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

by Jim McEnery

  Once K/3/5 got past the beach, the ground was solid coral that was next to impossible to even dent with a trenching tool, and the only natural cover between the beach and the field was some scrubby brush and a few low outcroppings of coral. Some of the men were able to find enough rocks to pile up and crawl behind, but many others were basically out in the open with nothing to protect them.

  All this was tough enough on infantry trying to advance, but the airfield itself was going to be the real ballbuster. Except for some shell holes and the carcasses of a few wrecked Jap planes, it didn’t offer us any cover at all. Once we started across, there’d be no turning back. We’d be like a bunch of clay pigeons in a shooting gallery. It was actually a big relief when Lieutenant Bauerschmidt told me we’d been ordered to hold the ground we had and wait till tomorrow morning to make the crossing.

  They’d warned us it’d be hot on Peleliu, but we weren’t prepared for the kind of heat we were getting. By mid-afternoon on D-Day, the temperature was close to 115 degrees. The only way to keep from getting heat stroke was to drink water. For that reason, each Marine had come ashore with two quart-size canteens filled to the brim.

  It wasn’t nearly enough, though, and a lot of Marines drank up their water way too fast. Within the first few hours, some guys had drained their first canteen and were dipping deep into the second one. I guess they thought we’d get resupplied with water before the day was over.

  They were wrong.

  THAT AFTERNOON, INSTEAD of the banzai charge we’d been half-expecting, the Nips sent a squadron of thirteen light tanks rolling across the airfield toward the Fifth Marines’ loosely organized lines. They were supported by at least 500 infantry troops, and they aimed the center of their attack at a gap between the First and Second Battalions, hoping for a breakthrough that might throw one or both battalions back onto the beach.

  We’d had a bunch of our own tanks knocked out by enemy artillery fire during the landings that morning, and I guess the Japs thought we’d lost every bit of armor we had. Fortunately, we hadn’t. A platoon of Sherman tanks from Colonel Jeb Stuart’s First Marine Tank Battalion were clustered just fifty yards from Major Gordon Gayle’s Second Battalion command post, and Gayle was able to send them out to intercept the Jap force in the nick of time.

  The Shermans were too heavily armored and packed too much firepower for those little Jap sardine cans. Between our tanks and a battery of 75-millimeter pack howitzers that the 11th Marines had just moved into position, the attackers never had a chance.

  Our Shermans and artillery shredded the Nip tanks like tinfoil, and we used machine guns, bazookas, grenade launchers, and BARs to take care of the enemy foot soldiers. I’m not sure any of them got away.

  One of our Shermans was disabled, but it kept right on firing and took out at least six of the Jap tanks, all of which were destroyed in a matter of minutes.

  “The battle was so easy for us once it was joined,” wrote Marine historian George McMillan, “that the whole affair [was] . . . something like a comic opera.”

  It could’ve turned out much differently, though, if our Shermans had arrived just a few minutes later.

  THE ENEMY MORTAR and artillery fire slacked off at times that first day, but it never really stopped, and before the day was done, it robbed our Third Battalion of several of its key commanders. We found out that afternoon that our executive officer, Major Robert M. Ash, had been killed on the beach that morning, just a couple of minutes after he landed.

  Then, about dusk, our Third Battalion CO, Lieutenant Colonel Austin “Shifty” Shofner, who’d been captured by the Japs on Corregidor, then escaped to fight again, was seriously wounded when an enemy round slammed into the battalion CP.

  Shofner was hit by shell fragments at a very bad time—just as he was trying to contact our scattered companies with instructions on how to deploy for the night. PFC Bill Leyden, whose First Platoon was much closer to the CP than my Third Platoon was, told me later he heard Shofner screaming after he was hit.

  “He was cussin’ loud enough to put a platoon sergeant to shame.” Leyden said, “but he sounded more mad than hurt.”

  Shofner was a former star halfback at the University of Tennessee—where he’d picked up the nickname “Shifty”—and as tough a Marine as you’d ever want to meet. But his wounds were severe enough that he had to be evacuated to a hospital ship, and Lieutenant Colonel Lewis “Silent Lew” Walt, executive officer of the Fifth Marines, was sent over to take Shofner’s place.

