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

by Jim McEnery

  When we finally got to go ashore, they loaded us in trucks and drove us out to a campsite that looked more like a city dump than a bivouac area. Some other outfit’s trash was all over the place, meaning we had another cleanup job to do. We were housed in moldy pyramidal tents, and a stagnant little corner of a swamp ran right through the middle of mine. If the water rose a few more inches, I’d have needed a life preserver.

  Oh, well, I told myself, what the hell? I was so tired I could’ve slept on a bed of nails.

  Naturally, mosquitoes were swarming all over the camp, and when our division surgeon had some of them tested, he confirmed that, yes, they were definitely the malaria-carrying kind.

  I thought, Okay, so what? I’ve already got malaria, so that’s nothing to worry about.

  Some of our First Marine Division officers protested to members of MacArthur’s staff about the crappy conditions at the camp, but it didn’t do any good. “When you talked to these people,” one Marine officer said, “you got the feeling they thought our troops were just another supply item that could be stored in a warehouse until they were needed.”

  FORTUNATELY, WE DIDN’T have to stay at Brisbane very long. I think General Vandegrift was determined to get us out of there ASAP, and he used his influence to put as much space as he could between us and Dugout Doug.

  None of us wanted to be MacArthur’s palace guard, but it wasn’t that we had any bad feelings toward the Australians. On the contrary, the ones I met were good people, and they treated us great the whole time we were there. They knew that what we’d done at Guadalcanal had kept the Japs from invading their country, and they were grateful.

  Anyway, when the Army claimed they couldn’t find sufficient transport to move us somewhere else, Admiral Halsey stepped in to help. The next thing we knew, the biggest troop transport in the U.S. Navy showed up in Brisbane harbor. It was the USS West Point, which had been the passenger liner SS America in peacetime. It was so big it couldn’t get to the dock, and we had to take a Liberty ship out to where it was anchored before we could get aboard.

  We sailed from Brisbane on January 9, 1943, and three days later we arrived at Melbourne and disembarked into a place that seemed like a completely different world from where we’d been.

  In the first place, Melbourne is probably the most beautiful city I’ve ever been in, and after four months on Guadalcanal and three weeks at Brisbane, it looked like heaven on earth to me. It lies at the extreme southeastern tip of Australia, where the climate is mild and pleasant the year round, and there isn’t a swamp or a jungle within a thousand miles.

  In the second place, the people in Melbourne gave us a welcome that none of us would ever forget. The day we arrived, the newspapers there called us the “Saviors of Australia,” and that’s exactly the kind of reception we got. Thousands of people opened their homes to us Marines and treated us like royalty.

  We were stationed at Camp Balcombe, near a town called Mount Martha and about forty miles by train from Melbourne. K/3/5 was put on a “no duty” schedule because of our worn-out condition, and so we had plenty of free time to take a train ride into the city.

  Our first stop was Flinders Street Station, and right across the street was a restaurant and bar called Young & Jackson’s Pub, where most of the Marines headed as soon as they got off the train. Right in front of the bar was Melbourne’s best known piece of artwork. It was a painting of a nude woman named Chloe by the famous French artist J. J. Lefebvre.

  But there were plenty of other places to have fun in Melbourne—beaches, amusement parks, theaters, fancy department stores, soda fountains, ritzy hotels, beautiful parks and flower gardens, and, of course, lots of other bars and restaurants.

  And maybe the best thing of all about Melbourne was that, wherever you went in the city, it felt so relaxed and orderly and normal after being in a hellhole like Guadalcanal. So after the Marines downed their first couple of Foster’s beers at Young & Jackson’s, they’d scatter in all directions and head for their favorite hangouts.

  One of my own favorites was a restaurant run by an older Russian lady. I used to bring her cigarettes and chocolates, and she’d fix me unforgettable meals. I especially remember how much I liked her borscht, a type of soup made out of beets. I called her “Mom” because she reminded me of my mother. Sometimes, after a long, hard night on the town, she’d let me sleep in a spare bedroom above the restaurant.

