Islands of the Damned

by R. V. Burgin

  We dug in for the night alongside the road and the next morning started toward a hill a mile or so to our left. We were moving along in a column when I heard the snap of a Jap rifle and felt a bullet pass by my ear. It was so close I could literally feel the heat. I didn’t stop, I didn’t pause, I didn’t even duck. I just kept walking at the same pace, thinking, Those sons of bitches are still trying to kill me.

  Somebody else back in the line might have seen the shooter and picked him off. Maybe he didn’t fire again. I don’t know. By then I think I was pretty much running on automatic pilot.

  * * *

  We knew Kunishi Ridge would be our last big fight. Mostly it was a rifleman’s fight, up the slope cave by cave and sniper by sniper. The Japs fired back with everything they had. Corpsmen started bringing our wounded down almost immediately. Because our men were working their way up the ridge, we couldn’t risk mortar fire, so the section was posted at the bottom to watch for infiltrators who might try to work their way around and come in from the east. When needed, we acted as stretcher bearers.

  The worst of it was June 18. A sniper shot Tex Cummings, one of the two ammo carriers I’d picked up for the squad on Pavuvu. The bullet hit him in the back and passed clean through, collapsing his lung. We called in an amtrac and loaded him on board as quick as we could. Then a grenade from a knee mortar went off beside Harry Bender, our BAR man. We carried him out with fragments in both legs, his back and his head. That same day we got word that Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, commander of the entire invasion, had been killed by a Jap artillery shell while he was observing the Eighth Marines on the far west end of the line. Buckner was the son of a Confederate general and the highest ranking U.S. military officer killed during World War II. One of our own, Lieutenant General Roy Geiger, took over the Tenth Army. Geiger had been with us on Peleliu. It was the first time ever that a Marine general was placed in command of a standing army.

  In the two days of fighting on Kunishi Ridge, K Company lost thirty-three men, five of them killed. Every casualty now was a painful reminder that even though the Japs were down to their last caves and the battle for Okinawa was almost over, any one of us could still go home wounded or crippled for life, or in a coffin. We were all thinking the same thing: If Okinawa was this bad, how bloody was it going to be fighting the Japs on their home ground? We knew we would soon have that to face.

  Late on June 18, the Eighth Marines relieved us and we came off the ridge. The Eighth had fought on Tarawa and Saipan, and looked fit and fresh. As we moved off south along the road, Jap artillery was still raining down on our tanks and amtracs, and occasionally knocking one out. But more and more their fire came from isolated positions. By the afternoon of June 20 we could finally look out over the sea. Whatever Japs were left by now were dug in behind us. It was only a matter of rooting them out of their hiding places. And they still prowled by night. Some of them got through our lines and we could see them wading out in the surf, where they made excellent targets.

  The next day, whoever made such decisions declared Okinawa officially secured. Our mail caught up with us and with it was a packet of letters from Florence. She hadn’t heard from me since I had been wounded, and she was worried. I sat down to reassure her right away.

  I told her I was out of the hospital, feeling “fine and dandy.”

  “Guess what, Darling? The Navy just gave us an orange and four eggs apiece. Boy do they look good after looking at C rations ever since April the first.”

  Then I got down to what had been on my mind.

  “I wish that we would have got married when I was there, and now you would be going to the States this month…. Why didn’t you drag me to the altar when I was there and marry me? Darling, I sure hope it won’t be long until you can come to me & the war is over so we can cuddle in a little home of our own.”

  I was pretty sure that I would soon be heading home. Florence had been working on her end at getting all the papers she would need to move to the States. I would soon start filling out the necessary paperwork on my end. I promised to cable her as soon as I had any news.

  We were sent out on burial details, shoveling dirt over enemy dead, and gathering up spent brass from the battlefield. We went hunting for Japs still holed up in caves and large Okinawan family tombs. A few of them were even surrendering, which was something we’d never seen before. I watched one small group creep out of a cave, no more than three or four of them. They were wearing only their jock straps, and one was carrying a white flag.

