Islands of the Damned

by R. V. Burgin

  That same night I got a look at one of the new night-vision scopes the Army was using. It took two or three guys to man that thing, but they could set it up after dark and see Jap infiltrators as they moved in, before they did their dirty work. One man held the scope and the other fired a BAR at the target. I looked through it. Everything had a strange, greenish glow, but I could see like daylight. I could recognize individuals thirty to fifty yards away, actually tell who they were.

  I thought, Man alive! If you had one of these things when they came at you in a banzai charge, you wouldn’t have to just fire into the dark and hope you’d hit one. You could pick them off like flies. I wondered how long until they were available for Marines.

  About two o’clock in the morning, all hell broke loose over in one of our foxholes. I was only fifteen or twenty feet away and I recognized the voice. George Sarrett was yelling and thrashing around. I thought, God a-mighty! I’ve set us up where there’s a Jap cave. They’ve come out and one of them is in the foxhole with George.

  I scrambled over, pulling out my KA-BAR just as Sarrett stood up, panting and sputtering.

  “Get him off me!” he yelled. “God, I hate those things!”

  I looked down, expecting to find a bloodied Jap crumpled in the bottom of Sarrett’s foxhole. Instead, there was a land crab that had tumbled in sometime during the night.

  That crab gave us the first laugh we’d had in many weeks.

  Beyond Dakeshi village we got held up at one particularly long, low ridge. Twice our men had made it almost to the top, only to be thrown back and pinned down in the valley. Each morning before they moved out, our artillery would raise hell, firing shell after shell over the crest. It wasn’t doing a damn bit of good.

  I watched from my forward position, directing the mortars, trying to figure out why artillery wasn’t doing the job. It was passing over the ridgetop and exploding on the far side. It should be catching the Japs.

  Something had to be running just beyond the crest that was sheltering them, something like a gully or a trench. The Japs could lay up in there protected from our artillery, then pop out and start firing when we moved up the slope.

  The difference between artillery and mortar fire, as every Marine learns in boot camp, is that mortar fire drops down at a steep angle. You can’t hide from it in a hole or a trench.

  I called back to the mortars and explained to the men what I wanted.

  “Register one gun to fire from right to left, the second to fire left to right, and the third to fire all along the crest of the ridge.” Sledge, Shelton, Santos, Redifer, Sarrett and the others instantly got what I had in mind.

  Scotty did not.

  He came on the phone from the gun pits. “You can’t do that!” he said. “We don’t have enough ammo.”

  I’d had differences with Scotty before on setting up the mortars. I would be out on the line somewhere, and when I came back he would have them set up where they were subject to rifle fire from any angle. I’d have the guys move the guns to where at least they had some protection.

  Then they’d have to re-dig all the foxholes. They didn’t mind, because they knew that’s where they should have set up to begin with. But nobody wanted to question Scotty’s decisions. I had been through this a couple times already on Okinawa. Now I had to do it again.

  I needed twenty rounds per gun, sixty shells in all, that I could throw at that thing. I knew damn well there had to be something there. I had them covered.

  Scotty and I had a pretty good powwow over the phone. I tried to explain the situation and why my plan would work, but he didn’t see it. Finally I thought, This is getting us nowhere. I called the company command post and explained what I wanted to do. “Can you spare us the ammo?” I asked.

  “No problem,” they said.

  Scotty was back on the line, fuming. “I order you not to fire,” he yelled.

  I ignored him.

  “Mortar section, fire on my command! Commence firing!”

  Whatever Scotty had to say was drowned out in the bump-bump-bump of mortar fire.

  Bill Sloan wrote in his book The Ultimate Battle that I told Scotty to go to hell. I want to clarify that. What I said was, “Scotty, if you’re going to be so damned observing, get your ass up here on the front line where you can see what’s going on.”

  That’s exactly what I told him. But I didn’t tell him to go to hell. He was my lieutenant.

