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

by Jim McEnery

  Colonel Ichiki didn’t seem the least bit concerned about the Marines’ well-prepared defenses. I guess he expected his charging troops to slash through the American lines like a hot knife through butter—just like they’d always done before.

  Man, was he ever wrong!

  When the Japs reached the barbed wire, they stopped, just as machine gun, small-arms, and 37-millimeter canister fire from the Marines tore into them. Dozens of Nips were killed before they could cut their way through the wire.

  A Marine lieutenant later described the scene like this: “They waved their arms wildly and shrieked and jabbered like monkeys, but they kept coming.”

  A few Japs got through and jumped into the Marines’ foxholes, where our guys rose up to meet them in hand-to-hand fighting. This was the first organized, large-scale enemy assault on Guadalcanal. It was also the Marines’ first chance for some real payback—for Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, Bataan, Corregidor, the Goettge patrol, and all the rest. What happened over the next few minutes answered forever the question of whether the Japs were invincible supermen and whether American troops could stand up to them toe-to-toe.

  One young Marine, Corporal Dean Wilson, mowed down Japs with his BAR until the weapon jammed. Then he grabbed a machete and hacked three more onrushing enemy soldiers to pieces.

  Just as Corporal John Shea jumped into an adjacent foxhole to try to clear his tommy gun, he was jabbed twice in the leg by an enemy soldier’s bayonet. His response was to jam his right foot into the Jap’s belly, throw him against the wall of the foxhole, and give him five shots in the chest with the tommy.

  Private John Rivers, a machine gunner, poured hundreds of rounds into the closely packed enemy ranks until he was fatally wounded by a bullet that struck him square in the face. Even then, according to eyewitnesses, his dying fingers squeezed off another 200 rounds to keep killing Japs.

  Private Al Schmid took over Rivers’s machine gun and kept it firing until fragments from an exploding grenade blinded him in both eyes and hurled him away from the gun. Then he drew his pistol and emptied it at the shrieking Japs around him.

  Ichiki tried desperately to reassemble his shattered forces, but Colonel Clifton Cates, a future Marine Corps commandant, delivered a deadly blow to the remnants of Ichiki’s detachment. Cates managed to reach the command post of the Third Battalion, 11th Marines, and call for artillery support. In less than a minute, 75-millimeter shells were raining down on the main body of Jap survivors.

  Some of them tried to regroup for a new attack by running along the beach beyond the sandspit and through the surf to hit the Marines’ flank. But our guys saw them coming and raked them with machine gun fire. Then they finished them off with more artillery and a platoon of light tanks.

  War correspondent Richard Tregaskis, author of the famous book Guadalcanal Diary, wrote this description of the carnage when the tanks chased the last remaining Japs through a coconut grove: “It was . . . something unbelievable to see them knocking over palm trees which fell slowly, flushing the running figures of men from underneath their treads, following and firing at the fugitives.”

  When the tankers came back to the Marine lines on the east bank of the stream, General Vandegrift noticed that the tanks’ treads and rear ends “looked like meat grinders.”

  The “meat” was definitely Japanese.

  At least 777 of Ichiki’s men were killed in the battle. Only fifteen enemy soldiers—thirteen of them wounded—were taken prisoner. Marine casualties totaled forty-four dead and seventy-one wounded.

  There would’ve been quite a few more prisoners taken alive if so many of the Jap wounded hadn’t done their damnedest to kill any Americans who tried to treat their wounds. In several cases, dying Japs discharged grenades when Marines or Navy corpsmen came close, killing themselves and the guys attempting to help them.

  General Vandegrift was shocked when he found out about this. “I’ve never heard of this kind of fighting,” he told a friend. “These people refuse to surrender. The wounded wait until men come up to examine them and blow themselves and the other fellow to pieces with a hand grenade.”

  For us in the ranks, it just drove home a realization that would be pretty much universal by the time we left Guadalcanal. We learned that “the only good Jap is a dead Jap,” as the saying goes, and we made sure that all the wounded ones left on the field after a firefight got to be “good Japs” just as quick as we could shoot them.

