So we were at sea again. The scuttlebutt was already circulating a day or two out when the USS Elmore’s loudspeaker squawked to life and confirmed the bad news. We weren’t going back to Australia. We would disembark at a place we’d never heard of—Pavuvu, in the Russell I slands.
Before long we’d all wish we’d never heard of Pavuvu and would never hear of it again.
The story was that some Army officers had picked out the island from the air. Never set a foot on it. They were flying around in a little spotter plane and they looked down and saw the neat rows of palm trees. And somebody said, “Yup, this’ll do.” Just decided then and there that Pavuvu was where we’d be going for rehab and retraining.
Later we found out that we couldn’t blame it on the Army. One of our own had chosen Pavuvu—Major General Roy S. Geiger, commander of the Third Amphibious Corps. Guadalcanal was just sixty miles east. But Geiger didn’t want us there after what had happened to the Third Marine Division: after Bougainville they’d been sent to Guadalcanal for R & R, and the island command had run the men absolutely ragged on work parties. They were too worn out to fight.
So Pavuvu was it for us.
At first it didn’t look so bad. We pulled in late on May 7, 1944, and anchored in Macquitti Bay. From the deck of the Elmore we could see palm trees, a lagoon and sandy beaches. We didn’t get to disembark until the next morning, in the kind of rain we thought we’d left behind on New Britain. That’s when we got a close look at our new home.
The Navy’s construction battalions, the Seabees, had been there, but they hadn’t done much. There was one pier and a muddy road gouged through the palms. The flat part of the island, about six hundred acres, was covered by layers of rotten coconuts, and beneath that was mud. The place had been a plantation until the war started, when the people who owned and worked it took off. Ever since, those coconuts had been falling off the trees and rotting on the ground. Every now and then you’d hear one hit with a thwack! You learned to give the trees a wide berth. The smell was overwhelming. It was years before I could eat coconut again in any form.
Since the Seabees hadn’t finished the job, the first arrivals had to build the camp. They found the tents and cots piled on the beach, most of them soaked through by the rains. The ones on the bottom of the piles were moldy. Some of the cots would come apart in your hands. The bivouac areas were ankle-deep in slop. The new guys stood in the rain, patching the holes in the tents, trying to get a footing, trying to find a dry place to pound in the tent stakes, only to see them float away. There were no wooden platforms—there were never any platforms beneath our tents, from start to finish—and when you’d lie down on the cots they’d sink into the mud like they had on New Britain. Some of the men decided to hell with it and strung hammocks between palm trees.
By the time we got there things had improved a little. The six-man pyramid tents were up, but they were full of holes. There was still plenty of mud and rotting coconuts around and there wasn’t any electricity anywhere on the island, so we had no lights. Marines can improvise under any circumstances. We rounded up tin cans and bottles, filled them with sand, poured in gasoline, inserted a piece of rope and rigged up lamps. They started fires here and there, but at least we had enough light to read or write letters, which was all there was to do for a time.
Worse than the rotting coconuts, the rain, and the mud were the rats and the land crabs. They had pretty much taken over the place. You’d see and hear the rats mostly at night, skittering across the tents or sliding down the tent ropes. They lived in the tops of the palm trees, where it was almost impossible to get at them.
We’d encountered land crabs before, but here they were absolutely everywhere. They were about the size of a fist, and their black and blue color reminded me of a bruise. I’d get up in the morning and they’d be down in my boots. I’d shake them and two or three would fall out and go scuttling sideways across the floor of the tent. They’d get into our clothes, they’d get into our bedclothes. Some of the guys got so aggravated that one Sunday morning they went on a land crab roundup, gathering them by the hundreds and dumping them in the street, where they poured gasoline over them and set them on fire. The stink from the burning crabs made us forget the rotting coconuts for a while.
During the days, work details went out to scoop up the layers of coconuts and truck them to a swamp. After we came off New Britain we had added one gun to the mortars and I was made corporal, so I was exempt. But I sent out my share of those work details. Everyone would come back stinking of sour coconut milk. There was no running water on the island, and you’d see somebody standing out in the daily downpour with a bar of good Marine soap and a brush, hoping to scrub off the smell before the rain stopped. The rain always started at the same time. You could set your watch by it. But it stopped without a warning, like somebody turned off a big faucet in the sky. Even after such a “shower,” the stink of coconuts never seemed to go away.
