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

by Jim McEnery

  We stood around for a while, cussing, kicking things, and shaking our heads while we asked each other the same stupid question over and over: “Whose bright idea was this, anyway?”

  As usual, though, bitching and bellyaching didn’t help matters a bit. So we finally started digging holes for tent poles and patching holes in the tents. We used any kind of solid material we could find—palm fronds, scraps of wood, even some of the tents and cots that were in the worst shape—to give us any kind of reliable footing against the mud.

  When the sun went down that evening, it got dark in a hurry. And I do mean dark. In the confusion of the afternoon, we hadn’t given much thought to the fact that there was no electricity on the island. As night descended, some of us scrambled around to find anything dry enough to burn and make a little light.

  This was where Gunnery Sergeant Elmo M. “Pop” Haney, a World War I veteran who was close to fifty years old, came to our rescue. Haney was by far the oldest man in K/3/5. His body was hard and muscular, but he looked almost scrawny in his uniform. He only weighed about 135 pounds and was fairly short—about five-eight, I’d say—but he was as tough as one of my old leather football helmets. He was eccentric as all hell, too, no doubt about it.

  Some of the stuff Pop did caused a helluva lot of laughter behind his back. Stuff like jumping up at dawn four or five times a week and conducting fifteen minutes of bayonet practice all by himself, even aboard ship. Or scrubbing his whole body—genitals included—with a stiff-bristled brush while taking a shower.

  He talked to himself more than he talked to anybody else, and every now and then he’d chuckle and nod his head as if he agreed wholeheartedly with what he’d just said.

  Because of such peculiar habits, a lot of the young guys in the company thought Pop was crazy as a loon and laughed at him behind his back. But as I found out when night fell that first day on Pavuvu, Haney was smart in ways the rest of us didn’t understand. The longer I was around him, the more I learned.

  He could deliver a lecture on hand-to-hand combat that would’ve done justice to any drill instructor at Parris Island—which I had a feeling he might’ve been at one time or another. He was a dead shot on the pistol range, where he was in charge of safety. And heaven pity anybody who tried to sneak up on him from behind. He was as agile as a monkey, and he’d turn the tables on you before you knew what hit you.

  “Come here, Sergeant McEnery,” he said, “and I’ll show you a little trick I picked up over there in France in 1918. We didn’t have much electric light in them trenches, neither.”

  He led me inside a tent where he had a canteen cup filled with beach sand. I watched while he cut off a piece of tent rope about six inches long and poked it down into the sand in the cup, then pressed the sand tightly around it. Next he poured a few ounces of gasoline into the cup and let it soak in good. Finally, he struck a match and touched it to the rope.

  And—poof!—like magic, Pop Haney had made a crude little lamp that put out a fair amount of light—at least enough to eat by or write a letter by, maybe even play cards by. It sure beat stumbling around in the dark like a bunch of moles.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” I said.

  He grinned at me and winked. “No, you won’t,” he told me, “not if you watch your step and learn a few more tricks.”

  IT WOULD TAKE about a week even to get power to the division command post, and we never had electricity in the bivouac areas during the whole three and a half months we were on Pavuvu. With enough of Haney’s lamps, we had enough light to get by, but there were some dangers involved with the lamps, too.

  About a month after we veterans arrived, we got a shipload of green recruits of the 46th Replacement Battalion. Many of these new guys turned out to be top-notch Marines, but I swear some of them acted like real chowderheads when they first arrived.

  There was seventeen-year-old PFC Seymour Levy, for example. He was a fresh-faced Jewish boy from my hometown of Brooklyn, assigned as a rifleman in my Third Platoon. His mother had damn near disowned him for lying about his age to get in the Marines, and I could see why. He was book-smart enough that he probably made high grades in school, but in a lot of ways he was still wet behind the ears.

  One of his favorite pastimes was reciting poetry by Rudyard Kipling in what he thought was a Limey accent. You know, like:

  You may talk o’ gin and beer

  When you’re quartered safe out ’ere. . .

