Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu

by Jim McEnery

  In my case, that was five clips that held five rounds apiece on each side of my belt. That came to fifty-five rounds total, including the clip in my rifle. Some of the guys who’d been shooting at phantoms those first two nights ashore had considerably less.

  “Conserve your ammo,” Lieutenant Adams told us as we started out along the beach road. “When we make contact with the enemy, don’t waste a single round. Make every shot count. Use your bayonets whenever you can.”

  By now, almost everybody in the company was down in the mouth and moping. Some guys started talking about Bataan and Corregidor in the Philippines and comparing our sorry situation to the one those poor devils had faced three or four months ago.

  A private in the K/3/5 mortar section was walking beside me when we moved out that morning. He had an expression on his face that looked like somebody had just kicked him in the nuts. “Oh Jesus, Mac,” he said, “you think we’ll ever get off this damn island?”

  He must’ve asked me that same question at least a hundred times over the next four months. I always tried to give him a positive answer, even though sometimes I wasn’t sure I believed it myself.

  This was definitely one of those times.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I told him. “We’ll be fine.”

  ROUGHLY AN HOUR into the march, the road along the beach led us just north of the airfield, which was to our left, and still within sight of the water to our right. It had been quiet all the way so far with no sign of enemy activity.

  Then, all at once, we saw a submarine surface out in the channel maybe a hundred yards from shore.

  “That’s a Jap sub!” somebody yelled. “Hit the deck!”

  We did exactly that, but like the Zeros that had flown over us twice before, the sub paid no attention to us. It opened fire toward the airfield with its one deck gun, and we could hear the shells whizzing over our heads. We could also hear the explosions as the shells hit off to the south. The sub kept firing for two or three minutes. Then it moved away and slipped out of sight under the waves.

  I almost felt like laughing. Here I was in an infantry rifle platoon, and the first and only Jap I’d seen was flying over me in a Zero at treetop level. Now I’d just come under fire—well, sort of—from a Jap submarine. But I still hadn’t seen a single enemy soldier on the ground. It all seemed nutty as hell to me, and I couldn’t help wondering what the odds were of something like that happening.

  “Okay, the sub’s gone,” Lieutenant Adams said. “Show’s over. Let’s move out.”

  We brushed ourselves off and started marching west again. We continued on for a couple of miles until we were ordered to stop and start setting up a new defensive perimeter near an outcropping of land called Lunga Point, where the Lunga River emptied into the sea.

  From there, our Fifth Marines perimeter would be tied in a lot more securely with the lines of the First Marines. The Fifth’s lines ran along a ridge and through some coconut plantations, but the First’s were mostly in the jungle. At least we were both in better positions now to protect the airfield and hold our ground if the Japs decided to attack us with something bigger than a submarine.

  And, sure enough, they did.

  Their planes came first, and since there weren’t any American ships left to target, they concentrated on the airfield they’d given up and our troop concentrations. It hadn’t taken them long to realize a couple of things. First, our carriers were long gone. Second, until the airport was finished, we wouldn’t have any planes of our own to fight back with.

  At the moment, all we had to protect the airfield were a few outdated 90-millimeter antiaircraft guns and a couple of searchlights. Our .30-caliber machine guns in K/3/5 and the other infantry companies were about as effective as peashooters against enemy bombers. What few 50-calibers we had were with the Third Battalion weapons company a considerable distance away.

  The number of Jap planes in the formations that targeted the airfield ranged from five or six to a couple of dozen. They’d aim a few bombs at our positions in passing, but they saved most of what they had for the airfield. We were well dug-in and had pretty good cover from the coconut palms, so we hardly had any casualties to speak of.

  But the bombings jangled our nerves and kept us on edge. Especially the ones at night. After dark, they’d send over just one plane at a time. The pilot would come in slow and leisurely, like he didn’t have a care in the world. He must’ve known we didn’t have a damn thing bigger than a .30-caliber or a BAR to fire at him. He’d circle around for a while, then drop one bomb and fly away. A couple of minutes later, another plane would show up and go through the same routine.

