The Sunday morning after Florence and I said our good-byes, they rousted us out of bed at six and told us to get our gear together. The First and Second battalions had already shipped out by the end of August. Shortly afterward the Seventh Marines had moved to the docks. We knew we were next.
After breakfast we were trucked down to Port Melbourne. We stood around all morning before finally climbing the ramp to the B. F. Shaw, a Liberty Ship.
Then we waited some more.
All that day and into the night we stood along the rails and watched the Shaw take on cargo. Little by little the mountains of crates piled all over the dock, the rows of trucks and jeeps, the artillery and deflated rafts and stacks of stretchers were lifted and lowered into the hold. I didn’t know a ship could carry so much. They had loading down to a science. The least important stuff went in first, then the more important, and finally whatever would be needed right away, like ammunition and drums of fuel. Last on, first off.
That ship sure wasn’t designed to carry troops. We were stuffed into the cargo hold with our gear. We’d sleep in hammocks stacked four and five high and slung between riveted bulkheads and columns. Make-do plumbing facilities were up on the open deck. The chow lines were slow and stretched for yards.
We steamed out of Port Phillip Bay into the ocean the next morning, September 27, then swung around to the north. We had only a general idea where we were headed—to some island someplace. To the war.
We sailed on for a little over a week without incident before pulling in one afternoon at Goodenough Island off the eastern coast of New Guinea. The Australians had cleaned the Japs out the year before, and the First Battalion had already set up an advance camp. We were able to disembark and walk around for a couple hours and get our land legs back. After the gentle, rolling country around Melbourne, Goodenough was a change in scenery and a glimpse of things to come. There was a coastal strip of jungle, then a steep, rugged slope leading up to a sharp volcanic peak. That night we were back aboard ship when a Jap plane came over, low. You couldn’t see him but you could hear him. He dropped a bomb without hitting anything and flew off. But he let us know we were in the war zone.
The next morning we pulled out and three days later, on October 11, we landed at Milne Bay, New Guinea. That would be our home for almost three months. The letters Florence had been writing in Melbourne—the first of hundreds—finally caught up with me. And I wrote my first letters to her.
We found a camp scraped out of the jungle. Rows of tents were set up on either side of a sort of road bulldozed through the mud. The rains came and went, and came and went again. The tents were wet, the ground was wet, our clothes were wet. When we went to lie down, our cots would sink into the muck so that we soon found ourselves sleeping on the ground with only a layer of canvas beneath us. Mornings we stood in formation, ankle-deep in the muddy “street.” Between rains we dried out a little. They scattered some crushed rock around, and that helped a bit.
Mud or not, we still observed the old Marine tradition of cleanliness. Company headquarters was down at the end of the street, and right behind that was a little branch creek. It became our laundry. We’d take a bar of Marine soap and a scrub brush and go down there and find a rock, maybe about a foot wide and not too jagged. We’d lay out our clothes one by one—dungarees, shirt, underwear—soap them up, scrub them with the brush, turn them over and do the same thing. Then we’d rinse them in the running creek and lay them out to dry. If it was sunny, it didn’t take too long. If it wasn’t, we wore them wet.
We were never idle. We were learning the new art of jungle warfare, at it every day with mock combat or with marches, rifle range, pistol range.
In November, Third Battalion got a new commander, and we met him in a strange way. Lieutenant Colonel Austin Shofner had just come up from Australia, where he had been personally decorated by General Douglas MacArthur with the Distinguished Service Cross. In 1942 when he was a captain, Shofner was captured on Corregidor Island and survived the Bataan Death March. After almost a year in a prison camp, he and a dozen others—American Marines, soldiers, and sailors and Filipino soldiers—escaped into the jungle, where they joined local guerrillas to fight the Japs.
We were down in a creek bed shooting our .45s when someone came thrashing out of the underbrush and the vines. It was Colonel Shofner. He asked what we were doing, then told one of the guys, “Set me up a target.”
We did so. He unholstered his .45 and shot one, two, three, four, five times, leaving a perfect V pattern over the bull’s-eye. Then he stuck his pistol back into his holster and walked back into the jungle without a word. I think you could have taken a ruler and not a shot would have been out of line. I never will forget that.
