by R. V. Burgin
The ship’s bell rang, and we got the order to stand by.
We helped one another with our packs and gear, snubbing up straps and making sure everything was secure. M1s and carbines slung over our left shoulders, we stood at the ladders leading down to the tank deck where the amtracs were waiting for us.
I just mumbled, “God, I’m in your hands. Take care of me.” That was always my prayer. I kept it short. I didn’t want to burden Him. He had other people to look after.
CHAPTER 5
The Unnecessary Island
You read nowadays that the Battle of Peleliu should never have been fought. We should never have invaded, experts say. And I agree.
We took that island to secure the airfield so the Japs couldn’t use it against MacArthur when he was landing on Mindanao, to the west. But we had already bombed that airfield three months before, and we could have gone on bombing it 24-7. We could have made it absolutely unusable. There was no way the Japs could have rebuilt it in time. They were finished as an air power.
Just days before our landing at Peleliu, Admiral Bull Halsey wanted to pull out, but Admiral Nimitz, his superior, refused. General MacArthur wanted to take the island as well, and President Roosevelt approved it. We were committed.
Those of us on the ground didn’t know anything about all that. Good idea or bad idea, we didn’t have time to dwell on it. The First Marines under Colonel Lewis Puller—nicknamed Chesty—were fighting for their lives on the Point, a hump of coral rock on the northwestern tip of the island. We were lost in the forest east of the airfield, no idea where we were. Every one of us was fighting for his life. We talked about it a lot after the fact. But not while we were there. We were pretty well occupied.
Peleliu would keep us busier than anybody ever imagined. General Rupertus was off the mark when he said we’d be in and out in two or three days. The maps and photographs and the model we’d all studied so carefully didn’t tell the whole story. They didn’t tell us that a lot of that level ground was thick mangrove swamp. They didn’t tell us that beneath the tops of the trees the ridges were steep, and honeycombed with more than five hundred limestone caves and man-made tunnels. One of them was big enough to hide fifteen hundred troops. They didn’t tell us that before it was over we’d have to fight our way from one cave to the next. One of our generals said it was like fighting in Swiss cheese.
The Japs had been on Peleliu since they seized it from the Germans during World War I. They’d had plenty of time to dig in. Starting in the 1930s they’d put the natives to work and brought in hundreds of Korean tunnel diggers, enlarging the caves and connecting them until the whole place was like a termite nest.
The island was coral rock, shaped like a crab claw with two prongs, a larger and a smaller, pointing northeast. A series of parallel ridges ran up the bigger prong of the claw. Roads skirted either side of the ridges and joined at the north end of the island, where the Japs had a phosphate mine. From there, a five-hundred-foot causeway led to a smaller island, Ngesebus. Ngesebus was mostly flat, and the Japs had started building a smaller airfield there. We’d have to take care of that sooner or later.
Peleliu was just north of the equator. We didn’t think about just how hot and dry it would get until we got there. We had no idea how sharp that coral was, how it could shred your clothes and boondockers and tear your skin. How even a minor wound would fester and seem to take weeks to heal.
With all the other things we were to face the first couple of days, the most aggravating was thirst. Most of us had come ashore with two full canteens. By the time K Company dug in that first night, lost somewhere in the scrub and out of touch with the rest of our units, we could shake our canteens and hear the last few drops slosh around. The daytime temperature had been well over a hundred degrees. We’d been gulping water like we had an endless supply.
I didn’t know where the information was coming from, but we were hearing that it had been a bad day for the whole First Division. We had lost more than a thousand men wounded or killed. It’s probably a good thing we didn’t know just how bad the situation was, or that the First Regiment was fighting for their lives, barely clinging to the Point. We knew our battalion commander was out of action, either wounded or killed, and that his executive officer was dead. We didn’t know who was running things.
Just before midnight we found out.
