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

by Jim McEnery

  A reserve battalion of the 164th Infantry was ordered into the line to support Puller’s men, but the Army troops were held up by the kind of torrential rainstorm the ’Canal was notorious for.

  And, sure enough, just after midnight on October 25, as the guys from the 164th were being fed into the line piecemeal, the Japs threw one of their biggest attacks yet at Puller’s outnumbered Marines. They were still hell-bent on recapturing that airfield.

  This was the fight where Sergeant John Basilone of 1/7 earned fame and the Medal of Honor for the steel nerves and sheer guts he showed in turning back the Japs that night.

  Later, I read an interview where Basilone told how he did what seemed impossible against the charging Japs—not once but over and over again—with three machine guns and a pistol.

  “We kept firing and drove them back, but our ammunition was getting low,” he said, “so I left the guns and started running to the next outfit to get some more. Soon after I got back, a runner came in and told me that at the emplacements on the right, Japs had broken through . . . and the guns were jammed.

  “I took off up the trail to see what happened. . . . After that I came back to my own guns, grabbed one of them, and told the crew to follow me. Up the trail we went. I was carrying the machine gun by the tripod. We left six dead Japs on the trail.

  “While I fixed the jams on the other two guns up there, we started to set up. We were really pinned down. Bullets were smacking into the sandbags.

  “The Japs were still coming at us, and I rolled over from one gun to the other, firing them as fast as they could be loaded. . . . We all thought our end had come.

  “Some Japs would sneak through the lines and behind us. It got pretty bad because I’d have to stop firing every once in a while and shoot behind me with my pistol.

  “At dawn, our guns were just burnt out. Altogether we got rid of 26,000 rounds.”

  More of the same continued through the day on the 25th and all that night, until early on the 26th, when the Seventh Marines broke the back of the Jap attack.

  At the same time, other attacks were hitting our positions along the Matanikau. All of them were repulsed with heavy losses.

  During the period of October 21–26, the Marines and the Army’s 164th Infantry killed an estimated 2,200 enemy troops, and many experts believe that estimate is way low.

  Total Marine losses for the period were 86 dead and 192 wounded. The 164th reported 19 killed or missing and 50 wounded.

  For the Japs, it was the beginning of the end on Guadalcanal—but only the beginning.

  ON THE MORNING of November 2, all three infantry battalions of the Fifth Marines were sent on an operation across the Matanikau that ended up changing the whole course of the Guadalcanal campaign.

  The First Battalion moved out on the right—or north—side of our advance across flat land that ran through a coconut grove west of the native village of Matanikau. Their assignment was to attack another small village called Kokumbona, which was supposed to be the headquarters of the 17th Japanese Army.

  Meanwhile, the Second Battalion was advancing on the left—or south—side of our front and following a ridge that ran west from the river. Our battalion, the Third, was in support of the other two and following in the tracks of the Second.

  Before they’d gone far, the First Battalion was stopped cold in the coconut grove by a Jap defensive line anchored by at least two 75-millimeter field pieces and about a dozen machine guns. There were also hundreds of Jap riflemen firing from a natural ditch that ran inland from the coast for 100 yards or more.

  The First took a god-awful bunch of casualties before they knew what hit them. Then, when they tried to take cover in the coconut grove, those 75s opened up and blasted most of the trees into stumps, pinning the First down not far from the mouth of the river and near an outcropping on the coast called Point Cruz.

  A first-aid station was set up just west of the river’s mouth where Higgins boats could pull in to pick up the First’s wounded and take them back to sick bay.

  Meanwhile, our Third Battalion was sent in to form a skirmish line behind the First so they could send their casualties through us, and we could cover them while they withdrew to a more secure position. Our setup was K Company on the left and I Company on the right, with L Company in support.

  One of the jobs I had as company recon sergeant was meeting the walking wounded from the First and helping them get to the area where the boats were. I must’ve walked eight or ten guys back along the same route through the trees when I spotted what looked like a path, and on my return trip to pick up another wounded guy, I decided to take it.

