by Jim McEnery
Before the struggle was over, a lot of us were dead or maimed for life. My grief over John Teskevich’s death soon faded into the background because other friends and comrades were falling around me every day.
We’d hear a shot ring out from a sniper somewhere. One of us would go down, while the rest of us cursed or choked back tears. Or both. We’d try like hell to locate the sniper, but it was hard to do. If we figured out the shots came from a den of Japs in a cave, we could call in mortar or artillery fire. But sometimes the terrain was so crazy that our shells couldn’t reach the target. And when it was an isolated sniper that was doing the damage, he might hit three or four of our guys, maybe more, before we could pinpoint where the son of a bitch was hiding.
None of us who survived the torment of those seventeen days would ever be the same again.
ON SEPTEMBER 27 (D-plus-12), Colonel Harold “Bucky” Harris, the Fifth Marines CO, assigned our whole Third Battalion—commanded by Major John Gustafson and including all of us in K/3/5—to make yet another amphibious assault on yet another Pacific island.
This time, our objective was a small chunk of coral just off the north coast of Peleliu. It was called Ngesebus (pronounced “Nega-seebus”), and it would be my fourth amphibious operation in the Pacific. In some ways, it was also going to be the roughest.
Major Gustafson made it clear that 3/5 was expected to secure Ngesebus in twenty-four hours or less. That was a tall order because, despite its small size, the island was a miniature of Peleliu itself—with low ridges down its center that were honeycombed with Nip caves and bunkers. It even had its own airstrip that was big enough for Zeros to use to attack our positions on Peleliu.
“At 0800 tomorrow morning, we’ll be boarding amtracks for a landing on Ngesebus,” Lieutenant Bauerschmidt told K/3/5’s Third Platoon that afternoon. “Regiment estimates that the Nips have over 500 troops in heavy fortifications on the island, plus dozens of mortars, several 75s, and some large-caliber naval guns. They expect us to do the job in one day and without reinforcements, so be prepared for a hard fight.”
Up to this point, we hadn’t had a lot of trouble with sneak attacks by Jap infiltrators, but late that night while we were dug in along the north beach, we lost two Marines to nighttime visitors who crawled into their foxholes and killed them. In one case, the Jap who did the dirty work spoke perfect English and pretended to be a Marine asking about a lost rifle. It reminded me of the time on Guadalcanal when a Nip yelled at me in English across the Matanikau River and invited me to “Come on over.”
I took those two Marines’ deaths as a warning of what lay ahead for us, and I was right. We were entering a phase of the fight for Peleliu where the threat of enemy attack, either at close quarters or from weapons buried in some distant ridge, never let up. From now on, it would always be there—around the clock, twenty-four hours a day.
AT DAWN ON September 28 (D-plus-13), we gathered up our gear and moved down to a narrow strip of sand on the extreme north tip of Peleliu, where thirty amtracks were waiting for us.
A thousand yards away across a shallow strait, Navy guns and Marine aircraft were hitting Ngesebus with an awesome array of firepower. The battleship Mississippi and the heavy cruisers Denver and Columbus were raining sixteen- and fourteen-inch shells on the island and raising huge clouds of smoke and dust.
At the same time, Corsairs from Marine Fighter Squadron VMF-114, flying out of the repaired Peleliu airfield, were blasting Jap positions along the beach with bombs and rockets and raking them with machine gun fire.
Unless you’d seen it all before, it was hard to imagine how anything could live through such a massive bombardment. But the memory of the much larger fireworks display before our Peleliu landings was still fresh in our minds, and we remembered that most of the Jap defenders had come through that one untouched.
Still, it was nice to know we were getting so much support. Division had also sent thirteen amphibian tanks to spearhead our landing, and that was encouraging, too, but I had the feeling we were going to need every bit of help we could get.
Less than two weeks earlier, 3/5 had come ashore on Peleliu with 1,000 troops. Now there were only about 700 of us left in the battalion’s three rifle companies. Casualties had claimed the rest.
At the moment, only God knew how many more killed and wounded we’d have before this day was over—but the rest of us would find out soon enough.
