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

by Jim McEnery

  By late afternoon, we were back on the same side of the creek where we’d started, and my sore leg was giving me fits. It was pretty swollen by now, and I had shooting pains from my knee to my toes. Since it looked like we’d be setting up right where we were for the night—and to get my mind off the leg as much as possible—I took out my trenching tool and started digging in.

  I was trying to enlarge a good-sized shell crater enough to serve as a two-man foxhole, figuring Lou Gargano and I would share it that night.

  And that was when the shit suddenly hit the fan all over again.

  A bunch of Japs—I’d say there were at least twenty-five of them—had somehow crept up and hidden in some high grass and bushes no more than ten or fifteen yards from where I was digging. None of the Marines knew the Japs were there until one of them jumped up and screamed like a damn banshee. It didn’t sound like he was hollering “Banzai!” It was more like just “Yaaaahh!”

  Then the rest of the bastards jumped up, too, and they all started shooting.

  I flung my shovel away and grabbed the M-1 I’d gotten from Jim Day. Then I hunkered down into that shell crater as low as I could and opened fire. I emptied a seven-round clip at the bunched-up Japs and saw a couple of them tumble. The empty clip popped out automatically, and I stuck another one in its place and got off a few more rounds.

  On both sides of me, Marines were firing from crouched positions, and off to my left, one of our machine gunners started spraying the tall grass shielding the Nips with his .30-caliber weapon. I could see bodies jerking and flopping around in the grass as the slugs tore into them. He must’ve gotten at least four or five of them, but those that were still able to move slithered away and took cover behind a small hill.

  “Come on, you guys!” I heard somebody yell from behind me and to the right. “Don’t let ’em get in the creek bed. We gotta cut ’em off!”

  After a second or two, I recognized the guy yelling as Lieutenant Andy Chisick, K/3/5’s executive officer. I felt relieved when I realized it was him. He was a good officer, and he knew what he was doing.

  I had a hard time putting weight on my bum leg, but I crawled as fast as I could through the mud and grass along with fifteen or twenty other guys until we had the Nips pretty well encircled. Then we reloaded and opened up on them again, keeping our aim low so we didn’t shoot each other.

  Over the next ten or fifteen minutes, we picked off most of the Nips, but there were still some left. I swear I could hear them breathing hard and rustling the grass. They were that close.

  “For God’s sake,” Lieutenant Chisick hollered. He sounded mad and disgusted as hell. “Everybody fix bayonets, and let’s get rid of these bastards!”

  We trusted Chisick, and we did exactly as he ordered. All of us stayed low while we locked our bayonets into place. Then the fifteen or twenty of us—most of the unwounded guys in the Second and Third Platoons—jumped up and lunged into the tall grass where the Japs were hiding.

  As we charged, we were screaming like banshees ourselves.

  We shot some of the Japs, but mostly we took care of them with our bayonets. I didn’t feel much of anything but the pain in my leg when I drove my bayonet into the belly of a Jap, then jerked the blade upward into his chest. I felt detached, like I was watching someone else doing it. At that moment, killing a man with a bayonet was just another hard, dirty job to me. I could’ve been digging another foxhole for all the emotion I felt.

  In less than a minute, tops, not a single Jap was left alive.

  When it was over, we just stood there panting and exhausted, covered with red blood, red mud, and sweat. It seemed impossible, but somehow, in the whole melee, we hadn’t lost a man.

  I LOOKED ALL AROUND for my shovel to finish the foxhole I’d been working on, but it was nowhere in sight. I never did find it, but Lou and I managed to squeeze into the hole that night the way it was. By that time, my leg was hurting so bad I couldn’t bend it.

  We argued over who’d take the first watch. It was an ironclad rule for Marines in combat that one guy in every two-man foxhole stayed awake at all times.

  “Listen,” I said, “you almost got killed today, and you led the platoon when I couldn’t do shit to help you. Now go to sleep. I’m wide awake anyway.”

  “No way,” he said. “I can tell your leg’s killing you, and you gotta get some rest. So I’m standing watch, and that’s that.”

  “But—” I started.