We went on pulling maneuver after maneuver, but we hadn’t practiced landings with the LSTs and LSMs—Landing Ships, Medium—which for some reason were not yet available. Finally one afternoon late in December we boarded DUKWs and started across the bay.
A DUKW—Ducks, we called them—is not much more than a low-sided amphibious truck, about thirty feet long and a little over eight feet wide. It could carry about twenty troops and was pretty smooth and speedy on land but slow and rough-riding in the water. The only time I ever got seasick was in a DUKW, and that day I was not the only one.
Just as the mortar section was getting ready to board our DUKW for an amphibious exercise, the wind and rain came up. That was nothing new to us. By the time we got out into the bay a gray curtain dropped over us. We couldn’t see thirty yards, much less the other DUKWs. Our coxman lost his bearing, and then he lost his breakfast. I wasn’t feeling so good myself. A wave of seasickness swept over everybody. The diesel exhaust blowing in our faces only made it worse. Pretty soon we all had our heads over the side. I think Jim Burke and P. A. Wilson were the only men in that DUKW who didn’t get sick.
In the middle of everything we got hung up on a reef. We sat in the water going up and coming down, up and down, banging on that reef. I thought, It’s going to knock a hole in the bottom of this thing. We’re in trouble out here.
Fortunately DUKWs had a double hull. But for two hours we were knocked around out in that bay. When we finally wallowed to shore, some of the men were so sick they took them to the hospital on New Guinea.
On Christmas Eve we boarded the USS Noel Palmer and sailed a hundred miles or so up the coast to Oro Bay, the main supply base. The Seventh Marines had already been there and gone. Here we learned we were being held in reserve for the assault on Cape Gloucester, New Britain.
Four days later General William Rupertus, the commander in charge of the invasion, called for his reserves, and K Company, Third Battalion boarded LST 204. There were about 150 of us. None had set foot on an LST before—we hadn’t trained on them. We walked up the ramp and they closed the big clamshell doors behind us, and off we sailed. I felt that we were like a boxer trained for his Friday night fight. We were ready. We had pulled enough maneuvers, done everything humanly possible to prepare every man for combat.
They’d started the invasion without us.
On the day after Christmas, while we were at Oro Bay, the Seventh Marines and the First and Second battalions of the Fifth Marines waded ashore on Cape Gloucester. Their objective was a Japanese airfield at the southwestern tip of New Britain. But instead of landing on the beach nearest the airfield, most of them had gone in several miles southeast, along the shores of Borgen Bay. This took the Japs by surprise, and our men landed without a shot being fired. But just beyond the narrow beach, where the invasion maps had indicated “damp flats,” they ran into a wall of jungle and a swamp. The flats were damp, all right, up to the Marines’ armpits.
Supplies from the LSTs piled up on the beaches as the Marines hacked and waded and swam through to solid land. Then they went on in driving rain to capture part of the airfield by December 30.
We landed the next morning, New Year’s Day.
By then engineers had bulldozed a path across the swamp and laid down logs to make a corduroy road. Supplies were moving. We were scattered but we were able to get together pretty quickly, and next morning we started a sweep inland, moving south and west. The Seventh Marines were somewhere ahead of us and on our left. By late afternoon we had gone a few miles without encountering a single enemy. We stopped for the night and were just starting to dig in alongside a little creek when about fifteen Japs popped out of the jungle on the other side. They came splashing through the water and the high grass, bayonets raised over their heads and screaming banzai!
I had been carrying the mortar base plate and didn’t have a rifle. I dropped the plate and pulled my .45 out quick—I don’t even remember drawing it—and fired, catching one of them in the chest. He was about thirty-five or forty feet away from me, still running when he went down. Other Marines were firing right and left and more Japs were stumbling, going down. The rest turned back to the woods. I don’t think more than one or two got away.
That was the first man I killed. I didn’t feel anything but relief. He didn’t get me. I got him.