  Anyhow, when Levy heard about the gasoline lamps that Pop Haney and a few other old-timers had made, he decided to build one on his own. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to locate a wide-mouthed metal container, so he decided to use a Coke bottle instead.

  Bad, bad idea.

  The bottle exploded and set Levy’s tent on fire. He was lucky it didn’t do the same to him.

  “Levy was a bright kid, but he just didn’t have much common sense,” said PFC Sterling Mace, another New Yorker, who was Levy’s best buddy in the replacement battalion. “Other guys were a little wary of bunking with him after that.”

  I liked Levy. Almost all of us in the platoon liked him in spite of ourselves. He was a nice kid and a dedicated Marine who served as a morale booster for his fellow replacements and even for older guys like me. But I had serious doubts about how he was going to stack up in combat, and I spent some extra time briefing him on stuff I figured he needed to know.

  Maybe it helped, because Levy turned out to be a whole lot tougher than he looked. So did PFC Bill Leyden, another boy wonder from New York City, who was as Irish as I was and a bit of a smartass, too.

  Personality-wise, Leyden was as different from Levy as two people could be. Levy did some dumb things because he’d led a sheltered life and didn’t know better. Leyden, on the other hand, did dumb stuff because he always wanted to see how far he could push the limits.

  To get him out of the house and out of trouble, I honestly think Leyden’s parents may have picked him up and carried him to the nearest Marine recruiting office the day he turned seventeen. After some of the stunts he’d already pulled, like trying to ride across Brooklyn on top of a subway train at the age of twelve—and fracturing his skull in the process—they may have thought he’d be safer in the Marine Corps than he was at home.

  Leyden liked to think of himself as a daredevil, and he took pride in taking risks that other guys wouldn’t. This made me kind of nervous because risk takers have a habit of dying young on a battlefield, and I knew he’d have plenty of chances to show how daring he was in the months ahead.

  Also among the new replacements was PFC Eugene B. Sledge, future author of the best-selling book With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa. Sledge was a quiet, studious young man from Alabama, who was assigned as an ammo handler in K/3/5’s mortar section.

  Of all the newcomers, Sledge seemed to be the most fascinated by Pop Haney. He was always watching Haney out of the corner of his eye and, I guess, trying to figure out what was going on inside the old guy’s head.

  One day on the pistol range, Sledge was stunned to see Haney throw a handful of gravel squarely in the face of a green second lieutenant who’d accidentally pointed his loaded .45 in the direction of another Marine.

  Any other noncom in the company might’ve gotten busted or even court-martialed for a stunt like that. But the green lieutenant just blushed and left the range, rubbing his eyes, and Haney went back to supervising the marksmen like nothing had happened.

  “Haney was the only man I ever knew in the outfit who didn’t seem to have a buddy,” Sledge would later write. “He wasn’t a loner in the sense that he was sullen or unfriendly. He simply lived in a world all his own. . . .

  “We all cleaned our weapons daily, but Haney cleaned his M-1 before muster, at noon chow, and after dismissal in the afternoon. . . . He would sit by himself, light a cigarette, field strip his rifle, and meticulously clean every inch of it. Then he cleaned his bayonet. . . . He was like Robinson Crusoe on an island by himself.”

&nb
sp; BEFORE THE WAR, Pavuvu had been the site of a big copra plantation, but when we landed there, its coconut crops hadn’t been harvested for nearly two years, and the ground in the palm groves was several feet deep in rotten coconuts.

  The smell wasn’t as bad as the smell of decomposing corpses on a week-old battlefield, but it came pretty damn close, and there was no way to escape from it for the first several weeks we were there.

  Every day, we sent out work details to load up and haul away the putrified coconuts. They trucked them through the quagmires that passed for streets and dumped them in the huge swamp that covered about three-fourths of the island. Eventually, the smell subsided. But even Marines who’d lived on almost nothing but coconuts and rice on Guadalcanal reached the point where the very sight of a coconut made them gag.

  Some guys developed such an aversion to coconuts that they started venting their anger against the trees that produced them. One classic story that made the rounds on Pavuvu was about a Marine who ran out of his tent screaming at dusk one night and threw himself against the trunk of a coconut palm and started beating it savagely with his fists.