  “Shut up, Mac,” he told me. “I’m your platoon leader, remember, and that’s a damn order.”

  I was too tired to argue anymore. I hugged my rifle with both arms and finally drifted off to sleep with my leg hanging out over the edge of the hole.

  THE NEXT MORNING, January 3, the Japs opened up with mortars to start the day, giving the area a good pounding and letting us know for sure that they hadn’t gone away.

  If the two Marine infantry battalions drawn up along Suicide Creek were ever going to get across the stream to stay, the brass figured we were going to have to have tank support.

  The problem was, the banks of the creek were too steep for tanks to negotiate, so our engineers had to bring in a bulldozer, first to cut a path through the tangled undergrowth on our side of the creek, then to shave down the banks so the tanks could cross.

  The bulldozer was unarmored, and the Nip snipers started firing at it the minute they spotted it. The driver, Corporal John Capito, was brutally exposed in the ’dozer’s high seat, and as he tried to push his fourth load of creek bank into the stream, a bullet hit him in the mouth.

  Two other volunteers, Sergeant Kerry Lane and PFC Randall Johnson, took Capito’s place and tried at first to operate the ’dozer from the side by using an axe handle to work the levers. When this failed, Lane climbed into the driver’s seat. He was soon hit by Jap fire, but he stuck with the job until the bank was cut down enough for the tanks to cross. The whole operation took most of the day.

  Both Capito and Lane survived their wounds and were awarded Silver Stars for their work.

  On the morning of January 4, three Sherman tanks made the crossing with rounds from Jap field pieces and machine guns bouncing off them like Ping-Pong balls. They pulverized the enemy bunkers on the other side of the stream, clearing the way for the riflemen of 3/5 and 3/7 to finally make it across.

  I was sorry that I wasn’t able to go with them. About noon the previous day, I’d struggled back to an aid station and asked a corps-man to take a look at my leg. He didn’t like what he saw at all.

  “Man, you need to go to sick bay and get some treatment for this thing,” he said. “Looks like you’ve got torn ligaments in there, and the more you try to walk on it, the worse it’s gonna get. You ain’t worth a damn on the line in the shape you’re in anyhow.”

  He sent me to a hospital tent in the rear, where they gave me some painkiller and bandaged my leg from mid-thigh all the way down to my toes. I was there for over a week, so I missed the rest of the Suicide Creek action and some of the hard fighting that followed.

  Beyond Suicide Creek was a series of Jap-infested hills and ridges, and the farther the Marines penetrated into them, the stronger the Japs resisted. Over the next few days, the Third Battalion, Fifth, lost both its commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel David McDougal, and its executive officer, Major Joseph Skocczylas, there. McDougal was killed, and Skocczylas was wounded.

  On January 8, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis W. “Silent Lew” Walt, a brawny, barrel-chested, square-faced guy who looked more like a prizefighter than a Marine officer, replaced Colonel McDougal as Third Battalion CO. Then, within hours of his appointment, the new commander found himself in the fight of his life at a place known at the time as Aogiri Ridge.

  At just after 1:30 AM on January 10, the Japs launched their first banzai charge against 3/5’s position on the opposite side of the ridge, where Walt had personally helped manhandle a 37-millimeter field piece into place earlier that day.

  Walt ordered the Marines
to hold their fire till the Japs were practically in their faces. Then they opened up with everything they had—rifles, grenades, machine guns, bayonets, Ka-Bar knives, bare hands, and that indispensable 37-millimeter gun. The charge fell apart, and the Japs were thrown back, leaving scores of bodies behind.

  Before dawn, the Japs charged four more times, and each time they were beaten off with heavy losses. When daylight came, the Marines counted more than 200 Japanese dead on the slopes below the crest of the ridge.

  A couple of hours later, Marine General Lemuel Shepherd, recently appointed assistant commander of the First Marine Division, visited the battlefield and decided the ridge needed a brand-new name.

  “We’ll call it Walt’s Ridge,” he said.

  THE NIGHT OF January 10 may have been the most memorable one in the history of K/3/5. My Third Platoon and the rest of the company were directly in the path of those five Jap charges, and Captain Haldane, our new company commander, became a legend that night among the Marines who served under him.