When we weren’t moving coconuts, we had parties hauling crushed coral to pave the roads and lanes between the tents, trying to keep on top of the mud. We’d also fill our helmets with crushed coral and carry it in a bucket brigade to make a dry floor under our cots. If you could find a couple scraps of wood you were a rich man. You could put up a dry platform where you could stow your clothes and shoes and letters from home. I salvaged a board or two and propped up Florence’s photo. Guys were always showing off their girlfriends’ pictures, but I wanted to keep Florence to myself.
A week or so after I arrived at Pavuvu, my mail caught up to me. My sister Ila sent me a package of homemade strawberry jam and some cookies. They were all broken up in transit, but even the crumbs tasted good. Best of all, I got a bundle of letters from my precious Florence. I sat down and read them right away. I was also writing her whenever I had the time to spare. It cost seventy cents to send an airmail letter to Australia. Surface mail was free. Even though I was making only sixty-four dollars a month, I sent them by air as often as I could.
Florence wrote that she was still working at the biscuit factory in Melbourne, putting in long hours. Her little brother—the one Jim Burke and I had carried piggyback on the Melbourne train platform—had chicken pox, but he was getting better. She told me she loved me and was waiting for my return.
I missed her terribly. Memories of the things we’d talked about and done together in Melbourne kept coming back. Our walks through the park full of flowers, buying fresh fruit from the little stand at Young & Jackson, just sitting on a bench in the sun. At night, lying in the tent, I’d think of the kisses we’d stolen. Or the times she teased me. Or my twenty-first birthday, when I drank a little too much and we sat in the dark movie theater and she cradled my spinning head in her arms and kept kissing me. Now my heart ached for her, and I wondered if I’d been wrong, if we should have got married when we had the chance, before I shipped out.
They cleared out some palm trees and hung up a sheet and started showing movies two or three nights a week. We sat on coconut logs, which cut into your backside after an hour or two. But those movies helped take our minds off things. We shouted advice to actors who seemed especially dumb around women—“Kiss her, you idiot!”—and whenever a pretty starlet appeared we’d yell and whistle at the projectionist to back up the film and show the scene again.
We no longer had to eat out in the rain or in our tents. They had battalion galleys up and working and screened against mosquitoes, which were everywhere. We were supposed to be taking the little yellow Atabrine pills to prevent malaria, but not everybody was going along with it. They tasted bitter, they turned your skin yellow, and there was a rumor going around that they’d make you sterile. In the mornings when we lined up in front of the tents for roll call, a corpsman would walk down the line. We’d be ordered to open our mouths—wide—and he’d toss that pill in as far back as he could get it. We got our Atabrine whether we wanted it or not.
We still had no fresh meat, no fresh eggs, no fresh anything. Every now and then a ship pulled in from Banika, the supply island between Pavuvu and Guadalcanal. But we had no refrigeration and couldn’t keep anything perishable very long in the heat and humidity. The cooks managed to bake bread, but by the time it got to us the weevils had moved in. I guess they added some protein to our diet. Mostly we lived on heated C rations, which provided three daily meals in one carton. There was always Spam or some kind of potted meat-and-vegetable stew. These were greasy when warm and congealed when cold. There was always a can of crackers and a little cup of cheese you could spread. There were powdered eggs and powdered potatoes, and a powder that made up into a urine-colored lemonade we called “battery acid.” You could drink it, or you could use it to scrub down the deck.
But little by little we all started to put on weight.
A few weeks after we settled in, a transport arrived with the Forty-sixth Replacement Battalion, fresh men from the States. Many of the old Guadalcanal veterans turned in their gear and lined up to go home. They’d earned it. The First Division band assembled down at the dock and played them off with “California Here I Come,” ending, as always, with the “Marines’ Hymn.” There wasn’t a dry eye in the place.