After that episode, I always carried an M1 and my pistol. A pistol is fine if somebody’s up close, but I didn’t want anybody getting that close again. That attack broke me in right away.
We pulled off the creek and moved three hundred yards up a knoll and dug in again. It was a very nervous night. I couldn’t see a thing. In the dark the land crabs came out and started rustling around in the leaves, and I was half convinced that the Japs were coming any minute. Everybody was a little trigger-happy anyway after the banzai charge. In the middle of the night one of the guys crawled out of his foxhole, probably to take a piss, and our sergeant, Johnny Marmet, shot him. He was wounded, not killed, but we had our first casualty.
At daybreak moisture was dripping off the leaves. Everything was soaked, and a kind of gray-blue haze hung in the air, a spooky mist that hid everything beyond the closest trees. It would be there almost every morning, especially after a rain. I never saw anything like it anywhere else and I never got used to it.
We started out again. We were picking our way south through thick jungle without finding any Japs when we came under fire on our left. It turned into a pretty good firefight until somebody up the line realized that we had run into the Seventh Marines, Third Battalion. Before we got it stopped, one of our men had been killed. It wasn’t the only time we would encounter friendly fire, Marines shooting Marines. And when we did, it would again be from the Seventh Marines.
We had been advancing parallel to their Third Battalion when they had come up against a pocket of Japs that slowed them down. We went on without meeting any opposition and then began a swing back to the left. That’s when we suddenly appeared on their right, and they opened fire.
We all finally caught up with a large body of Japs dug in along the far side of a stream we came to call Suicide Creek. They were screened behind brush, and every time we tried to wade across, they just cut us to pieces. We lost a lot of good men there.
Jim Burke and I were holed up some distance to the right of where the Seventh Marines were trying to cross. There was a small break in the trees, hardly big enough to call a clearing, and we’d set up a five-gallon water can with a canteen cup on top. I got thirsty and walked over to get a drink, all the time watching out for myself. After I put the cup back on top of the water can and ducked back, Jim went over for a drink. He was just reaching for that cup when there was a shot and the cup flew off into the brush. I felt something hit my sock just in front of my ankle. I looked down and there was a fragment of bullet stuck there, still hot.
Jim took three steps straight back and turned to me and grinned.
“I don’t think I’m that thirsty,” he said.
We knew whoever had fired at us was above our heads, somewhere in the trees, most likely tied in, as we’d learned from the Guadalcanal veterans. We crouched there for a while scanning the branches but all we could see was a green wall of foliage.
I went off to find K Company’s .30-cal machine gunner.
“There’s a Jap sniper up there somewhere, Norman,” I told him. “He’s well camouflaged, but we know he’s there.”
Norman set up his tripod and swiveled his gun upward and cut loose, raking the trees back and forth. Bits of leaf and falling branches showered down. There was a sudden crack and a body dropped out of the canopy and jerked to a stop about twenty feet above the ground. When we left he was swinging there upside down with his rifle dangling beneath him.
Farther down the line the Seventh Marines were still hung up at Suicide Creek. The Japs were invisible, dug in behind earth-and-log bunkers or behind the roots that fanned out like walls from the base of the tallest trees. Bazooka shells would bounce off the bunkers without detonating, and we couldn’t use our mortars because of the forest canopy. The stream was about forty feet wide with steep banks. In the afternoon three Sherman tanks showed up, crashing through the underbrush, and stopped at the near edge of the stream. But the embankment was too steep, so a bulldozer was called forward to carve a ramp down to creek level. We heard later that a sniper shot the bulldozer driver out of his seat. Another Marine climbed up to take his place and he was shot, too. A third Marine ducked down behind the dozer and, somehow working the controls with a shovel and an ax handle, managed to finish the job. Next morning, January 4, the tanks churned across Suicide Creek and the Japs fell back and we all started moving forward again.
Those were the tactics the Japs would use over and over. They would set up and let us come to them. Then they’d retreat through the jungle and set up again farther on. We couldn’t see them until we were right on top of them and they opened fire. Sometimes the undergrowth was so thick you couldn’t see even three feet in front of you. You knew there was a Marine somewhere on your right and another on your left. But you couldn’t see either one. That’s a weird feeling when you’re moving forward. I thought many times, Hell, I’m the only man out here. I’m fighting this war all by myself.