  I met a girl named Marian Curtis, who lived in a small town outside Melbourne called Marubeni, and I dated her quite a few times. Marian was really a sweet girl, and she had a very nice family. They invited me to stay with them sometimes and fixed up comfortable sleeping quarters for me on their wide front porch.

  It was also in Melbourne that I became close friends with Lou Gargano, a Marine I’d first met at New River in North Carolina. Lou had been with K/3/5 ever since then, but he’d been leading a mortar squad on Guadalcanal, and I never saw much of him there. But when we got to Camp Balcombe, he was reassigned to the First Platoon, and we saw each other every day.

  We were both buck sergeants and eligible for the same special NCO assignments, so we could’ve easily become rivals. It’s also been said that Italians and Irish don’t get along very well, but that wasn’t true with Lou and me. Within a couple of weeks, we became best buddies. He was from Bayonne, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from my hometown of New York City, and we were about the same age. It seemed like we could always find a lot of things to talk about, and we started pulling a few weekend liberties together in Melbourne.

  Lou had what you might call movie-star-caliber good looks, with the kind of dark eyes and wavy black hair that women love, and I noticed early on that he got a lot of attention from the girls we encountered in the Melbourne bars. But I also noticed that he never flirted with them or even paid much attention. He was always polite, but that was as far as it went.

  On our second or third night on the town, I found out why.

  “When I first joined up, I planned to make a career out of the Marine Corps,” Lou told me, “but then I got married, and now I’ve changed my mind. When this stinking war gets over, all I want to do is settle down with my wife and little girl, maybe have another kid or two.”

  What he said kind of surprised me. I already knew he was married, but I didn’t know how serious he was about it, and I hadn’t realized he had a kid. Back in those days, lots of guys in the military got married on the spur of the moment right before they shipped out, but as time went by, either the guy or the girl he left behind started having second thoughts.

  “Where’s your wife now?” I asked him.

  “Oh, she’s going to school at East Carolina Teachers College,”

  he said. “She’s still got about a year to go to get her degree. Then she says she wants to find a job teaching first grade.”

  Lou reached for his wallet and showed me pictures of his wife and baby daughter. The kid looked pretty much like all babies to me, but I had to admit his wife was a really attractive woman. I gave both pictures an appreciative nod.

  “Very pretty lady,” I said. “Cute kid, too. How old is she?”

  “A little over six months old,” he said. “I didn’t find out my wife was expecting until I got overseas. She had to drop out of college for a semester to take care of the baby, but she’s a smart gal, and she went right back. I may have to go to college myself after the war, just to keep up with her.”

  As the weeks passed, I saw less and less of Marian Curtis. I knew for sure now that Lou wouldn’t have anything to do with the girls in Melbourne—and there were plenty of them, I can tell you—so there was no chance of us double-dating. I also didn’t think any of us would be very comfortable if I brought Marian along on my beer-drinking bull sessions with Lou.

  But there was another factor involved, too. Marian had let me know more than once that she was in the market for a husband and wouldn’t mind at all if it turned out to be a Yank. She sent me a beautiful picture of h
erself along with a long letter that pretty much summed up her feelings.

  Like I said, she was a lovely girl, but I wasn’t ready to get married. Not anywhere near ready. I knew this stopover in Melbourne was going to end one day soon. When it did, I’d be going back into battle on some other damn island, and I didn’t want to leave any Aussie war widow behind.

  After a while, I just quit calling Marian, and that was the end of it. From then on, Lou and I spent our liberties at our favorite “slop chutes,” as we called them, or took in one of the American movies that were always playing in Melbourne.

  After I stopped seeing Marian, I still thought about her fairly often, and I never forgot her. I’ve always hoped she had a good life. Matter of fact, I still have that photograph of her somewhere. My wife, Gertrude, the wonderful woman I’ve been married to for the past sixty-five years, thinks it’s funny that I’ve kept it all this time.

  And when I stop to think about it, I guess she’s right.