  It was getting dark by the time Walt got to the 3/5 CP, where he found radio and phone connections with I, K, and L Companies so undependable that he decided to contact the company commanders in person. He set out alone, except for a runner, and by the time he got all three companies formed up in a circle of defense, it was black as pitch outside.

  What followed was one of the longest and uneasiest nights I ever spent, and our replacements in K/3/5 were really antsy. We were running low on ammo, and the fact that most of the new guys were completely out of water by now didn’t help, either.

  “What’s gonna happen tonight, Mac?” PFC Seymour Levy asked me. “Are the Nips gonna pull one of those banzai charges?”

  “I don’t know, kid,” I told him. “If they do, they’ll let you know they’re coming long before they get here, and we’ll blow their asses off. Infiltrators are a bigger problem ’cause you can’t hear ’em coming. Just stay down and keep your rifle and Ka-Bar ready.”

  As it happened, it stayed quiet that night in K/3/5’s immediate area—quiet enough that you could hear men praying up and down the line. I said quite a few “Our Fathers” myself.

  It wasn’t nearly so quiet, though, at Fifth Marines’ headquarters. Our regimental commander, Colonel Harold “Bucky” Harris, was slightly injured, and a Marine on his staff was killed when a mortar shell hit right in the middle of their CP. Major Walter McIlhenny, who’d won a Navy Cross at Guadalcanal and whose family owned the company that makes Tabasco sauce, was wounded by the same shell and evacuated.

  A LITTLE BEFORE 8:30 the next morning (D-plus-1), Lieutenant Bauerschmidt came over to where I was “dug in” behind a small pile of rocks and brush, and told me to get the platoon ready to move on the double.

  “It’s time to do what we came here for,” he said, “and capture that damn airfield.”

  We were about to take part in one of the largest offensive ground operations of the Pacific war. The whole Fifth Regiment was going to jump off together and charge across the airfield at the same time. North of us, to our left, elements of the Second Battalion, First Marines, would be charging, too. And to our right, near the edge of the scrubby jungle at the south end of the airfield, the Third Battalion, Seventh Marines, would also be advancing abreast of us.

  In other words, a total of about 4,500 Marines would be on the move in the open—all of them exposed to intense enemy fire for as long as it took them to get north of the field.

  It didn’t sound like a stroll in the park—and it wasn’t.

  “We’ll do this just like we practiced it on Pavuvu,” Bauerschmidt said. “Stay down till I give the signal. Then run at a crouch and keep moving. Try not to stop for anything. Put some distance between yourself and the other guys around you, so you don’t make as big a target.”

  I nodded and said “Okay,” but as I relayed the lieutenant’s orders to the guys around me, I damn sure wasn’t feeling okay. I don’t know to this day what caused it, but I was getting a sudden, urgent call from nature at the most inopportune moment of my life.

  Suddenly, all the guys in the platoon were on their feet, and Bauerschmidt was jabbing the air with his hog-leg revolver.

  “Move out!” he yelled. “Move out!

  We went forward in a wave, then scattered out, like we’d been told. From the ridges on the far side of the field, the Japs must’ve been watching and waiting, because dirty little mushrooms of dirt and smoke started blossoming around us almost instantly. The air was full of
blue tracer bullets from Nip machine guns.

  I saw PFCs Sterling Mace and Seymour Levy running parallel to me. I saw Corporal John Teskevich directly ahead. I saw Private Dan Lawler, one of the ammo handlers in our machine gun section, cry out and fall, clutching a bloody leg.

  “Keep moving!” I shouted. “Don’t slow down!”

  I was at the outer edge of the main runway when I knew for sure that I wasn’t going to be able to obey my own commands.

  I HAD to stop. I had to stop NOW. Because I had to GO!

  So I dropped my britches and took a crap right there in the middle of the runway while my platoon mates ran past, hardly seeming to notice me, and bullets smacked the tarmac a few feet away.

  It probably didn’t take me over thirty seconds to get done, yank up my pants, and start running again. But those were the longest, most helpless-feeling thirty seconds of my life.