What the Guadalcanal veterans had said stuck in my mind. Watch your back. Watch your sides. Watch everywhere.
About this time we had our one and only problem on New Britain with Japanese aircraft. It was a small single-engine plane. We actually never saw him, but we heard him. We called him “Piss-call Charley” because he’d come over every night around one o’clock or two o’clock and drop a single bomb wherever he thought we were. It wasn’t a very big bomb, about a hundred pounds. Just harassment, that’s all. We could hear them firing at him over by the airfield with those twin 40s, but I don’t think they ever hit him because the next night he was back again, right on schedule.
Then one night he came over and dropped his bomb and it went off real close, wounding several of our guys. One of them was in a foxhole with Jim Burke. Jim couldn’t see in the darkness, but he knew the guy was badly wounded—he died later—and right away Burke yelled for a corpsman. Seconds later he yelled “Corpsman!” again. I could hear him every few seconds hollering for a corpsman, over and over.
It took a corpsman no more than a minute and a half to get to the foxhole. But afterward Jim said it felt like ten minutes. Combat would do that to you. Hours seemed to go by in minutes. Minutes would stretch out into hours.
The farther we got from Suicide Creek, the stronger the resistance from the Japs. After we took a little knob called Hill 150, they wounded our battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel David McDougal. Then they got McDougal’s executive officer, Major Joseph Skoczylas. So on January 8 we had a new battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Walt.
We were fighting uphill now, advancing in a wide arc through the jungle. It was raining, always raining. Every stream was swollen and the ground was gumbo. Moving forward was like trying to walk through oatmeal. I was still carrying around that mortar base plate, but we couldn’t use it much because of the trees, so 90 percent of the time I took my place up front with the riflemen.
Colonel Walt was looking for a location identified on a document they’d taken from a dead Jap. It was called Aogiri Ridge, and it was apparently very important to the Japs, because the document warned that the ridge must be held at any cost. All evening we slogged on, dragging a .37 artillery piece that was our only heavy weapon. We’d load it with grapeshot or armor-piercing shells, depending on what we were faced with. From time to time we’d stop and fire it to clear out a machine-gun nest or a bunker. As we set up they’d fire at us and the bullets would sing off the quarter-inch steel shield on the front of the gun. We took turns, five or six of us at a time, wrestling that rascal up the hill in the mud. I pushed part of the way, slipping and sliding, vines snatching at my boots. As a reward they let me fire it. By dark we were sitting along the crest of a ridge, exhausted and facing a line of Jap bunkers. As we were digging in we could hear them in front of us, a dozen or so yards away.
After dark they started yelling at us. About ten thirty, one of them got out in front calling, “Raider! Raider! Why you no fire? Why you no fire?”
Raider was our machine-gun sergeant.
In a calm, quiet voice, Raider told his gunner, “Give him a short burst, about two hundred rounds.” And he did. That Jap was very quiet after that.
About an hour and a half past midnight, they came screaming at us through the rain, hollering “Marine, you die!” I was in a foxhole with Jim Burke. I’d had bayonet drill in boot camp along with everyone else, but I’d made up my mind that as long as I had ammunition I wasn’t going to let anyone get close enough to use my bayonet. But I saw a Jap silhouetted at the edge of the foxhole. I was on my knees with my rifle pointed at him and I shoved my bayonet into his chest as hard and deep as I could, right beneath the breastbone. In one motion I leveraged him off the ground and swung him over my shoulder, pulling the trigger all the way. I don’t know how many shots I put into him—four or five anyway.
He was dead when he landed.
We fought off the charge, and then there was silence, except for the pit-pat of the rain. Then they charged again. And again. We were running low on ammo and we were holding our fire until they were almost on top of us. All the time Colonel Walt in the command post about fifty yards back was calling in long-range artillery, which was crashing almost in our faces.
