. It was only after we were able to get some flame-throwers and have napalm dropped that we were able to make any headway at all.

  Our biggest problems were the Japanese fire and heat exhaustion.

  Bloody Nose Ridge was a coral escarpment honeycombed with caves. The naval gunfire and bombs had blown most of the leaves off the trees, so every time we moved we were always out in the open.

  In the course of the six days that the 1st Marine Regiment was there, we had about 315 killed and we had over 1,400 wounded. That means we suffered 54 percent casualties, the worst casualty rate to that point of any regiment in World War II.

  I got hit with shrapnel in the back on the third day but stayed until the sixth day, when they evacuated me to the hospital ship.

  The corpsman is always vulnerable. And the Marines all knew that. They protected us. And as a result, there is a very close bond between the Marines and their Navy corpsmen.

  One of my friends bandaged me and we just stayed there and toughed it out. On the hospital ship, they didn’t take the shrapnel out. They said it wasn’t impairing anything so they left it in. They sewed me right up over the hole.

  I spent six weeks on “light duty,” and then back on Pavuvu we started training for the invasion of Okinawa.

  One of the things that I’ve always been very proud of is that I served as a medical corpsman with the Marines. In our military, the group that has the highest number of citations for bravery are the Navy corpsmen assigned to the Marines.

  OPERATION STALEMATE

  1ST MARINE DIVISION

  PELELIU, PALAU ISLANDS

  16 SEPTEMBER 1944

  By nightfall on D-Day there were slightly more than 7,000 Marines ashore on Peleliu. The 1st and 5th Marine Regiments were hunkered do
wn just a few hundred yards inland from White and Orange Beaches, unable to press inland because of withering fire from Japanese machine guns. Efforts to penetrate further inland during the night were repulsed and at dawn of D+1 their positions were little changed.

  Late on D-Day, General Rupertus committed most of the 7th Marines—his reserve—and landed them in the vicinity of “the point.” But by the morning of D+1, they too were being held up by a series of well-fortified pillboxes on the ridge above them. With nearly the entire division now engaged, Rupertus sought a breakthrough.

  He ordered the 7th Marines to shift the orientation of their attack and seize the airfield. Major Gordon Gayle was acting commander of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines during the assault on the airfield. It would turn into a “run and gun” tank-infantry battle—a first for the Marines.

  MAJOR GORDON GAYLE, USMC

  1st Battalion, 7th Marines

  Peleliu, Palau Islands

  21 September 1944

  When I joined the Marine Corps, it was the size of the New York City police force. When the war was over, the Corps was half a million strong.

  We went to Guadalcanal in ’42, came out of New Guinea in ’43. We landed in New Britain and came out in May of ’44. It was hot, but not as hot as Peleliu.

  After we left New Britain and went down to Pavuvu, a ship came in with replacements. I went down to watch our people leave and watch the new people come off the ship, and the contrast was just mind-boggling. The veterans who were leaving to become the cadre of new units forming up were all thin, lean, sharp-eyed, and walked on their toes, and they were tan.

  The new guys coming off the ship were relatively white and heavy, walking on their heels. It was really one of the more impressive experiences that I had during the war. It wasn’t anything you could talk about, because you didn’t want to tell the troops that they didn’t look ready, but it made a terrific personal impression.

  My battalion landed on Peleliu in support of the two assault battalions of the 5th Regiment. The 5th Regiment was to land with the 1st Marines on their left and 7th Marines on the right.

  It didn’t surprise me that we were going to have bitter resistance. Some of the naval officers seemed to think that their bombardment had destroyed everything there and, Colonel Puller was told by the captain of his ship, “I’ll see you back here for dinner.”

  I went ashore in an Amtrac. And as we went in, you could see other LVTs burning on the beach. You could see Marines lying on the beach, and a lot of pandemonium.

  There were a lot of mines, and the Japanese had attempted to rig up log obstacles. The tetrahedrons were down on other beaches, but they weren’t on our beach. The obstacles didn’t create any particular problem of moving the tractors in or getting out of them and running to shore. It’s just that there was a fair amount of fire.

  I ordered my troops to move out as fast as they could. Our mission was to go through the two assault battalions and cross the airfield. And I told everybody, “Understand that the nice, comfortable trench that the Japanese dug alongside the airfield will be well registered by their guns, so don’t go there.”

  We expected the airfield to be defended in depth. And all of those expectations came true. We had been warned that they had tanks, and about mid-afternoon, the Japanese launched a tank and infantry attack across the airfield.

  I was in a bomb crater with my intelligence officer. I said, “Send our tanks after them.” I had a platoon of five Sherman tanks, and I sent them into the fight. And they just knocked the Japanese tanks apart, literally.

  We had to move as hard and fast as we could in the initial stages. As long as they were up on top of those ridges and looking down on us, we had to keep going.

  The significant tactical mistake that was made there, in my judgment, is that the character of the battle changed from a maneuver battle to a siege. General Rupertus never recognized that.

  He wanted us to hurry and finish it off. But we needed reserves, and we didn’t have them.