  “I hate you, goddamn it,” he sobbed. “I hate you! I hate you!”

  “Hit the son of a bitch once for me,” somebody yelled from a nearby tent. Otherwise, there was no reaction to the screamer’s outburst. It was just another typical evening on Pavuvu.

  OTHER WORK PARTIES carried crushed coral from a large vein that Marine engineers located and quarried, using whatever containers they could find—pails, helmets, even mess kits—to pave walkways and streets in the endless sea of mud. Still others dug drainage ditches and collection pools to carry off and contain the rains that fell every day.

  According to Marine regulations, tents in rest camps were supposed to have wooden decks, but lumber was about as scarce as gold nuggets on Pavuvu. To keep us from sinking up to our knees in the muck inside our tents, we scrounged every scrap of wood, sheet metal, or pasteboard we could find to keep at least some of our gear dry.

  And then there were the tens of thousands of uninvited guests—the rats and land crabs—that invaded our tents every night.

  Nobody was sure where the rats went in the daytime, but at night, they were everywhere. Herds of them ran across the tops of our tents and down the tent ropes to the ground, where they scattered in all directions, screeching wildly, darting over sleeping Marines, and devouring anything remotely edible in their path. Judging from the number of guys who were bitten by them, human flesh definitely fell into that category.

  Men tried in various ways to fight back. Some made traps by placing bait in five-pound coffee cans and incinerating the rats who got caught in them with gasoline. Others created booby traps by putting percussion caps into packages of crackers. One company commander armed his men with flamethrowers and declared all-out war against the little devils. They killed over 400 rats in a single night, but the next night there were just as many as ever, and the CO decided his offensive was wasted effort.

  The land crabs also came out to prowl every night. They weren’t as vicious as the rats, but they were just as repulsive and infuriating. They especially liked to crawl into our boondocker combat boots and make themselves at home. You learned pretty fast to shake out your boots in the morning before you put them on or suffer the consequences. Once I found three of the things in one of my boots. Because of the crabs and mud, some guys quit wearing shoes altogether and just squished around barefoot.

  The occupants of a half-dozen tents got so sick of the crabs that they formed a crab patrol one morning and tried to exterminate them all. They routed them out of their hiding places, smashing them with sticks and rifle butts and stabbing them with bayonets, Ka-Bars, and trenching tools.

  After the massacre, they counted 128 dead crabs in one tent alone. They threw the carcasses into an oil drum, drenched them with gasoline, and set them on fire—and immediately wished they hadn’t.

  “It was the most sickening smell in the world,” one Marine said. “It was so bad we couldn’t stay in our tents the rest of the day. It was a Sunday, too, so we lost all our Sunday sack time.”

  EXCEPT WHEN THEY’RE LUCKY enough to be dining in style aboard Navy ships, Marines always seem to complain about the chow they’re served on duty, and Pavuvu was no exception to this rule.

  Since there was no refrigerated storage for fresh meat, fruits, and vegetables on the island, our meals for the first month or two consisted mostly of powdered eggs, dehydrated potatoes and carrots, and three or four kinds of canned meats, all of which we called “Spam.” In other words, they were the equivalent of heated C rations, and all we had to wash them down with was a bright yellow, imitation-lemon-flavored drink known as “battery acid.”

  During one period of several days, the cooks varied the menu by serving nothing but oatmeal—morning, noon, and night. It was monotonous, and it didn’t taste all that great, but when I remembered what we survived on at Guadalcanal, I counted my blessings.

  The new guys were particularly critical of the bread our cooks turned out. Gene Sledge described it as being “so heavy that when you held a slice by one side, the rest of the slice broke away of its own weight. The flour was so massively infested with weevils that each slice of bread had more of the little beetles than there are seeds in a slice of rye bread.”

  When combat veterans heard Sledge and other replacements bitching about the bread, some of them made a joke out of it. “Hey, those bugs are good for you,” they’d say. “They put more protein in your diet.”

