by Bill Sloan
PRIVATE FIRST CLASS SAM SMODDY of the 8th Marines never had a chance to use the machine gun he’d been taught to handle during a three-month crash course. Something big and ugly like a mortar shell hit the tractor Smoddy was on just as he was stepping ashore on Saipan. It threw up masses of shrapnel, and pieces of it struck the eighteen-year-old farm boy high and low.
He saw that one of his best friends was killed, and he didn’t know where the rest of the guys went. All Smoddy knew was he was hit in the knees and shoulder. An explosion behind him knocked him forward, and then somebody gave Smoddy a stiff shot of morphine—enough to knock him out cold. When he woke up someone was trying to get him aboard a merchant ship. He got close to the side, and they threw over a cargo ladder for him to climb. Later he couldn’t remember how he did it, but he found out that if you were scared enough, you could climb almost anything.
As he reached the top of the ladder he got shot again. They laid him on the deck. Soon they had most of his clothes off. He had no money except for the silver dollar his grandfather had given him as a good-luck piece.
He wondered if his grandfather’s gift could be the reason he was still alive.
IT TOOK SERGEANT TOM TINSLEY more than six hours to find his way to the place where he was assigned. He didn’t know it at the time, but about 10 percent of the twenty thousand men who landed on the beach had been wounded or killed—and he thought he had seen most of them by now. He had picked his way through their scattered forms along the way to his assignment at the Regimental Message Center, where he was supposed to be in charge.
Because of the heavy fire, the 8th Marines—Tinsley’s regiment—had landed several hundred yards north of their assigned landing area. They had fought a flanking action down the beach to the south to hook up with the unit. A lot of the beaches were under fire, and the ones he crossed were filled with the blood of Marines and Japanese.
It was almost dark when Tinsley finally met the regimental executive officer, Colonel Jack Juhan. He wanted Tinsley to take him to the command post (CP) Tinsley had just left.
Tinsley explained to Juhan that the Japanese were laying artillery barrages up and down the beaches. They would fire one barrage, then move fifty or a hundred yards, and lay down another barrage. He had seen their barrages hit many wounded men again.
“What I’m telling you, sir,” he told the colonel, “is we’d better get moving!”
Tinsley and the colonel hadn’t gone far when they heard the whine of approaching shells. “I yelled at the colonel to take cover, and I made a dive for a hole,” Tinsley remembered. “I felt a sting in my right shoulder, but I never thought too much about it. I took the colonel to the CP, and both of us saw that I’d been hit, and the colonel shouted for a corpsman.”
The corpsman cleaned up Tinsley’s wound, but he had unwelcome news: the corpsman couldn’t remove the shrapnel, and one of the larger pieces was stuck in the bone. Tinsley was told he had to go to a hospital ship
But the hospital ship was full. Tinsley was assigned a bunk in a large room that must have contained at least fifty bunks. A doctor removed the shrapnel and told him he would be all right in a few days. The problem was that he would need to stay aboard the hospital ship on its cruise to Kwajalein Island and endure several days of moaning, crying, and dying of Marines. Burials at sea constantly interrupted his stay on deck: “There must have been hundreds of them, and my nerves were at a breaking point when the ship dropped anchor at Kwajalein.” As far as Tinsley was concerned, it was more than any sane person could take. Or so he thought.
They had told Tinsley that he would be sent back to Pearl Harbor for reassignment to another unit. But he desperately wanted to stay with his assigned unit. He had been aboard the hospital ship for about a week when an LST (landing ship, tank) anchored nearby and started loading smudge pots to take to Saipan. Tinsley boarded the LST that night and was headed for Saipan within the hour.
“It was peaceful just lying on deck, breathing fresh air without the sound of moaning, groaning, and dying,” Tinsley said. “I hoped to God I never witnessed another burial at sea.”
THE MARINES HAD been digging in on the beaches when the Japanese mounted a counterattack, aimed at where Colonel James Riseley, newly appointed commander of the 6th Marines, was trying to establish a command post on Red Beach 2. But the Marines were well prepared and cut the attackers down with machine guns and M-1 rifles.
