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

by Jim McEnery

  Along about this same time, beginning the second week in November, we started hearing a lot of scuttlebutt about the whole First Marine Division being relieved and shipped to Australia. The Japs were still sending platoon-size patrols to probe our lines along the Matanikau, but it seemed like they’d lost interest in any more all-out fights.

  What we didn’t know was that a large Jap convoy, accompanied by an escort force of cruisers and destroyers, was heading our way with thousands of fresh troops and plans to launch a whole new invasion of Guadalcanal. The Nips who’d been taking it on the chin from us during October and early November may have been ready to call it quits, but Imperial Army headquarters obviously had other ideas.

  Before he got word about this new threat, Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey, commander of the Navy’s South Pacific Area—a man I truly admired and still do—had also sent a major force of U.S. warships and transports toward Guadalcanal. There were four transports carrying the Army’s 182nd Infantry Regiment to reinforce our garrison on the ’Canal, and they were escorted by six cruisers and fourteen destroyers. There were also three cargo ships loaded with all kinds of equipment and supplies.

  Halsey had a second, even bigger task force standing by down at Noumea, New Caledonia, including the battleships Washington and South Dakota. The aircraft carrier Enterprise was there, too, but she was still undergoing repairs by a crew of eighty-five Seabees for heavy damage inflicted by the Japs.

  (The “Big E,” as she was known, was now the only U.S. flattop afloat in the South Pacific. The gallant old carrier Hornet, which had launched Colonel Jimmy Doolittle’s bombing raid on Tokyo the previous April, had joined her sister ship, the Wasp, at the bottom of the ocean on October 26 after being hit by Jap torpedo planes during the Battle of Santa Cruz Island.)

  Meanwhile, the Japs had two battleships of their own, the Hiei and the Kirishima, in the southern Solomons, and the two opposing forces were on a collision course as they steamed toward Guadalcanal.

  The U.S. Navy’s main goal was to get our new troops onto the ’Canal ahead of the Japs and then get our transports and cargo ships out safely. Once that was done, Halsey’s fighting ships were ready to take on the enemy force jaw-to-jaw.

  Far out to sea, one of the most furious sea battles ever fought was rapidly taking shape. None of us ashore had any idea what was about to happen, but the fate of every sick, battle-worn, half-starved Marine already on Guadalcanal was hanging on that battle’s outcome.

  AS LUCK WOULD have it, the first group of U.S. ships did beat the Japs to the island—but not by much. They anchored at Lunga Point at 5:30 AM on November 11. Just four hours later, while they were still unloading, they came under their first attack by enemy planes, and the transport Zeilin was damaged. A second air attack soon followed, but the unloading was completed that afternoon.

  The second group of transports came in on the morning of the 12th and their escorts fought off another Jap air raid while they unloaded. But the only damage was to the cruiser San Francisco, caused when an enemy plane dived on her kamikaze-style. (Suicide attacks were rare by Jap pilots at that time, but within a couple of years they’d be crashing into our ships by the hundreds.)

  So far, our side was doing okay, but it wasn’t over yet. Far from it. As the cruisers and destroyers escorting the transports started withdrawing from the area early on the morning of November 13, inadequate radar caused them to move directly into the path of the approaching enemy naval force.

  It was only when some of the Jap ships turned on their searchlights that the Americans realized what they’d stumbled into. Then, in the confusion, several of the American ships may have actually opened fire on each other.

  It turned into one helluva bloody mess. Our cruisers Atlanta and Juneau were sunk along with four of our destroyers. Two other U.S. cruisers and three other destroyers were damaged.

  Still, we got in some good licks, too. We sent the Jap battleship Hiei to the bottom with over eighty shell holes in her, and we also sank two Jap destroyers and damaged four others.

  But our Navy’s biggest challenge was still ahead. Those enemy transports carrying an estimated 15,000 reinforcements—roughly a whole division—had to be stopped before they could land those troops. Otherwise, the Marines on Guadalcanal would be in deep shit, and everything we’d gained over three-plus months of hard fighting could go down the drain overnight.

