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

by Jim McEnery

  Jones nodded. “I’m thinking about climbing up on this tank to try to spot a target for the gunners to shoot at. They’d have a better chance of hitting something with a machine gun or a 75 than we do from the ground with rifles. What do you think?”

  Brooks frowned. “It sounds awful damn risky to me,” he said.

  “Yeah, but I figure it’s either that or sit here in this Nip shooting gallery the rest of the day.”

  Brooks thought about it for a moment. “Okay then,” he said. “Give it a try, but watch yourself.”

  Jones left his tommy gun on the ground—the snipers were well out of its range, anyway—and climbed up on the rear deck of the tank, then tapped on the turret to get the tank commander’s attention.

  “I’m gonna try to find you a target for your .50-caliber or your 75,” he said, “so get ready.”

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Brooks yelled up at Jones from the protected area behind the tank.

  Hillbilly shrugged. “So far, so good,” he said.

  Those were the last words anybody heard Jones speak. As he peered around the tank turret toward the ridge, a single shot rang out. The bullet hit Jones in the left side below his ribs, and he fell backward and slid off the side of the tank onto the ground.

  Somebody yelled for a corpsman, but the other Marines were stunned to see Jones pull himself erect and stagger back to the tank. He was obviously hurt bad and maybe delirious with pain. His shirt was soaked with blood, but somehow he climbed back onto the deck of the Sherman and tried to stand up.

  Then a second shot hit him, and this one went straight through his heart.

  The handsome, guitar-strumming officer described in Eugene Sledge’s book as “a unique combination of bravery, leadership, ability, integrity, dignity, straightforwardness, and compassion” was gone. I think every man in the company felt a sense of personal loss when they learned of Hillbilly’s death.

  The snipers kept plaguing us for the rest of that day with both small-arms fire and knee mortars. But the next morning, battalion ordered every inch of that damn ridge pulverized for hours by our tanks, artillery, and mortars. Our Corsairs also came in and blistered it with napalm.

  After that, the sniping in that particular area stopped. But the killing went on and on.

  OVER THE NEXT day or two, with most of the Seventh Marines now in a secure rest area near the airfield, fresh Army troops were moved into the line to take over the Seventh’s old positions. But these untested troops were there mainly in a defensive role, and their main job was to prevent any kind of breakout by the Japs. Carrying on the offensive against the Pocket was up to the battle-scarred Fifth Marines, who were damn near as bad off as the Seventh.

  With the help of a 75-millimeter howitzer that was manhandled up a cliff to the top of a strategic ridge by sixty-eight Marines, Major Gordon Gayle’s 2/5 managed to capture the piece of high ground known as Hill 140. But because of the heavy casualties that small victory cost, it turned out to be their last organized action on Peleliu. Along with Colonel Robert Boyd’s 1/5, Gayle’s battalion was ordered off the line and into reserve.

  Early on the morning of October 12 (D-plus-27), what was left of the Third Battalion replaced the withdrawing survivors of 2/5 on the crest of Hill 140. We were now the last infantry battalion of the First Marine Division still actively engaged with the enemy.

  “You’ve still got Jap sharpshooters all over the place out there,” one of the 2/5 Marines told me, “so be sure to warn your guys to keep their heads down. Just one quick look over the crest of the hill can be fatal.”

  That was demoralizing enough in itself, but I guess it was an omen of things to come. For the approximately ninety of us in K/3/5 who were still capable of combat, the most tragic day of the war lay just ahead.

  BEING AS HE was an old machine gun man, Captain Ack-Ack Haldane still liked to take a personal hand in making sure the company’s .30-caliber weapons were in the most effective locations.

  This was especially true that morning on Hill 140, where Haldane was told that 2/5’s machine gunners were kept so pinned down by Jap snipers that the only way they could take aim was by sighting along the undersides of their barrels.

  For that reason, Ack-Ack called on some of his senior NCOs to go with him to an observation point on the ridge to discuss where our company machine gun section should set up.

  We were running very low on commissioned officers at this point. Besides Haldane, the only two we had left were Lieutenants Thomas “Stumpy” Stanley, the company exec, and Charles “Duke” Ellington, who commanded the mortar platoon.