  K Company took the ridge without further trouble, and I didn’t hear any more from Scotty. But when I got to the top I took a few minutes to look around. Sure enough, there was a narrow gully running right behind the crest. And laid out in the gully, almost side by side, I counted the bodies of more than fifty Japs.

  * * *

  We moved on, ridge to ridge, until we hardly knew anymore which was which. After days of shelling they were all as bare as plucked chickens. We moved along a narrow road between stone walls, always five paces apart. Keep moving! Don’t bunch up! All the time we were working our way closer to Wana, the last ridge before Shuri Castle.

  We were to relieve the First Marines, who had cut around the west end of the ridge and had been working their way east up Wana Draw. Three times they had been forced back under intense fire from the heights. Now they were exhausted. While the Seventh Marines concentrated on the ridge itself, to our left, we started fighting our way back up the draw, supported by tanks. The walls of that thing were two hundred feet high in places, and we saw more of the strange, horseshoe-shaped tombs the Okinawans carved out of solid rock. Whole families were buried in them, going back generations. The Okinawans considered them sacred ground. But the Japs fortified them and set up their antitank guns and mortars to fire down on us. They quickly knocked out two of our tanks and forced us back, but not before we were able to call in fire on two of their positions from the battleship Colorado.

  Our Second Battalion managed to get a foothold on Hill 55, which anchored the west end of the draw. On the next morning, May 20, we started up Wana Draw again, making progress.

  I felt a little uneasy that morning. It wasn’t a feeling I could describe. As I said, I never for a moment believed I wouldn’t come home from the war. But I was no fool. I knew that I could come home wounded or crippled.

  The Japs started firing at us from the left, with a 150mm gun up on the ridge. Jim Burke and I were up front observing, and when those big shells started landing around us we thought we’d better get the hell out of Dodge. We ran down the slope to where there were a couple shell holes and Jim jumped into one and I tumbled into another. Just as I hit the bottom, there was a terrific crack just behind me, on the edge of that thing. I felt that force go right through me, and then dirt and rock come raining down. For a moment I couldn’t see a thing, couldn’t breathe. I was buried. I clawed my way out, caked with dirt, bruised and sputtering. I don’t remember being relieved, thinking I’d had a close call. As a matter of fact, I don’t remember much from the rest of that morning.

  That afternoon about two o’clock we were sitting somewhere nearby, out in the open. That big ridge was still right in front of us and Marine and Navy planes were working it over, strafing and dropping bombs. Artillery was going on both sides. We were in the middle of it.

  For some reason our new corpsman, Wesley Katz, took it into his head at that moment to start praying. Doc Caswell, who had been with us since Peleliu, had been wounded a couple days earlier, during the push up Wana Draw with the tanks.

  I had nothing against prayer. I’d prayed myself from time to time, always quickly and silently. But Doc Katz was praying loudly. You could hear him over the roar of the airplanes and the rattle of shells. I reached over and patted him on the shoulder and said, in a soft voice, “Let’s just have a silent prayer here, son. It’s not doing the other troops any good.”

  He bowed his head and finished his prayer in silence.

  A short time later I was sitting on my helmet eating ham and lima beans from a can when a big shell smack
ed down maybe fifty or a hundred yards away. Just a flash and a crack! The impact knocked me off my helmet and at the same time I felt something sting the back of my neck.

  I sat on the ground for a moment, then reached up to brush away whatever was on my neck. I felt something hard and sharp, and this chunk of metal fell on the ground. It was about as long and as big around as my finger, tapered and real jagged. I reached down to pick it up but it was hot and I dropped it. I waited a second and picked it up again. I looked at it and put it into my pocket. I felt blood trickle down my neck.

  Katz was at my side. He started dressing the wound. It had been numb but now it was starting to really hurt. Three or four minutes had gone by. Doc poked me with a syrette. I stood up and turned my neck just to make sure everything still worked. Nothing was broken.

  “Do you think you can walk?” Katz asked.