At 9 AM, the “softening-up” bombardment along the Ngesebus beaches ended. Then, with our amphibian tanks out front—each packing a 75-millimeter cannon and two .50-caliber machine guns—the tractor drivers revved their engines. Slowly, like giant turtles, our loaded amtracks rumbled down to the water’s edge.
I took the .50-caliber on the right side of the amtrack’s bow, but there was something wrong with it, and it wouldn’t fire properly. I had to reload every few rounds, so I doubt if it did us much good, but I kept trying.
As far as I could tell, there was no return fire from the Japs. This was a good break for us because it took almost six minutes for those slow-ass amtracks to crawl across the shallow water and reach the beach on Ngesebus. I was still wrestling with the stubborn .50-caliber gun when I discovered everybody else aboard was already ashore.
When I jumped off the tractor and ran after them, the first thing I saw right in front of me was a pillbox. After I hit the deck, I tried throwing a couple of grenades at the pillbox opening, but both of them fell a little short.
Then Corporal Thomas “Nippo” Baxter—who got that nickname from the uncanny way he could spot hiding Jap soldiers—crawled up beside me with a couple of other Marines. One had a bazooka, and another had a flamethrower, and between them they were able to cure the pillbox in short order. Two Nips ran out of it with their clothes on fire, and we put them out of their misery with our rifles.
We penetrated the rest of the Japs’ first line of defenses without much further trouble and ran past the bodies of fifty or sixty dead Japs who’d probably been killed by the strafing Corsairs. We used grenades to silence a couple of Nip machine guns that were still being manned and quickly disposed of another pillbox, using the same combination of weapons as before.
One of my duties as platoon guide was to maintain contact with the units on our flanks. There was nothing but ocean on our left, so I had only our right flank to worry about. That was where the First Platoon was, and I was positioned as close to those Marines as I was to the guys in my own Third Platoon.
As we inched forward during that first hour ashore, I came across a Thompson submachine gun in perfect condition and about a hundred rounds of ammunition. The gun was just lying there behind a little knob of rock, and I had no idea at the time how it got there. Someone told me later that it was probably dropped by Sergeant Tom Rigney of the Second Platoon, who’d been killed in that area earlier that morning.
To me, it was almost like a divine gift from above.
I’d been checked out on tommy guns back at New River before the war, but I hadn’t fired one since, and I was excited to have the chance now, especially in the situation we were in. My M-1 was a fine weapon—don’t get me wrong about that—but with a tommy and plenty of ammunition, I could be the equivalent of a whole damn fire team all by myself. The problem was, I didn’t have plenty of ammunition. That hundred rounds would go in a hurry in the kind of firefight we were into, but it would be great while it lasted.
The machine gun and small-arms fire that raged on both sides of me that morning were the heaviest I’d seen so far in the Pacific. We were lucky as hell to have our tanks giving us cover and fire support. Otherwise, I’m not sure we could’ve held our ground, much less flushed the Japs out of their pillboxes and caves. The tanks saved our bacon more times than I could count.
There were other times, though, when we infantry guys had to rescue some of the tankers. One of those times was just a few minutes after I found the tommy gun. I spotted a tank up ahead of me with Japs swarming all over it. There must�
�ve been twenty-five or thirty of them, and the tank crew was obviously in deep trouble.
I turned and saw PFCs Sterling Mace and Bill Leyden, along with two or three other Marines close beside me, and I yelled at them above the roar of the gunfire.
“We gotta get those Nips off that tank! Follow me!”
Luckily, the Japs were too intent on getting at the tankers to notice us at first. I was about thirty feet away when I turned loose the first long burst from the tommy. Mace, Leyden, and the others opened fire with their rifles at the same moment, and Jap bodies started flying off the tank in all directions.
Several Nips were still on top of the turret and trying to wrest it open when I hit them with a second burst. They all fell without firing a single shot in reply. Within ten or fifteen seconds, every Jap attacking the tank had been blasted off it. They’d all been hit, but some were still jerking around on the ground.