  When Colonel Ichiki realized how bad his men had been defeated, he made himself a “good Jap” by burning his regimental flags and shooting himself in the head. My sentiments when I heard about it can be summed up in two words: Thanks, asshole!

  General Harukichi Hyakutake, commander of Japan’s 17th Army, sent the following message to Tokyo after he learned how the battle ended: “The attack of the Ichiki Detachment was not entirely successful.”

  This had to be one of the biggest understatements of the war.

  BY EARLY SEPTEMBER, my platoon still hadn’t seen any live Japs near enough to shoot at with small arms, and some of the guys in K/3/5 were starting to feel kind of left out and neglected. When it came to combat, we never seemed to be where the main action was.

  That’s not to say I hadn’t already been pretty close to some major fireworks a time or two. On August 30, I’d decided to take my first real bath since I’d been on Guadalcanal, and since there was no fresh water where K/3/5 was set up, I went down to Iron Bottom Sound to dunk myself in the surf. I piled all my gear on the beach and jumped in, but I’d barely gotten wet when I heard about six Jap dive-bombers coming in low and fast.

  I jumped out of the water again, grabbed up my stuff, and ran like hell for cover. Then I crouched there in some bushes and watched those Jap planes zero in on one of our destroyer transports, the USS Colhoun. They must’ve caught the ship just as she tried to slip away after delivering some much needed supplies ashore.

  I saw the bombs hit the Colhoun in a series of bright orange explosions. In a matter of seconds, the whole ship was blazing like a torch. Then the stern of it went down, and the bow stood straight up in the air. In the space of about three minutes, it slid under the water and disappeared.

  Watching it made me sick all over. I never felt so damn helpless in my life. I heard later that about fifty members of the Colhoun’s crew went down with her.

  Things like that ate at me while K/3/5 marked time and waited.

  It wasn’t that we were a bunch of eager beavers just itching to get in the big middle of a shootout like the Tenaru battle. So far, though, about all we’d done except for finding those bodies from the Goettge ambush was make a few uneventful patrols and stay hunkered down when the bombs and shells started falling.

  In my personal case, it didn’t help that I’d just been promoted to buck sergeant and assigned as reconnaissance NCO for the company. Sometimes I had the feeling I didn’t deserve the promotion because I hadn’t done anything to earn it yet.

  It may sound stupid, and maybe it was, but we were an infantry company in the United States Marines, and we’d come to this shitty place to fight Japs, not sit around and scratch mosquito bites and watch our socks rot on our feet.

  We knew our turn on the hot seat had to come sooner or later, but all this waiting was getting on our nerves. It was like until we got our baptism of fire, as they call it, all we could do was mark time and wonder about how we’d do when it finally happened.

  About eleven o’clock on the morning of September 7, we found out.

  THE SECOND PLATOON of K/3/5 was already on the line and drawing heavy fire when our First Platoon was ordered to go in and give them some help.

  Captain Lawrence V. Patterson, our company commander, called me to his command post and told me to collect two men from each of the four squads in the First Platoon and hustle them up to the line as fast as I could.

  After I picked two guys from my own old squad, I checked with the three other squad leaders and let them pick the guys they
wanted to send until I had my eight-man quota.

  “Come on,” I told them then, “let’s move out.”

  I don’t remember much about any of the eight guys I picked, except for Private Kenny Blakesley, the kid from my old squad who’d been so upset when we stumbled onto the cut-up bodies from the Goettge patrol. I picked him because I knew he was steady and dependable, even though he was still just seventeen years old.

  We tried to move as fast as we could, staying low to the ground, but it took us four or five minutes to cover the seventy-five yards to where the Second Platoon was pinned down. Just as we eased up to the top of a slight ridge, I glanced ahead at Blakesley’s rear end about two yards ahead of me and slightly to my left.

  The firing was sporadic except for a Marine lying flat on the ground in some grass about ten yards to my left and blazing away with a BAR. I didn’t recognize the guy, but I thought he’d probably come from the company CP. Anyway, he was big and burly, and he handled that nineteen-pound weapon like it was a water pistol. He was giving the Japs pure hell, and the barrel of the BAR must’ve been red-hot. I could see the slugs from it chewing so hard into a bunch of Japs running toward him that their blood was spraying into the air.