  “Ack-Ack was right there on the line with us every time the Nips came at us,” one K/3/5 Marine told me. “He had his .45 in one hand and his Ka-Bar in the other, and he knew exactly what to do with both of them. Once when we were almost out of ammo, I saw him ram that Ka-Bar into a Jap and then pick the bastard up and throw him off the ridge the way he used to throw a damn football. He rallied us and inspired us to fight harder than we ever thought we could.”

  Haldane had a rare combination of learned skills, natural intelligence, and raw courage that won the respect of everybody in the company and made us proud to have him as our CO. We respected him because we could tell that he really cared about us. He richly deserved the Silver Star he was awarded for “gallantry in action and conspicuous valor” during the savage hand-to-hand combat that night on Walt’s Ridge.

  Today, even after all these years, I still regret not being there to fight beside him. On the other hand, maybe that corpsman who insisted that I go to sick bay saved my life.

  Who knows?

  WHILE I WAS in the hospital, I had a visit from Lieutenant Tom O’Neil, an old friend from New Jersey, who’d been with K/3/5 on Guadalcanal but was now with L Company. He brought me some news that hit me like a ton of bricks and left me with a pain inside that was worse than my leg had ever been.

  Tom was what they called a “Mustang,” meaning a guy who’d started out as a private and worked his way up through the ranks to become a commissioned officer—something that didn’t happen very often—and he was one of the finest Marines I ever knew. I was pretty sure he hadn’t come all the way back to the hospital just to pass the time of day, and I could tell there was something gnawing at him even before he broke down and told me.

  “We lost three real good men a couple of days ago,” he said finally. “It was a freakish thing. They were all hit by a short round fired by one of our own 105s. I thought you’d want to know.”

  The tone of Tom’s voice gave me a queasy feeling in my gut. “Well, sure, I do,” I said. “Who was it?”

  “Dutch Schantunbach and Norm Thompson had come back to the Third Platoon CP to hand out grenades to guys to take back to their squads when the round hit,” Tom said. “They were both apparently killed instantly, and several other guys were wounded, too, but—”

  “You said there were three killed,” I interrupted. “Who was the third one?”

  Tom looked away. “Lou Gargano was a few feet away from the others, but he got hit by a bunch of fragments, and . . . well, he didn’t make it, Mac.”

  “Oh shit,” I said. As well as I remember, I said it several times.

  Dutch and Norm had been in K/3/5 ever since I joined the company, and they were part of its heart and soul. I could never forget Schantunbach leading a Higgins boat full of scared young Marines in singing “Roll Out the Barrel” as we headed into shore at Guadalcanal. And no squad leader I ever knew was more respected by the men he led than Thompson.

  But Lou Gargano’s death was something my mind refused to accept for a few seconds. I wanted to yell at Tom O’Neil and tell him to quit kidding around.

  Lou can’t be dead, I told myself. How could a guy who went through what he did at Suicide Creek be cut down by a short round from one of our own howitzers? Tom’s got to be wrong!

  Only he wasn’t. Lou was gone, and the realization hit me as hard as anything that ever happened to me. I couldn’t stand to think about the wife and the baby daughter he’d never seen waiting for him at home. I thought I’d go nuts if I did, so I forced myself to think about something else.

  ON JANUARY 12, 1944, I was released from the field hospital and rejoined K/3/5 and the Third Platoon. The doctors at the field hospital had worked wonders on my bum leg. When they took the thigh-to-toes bandage off, the pain and swelling were almost gone.

  Physically, I was feeling better than I had since we’d left Melbourne. My malaria was dormant, at least for the time being, and my budding case of jungle rot had cleared up. Even the overall situation on Cape Gloucester was looking brighter than it had since we got there. Walt’s Ridge was secure, and the only remaining Jap stronghold around Borgen Bay was a rocky knob designated as Hill 660. By January 16, the Japs’ last attempt at a counterattack had been wiped out, and the hill belonged to the Marines.

  But there was no jubilation on my part. There was only an emptiness inside me that would take a long time to go away.