  To Halsey, the stakes couldn’t have been any higher, but he didn’t admit publicly how desperate he considered the situation to be until he wrote his memoirs in 1947.

  “If our ships and planes had been routed in this battle,” he said then, “our troops on Guadalcanal would have been trapped as were our troops on Bataan. We could not have reinforced them or relieved them. . . . Unobstructed, the enemy would have driven south, cut our lines to New Zealand and Australia, and enveloped them.”

  Halsey knew the ships he’d lost were much less important than keeping those 15,000 fresh Jap troops from joining the fight for the ’Canal, and he pulled out all the stops. He ordered his battleships and the Big E north from New Caledonia at top speed. In the meantime, he sent every available plane aboard the Enterprise and at Henderson Field, along with a squadron of PT boats already in our area, to attack the Jap shipping.

  At 11 AM on November 14, our search planes found the enemy transports, and what became known as the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal finally exploded full force. As Halsey remembered it later: “We threw in every plane that could take the air—planes from the Enterprise, Marine planes from Henderson, B-17s . . . fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo planes. They would strike, return to base, rearm and refuel, and strike again.”

  Six of the ten Jap transports were sunk outright. The other four were destroyed by Marine artillery and planes after they ran aground on Guadalcanal. Most of the troops aboard them were killed.

  In a duel with the South Dakota and Washington, that other Jap battleship, the Kirishima, was also sunk, along with one enemy destroyer. We lost three destroyers, while the South Dakota and another destroyer were damaged.

  After the remnants of the Jap invasion armada struck out for safer waters, Halsey summed up the situation in a five-word dispatch to Pacific Fleet headquarters in Hawaii.

  “We’ve got the bastards licked!” it said.

  BAD AS I hate to admit it, the First Marine Division itself was pretty well whipped by this time, too. Not by the Japs but by a combination of exhaustion, stress, malnutrition, hard labor, and those damn malaria mosquitoes. We’d lived with almost constant rain and mud for close to three and a half months. Our socks had long since rotted and fallen to pieces in our shoes.

  During the Fifth Marines’ fight along the Matanikau, our manpower losses from malaria got so bad that the medics were giving every man on the line twenty grains of quinine per day—and they were still dropping like flies.

  At the middle of November, General Vandegrift reluctantly declared the division “no longer capable of offensive operations,” and by the end of the month more than 3,200 Marines had been hospitalized with malaria. If misery loves company, I guess I should’ve been happy as a pig in shit. Only I wasn’t. I was totally miserable.

  There seemed to be a widespread feeling about this time among the brass at division headquarters that the Fifth Marines needed some “new blood” among its officers. So after we were pulled off the line, a series of big changes started taking place in the regiment’s command structure.

  At the very top, Colonel Red Mike Edson was named the new regimental commander of the Fifth Marines, replacing Colonel LeRoy Hunt. As weak and tired as I was, I was overjoyed when I heard the news. It wasn’t that I didn’t admire and respect Colonel Hunt. How could you not admire a guy who earned a Distinguished Service Cross, a Navy Cross, and a Silver Star as Hunt did in France in 1918? And, anyway, it wasn’t like the Marine Corps was giving Hunt a demotion. He went on to become the commanding general of the Second Marine Division.

  But if the F
ifth Marines was looking for the kind of young, aggressive, hands-on commander who could inspire men in battle by his example, they couldn’t have found a better man than Red Mike Edson. Like Hunt, he’d served in France in World War I, but he was only a boyish second lieutenant then, and now he was still in his mid-forties. He was the kind of leader who got right out there with his troops and fought with them shoulder to shoulder. He’d proved himself plenty of times on the front lines on Guadalcanal and had been awarded a Medal of Honor for it.

  With this change at the top of the regimental command structure, there was a kind of ripple effect that ran all the way down through the battalion and company levels.