“Hey, you guys,” I told the other Marines. “I’m running low on ammo, but we can’t leave any of those sons of bitches alive. They’re damn good at playing possum, so if any of ’em don’t have their faces or guts blown open, shoot the bastards again.”
When we moved away after a ragged volley of rifle shots, we left nothing but “good Japs” behind us.
We hadn’t gone far when another Marine tank pulled up and stopped beside us. The tank commander opened the hatch and grinned at me.
“I saw what you guys did back there,” he said. “Thanks for the help. Are you short of rounds for your tommy gun?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’m practically out.”
“Well, here,” he said. “I got way more than I need.” He started handing box after box of .45-caliber ammunition down to me. By the time he got through, I had enough to kill every Jap on Ngesebus two or three times.
“Thanks, man,” I said. “I promise to put this to good use.”
“Go get ’em, Sergeant,” he said, and closed the hatch.
I noticed that the rest of my Third Platoon had gone up a hill to my left, so I headed in that direction. On the way, I decided to make sure the ammo the tanker had given me would work in the tommy gun’s magazine. I knew the gun took .45-caliber cartridges, but I wanted to be sure they’d be okay if I loaded them into the magazine manually one at a time, so I fired a few as a test, and they worked fine.
Just at that moment, Captain Haldane came along and saw what I was doing. “Hey, Mac,” he said, “you’d better go slow on that ammo. Before we’re done here, you may need every round you’ve got.”
I remembered how worried I’d been just a few minutes earlier when I was almost out, and I felt kind of guilty. I guess it looked like I was being wasteful.
“Okay, I’ll save the rest for the Japs,” I said.
Ack-Ack waved at me and moved on.
THE REST OF that day was one long, continuous firefight. The hill complex that was the Third Platoon’s major objective was a maze of interconnected caves and pillboxes, all of them crawling with Japs, and the air around them was full of bullets.
Once, when the platoon got bogged down temporarily as K and I Companies moved up together, I saw fifty-year-old Gunnery Sergeant Pop Haney jump up and rally the troops.
“Come on! Come on!” he yelled at Lieutenant Bauerschmidt. “We gotta keep movin’! We gotta move up!”
Bauerschmidt did what Pop told him, and we fought our way on up the hill, but guys were falling all around us. PFC Walter Stay was killed, and Corporal Richard Van Trump was evacuated with most of his lower jaw blown away.
I must’ve thrown forty or fifty grenades that day and had at least that many thrown at me. I also gave the tommy gun one helluva workout. One of our tanks would pull up close and fire its 75 straight into the opening in the side of a pillbox or Nip Baxter would call in Marines with flamethrowers and bazookas. Then, if any Japs ran out, I’d spray them with the tommy.
We repeated the process over and over. Only the Lord knows how many I killed that day. But we had plenty of casualties, too. One I remember most vividly happened after Bill Leyden and I saw four or five Japs run out of a cave and start throwing grenades at us as fast as they could pull the pins.
I dropped two of them with the tommy gun, but one Nip was a daring son of a bitch. He stopped right in front of Leyden and hollered “Kill me, Marine! Kill me!”
Well, Leyden killed him, all right, with a quick burst from his M-1. But the Jap got a grenade off just as he went down, and fragments hit Leyden square in the face. The last Jap still standing drew back his arm to throw a grenade at me, but I cut him in half with the tommy before he could release it.
Leyden’s face was a bloody mess, especially the area around his left eye. As soon as we could get a corpsman to him, he was evacuated to the rear. The last thing I heard him say was, “Oh shit, oh shit, I think I’m blind!”
I said a little prayer for him right there.
Bill was barely eighteen, and he could be a wise guy at times, but he was also a damn good Marine who fought as hard and well that day as any man I ever knew. (I was glad when I learned after the war that the medics had managed to save his eyes. He recovered fast enough to get wounded even worse at Okinawa by a Jap 75, but he lived through that, too.)
BY DUSK ON September 28, we had Ngesebus 90 percent secured, except for a few small pockets of Nips that were still holding out, so we dug in for the night and left the mopping up until the next morning.