It was one of those shells that got Lonnie Howard—the guy I mentioned earlier who had a premonition and asked me to keep his wrist-watch.
That night we took five banzai charges. In the half-light of morning we could see Japs sprawled everywhere. In some places you could have stepped from body to body without touching the ground. Bleary-eyed and weary, we wandered out and counted more than two hundred. The rest had slipped away in the darkness. After a nerve-wracking fight, we had Aogiri Ridge to ourselves.
Now I was glad that I was carrying an M1. Most mortarmen carried the lighter carbines, but a carbine couldn’t stop a charging Jap.
After that night of banzai attacks, Jim and I were moved down to the extreme right end of the line. There wasn’t anybody beyond us. It’s a funny feeling when you know you don’t have any support on your flank. If you ever needed a guy who was calm and knew what the hell he was doing in a situation like that, it was Jim Burke. Whether you were with Jim in a foxhole or out in the open you knew he had your back covered.
The next night I spotted a Jap a few yards off trying to sneak around behind us. All I could see was a dark shape moving through the trees. I grabbed my M1 and shot him. He must have been a scout because he was alone.
I also almost shot a Marine.
We were digging a foxhole. I was standing guard and Jim was digging—one man always stands guard while the other digs. You always throw the dirt out in front of you to build up a little rampart. I could see somebody crawling toward us through the underbrush. I reached over and pushed Jim’s helmet down and laid my .45 up on top of that mound of fresh dirt. I didn’t know if it was a Jap or a Marine coming, but I knew I had him either way. When he got about two feet from me, I could see the silhouette of a Marine helmet.
“Pssst, Burgin,” he said. “You got any water?”
I recognized the voice.
“Yeah, Oswalt. I’ve got some water.”
I handed him the canteen and he took a long drink.
I waited until he was finished.
“Oswalt,” I said, “what the hell are you doing out of that foxhole? Do you know I almost shot you right between the eyes?”
He stared at me.
“Let me tell you something,” I said. “You get out of that damn foxhole again tonight, I will shoot you just on general principles.”
Later they renamed the ridge we were on Walt’s Ridge. And we found out why it was so important to the Japs. Their main supply trail up from Borgen Bay lay just beyond, and that trail led straight west through the jungle to their main headquarters. It was the key to their whole operation.
We were left to mop up the ridge and the Seventh Marines’ Third Battalion fought its way up another high point, Hill 660. After that they gave us all a rest. We’d been at it for two weeks.
From that point on the Japs were finished on New Britain. There was no place for them to go except east through the jungle, back to their big naval base at Rabaul—and our planes had bombed that into uselessness.
We had plenty of fighting ahead of us. But for now, we came out of the jungle down to the edge of the airfield, which was in our hands, and went into reserve. It scarcely seemed possible, but the rains started coming harder, thirty-six inches in one twenty-four-hour period. I’d never seen so much rain. We stayed wet so long my little toenails rotted off. Our clothes mildewed and stank. We stank. The only time we could bathe or wash our clothes was if we crossed a stream or found ourselves near the ocean.
The Marine Corps had discovered the convenience of hammocks. You’d tie them between two trees and they’d keep you out of the mud—if the rain hadn’t rotted the strings. Sometimes at night you’d hear a rip and a splat and a lot of cussing. If it was raining you could drape a rubber tarp over you to keep dry, and you’d have a net to keep off the mosquitoes. You had to zip it open to get in and out.
Sometimes the zipper didn’t work fast enough.
New Britain was crawling with land crabs. After the first few weeks we had a new man join us on the island, George Sarrett. George was from Dennison, Texas, and I don’t believe George was afraid of anybody or anything. Not the Japs, not the Devil himself. But a land crab could run him off the face of the earth. George was sound asleep in his hammock one day. The land crabs were scrabbling around and I picked one up and slipped it into George’s hammock. He had his trousers on but no shirt. It wasn’t long before that land crab had skittered up his trousers and out across his chest.
Sarrett came out of there with his KA-BAR knife, slashing that mosquito net from one end to the other. Just—whoosh—and he was out of that hammock. Didn’t make a sound.