Around noon two Japanese tanks came down from the foothills, but the commander of the tanks became confused and paused for a look-around. Marine rocket launchers and riflemen made short work of the tanks. A few minutes later three more tanks approached, again headed for Riseley’s command post. Two of the tanks were stopped well short of their target, but the third reached a point no more than fifteen yards from the CP before it was hit and disabled.
By 1300 Riseley estimated that 35 percent of the 6th Marines had become casualties, but the beachhead had been expanded to about four hundred yards. He sent an assault against the ridgeline ahead, which was heavily infested with Japanese mortars. It was thrown back with even heavier losses.
IN ADDITION TO being a radio operator, Private First Class Wayne “Twig” Terwilliger of the 2nd Tank Battalion held a gunner’s position with a .30-caliber machine gun armed with a periscope, and he thought he was in pretty good shape. As his tank rolled across the beach he spotted several Japanese. He squeezed the trigger and started to fire. Then the seven-passenger tank twisted and jerked to a stop, and he lost his aim.
“Hey, what the hell’s the matter?” he yelled.
Somebody said, “We’re stuck in a damn mud hole. We gotta get out of here!”
Twig abandoned the gun and climbed out of the tank. The island of Saipan stretched out before his eyes, and a Japanese tank was heading toward him. He saw dead Marines on the ground and some that maybe weren’t quite dead. He squeezed his eyes shut, and a scene from the past flashed before him.
It was a day game at Briggs Stadium in Detroit, and the New York Yankees were in town to play the Tigers, when the immortal Lou Gehrig came to bat. Twelve-year-old Terwilliger, a skinny, curly-haired kid, was watching the game with his father.
“We were in the right-field bleachers,” Terwilliger remembered, “when Gehrig took a big swing at the second or third pitch and busted the ball right at us. My dad said, ‘Here it comes! Here it comes!’”
The ball was headed straight at Twig. The only thing he could think to do was get the hell out of the way. At the last second he ducked, and somebody else caught the home-run ball. Twig would never forget how mad his father was when he didn’t catch it. Ivan Terwilliger played on a semipro baseball team when he wasn’t serving up drinks at a place he owned in Charlotte, Michigan, called the Dearborn Bar, and his son figured Ivan would’ve caught the ball if it killed him.
Now, six years later Terwilliger hit the shore at Saipan, manning a machine gun with a periscope he could no longer see through—so he ran. The Japanese tank was heading straight for him. An American tank fired at it, and the impact blew Twig’s helmet off.
The only thing he knew to do was duck under his own tank and try to hide: “It was what I’d done when that ball was headed straight toward me—and that’s what I did.”
At the last possible second the American tank knocked out the Japanese tank.
UNFORTUNATELY MANY OF the crewmen of amphibian tractors and tanks were having much the same problem. For the most part the scheme of employing amphibian tanks as land tanks and LVTs as overland troop-carrying vehicles was rapidly becoming a failure. They had neither the armor nor the armament to withstand the terrible pounding from Japanese artillery that could be expected in this phase of the assault. Most of the amphibians were underpowered and stopped by sand, trenches, holes, trees, and other minor obstacles, most of which a land tank could have negotiated with ease.
And once Amtracks and amphibious tanks were out of the water, their hulls were exposed, making them easy targets for enemy fire,
which their armor was too light to resist. On shore they were clumsy and slow. It was much healthier for troops to extricate themselves from these vehicles as rapidly as possible and find protection in whatever the terrain and vegetation offered.
On the 2nd Marine Division’s beaches the situation rapidly became impossible. Trees, shell holes, and even muddy patches of ground stopped some of the 2nd Armored Amphibian Battalion before they could even cross the beach. Between the beach and the tractor control line, twenty-eight of the vehicles—more than one-third the total number—were disabled and abandoned.
“We started out with fifteen tanks in our squad,” recalled Corporal Canara Caruth, the commander of Terwilliger’s tank, “but after the first day all we had left was five tanks that were still in running condition.” Caruth, who had grown up on a farm outside of Pampa, Texas, one of the driest spots in the Western Hemisphere, was amazed to see how wet the island was. “Saipan had had a lot of rain recently,” he said, “and it was literally covered with swamps.”