  In all the time I’d been assigned to the job of running messages back and forth and guiding wounded, I’d never been given a compass to help me keep my bearings and find my way. So I was basically just operating on instinct when I turned down this path. I was hoping it led toward Matanikau Village and was a shortcut to where the boats were.

  Bad idea. Bad decision. Bad move.

  I hadn’t gone five steps when I heard a shot and felt a bullet whiz past my head. Then I heard a Marine yell from behind a clump of brush where he was hiding.

  “Get down! For Chrissake, get down! You’re in a Nip fire lane!”

  I didn’t lose any time doing what the man said, and it was a good thing I did. Seconds later, an unsuspecting lieutenant came trotting along with a runner of his own, and another shot rang out.

  The lieutenant’s runner wasn’t nearly as lucky as I was. The bullet caught him squarely in the throat, and he went down hard, gushing blood. The wound looked really bad, but I never knew if the guy lived or died. I didn’t recognize either the lieutenant or the runner, and I thought they must be from the First Battalion.

  I crawled on my belly till I was maybe fifteen yards away from the Nip fire lane. Then I got up and ran like hell through the trees and brush. That’s what runners are supposed to do.

  Anyway, getting the First and Third Battalions realigned took most of the rest of the afternoon, but it doubled the size of our force facing that ditch.

  THIS WAS THE START of K/3/5’s toughest battle on Guadalcanal—one that played a big part in finally breaking the Japs’ grip on the island. We won it by beating the Bushido bastards at their own game and mounting two bayonet charges of our own. That surprised the hell out of them. They didn’t think Americans could do stuff like that.

  I saw a lot of incredible things in my nearly two and a half years in the Pacific. But I think the action I witnessed—and took part in—on November 3, 1942, on Guadalcanal was the most unforgettable one of all.

  As the sun rose that morning, the temperature started shooting up toward 100 degrees, and a lot of guys in the First Battalion, Fifth Marines were still stuck out in the open where that coconut grove used to be before the Japs blew it away. Not only were they frying out there in the blistering sun with hardly any place to take cover, but one of those Jap 75s started zeroing in on them again.

  Lieutenant Charles J. Kimmel of I Company was crouched in the middle of a bunch of Marines from I and K Companies and staring down into the coconut grove, when he jumped up all of a sudden and yelled: “Those guys are getting murdered by that 75 out there,” he said. “We got to give ’em some relief. Who wants to help me knock out that damn gun?”

  The first man to step forward was Corporal Weldon Delong, a husky Marine just under six feet tall who was from somewhere close to Boston.

  “Sure,” he said. “Let’s hit ’em!”

  Delong was from Nova Scotia originally, but he’d moved to the States as a young boy and joined the Marines about the same time I did. I’d known him since boot camp, and he was a born leader who’d taken over my squad of the First Platoon when I was assigned as company recon sergeant. He was also a crack shot with either a rifle or a pistol and one of the gutsiest Marines I ever knew—exactly the type of guy you wanted with you when the chips were down.

  Corporal John Teskevich, a coal miner from P
ennsylvania, stepped forward next. “Sure, count me in,” he said. “It’ll give my old man another shot at collecting my GI insurance.”

  Teskevich was notorious for his hot temper, but he was also known for being cool as a cucumber under fire. He’d been in so many brawls since he joined the Corps that his squad mates started calling him “the mad Russian.”

  Never to his face, though.

  “Yeah, I’ll go along, too,” said PFC Charles “Slim” Somerville, a short, skinny West Virginian who talked with a slow drawl but was the fastest man with a BAR in all of K Company.

  After that, dozens of guys in K and I Companies started jumping up and hollering, “Me too! Me too!” Captain Wells, the CO of I Company, was there, too. He jammed his fist in the air to show his approval.

  “Okay, fix bayonets!” Kimmel said. “And when I say ‘Charge,’ just run at the bastards like your pants are on fire.”