Among the replacements who marched ashore was a young private first class, Gene Sledge. He was assigned to my mortar platoon. We’d soon be calling him “Sledgehammer.” Sledge was a little older than the other recruits. I learned later he had a couple years of college behind him, but to me he was just another kid, wet behind the ears. Those of us who had been on New Britain were a sorry-looking bunch, yellow from the Atabrine tablets, skin like leather—they didn’t call us Leathernecks for nothing. We were still skin and bones compared to the guys from stateside. I think our appearance shocked our replacements, and maybe gave them a little taste of what they’d look like, too, after combat.
Right away we sent the newcomers out on work details, hauling coconuts and coral. The first week or two you’d hear them bellyache about this and that. The food or the land crabs or the rotting coconuts and mud. I didn’t have much sympathy. I had just come off of four months of battle, where I was sleeping in foxholes when it would be raining and I’d wake up the next morning with water up to my chin. They’d been sleeping on momma’s white sheets in Marine Corps barracks. Now they thought they’d fallen into the hellhole of creation, and I guess from their point of view they had. That’s certainly what Sledge felt years later when he wrote about the experience in With the Old Breed, one of the great combat books of the war.
Overseas Marines and stateside Marines are two different breeds almost. We were a lot more relaxed as far as discipline. We didn’t go in for much of that parade stuff like they did back in the States. But we did calisthenics, and some mornings after roll call we’d fall out and run three miles before breakfast. We had a large field where we played baseball and volleyball. We went to the rifle range.
One thing I want to clear up.
You read in books about suicides on Pavuvu. Someone would get a Dear John letter, and there’d be a shot some night and later everyone would learn he’d put a rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
I think that’s a crock. I was in the Marine Corps, in the First Marine Division, from 1943 until 1945 and I know of only one suicide in that span. There were always rumors, especially on Pavuvu. For a while somebody was supposedly going around and knifing people at night. Just creep into your tent and slit your throat and vanish. That rumor got thick and heavy.
The funny thing was, it never happened here. It always happened somewhere else. There was no evidence that this was happening anywhere. But the rumors got pretty strong, and spread and grew from there. And to tell the truth, we all got a little edgy.
There was a guy named Al Flame. About the time the rumors of the knifings were going around, he was visiting somebody else’s tent in the next company over—Marines were always socializing from tent to tent at night. One evening, instead of going around the end of the tent rows and bypassing K Company, he decided to cut through. We’d heard all the stories. It was pitch dark when I spotted someone moving among the tents. I pulled my .45 and stuck it in his face and challenged him.
“You take another step and I’ll blow your head off.”
“Burgin,” he said. “This is me! Al Flame, dammit!”
I just said okay. Al went on about his business and I went on about mine. But it shows our frame of mind.
We called it “Going Asiatic.” Going crazy.
Sergeant Elmo Haney was the most Asiatic Marine I knew. He had been in the Corps since World War I and he’d seen it all. He was a platoon sergeant assigned to K Company, but he didn’t have a job—a platoon sergeant without a platoon. Sergeant Haney had gone Asiatic. He would do something wrong, what he imagined was some infraction, and he’d assign himself Extra Police Duty. He’d put on a full combat pack and march down the street muttering to himself, and at the end of the street he’d put himself through a full bayonet drill, all by himself.
You’d see him in the shower scrubbing all over his body with that Marine brush, even his testicles. And I mean those bristles were tough.
We’d heard they had stationed him back home once, and he had gone AWOL. He’d gone down to the docks and caught a freighter to the Pacific and worked his way back to K Company.
After Peleliu he went home for good. I heard he told someone, “This is a young man’s war.”
About this time I started having trouble with our platoon leader again, the officer we called Lieutenant Legs. The truth is, a lot of us had been having trouble with Lieutenant Legs since the canned peaches incident on New Britain.
As usual, Legs was making up the rules as he went along. We’d made a practice beach landing and gone in. He told us where to set up the mortars, and we did. Pretty soon a battalion commander came along.
“Who the hell set these up?” he barked at Legs. “Why did you set them up there?” Just chewed up his butt.
After he was gone, Legs started chewing me out. “What the hell were you thinking, setting up that way?” he yelled. “They’re supposed to be over there!”
He was getting worse. He’d tell us to do something and then he’d chew our ass for doing what he said. It was demoralizing. Our platoon sergeant, Johnny Marmet, knew something was wrong. Finally he called the mortar section together.