I never did tell him who put that land crab in his hammock.
I thought the mosquitoes were worse than the land crabs. We joked that the big ones would hold you down while the little ones sucked you dry. We had a mosquito repellant but it was absolutely pungent. You’d pour a little bit out of a bottle into the palm of your hands and spread it around. It would keep the mosquitoes off, but you could hardly live with yourself. It was hard to tell what was worse, the mosquitoes or the smell.
We were also fighting a more serious problem. We called it “jungle rot.” It was a fungus that would invade your armpits, ankles and crotch, and spread beneath your belt. Damp underwear seemed to promote the fungus, so some stopped wearing underpants—those whose underpants hadn’t already rotted off. The only thing that would relieve the itch was gentian violet, an antifungal medication. The corpsmen would paint all the places you’d scratched raw and the festering rash of pimples under your arms. Everybody had that purple stuff on them. We were a colorful mess.
But at least we were out of combat. We cooked pancakes over an open fire, and I was able to go swimming in the ocean a couple times. It got deep pretty fast twenty-five or thirty yards out. I dove to the bottom and looked around. There were a lot of shells and starfish scattered on the ocean floor, things that seemed strange and wonderful to a boy from an east Texas farm.
One day we were washing our clothes in the ocean and I waded out to where it was waist deep. I looked up and here came two Jap bodies floating along. I guess they’d been killed on airplanes or ships. We got out of the water pretty fast then.
The Japs had pretty much melted into the jungle. In February we climbed into LCMs and made a series of landings eastward along the coast from Borgen Bay. We hoped to catch up with the Japs and cut off their retreat to Rabaul. We’d land and conduct a patrol for a day or two, searching jungle trails for signs of the enemy. Then we’d move on, leapfrogging another unit that had landed farther up the coast.
We found a few stragglers. They’d leave two or three behind with knee mortars and a machine gun. We called them knee mortars because they had a folding arch that looked like it could fit over your knee. They wouldn’t use it that way, of course, because there was too much kick—it would break a man’s leg—but we called it that anyway.
When we’d come up on the Japs they’d open fire. If we didn’t get them, they’d move farther up the trail and set up again. By late in the month we’d captured a major enemy supply dump, meeting only occasional resistance.
When we went on patrol we’d take along war dogs that could sniff out Japs. After a while I realized that I could smell the Japs, too, if they were in the area and the wind was right. It was just like hunting in the woods back home, when I could smell a squirrel or a deer. But the smell of Japs was completely different from anything I’d ever smelled. They told us they could smell us, too. They said we smelled like goats.
We’d have a dog with us, and the Japs would be sleeping in these A-frame lean-tos they made of palm leaves. And the dog would get you in real close, like a bird dog. Japs would be inside, napping or just lying around.
We’d go in both ends at once and bayonet them or slit their throats. We didn’t want to shoot them and let anybody else in the vicinity know we were around.
The first time we went out on patrol we captured three and took them all the way back to battalion headquarters. By then the rain had rotted out our shoes and our clothes were just about falling off our backs.
At the battalion they gave our prisoners fresh underwear and socks, new shoes, new caps, new dungarees, the works. Here we were, wearing the same underwear and socks and shoes for thirty or forty days. We thought, To hell with this. They’re giving the Japs all that, but they won’t give us anything. So we fixed it. We didn’t bring in any more prisoners.
In early March, hoping to cut off the Japs once and for all, the Fifth Marines made a major landing on the west side of the Talasea Peninsula, a long finger of land sticking out about 120 miles into the Bismarck Sea east of Borgen Bay. The Third Battalion was in reserve again. We missed the main landing but sailed around the northern tip of the peninsula, and the next afternoon came ashore on the eastern side, where we relieved the First Battalion.
From what I could see, Talasea was a couple volcanic peaks overlooking abandoned coconut plantations. The Japs had built a small airstrip near the shore, and there was a Jap fighter plane on its back in the middle of the runway. Farther inland at a place called Bitokara there was a German Lutheran mission, also abandoned. The Fifth Regiment had set up headquarters there after driving off the Japs, and we were assigned to guard the headquarters. The defenders had put up a brief fight, killing eight Marines and losing 150 of their own. Then they had moved out.