  Not all of us old hands were quite that polite, though. “What the hell are you griping about?” I remember telling one mouthy replacement. “This ain’t the Waldorf-Astoria. You volunteered to be a Marine, and you’re getting exactly what you asked for. If you’d been at the ’Canal, you’d know how good you’ve got it here.”

  Another veteran noncom put it even more bluntly. “Just shut up and quit whining,” he told Sledge. “Things could be a damn sight worse, and besides, until you’ve been in combat, you got nothing to complain about.”

  This put-down left a deep impression on the sensitive young replacement. “He made me thoroughly ashamed,” Sledge said later. “After that, I kept most of my negative remarks to myself.”

  IT WAS UNDENIABLY true that Pop Haney didn’t have any really close buddies. But for reasons I never fully figured out, Pop did take a liking to me, and I guess I became the closest thing he had to an actual friend in the company.

  For one thing, I didn’t mind listening to Pop’s long explanations about the importance of one man staying awake and alert at all times in every foxhole or how to stay ready to fight off an attacker who jumped into your foxhole at night.

  “You gotta keep your bayonet sharp and in your hand when there ain’t room to use your rifle,” he’d say. “You gotta grab that fuckin’ Jap and pull him up close and cut his damn throat as quick as you can.”

  Usually all I had to do was nod and say “Uh-huh,” and Pop would just go right on talking. But I really did listen to a lot of what he had to say because I knew he knew what he was talking about. After all, he’d been doing it since before I was born.

  About once every three or four weeks, Pop came up with a pint bottle of whiskey. I never asked where it came from, and he never told me, but I figured he got it from one of the men who delivered our mail by boat every four or five days.

  (The mail came from Banika, the nearest island to Pavuvu, where the Navy maintained a huge supply depot, a hospital staffed by real, live American nurses, and other major amenities. Only a handful of Pavuvu Marines ever got to go to Banika, and the ones who did talked about it like it was heaven on earth.)

  Anyway, whenever Pop got a fresh bottle, he’d invite me to share it with him, and he never had to ask me twice, I can tell you. I mean, the last thing I wanted to do was hurt the old man’s feelings.

  He’d lead the way to a beat-up old rowboat he kept hidden in some reeds, and we’d row out to a raft anc
hored about a hundred feet offshore. We’d sit there for a half-hour or so, until the bottle was empty, then get in the boat and row back to shore.

  After a couple of snorts from the bottle, all Pop wanted to talk about was the “old Corps” and how things were in France in World War I, where he served with the very same K Company, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines.

  He’d left the Corps in the 1920s and taught school in his native Arkansas for a few years before joining back up in 1927 and getting right back in K Company again. I can’t say for certain, but he may have served longer in K/3/5 than any other Marine in history.

  “You’d’ve done all right over there, McEnery,” he’d say, “because you’re careful, and you don’t take a lotta stupid chances. Most of these punk kids, though, they’d never of made it in the old Corps.”

  I always nodded and said “Thank you” a lot and kind of let it go at that. After two or three drinks of whiskey, Pop could carry on a conversation for an hour or more all by himself without any comments from me. He’d stop now and then to cuss or chuckle at something he’d said, then go right on.

  But I never thought the whiskey actually had much of an effect on him. I mean, he said and did all those same things when he was dead sober, too.

  One thing Pop didn’t talk about—not ever, as far as I know—was the fact that he’d been awarded a Silver Star for heroism at Cape Gloucester. He’d made his way through heavy Jap fire to take a fresh supply of grenades to a group of pinned-down Marines who’d run out, then helped them wipe out a big nest of Nips.

  I heard about all this secondhand from several guys while we were on Pavuvu, but I never said anything about it to Haney because I didn’t know for sure till after the war if the story was authentic. It definitely was.

  AS REST CAMPS and training areas go, Pavuvu had to rank at or near the bottom in a lot of ways. One of the major logistical problems was there was so little usable land area that it was impossible to hold large-scale maneuvers there without our skirmishes overflowing into company streets. But that was the brass’s problem, as far as I could see, and when I stopped to compare Pavuvu to the other Pacific islands I’d done time on so far, I knew it could’ve been a whole lot worse.