Islands of the Damned

by R. V. Burgin

  It seems somebody had carelessly left a can of gasoline in that brush pile. While the mess crew was cleaning up after supper, the brush had mysteriously burst into flame. The sentry on duty yelled “Fire!” and while everybody was running around trying to put it out, two leftover turkeys vanished from the galley.

  We finished our midnight snack.

  “Make damn sure you don’t leave any of this stuff lying around,” somebody reminded us. We took the bones and carcasses over to I Company’s bivouac and dumped them in their trash can.

  Guess who got the blame the next day for stealing the turkeys.

  * * *

  As the new year began the rumor mill kicked into high gear. There were the usual stories that somebody had shot himself. For a time there was speculation that the Marines were about to be absorbed into the Army. That one had popped up again and again over the years. There was a tale they were putting saltpeter into our food to cool down our sex drive. I don’t know what they thought we might do, with only a handful of Red Cross girls on the island, safe behind barbed wire most of the time. Our tents were about three-quarters of a mile from the beach, and I didn’t bother to go down to the USO canteen just to be hanging out there. From time to time I’d go to company headquarters to visit a friend of mine I’d gone to school with. Whenever I went down there I’d see the Navajo code talkers hanging around, but I never got acquainted with any of them.

  Mostly the rumors were about where we were going next.

  Our training now emphasized street fighting and mutual support between tanks and infantry. That led some of us to think that we were headed for Formosa or mainland China, or even to Japan itself. There was a map of a long, narrow island in circulation, but none of us recognized it.

  In late January the whole division shipped out to Guadalcanal for amphibious maneuvers in LCIs—Landing Craft, Infantry. These were a newer and smaller version of the LSTs we’d taken to Peleliu, but with ramps running down the side instead of bow doors. They could carry an infantry company plus a couple of jeeps. We’d go out and make a run for the beach. When we got on shore we’d bail out and move in a few dozen yards. Then we’d get back on the LCIs, go out and do it all over again, eight or ten times a day. The mortar platoon also practiced setting up with three guns until we could do it in our sleep.

  Guadalcanal had the same long, thick kunai grass we’d seen around the airfield at Cape Gloucester. It reminded me of the Johnson grass back home. In the grass we found these big lizards, about two feet long, with flickering tongues, like a snake’s. The natives called them goannas, and we had a lot of fun with those things. When we came up on one we’d all gather around a circle daring each other to grab him. Of course when that rascal came charging, we all gave him plenty of space.

  All this time we were listening to the Armed Forces Radio Service, so we got word whenever the Marines hit another island. I didn’t know how many of those islands there were out there, but I knew every one of them was on the way to Tokyo. We’d gone from Guadalcanal in 1942 to Tarawa, to Kwajalein, Saipan, Guam and Peleliu. When we returned to Pavuvu from maneuvers, the Third, Fourth, and Fifth divisions invaded Iwo Jima. We listened closely to every news report. Once again the Japs had holed up in caves and fought to the last man. It sounded a lot like what we had been through on Peleliu, but shorter and with three times the casualties. We knew we would be next. And we knew we were in for a helluva fight.

  In February we went back to Guadalcanal for two more weeks of exercises and maneuvers off Tassafaronga Point, where the Navy had suffered a big defeat by the Japs in 1942. They worked us even harder, adding cliff climbing to our exercises because, they said, we would be climbing a seawall to get onshore at our next destination. We camped in what had been the Third Division’s bivouac before they left for Iwo Jima and hoped that wasn’t an omen.

  During our stay on Guadalcanal some of us discovered the Seabees’ mess hall, where the chow was better and more abundant than what the Marines had been feeding us. The Seabees were pretty generous, allowing us to join the chow line after they had been through.

  T. L. Hudson—“Peaches”—and I discovered the PX at Henderson Field, where we could buy ice cream bars, something we’d never seen on Pavuvu. They were four inches long, two inches wide and half an inch thick, covered with chocolate, and they cost a nickel. We thought we’d died and gone to heaven. T.L. and I would get in line and buy one each—they’d only sell you one at a time. We’d eat those then get in line and get another one. Then we’d come back around again. They never caught on or they didn’t mind. Either way, we made four or five trips through that line.

