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

by Jim McEnery

  But the most shocking sight was a group of Red Cross nurses standing behind the tables and handing out doughnuts and paper cups of chilled grapefruit juice.

  These were the first young, attractive white women we’d seen since our last leaves in Melbourne close to a year before, and seeing them so unexpectedly scared a bunch of us tough Marines half to death. We’d been isolated from the fair sex for so long that we didn’t know how to act.

  A few overeager Marines rushed up to get in line at the tables, but a good many shied away and pretended to ignore the women. They sat down on the beach, kind of sulking and looking the other way. Others just stood and gaped at the nurses like they were creatures from Mars or someplace. But some of us had enough sense just to grin and accept the refreshments they offered—and even remember to say “Thanks.”

  These women seemed so out of place to a lot of the guys that they actually resented them being there.

  “Well, hell, I guess we’ll have to wear swim trunks from now on when we take a dip,” I heard one Marine say.

  To me, such an attitude confirmed the old saying that “some guys will gripe about anything.” The only thing the women’s presence meant to me was that one little hint of civilization had finally made it to Pavuvu.

  On the other hand, the odds of any of us getting really chummy with one of those Red Cross girls were as close as you could get to absolute zero. We had a better chance of flying to the moon. After all, there were only half a dozen of them, and there were 15,000 of us.

  I guess that’s one reason the new canteen/clubhouse building never got used very much by the Marines. After what we’d been through, maybe it was just a little too spiffy for us to be comfortable in. But all the other changes that had taken place on Pavuvu during the months we’d been gone got our full approval.

  Marine engineers and Seabees had built very comfortable bivouac areas for us, complete with brand-new tents with wooden decks and electric lights. We also had access to modern showers, laundries, screened and well-lighted mess halls, plus a large PX stocked with all kinds of stateside goods.

  Instead of a sea of mud, there were neatly laid-out streets and roads built of packed coral, a fifteen-acre parade ground, ball fields, and other recreational facilities. There were plenty of sodas, ice cream, candy bars, and other half-forgotten treats—including a three-can-a-week-per-man beer ration.

  One of our few disappointments was that a big batch of that notorious alcoholic brew called “jungle juice,” prepared by the healing wounded men from Peleliu who’d reached Pavuvu weeks before we did, had sat too long and turned to vinegar by the time we finally got there.

  TO MY RELIEF, I received official word a few days after reaching Pavuvu that I was scheduled for rotation back to the States within a few weeks—and a thirty-day leave once I got there. Major Gustafson, the Third Battalion commander, signed the paperwork, and it was a done deal. My departure date was originally set for November 19, but it was actually December 1 before we embarked.

  Once this was settled, I went over to battalion headquarters and told the sergeant major who ran the office there that I wanted to extend my enlistment for another two years.

  “You need to wait till you get stateside,” the sergeant major told me.

  “No way,” I said. “I want to do it now, before I leave.”

  This may sound a little weird, but I had what I thought were good reasons for wanting to speed up the reenlistment process a little.

  My current enlistment was already finished, but there was no way the Marine Corps was going to discharge a healthy NCO with my seniority and combat experience until the war was over. And, like most other Marines I knew, I expected the war to last at least another two years. (Obviously, we’d never heard of the atom bomb.)

  So I figured if I extended now instead of waiting till I got state-side and wound up a thirty-day leave, it meant I might get my discharge that much earlier. In the meantime, unless I formally requested more overseas duty, I could probably serve out my time in the good old U.S.A.

  Even halfway around the world, we’d heard how the Corps was now drafting guys by the tens of thousands—it was the first time in history that all Marines hadn’t been volunteers—and we’d also heard how urgently they needed seasoned NCOs to train all these new boots.

  I’d already completed the requirements for promotion to platoon sergeant, and I hoped I could get assigned as a drill instructor at Parris Island or some other training camp. In its own way, it would be a job that was just as vital to the war effort as shooting at Nips and getting grenades thrown at you. But at the same time, it wouldn’t be nearly as dangerous and dirty as the one I’d been doing for the past twenty-eight months.