It took us an hour or so to wipe out the last of the Jap caves. I called up a bazooka man and a flamethrower guy to help. Then, to make dead certain the cave was really cured, a demolition team moved in and sealed up the entrance with TNT charges.
After that, we turned over the rest of the cleanup chores to some Army troops and went back to the beach where the amtracks were supposed to pick us up and take us back to Peleliu.
By the time we left, 470 of the estimated 500 Jap troops on Ngesebus were either dead or captured. It seemed to me like we’d had to kill all the dead ones three or four times before they’d stay dead.
In about thirty hours on Ngesebus, K/3/5 had suffered two-thirds of the Third Battalion’s total casualties there—eight men killed and twenty-four wounded.
We earned a big round of applause from division headquarters for the job we’d done. Colonel Lew Walt, who served as overall on-site commander of the operation, praised our “excellent tactics,” and Major Gustafson, CO of the Third Battalion, called our tank-infantry assault “perfectly coordinated.”
The division’s battle diary summed up our victory on Ngesebus in these words: “Infantry and armor performed with a ruthless efficiency unequaled in any previous Pacific operation.”
We weren’t given much time to enjoy all this recognition, though. Two days after finishing up on Ngesebus, we were sent into the enemy-infested heart of Peleliu’s Pocket to try for an encore. We’d stay there for two weeks of around-the-clock combat—until Peleliu itself was secured. Many more of K/3/5’s bravest and best would give their lives before that happened.
BY EARLY OCTOBER, what was left of the Seventh Marines was locked in a stalemate with the Japs in the Umurbrogol’s southern ridges and along the West Road. But the Seventh’s lines were stretched thin as tissue paper. It was all they could do to hold the ground they had and keep the Nips from scoring a breakthrough.
They could measure any advances they made in feet, sometimes inches. In many places, their lines were within ten or twelve yards of the enemy’s. There was no time for them to eat and no way for them to sleep. Except for brief, infrequent lulls, the firing never stopped.
To keep this so-called quickie battle from lasting the rest of the year, it was obvious that the Seventh Marines needed to be relieved in the ridges by fresher troops. And it was equally obvious that if the First Marine Division was going to break the Japs’ grip on the Pocket, it would be up to us in the Fifth Regiment to do the job.
On the maps, most of the major ridges and rocky knobs had names—the Five Sisters, the Five Broth
ers, the Horseshoe, the China Wall—but they all looked the same to us. Inside each one was an anthill of Japs and stockpiles of weapons and ammo. When we managed to take one, there were always three or four more just like it looming ahead of us. They seemed to go on forever.
Lots of guys who lived to get out of those damn ridges later tried to describe them to the folks back home, but it was impossible. I think PFC Sterling Mace may have come up with the best description when he said, “This terrain’s like the surface of a waffle iron, only magnified about a million times.”
At this point, the stench of death hung over Peleliu like an invisible, suffocating fog. Our Marine pilots said the smell was overpowering even at 1,500 feet above the island. The Japs never made an effort to collect or bury their corpses. They just left them to rot where they fell. There was one dead enemy soldier in a sitting position just above a trail that I traveled pretty often, and I must’ve shot his corpse on at least a dozen different occasions. Whenever I rounded a bend in the trail and saw him sitting there, I’d hit him with a few rounds just as a reflex. Finally his corpse decomposed to the point where he didn’t even look like a man anymore, and I quit shooting him.
Although we Marines took pride in taking proper care of our dead comrades, the intensity of the fighting in the ridges made any attempt to send out burial details a suicide mission. For one of the few times in Corps history, our dead were left on the field for days, even weeks. The bodies of some of Chesty Puller’s men who were killed on D-plus-2 still hadn’t been recovered by early October.
All these hundreds of decomposing bodies drew huge clouds of blowflies. They were so thick at times that they actually blotted out the sun, and you had to fight them for every bite of food you ate. If there was any Marine on Peleliu who didn’t swallow a few flies along with his C rations, I never met him.
Meanwhile, the heat continued unabated—up to 115 degrees in the afternoons. In all the history of warfare, I don’t think men have ever fought each other under more brutal conditions.
