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

by Jim McEnery

  We were moving into a native village when we came on a bunch of foxholes. The villagers assured us they were all empty, that the Japs who’d used them had all left, but Bauerschmidt wasn’t so sure, and I wasn’t either.

  “Hey, Mac,” he told me. “Go up there and check out those foxholes. I’ll cover you.”

  I didn’t relish going up there by myself, and I was sweating a little, but I did as Bauerschmidt ordered. Sure enough, the holes were empty, and the Nips were long gone.

  Later, the lieutenant called me aside and apologized. “That was a bad move on my part, Mac,” he said, “and I’m sorry. I put you at risk, and I shouldn’t have done it. We should’ve just grenaded the damn holes to be on the safe side.”

  EVEN WHEN THE NIPS did try to pull an ambush on us, they seemed almost halfhearted about it. More often, they just scattered into the jungle without firing a shot. Sometimes they just sat there and let us kill them or did us a favor by killing themselves.

  We didn’t take any prisoners, mainly because almost none of them chose to surrender. If their situation was hopeless, they preferred to blow themselves up with grenades or fall on their own bayonets. Usually, only the wounded fell into our hands while they were still alive, and we made short work of them. We knew better than to leave any Jap wounded lying around because as long as they had breath in their bodies, they’d do their damnedest to kill us. We’d learned that lesson the hard way at Guadalcanal. I got to the point where I could shoot them without feeling anything.

  To a Jap soldier, surrender was the worst disgrace imaginable. Never in any of the fights I was in did I see one drop his weapon and raise his hands, clearly signaling that he was giving up. If I ever had, I’m not sure what I would’ve done, but I’d probably have shot him, anyway. Most of the time, we had no secure place to put prisoners and no time to deal with them—and we knew they couldn’t be trusted. If the situation was reversed, we know they’d treat us the same way.

  During one of our skirmishes, a Marine scout dropped his rifle, and when he went back to get it after we finished the Japs off, he found it booby-trapped. A land mine was attached to the rifle, and a grenade was attached to the land mine.

  “I think I can dismantle that thing,” I told Captain Haldane. “Do you want me to try?”

  “No, Mac, just stay away from it. It’s safer to leave it alone,” he said. So I did.

  Another time, I passed the body of a Jap who had his pants pulled down and his genitals exposed. I had no idea how he’d ended up that way unless he’d died or been killed while he was trying to relieve himself.

  THE PLAN WAS to rotate the Fifth Marines’ three battalions so that fresh troops were going out every day. While a couple of companies marched, another one boarded landing craft to try to leapfrog the retreating Japs and get ahead of them.

  But bad weather hampered us from the start. It rained buckets damn near every day, and there was such heavy cloud cover that the Grasshopper observation planes we relied on to locate Jap troop concentrations were no help at all. The surf was so rough in spots that we couldn’t even land on some of the beaches.

  Colonel Selden, our new battalion commander, realized what a struggle we were having, and he took it kind of easy on us. He also knew the Japs were in no condition to offer much resistance.

  “With few exceptions,” he explained later, “men weren’t called upon to make marches on two successive days. After a one-day hike, they either remained in that camp for three or four days or made the next jump by LCM [landing craft].”

  The weather and the colonel’s patience were two main reasons it took us almost all of February to advance about thirty miles, from the west shore of Borgen Bay to a place called Iboki Point.

  The Japs never offered any organized rearguard resistance. Most of the enemy troops we encountered were stragglers with no will to fight. Quite a few of them committed suicide as we approached by holding grenades to their heads and pulling the pins.

  IT WAS DURING this time that I had one of the weirdest—and, I have to admit, one of the scariest—experiences of my life.

  We were moving slowly to the east through some heavy jungle growth, and I was anchoring the extreme right flank of our advance. I was keeping an eye out for Japs to our right and also trying to stay in sight of the Marine next to me on my left, maybe fifteen or twenty yards away. But the jungle got so thick in some places that I’d go for several minutes without being able to see or hear any of the other guys.