We were expecting Jap infiltrators when two figures walked out of the brush and gave the password. It was Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Walt, our battalion commander on New Britain, and his runner. After Shofner had been taken out to a hospital ship, Walt, who was now the Fifth Regiment’s executive officer, had taken charge of Third Battalion. With communications still down, he set out in the darkness to find his scattered companies and put them back into some kind of order. He’d already rounded up I and L companies. When he found us he led us back toward the airfield and positioned us facing south just behind Second Battalion, which was facing north. We’d be watching one another’s backs through the rest of the night.
We dug mortar emplacements, registered the two guns with a couple test rounds, laid out our KA-BARS where they’d be handy, and settled in for a long, restless night.
The water situation hadn’t improved, and by dawn there were a lot of empty canteens. The coral never cooled during all the time we were on Peleliu. Even at night it stayed warm, and the morning sun soon turned it into a griddle. Some of our guys went searching and found a cistern at the edge of the airstrip with a little pool of stagnant water about ten or twelve feet down. Word spread and guys started to gather around, passing their canteens down to be filled. We were an excellent target. The water didn’t look too good to me, silty and probably polluted. But none of us were picky at that point. Before long they managed to bring up a couple of the fifty-gallon drums from the beach, old diesel containers that were supposed to have been steam-cleaned on Pavuvu before they were filled with water. We lined up to fill our canteens, but it was even worse than the water from the cistern, tea-colored and smelling strongly of fuel oil. Guys would take a mouthful and spit it out. Those that swallowed it would throw up a few minutes later. Some of them had the dry heaves all morning.
I thought, If anyone lights a match around us we’ll all be turned into human flamethrowers.
About this time the Japs opened up on us from the high ground overlooking the airfield. We called it Bloody Nose Ridge, and it bloodied us good. They could see us in the morning light, but we couldn’t see them. The Navy’s guns and our own heavy artillery on the beach answered, but I don’t think we had much effect. The Japs were shooting from the mouths of caves a couple hundred feet up, where we couldn’t get at them. They’d wheel a gun to the entrance, fire, and wheel it back out of sight.
As the enemy poured steel down on us, we got the word to prepare to move out. The whole Fifth Regiment was to attack straight across the airfield, then swing north. We’d be on the right, moving across the southern end. Second Battalion was on our left. They’d take the middle. Then on their left, First Battalion, which had hooked up with elements of the First Marines’ Second Battalion. Off on our right in the scrub jungle were the Seventh Marines.
We’d practiced the drill on Pavuvu. Stay down until the signal. Keep a distance between one another so we present a scattered target. Move fast and don’t stop until we get to the far side. A moving target is harder to hit. We crouched in the underbrush, listening to the guns bang away at one another. Then the word came: “Move out!”
That was the longest walk I ever took in my life. We were on the go. We were moving, bent over at a trot. Everything was coming at us—mortars, artillery, machine-gun and rifle fire. You heard the hiss and zing of shrapnel and bullets all around you. We were as exposed as bugs on a breakfast table. I kept yelling, “Keep moving! Keep moving!”
The field was littered with scraps from the tank battle the day before, empty ammo boxes, chunks of shrapnel bouncing and skittering along. There were a couple wrecked Jap war
planes, including one of their twin-engine “Betty” bombers.
I saw Merriel “Snafu” Shelton go down, carrying the mortar tube. Sledgehammer went down right behind him, cradling a bag of mortar shells in his arms. Neither was hit and both got up and started off again.
We couldn’t fire back at our tormentors because we were on the run. We didn’t want to expose ourselves any longer than we had to. But it was frustrating. After what seemed like ages, a line of brush appeared in front of us. We dove into the shade, panting and sweating. For the first time I realized how hot we had been coming across. It was like the Japs had one more weapon on their side, the sun.
Everyone was accounted for. Mortar section hadn’t lost a man in the mad dash. But K Company lost two dead and five wounded. One of them was Private First Class Robert Oswalt, shot through the head. He was the one I had almost shot between the eyes myself on New Britain when he came crawling out of his foxhole at night begging for a drink of water. Suddenly I felt awful.