  For instance, I don’t think the brass was very happy with the job Captain Patterson had done with K/3/5 in the three months we’d been in combat, and I can’t really say I blame them. Patterson almost never left his command post during a fight, and nobody in the company was more aware of that than I was. After all, I was the guy who ran back and forth with messages from his CP to the platoon leaders out on the line. A lot of them were messages Patterson could’ve—and I think should’ve—been close enough to his men to deliver himself.

  To me, there’s something wrong when a company commander has to send a runner like me to find out where his own damn company is. On the other hand, there’s nothing that revs up a Marine’s fighting spirit more than seeing his CO alongside him when the going gets rough.

  At any rate, we got a new company commander named Captain Murray. In the short time I knew him, he struck me as being a really good, competent guy, but I never had a chance to see how he’d do in combat, because we never went back on the line at the ’Canal.

  For reasons none of us really understood, Murray was replaced before long by Captain Charles Cobb. He was only with K/3/5 for a few weeks, and then he was also gone. The only thing I remember about him is that he didn’t seem to like me much—I never knew why—and the feeling was mutual. I never knew what happened to him, and I never really cared. I was just glad I’d never have to go into battle with him in command.

  ON DECEMBER 9, 1942—four months and two days after D-Day—the rumors we’d been hearing came true. We Fifth Marines became the third major unit to be relieved on Guadalcanal. The casualty-riddled Marine Raiders and Paratroopers had left several weeks earlier, and within a few days all the rest of the First Marine Division would also be pulling out for Australia.

  On that same date, December 9, General Vandegrift turned over command of U.S. forces on Guadalcanal to Army General Alexander Patch, and even as we were leaving, the American troop buildup on the island continued. The Second Marine Division was already there, plus two Army infantry regiments, Army artillery, the Second Marine Raider Battalion, and all kinds of support and supply units.

  Before the end of December, we’d have a total of 50,000 U.S. troops on the ’Canal, and the Jap high command finally saw the handwriting on the wall. Halsey had been right. The bastards were licked and they knew it.

  We now know that on December 12, top officers of the Jap navy recommended to Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo that Guadalcanal be abandoned, and two weeks later they started drawing up a secret plan of withdrawal.

  If the Japs had any second thoughts about the final outcome of the fight for Guadalcanal, an American offensive that kicked off on December 18 put an end to them. By early January 1943, the offensive had cost the Japs about 3,000 men killed to only 250 KIAs for the Americans.

  During the first week of February, virtually all remaining enemy troops on the island were evacuated, leaving behind more than 30,000 dead.

  According to official records, total casualties for the First Marine Division were 621 killed in action, 1,517 wounded in action, and 5,601 hospitalized with malaria.

  Our battle casualties were incredibly low for a campaign that lasted so long, saw so much hard fighting, and changed the whole complexion of the Pacific war, but the reasons for that were simple: We’d held our ground in well-entrenched defensive positions against troops that threw themselves at us in human-wave attacks.

  The Guadalcanal campaign was over, but even then, not many people realized its full importance. General Vandegrift himself described it at the end as only “a modest operation.”

  But the truth became more and more obvious as time went by. The Jap navy went into hiding and didn’t come out again for almost two years. The Americans gained a major airbase and staging area deep in the heart of formerly Japanese territory for our island-hopping drive across the Pacific. Because of its huge losses in ships, planes, and manpower, Japan’s whole military machine was weakened so much that it was never able to mount a major offensive action again. Our naval losses were even heavier, but we could afford it because our production capabilities were much higher than Japan’s.

  And best of all, to those of us who were there when things looked the darkest, we showed the world—and ourselves—that the Nips weren’t supermen, after all.

  “Never did the enemy succeed in coordinating the attacks of his always-superior forces,” wrote Marine historian John Zimmerman. “He under-estimated both the number and quality of the troops who first landed on the island. He committed his troops piecemeal and thereby suffered shocking losses.”

  Toward the end of the war, Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall summed it up very nicely when he said: “The resolute defense of these Marines and the desperate gallantry of our naval task forces marked the turning point in the Pacific.”