  MY SADDEST EXPERIENCE during our time at Camp Balcombe happened one day when I went over to the Seventh Marines’ area looking for Remi Balduck, my old friend from Parris Island. I didn’t know what company he was in, so I just started asking around, hoping that somebody would recognize his name and steer me to him.

  The first few Marines I asked gave me nothing but head shakes and blank stares. But I finally came to this one guy whose expression told me instantly that he knew who I was talking about and what he was going to tell me wasn’t good.

  “Sure, I knew Corporal Balduck,” he said. “Were you a friend of his?”

  That past tense he was using gave me a sinking feeling in my gut.

  “Yeah, we were in boot camp together,” I said. “Then we were both stationed at Norfolk for a while. Do you know where I can find him?”

  The guy frowned and looked away. “In a hole in the ground on Guadalcanal,” he said. “Remi bought it there last November.”

  The guy told me how Remi’s G Company, Second Battalion, Seventh got into a heavy firefight with the Japs east of the Lunga River. Normally, he was a squad leader, but that day he spearheaded an attack by his whole platoon against a Jap position.

  “He was hit just as he threw a grenade,” the guy said, “but we wiped out the Japs and took the position. Remi’s up for a Navy Cross for what he did.”

  I learned later that the citation for that Navy Cross praised Remi’s “relentless fighting spirit, extraordinary heroism, and utter disregard for his own safety.”

  That was the Remi I remembered.

  The day he was killed was November 9, 1942. At that same time, I was in a field hospital with malaria, and it was strange to think that I’d only been a couple of miles away when it happened.

  In 1944, the high-speed transport USS Balduck (APD-132) was named in Remi’s honor.

  NOT LONG AFTER K/3/5 settled in at Camp Balcombe, we got yet another new company commander, this time to replace Captain Cobb. His name was Captain Andrew Allison “Ack-Ack” Haldane, and he’d done a great job leading a machine gun section on the ’Canal.

  Haldane was our third CO in about a month, but I guess the third time was the charm, like they say. Ack-Ack was one helluva great guy and an outstanding officer.

  He’d been a big football star at some college in New England, but he was a regular guy who got along fine with the enlisted men. He was firm with the troops but always fair, and he never raised his voice. As a fighting man, I think he was cut out of the same cloth as Red Mike Edson.

  (Red Mike, by the way, was destined for bigger things than being CO of the Fifth Marines. In August 1943, he’d become chief of staff of the Second Marine Division and was later promoted to brigadier general and assistant division commander. He was succeeded as Fifth Marines commander by Colonel John T. Selden, who would lead the regiment at Cape Gloucester.)

  Haldane’s arrival put an end to the game of musical chairs with our K/3/5 COs. He’d be in charge of the company for almost the next two years, and when we got to places like Cape Gloucester and Peleliu, we’d realize how fortunate we were to have him.

  I’ll be telling you more about him later—a lot more.

  ONCE WE RESTED UP, recovered from our malaria and malnutrition, and passed a complete physical, we were put through some of the most rigorous training we’d ever had. Reveille at Camp Balcombe was at 7 AM, and usually it signaled the start of a busy day of simulated combat maneuvers.

  During the Australian summer of 1943—wintertime in the U.S.A.—I was sent to an Aussie combat training school for NCOs, and it was terrific. The trainers were Australian sergeant-majors, who taught us boxing, jujitsu, and other self-defense techniques we’d never learned before.

  We were split up into groups or wings with one group lying in wait and hiding until another group went by. Then the first group would jump out and attack the second one. What followed was a real brawl with a lot of good, honest, clean fighting. We got plenty of scrapes and bruises, but nobody got seriously hurt.

  We also had a bunch of swimming competitions. The Aussies were noted for their excellent swimming, but we Marines outdid them. I won a handful of medals that I was really proud of from the Royal Life Saving Society.

  The Aussies were fierce, tough competitors, and when we were on liberty, we got into some pretty wild brawls with them. I’ll say this for them, though: They never fought dirty. No sticks or broken bottles or thrown chairs. But if you ever got into it with one of them, you’d have to take on the whole gang. They had kind of a herd mentality in situations like that.