Once we were across the airfield, our orders were to swing north and head for the low area east of Bloody Nose Ridge, near the coast. There we’d link up with the Second Battalion. As we started north we found our battalion getting squeezed between the Second Battalion and the Seventh Marines, who were still clearing out the swamps.
At the north edge of the field, a few yards on our left, we passed a two-story concrete shell, evidently the air base headquarters. By the time we saw it, one of the battleships had blasted it with fourteen-inch guns, but the walls were at least a foot thick with steel reinforcing, and it was still standing. Some other Marine unit had dislodged the Japs there and moved in.
Beyond the northeast corner of the airfield, we found ourselves in dense scrub again. Beyond lay a patch of swamp with the sea shimmering in the distance. The main road running north along the east side of the island cut through here, but we stayed out of sight. We found a clear space where we could set up the mortars and pound in the aiming stakes to orient the weapons. Late in the afternoon we fired a few rounds to register the guns and scraped out foxholes in the hard coral, piling up rocks and logs around them. All the time we kept our eyes on the wall of scrub around us, expecting a banzai attack any minute. It never came. In fact, the Japs never charged us banzai-style on Peleliu like they had on New Britain. They knew better. Now they waited until dark. Then they came creeping out of their caves to slit our throats.
As it happened, our second night passed quietly. Orders for the next day were to continue to advance north and relieve First Battalion. They had been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the Japs all afternoon, working their way along the lower slopes of the ridge. Whenever they moved forward, Jap mortars and artillery shells would come pouring down on them from the hills. Whenever they stopped, the fire stopped.
* * *
Next morning we set out for our rendezvous with First Battalion, still picking our way through dense scrub. I could tell it was going to be a hot one. As the sun climbed higher guys started dropping out with heat prostration, and we had to stop more and more frequently. We were burning through our salt tablets.
The east flank of Bloody Nose Ridge rose up on our right, and as we advanced we started coming under vicious artillery and mortar fire from the heights. We couldn’t use our own mortars for fear of dropping them on First Battalion, which was somewhere between us and the ridge. By noon we had linked up with them and we took their place in the front lines. When we started forward again we almost immediately ran into a wall of fire that kept pinning us down all afternoon. When we tried to move forward, the Japs would open up on us. There’s no feeling on earth as vulnerable as having somebody fire shells down on you from up above.
Second Battalion had pulled to our right and was making better progress through the mangroves. Behind them somewhere was the Seventh Marines. Our company finally found our own little patch of mangroves and pushed through until we came out in a coconut grove and, on the far side, an open area. This had once been a native village, but the Japs had taken over and built rows of barracks. During the landing we had bombed and shelled the area pretty thoroughly, and there wasn’t much left but piles of charred lumber.
Our supplies caught up with us by late afternoon, including some precious water. Things seemed about to take a turn for the better.
The next morning Second Battalion was ordered east across a narrow neck of land that joined the larger of Peleliu’s crab claws to the smaller. Japs had been spotted in that area. The Marines had just started across when a group of Navy fighters came roaring over, strafing the column from one end to the other. This mistake cost the Corps almost three dozen men. Our battalion was hurried forward to reinforce them. We were coming up on the same neck of land, following a crude road with swamp on either side of us, when shells—big shells—started raining down on us. I knew they were ours because they were screaming right over our backs and crashing just in front, showering us with mud and coral rock. We could feel the thump of the concussions on our dungarees before we all hit the ground.
We’d been stringing out communication wire as we went. I grabbed the sound-powered phone to the command post.
“We’re taking fire from behind us up here!” I shouted.
“No, that can’t be ours!”
“Don’t by God tell me it’s not ours! It’s coming from the damned airfield, and we’ve got the airfield. I’m telling you what the hell it is! It’s our damned artillery and it’s a 155. I’m looking at it as it lands. Get word back to them to cut it out. They’re too damned close.”