  Even if we’d had time to pause and aim and fire, there wasn’t a damn thing for us to shoot at. The Japs that were raking us with everything from 75s and heavy mortars to machine gun and rifle fire were hidden in deep holes among the distant high ground.

  The real name of that high ground was the Umurbrogol Plateau, but we came to call the whole thing Bloody Nose Ridge. It more than lived up to that name, but it was actually dozens of ridges, sheer cliffs, and steep ravines honeycombed with hundreds of natural and man-made caves that the Japs had spent years fortifying.

  By afternoon of D-plus-one, the Fifth Marines had gained control of the airfield. Seven members of K/3/5 had been killed in the crossing, and two dozen others wounded, but the casualties we’d taken were remarkably light, all things considered.

  One thing that helped save us was that the shelling raised so much smoke and dust over the field that the Nip gunners had a hard time seeing us. Plus, the fact that we were spread out so thinly helped, too.

  It was one hellacious nightmare nevertheless, especially for troops who’d never come under fire until about twenty-four hours earlier. In his book, Gene Sledge called it the “worst combat experience” he had during the whole war and described it as “terror compounded beyond the belief of anyone who wasn’t there.”

  For several days to come, the field still wouldn’t be fully secure and our planes wouldn’t be able to use it because it was still coming under fire from enemy guns buried deep in that maze of high ridges to the north. Those guns had to be silenced, and a lot of Marines were destined to die before the job was done.

  If it was any consolation, we could at least be sure there’d be no banzai charges on Peleliu. The terrain was much too rugged for that, and the Nips we were fighting now were using a completely different strategy from what we’d seen early in the war.

  They had no hope of escaping or being reinforced, and they knew we were eventually going to kill them all. But in the two-plus years since Guadalcanal, they’d learned better than to waste their time—and their lives—trying to scare us.

  Except for the enemy infiltrators who visited us almost every night, the Japs’ goal now was to wait for us to come to them, then take as many of us with them as they could while we rooted them out of their hiding places, one cave at a time.

  AMONG THE DIVISION’S three infantry regiments, there’s no question that Chesty Puller’s First Marines took the worst punishment in the early going on Peleliu. Not only did they have the toughest time on the beaches, but they were also the first regiment to tackle those damn ridges just north of the airfield.

  Within the first two or three days, the First lost over 500 Marines killed and wounded, and a lot of people claim to this day that Chesty deserves a big share of the blame for those losses. I’m not sure if I’m one of those people, but I do know this much: I’m damn glad I wasn’t serving with the First Marines during the third week of September 1944.

  Puller had won the admiration of the whole First Marine Division for the fight he led at Guadalcanal to keep the Japs from recapturing Henderson Field. But he lost a lot of that admiration at Peleliu when he threw his troops again and again against impregnable enemy fortifications in the ridges, where hundreds of Marines were slaughtered.

  It was a miracle that anyone in Captain George Hunt’s K Company, Third Battalion, First, lived through the first forty-eight hours of what would become a month-long battle for Peleliu.

  On D-Day, Hunt and his men stormed and captured the Point, that coral outcropping jutting out into the sea above White Beach 1 that I mentioned earlier. It was the first important piece of high ground that fell to the Marines on Peleliu, and the reason it was so important was because its field pieces and machine guns were within range of about half our beachhead. As long as it was in enemy hands, no Marine on the White Beaches and the whole north half of our beachhead was safe from its fire.

  Capturing it was a great accomplishment for Hunt and his guys. But holding it turned into one of the bloodiest struggles in Marine Corps history.

  Before they were finally relieved two days later, Hunt and a handful of his men fought off repeated Nip assaults that left piles of enemy dead around the base of that hollowed-out chunk of coral.

  In my opinion, Chesty Puller can’t be faulted for the heavy casualties suffered by the First Marines in their landing area on D-day and D-plus-1. The regiment—especially its Third Battalion—simply found itself trapped in a Jap hornet’s nest, and most of those losses couldn’t have been prevented, no matter who was in charge.