On March 12, we raised the flag over the mission, the same flag raised in January over the air base at Cape Gloucester. In the three battles I fought during the war, that was the only flag I ever saw raised in victory. When that flag went up I thought, God, I’m glad I’m an American. I had participated in raising the flag in high school a few times. I always felt honored to do that. But seeing that flag go up at Talasea was a different feeling altogether. It was like the feeling you get whenever they play “Taps.” You know—Old Glory.
For the next month and a half the three battalions of the Fifth Marines would scour Talasea Peninsula and beyond, looking for the Japs. K Company was sent south from the mission at Bitokara toward a place on the map called Numundo Plantation, at the base of the peninsula. It was supposed to be a three-day patrol.
We had those little spotter planes—we called them grasshoppers—to help us off and on. One afternoon I saw a Japanese Zero get after one of those planes. The grasshopper was flying along the edge of the ocean, about fifty miles an hour or so. When the Zero showed up, the spotter plane dipped down to tree level and started weaving back and forth. The Zero must have been going more than a hundred, and he couldn’t adjust. He made a pass at that little plane moving in slow motion and overshot his target and went flying by. Then he came around and made another pass—he missed again. As we watched he made pass after pass firing at the grasshopper, which kept zigzagging frantically. Finally I guess the Zero ran out of ammunition and flew off. Never did hit him. We were cheering for that little plane until he flew out of sight.
We were out more than ten days. And every day, it seemed, we would run into an ambush. As usual they’d leave a few guys behind with knee mortars and a machine gun. Before we could flank them they’d disappear. It was just aggravating. The few we came upon were in about as bad a shape as we were in, and they’d been there a lot longer. They were sick with malaria and were starving. Their wounds weren’t healing. We tried to take them with us, but sometimes we had to leave them behind.
Along the way we ran into groups of dark-skinned natives who had come down out of the mountains, where they’d been hiding out with their wives and children after the Japs had started raiding their villages and plundering their gardens. Whenever we needed working parties they were there, about fifteen or twenty of them ready to carry ammunition and supplies.
Every so often we came upon a deserted village or coconut plantation. At one of them I saw this kid who looked like he could have been twelve to fifteen years old, maybe sixteen. It was hard to tell. He put his hands and feet on a coconut tree, with a machete tied around his waist, and he just walked up that thing. Climbed all the way to the top with his hands and feet. When he got to the top he took his machete and lopped the coconuts off. Then he came down the same way he went up.
We didn’t eat a lot of coconuts, but we’d slash the ends of them off and drink the milk and throw the rest away.
One afternoon we stopped in a clearing around an abandoned hut. Some of our guys went to fill their canteens down by a creek, where the Japs opened up with machine guns. Everybody got the hell out of there, but they may have hit a couple of natives.
Later in the evening we were digging foxholes and the Japs started shelling us with knee mortars. We started digging faster. The natives grabbed sticks, tin can lids, or chunks of metal, or used just their hands, and started digging a long trench about a foot to eighteen inches deep. They were digging faster than we were with our entrenching tools. When they finished they just lay down in that thing, head to foot, head to foot.
We moved on, continuing to encounter rain-swollen streams. The wider ones we would follow down to the beach, where the flood had pushed up an apron of sand, and we’d wade across in the shallow water. A tree had fallen across one stream and we could hang on to the branches to cross over. Most of us had made it to the other side when the man in front of me, Andrew Geglein, slipped and went down on the upstream side. He disappeared into the chocolate-colored water with his rifle and all of his gear, just vanished. We thought he’d be washed underneath the fallen tree, and one of the guys got in on that side and searched along the log, and then farther downstream. Time was of the essence. Then another guy jumped in on the upstream side and groped along until he found Andrew hung up on the branches underneath. We hauled him up out of the water, but he was already gone.
I thought, That’s a terrible way to lose your life when you’re fighting a war.