  The thing that hurt worst was they kept us awake most of the night. Plus they were such arrogant, infuriating sons of bitches. They knew there was nothing we could do against them. It was like they were just toying with us and getting a big kick out of it. We called all the Jap pilots by the same name—“washing-machine Charlie.”

  About 1 AM one morning, I heard a frustrated Marine cussing the third or fourth low-flying “Charlie” of the night from a couple of foxholes away.

  “Damn you, you asshole!” he yelled. “I’d give a hundred-dollar bill for thirty seconds with a .50-caliber machine gun right now!”

  I knew exactly how he felt.

  IN BETWEEN AIR raids, we did finally get something to eat.

  As far as I remember, the first time we had what you’d consider a full meal was late on the afternoon of August 10 (D-plus-3). Up to that point, the only chow I’d had was a few captured Nip candy bars. But that evening, I got a mess kit full of boiled rice with some dried fish mixed in and a can of tangerines. Naturally, it was all Japanese.

  The rice was okay, and it was filling, but the tangerines were really great. I don’t think I ever ate anything before or since that tasted so good. Of course, the fact that I’d gone over three and a half days with almost no food probably had a lot to do with how much I enjoyed them.

  With the small amount of edible stuff—mainly just coffee—that had been unloaded from the ships, plus the large supply of Jap rice our guys had found stored near the airfield, we supposedly had enough food to last us about fourteen days. That was only figuring on two meals a day, though. Like I said earlier, our breakfasts were at least 90 percent black coffee—no cream, no sugar—and there was no such thing as lunch.

  By this time, some of our guys were getting fairly adept at busting open coconuts. And God knows, there were enough of those. According to the rumors we heard, the Japs were living almost totally on coconuts, now that they’d lost their rice supplies. I can tell you for sure we didn’t feel sorry for them.

  The one big break we got in the food situation during those first couple of weeks came in the form of a steer that wandered into our area. For several days, we watched it grazing in a grassy open space down below the ridge where we were set up. None of us had had a bite of real meat since we’d left the troopship.

  “Look at all that beef on the hoof,” one of the guys in my platoon finally said. “Every time I see that beast, my imagination runs wild, and I think I smell steaks cooking.”

  “Well, hell, let’s shoot the son of a bitch and have a barbecue,” somebody else said. “I bet I can drop him from here.”

  As far as I remember, we didn’t take a vote of any kind on this suggestion, but a few seconds later three or four of my platoon mates raised their ’03s and started taking pot shots at the steer, more or less in unison. At least one of them hit the steer, and it fell over in its tracks without making a sound. It was still kicking a little when a half-dozen of us ran down and grabbed it and dragged it back to our lines.

  We had to cook the steer in daylight because there was a strict ban on fires at night, and instead of barbecuing it, we cut it up in chunks and boiled it in some twenty-gallon GI cans. The Marines who’d done the killing, skinning, and butchering were surprisingly generous with the meat. I think everybody in K Company got a chunk or two, and we even let some of the guys i
n I Company have a taste.

  To me, no prime filet mignon in a fancy restaurant ever tasted as good.

  WITH FOOD BEING so scarce, a lot of the guys in the Third Battalion, Fifth, started feasting on rumors—and there were some wild ones going around. One story that made the rounds was about a patrol that came in after half a day in the woods and told an intelligence officer they’d found a batch of cosmetics and toilet articles belonging to women being held by the Japs.

  The officer immediately got on the phone to division head quarters and asked for permission to organize a rescue mission to free the women.

  “A fat lot of good freeing them would do an old fart like you,” division told him. “Forget it and stay where you are.”

  But after what took place on the evening of August 12 (D-plus-5), a Marine would’ve had to be totally crazy to go chasing off into the no-man’s-land to the west to check out a rumor.