  As it got later in the day, I sort of got accustomed to being out of sight of the others, and it didn’t bother me at first. But then I realized it had been a half-hour or more since I’d seen another Marine, and I started feeling a little edgy.

  About that time, I passed a native woman who was bathing her young child in a shallow stream, and I moved a little farther to my right to get past her. She never looked in my direction, and I don’t think she even knew I was there.

  It never occurred to me then that she and her kid would be the last human beings I’d see for the next eighteen hours.

  As the afternoon wore on, I started veering a little more to my left, expecting to run into one of my platoon mates. We were all familiar with the pace we were expected to keep, and I was pretty sure I was still moving parallel with the rest of the platoon.

  But when I couldn’t make contact with anyone, it began to bother me, especially when the daylight started getting a little dimmer, and it was obvious that darkness wasn’t far away.

  Several times, I considered letting out a yell, but then I thought: What if a bunch of Japs answer?

  So I tightened my grip on my M-1 and kept my mouth shut while I veered a bit more to the left. Still, the only thing I saw was more damn trees, brush, and vines.

  When it got too dark to keep going, I sat down with my back to a big tree, laid my rifle across my knees, and ate some C rations. Before long, it started to rain, as usual. The jungle was full of strange sounds, but nothing I could identify as human.

  I spent that night alone in the jungle—as alone as I’ve ever felt. I tried to stay calm, but I had a nagging feeling that I might be seriously lost, and I actually started to wonder if I’d ever see my platoon mates again. I was soaking wet, which didn’t help, and I probably didn’t sleep more than a few minutes at a stretch the whole night. I kept jerking awake and feeling for the trigger of my M-1, but I had enough self-control not to fire it.

  Sometime before dawn, I did drift off. When I woke up, it was daylight, but the mist was so thick I could barely see the lower limbs of the tree I was leaning against.

  Okay, I told myself, this is stupid. I’ve gotta find somebody—anybody!

  I stood up and started working my way to the left. After fifteen or twenty yards, the trees thinned out a little. After another twenty yards, I thought I heard low voices, and I stopped to listen. Then I saw a couple of Marines I knew sitting in a clearing and smoking cigarettes.

  I went over and sat down beside them, feeling a surge of relief.

  “Man, am I glad to see you guys,” I said.

  One of them looked at me with kind of a puzzled frown. “Why?” he asked. “Do you want to bum a cigarette?”

  I didn’t even try to explain.

  I MADE A POINT of staying within sight of at least one of my platoon mates after that, but I’ve never forgotten the lost feeling I had during that night in the jungle. A couple of days later, we got to Iboki Point and took a rest.

  As nasty as our job of rooting out and killing Jap stragglers was, Colonel Selden told us he was proud of us for doing it well and not having any combat losses for several weeks while “maintaining unremitting pressure on the retreating enemy.”

  Our last real scrap in the Cape Gloucester campaign came toward the end of the first week of March, when we moved by boat out onto the Willaumez Peninsula, which juts about twenty-five miles into the Bismarck Sea from the north coast of New Britain. A good-sized enemy force was dug in on top of a 900-foot peak called Mount
Schleuchter with mortars and at least one field piece.

  K/3/5 and the rest of the Third Battalion landed on a beach at the base of the peninsula near Talasea Point and the Talasea coconut plantation. We quickly occupied both areas with only minor skirmishing while 1/5 drew the tough assignment of dislodging the Nips from their fortified mountaintop.

  It took four days, heavy fire from our own mortars and artillery, and hard fighting by the First Battalion, Fifth, to finish the job. But by March 9, the mountain was clear of Jap defenders, and their mortars and field piece were in the hands of the Marines.

  The so-called Battle of Talasea was our last major action on New Britain, and it cost the division its first significant casualties since Hill 660—18 Marines killed and 122 wounded. Close to 200 Japanese dead were counted.

  After that, enemy resistance in western New Britain was over, but the end of the fighting there didn’t mean we were going to get to leave. We’d be stuck there for nearly two more months—and if Dugout Doug MacArthur had had his way, we might still be there.