  I felt a little light-headed, but I thought I knew where I was. I nodded and he pointed the way to the first aid station, a few hundred yards off. I stumbled in that direction with the battle still going on all around me, bullets singing and shells falling. I don’t know how the heck I made it, but I did.

  I stayed at the first aid station until it started to get dark. Then a jeep ambulance came and took several of us to the forward field hospital. I remember on the ambulance holding a plasma bottle for a guy who really was in a bad way, but I don’t remember much else. I’m sure he was dying.

  The field hospital was little more than a big tent with stretchers on the bare ground. They brought me in and I lay down on one of the stretchers. An Army medic eventually came by and gave me a couple of shots. I thought, That’s good. That’s for the pain and for tetanus. After a while, another corpsman came by and gave me another shot. A little while later, I got one more shot.

  When I looked up again, there was another medic standing there. He said he was going to give me a shot.

  “Hell, I’ve already had three shots,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  He stared at me. “You’ve had three shots already?”

  “Hell, yes. I’ve already had three. And now you’re wanting to give me a fourth.”

  He stood there a moment. Then he shook his head and walked away.

  The next morning they picked me up on a stretcher and put me in an ambulance and took me to another hospital, farther from the front. It was a tent, but it had a floor and real doctors and nurses. I was lying in a bed. For some reason my whole abdomen hurt. A nurse came by and said she was going to give me a sponge bath. I told her about the pain.

  “Let’s see what the problem is.”

  She pulled back the covers and started to sponge me gently. My stomach was so sore I could hardly stand to be touched.

  “Have you been close to an exploding shell?” she asked.

  I remembered diving into the crater just as the 150mm shell went off, and being buried in dirt.

  “Yes, ma’am. Artillery shell yesterday morning, just about as close as you can get and still be here.”

  “You’ve had a concussion,” she said. “That’s your problem. A couple days will take care of it.”

  She sponged me gently, and the dirt and dead skin came rolling off. You never realize in combat just how filthy you get. But I won’t ever forget her tenderness and kindness. She gave me some pills for the pain, and three or four days later it eased up, just as she said.

  As soon as I was able I got some Red Cross stationery and wrote to Florence.

  “Just a few lines to let you know I was hit Sunday May 20th, but don’t worry, Darling, I am not suffering & haven’t been at all.”

  I told her I’d just been scratched, no serious damage done, which was mostly true.

  Now that I was out of combat, I found myself thinking about her almost all the time.

  “I sure wish I had you here, Darling, to change the bandages & give me about a million sweet kisses a day or more. I am sleeping on nice white sheets with the softest pillow. It sure beats a wet foxhole.”

  They showed a movie to some of us who could get around, In Old Oklahoma, with John Wayne and Gabby Hayes. I was able to relax and enjoy it.

  I don’t remember that they ever stitched me up. I think they just let the skin grow back over the wound. There was no infection. I had been lucky.

  A doctor came in every morning to make his rounds. My cot was the second or third one on the right. After he’d seen everybody else, he’d stop and sit on my bunk and we’d talk for ten or fifteen minutes. It turned out he was from San Antonio, so we hit it off right away. All through the war, it was that way whenever I ran into someone from Texas, an instant bond. We were buddies.

  Doc Moore was his name. He told me I had been very lucky.

  “Why is that?”

  “If that fragment had gone any deeper it would have hit your thyroid.”

  “Would that be bad?”

  He showed me where my thyroid gland was located, right behind the voice box, and explained how the thyroid affected everything from digestion to energy level. A damaged thyroid could affect me in several ways, he said.

  “You might become real, real thin. Or you could become grossly obese. Either way, it would have messed you up for life.”

  So I guessed I was luckier than I thought.