  Because I’d been functioning as leader of the Third Platoon since Lieutenant Bauerschmidt was killed, Haldane asked me to join the group on the hilltop. Other noncoms who were there included Platoon Sergeant Johnny Marmet of the mortar section, Sergeant Dick Higgins, Haldane’s personal aide, and Corporal Jim Anderson, one of the captain’s most trusted runners.

  Haldane was no more than four or five feet ahead of me as he crawled up to the edge of the ridgeline and raised his head a few inches to steal a look.

  I heard him say something like, “We need the guns as close as we—”

  In a split second, the sharp sound of a rifle shot cut off Haldane’s words. It sounded less like gunfire than somebody slapping his hands together, but every one of us on that hill knew instantly what it was.

  Then Ack-Ack’s head vanished in a flash of red, and a shower of blood blew back in my face.

  “Oh, dear God, no!” I think I whispered. Then my tongue froze in my throat as Jim Anderson and I stared at each other in shock and disbelief. Dick Higgins scrambled forward toward the body, and I seem to remember someone else pulling him back to keep him from getting hit, too. Then he whirled around and ran back down the hill, screaming for a corpsman.

  There was no need for a corpsman. What Ack-Ack needed was a priest.

  I can’t remember what happened over the next minute or two. Whatever it was, it’s still a total blank for me. When I came back to reality, Johnny Marmet had left—to tell his mortar men out on the line what had happened, I learned later. Dick Higgins was gone, too, and I understand he ended up at an aid station that morning being treated for severe shock. Two Marines were carrying the captain’s body away on a stretcher. Jim Anderson was wiping his face and shaking his head.

  “I can’t believe this,” he muttered. “I saw it, but I can’t believe it.”

  As for me, I’d reached the point where I could believe almost anything, but there was no way to get rid of the emptiness inside me. Gradually, though, as I started to sort things out, the reality of the situation hit me like a ton of bricks:

  Haldane was dead. Lieutenant Stanley was at battalion headquarters and out of reach, and so was First Sergeant David Bailey. Lieutenant Ellington was out with his mortar squads, and Platoon Sergeant Marmet was probably out there, too, or on his way. Platoon Sergeant Harry Spiece was somewhere on the line, but nobody knew where.

  “You’re the highest-ranking NCO available, Mac,” somebody told me. “You’ve gotta take charge of the company.”

  It was true. Whether I liked it or not. Whether I knew what to do or not. I was it. There was nobody else to do it.

  So there I was, a lowly three-stripe buck sergeant, trying to take the place of one of the best COs in the Marine Corps in one of the toughest spots we’d ever been in.

  What the hell was I supposed to do now?

  One thing I could do, I decided, was get on the phone in the company CP and try to tell our artillery where those damn Jap snipers were concentrated. I was able to get in contact with an Army 105 down in the valley below Hill 140 and direct his fire on Jap positions I could see from the high ground. I also got through to a tank destroyer with a 75, and he also opened up on the Jap caves.

  I sent out a few patrols and met with some aviation Marines who’d been sent up to help us. They weren’t supposed to go out on the line, but when I told them about the spot we we
re in, they volunteered to go—all of them. I gave them a quick lesson on how to throw grenades. None of them had ever done it before, but they learned in a hurry.

  When Major Gustafson, the battalion CO, found out what was going on, he phoned the company CP and asked who was directing the artillery fire.

  “I am, sir,” I said. “I’m the senior guy up here, and I didn’t think we could afford to quit shooting till one of our officers gets back to take over.”

  “Okay, Sergeant,” he said. “I’m sending Lieutenant Stanley back your way. In the meantime, keep doing what you’re doing. Just be careful.”

  ON OCTOBER 14 (D-plus-29), K/3/5 was back in action in the vicinity of Hill 140 with Lieutenant Stanley in command. We spent most of the day sending out patrols, sealing caves, rooting out diehard snipers, and stringing wire to keep infiltrators away from our foxholes that night.