  But it was over the next four or five days after the White Beaches were secured that Puller pushed his troops too hard, and a lot of men died who shouldn’t have. He sent companies that were already beaten up and shorthanded into those ridges north of the airfield, and he ordered them to keep attacking when he knew they were hopelessly outgunned and getting chewed to pieces.

  One glaring example of this was what happened to C Company, First Battalion, First Marines, commanded by Captain Everett Pope—who, by the way, was a close friend and former college classmate of K/3/5’s Captain Haldane.

  Pope’s outfit had taken a terrible beating on the beaches, where close to two-thirds of the 235 men who landed with C/1/1 were either killed or evacuated with serious wounds.

  But on September 19 (D-plus-4), Pope and his ninety remaining troops were ordered to capture a knob of rock designated on our maps as Hill 100.

  Once again, the maps were wrong. Hill 100 wasn’t actually a separate hill at all. It was part of a long, twisting ridge, dominated by higher ridges just to the north and west, all of them packed with Jap riflemen, machine guns, mortars, and even small artillery.

  Pope and about twenty-five guys easily made it to the top of Hill 100—which was only a little larger than a tennis court and offered almost no cover—only to find themselves trapped and surrounded.

  Except for their M-1s and three or four dozen hand grenades, their only weapons were a couple of tommy guns, a few BARs, and one .30-caliber machine gun. Since they’d had to travel light while climbing the hill, they were critically short of all types of ammo.

  They also didn’t have any reliable contact with battalion headquarters or C/1/1’s own mortar and machine gun squads. With nightfall closing in, they were on their own and in “one helluva bad spot,” as Pope put it.

  “Let’s gather up plenty of rocks,” he told his NCOs. “The idea’s to throw three or four rocks over the side of the cliff when the Japs start trying to come up, then follow them with one grenade. In the dark, they won’t know which is which, and they’ll take cover just as fast for a rock as they will for a grenade.”

  Hand-to-hand fighting raged on Hill 100 from just after dark till dawn. By then, the Marines had fought off dozens of Nip attacks, using not only rocks but Ka-Bar knives, rifle butts, empty ammo boxes, thrown-back Nip grenades, and bare fists. Several Japs were thrown bodily off the sheer edge of the cliff.

  When daylight came and the Japs broke off their attacks, only nine of the twenty-five Marines who’d reached the crest of Hill 100 were still alive, and most of
them were wounded. Battalion finally got through to Pope by radio and ordered him to withdraw, but his radio operator was killed by Jap machine gun fire on the way down, and Pope had to throw himself behind a stone wall to keep from being killed, too. He’d already been hit in the leg by several chunks of shrapnel, which he later pulled out with a pair of pliers.

  On September 22, a week and a day after our landing on Peleliu, the First Marines were finally pulled off the line. By that time, the regiment had lost over 1,600 killed and wounded—56 percent of its total strength—and Captain Pope was the only company commander who wasn’t dead or seriously wounded.

  Chesty Puller’s reputation was permanently tarnished by the slaughter of his Marines in those ridges. In The Old Breed, George McMillan called Puller “a tragic caricature of Marine aggressiveness,” who “crossed the line that separates courage and wasteful expenditure of lives.”

  Captain Pope was awarded the Medal of Honor for his valor and resourcefulness on Hill 100, but he never forgave Puller for sending his men there.

  “I had no use for Puller,” Pope said many years after the war. “He didn’t know what was going on, and why he wanted me and my men dead on top of that hill, I don’t know.”

  AFTER MAKING IT across the airfield, the Fifth Marines pushed on through thick jungle and swampy terrain toward the east coast of Peleliu and wound up in an area designated as Purple Beach. Along the way, we hardly encountered any Jap resistance at all—certainly nothing compared to what the First and Seventh Marines were running into. There was plenty of evidence that Nips were in the vicinity, but they seemed to be playing a cat-and-mouse game with us, at least for the time being.

  On the morning of September 17 (D-plus-2) my Third Platoon was picking its way through a jungle thicket when we came across the decomposing bodies of some Japs who’d apparently been killed by our pre-invasion bombs or naval gunfire.