“All right, there’s something going on around here and I want to know what the hell it is.”
He went down the line, asking each man if he had a gripe. “Whatever the hell is on your mind, I want to hear it.”
Some didn’t have a problem with Legs. But some of us definitely did. I was the last one. Marmet dismissed everybody else. I was sitting there, and he said, “Burgin, what is it? What’s going on in this outfit?”
“John, Legs has been riding us for the stuff he’s been doing ever since New Britain,” I said. “He’s passing down the blame to me and everybody else for his own damn mistakes. I’m going to tell you something, John. You get that son of a bitch off of my ass or I’m going to get him off. And if I get him off, both of us are going to be sorry.”
Marmet just said, “I’ll take care of it.”
And he did, I guess. Because after that Lieutenant Legs didn’t give me any more problems for a long time.
A sergeant could do that—you’d better believe it. The first sergeant, gunny sergeant, he pretty well runs the company. Whatever he said went.
He’d just say, “Lieutenant, I need to have a word with you.” A wise lieutenant would listen. Because if he didn’t the sergeant would go to the captain and say, “Hey, we have a problem with Lieutenant So-and-So. This is what he’s doing, and it’s not right. And he’s not listening to me.”
Before long it would be fixed. The word of a sergeant carried a lot of weight. Yes, it did.
I had no trouble with other officers. Sledge, in his book With the Old Breed, was too hard on officers, in my opinion. But even Sledge liked Hillbilly Jones. We all liked Hillbilly.
First Lieutenant Edward A. Jones had been with us on New Britain, and he would be with us on Peleliu, for a time. He was the most—I don’t know what the word is—disciplinary officer I was ever around. He wasn’t a horse’s patoot. He didn’t make up his own rules. He went by the book. His mind-set was, You’re a Marine, and you’re going to act like a Marine whether you’re in the States or out here in combat. That’s the way it’s going to be.
Whenever we’d fall in for morning roll call, standing in ranks, he’d be out in front and he’d inspect the rifles. He’d spent five years as a seagoing Marine, so he was sharp. I mean he would pull that rifle—snap!—and twirl it—snap!—and it would come back to you—snap! He had it all. When you fell in, your collar was buttoned, your cuffs were buttoned. You stood erect. You didn’t slouch. You stood like a Marine. From reveille to recall in the afternoon he was as GI as they ever came, I’ll guarantee you.
But after recall turned us loose at four o’clock, Hillbilly was a different human being. He’d wander down to our tents carrying the guitar he always had with him and sit around and we’d sing and shoot the bull all night. Coming over from New Britain, we’d gather around Hillbilly on the deck of the Elmore singing one song after another. “Waltzing Matilda” was popular, from our stay in Melbourne. We sang “Danny Boy,” and “She’s Nobody’s Darling But Mine.” My own favorite was “San Antonio Rose.”
For some reason I always thought Hillbilly was from West Virginia, because he knew every country and western song. The fact of it is, he was from Red Lion, Pennsylvania, right on the Maryland border. Hillbilly was the leader of K Company’s machine-gun platoon, and the kind of officer you always wanted to have somewhere near you in a battle. He was soft-spoken, always calm and reassuring. Nothing rattled him. When everybody else was sweating and filthy, Hillbilly always looked fresh scrubbed. None of us knew how he did it.
They were working us harder now. More marches, more drills, more inspections. We all knew they were getting us ready for something, toughening us up. In July signs appeared in the galleys: KILL JAPS! KILL JAPS! We’d heard Colonel Lewis “Chesty” Puller posted them. He’d lost a brother in the fighting on Guam.
We were pulling more maneuvers. Just at the squad level first, then working up to platoons, and finally companies. You couldn’t maneuver with anything larger than a company on Pavuvu. The island was only ten miles long and six miles wide. There was a low hill in the center, covered with jungle. That didn’t leave much wiggle room for fifteen thousand Marines and their weapons to pull maneuvers at the same time. One unit would be doing close-order drill and another would come along and march right through it, neither paying any attention to the other. The weapons ranges were in constant use, always some unit waiting to get on. If they ever lined all of us up to hike, we were sure the front of the column would come right up to the back of the column. We’d be like a snake chasing its tail.