  WHILE WE WERE waiting to go aboard ship, I kind of wished I’d run into that squirrelly little character from our mortar section who’d kept asking me for months if I thought we were ever going to “get off this island.” If I had, I’d have laughed in his face and said, “I told you so.” But I guess by that time he’d already gotten his question answered once and for all.

  Among the last things some of us did before leaving Guadalcanal was pay a visit to the new military cemetery near the airfield. I dragged myself out there, too, and I was glad I did.

  The graves were still marked with crude crosses, and many of them had the dead man’s mess gear and other possessions attached to the crosses. In some cases, friends of the deceased had written simple inscriptions like “Our buddy” or “To a swell guy.”

  But there was one in particular that was as straight to the point as it was poetic. It read:

  And when he gets to Heaven,

  To St. Peter he will tell:

  “Another Marine reporting, Sir.

  I’ve served my time in hell.”

  When we climbed up the cargo nets to board the USS President Jackson and sail to Australia, many of us were so weak and exhausted we had to have help from the ship’s crew to make it to the top. Personally, I was so tired I wasn’t even embarrassed by it. I just thanked the swabbies for giving me a hand and looked for the nearest place to sit down.

  After five days at sea, we docked at Brisbane, Australia, and got our first look at the “Land Down Under.” I’ll never forget that day. I kind of wish I could.

  I have to admit I wasn’t very impressed with Brisbane. The problem was, it was in northern Australia, where the climate was just as hot and miserable as it was on Guadalcanal. Brisbane was a really tropical city with banana plantations everywhere you looked, and the countryside around it was one big, stinking swamp. You could almost see the steam rising from it. It was the middle of summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and, of course, there were clouds of mosquitoes everywhere.

  Besides that, a lot of us were ready to hate the place even before we saw it, because it was Dugout Doug MacArthur’s headquarters, and we’d all heard what he’d said about the Marines before he bugged out from the Philippines.

  He’d refused to let the Fourth Marines fight on Bataan because he wanted to keep them on Corregidor to protect his own headquarters till he left for Australia. And thanks to Dugout Doug, they were also the only American unit that got left off the presidential unit citation given to the Bataan and C
orregidor defenders by President Roosevelt.

  When somebody asked MacArthur about it, he said, “The Marines got more than their share of glory in World War I, and they’re not getting any in this war.”

  Then, about three months later, he’d had the gall to send the First Marine Division into a hellhole like Guadalcanal. Now we were under his command, and most of us figured he expected us to defend Australia. The whole idea started us doing quite a bit of cussing under our breath, and what came next was like throwing gasoline on a smoldering fire.

  Once all the troops had disembarked, I was put in charge of a K/3/5 working party assigned to clean up the mess the Fifth Marines had left behind on the President Jackson.

  Obviously, none of the guys from Guadalcanal wanted to be stuck with this kind of job. You could almost feel their anger and disgust building up and up until it finally exploded like a bomb. The guys were already nettled because they didn’t like MacArthur or the look and feel of Brisbane, and getting stuck with cleaning up after about 2,500 Marines only added insult to injury. Then, as the final straw, this turkey of a ship’s captain lit into us in a report that described our cleanup job as “the worst” he’d ever seen.

  I personally thought we’d done a fairly decent job, all things considered. I mean, what did this guy expect from a bunch of men who’d gone through over four months of fighting Japs and malaria with almost no food, no way to take a bath, only the ground to sleep on, and no fresh clothes until we were aboard his ship?

  “Look at this lousy place,” some of the guys started yelling. “What kind of a place is this? If this is how it’s gonna be, just take us back to the ’Canal, for Chrissake!”

  A few of them actually threw their rifles overboard. That was something I never saw Marines do before or since. As it turned out, it didn’t matter much, I guess, because we were about to be issued the new semiautomatic M-1 Garand rifles to replace our old ’03 Springfields anyway. But the guys’ behavior pissed off the ship’s captain even more than he already was—not that any of us particularly gave a rat’s ass.