  We also took our last two casualties on Peleliu, when Sergeant Harry Spiece and PFC Earl Shepherd were wounded and evacuated.

  That afternoon, we started hearing rumors about Army troops relieving us on the line the next morning. At first, I didn’t believe it, and most of the other guys didn’t either. By now, we were too damn exhausted to waste energy getting our hopes up.

  But this time, to our great relief, the rumors were actually true.

  About noon on October 15, we turned over our foxholes to some grim-looking replacement troops of the Army’s 321st Infantry Regiment. We didn’t say much to them, and they didn’t say much to us, but the expressions on their faces were worth a thousand words. They were scared shitless—understandably so—and as awful as we looked, they envied us.

  We made our way down the hill, still under sporadic small-arms fire, and boarded trucks for a ten-minute ride into another world—a neat, orderly bivouac area near the East Road, where the constant gunfire from the ridges was barely audible. It was so quiet that I thought for a while I was going deaf.

  It was also the closest thing we’d seen to civilization in a long time. It had a well-equipped cookhouse and mess tent, showers with plenty of fresh water, decked tents, and even an outdoor movie screen. There were clean uniforms, boondocker shoes, and new white socks waiting for us to replace the filthy, rotting rags most of us had worn since D-Day.

  As a precaution, we established a defensive perimeter facing the beach in case of an enemy counter-landing, but it was only a formality. Outside of the Pocket, the Japs on Peleliu were done, and for us, the fighting there was finally over.

  GOING BACK TO THE REAL WORLD

  IT TOOK US two full weeks to get away from Peleliu because the Navy had a hard time finding transportation for us, but I can’t remember much of anything about that interval. From the time we were pulled off the line for good to the day we boarded ship and left the island is mostly just a blurry space in my memory.

  We were all about to collapse from exhaustion, and for the first three or four days, the only thing we did was sleep. We’d wake up long enough to eat a meal or take a shower. Then we’d crawl back in the sack and sleep for another five or six hours. I didn’t think I was ever going to get enough shut-eye.

  On October 29, after we finally got rested up, a Marine Corps photographer lined us up on the beach to take pictures of what was left of K/3/5 and the other companies of the Third Battalion, Fifth. Showing up for the photo session was our last official duty assignment on Peleliu.

  In all, only eighty-five of us were available to pose for our company portrait. The 150 others who’d landed with K/3/5 on D-Day had all been killed or wounded.

  Twenty-six men from our company were either lying in freshly dug graves in a new cemetery near the airfield or had died aboard Navy hospital ships and been buried at sea, and 124 others were hospitalized with battle wounds at various locations around the Pacific. K/3/5’s casualty rate of 64 percent—almost two-thirds of its D-Day strength—was among the highest in the division.

  I was one of just five K/3/5 senior noncommissioned officers still standing. The other four were First Sergeant David Bailey, Sergeant Dick Higgins, Platoon Sergeant John Marmet, and Sergeant Donald Shifla. The only two commissioned officers still with the company were Lieutenant Stumpy Stanley, who took command after Captain Haldane was killed, and Lieutenant Duke Ellington of the mortar section.

  Overall, the First Marine Division suffered a total of 6,336 casualties at Peleliu, including 1,121 killed in action, 5,142 wounded in action, and 73 missing in action.

  I made a couple of trips down to the new cemetery, looking for the graves of guys I knew—especially John Teskevich’s—but I never found any of them. Lots of graves were still unmarked, and bodies were still being hauled in for burial. It was sheer chaos, and it depressed the hell out of me.

  I never knew for sure what happened to all those dead Japs. Quite a few of them were entombed in their caves, and I guess a lot of others were just left on the battlefield until much later. The impossible terrain of the Umurbrogol Pocket made it almost impossible to retrieve the thousands of enemy bodies, even if we’d had the manpower to do it.

  At the time the Fifth Marines were withdrawn, it was estimated that fewer than 1,000 of the 10,900 Jap defenders were still capable of combat. But according to somebody’s calculations at Marine Corps headquarters, it had taken an average of about 1,590 rounds of all types of our ammunition to kill each one of those enemy soldiers.

