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

by Jim McEnery

  ON THE MORNING of October 1 (D-plus-16), all three battalions of the Fifth Marines climbed aboard a convoy of trucks and amtracks at a bivouac area south of the Jap stronghold known as the Five Sisters.

  The first assignment for K/3/5 and the rest of the Third Battalion was to get rid of a bunch of enemy snipers who were threatening a stretch of the West Road called Dead Man’s Curve. It was the same area where John Teskevich had been killed and Jesse Googe had been wounded less than a week earlier, so we figured we had a score to settle.

  Within a few minutes after we got off the trucks and started moving up into the nearest ridges east of the road, we began drawing fire. It was nothing heavy or concentrated; it was just an isolated shot now and then, but almost every time it happened one of our guys fell. The Nips had obviously been watching us unload and waiting till we made the best possible targets before opening up on us.

  The scariest part of all was how well the bastards seemed to see us. It didn’t take but a split second of exposure to draw their fire. Fifteen or twenty minutes would go by without a shot being fired. Then some Marine would make a bad move—and Bam!—he’d be dead in his tracks.

  My Third Platoon was inching its way along a jagged ridge—and I literally mean “inching”—when I got really worried. It had been quiet for a few minutes, but I just had a gut feeling that something was about to happen.

  “Watch it now, you guys,” I said. “There’s no such thing as a comfort zone out here. Just take it easy and keep your heads down. Play it safe, and you’ll be all right.”

  PFC Sterling Mace was crouching just to my left. I could tell he was itching to get a shot at something with his BAR, but I trusted him not to do anything stupid, and so far he hadn’t. He was stuffing his pack and pockets with extra ammo and patiently waiting for a chance to use some of it.

  “Oh, crap, I didn’t leave any room for my cigs,” he said, then turned to his left and nudged his buddy Seymour Levy. “Hey, Sy, you got room in your pack for this fresh pack of butts? I got no place to put ’em where they won’t get mashed.”

  Levy had been quieter than usual since he’d gotten the wound in his chin. He hadn’t even been quoting much Kipling poetry lately, and sometimes I thought he acted a little irritable, but he seemed okay at the moment.

  “Sure,” he said, “toss ’em over here.”

  “You better be careful, Mace,” said PFC Frankie Opecek, who was huddled on the other side of Levy. “Levy’s liable to smoke the whole pack when you’re not lookin’.”

  “He better not,” Mace warned. “It’s the only pack I’ve got.” He and Opecek both knew Levy didn’t smoke.

  Levy just shook his head and didn’t say anything, and because of the dirty bandage he still had on his chin it was hard to tell if he was smiling or frowning. But after Mace moved on down the line with his BAR, some scattered shooting started up from the Nips again. I noticed an odd look in Levy’s eyes, and it bothered me.

  “Something eating you, kid?” I asked.

  He shrugged again. “I guess I’m just edgy, Mac. I hate being pinned down like this. It makes me feel . . . you know, trapped. Sometimes I feel like I can’t stand it.”

  “Just take it easy and keep your head down,” I told him. “You gotta be patient at times like this. For God’s sake, whatever you do, just stay down.”

  About that time, another shot rang out, and someone down the line yelled for a corpsman. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Levy fidgeting.

  “Keep your damn head down,” I warned again.

  For a while after that, Levy seemed to get control of himself. I heard him strike up a conversation with Corporal Tom Matheny, a quiet guy from our mortar section, and I thought he was going to be all right.

  But just three or four minutes later, Levy jerked up his rifle and let out a god-awful yell.

  “I’m sick and tired of this shit!” he screamed. “I can’t take it anymore!”

  Then he jumped straight up—right into a Jap bullet. Little droplets of his blood spattered me in the face. He never knew what hit him.

  By the time Mace came back looking for his cigarettes, two other Marines had risked their lives to haul Levy’s body down the hill. When Mace found out what had happened, I thought I’d have to wrestle him down and hog-tie him to keep the same thing from happening to him.

  “I’m gonna go up there and wipe out the whole damn bunch of those assholes,” he said, gesturing at the ridge above us with his BAR.

