Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  “Coming back for supper?” he called out cheerfully.

  “Why?” Puller growled.

  The skipper waved an airy hand shoreward.

  “Hell, everything’s done over there. You’ll walk in.”

  “If you think it’s so easy,” Puller snapped, “why don’t you come on the beach at five o’clock? We could have dinner together and maybe you could pick up a couple of souvenirs.”

  Then Spitfire’s commander went ashore, losing all of his communications amtracks on the way.

  “Playmate, this is Spider. Resistance moderate to heavy, I’d say. There are amtracks burning on the reef. Repeat: There are amtracks burning on the reef. Over.”

  “Spider, this is Playmate. Where are our front lines?”

  “Lines well inland on the right and center, but left of Spitfire is still on beach. They seem to be pinned down…. I’m going lower to try and see what’s to their front….”

  They were pinned down. The Marines of Captain George Hunt’s K Company, First, had come in jauntily singing, “Give My Regards to Broadway,” until the amtracks began to lurch and odd bumping, strangling noises against their sides signaled the arrival of Japanese mortars. The Marines fell silent, their faces paling beneath the outlandish streaking of their camouflage paint. Captain Hunt’s amtracks crunched ashore, his men jumped out—and they were struck from their left by a terrible enfilading fire.

  On that left stood The Point, a mass of coral rising 30 feet from the sea, a natural fort made of crevices, boulders and pinnacles, fortified at its base with five pillboxes of ferro-concrete, sprinkled with others protected by coral-and-concrete roofs six feet thick, and salted with spider holes. Within the pillboxes were heavy machine guns and one of them held a 47-millimeter antiboat gun.

  Even now that gun was dropping shells among the First Marines on the beaches. For The Point stood on the division’s extreme left or northern flank and it had the First’s landing zone clearly in view beneath it. Over a rocky corridor between The Point and the sea, the Japanese could launch a counterattack almost any time they chose. Clearly, The Point must fall.

  Captain Hunt ordered two platoons up against it. They turned left from the coconut grove and attacked. They were riddled. Hunt called battalion.

  “We’re pretty well shot up and there’s a gap between my two assault platoons. I’m throwing the first platoon in to take The Point. The goddam naval gunfire didn’t faze the Japs ! We need stretcher-bearers!”

  “All right, bub,” said Major William McNulty. “I’ll have L Company fill in the gap. I’ll send up everybody I can spare with stretchers.”

  But L Company did not plug the gap, nor did A or B Company from the First Battalion, nor were the stretchers able to reach the stricken during that incredible and impetuous assault which did, in fact, storm The Point.

  The wounded had to be taken out by amtracks running the gantlet from the sea. When they had departed, there were Captain Hunt and Lieutenant Bill Willis and 30 men—all alone atop The Point.

  “Playmate, this is Spider Two. Spider One has been shot down. Lonewolf is on the edge of the airfield in several places. Mustang making good progress, too, but resistance is heavy behind Spitfire’s beaches. Over.”

  “Spider Two, this is Playmate. How are things on the reef now? Over.”

  “Damned bad! Boy, the stuff’s sure hitting the fan now! There’s about twenty amtracks burning off the Spitfire beaches and I make about eighteen off Mustang’s. They got that one enfiladed, too.”

  “Spider Two, th— ”

  “Ow, I see ‘em! Six of f ‘em with a field gun! Request permission to attack. Over.”

  “Spider Two, this is Playmate. Your request: Negative.”

  “Please? Just one little strafing?”

  “Spider Two, this is Playmate. Negative. Repeat: Negative. You’re supposed to be an aerial observer. Stay in the air and observe. Over.”

  “Oh, goddamit it to hell….”

  On the heavy cruiser Portland a gunnery officer had also seen the Japanese field piece. He watched through glasses as a great steel shutter swung open in the face of a hill, as tiny figures trundled out a gun, as it fired, as the men pulled it back inside the cave and the steel door swung shut again.

  The gunnery officer had the target spotted.

  “Fire!”

  A full salvo of eight-inch armor-piercers screamed shoreward. The hillside flashed and smoked.