  “It was like pulling teeth to get the First Division from MacArthur and away from Cape Gloucester,” wrote George McMillan in The Old Breed. “The negotiations reached their climax in the first week of April with a not altogether pleasant exchange of messages between Admiral Nimitz and MacArthur.”

  After all the fighting our division had been through, Dugout Doug wanted to send us to the other end of New Britain to take on the big Jap base at Rabaul. But Nimitz and other Navy brass were convinced that Rabaul had become isolated and could now be safely bypassed, rather than made the object of a costly, pointless battle.

  To apply maximum pressure, Nimitz turned for support to Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations, and they both advised MacArthur to forget his Rabaul campaign and relieve the First Marine Division “as soon as practicable.”

  In the language of top military commanders, that meant “Do it now, damn it!” and MacArthur gave in. On April 17, he made a brief visit to First Marine Division headquarters on New Britain for handshaking and picture taking that took all of about two minutes. Then he was gone. It was the only time he ever came anywhere near Cape Gloucester.

  A little more than two weeks later, we were gone, too. On May 4, 1944, we boarded the USS Elmore at Borgen Bay, and the following day we were among the last members of the division to leave our Green Hell behind.

  Other hells awaited us.

  THE CRAB AND COCONUT WARS

  WHEN WE EMBARKED from Gloucester on May 5, most of us in K/3/5 were pretty sure we were on our way back to Camp Balcombe near Melbourne for another extended stay.

  Scuttlebutt to that effect had been circulating for weeks, and we’d convinced ourselves it was the straight scoop. General Rupertus himself had supposedly said so, and a feeling of excitement spread over the ship as New Britain disappeared behind us and we headed into open sea. We were like a bunch of kids on the night before Christmas.

  On the deck of the Elmore, some guys gathered around Lieutenant Edward A. “Hillbilly” Jones, the guitar-strumming leader of the company’s machine gun section, and started singing the old Australian folk ballad “Waltzing Matilda.” The tune had been adopted by the First Marine Division as our unofficial theme song when we were stationed at Balcombe back in ’43, and it cheered us up to hear it again.

  Lieutenant Jones was from some little burg in Maryland, up near the Pennsylvania state line, and he was one of the best-loved officers in the Corps. He was another one of those so-called Mustangs who worked their way up through the ranks, and the enlisted guys who served with him knew he’d paid his dues on his way to becoming an officer.

  Jones had joined the Corps as a private in the mid-1930s and served for six years as a seagoing Marine aboard a Navy ship. He’d won a lieutenant’s commission at Guadalcanal for the fine work he and his gunners did in stopping those Nip banzai charges.

  He was especially popular with our southern boys in K/3/5 when he was belting out some twangy country song like “San Antonio Rose” or “Red River Valley.” They were the ones who’d tagged him with the nickname “Hillbilly,” but by now everybody in the company called him that.

  Personally, my musical taste ran more to “Sidewalks of New York” or “My Wild Irish Rose,” but I was also a big admirer of Jones. He was a damn good person as well as being a good Marine, and the way he played and sang “Waltzing Matilda” even got me to humming a few bars.

  We remembered Melbourne as a peaceful, stable, normal kind of place—one untouched by the gruesome ugliness of war that we lived with every minute at the Cape and the ’Canal. Short of getting back to the States, there was no place else on earth we’d rather go.

  If we’re lucky enough to go back to Melbourne, I thought, I may just give Marian Curtis a call when I get there.

  I guess I should’ve known I was only kidding myself. We were all destined to be disappointed. Very disappointed.

  SOME OF MY SHIPMATES with a keen sense of direction in mid-ocean and no land in sight started to get suspicious after we’d been under way for two or three hours.

  “We’re headed almost due east,” one of them said glumly. “We’d have veered south by now if we were going to Melbourne. Dear God, do you think they’re taking us back to Guadalcanal?”