  I spent the rest of my time on Pavuvu hanging around with some of the wounded Marines who’d been there a while and talking about mutual friends who didn’t make it. Some of the guys from K/3/5 were trying to recover from terrible, disfiguring wounds. It almost hurt me to look at them.

  One man in particular couldn’t seem to get his mind off all the horrible things he’d been through. He just kept reliving them over and over. I’d try to switch the subject to something else, but he’d always come back to the bad stuff. It was like his memory was holding him prisoner.

  We didn’t know much about post-traumatic stress syndrome in those days, but I’m sure that’s what this poor guy had. I really felt sorry for him, but I have to admit it was a relief to get away from the haunted look in his eyes when the time came for me to leave. I don’t know what happened to him after that.

  ON DECEMBER 1, a large group of us boarded a Navy transport called the USS Wharton, and we sailed from Pavuvu that same day. Our first stop was at Guadalcanal, which was only sixty miles away. I was amazed at how peaceful and calm Iron Bottom Sound was. Not a single sea battle or air raid was going on.

  I’d heard that some of the kids I’d played football with back in Gerritsen Beach were stationed at the ’Canal now, and I tried hard to find them in the short time we were there, but I didn’t have any luck.

  (I’d learned in a letter from my sister that my old buddy Charlie Smith was back in Brooklyn by this time. He’d been wounded twice since I’d seen him, once at the ’Canal and again, more seriously, with the Second Marines at Tarawa. That second wound got him sent home for good.)

  We stopped a couple more times on our way east across the Pacific at New Hebrides and New Caledonia to take on more passengers. Then we passed Hawaii without pulling into port. We picked up some big band music on the radio from Honolulu, but that was as close as we got.

  The trip got pretty monotonous after that, and I spent a lot of time at night looking up at the stars and thinking about the men we’d lost on the islands where we fought and all the different ways they’d died.

  For some, it was in the heat of a firefight or as they charged a Jap cave. For some, it was when they peeked over a ridge at the wrong moment or when a Jap sneaked up in the dark and stabbed them in their foxholes. For others, it was an enemy shell or grenade—or sometimes one of our own—that came out of nowhere.

  No matter how it happened, though, they were all just as dead. It made me fully aware—for the first time, I think—how lucky I was to still be breathing and heading home.

  The voyage took three weeks altogether. We didn’t get to San Francisco till December 21, and it didn’t hit me until we were getting ready to go ashore the next morning that it was only three days till Christmas. That’s how out of touch I was with the real world.

  All of a sudden, I was in the mood to celebrate and in a terrific hurry to hit those legendary streets of San Francisco, but the people in charge aboard the Wharton had other ideas.

  First the voice on the ship’s intercom said, “All Army personnel prepare to disembark.” Then, a few minutes later, it said, “All Navy personnel prepare to disembark.”

  Finally, a third announcement came over the speakers, but it didn’t make any mention of disembarking. It simply said, “All Mar
ines, stand by.”

  Uh-oh! What’s this? I wondered. Another ship-cleaning job?

  As it turned out, somebody was trying to do us Marines a favor. The movie actress Marie McDonald was planning to do a special welcome-home show for us on the ship.

  The problem was, nobody asked us if we wanted to wait around to see her show. And—no offense—some of us didn’t. I hadn’t been able to write Mom and my sister that I was coming home because of the strict censorship in the Pacific, and now I was anxious to let them know I was back in the States. Once that was done, a couple of K/3/5 buddies and I were all primed to go out on the town in Frisco and reintroduce ourselves to the real world.

  “Let’s get off this tub,” one of my buddies said. “We can catch Marie later on the silver screen.”

  So the three of us jumped ship. We just walked off the Wharton, and nobody on deck seemed to care. We didn’t even take any of our gear. All we had was the clothes we were wearing—which, in my case, was a set of dungarees and a pair of boondockers—but our pockets were stuffed with back pay that we hadn’t had a chance to spend in months.