  When they wouldn’t surrender, we’d call up flamethrower tanks or have the demolition men blast the entrance shut. Many of their officers, we heard, committed ritual suicide. On the morning of June 22 after an all-night banquet with their staff, the Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, and his aide, Major General Isamu Cho, killed themselves on a ledge overlooking the ocean. They had ordered their soldiers to carry on the fight to the last man, which for some of our troops meant at least another month of fighting. But the Fifth Marines were to be sent north, out of the battle at last.

  We needed a rest. We’d been on Okinawa now for three months, in combat continuously for two months. Everybody’s nerves were shot. Everybody was on edge.

  They had set up a mess hall in a tent. You stood up to eat, at tables that were about four feet high. One day we were having soup for lunch. Private First Class David Burton Augustus Salsby was standing straight across from me. The table wasn’t that wide, maybe two feet.

  Salsby was from Idaho, a little guy about five feet four, and he had that Little Man Syndrome. He’d been wounded and returned to duty, and he was cocky. He thought no harm could come to him. He was also tough. He could do anything anyone else could do.

  Each time he raised his spoon to his mouth he’d slurp. Real loud. Slurp! Slurp!

  “Salsby, don’t do that,” I finally said. “That just rakes my nerves over when you do that.”

  He looked up at me.

  “Burgin, you can tell me what to do when we’re on duty. But whenever I’m off duty I’ll do as I damn please.”

  I reached across and grabbed his lapels and lifted him right off the floor and pulled him up close to my face.

  “You little son of a bitch! If you do that one more time I’ll knock your damn teeth out. Do we understand each other?”

  I set him down. He didn’t slurp anymore. It shows the frame of mind we were all in by then.

  Okinawa had one more little surprise for us, before we headed north.

  I was sitting there when something caused me to look up. I saw the ground rolling toward me like an ocean wave. The wave just lifted me and then went on by and that was that. While it was happening the strangest feeling came over me. Like nothing in the world was steady or solid. It was over with that quick, but I’ll never forget that feeling. We had had a little earthquake, the first I’d ever experienced.

  The trucks picked us up early in July and we rode north through a landscape that we could hardly recognize. The Seabees and construction crews were at work everywhere. Roads were being surfaced with crushed coral, huge stockpiles of supplies were being built up. Planes were flying in and out of the airfields constantly. Okinawa was being transformed into a base for the invasion of Japan.

  The enlisted men settled into a camp on Motubu, a large peninsula just north of the beaches where we had landed on April 1. NCOs were driven farther north almost to the tip of the island, where a camp was already set up. Tents were in place, roads surfaced. A short runway for the spotter planes ran through the center of the camp.

  It’s a funny thing, but I don’t remember much about that camp. I can’t remember where the chow hall was, where the heads were. The two most important places in camp. I can remember where the doctor’s office was. But there’s just so many things that I can’t recall. I guess I was just wiped out by then. I think from thirty months of combat, from losing men from my platoon, guys that I had known since Melbourne, guys that were go
ne. Hillbilly Jones, Captain Haldane, and the others. I was pretty stressed out, no doubt. Just flat numb.

  I slept with Florence’s picture under my pillow, and thought of the days when we would have a home of our own, and children to call us Mother and Dad. I was sure I had accumulated enough points to be rotated back to the States. The problem was, Florence was in Melbourne. Our plans were to make a home together in Texas, and I was trying to work it out. Thousands of American servicemen had married Australians. When travel was possible again, wives with children would get first priority to go to the States. After that would come wives without children. Only after they’d been accommodated would fiancées be allowed to travel.

  “I just talked to my company commander about the papers,” I wrote her in mid-July, “and he is going to see about them in the morning. I hope I can get them fixed up before I go home. Oh how I hope & pray I can. I want to have your name on the list, knowing it won’t be too long before you can come home to me forever, Darling, & I do mean forever.”

  Some of the guys were being married by proxy, and Florence and I had talked about it in our letters. But when it came down to it, I didn’t want to get married that way. I wanted a real wedding in a church and a real life again.