  What happened on that date to a twenty-five-man Marine patrol led by Lieutenant Colonel Frank Goettge also didn’t leave us much time—or stomach—for thinking about food.

  Those invisible Japs we’d been looking for behind every bush for the past five days were about to get all too real.

  ON THE AFTERNOON of D-plus-5, word reached our regimental headquarters by way of a captured Jap sailor that a group of enemy soldiers was willing to surrender if the Marines would send out some troops to liberate them and guide them back to our lines.

  As I understand it, Colonel Goettge’s patrol included quite a few guys in intelligence, and they’d already been planning a reconnaissance mission into the area west of our Lunga Point perimeter, where most of the Japs on the island were allegedly concentrated.

  Since Geottge and his guys were going into the same area where these Japs that claimed they wanted to surrender were, the brass told him to try to make contact with them.

  I’ve heard that some of our officers—including Geottge himself—fell for this surrender story hook, line, and sinker. Geottge really believed his men were on some kind of humanitarian mission because the Japs were supposed to be starving and some of them badly injured. Somebody even claimed to have seen a white flag flying above one of the Jap positions.

  Anyway, Goettge took along the assistant First Division surgeon, Lieutenant Commander Malcolm Pratt, to help those that were hurt. He also took one of a handful of language officers in the division to serve as a translator.

  The patrol started out just as it was getting dark. This was a silly thing to do in itself because they couldn’t see what they were heading into. It was black as pitch out there. Lots of clouds and no moon. All the guys were packed into a single Higgins boat for the short trip along the coast, which was another dumb move. An enemy machine gun or a couple of well-placed grenades could’ve wiped out the whole lot of them before you could bat your eyes.

  I guess because they were so convinced the Nips were going to welcome them with open arms, the only weapons the Marines had were rifles and pistols. There wasn’t a single BAR or machine gun among them. They didn’t even take along any grenades.

  The Goettge patrol was nothing but one big, terrible series of mistakes. All of us were naive as hell at that point, but as green as some of our officers were, they should’ve known better.

  As time went on, we’d learn the hard way in the Pacific that Japs never surrendered. To them, surrender was the worst thing they could imagine, and they’d a whole lot rather die than disgrace their family by doing it. In fact, thousands of them committed suicide when they were surrounded and trapped just to keep from surrendering.

  But we didn’t know anything about that in those first days of combat. We didn’t know how sneaky and bloodthirsty the bastards were, either.

  The whole thing with the Goettge patrol was a ruse—a carefully laid trap.

  Goettge and his men walked straight into an ambush. Only three of the twenty-five Marines escaped alive. The rest were slaughtered before they could get off the beach where they landed. Then the Japs entertained themselves by chopping up the bodies into little pieces.

  One of the guys who survived said the last thing he saw early the next morning, when he glanced back at the beach where the massacre took place and swam for his life, was “swords flashing in the sunlight.”

  TWO MORNINGS LATER, after the three survivors dragged themselves back to our lines and the story of what happened got around, Third Battalion headquarters sent a bunch of patrols into the area where the ambush had taken place. As soon as it was good daylight, Lieutenant Adams called me over and assigned my eight-man rifle squad to one of the sectors to be checked out by these patrols.

  We were also supposed to look for an F4F Wildcat fighter that had gone down and bring out the pilot if he was still alive. We never found a trace of the plane or pilot, and after what we did find, we forgot all about them.

  “Be damn careful out there, Mac,” the lieutenant said. “Don’t take any unnecessary chances.” Then he paused, looked me straight in the eye, and added, “Don’t take any prisoners, either.”

  “No chance of that,” I said. “We don’t need no extra mouths to feed.”

  Every guy in my squad was mad as hell about what had happened, and so was I. We were itching for some kind of payback. By now, it was the sixth day since we’d landed, and so far we hadn’t even seen a Jap on the ground, much less had a chance to take a shot at one. I think most of us hoped this would be the day we did.

  We knew one thing for sure. If we found the murdering bastards, they wouldn’t have any luck pretending to surrender this time.

