War Stories II

by Oliver L. North

  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.

  OPERATION STALEMATE

  1ST MARINE DIVISION

  PELELIU, PALAU ISLANDS

  26 SEPTEMBER 1944

  The Japanese weren’t the only enemy on Peleliu. The steamy island offered no respite from the sun. By noon every day the temperature would rise to between 110 and 120 degrees.

  And in this heat, water was precious. It was also scarce. Forced to bring in their own water supplies, the Marines pumped a whole lot of it into fifty-five-gallon gasoline drums. But the drums hadn’t been washed out and the water was so contaminated that only the most desperate Marines drank it. Instead, they looked for canteens on the bodies of the dead, or for stagnant pools as they moved forward. They scraped the green scum from the surface of the water in a swampy area and drank that, carefully coaxing as much of the filthy water as possible into their canteens.

  Along with the heat and thirst, Peleliu’s terrain was yet another nightmare for the Marines. The Japanese took every advantage of every wrinkle in the earth, each furrow, rock, and cave. Some of the caves and tunnels were four or five stories deep, and many had electric lights, furniture, cots, and supplies to help the defenders outlast the Americans. The Japanese were dug in so well that it was impossible to see them or even where their machine gun fire was coming from as it laced into the Marines.

  To the attackers, it seemed as though every bunker or fighting position had been laid out so that others could support the one being assaulted. If the Marines got close enough to engage a bunker, cave, or blockhouse, at least two more emplacements opened up from the flanks.

  The most difficult terrain to maneuver through on Peleliu was a hilly region called the Umurbrogols, a series of high, zigzagging coral ridges, full of natural caves and dangerous cliffs. The drive was halted for a month in the Umurbrogol area, which the Americans came to call Bloody Nose Ridge.

  Twenty-five-year-old Captain Everett Pope from Milton, Massachusetts, came to know the area well. Colonel Puller had ordered Pope, the C Company commander, to seize Hill 100, a strategic piece of terrain on Bloody Nose Ridge. Just after noon on 20 September, Captain Pope led ninety Marines—all that remained of his reinforced company that had numbered 235 on D-Day—into the attack on Hill 100. The temperature was already over 105 degrees as they started up the slope.

  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 i
nstinct 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.

  OPERATION STALEMATE

  1ST MARINE DIVISION

  PELELIU, PALAU ISLANDS

  28 SEPTEMBER 1944

  After Peleliu’s airstrip was under American control, Marine Corsairs began to use the field. The aircraft would take off, bomb, strafe, or drop napalm and land again all in the space of five minutes. Many times the pilots wouldn’t even bother to raise their landing gear.

  After a week of furious battle, General Roy Geiger came ashore to assess the situation. By the time the amphibious assault force commander made his visit to Peleliu, Puller’s 1st Marines had taken 2,300 casualties. Despite Puller’s objections, Geiger decided that the depleted regiment had to be pulled off of the island. The 1st Battalion had suffered a horrific 70 percent dead or wounded. Ray Davis, its commander, would be awarded the Navy Cross.

  General Geiger replaced the 1st Marines with a regimental combat team from the U.S. Army’s 81st Infantry Division, the “Wildcats,” at the end of that terrible first week. Using bazookas, tanks, and flame-throwers, the fresh troops broke the back of the Japanese defenses, though organized resistance didn’t end until 13 October.

  After seventy-two grueling days, the 5th and 7th Marine Regiments were finally withdrawn and rejoined the 1st Marines on Pavuvu.

  Before committing ritual suicide at the end of October, Colonel Nakagawa sent a final message for Tokyo: “CHERRY BLOSSOM. CHERRY BLOSSOM. CHERRY BLOSSOM.” The meaning: “Peleliu has fallen.”

  The victory had come at a ghastly cost. Nearly 600 soldiers, sailors, and Marines received awards for heroism. But the 1st Marine Division suffered a total of 6,500 casualties and the Army lost another 3,000. And for the Japanese it was even worse. Of the 10,000 troops of the original garrison, fewer than a hundred were alive at the end. In April of 1947, two and a half years after the battle for Peleliu ended, thirty-four Japanese soldiers surrendered. They still couldn’t believe that the war was over.

  Decades after the Battle of Peleliu, debate continues as to whether the United States really needed to fight the Japanese for the island. There are those who hold to the original premise that an unsecured Peleliu was a threat to MacArthur’s flank and would have made the Allied thrust northward to Japan vulnerable.

  Others think it wasn’t necessary. They believe that the U.S. had already driven the Japanese fleet from the island waters and that any air threat from Peleliu could have been ameliorated by regular bombing of the airfield. According to this argument, the 10,000 Japanese troops on Peleliu were no more of a threat than the 120,000 isolated Japanese troops rotting at Rabaul.