  “No, you’re not,” I said, grabbing him by the shoulders. “You’re one of the best BAR men in the platoon, and I ain’t lettin’ you get yourself killed for nothin’, so just cool off. You can handle this, kid. Hell’s bells, you gotta handle it.”

  Mace sank down to the coral and lowered his head. “But why’d he have to come back?” he said. “Why couldn’t the dummy just take his million-dollar wound and go home?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “And now we’ll never know.”

  Battalion was finally able to call in artillery and mortar fire, along with some napalm shots by our Corsairs, and broke up the snipers’ nests enough to get us out of the jam we were in and let us catch our breath.

  But there were worse jams ahead, and the killing had only just started.

  EARLY ON OCTOBER 3, we launched a battalion-strength assault from the south against the five-headed monster we’d come to know as the Five Sisters. For me, it would be one of the worst days of the war—a day when I lost three more friends from my Third Platoon, and K/3/5 suffered twenty casualties overall.

  The attack by 3/5 was to be coordinated with a simultaneous strike from the east by the Second Battalion, Seventh Marines, on an adjacent strip of high ground now designated as Walt’s Ridge in honor of Colonel Lew Walt, executive officer of the Fifth Marines. (This was the second time Walt had been so honored.) Actually, though, 2/7’s target was the very same Hill 100 where Captain Everett Pope’s men had taken such terrible losses two weeks earlier. This illustrates just how little ground we’d gained against the Jap-held Pocket since then and it shows why the fight for Peleliu was as disheartening as it was deadly. We were attacking the same damn ridges over and over again and never seeming to get anywhere.

  We started our advance that morning with a network of ridges rising up on our left. To our right, we could see through a long, open area all the way to the airfield and our original beachhead. On our way up the slopes, we ran into some heavy fire from a string of Jap caves and pillboxes on a long ridge above us. At the right end of the ridge were the rocky knobs of the Five Sisters.

  We had some tanks with us, but the terrain was so rough they could only fire at the Nip positions from a distance, so we had to spend most of the morning using bazookas, flamethrowers, and TNT charges against the caves until we thought they were all shut down. But unfortunately, we missed some, and as we moved farther up the hill, we suddenly found ourselves in a meat-grinder, catching enemy fire from both front and rear.

  “Shit, they’re behind us!” I heard a Marine yell. “Get down! Get down!”

  Lieutenant Bill Bauerschmidt was only four or five yards from me when he was hit low in the belly by a Jap rifle bullet. I turned toward him just as he fell.

  Other enemy rounds were peppering the hillside when I snaked my way up beside Bauerschmidt, and what I saw made me sick. It was like Teskevich all over again. Same kind of wound in the same area. The lieutenant was already covered with blood from the waist down, but he was still trying his best to get that hog-leg .45 of his out of its holster.

  “I don’t get it,” he mumbled. “The shot came from behind. Are our own men shooting at us?”

  “No sir, we must’ve missed some—” I started to say, but by then he was unconscious.

  Several guys shouted for stretcher-bearers, but they were slow in coming, and who could blame them? I knew from sad experience there was no need to hurry, anyway. Within a few minutes, the lieutenant was dead.

  I’d never known an officer
that I liked or admired more than Bauerschmidt. He’d been an outstanding platoon leader, but he’d been a good friend, too. He’d made us grunts feel like he was one of us, and I hated what had happened to him. But at that moment, there was only one thought in my head:

  A lot more of us are going to die if we stay where we are. Gotta move! Gotta move!

  “We can’t hold here!” I yelled at the men around me. “Fall back down the hill! Fall back!”

  We lost two more guys before we made it to cover. PFC Lyman Rice was killed instantly as he tried to retreat, and PFC Raymond Grawet was cut down when he ran past one of those overlooked Jap caves. Grawet was one of those daring eighteen-year-old kids who thought he could dive off the Empire State Building into a thimbleful of water, but this time he’d moved out too far into the open and exposed himself to enemy fire once too often.