  Moving in single file, we waded across a knee-deep stream and climbed the three-foot-high mud bank on the other side. Then we made our way through dense undergrowth and a thick grove of coconut palms. Our feet squished in our boots. Before long, we’d get used to that feeling.

  Over the next twenty minutes or so, we covered several hundred yards, gradually circling back toward the beach. That’s when we spotted the bodies—or what was left of them—scattered in pieces near the water’s edge.

  We’d stumbled across the exact spot where the Goettge patrol had been ambushed by the Japs and where they’d been butchered afterward like a bunch of pigs.

  The first thing I saw was the severed head of a Marine. I almost let out a yell because the head was moving back and forth in the water and looked like it was alive. Then I realized it was just bobbing in the small waves lapping at the shore. They would wash it up onto the sand a few inches, then it would float back out again when the waves receded.

  The next thing I noticed was a leg that had been hacked off at the knee. It was still wearing its dead owner’s boondocker shoe with its laces neatly tied. A few feet away was part of a bloody sleeve from a Marine first sergeant’s shirt with the chevrons still attached. Other chunks of rotting flesh that had once been human body parts were floating in the water and lying on the sand. The smell was overpowering.

  “Holy shit!” I heard a guy behind me groan. “I think I’m gonna puke!”

  He stumbled over to a clump of brush and I heard him gag. I almost gagged myself. None of us had ever seen anything like this before. If I’d had something besides black coffee in my stomach, I probably would’ve been as sick as a dog.

  It still kind of surprises me that none of the guys in my squad started screaming or cussing or otherwise going hysterical. Mostly, they just stood there frozen in their tracks, like their brains couldn’t process what they were seeing. When I think back on it, I figure they were all thinking something similar to what I was thinking.

  I won’t ever forget this—not ever! I told myself. I’ll never see a Jap in my life without thinking about it.

  Over the next two-plus years, I saw a lot of gruesome sights in the Pacific, but I can’t remember anything worse than what we saw that morning.

  As best we could tell, there were pieces of at least four bodies scattered along the beach, and there may have been several others in some bushes a few yards in from the water. W
e didn’t bother making a detailed search. It was totally obvious what had happened to Goettge and his men.

  When I got hold of myself and looked around, the first member of my squad I saw was PFC Kenneth Blakesley, a skinny blond kid not quite eighteen years old. He was standing a couple of feet from me and staring wide-eyed at the bodies and shaking his head. When he tried to talk, it sounded like he was choking on his own words.

  “For God’s sake, Mac,” he said, “why would anybody do this? Wasn’t killing ’em enough? Did they have to make mincemeat out of ’em, too?”

  I put my hand on Blakesley’s shoulder. The kid was a good Marine who was always willing to go out on a work detail when I needed somebody. But right now, he looked like he was about ten years old.

  “They just want to scare us, Kenny,” I said. “They want to show us how tough and mean they are so we’ll think they’re a bunch of damn supermen. But we’re gonna show them a few things, too, before this shit’s all said and done.”

  A minute or two later, Lieutenant Adams showed up with the rest of the platoon. They’d been moving parallel to my squad on our left, and they’d come across some dead Marines, too.

  “What should we do with these bodies, Scoop?” I asked him. “You want us to try and bury them?”

  He shook his head, and there was a look of pure misery on his face. “Just leave ’em where they are, Mac,” he said. “There’s no time for it right now. Maybe we can send back a burial detail later, but frankly I’d hate to risk it.”

  I got my squad together and the whole platoon moved out. Later on, First Marine Division headquarters refused to confirm that the slaughter of the Goettge patrol had ever actually happened. But I never really understood why. Any man who’d seen what we saw that morning knew better.

  Patrols from two other companies—L/3/5 and I/3/5—also reported finding mutilated body parts. But the bodies of Goettge himself and other members of his party were never recovered or officially identified. As a result, as far as I know, all of the dead Marines are still listed as “missing in action.”