MARINE PRIVATE FIRST CLASS CHARLES PASE came from a small town in West Virginia called Thomas. It was about as “big as a minute” and way up in the Hill Country next to the Maryland border in Tucker County. When he got to high school he moved to Georgetown in Sussex County, Delaware, just a few miles from the Atlantic Ocean.
He came by his trade honestly. One of his older brothers had been a Marine in Peking, China, before World War II. Joseph Pase served with the Legation Guard and came back to the States in 1938. When they started drafting people a couple of years later, he decided to join the Army. They made him a first sergeant and sent him overseas to serve with the Philippine Scouts. The Japanese captured him at Corregidor, and nobody knew for several years whether he was alive or dead.
That brother was really the reason Pase joined the Marines. When Joe was finally released from the prisoner-of-war camp at war’s end, his overall health was so bad that he only survived for a couple more years.
Charles Pase had dropped out of high school at the start of his senior year with the avowed intention of joining the Marines. He was a little young for it, only sixteen, and he was working on a cattle ranch in southern Montana. On his seventeenth birthday in January 1943 he drove into Billings, Montana, to join up. Their quota of seventeen-year-olds had already been taken, so they told him that his best chance was to catch a bus down to Denver and sign up there, which is what he did.
Pase was sworn in on 16 February 1943 and went to Camp Elliott for special weapons training—the .50- and .35-caliber air-cooled machine guns, anti-aircraft guns, 75-millimeter antitank rifles, and various types of small hand weapons. In June 1943 he had been in the Marines for about five months when they bundled him up with fifteen hundred other new troops and said they were sending them to Guadalcanal on an old Dutch tramp steamer that had been converted to a troop ship.
“There was a five-inch gun on the fantail of this ship—and that was our armament,” he recalled. “The bunks were five high, and it was a very bare-bones kind of a troop ship. There were two latrines for the entire ship, and they were big, long, open latrines in the belly of the ship.”
They were fed twice a day. The morning meal was almost always either beans or SOS (“shit on a shingle”—the military nickname for creamed chipped beef on toast), and for the evening meal they sometimes had genuine meat of some kind. “I’m not sure what it was,” he said, “and I don’t want to guess.”
The Marine recruits did a lot of complaining about it, and they had another name for it too that was less complimentary. “But remember, this was right after the Depression,” Pase said, “and we had to admit that it was better than we ate before we joined the service.”
The troop ship never made it to Guadalcanal. It stopped at Noumea, New Caledonia, then moved on to New Zealand. Early one morning, when they had been out of Tonga about five or six days, they saw a smudge on the southwest horizon. The captain sounded general quarters, and the ship made a right about-face and headed back for Tonga as fast as it could go, about fifteen knots.
As the ship got closer, they were pretty sure it was the USS Tennessee. “As soon as the watchers found out she was on our side,” Pase said, “we turned around and headed to New Caledonia again. There were loud sighs of relief because the little five-inch gun that was the only weapon on board wouldn’t have reached very far if the ship had been Japanese.”
After narrowly avoiding a trip with Carlson’s Raiders, an elite special-ops team within the Marines, Pase traveled from New Caledonia down to Wellington, New Zealand, where he joined the 2nd Marine Division and put in some long, hard training from July to October 1943, when he once again set sail for… somewhere.
Pase and his shipmates had no idea where they were going, although they were sure the officers knew. All they were aware of was that they took off aboard a small troop transport called the USS Frederick Funston. Once they boarded ship and pulled out, they were told their destination would be an atoll in the Gilbert Islands. It was fortified but not expected to be any problem because the Navy promised they would have all the Japs killed by the time they got there.
The name of the atoll was Tarawa—and the Navy was dead wrong.