  Actually, the guy wasn’t far wrong. For several reasons, Marine Corps brass had seriously considered Guadalcanal as our destination for rest and recuperation. Our battleground of a year and a half ago was now the largest rear-area U.S. military complex in the South Pacific, and there were ample accommodations available for us there.

  But the problem was, the ’Canal had become such a beehive of constant activity that weary Marines who got sent there were likely to spend more time working than resting.

  That was exactly what had happened when the Third Marine Division was sent there after their fight at Bougainville. They’d been ordered to supply 1,000 men a day for work details on the ’Canal. After four months in the Green Hell of Cape Gloucester, we were too sick and worn out for an assignment like that, and our Marine officers knew it, even if the Guadalcanal Island Command didn’t.

  So the Marine decision makers, including our old friend, General Roy Geiger from the Cactus Air Force, decided to send us to an obscure, undeveloped island called Pavuvu. Nobody in the division had ever heard of it, but the name itself sent up warning flares. It sounded like something that would stick to the bottom of your shoe.

  Careful! Don’t step in that Pavuvu!

  Geiger had recently been given command of the III Amphibious Corps, which now included our division, and he and his staff chose Pavuvu on the basis of flying over it exactly one time. Glancing down from 1,000 feet, they saw sparkling white beaches, a placid blue lagoon, and neat rows of graceful coconut palms. To them, it seemed like a perfect spot for R&R.

  Believe me, they should’ve looked closer.

  COMPARED TO GUADALCANAL, Pavuvu’s just a speck in the ocean, but it’s the largest of the Russell Islands, a string of tiny dots of land stretching along the southeastern edge of the Solomon group. It measures about ten miles long from east to west and six miles wide from north to south, and it lies only sixty miles from Guadalcanal.

  But more important for U.S. military planners in the spring of 1944 was the fact that Pavuvu was less than half as far as Melbourne from the First Marine Division’s next objective, which had already been selected for us by none other than Dugout Doug himself.

  None of us knew it at the time, but that objective was Peleliu, an obscure chunk of coral in the Palau Islands that nobody in the division had ever heard of and wouldn’t for several months to come. It was a long sail away from either Guadalcanal or Pavuvu—roughly 2,100 miles—but if we’d had to travel from Melbourne, the trip would’ve been more like 5,000.

  Personally, I’m glad they kept us in the dark about where we were going next. Dealing with Pavuvu was bad enough.

  EVEN FROM THE DECKS of the Elmore, the island could’ve
been mistaken for a tropical paradise. As one Marine put it, “The palm trees were swaying in the breeze, and the lagoon was beautiful. Then we went ashore and found out what it was really like.”

  There were no docks for our ships. We had to wade ashore from landing craft through a driving rainstorm. The rainy season on Pavuvu—when more than six feet of rain (that’s seventy-two inches) falls in an average year—was supposed to be over already, but it must’ve been running late that spring.

  We expected to find at least a preliminary campsite with roads, bivouac areas, drill fields, water wells, electric generators, and tents already in place. Instead, we found nothing but a wasteland of oozy mud littered with millions of rotten coconuts and besieged by armies of rats and land crabs.

  As it turned out, it was a good thing the rainy season hung around longer than usual. There was no fresh water available, and the daily afternoon downpours were our only chance to bathe or wash our muddy dungarees.

  According to General Geiger, a full battalion of Seabees was already on the island and ready to assist the Marines “in every way possible.” Actually, only a handful of Seabees were there, and those few were waiting restlessly to be rotated back to the States. Meanwhile, they weren’t exactly eager to do any dirty, sweaty work for a bunch of Marines.

  As it stood, our “rest camp” consisted of piles of ragged castoff Army tents and half-rotted canvas cots scattered on the beach, and our designated bivouac areas were under several inches of water. Underneath a semi-solid crust, the soil was dangerously unstable. A man could sink over his shoe tops without warning. And the more it was walked and driven on, the more the surface dissolved into one giant, knee-deep quagmire.

  In this mess, it soon became obvious that we were going to have to build every stinking, saturated inch of our camp from scratch.