  I emptied one five-round clip of my own from my ’03 Springfield, but I’m not sure if I hit anything. I’d just glanced toward where Blakesley was hugging the ground and easing forward when I heard the pop of a Jap rifle. I saw the kid grab at his chest and flop over on his back with dark red blood staining the left side of his dungaree shirt.

  I yelled, “Hit the deck!” as the other Marines scrambled for cover. Even in the shock of the moment, I realized this was the first time I’d come directly under hostile fire on Guadalcanal. It was something I’d been expecting since that day in the Higgins boat exactly a month ago, but it hadn’t happened until now.

  When I crawled up next to Blakesley, he was groaning and his face was pale.

  “No use bothering about me, Mac,” he mumbled. “I think he got me in the lung. I’m probably done for.”

  I lifted the kid’s arm and tore open his shirt for a better look. “Nah, I think it’s between your arm and shoulder, Kenny,” I said. “Just take it easy. You’ll be okay.”

  “Don’t let the bastards chop me up if I die out here,” he whispered. “Promise me you won’t, Mac.”

  “Don’t worry, we’re gonna get you outta here,” I said. “Nobody’s gonna chop you up.” I wadded up his torn shirtsleeve and pushed it against the wound to slow the bleeding.

  “Corpsman!” one of the guys behind me screamed. “We got a man down here!”

  Within a few seconds, I was surprised as hell to see Corps-man William Hughes come from somewhere to my left and squat down beside Blakesley. But before he could even start treating the wound, there was another shot. It looked like the bullet went straight through Hughes’s chest, and you could tell by the way he fell across Blakesley’s body that he was dead before he hit the ground.

  “Stretcher-bearer!” somebody yelled. “Now we got two guys hit!”

  Then damned if another corpsman named Raymond Scott didn’t come running up, but the Jap snipers killed him, too, just as he was trying to lift Blakesley in his arms. A bullet drilled Scott right through the head, and he died instantly.

  Seeing all this made my stomach churn and my head spin, and the next few minutes were just one big blur for me. I jammed another clip in my ’03, but I felt for a second like I was going to pass out, and I didn’t know if I dared try to raise the rifle and fire. Those snipers really had a bead on this particular spot.

  We need to get the hell out of here, I remember thinking, before they pick us all off one at a time.

  But I forced myself to stay down and keep still a little longer. While I tried to make myself invisible, I grieved for those two dead corpsmen.

  The medics assigned to Marine rifle companies were some of the bravest guys in the world. It tore me up to think that two of them had been killed a few feet from me within about thirty seconds of each other.

  All our corpsmen wanted to do was help people that were hurt. I figured out later that was why the Japs liked to target them so much. I think they actually got a bigger kick out of killing corpsmen—who were mostly Navy pharmacist mates second class—more than high-ranking officers. This was because they thought the more corpsmen they killed, the more of our wounded would die from lack of treatment.

  And the saddest part about it was they were right.

  When firing slacked off a little, I managed to get Blakesley on a stretcher and move him a few yards to a spot with better cover than the one where he and the medics had been hit. Then a couple of the guys that had come up to the line with me carried him back to the rear. They had to drop the stretcher and take cover three or four times to keep from getting hit themselves.

  The firefight we were in that day lasted for two or three hours, and before it was over, the whole company was involved. But some Marine Raiders and guys from the Marine Parachute Battalion were sent up to bolster our line, and the 11th Marines came through with some artillery support. Finally, the Japs that were left withdrew back to the west side of the Matanikau.

  Our fight wasn’t nearly as big as the one on the Tenaru, but the Japs’ goal had been exactly the same—to take back the airfield—and we knew they weren’t about to give up trying anytime soon.

  I found out later that day that PFC Blakesley was still alive when they got him to a field hospital. That night, I couldn’t get the kid off my mind. I kept remembering the day we went on patrol and he lost the bolt out of his rifle. He’d had a round in the chamber, and the bolt was up. It must’ve caught in a bush while we were moving through some heavy undergrowth and just pulled out.