“Of course, the story is well known,” Pase said later, “that the Marines were unable to cross the reef with most of the boats, and the men had to walk from the outer reef four or five hundred yards, completely unprotected from Japanese machine gunfire all the way to the beach. We were still close enough that with our field glasses we could see what was going on, and it was a very awful thing.”
They watched the lines of Marines climb out of the Higgins boats as they worked up onto the reef and then try to walk ashore. Then the men started to disappear. Hundreds of them were dropping into the water. Pase and the others couldn’t see the blood, of course, but they knew what was happening. The men were being picked off by machine guns. The watchers could see the bullets hitting the water like raindrops.
“It made us feel sick because all of a sudden it became abundantly clear that the Navy had not been able to do all the things they talked about,” Pase said. “We were going to go against a contested beach with absolutely no cover whatsoever.”
As luck would have it, on the afternoon of the second day Pase and the others got the word that they were to go ashore, but not where the other Marines had been gunned down. They landed on a small atoll facing the main island of Tarawa and set up their machine guns to stop the Japanese from retreating.
A lot of Japanese had already escaped, but once Pase and the others got there and set up their lines, they pretty well closed the beach to any more Japs. “A lot of them tried it, but we stopped all of them,” Pase said. “That was my initiation into fire. I was seventeen years and ten months old. And on top of everything else, I had tonsillitis so bad, I could hardly walk. When I went ashore at Tarawa I could barely stand up, but oddly enough, after I got ashore I don’t remember the tonsillitis at all. There were other things happening that wiped that out completely.”
Pase’s group, having been spared the casualties of the other units that landed on the main island, were given the job of burying the dead.
On that three-hundred-acre island there were some six thousand dead bodies that had been laying out in the sun for close to a week. “I can’t remember a lot of it,” Pase said, “except these sturdy Gilbert Islanders working with my platoon, collecting pieces of humans and moving them off.” If somebody found a leg, they tried to tell if it was an American leg or a Japanese leg, he noted. If it was an American leg, they put it on one pile. If it was a Japanese leg, they threw it in a trench and covered it up. For a kid of seventeen it was a rude awakening as to what war was really like. By the time Pase boarded ship for that quick run to Hawaii, nearly all the glamour of war against the Empire of Japan had pretty well worn off.
His next assignment was Saipan. “But this time the Japanese tried to outsmart us. They let the first wave or two get in,” Pase said, “and then they
started shelling anything that moved in to reinforce them. The beach master—who was in charge of everything on the beach—saw what was happening and, after losing a bunch of Amtracks, said, ‘That’s enough of that. We’re closing the beach down. There will be no more reinforcements going in this afternoon. We know the Marines that are in place will hang on. We’ll get to them first thing in the morning.’
“They closed the beach down solid,” Pase said, “and they refused to let us—and our guns—get in there. So we lay there all night, bobbing up and down in those Amtracks, seasick as dogs.” Everyone in the group was fairly seaworthy and had been at sea for a long time, so nobody was supposed to get sick. “But believe me,” said Pase, “after you’ve been smelling those diesel fumes and vomit and carbon dioxide gas, everybody got sick!”
The next morning a troop ship happened along, and they paused long enough to feed the guys huddled in the Amtrack breakfast. Those who could eat did so, and they topped it off with ice cream. Everybody got at least one scoop before they got back in the Amtrack and headed for the beach.
This time they made it. “We lost a lot of men on the beach at Saipan,” said Pase. “But thank God, it was nothing like Tarawa.”
SOMETIMES THE AMPHIBIANS—“AMPHIBS,” the guys called them—that made up the 773rd Amphibious Tractor Battalion seemed to have a mind of their own. Such was the case of the Texas Tornado and the three young Army men from Texas who made up its crew. At age nineteen Private James Fulbright had put aside a college career at Abilene Christian College to become captain of the Tornado. Privates Paul Stauffer and Dale Brown were the crew.
The trio had dodged bullets while helping to unload about eight thousand Marines on the shores of Saipan as a firefight between American and Japanese forces raged around them. Now the melee was over as Fulbright drove back into the water and headed for the ship. Each amphib could carry up to twenty-five fully armed Marines plus the crew of three with no problem.