  We almost didn’t make it off of Guadalcanal. At the end of the last day of maneuvers, our squad waited on the beach for the Higgins boat that was to take us back out to our mother ship, the USS McCracken. We were dog tired. The sun was getting lower and lower until we were the last bunch left on the beach. The wind had come up and the sea was getting choppy. Finally the boat came nosing in and dropped its ramp on the sand. We climbed aboard wearily and stowed our weapons. The bay was full of ships, and we passed several on our way out, bouncing on the waves. I looked down and saw water sloshing beneath the deck. We were overloaded and taking on water. I went forward and told the coxswain, “We better get this thing to a ship.” He took one look and turned toward the nearest ship. Meanwhile the water was coming up under our feet and the Higgins boat was riding lower and lower in the waves. The coxswain started the bilge pumps. We pulled alongside an attack transport and yelled for help. They yelled back, asking where we were from and what was the problem. Our coxswain explained that we were from the McCracken and we were taking on water and they threw a couple lines down to us. The water was creeping up our ankles now. As our boat started going down we got the lines attached. We scrambled up the cargo net and spent the night on the transport. The next morning a Higgins boat took us back to the McCracken.

  * * *

  Things were moving faster. The McCracken took us not to Pavuvu, but to Banika, where we spent a week loading ships and getting the usual round of inoculations that come before a major campaign. Troopships began appearing offshore. On March 14 we boarded the McCracken again and the next morning sailed out of the harbor and north to Ulithi.

  Ulithi had been secured without a fight by the Army’s Eighty-first Wildcat Division about a week after we went ashore at Peleliu. It was really a cluster of small islands surrounding a deepwater port, where the fleet for our next operation was coming together.

  We knew by now we were headed for Okinawa. For once they didn’t wait until we got on board ship to tell us. Scotty showed us a map of the island. It was only 350 miles from Tokyo.

  Now we understood why they had pushed street fighting and tank warfare in our training. Unlike Cape Gloucester and Peleliu, Okinawa had a lot of open cultivated ground, including not just villages but real towns.

  If we hadn’t been told, we would have known anyway that this was going to be bigger than any operation we’d had so far. From the deck of the McCracken all we could see was ship after ship, hundreds of them spread all the way out to the far horizon. It was as though they had assembled the entire U.S. Navy at Ulithi, from the biggest battleships and aircraft carriers down to escorts and patrol boats.

  While we were at Ulithi, the battered hulk of the USS Franklin limped in and docked right next to us. I was standing only thirty or forty feet away. While we had been under way to Ulithi on March 19, a single Jap bomber had appeared out of the clouds and dropped two five-hundred-pound bombs on the carrier. She was just fifty miles off Kyushu, the westernmost of Japan’s main islands. The bombs went right through the flight deck and exploded in the hangars, setting off ammunition and fuel. Almost 725 of her crew died and more than 250 were injured. We heard that many of the wounded were still on board.

  The survivors fought the raging fires, dodging exploding bombs and ammo, and managed to bring the ship hundreds of miles into Ulithi. She was listing 13 degrees to st
arboard when they got her docked, so we had a close-up view from the deck of the McCracken. Her sailors were crowded on her ruined flight deck, leaning against the tilt. Smoke still oozed from her side where the explosions had torn holes the size of a garage door. It wasn’t hard to imagine what the Franklin and her crew had been through. I guess every sailor who ever lived is also a firefighter. I had watched them hold drills on our transports. Every man knew exactly what to do and when to do it. I thought, At least on land we could dig foxholes and had some room to maneuver. On shipboard, there’s nowhere to go.

  While we were in port at Ulithi a telegram came for me, from Jewett, Texas.

  My younger brother, Joseph Delton Burgin, had joined the Army the year before and after basic training had been sent to France. Before he enlisted, J.D. had written to me asking about the Marine Corps. I had written back to discourage him. I thought he might have an easier time of it than I did if he joined the Navy. But I guess we were all in harm’s way, whether we were in the Marines or the Army or Navy.