  When I got back to where K/3/5 was bivouacked, I was named Lou’s replacement as platoon guide. It was a promotion that once would’ve made me feel good, but as it was I didn’t feel much of anything.

  Our platoon guides weren’t lasting long these days. It was like being handed a time bomb to wear around your neck.

  With so many good friends in the company dead now, I couldn’t help but wonder what would come first for me. Would it be a trip home or a bullet—or maybe a short artillery round—with my name on it?

  I tried not to waste my time and energy thinking about stuff like that. If you dwelled on it too much, it’d mess up your mind really bad.

  I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to make any more close friends like Lou Gargano and Remi Balduck had been. It hurt too damn much when you lost them.

  I was almost afraid to think about Charlie Smith, my boyhood friend from Brooklyn who’d joined the Marines with me on a day that seemed like a lifetime ago. I could only hope Charlie was okay—wherever he was.

  Right now, all I wanted was to do my job at Cape Gloucester, get it over with as soon as possible, and get the hell out of there.

  For reasons that those of us who were there never fully under-stood—and still don’t to this day—it would take three and a half more miserable months in that “Green Hell” to complete this assignment.

  ON FEBRUARY 3, General Rupertus informed the Army that the Japs on our end of New Britain were no longer capable of mounting a counterattack against the Cape Gloucester airfield—or, for that matter, any of the area west of Borgen Bay that they’d fought so hard to hold in January.

  At this point, the Japs were in general retreat to the east, and the only thing left for us to do was hunt down and destroy as many of them as we could.

  Personally, I think if we’d just left the bastards alone, most of them would’ve probably died on their own without any help from us. They were in that bad shape. Most of them were sick with tropical diseases, and a lot of them were wounded. All of them were starving and dead on their feet from exhaustion, so they weren’t capable of putting up much of a fight.

  They’d demonstrate that fact again and again in the weeks ahead, but unfortunately for K/3/5, General Rupertus had other ideas. He wanted the Fifth Marines to give the Nips as much assistance as possible in the dying process, and he assigned all three battalions of us—more than 5,000 troops—to go after them.

  The first problem we had, though, was that the brass couldn’t decide how we were supposed to travel. At first, we were told we’d be using Higgins boats to sail along
the coast to a point east of Borgen Bay, then go ashore and try to find somebody to fight, but this plan was dumped before it could happen.

  Instead, we marched overland on a government trail that more or less followed the northern coastline of New Britain. K/3/5 went without its machine gun and mortar sections, and, of course, with no artillery support. BARs, M-1s, and hand grenades were the strongest weapons we had, and a group of natives went along to carry extra ammo for us.

  To help us sniff out Japs, we were also joined by some Army war dogs and their trainers, and I have to admit they knew their business.

  I worked directly with one of those dogs for a day or two. It was a Doberman, and I was amazed at how it could pinpoint Nips who were doing their best to hide. It was almost like a bird dog setting a covey of quail, except that when the dog spotted the Japs, it let out this loud howl like a coonhound on the scent.

  At one point, that howling dog flushed over a dozen Nips out of a single hole. They didn’t shoot at us or anything. They just tried to get away, but we killed them all, mostly with our bayonets.

  At times, it seemed like we ran across small groups of Nips at nearly every turn in the trail, and we were always wary of ambushes. Usually, they were either too lazy or worn out to try to surprise us, but a few times they did—and one of those times cost the life of Lieutenant James Lynch, who’d just taken over as our platoon leader.

  The lieutenant was a replacement who hadn’t seen much action, and he made the mistake of walking right up to a line of Jap foxholes, thinking they were all empty. One of them wasn’t, and the Jap inside shot Lynch dead.

  After that, Lieutenant Bill Bauerschmidt took over as our platoon leader. He was another one of many green officers who were joining our ranks at that time. Most of them came in as platoon leaders, who as I said were by far the likeliest officers to be killed in action.

  Bauerschmidt was the son of a World War I veteran, and he carried the “hog-leg” revolver that his father had carried in France. He developed into a damn fine Marine officer, but during his first few days with the platoon, he sent me out on a mission that could’ve easily gotten me killed.