After ten days out on patrol we got word to return to Bitokara. I don’t know why, and I don’t know what happened, but we were glad to get out. We just hauled ass. By then we had a lot of men wounded and a lot of men killed. I figure we were down to about three-quarters of a company. Around 235 men went in and about 175 or 180 came out.
It was the last combat we were to see on New Britain.
I had a souvenir to take with me. I had found a fine hara-kiri knife, a beautiful thing with an ivory handle and sheath.
Hara-kiri—they would do that. About thirty yards beyond one of the creeks we’d crossed, we came upon a Jap officer lying on his back with his knees up. I don’t know whether he had been standing or kneeling when he had stabbed himself, but he had a bayonet stuck in his belly, and his hands were still curled around the grip. We didn’t know how long he had been there. His face and body were black and bloated. I didn’t take that bayonet.
Somebody else beat me to it.
After we came off the Numundo patrol we hung around Bitokara for a month. The mission was on a hill overlooking a small harbor, where we swam and fished. There were broad lawns and flowers and fruit trees, including a pepper tree. I’d never seen one before. It was about eight or ten feet high and absolutely loaded with those little tabasco peppers. We also saw banana trees, though no bananas. Nearby there was a native village. The place must have been a tropical paradise before the war.
We swam in the local hot springs, in water as clear and soothing as in a bathtub. For most of us it was the first hot bath we’d had since Melbourne.
But the food situation didn’t improve that much. There was never enough of it. About a month or so after we’d landed they brought out hot field-cooked meals to the front lines. There was a little piece of ham about three inches wide and a quarter inch thick, some potatoes, some cabbage. And a big navel orange. I looked at my mess tin and thought, What the hell? Do they think they’re feeding a canary?
And do you know? I couldn’t eat all of it. My stomach had shrunk so much, I could not clean my plate. I saved the orange for later on but I never did eat it. I went into New Britain weighing 180 pounds. I came out weighing 140.
We’d go in for lunch and they’d serve soup so thin you could read a newspaper through it. At night we’d designate one man to go down to the chow dump, where they stockpiled all the food, and he’d bring something back to the battalion, a gallon can of peaches or fruit cocktail or something like that. Everybody got their canteens out to have some, including our lieutenant. I’ll call him “Legs,” because he was a tall, gawky guy.
I guess we weren’t the only ones raiding the chow dump, because headquarters finally came out with an order that anyone caught stealing food would be court-martialed.
When that order came down, Legs called us together and chewed our butts. He got real indignant about the whole thing. “You guys are going to have to stop stealing that food! They’re going to court-martial your ass!” A real big shot.
He had eaten as much of that fruit as anyone else. I thought, What kind of officer is this? So afterward I said to the guys, “Don’t pay any attention. Let’s go ahead and take the food, but make damn sure we don’t get caught. Whenever it comes into camp, we just won’t let him know it’s here and he won’t get any more.”
And we did, and he didn’t.
It was not the last time I was to get crossways with Lieutenant Legs.
In our last days on New Britain, the Navy established a PT base on Talasea to keep after Jap barge traffic along the coast. I loved those PT boats, and I wasn’t alone. We’d all go down and visit with the crews and swap lies, always trying to outdo one another. They’d invite us on board and we’d sit at the turrets and fire the guns. Get a feel for what it was like to be on one of those things. One of our guys, Fred Miller, went out on patrol with them one day, and when he got back, our captain gave him hell.
He said, “Miller, if you’re going to get your ass killed, I’d prefer you do it fighting with the Marines.”
Near the end of April LCMs carried the First and Third battalions back down the coast to Borgen Bay. Ten days later, about the first of May, they started shipping units out on LSTs. On May 4, the Third Battalion mustered down at the beach and, after waiting around for an hour or so as usual, dragged ourselves aboard the USS Elmore, an attack transport.
We must have been the very last Marines to leave New Britain.
The division had been battered pretty badly. We’d lost 1,347 men. Those of us who were left had oozing red rashes from jungle rot, or dysentery—“the shits”—or malaria.
We’d all heard we were headed back to Melbourne, and I prayed I would soon see Florence again.
We were in for an unpleasant surprise.