  The shutter swung open again.

  The field piece was run out again, it spoke again, it was withdrawn again.

  Four times more Partland’s eight-inchers breathed flame and smoke rings, four times more the cave-gun fired, and at last the gunnery officer shook his head in grieving futility and said:

  “You can put all the steel in Pittsburgh on that thing and still not get it.”

  From the division’s right Sank—the beaches south of the airfield where the Seventh Marines were landing, where Spider Two had seen all those burning amtracks—Colonel Herman Henry Hanneken sent the command ship that most ominous message of an amphibious invasion:

  “Assault waves are wading ashore.”

  The Seventh had come in to a deadly subsea garden sown with antiboat mines, antiboat barriers, antitank mines, and antitroop mines—above which sprouted a wicked black tumbleweed of barbed wire—and all planted to channel attacking boats and wading Marines into preregistered mortar and artillery fire.

  From reef to water, smoke and flames rose from burning amtracks while ammunition popped around them. The white coral sands of the beaches ashore were pocked with shellholes and these were filled with Marines in mottled green dungarees and helmets. And there were limbs and heads and pieces of flesh flying through the air; there were men staggering about in the last throes of death, their lives spouting crimson from severed faces or stumps of arms; there were files of men erased from sight in the water by obliterating shellbursts; there were bullets clipping the wavelets and Marines falling with heavy splashes among them.

  Then there were Sherman tanks coming ashore, plodding carefully in the wake of the few remaining amtracks, stopping whenever the amtracks became waterborne in coral potholes, waiting until a safe path could be scouted. The Shermans got ashore, only to be blocked by beach mines.

  One of the tank commanders unbuttoned his turret. He scouted the mined beach on foot. He led his tank through it, trailing toilet paper to lead the others through. They lumbered inland at the point where the Seventh’s left flank joined Colonel Harold “Bucky” Harris’ Fifth or Lonewolf in the center.

  “Playmate, this is Spider Three. Enemy tanks forming in Target Area 134-R…. Enemy tanks supported by infantry crossing airfield to attack Lonewolf…”

  The Japanese tanks came in a cavalry charge.

  They emerged from a cluster of concrete buildings which formed the Japanese headquarters and barracks area on the northern edge of the airfield. They approached as Japanese artillery on the ridge to their rear began to fire, and when they reached the edge of the airfield, the drivers stepped on the gas and the tanks sped over the crushed-coral surface at 30 miles an hour, leaving the infantry far behind. They charged on a southwest diagonal for the left-center juncture of the First and Fifth Marines.

  They went whizzing past the front of the Second Battalion, First, about a baker’s dozen of them, their little wheels spinning within their treads, their guns barking. Snipers rode their engines or were slung to the rear in camouflage nets. They took a terrible flanking fire. Snipers were picked off one by one and the men in the nets shot to death and left lolling like dolls stuffed in Christmas stockings.

  One tank butted a Marine amtrack in its rear, but another amtrack butted the Japanese rear. Caught, the Japanese tankers popped out of their turret and were cut down by rifle fire.

  Then the Marine tanks arrived, an American rocket-firing plane swooped low over the airfield, and the work of destroying the Japanese tanks was begun.

  The Japanese infantry, wit
nesses to that annihilated charge, withdrew.

  The Seventh Marines moved east across the island, and turned to their right to face south and close off Peleliu’s southern tip.

  The Fifth Marines drove across the southern edge of the airfield to reach the east coast.

  The First was able to keep its right flank tied in with the Fifth’s left, but its own left was splintered into three segments.

  Night began to fall on Peleliu, and up on The Point, where K Company was still cut off, Lieutenant Willis whispered to Captain Hunt:

  “There’s one thing that can be said for our situation. Well be able to kill some more of the bastards.”

  That night they did not kill as many as they thought they would, for the single thrust that the enemy made was quickly repulsed. Hunt thought it was only a sharp probing attack.

  In the morning, Hunt found that the probing attack had actually been a skillful infiltration-in-force—and all along the line the Marines could sense that the Japanese on Peleliu seemed a breed vastly different from their brothers of Guadalcanal and New Britain.