  A few seconds later, close to a hundred Marines formed up in a ragged line. Then they yelled like a bunch of lunatics and took off like crazy toward that Jap-held ditch forty or fifty yards away.

  I’d just delivered a message to the K/3/5 CP when another runner came in and told Captain Patterson, the CO, that something strange was going on out on the line.

  “Hey, Mac,” Patterson said, “get back out there and see what’s happening. Then report back to me.”

  I thought at the time if Patterson was the same kind of officer as Lieutenant Kimmel and Captain Wells of I Company, he’d be out on the line himself in a case like this. But I didn’t say anything. I just did what I was told.

  When I got back to the line, a second wave of the charge was forming up with Captain Wells leading it, and I got caught up in the excitement and joined it.

  There were at least another hundred guys in this second wave, and I was squarely in the middle. I noticed that PFC Bill Landrum, the assistant leader of my old squad, who’d shared a foxhole with me on our first night on Guadalcanal, was just three or four guys to my right.

  Right before we jumped off, I’d heard Landrum tell the Marine next to him, “Just give your soul to the Lord, and let’s go!”

  We went right through the ditch where the main Jap line had been, but it had already fallen to pieces. The first wave of the charge had completely ruptured the enemy line. I saw Japs blowing themselves up with grenades and others running like so many scared rabbits.

  I remember thinking they didn’t look much like supermen now.

  I emptied one five-round clip from my ’03, and a couple of Japs sprawled on the ground in front of me. When I lowered my bayonet and jabbed at them, they didn’t move, so I jabbed them again.

  I saw two or three Marines I knew get hit and fall, but that wasn’t nearly enough to slow down the momentum of the charge. I recognized one of them as Bill Landrum, and I tried to block it out of my mind. Another guy I knew, Private Paul Gunter, was killed about the same time, although I didn’t see it happen. Gunter was another one of those kid Marines, maybe eighteen years old.

  Over the years, people have asked me what I thought and how I felt when we were charging those Japs and saw buddies like that cut down. I’ve always had to tell them I don’t distinctly remember, that everything was just a big blur, and it was all happening so fast I didn’t have time to feel much of anything.

  In situations like that, you can’t focus on anything but the job you’re trying to do. That’s just the way your mind has to work if you want to get through it alive. Everything else gets blanked out.

  It’s later on, when the excitement fades away, that you start thinking. That’s when the knots come up in your insides, and you feel sad and sick about the guys you knew that died. You may even shed a tear or two, or say a prayer like the “Our Father” I said that night for Bill Landrum. But along with your sorrow, you also feel relief that you weren’t one of those who went down. You know damn well you could’ve been, just as easy as not.

  Anyway, within a minute or two, we’d chased all the Japs that were still able to move out of the ditch. They left their howitzers behind in a wild scramble to find some other cover. They also left about 400 bodies behind. They were scattered all over, in and out of the ditch.

  Now there was only some mopping up to do, but it turned out to be almost as dangerous as the charge had been. Jap survivors were scattered over a wide area singly and in small groups. Some were wounded, but they all had weapons of some kind, and they were more than willing to use them.

  After the ditch was clear of live Japs, Weldon Delong started running back and forth with nothing but a pistol and firing whenever he saw a downed Jap make a move. I guess he’d dropped his rifle in the heat of the charge instead of trying to reload.

  Delong had put several enemy wounded out of their misery when Slim Somerville spotted three or four Japs hiding in some water behind a log. They thought we couldn’t see them, but Somerville noticed their reflections in the water.

  The first thing Slim did was try to warn Delong, who was out in the open and unprotected.

  “Get down! Get down!” Slim yelled.

  I’d always liked going on patrols with Delong because he was always so alert to everything around us. Always looking up in the trees and behind the bushes. Always checking out anything that looked suspicious. Other guys in my squad were good, too; they just weren’t as good as Weldon Delong.