  Pretty soon I started feeling restless and eager to get back to K Company. I had written Florence a couple more letters, but I didn’t get any replies. In fact, I hadn’t received mail from anybody while I was in the hospital, so I figured the mail system had screwed up and lost track of me. On June 9 Doc Moore gave me a clean bill of health and the hospital turned me loose. It had been twenty days since I’d been wounded. I asked around if anybody knew the location of Third Battalion’s K Company, and the next day I hitched rides on Army trucks headed south toward the front.

  In my pocket I still carried the shell fragment that had cost me so much trouble.

  * * *

  Gene Sledge described the fight for Shuri Castle as a time of “mud and maggots.” The rains started up again the day after I was wounded and went on for the next ten days without a letup. I could hear them drumming on the roof of the hospital, but I had no idea how bad it was out on the battle line.

  For K Company these were some of the worst days of the war. The fighting was so intense that neither side had time to gather its dead, which were left to rot in the mud on the battlefield. Maggots were everywhere. If a man slipped in the mud, he stood up covered with maggots. They filled his pockets. The Japs were shelling anything that moved, and the sheer noise and force of the explosions left men dazed and deaf. Stumpy Stanley, our company commander, came down with malaria. He was so delirious he refused to leave his command post until a corpsman dragged him to a first aid station. Lieutenant Loveday took his place.

  On May 29, while I was on the road to recovery, Companies L, K, and I captured the area around Shuri Castle and flew a Confederate flag from the ramparts. Most of the Japs fled south. First Regiment relieved the Fifth Marines on June 4. The next day the rains ended.

  I found my old company several miles south of where I’d left them. We were in a bad way. We’d lost thirty-six men in the fighting around Shuri Castle and we were down to about a hundred enlisted men and three or four officers. The word was that the Fifth Regiment would not be sent into combat again.

  Because the rains had gummed up the roads, the Navy had been air-dropping food, water and ammo from TBM Avenger dive-bombers. Somebody found a cache of Jap rations. Everything was in cans. I ate some of their tuna fish and mandarins, little orange sections. It wasn’t too bad. We ran across saki quite often. A lot of the guys drank it. I couldn’t stand the taste.

  Most of the time we were going out on patrol, sealing caves and trying to find pockets of Jap stragglers. The Japs had been squeezed into an area maybe three miles long by four miles wide, their backs were to the coastline. There was no place else to go.

  We’d been warned not to go into the caves, but I got curious. I put a Sterno can on
the end of a stick, like a candle, and felt my way down into one cave we had come across. You couldn’t see three feet in front of you. Some distance inside I came upon a cot. I put my hand down to feel it and it was still warm.

  I stopped, listening. Somewhere close by I could hear a clock ticking. I thought, Burgin, get the hell out of here. When you’re in a cave looking out, you can see anything between you and the opening as plain as day. But if you’re looking in, you can’t see a thing, even holding a little Sterno candle in front of you. So I started backing out very slowly. Thank God, I didn’t get killed. When I got outside, I called the demolition people, and they sealed up the whole thing with a satchel charge.

  I’m sure to this day there was a Jap inside there, because that cot was warm. Why didn’t he shoot me? Maybe he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. Maybe he thought he could sneak out at night and do more damage than by just killing one Marine. I don’t know. He sure as hell had the opportunity.

  I swore then and there that I’d never go into another cave.

  There were caves everywhere, most of them full of Japs. The First and Seventh Marines had fought their way to the top of the last ridge before the coast, Kunishi Ridge. But the Japs were inside, fighting from caves, and the men on top were cut off from supplies and reinforcements. We knew both regiments were suffering heavy losses. On June 14 we were ordered to square away our equipment and get ready to move south the next morning. None of us was very happy about this development, but it was the only way.

  Along with tanks and amtracs, we moved out single file on both sides of a dusty road. The noise of the battle grew louder and we saw more and more ambulance jeeps headed north full of wounded Marines, not a good sign. We came to a broad, open area of rice paddies with a long, steep ridge rising up beyond. For those of us who had fought on Peleliu, it reminded us of Bloody Nose Ridge, where we’d been exposed to such devastating fire from above.