  Four days?

  It looked more like forty.

  18

  It was the Seventh Marines who were first to test the tenacity of Japan’s new defensive fighter. On the blazing hot morning of September 16, the Seventh’s First and Third Battalions began their drive to clean out southern Peleliu.

  They were contested by the elite 3rd Battalion, 15th Infantry, which Colonel Nakagawa had left behind, and all the way they encountered copious supplies of those targets which the bombardment force claimed to have exhausted. Pillboxes, case-mates, bunkers, rifle pits, trenches, and here and there a blockhouse—they were still standing, still spitting death and defiance. If they had not been fixed to fire seaward over the eastern beaches, the ordeal of the Seventh to the south might have rivaled the slaughter impending in the north. But the Marines were able to strike at the Japanese rear and flanks.

  All the while the enemy stayed holed-up. Soon the Marines found themselves harassed by the tactic of “passive infiltration” which General Inoue had recommended in his training plan. Swarming along their underground tunnels, the Japanese reoccupied pillboxes which the Marines thought they had knocked out. They attacked the Marines from the rear. They popped up out of unsuspected cavemouths. Where they held high ground, they ran out entrances on one side of their ridge while the Marines pumped explosives or swished flame into it. Then they ran back in again and resumed fighting.

  The attack south became a grinding, three-day push, but the Seventh’s two battalions gradually herded the enemy before them into a pair of tiny, pillbox-studded promontories. It was here on the third day that Pfc. Arthur Jackson launched a one-man attack. He charged pillbox after pillbox, spraying automatic fire, hurling white phosphorous grenades and explosives brought up by other Marines, moving from point to point in an astonishing singlehanded foray which wiped out 12 pillboxes and brought death to 50 Japanese—as well as the Medal of Honor and a lieutenant’s commission to Pfc. Jackson. On the afternoon of September 18, the surviving Japanese jumped in the water in hopes of swimming to the islets on the Peleliu lobster-claw’s lower prong. They were picked off by riflemen. Colonel Hanneken reported to General Rupertus:

  “The Seventh Marines’ mission on Pelelius is completed.”

  In the first light of September 16 Captain Hunt’s men on The Point beat off the Japanese attack launched by the force which had infiltrated during the night. They hung on to their vital height until other Marines reached them and Captain Hunt’s band was firmly tied into the line.

  In the meanwhile, the front of the First and Fifth Marines was plugged and straightened everywhere and the two regiments wheeled across the northern edge of the airfield to face the Umurbrogal rising above it.

  The Marines crossed the airfield with the temperature at 110 degrees. Heat rose from the surface of the runways in shimmering, visible waves. Bullets hummed among the Marines and struck them down. They went across standing up—for there was no place to hide on this cruel table-top—and they walked or ran, scattered, hundreds of men, but each to himself alone. Men were falling of water poisoning, sickened by water floated ashore in oil drums from which the oil had not been thoroughly cleansed. All along this line steadily straightening from west to east and swinging north there rose the shrill calls of “Corpsman! Corpsman!” and the hoarser cries for blood plasma or water, the lesser calls for salt tablets.

  Amtracks answering these calls had to run the gantlet of the reverberating hell which Colonel Nakagawa’s concealed guns were making of the airfield. They had to go careening up Purple Heart Run from the beach to the airport, zigzagging wildly over Silver Star Run from airfield to ridge.

  At the end of the day the line was straight. But the Umurbrogal was not yet quite reached, although the Marines had already a hint of the confidence of the men who held it. They had found a Japanese propaganda leaflet, which said:

  American brave soldiers!

  We think you much pity since landing on this island. In spite of your pitiful battle we are sorry that we can present only fire, not even good water. We soon will attack strongly your Army. You have done bravely your duty.

  Now, abandon your guns, and come in Japanese military with white flag (or handkerchief), so we will be glad to see you and welcome you comfortably as we can well.

  There were no takers.

  “There they are! They’re comin’ in at us!”