  We’d probably gone a quarter-mile before he realized the bolt was gone, and by then there was no way to ever find it. The rifle was basically useless without it, and we had to get Blakesley a new weapon when we got back to camp.

  I especially remembered how I chewed his ass out over it, up one side and down the other. I did it mainly in hopes that giving him a hard time might help save his life someday. He just kept saying, “I’m sorry, Mac, I’m sorry. It’ll never happen again, I promise.”

  Later on, he brought me a piece of chocolate as a kind of peace offering. He was that kind of kid, and I knew I was going to miss him.

  As time went by, I often wondered what became of him and if he’d ever completely recovered from his wound.

  After the war, I had a chance to go through a complete list of Marines who were killed in action or died of wounds on Guadalcanal, and I felt relieved when I didn’t find Kenny’s name there.

  But I never saw him or heard from him again, and sometimes at night I still wake up and wonder whatever happened to him.

  SOUTH AND SLIGHTLY east of Henderson Field there’s a twisting snake of a ridge that runs from northwest to southeast for about 1,000 yards. I’m not sure if it even had a name before September 12–14, 1942. But ever since then, it’s been called Edson’s Ridge—and for damn good reasons.

  The ridge is named for Colonel Merritt A. Edson, commander of the First Marine Raider Battalion. This was the outfit that had given the Japs one helluva beating on the islands of Tulagi, Gavutu, and Tanambogo across Iron Bottom Sound from Guadalcanal back in August.

  In early September, they’d landed on Savo Island and secured it, then raided a village called Tasimboko near the Lunga River east of our defensive perimeter, where natives reported seeing about 400 Japs. After they flushed a small party of enemy soldiers out of the village, the Raiders found large stores of food, ammo, and weapons, including machine guns and 75-millimeter howitzers.

  On September 10, after all the fighting and traveling Edson’s men had done, General Vandegrift thought the Raiders deserved at least a few days’ rest, so he decided to send them down to a bivouac area inland from the airfield that seemed fairly quiet and safe.

  But “Red Mike” Edson, as he was known to his troops
because of his carrot-colored hair, wasn’t so sure any place on Guadalcanal was really going to stay quiet and safe for long. Because of what his men had discovered at Tasimboko, he was sure a much larger enemy force was lurking somewhere in the area.

  “That bunch at Tasimboko was no motley [group] of 400 Japs but 2,000 to 3,000 well-organized soldiers,” Edson said later. “When they sent us out toward the ridge, I was firmly convinced we were in the path of the next Jap attack.”

  He decided this was no time for a routine bivouac. So without even giving his men time to read the first letters from home they’d gotten in the Solomons, Edson ordered them to dig in along this unnamed ridge and send out patrols just as if they were still on the front lines.

  As it turned out, they were.

  The first patrols went out on September 11 and poked around in the jungle without finding anything. But on the 12th, Red Mike sent them out again, and this time they made a contact.

  It was nothing big or serious. Just a brief skirmish with a small party of Nips that seemed to be right at home in the area. But it convinced Edson he’d better act fast. He put his men on full alert and ordered them to set up no-bullshit lines of defense for that night.

  “Put them as far forward as you can get,” he told them.

  It was a good defensive setup. Any attackers trying to approach the ridge faced deep ravines on both sides, and some of them were so heavily wooded that the Japs would have to cut their way through. Several rugged spurs that stuck out on either side of the ridgeline offered good visibility of the countryside and great vantage points for Marine machine gunners.

  The downside was that Edson didn’t have enough men to form a continuous line, so he ordered small strongpoints to be set up, hoping the combination of heavy fire from them, plus the tough terrain, would keep the Nips from penetrating the line in strength.

  Some of the men grumbled about the new orders. Marines do that sometimes, even Marine Raiders. I know from talking to some of them that they would’ve followed Red Mike over the edge of a cliff if he’d led the way. Still, they’d been through a lot. They were tired. They wanted to open their packages from home and read their letters. They’d been promised a rest break—and they deserved one if any outfit in the Corps ever did.