  I came as close as I ever did to getting killed myself that morning when I ran back to get my pack out of a ditch where I’d accidentally dropped it when the firing started. (See map, p. 252.) One Nip threw five grenades at me, and a couple of them hit within a few feet of me, but I hunkered down in the ditch, and by the grace of God, I didn’t get a single scratch. I was carrying a tommy gun again that morning, but I didn’t dare shoot at the SOB because he was directly in line with the K/3/5 CP.

  Then the Japs opened up on our stretcher-bearers who were trying to move some of our casualties. They killed one bearer with a grenade and wounded another one, Corporal Charles Williams, whose official job was our company “field music” or bugler. I grabbed him and pulled him down to the ground with me. Otherwise, I’m sure he would’ve been killed.

  October 3 went into the record books as one of the costliest days of the war for K/3/5. The company lost a total of twenty killed and wounded that day.

  October 4 wasn’t quite so bad. We only had eight casualties that day, including PFC Alden Moore, who was KIA.

  PFC Ray Rottinghaus, a tough farmhand from Iowa, fired close to 500 rounds from his BAR within a couple of minutes that morning while wiping out more than a dozen Japs caught in the open. But then a machine gun in a nearby pillbox opened up on him. One round blew off his left index finger and splintered the stock of his BAR. Another smashed into his left shoulder.

  Ray calmly wrapped his shirt around the bloody remains of his left hand and started back toward an aid station on his own. He’d covered about half the distance when some stretcher bearers persuaded him to let them carry him the rest of the way. He was one of seven K/3/5 guys wounded that day.

  By nightfall on October 4, the company’s two-day casualty total stood at 28—or more than 20 percent of what our strength had been forty-eight hours earlier.

  MEANWHILE, THE THIRD Battalion, Seventh, was faring even worse. Its L Company lost both its commanding officer, Captain James V. “Jamo” Shanley, who had been awarded a Navy Cross at the Cape, and its executive officer, Lieutenant Harold Collins, within seconds of each other. They were caught in a fierce Jap crossfire as the company tried to retreat from a jagged outcropping called Hill 120. Only eleven of the forty-eight L/3/7 Marines who attacked the hill escaped alive, and six of them were wounded.

  Those two days were the swan song for Colonel Herman Hanneken’s Seventh Marines on Peleliu. On October 5, General Geiger, commander of the III Amphibious Corps, ordered General Rupertus to pull the remaining troops of the Seventh off the line and get them ready for evacuation.

  By now, total casualties in the Seventh had reached 1,486 killed and wounded. That was 46 percent of the regiment’s authorized strength. Both L and I Companies were especially hard hit. Each of them had only about thirty able-bodied Marines left. Less than three weeks earlier, they’d landed on Peleliu with 235 men apiece.

  Even under these conditions, Rupertus tried to argue with Geiger. “Just give ’em a little more time,” he said. “They’ll take the Pocket, and the battle will be over.”

  Rupertus was still kidding himself. He was the same guy, remember, who’d said the Peleliu operation would be a done deal in two or three days. Every field officer in the regiment knew the Seventh was too worn out for any kind of offensive action, but I think Rupertus’s head was as deep in the sand as Chesty Puller’s had been two weeks earlier.

  It was true that over 95 percent of Peleliu could now be considered secure and that the Japs were bottled up in an area not much bigger than a half-dozen football fields put together.

  But it was also true that we were nowhere near breaking the Jap stranglehold on the heart of the Pocket—and those of us out there on the line damn well knew it.

  It was going to take a lot more dying before that happened.

  Fortunately for the men of the Seventh, Rupertus eventually relented. Late on the morning of October 6, he gave in and ordered Hanneken’s survivors to withdraw.

  Now, if the Marines were ever going to sew up the Pocket, it’d be strictly up to the Fifth to finish the job.

  We were the only ones left.

  THE KILLING WENT on and on day after day, and the stink grew steadily worse. As if the odor of decaying corpses wasn’t bad enough, we now had three weeks worth of human dung piled on the coral by us and our enemies. It was impossible to build latrines on the solid rock of the Umurbrogol or even gouge out a hole to bury your own waste.