After breakfast most mornings the mortar section would go out for a training exercise. We wanted to teach the new guys just as the Guadalcanal veterans had taught us. We showed them what to do and what not to do in combat, we told them what to look for, all the Jap tricks. We’d work on how and where to set up the guns. We’d have them humping ammunition. Of course they’d been through it all before at boot camp. They knew the routine. But we’d practice it, carry it out and practice it again.
I don’t know who in the Marines dreams up all that stuff in your training. Like jerking you out of your sleep and doing a forced run or a forced march. But they do a very good job of it. I don’t think I can stress it too much: They don’t only train you physically. They train you mentally. They know if they can make you upset about something, if they can aggravate you, they’re getting you in the right frame of mind for combat. They throw something unexpected into the agenda, so that when you get on the battlefield you’re already mad. You’re ready to get out of all that you’ve been going through, all that BS you’ve been doing. You’re ready to kill someone.
Some thought it was all BS, the whole four months we spent on that island. I wasn’t on the same page with a lot of guys who downgrade Pavuvu. When you look back on it, the Marines knew what they were doing. We were glad when it was over, even though we knew we were facing death where we were going. In a way, anything would have been better than Pavuvu.
Around July 4 a few of us caught a break.
Captain Andrew Allison Haldane—we called him “Ack-Ack” on account of his initials—called nine or ten of us in. He had a special assignment for us. Besides myself, there was Hillbilly Jones, John Teskevich, Jim Day, George Sarrett, Paul R. Yarborough, P. A. Wilson and a few others.
Captain Haldane had been K/3/5’s commander the night we fought off five banzai charges on New Britain. They’d awarded him the Silver Star for that. He was as well liked as any officer I knew. I never heard him raise his voice at any man. He was firm, but he was a gentleman, and compassionate.
We were to take the boat across to Banika, he told us, and guard a storehouse for two weeks. We’d heard of Banika, but none of us had been there. Everything good came from Banika. The Navy had a supply dump on the island. If we got fresh meat, it came over from Banika. If we got fresh eggs, they were from Banika.
One of us asked what we’d be guarding. Beer and soda pop, Haldane told us. A whole warehouse. Thousands of cases. It was like sending foxes to guard the chicken coop.
I figured afterward that Captain Haldane and our first sergeant, Mo Darsey, had gone down a list and handpicked us for the assignment. I can’t speak for myself, but everyone else chosen was a top-notch Marine. I felt proud to be in their company.
It didn’t take us long to get to our warehouse on Banika, about a twenty-mile boat ride from Pavuvu. We had two six-man pyramid tents, on real wooden platforms for a change. The duty was light. Four hours on, ninety-six hours off. For chow, we went down to the wharf and climbed on board a ship that was anchored there. The first time I went aboard I almost fainted. I had never seen anything like that in the Pacific.
When we went in they sat us down and brought us menus. There were napkins and tablecloths on the tables. White linen towels to dry your face and hands. After we looked over the menu, the waiter asked, “What will you have, sir?” We could order anything—breakfast, lunch or dinner—and he’d bring it to us like we were in a restaurant. I’d never dreamed of being served like that anywhere in the Marines. On a troopship you’d just go through a line and they’d dish it out, just slop it on your tray.
We helped ourselves to a share from the warehouse. It was hot, but it was beer.
One Saturday night on Banika four of us were sitting around—Hillbilly Jones, Yarborough, myself, and somebody else. Maybe Sarrett. I can’t recall. We were pouring 190-proof alcohol in the bottom of a canteen cup and filling the rest with grapefruit juice. We were singing and telling jokes and drinking that stuff, and by ten thirty we started to run low on grapefruit juice, and so we poured in more alcohol.
Oh, my God. You talk about drunk. I had to put all three of them to bed, I mean every single one. Haul him to his feet. There was a jeep outside that had a 250-gallon water tank on the back, with a spigot on the side. I’d wrestle each one out there and stick his head under the spigot and run water over him until I thought he could make it to the tent more or less upright. I’d get him there and put him on his cot. Tuck him in. All three of them.
And I was thinking, Man, I’m doing okay, you know? Here I’ve put these three drunks to bed and I’m still walking straight.