  It was ten o’clock at night, and the cries of alarm rose all over The Point. They rose as 350 Japanese charged furiously at Captain Hunt’s men, now supported by Marines on the right as well as with mortar and artillery fire and the illumination of naval flares.

  “Give ‘em hell!” Hunt bellowed. “Kill every one of the bastards!”

  “Klopf! Cut loose! Fire until I tell you to stop.”

  “LaCoy, LaCoy—”

  “Yes?”

  “Let’em have it! Traverse the whole line and keep firing!”

  “Kill! Kill!”

  “Artillery falling short!”

  “Goddamit, Klopf! Lift the range 200 yards.”

  “Short rounds! We’re raising it now!”

  “Who’s there, who’s there?”

  “It’s LaBerge, LaBerge.”

  “Who’s there, I say—I’ll shoot!”

  “It’s LaBerge, goddamit, don’t you know me? I’m LaBerge!”

  Bang!

  “Are you satisfied now, you son of a bitch, you did shoot me?”

  “They’re coming around the flank in the water! Bring that gun down to the beach.”

  “LaCoy—drop some rounds along the beach 50 yards in front of us.”

  “There they are, there they are—let ‘em have it!”

  “They’re duckin’ in the niches! Don’t let ‘em get away. Use thermite grenades!”

  “Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus, lookit ‘em. Lookit ‘em burn! Even in the water…. Y’hear ‘em?”

  After the last ammunition belt had gone off like a string of firecrackers, after the last scream had subsided, there were no more sounds of battle on The Point. Captain Hunt’s Marines had held. Of 235 who had landed on September 15, there were 78 left on the morning of September 17 where K Company was relieved.

  19

  On the Sunday morning of September 17 the southern third of Peleliu—where the island is broadest and the airfield is located —was in American hands. The Seventh Marines were cleaning out what few enemy remained within this sector, while above them the Fifth Marines began to move up the east coast to the mouth of the lower peninsula or prong and the First Marines struck headlong at the Umurbrogal.

  The First attacked across a three-battalion front. On the left the Third Battalion had good going along West Road running like a corridor between sea on the left, Umurbrogal on the right. They had to slow down. They were outdistancing the First Battalion on their right.

  One of those enormous blockhouses missed by the bombardment forc
e had halted the First Battalion. It had reinforced concrete walls four feet thick and was supported by 12 surrounding pillboxes and a maze of tunnels. The Marines marked time while old Mississippi steamed in to hurl her 14-inch armor-piercers and high-capacity shells into it. The blockhouse shuddered and began to fly apart. Those Japanese who attempted to escape it were cut down. The Marines of the First Battalion rolled through the remaining pillboxes and fought through a tiny dense jungle. They came to the ridges.

  On their right, the Second Battalion was the first to reach the Umurbrogal’s outpost hills. They went up against Hill 200, while the Japanese field pieces ran in and out of cover to strip them of supporting Shermans and amtanks, to knock out the amtracks coming up with supplies, and then to fire point-blank among the climbing riflemen, even then being raked with small-arms fire.

  Up, up, up, fighting in an oven of 112 degrees, climbing the cruel slashing coral, clawing over razorbacks, flopping behind boulders to gasp for breath, shinnying up the pinnacles, rolling down steep inclines to escape the bullets and grenades, crawling back up it again to re-form and attack once more, and all around the clanging hell of the enemy artillery and mortars, the cries for water and plasma, and over and over again: “Pass the word for stretcher-bearers, pass the word for stretcher-bearers.”

  But they went up, sometimes having to slide back down to retake “fallen” caves which had erupted with killing fire again. They took the first height of the Umurbrogal, and found that to their left above them was another. It was Hill 210, just that much higher than Hill 200, and down from it plunged a terrible rain, while up from the wooded ravine between ridges flashed a matching fire.

  The men of the Second Battalion, First, “dug in.” That is, they gathered coral rocks and piled them between themselves and the enemy fire. Then they lay down on the unyielding rock, feeling its intense heat through dungarees slashed and torn by the ordeal of their climb.