  But on this particular afternoon, he was too intent on looking for Japs to hear Somerville’s warning. One of the Japs in the water fired, and the bullet slammed into Delong’s chest. He went down without a sound, and never moved again.

  After some other Marines took care of the Japs behind the log, I ran over to Delong. He was lying in a puddle of blood with his eyes wide open and his pistol still in his hand. The bullet had gone straight through his heart. He was as dead as a man could get.

  By now, the adrenaline that had kept me going was drying up, and I felt like somebody had kicked me in the gut. Delong’s death left me shaken as bad as I’ve ever been. I considered him the best Marine in my former squad and maybe the best in the whole platoon. I could trust him with any job, no matter how tough it was. But now, one moment of carelessness had cost him his life.

  He was posthumously awarded a Navy Cross for outstanding valor that day in leading the charge against one of those Jap field pieces and then wrecking the gun. He also had a ship named in his honor.

  But even more important than that, he was my friend.

  “Don’t beat yourself up about it, Mac,” said Private Lou Bors, another member of the squad I’d led. “If you hadn’t warned me to keep my head down, I wouldn’t be alive now, either.”

  I nodded numbly. I didn’t even remember warning him.

  “Yeah, God knows every one of us damn nearly bought it right here,” said John Teskevich. Then he laughed. “I almost made my old man $20,000 richer today, but I guess he’ll have to wait a while.”

  I felt like total crap, but I tried to stay busy to keep from thinking.

  Sergeant John Kelly, our third in command as platoon guide in the First Platoon, had just made lieutenant the day before. Now he was unconscious on the ground, shot through the body and bleeding like a stuck hog.

  A corpsman did his best to stop the bleeding and patch up Kelly’s wound, and I went over to see about him.

  “Is he gonna make it?” I asked.

  “Hard to tell,” the corpsman said. “He don’t look too good, but I’d say he’s got a chance.”

  I stayed with Kelly (who I learned years later did survive his wound, by the way) until the stretcher-bearers came to pick him up. By then, it was after dark, and a day I knew I’d never forget was almost over.

  In one way, it was the worst day of my life so far. I was sick at heart about the friends I’d lost, and I spent a long time that night with their faces floating through my mind, thinking about them and praying for them. But buried somewhere underneath my grief for Delong and Landrum and the others was the feeling we’d really accompli
shed something that day.

  The Japs never advanced east of the Matanikau again, and after a few more halfhearted attempts, they quit trying.

  Their three-month offensive to drive us off Guadalcanal had hit a wall, and now they were running out of gas.

  As it turned out, I was, too.

  “WE’VE GOT THE BASTARDS LICKED”

  IT WASN’T MORE THAN a week after that last big fight along the Matanikau when I came down with a sudden, nasty case of malaria. And when I say “came down,” I mean that literally.

  I didn’t even know I was sick until it hit me out of the blue; I thought I was just tired and weak from hunger. I was walking along in the K/3/5 bivouac area on my way back to the CP one morning when I passed out cold and fell flat on the ground.

  The next thing I knew, I was in sick bay burning up with fever, and the medics were cramming quinine down me. I had a lot of company in that field hospital, too. The place was running over with malaria patients.

  When the malaria outbreak on the ’Canal first got serious, the medical officers had made a standing rule that guys with the disease should be hospitalized for at least ten days. But after a few weeks, there were so many cases they had to scrap that rule and start discharging malaria patients a lot sooner.

  After three or four days in the field hospital, they gave me a handful of quinine tablets and sent me back to the company. I felt okay for a while, but the malaria bug kept coming back on me from time to time for as long as I was in the Pacific. Actually, I even had a few flare-ups with it after I got back to the States.

  Following the action of November 2–3, K/3/5 was pulled off the line and sent to a rest area in the rear, and as it turned out we never went back on the line on Guadalcanal again. Our company hadn’t been in the thick of the action as much as we’d expected when we landed in August, but we’d had a baptism of fire on the ’Canal that would serve as a useful dress rehearsal for what lay ahead of us on New Britain and Peleliu.