  ON JULY 8, 1943, General William Rupertus took over command of the First Marine Division from General Vandegrift, and after that training got considerably more intense at Camp Balcombe. We knew the good, relaxed times were coming to an end. Our next operation was getting close.

  By this time, a lot of new replacements had joined the division, and they were being integrated into all three of K/3/5’s infantry platoons to serve beside the Guadalcanal veterans and learn from their experiences during field exercises.

  The new guys needed an education if they wanted to improve their odds of surviving the next operation, and we were glad to try to give it to them. We filled them in on the tricks Jap snipers used, like tying themselves in the tops of trees and waiting for a column of Marines to pass. And like cutting fire lanes a few feet wide at right angles to the Marines’ line of march, then setting up machine guns to mow us down as we crossed the lane.

  We warned them that Japs liked to slip up behind the last Marine in a column on patrol and slit his throat before he could make a sound, then do the same thing to the next guy in line. And the next, and the next.

  In August, we started making practice landings from rubber boats, and learning how to work closely with tanks. Most of our liberties were canceled, and our leisurely weekends in Melbourne became a thing of the past.

  Along with our new M-1 rifles, we were also issued a new piece of equipment to wear in a special sheath on our belts. It was a broad-bladed instrument that could be used either as a sidearm or a utility tool. It closely resembled the famed Bowie knife of the Old West, but it was called a Ka-Bar.

  “You can do many different things with this knife,” we were told when we received our Ka-Bars. “You can open a can of C rations with it. You can chop up firewood with it. You can clean the mud off your boondockers with it. And, of course, you can slit a Jap’s throat with it.”

  The time for our next battle was getting close, and we all knew it.

  ABOUT DUSK ONE evening, Captain Haldane surprised us by telling us to get our gear together and prepare to move out. We hiked all night long with full packs and bedrolls and carrying our M-1s. We’d march for fifty minutes, then get a ten-minute rest break.

  The next morning, field cooks met us and served breakfast. Then the same routine started all over again. We hiked all day at the same pace as before, never getting a break longer than ten minutes, and then we kept it up for a second straight night.


  The second day was constant maneuvers with tanks, artillery, and machine guns firing live ammo over our heads as we crawled on our bellies and planes bombing and strafing the area immediately in front of us. Finally, about 4 PM, all the firing stopped, and we started hiking back to camp.

  On the way, I spotted an apple orchard where the trees were loaded with fruit, and I led my squad into it. We were relaxing in the shade and eating apples when the owner of the orchard came along. I expected him to tell us to get the hell off his property, but he surprised me.

  “You Yanks are welcome to anything I have,” he said. “I’ve got a son in America, and everyone treats him marvelously over there. You can bed down here for the night if you want. I’ll get you some blankets.”

  When we got back to Camp Balcombe, considerably later than the rest of the company, Lieutenant Daniel Dykstra, our new platoon leader, wasn’t nearly so charitable or understanding.

  ON SEPTEMBER 27, the Fifth Marines left Melbourne and sailed north through the Great Barrier Reef and around the broad curve of Australia’s east coast. General Rupertus and his staff had expected the division to travel aboard APAs, the Navy’s new, specially designed assault transports, but we were in for a big disappointment.

  The First Marine Division was now part of the U.S. Sixth Army, and Army brass didn’t give a hoot in hell about our comfort or convenience. So we ended up spending two weeks aboard a cramped Liberty ship named the SS B. F. Shaw. It was a Merchant Marine vessel that was never meant to carry troops, and we were crammed into quarters that ranged from primitive to nonexistent.

  We shared the cargo hold with hundreds of crates, artillery pieces, trucks, jeeps, deflated rafts, and other equipment. We had two sleeping choices—we could either hang hammocks between steel bulkheads and girders in the hold, or we could bed down on deck under ponchos and the sections of two-man tents we called “shelter halves.”