  We hadn’t seen each other in almost two years. I could tell from her letters she was as anxious as I was. And she still worried about my wound.

  “Really, Darling, it didn’t hurt me,” I wrote her. “I hardly have a scar to show for it. I have been hurt a lot worse in a football game, and never stopped playing.”

  I have no memory of hearing about the atomic bomb. I guess I heard about it on Armed Forces Radio. Of course, I didn’t know what an atomic bomb was, so it didn’t mean a whole lot to me. They said it did terrible damage, but that’s about all we knew. A week or so later we got word that the Japs had surrendered. It was over, and that was a good feeling. We knew we’d be going home, though we didn’t know when. But there wasn’t a lot of hooting and hollering, no big celebration. The folks back in the States probably celebrated more than we did.

  I did see one Marine celebrate. The day the war ended or the next, a Corsair came buzzing down our little runway, upside down all the way. The pilot could have opened his canopy, stuck out his hand and dragged his fingers along the ground. That’s how low he was. I just knew he was going to crash, but he flew on down the runway, pointed the nose of that Corsair up and flew straight up into the air. Then he turned around, did a nosedive, flipped that plane over again and made the trip back down the runway in the opposite direction, upside down all the way again. He pulled up and ended with several rolls, then flew off.

  I stood there gawking, as I had back in boot camp when those fighters came roaring off the runway at North Island. I thought, You crazy son of a bitch. You’re going to crash. Those Marine pilots, they were good. They were something else.

  I had nothing to do now but wait. The sergeants were all bunking together. I was still in charge of the mortar section, but they were bunking down the street. If I needed anybody to do anything, I just hollered. I was tired, but my wound had healed. Then one day I suddenly felt a chill. Within minutes I was shivering violently. I couldn’t seem to get warm. The feeling passed but a short time later I started sweating. I was burning up with fever. I went down to the camp doctor’s office, my knees so wobbly I could hardly walk.

  I knew very well what it was. I’d seen it often enough in others. Like so many Marines, I’d come down with malaria. The doctor started me on quinine and increased the Atabrine tablets I’d been taking, like everyone else. I went back to my tent to lie down, alternately shivering and sweating for the rest of the day. All week I lay in my cot or, when I felt strong enough, got up and wandered around a bit. The fevers and chills gradually lessened. But the truth of it is, you never really get over malaria. The symptoms go away. But months and even years later they can come back. Malaria was to be an off-and-on presence in my life for some time to come.

  It was September 14 before I finally learned I was being shipped back to the States. The rest of the First Marine Division were going to China. The next day I went down to the enlisted men’s camp and looked for my old buddies. I spent most of the day going from tent to tent saying my good-byes. Some were already on board ship. Late in the month the First Marine Division left Okinawa for China. Jim Burke, Sledgehammer, Hank Boyes, Snafu Shelton, Sarrett, Santos—the guys I’d fought alongside, all my old buddies—were gone. I was on my own.

  In the weeks afterward I moved from the NCO camp to another camp, where I sat through a raging typhoon. When it was safe to go outside the first thing I saw was a cargo ship blown right up onto dry land. It was a foretaste of what the sea can do. After the typhoon I moved closer to the harbor, with the Eleventh Artillery Regiment, where I bunked until it was time to ship out.

  The eighty-two-day battle for Okinawa had taken more than twelve thousand American lives, and left more than thirty-eight thousand wounded. Nobody has ever been able to calculate exactly how many Japanese soldiers and Okinawan civilians died in that campaign. Even after the surrender, small pockets of Japs went on fighting, just as they had on Peleliu.

  CHAPTER 10

  Home Port

  I came off watch on the pitching deck of the USS Lavaca at midnight and felt my way down the ladder to the cramped sleeping quarters. It had been a rough night with the ship bucking heavy seas. The air below was close and foul as I squeezed between the tiers of bunks filled with snoring men. I found my own bunk, shed my dripping poncho and threw myself down. I closed my eyes in relief. One more day closer to home.

  It certainly hadn’t turned into any bon voyage.