  Typical of J.D., he made up his own mind.

  He was almost four years younger than me, always quiet, not a hell-raiser. But he would not be pushed around. When someone got in his face, you’d see those black eyes snapping in anger. When he was starting first grade, Momma made him a pair of overalls out of uncolored denim from cotton sacks. She had dyed them blue, so they looked like regular overalls. One morning she saw him sitting out on the porch cutting something with a pair of scissors.

  “What are you doing out there, J.D.?”

  “These overalls are hot, Momma. I’m cutting holes in them.”

  She chased him all the way across the yard and under the fence, where he got hung up on the barbed wire.

  J.D. and I used to go fishing together, and possum hunting at night with the dogs and a .410 shotgun. He was with me when I shot my first deer.

  According to the telegram, J.D. had been killed by German artillery in Alsace-Lorraine. An Army officer wrote my folks that it had been sudden. J.D. hadn’t felt a thing.

  * * *

  Nights on the deck of the McCracken were cool and pleasant as we sailed north from Ulithi. We could almost forget we were getting closer to Japan. But a briefing from K Company’s officers sobered us right up. Okinawa would be the bloodiest campaign of the war, they warned us. We could expect 80 to 85 percent casualties.

  Going in we would face heavy fire from a large Jap gun on the beach. Enemy paratroopers might drop in behind us, and there would probably be a banzai attack during our first night ashore. We were also facing a new tactic. Starting in October of 1944, Japanese pilots had been deliberately crashing their planes into American warships in a kind of aerial banzai attack.

  The convoy that left Ulithi March 27 was the largest ever assembled in the Pacific. We had almost 1,300 ships of all kinds and more than 180,000 men from five Army divisions—the Seventy-seventh, Ninety-sixth, Twenty-seventh, Seventh and Eighty-first—and the First, Second and Sixth Marine divisions. We were facing at least 100,000 Jap troops who, we knew, would fight to the last man. Their back was to the wall.

  The old bivouac rumor about the Marines being absorbed into the U.S. Army almost came true, in a way. The entire invasion force, called the Tenth Army, was under the command of Army Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner.

  Because the Fifth Marines’ Third Battalion had been in the first wave at Peleliu, we were to be spared that distinction at Okinawa. We’d be held offshore in regimental reserve.

  It had now been sixteen months and a couple days since Florence and I sat on that park bench in Melbourne kissing and saying our good-byes. I was no closer to returning for her as I’d promised, no closer to settling down in our little house together. In fact each island where I’d fought took me farther from her. How long would I be on Okinawa? And then where? Japan? We knew as we were getting closer that the enemy was getting weaker and more desperate. Standing there at nights on the deck of the McCracken, I just couldn’t see any end to it.

  CHAPTER 8

  April Fools

  We awoke once again to the smell of steak and eggs from the galley. Sunrise was still two and a half hours away, but crews aboard the McCracken were already at their battle stations. Jap planes did not wait for the light of dawn before starting their bomb runs and kamikaze attacks. We’d been warned the night before to get plenty of rest because April 1 was going to be a long, hard day. I had slept pretty good, but I’d been through this twice before, three times if you count Ngesebus. Losing sleep did not make any landing easier.

  It was Easter Sunday. And it was April Fools’ Day. After the usual clatter and commotion of getting everybody up and collecting our gear, we assembled for a chapel service. I don’t remember any of the details or what was said to us. But I’m sure many of us prayed very sincerely that morning. We stood in line for the mess hall, stood in line for the heads, and by twos and threes climbed to the deck.

  The temperature was in the mid-seventies. It was going to be the kind of balmy, clear morning that back home would have sent me out into the woods with the dog and my hunting rifle. J.D. would probably have come along. The ship faced east and as the horizon got brighter, we could make out a long, low landmass silhouetted a few miles away with an umbrella of smoke hanging over it. We could hear the hum of airplanes getting closer and the bark of ack-ack guns from other ships. For several days we had watched as streams of plump B-24s droned high above, paying an advance call on Okinawa, but this time the approaching planes weren’t ours.