  It would take the Army troops another six weeks—until late November—to wipe out the last Jap resistance. And it wasn’t until April 1947, more than a year and a half after the end of the war, when the last group of twenty-six starving Nip survivors gave up and ventured out of their caves.

  When the fighting finally stopped and U.S. forces explored the intricate system of defenses that General Sadae Inoue’s troops had created, they found more than 500 caves, many of them with multiple levels and entrances. Some were equipped with sliding steel doors that opened to allow heavy artillery to fire, then closed again to hide the big guns.

  One underground fortress in particular was large enough to house a whole battalion of troops—1,000 men—along with their ammo and other supplies.

  As one of my comrades in K/3/5 aptly put it: “The Nips weren’t just on Peleliu; they were in Peleliu.”

  AS MUCH AS I looked forward to it, the details of our long-awaited departure from that terrible island on October 30 are hard for me to sort out in my mind. I still felt tired and numb, and I didn’t particularly want to talk to anybody. Most of the thoughts I can remember were recollections of friends and comrades who’d died in combat and vague feelings of relief that I hadn’t.

  The realization that I might never have to shoot or bayonet or grenade another human being did cross my mind at times. As John Teskevich and I had told each other the night before he was killed, the Marine Corps almost had to send men like us back to the States after Peleliu.

  But, of course, John wouldn’t be making that trip now, and there was something unreal about the idea that I would. It was almost like one of those dreams that’s too good to be true. I was afraid I’d wake up and be back in a rocky hole with bullets whining around me and the smell of death in the air.

  There was always the chance that somebody in Washington could change the rules, and that worried me a little. It meant I might end up in another killing spree on another damn island, so it was premature to think too much about going home. But it was also hard as hell to keep it off my mind.

  One of my few clear images of the day we sailed from Peleliu is the new dock the Navy had built on the east side of the island. It was long and black and about twenty yards wide. But the water wasn’t deep enough for the incoming troopships to reach it, so we had to get on Higgins boats for the short trip out to the SS Sea Runner, the merchant ship that was to take us to Pavuvu.

  As usual, we were expected to climb cargo nets to board the ship, and even after a dozen days of rest and rehab, lots of our guys were too weak to make it to the top under their own steam. I don’t rec
all having as much trouble with the nets as I had at Guadalcanal, but they were a real struggle for some of my comrades.

  “I only got halfway before I had to stop and rest,” recalled PFC Jay d’Leau, one of our bazooka men, many years later. “Three feet from the top, I was totally beat, and some sailors had to reach down and help me.”

  In his book, Gene Sledge remembered “feeling like a weary insect climbing a vine” and thinking it was fortunate that no Marine lost his grip and fell.

  I THINK I STAYED in a kind of withdrawal state much of the time during our trip back to Pavuvu. It took us eight days to get there, and we crossed the equator on the way, heading south. We had comfortable quarters below decks, and the Sea Runner’s galley served excellent chow. We spent a lot of time on deck, just bullshitting and breathing in the fresh air, and we got in plenty of sack time, too, since we had no duties to perform.

  Only a few shipboard incidents stand out in my mind. The main ones I remember were some fights that broke out between members of the Merchant Marine crew and a group of about ten Navy gunners assigned to man the five-inch gun on the aft of the ship. The Navy guys were seriously outnumbered, and they were getting the crap stomped out of them when some of the Marines decided the odds weren’t very fair, and they jumped in and took care of those crew-members.

  For once in my life, I went out of my way to keep from getting involved. I just wasn’t in a fighting mood.

  I know the Merchant Marine did great work for our country during the war, but those guys on the Sea Runner were a bunch of knuckleheads, and they deserved the whipping they got.

  WHEN WE ARRIVED at Pavuvu on November 7, the palm groves along the shoreline looked familiar from a distance. But as the small boats that took us from the ship to a new steel pier got closer to the beach, we hardly recognized the place.

  Several decorated tables were lined up near the water’s edge, and a sleek new canteen/clubhouse building was under construction in the background. There wasn’t a rotten coconut or rat to be seen anywhere.