  I had witnessed what a typhoon could do the week before on Okinawa, when a storm parked a ship on dry land, practically at the doorstep of my tent. That morning I went out and walked around. It looked like a good old Texas tornado had passed through. Two-byfours were driven slantwise into the ground, trees uprooted and tipped over, roofs peeled away in ragged strips. The transport that was to take the Fifth Marines to China had sailed out of the harbor to weather the typhoon at sea, rather than risk being driven aground.

  Just before I left the island I hooked up with another Texan, Ernest Schelgren, a platoon sergeant in the Eleventh Artillery who was also awaiting shipment home. He was from a farm and I was from a farm, and we hit it off. On October 16 we boarded the USS Lavaca together, looking forward to calm seas and an uneventful voyage. A few days out a typhoon caught us.

  The Lavaca was an attack transport, built just a few years before but already a bucket of rust, a real tub. A couple days out I got assigned to guard duty on deck for four hours. As we watched clouds pile up across our path, the skipper came on the loudspeaker warning the crew to batten down the hatches. Everyone was ordered to wear life jackets and to stay below. Except those of us unlucky enough to be on watch.

  Topside, I clipped on to the fore and aft line, a rope three or four inches thick that ran from the bow to the stern. It was the only thing you could hang on to.

  The wind strummed the wires and the Lavaca creaked and groaned. Spray washed over the deck, and, as we got deeper into the storm, raging rivers of foam five and six feet deep. A crewman said the waves were fifty feet high, and I believed every word. They were taller than the ship. The Lavaca would climb up one side of a wave, seeming to take forever. Then it would tip, slide down the other side and start the long climb up again. It was a little like fighting across the ridges and valleys of Okinawa.

  When I got below after my watch, the bunks were swinging against the sway of the ship. In bed at last, I adjusted my arms and legs, stretched out and closed my eyes. Maybe I even drifted off to sleep for a minute or two. Suddenly there was a roaring grind like metal being torn from metal, and a bang! I bolted up, wide-awake. We were next to the ship’s galley and I could guess what had happened. In all the tossing and heaving, a stove had torn loose from its moorings and come sliding across the floor and slammed into the bulkhead. N
ow with a complaining screech it started sliding back the other way. Canteens and canteen cups, shaving kits and mess kits were clattering on the deck, tumbling off the overhead beams where owners had left them for safekeeping. In the semidarkness there were groans and shouts of alarm.

  I thought, Well, it’d be a helluva time to have your ship go under and drown, on your way home. Then I thought, I’ll just lie here and I’ll find out right quick if we’re still afloat or not. The ship went up, then it came down. Then it went up again, each time about fifty feet, and it came down. I decided, Okay, we’re still afloat.

  So I turned over and went to sleep.

  The storm went on for seventeen hours, during which nobody moved around much. A lot of the guys got seasick, which made the smell in the hold even worse. I didn’t get seasick but a few days after we passed through the storm, my chills and fevers returned. I was sent to sick bay with malaria.

  After three weeks at sea we sailed past the Golden Gate Bridge and the Oakland Bay Bridge one morning and docked in San Francisco. None of us went ashore. Before the end of the day we were on our way again, down the coast to San Diego.

  I was feeling reasonably like a human being again. The Red Cross met us at the dock with paper cups of orange juice and half pints of milk. Trucks were waiting, engines running. The Navy had taken over Camp Elliott, where I had departed for the war thirty-two months before, so we were driven to Camp Pendleton. I’ll never forget the first night in the barracks. The weather wasn’t freezing, it wasn’t even particularly cold. But I was the coldest I’d ever been in my life. After so many months in the southwest Pacific I guess my blood was thin.

  I had an upper bunk. There was a mattress, a pillow, a sheet and one thin blanket. Between the mattress and the springs was a cloth pad, a mattress protector. After a few hours, I climbed out of bed and put my clothes on. I crawled back under that blanket but I was still freezing to death. Literally shaking. I thought, To hell with this, and I pulled the mattress over me, and that’s where I spent the night, sleeping on that mattress pad. I never did get warm until I got up next morning.