  You couldn’t see those caves. The Japanese were in them on both sides, shooting down. You had to go in there with tanks and shoot them up, and that’s what we finally wound up doing.

  It became pretty clear that before we landed at Peleliu, somebody at the highest levels in Japan had made the decision to change their tactics. Instead of banzai attacks, they wanted their troops on Peleliu to dig in, hang tough, extract the maximum price, and get the best results that they could.

  We captured thirteen Japanese military people out of 10,000. It was partially because of their stubbornness and how hard they resisted. They were tough fighters, and they obviously had a healthy respect for the Marines.

  When we went up north, we ran into a hill that had been a mine and was full of Japanese. We had to capture that hill.

  We had to get around it on the bottom and were being stopped by all the fire coming out of there. I prevailed upon Colonel Walt, who was executive officer of the regiment, to get a 155 mm gun, which we fired point-blank at 250 yards. We just pulverized the side of that hill and then we went in. That was the kind of fighting that had to be done. Fortunately, my regimental commander knew that. I never got pressured into charging some place where we weren’t ready to go.

  My battalion landed, covered, and then took the length of the airfield in two days. It took us a day to get across the causeway, which was 200 or 300 yards. Once we were on the other side, we advanced and covered that whole peninsula in the next two days with no opposition. But then when we got up to the north of the pocket, and started working down, if you made fifty yards in a day, you had a good day.

  The final cleanup assignment took until 16 October, when they relieved us. My 1st Battalion of the 7th Marines was the last battalion engaged. The island was actually secured, in my judgment, as soon as we captured the north end. After that, the enemy had no more reinforcement capability. Somebody suggested that we should simply run barbed wire, and designate “the pocket” as a POW enclosure. There was still the thought that the Marines ought to clean it out. And that’s why the campaign continued for another ten days.

  The debate over whether or not we needed to go to Peleliu is a very difficult one for me. I lost half my men and 60 percent of my officers there, so it’s hard to think that maybe we didn’t need to take the island.

  OPERATION STALEMATE

  1ST MARINE DIVISION

  PELELIU, PALAU ISLANDS

  19 SEPTEMBER 1944

  Major Gayle’s tank-infantry-tank battle at the airfield inflicted fifty-nine casualties on the Marines, but it proved fatal for nearly 900 Japanese.

  On D-Day, an F4F had belly-landed on the Japanese-held airfield while the Marines were landing. When Gayle’s Marines swept across the runways on 16 October, the body of the American pilot was still in the plane, slumped over the controls, dead. The pilot had evidently done a dead-stick landing and a sniper had shot him in the temple as his plane slid to a stop. By the fourth day, Marine Sherman tanks were operating well beyond the airstrip.

  After losing fifteen tanks in the “run and gun” battle at the airfield, the Japanese changed tactics and dug in their remaining tanks, using them like pillboxes at roadblocks. Even that didn’t change the outcome in a tank-to-tank fight. The Japanese light tanks on Peleliu had only half-inch armor and weighed three tons. The Sherman tank weighed ten times that much.

  The shells from the Marines’ Shermans were at first ineffective. One tank operator said he was using the standard anti-tank ammo, but the armor-piercing shells were going right through both sides of the Japanese tanks without detonating or causing much damage. Then he changed to high-explosive ammo that detonated much easier and got a “kill” with every hit. The same thing applied to the 2.75-inch bazookas the Marines brought up to the line.

  An SBD dive-bomber, returning from another mission, still had a 500-pound bomb while the tank battle was going on. The pilot dove on one of these tanks, plopped the 500-pound bomb right on top of the Japanese ta
nk, and vaporized it. The handful of Marine Sherman tanks wiped out a baker’s dozen of Japanese tanks.

  The outcome of the battle for the airfield did little to ease the pressure on the 1st Marines. Their regimental commander, Colonel Lewis “Chesty” Puller, pushed his Marines to move inland even though they were taking horrific casualties. Puller was already a legend—much in the mold of his cousin, General George Patton. His reputation for fearlessly engaging the enemy had grown on Guadalcanal, where he had been seriously wounded. Because his wounds hadn’t healed fully, he probably shouldn’t have been at Peleliu.

  Puller’s men paid a terrible price for his aggressiveness and Oldendorf ’s erroneous assumption that the Navy guns had already destroyed all of the Japanese targets on Peleliu. One of the many targets Oldendorf had missed was a large concrete blockhouse in the center of Puller’s zone of action. Puller lost thirty-five of his Marines, killed or wounded trying to take this hardened fortification.

  U.S. tanks on Peleliu.

  Finally, Major Ray Davis, the commander of Puller’s 1st Battalion, was able to call in fire from the USS Mississippi. The venerable battleship’s fourteen-inch guns quickly damaged the blockhouse enough that Davis’s men could kill the occupants with grenades, demolitions, and flame-throwers.

  The men who carried the explosives and flame-throwers were essential to victory for the Marines who fought their way ashore and across Peleliu’s steep coral escarpments. Eighteen-year-old PFC Fred Fox didn’t start out in the Marine Corps as a demolitions expert or as a flame-thrower man. But on Peleliu he learned just how valuable those skills could be.