  “All troops below!” some sailor yelled. “No troops on deck! Captain’s orders. Jap planes coming! We don’t want Marines killed on our deck. Everybody get below.”

  Did the Navy think we’d never been under fire before? Swabbies were always hassling Marines. You’d find a shady cubbyhole to snooze and the first thing you knew some swabbie would come along with a hose to wash down the deck. We figured this was more of the same.

  The McCracken’s 40mm antiaircraft guns started bellowing. Over our heads the silhouettes of planes came snarling over, swooping and darting like barn swallows. Flashes popped among them, and inky blots of smoke drifted away.

  We were herded through a hatch and a sailor slammed it shut. The space we found ourselves in was dark and crowded. We were wearing full packs, and there was no ventilation. Before long we were hot as blazes. We could hear the racket above our heads and none of us wanted to be caught like pigs in a pen if a Jap plane or bomb came crashing through the deck. We started yelling for someone to let us out. Finally a bunch of us took matters into our own hands and battered the hatch open and we all came swarming out, the battle going full blast around us.

  A Naval officer appeared on the deck above and behind us. “All Marines, return to quarters!” he barked. “That’s an order! Do it now!”

  “Sir, we’re about to hit that beach. We’d just as soon take our chances out here.”

  He turned and strode away. While we milled around waiting for what might happen next, a couple of our own officers showed up and ordered us to stand by for loading. We formed up at the railing four abreast and waited for the signal to turn and scramble down the cargo nets. Climbing those things you try to make haste carefully. You hope the guy above you doesn’t step on your hands or face, and you try to not step on the hands or the face of the guy below you.

  When the amtrac was full, I called out, “Shove off, Coxswain. You’re loaded.” We nosed away from the ship and joined the line of other amtracs headed out to the assembly point just outside the reef until the signal came to form up and go in.

  While we waited we watched the air show. A Jap plane nosed over and fell toward the sea, twisting and trailing a long spiral plume of smoke until it smacked the water. Another burst into flame and disappeared behind the hulk of the McCracken. Hellcats went weaving through the smoke and din, and we held our breath hoping the gunners on those ships knew their planes and aimed accurately. A lot of shipboard gunners, we knew, were our
guys, Marines.

  The Navy’s big guns and rocket-launching LSMs were still working over the beach and beyond, planting long, even rows of explosions along the shore. Thunder swept across the waves and beat against our faces. Amtracs and Higgins boats headed this way and that. Many had already left troops on the beach and were headed out for another load or for supplies. The Fifth Marines’ First and Second battalions were already landing on Blue Beach to our left. Our battalion was to have been held back in regimental reserve. But obviously they were sending us in along with everyone else to anchor the left flank on Yellow Beach. To the south a muddy river, the Bishi Gawa, separated us from Purple Beach, where the Army’s regiments were coming in.

  When the flag dropped we formed a wide line and started across the reef. Ships were pumping out clouds of white smoke, screening our approach. A few gray spikes erupted in the water in the distance. But so far we hadn’t seen any of the burning amtracs that had made the trip into Peleliu such a nightmare. The Navy bombardment had ceased. In the quiet we could hear the rumble of amtrac engines all around us. Little by little Okinawa appeared through the haze and smoke. From my perch on the gunwale, I could make out ground sloping up from the beach and a patchwork of fields separated by rows of pine trees. Except for columns of rising smoke here and there it looked like nice farm country, a little like the countryside around Melbourne.

  “Hey, we’re not taking any fire!” somebody noticed.

  “Yeah. You’re right. Where are the Japs?”

  Somebody yelled from the boat on our right, “We’re going in unopposed.” We passed the word to the boat on our left, and the news traveled all along the line, boat to boat. “Unopposed landing!”

  “I don’t believe this!” somebody else yelled.

  No bodies floated in the water. No snipers’ bullets whined over our heads. Just the steady beat of the amtrac’s diesel and the churn of water against the hull.