  I had the home address of a friend of mine, PFC Robert J. Moss, who was stationed at the Marine quartermaster base in Frisco. Bob had been wounded at the ’Canal and sent stateside. He was married to a girl from Auckland, New Zealand, and they were expecting a baby. I’d kept in touch with him by mail, and I knew he’d be glad to do me a favor.

  Bob had access to a phone with priority clearance, so I asked him to call Mom and tell her I was back on American soil. At the height of the holiday season in 1944, with tens of thousands of inbound and outbound troops tying up the long-distance lines, it could take hours to complete a transcontinental call. But I gave Bob a time when I was pretty sure Mom would be home from work, and he was able to do the job in just a few minutes.

  After that, my two buddies and I bought several cases of beer and spent three full days doing the town. I lost count of the parties we crashed and the bars we visited. Anytime we saw people celebrating, we just joined in. It was all kind of crazy, but nobody seemed to mind. In fact, a lot of total strangers made us feel welcome just about everywhere we went.

  I don’t think Americans in general ever felt more patriotic or more hospitable toward Marines and other service personnel than they did that Christmas season. We struck up a friendship with an older guy named George Brody, who drove us wherever we wanted to go in his old Plymouth.

  For war-weary Marines on leave, we behaved ourselves pretty well. We only got in one small fight, and Brody, a civilian, did most of the hitting.

  By Christmas night, when our nonstop celebration ended, we’d gotten a lot of the Pacific out of our systems. I think our partying was good therapy, but I was tired as hell and ready to start the long trek home to Brooklyn.

  When we went back to the ship, the officer of the deck seemed unconcerned about us being AWOL. He just shrugged and told us to get our belongings and go about our business.

  But when I got back to my quarters, some damn swabbie had stolen all my stuff. I had to borrow a poncho from another Marine. It was too cold that night in San Francisco to wander around in shirt-sleeves.

  The next day, I caught a train for San Diego. When I got there, I was quartered alphabetically in a Quonset hut dormitory on the Marine base with about eighty guys whose last names all began with “Mc.” Whenever someone stuck his head in the door and hollered “Hey, Mac!” everybody in the damn place would answer.

  I was stuck there for several days, during which I got antsy and jumped the fence to take a little liberty. The people who’d been there ahead of me had been allowed liberty, but some of them got in trouble, so the privilege was canceled.

  When I jumped the fence to get back in, a sentry caught me and started to write me up. I gave him a song and dance about just being back from overseas, and he finally let me go.

  January 1, 1945, was an extremely happy New Year for me because that’s when the train trip from San Diego to the East Coast finally started. It took a whole week because we stopped in nearly every town along the way, but the only big cities I remember going through were Kansas City and Pittsburgh. As far as I know, nobody from K/3/5 was on the train, but there was a bunch of guys from the Fifth Marines weapons company. Almost no civilians were aboard. It was like a troop train, only it had berths, which was great because I was able to catch up on lost sleep.

  One of the weapons company Marines lived in Pittsburgh, and he had a brother who was starting a wholesale food business. When we stopped there, the brother gave all of us who were continuing east a big bag of groceries. Mine was full of cheeses and other stuff that was hard to get with rationing in effect.

  When I finally got to the house in Gerritsen Beach on the night of January 8, I still had that bag of groceries clutched in my arms. My heart was beating a little fast, and my palms were kind of sweaty in spite of the cold.

  When the front door opened, and Mom saw me standing there, her eyes got wide, and her jaw dropped. Then she grinned and reached out for me.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said, “I’m home.” I hugged her around the bag of groceries, and I could tell she was crying.

  I have to admit I was feeling a little teary myself.

  THE REST OF January was old home week in Brooklyn. It was full of family get-togethers with uncles, aunts, cousins, and plenty of Mom’s great home cooking. I also made the rounds of all my old hangouts. Many of the guys I’d known as a kid were still overseas, but a few of them dropped in on furlough while I was there.