  The problem could’ve been a lot worse if so many of us hadn’t lost our appetite because of the disgusting conditions we lived in. Personally, I don’t ever remember being really hungry on Peleliu. Fighting the flies for every bite of food you swallow gets old in a hurry. I routinely went for two or three days without eating anything, and so did plenty of other guys.

  Of course, this also meant that a lot of food got thrown out to spoil, and that added yet another element to the mix of foul smells.

  We didn’t sleep much, either. We went through the days like zombies because at night the Japs were always there, no more than a few feet away, and the tension never let up. Most of the Jap infiltrators wore black pajamas and rubber-soled shoes, so they were both silent and invisible in the dark. They came creeping into our lines every night, intent on killing anybody they caught unawares.

  I was extremely fortunate that I never had to fight off one of the sneaky devils, but several of the Marines near me did. Maybe it was sheer luck on my part, but I still wonder if the Japs could somehow sense that I was ready and waiting for them. During those last few days in the Pocket, I barely slept at all. I kept my back against a wall of rock, my rifle or tommy gun in my hands, and my Ka-bar knife in my lap. All I thought about was what I’d do if one of the bastards jumped at me out of the dark. I forced myself not to think about home or family or anything else pleasant for fear it would lull me to sleep.

  But the more the fatigue and stress built up, the more careless—and crazy—some of us became. A lot of men lost heart to the point where they didn’t give a damn. I heard about guys sticking their feet or arms out into the open during firefights that never seemed to end, trying to get wounded just enough to be evacuated. I never actually saw anybody do that, but I don’t doubt that it happened.

  Looking back on those last ten days on Peleliu, I can’t imagine how any of us lived through it—but miraculously some of us did.

  Those of us in the Fifth Marines were extremely fortunate to have a CO like Colonel Bucky Harris. That was one of the most positive things going for us. Harris refused to send us on suicide missions against those Jap caves like some of the other commanders had done. Instead, he played a patient waiting game, calling in artillery, tanks, mortars, and air support and giving them time to do their work before the infantry went in to clean up with flamethrowers, bazookas, and TNT.

  I truly believe that most of us in K/3/5 who left Peleliu with breath in our lungs owe our lives to Colonel Harris. If I’d been in Puller’s regiment, I’m convinced I would’ve died there.

  BY THE SECOND week of October, the Jap snipers in those ridges above the West Road were still giving us fits. They were a constant
threat to anything or anybody trying to use the road, and they were so well concealed and so scattered out, usually firing from one-man positions, that it was next to impossible to see them, much less return their fire.

  On the morning of October 10, K/3/5, along with six or seven tanks, was sent into the same general area where John Teskevich had been killed to try one more time to get rid of the snipers.

  At this point, the company’s casualty rate had climbed to over 40 percent, and the First Platoon, now led by Lieutenant Hillbilly Jones, was down to about fifteen riflemen—half its normal strength—with Jones as its only officer. (The lieutenant had been wounded in the hand several days earlier, but he’d insisted on staying on the line and treating the wound himself.)

  Most of the snipers were firing from positions about 100 yards south of Jones’s guys, and as the morning wore on, they got steadily more active. They took their time, though, and picked their targets well. PFC Charles R. McClary was hit in the gut, much like Teskevich had been, and died a short time later. Two other K/3/5 riflemen were seriously wounded within a couple of minutes of each other.

  Like everybody else in the company, Jones was tired and on edge, and these latest casualties didn’t help matters. If they continued at this rate, his whole platoon could be wiped out before the day was over.

  “Hillbilly was one of the calmest, most levelheaded officers I ever knew,” one First Platoon Marine told me, “but he was really depressed and sick about our losses. He was desperate to get back at the Japs, and that’s why I think he did what he did that morning.”

  As Jones crouched behind one of the tanks, gripping his tommy gun and studying the sniper-infested ridge through binoculars, Major Clyde Brooks, a staff officer from Third Battalion headquarters, came running up and took cover beside him.

  “Major Gustafson sent me over to see what we could do about those snipers,” Brooks said. “You got any ideas?”