  Major General Roy Geiger

  Peleliu is sometimes called the “forgotten” battle of the Pacific war. But for those who fought there, it will always be remembered. Certainly no one questions the courage and determination of the Marines, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Coast Guardsmen who fought in this battle and eventually seized this Japanese fortress. One Marine said it best about the bitter struggle: “All gave some; some gave all.”

  CHAPTER 14

  “I HAVE RETURNED”: THE BATTLE OF LEYTE

  (OCTOBER 1944)

  U.S. 7TH FLEET

  VICINITY SURIGAO STRAIT

  NEAR THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS

  15 OCTOBER 1944

  The carnage in the Palau Islands did little to alter the short-term war plans for either the U.S. or Japan. Both sides were now locked into a bloody fight to the finish. For Tokyo there was only one choice: inflict as many casualties as possible on the Americans in hopes that the bloodletting might cause FDR to accept something less than unconditional surrender. It was a battle plan of utter desperation.

  In Washington, the costly battles for Tarawa and Saipan had already tempered any pretense of euphoria. Now, the Peleliu casualty figures were cause for the Joint Chiefs to contemplate the long-range consequences of invading the Home Islands. To the small handful who were aware of its potential, Peleliu was a good reason to consider the as yet untested atomic bomb as a preferable alternative to assaulting the emperor’s native soil.

  But all that was well into the future. In the near term, no one was prepared to suggest that MacArthur revise his plans for returning to the Philippines. Even before the fighting was done on Peleliu, Nimitz began shifting his subs, carriers, and surface forces south from the central Pacific to support the invasion of Leyte.

  In preparation for the operation, code-named King Two, American bombers struck Imperial air and naval bases on Formosa and Luzon repeatedly in order to minimize the effectiveness of any counter-attack against MacArthur’s invasion forces. By 11 October, when the ships of the 3rd Amphibious Force were ordered to sortie from the Admiralty Islands, the Japanese had lost air superiority over much of the southern Philippines. Two days later, the 7th Amphibious Force deployed from bases MacArthur had seized on the north coast of New Guinea.

  On 15 October, the two amphibious forces rendezvoused with the rest of the 3rd and 7th Fleets, just east of Leyte, at the north end of the Surigao Strait. The combined 738-ship armada included eight large aircraft carriers, twenty-four small carriers, a dozen battleships, two dozen cruisers, and 141 destroyers—making it the most powerful naval force ever assembled.

  Among those engaged in this extraordinary endeavor were some of the most famous names in the history of the U.S. Navy: Admiral “Bull” Halsey, commanding an abbreviated 3rd Fleet aboard the battleship New Jersey; Admiral Marc Mitscher, on the carrier USS Lexington; Rear Admirals Frederick Sherman, Ralph Davison, and Gerald Bogan; and Vice Admiral John S. McCain, the grandfather of Senator John McCain.

  Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, commander of the 7th Fleet, was also designated as the overall commander of the invasion operation. MacArthur, deployed aboard the cruiser Nashville, was little more than a passenger until he got ashore
—as he clearly intended to do as soon as possible. Halsey’s 3rd Fleet, though not under Kinkaid’s operational control, was nonetheless assigned the mission of providing cover for Kinkaid’s 7th Fleet and the landings by the amphibious forces. It was a command arrangement that would come to haunt the invaders.

  HQ 6TH RANGERS ASSAULT

  SULUAN AND DINAGAT ISLANDS

  PHILIPPINE ISLANDS

  18 OCTOBER 1944

  Though D-Day for the invasion of Leyte had been set by the Joint Chiefs for 20 October, operations ashore actually commenced on 17 October when the 6th U.S. Army Ranger Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Henry “Hank” Mucci, charged ashore on the islands of Suluan and Dinagat. Their mission: destroy the Japanese radar and communications facilities and anti-shipping artillery on the tiny spots of land that provided natural obstacles off Leyte’s landing beaches.

  Supported by carrier air strikes and naval gunfire, Mucci’s 500 Rangers made short work of the Japanese garrisons on both islands. On Dinagat, in a fashion reminiscent of Peleliu, the enemy had installed heavy artillery that could roll out of caves and fire at the approaching U.S. Navy ships. The guns were spiked in short order and despite lingering Japanese resistance, the Rangers set up beacons to guide the ships of the main landing force to their beaches. After securing the islands, the Rangers planted an American flag—the first to fly in the Philippines since Japan had taken the islands from the United States almost three years earlier.

  ABOARD USS NASHVILLE

  LEYTE GULF

  PHILIPPINE ISLANDS

  20 OCTOBER 1944

  For the next forty-eight hours after Mucci’s rangers seized the two little sentinel islands off Leyte, the landing beaches were pounded by the 7th Fleet’s battleships. Carrier aircraft bombed and strafed the beaches. Employing lessons learned from the assaults on the Marianas and Palau Islands, naval gunfire spotters in small aircraft overhead and aboard close-in destroyers and LCIs adjusted the fire of the battleships and cruisers until they were sure that every known target ashore had been hit at least four times.