  One guy I’d grown up with, Dennis Murphy, was in a cast from his toes to his hip. Naturally, I was curious about what had happened to him, but at first I hesitated to say anything, thinking he might be sensitive about it. When I finally did ask, he just shrugged and said, “SCM.”

  I was familiar with most of the initials we used in the service, like LST for landing ship, tank, or LCI for landing craft, infantry, but I’d never heard of an SCM.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked.

  “Swivel chair, mahogany,” he said, and we both had a good laugh.

  TOWARD THE END of January, I got some good news from the Marine Corps. I’d been accepted for the assignment I was hoping for—as a drill instructor at Parris Island—and on February 5, 1945, I reported to the DI training school for the Fourth Recruit Battalion there.

  As a combat veteran of three major operations and someone who’d always liked helping younger guys become seasoned, savvy Marines, I thought I’d make a good DI, and I was really looking forward to the job. It wasn’t that I got a kick out of ordering boots around or making their lives miserable. It was because I seriously believed I could teach them things that might save their lives a short time later on some godforsaken Pacific island.

  The DI school was right next to where the recruits were quartered, and I’ll never forget the first time I passed a new boot in a hallway. He jumped to attention and saluted me so fast I thought he was going to throw his arm out of joint.

  Nothing like that had ever happened to me before, and I almost laughed out loud. But I managed to keep a straight face and told the boot, as casually as I could, to carry on.

  I was assigned to a recruit platoon along with a platoon sergeant named Jim Bordenairo. Jim was a heavily experienced DI, and we got along great from day one. He was dating a lady Marine—whose name, I swear, was Grace Kelly—and when they decided to get married, he asked me to be his best man.

  After the wedding, he gave me a silver cigarette lighter that had “Jim McEnery” engraved on one side and “Grace and Jim” on the other. I really treasured that lighter, and I carried it in my pocket for years. I think I still had it when I quit smoking at the age of seventy-four.

  Two important things I learned from Jim were (1) never threaten a recruit and (2) never lay a hand on one. “As a DI, your main job is to teach these young men what they need to know to survive in combat,” he’d say. “As green kids, they may not realize when they do some
thing wrong, and there’s plenty of nonviolent ways of making them catch on.”

  It was easy, for example, to lose your temper with a bunch of half-asleep recruits when you were trying to talk to them in the barracks after a hard day on the drill field. But instead of yelling at them or cussing them, I’d have them stand up and go to an open window, then take a few deep breaths of fresh air to clear their heads.

  In the process of learning stuff like this, I heard a lot of stories about truly dumb things some DIs had done to their recruits. One of them marched his platoon straight into a creek, where several men drowned. This was plain stupid—and mean, too.

  Some DIs also used a lot of profanity and derogatory names when they chewed out their recruits. But the worst thing I ever remember saying to one of them, even when he was arguing or being a wise guy, was: “Don’t be a horse’s ass. Horse’s asses don’t last long on a battlefield.”

  Some NCOs with heavy combat experience didn’t like serving as DIs. They thought working with boots who knew so much less than they did was boring and a waste of time. But I never felt that way.

  For one thing, I still remembered my own days in boot camp, back when I didn’t know “Semper Fidelis” from “seventy-five dollars.” I remembered the little things I’d learned there that had saved me a bunch of grief later on. Little details about dislodged pins in hand grenades or open bolts in ’03 Springfields or keeping a sharp bayonet at your fingertips in your foxhole at night.

  To me, teaching these new kids things like that was just as important as killing Nips had been on Guadalcanal, Cape Gloucester, and Peleliu. In a way, maybe it was even more important.

  In that winter of 1944–45, the Marine Corps was rushing to get thousands and thousands of green troops ready to fight in two of the biggest, toughest battles of the war—Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

  I’m still glad I played a small part in preparing dozens of those untested recruits for the dangers and challenges they’d soon be facing in those final Pacific campaigns.

  Did it do any good? Did it save any lives?