That was the first time I ever experienced an airburst. Those things are wicked. The shell comes in and explodes before it hits the ground, and the shrapnel slices down through anything that isn’t under cover. A foxhole or a trench—it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference where you’re at. There’s no place to hide from an airburst. I thought for sure that stuff was going to eat us up. But by some miracle, nobody was hit.
After the artillery let up we moved on. By early afternoon we dug in south of the Second Battalion.
The Japs had their main base up on Babelthuap, a larger island about forty miles north of Peleliu. Our intelligence had information that they might send a force across to relieve their Peleliu garrison and drive us off the island. It wasn’t clear to us what a couple hundred Marines could do to stop a major landing, but at least we could sound the alarm and hold them off for a while. As we pushed through the swamps on the smaller claw we ran into an occasional sniper. But the next day or two was about the quietest we were to experience on Peleliu.
The third day they sent about forty of us on an extended patrol down to the tip of a long, narrow peninsula running along the southeast coast of the island. Hillbilly Jones was in charge and we had an Army man with a war dog, a big Doberman that could smell the Japs.
There were a couple of islands off the tip, and we were told about two thousand Japs were hidden there. When the tide went out it would be easy for them to wade across, come up the peninsula and catch us by surprise. We were supposed to set up and watch for them.
It was a spooky place to start with, gloomy and dark, with dense trees and thick vines snaking all over the place and tangles of roots that looked like the legs of some giant spider. Sledge was goggling at the birds, and I had to remind him to keep his mind on business. We settled near an abandoned Jap bunker, where Hillbilly set up his command post. The rest of us spread out and dug in. For a change the ground was soft enough to dig real foxholes. We set up our gun at the water’s edge and pointed it where we thought they’d try to cross. We didn’t dare fire a register round because every sound would carry right across the water. In fact, we were ordered to stay quiet, not light up a smoke, not advertise our presence in any way.
The sun went down, leaving us to our rations and to the mosquitoes. Sergeant Elmo Haney, who’d amused us with his antics on Pavuvu, had come along. He was more Asiatic than usual that night. He kept moving up and down the line urging everyone in a hoar
se whisper to check their weapons, lock and load, stay alert. The Japs might come across at any minute with fixed bayonets, he warned. He disappeared, but pretty soon he was back again to see if we knew the password. Check your weapons. Stay alert. He was starting to get to us.
Fact is, we were more than alert. We were forty twitching bundles of nerves. We jumped at every sound. A fish splashing out in the water, some animal snapping a twig or some bird ruffling its feathers—anything could set us off. Nobody was getting any sleep.
I was near the command post around midnight when we all heard someone start to moan. “Ooooooooooh. Ooooooooh. Dog! They’re gonna kill me, dog! Help me! Ooooooooooooh!” It was the dog handler. He went on and on, getting louder, like some siren. Somebody shushed him, then somebody tackled him in the darkness. I could hear them thrashing around, grunts and moans.
“Quiet that man!” Hillbilly ordered. Someone else called for our corpsman.
The dog handler was screaming louder. “Help me. Oh, dog! God! Help me! Help me!”
“Shut that man up!” Hillbilly hissed.
Several of us were wrestling him now, while the corpsman got out his syringe. He gave him a shot of morphine, but it just seemed to egg him on. He howled louder, calling on his dog, or God, to save him.
“The Japs have got me! The Japs have got me! Save me, dog!”
The corpsman gave him another shot, enough morphine by now to kill a horse. Anything to shut him up. He went on yelling, kicking and punching at anyone who came near. If the Japs couldn’t hear him, we were sure they were deaf.
Hillbilly was trying to talk him down in low, soothing tones. “It’s okay, son. You’re going to be okay.”
He kept yelling.
Someone said, “Hit him! Shut him the hell up!” And someone else grabbed an entrenching tool and swung.