About three o’clock that morning I woke up vomiting. I want to tell you, I never vomited so hard in my life. I got up the next morning and looked over the side of my cot. And there was blood everywhere. I’d vomited so hard I’d vomited blood.
That was on Sunday morning. My first meal after that was on Thursday.
Toward the end of our stay on Pavuvu we had a visitor from Banika.
Bob Hope had been entertaining troops across the South Pacific. He had taken his whole USO troupe with him—singer Frances Langford, comedian Jerry Colonna, Tony Romano, who played the guitar. And a lively, pretty little blond dancer named Patty Thomas.
We weren’t on their schedule. They’d been to Christmas Island, Tarawa, Kwajalein, Saipan, Bougainville, Tulagi. A Catalina flying boat that was taking them to Australia had made a crash-landing in a river bar, but they’d made it out okay. In late July they were putting on a show over on Banika.
Somebody had flown over and told Hope there was a whole division stuck on this little island, about to go into battle. We hadn’t seen an outsider for months, much less a female outsider.
“Where are they?” he asked. Pavuvu, somebody told him.
Hope had never heard of it. “Where in the hell is that?” he asked.
We had no runway, but our one road could accommodate the occasional Piper Cub that flew in with messages or visiting officers. If the troupe could be ready the next morning, they could be flown over one by one.
We got word the same day and by next morning we had put up a makeshift stage down by the beach, at the end of an open area where we played baseball and drilled. By the time the first of the planes appeared, there must have been fifteen thousand of us standing in that field, all of us yelling our heads off. The pilot cut the engine on Jerry Colonna’s plane as it circled over and we heard him let out that famous Colonna howl: “Yee …ow …ow.” Even from the ground we could see his handlebar mustache and those shining white teeth.
The show lasted about ninety minutes, but it seemed shorter. Patty Thomas, who was wearing a skimpy skirt and a halter top, invited guys from the front rows to come up onstage and jitterbug with her. Hope and Colonna traded jokes.
Hope asked Colonna how he had enjoyed the flight from Banika.
“Tough sledding,” Colonna said.
“Why tough sledding?” Hope asked.
“No snow.”
We roared with laughter.
Somebody must have briefed them on Pavuvu, because Hope even got in a joke about our land crabs. He said they reminded him of Bing Crosby’s racehorses—“they run sideways.”
Pavuvu was so small, he said, “the gophers have to take turns coming up.”
At the end of the show, Hope sang his theme song, “Thanks for the Memories.” Then they got into their Piper Cubs and, one by one, took off. We stood alongside the road cheering.
For days afterward we’d talk about that show. It really lifted our spirits.
Years later, on one of his last television broadcasts, Hope called that appearance on Pavuvu one of the most moving shows he ever played.
“You knew when you walked out there that a lot of those guys you’d never see again,” he said. “And as it worked out sixty percent of these kids were knocked off.”
It was not quite as bad as that. But almost. Thirty percent of the First Division would be wounded or killed on Peleliu.
They passed around some maps and some fuzzy photographs taken from planes or through a submarine periscope. None of them showed any useful detail. It just looked like a lot of trees and some hills.
They’d also made a model. The island was even smaller than Pavuvu. We’d be landing across a wide beach stretching north to south. Two hundred yards beyond was the Jap airfield that was our first day’s objective. Behind the airfield, mountains rose up and continued almost the whole length of the island. Except for the hills, they told us, most of the place was flat.
They didn’t tell us the name yet.
Our training wrapped up with a couple big landing exercises. We didn’t have our amtracs. They were still busy on Guam. So we used Higgins boats. They told us to come out of the amtracs ready for anything. Have bayonets fixed, a round chambered in our rifles and the safety on. Locked and loaded. Our ammo carriers were to have a couple mortar shells unfastened and ready to go.
They repeated over and over again the lesson learned on Guadalcanal:
“Get off the beach! Get your ass off the beach! Move in!”
Late on August 26, we filed on board LST 661. The next morning we were under way.
An LST was the largest ship the Navy could actually put right up on a beach. The hold would be full of amtracs and the amtracs would be full of troops. The big clamshell doors in the front of the ship would open and you’d just roll ashore. If there was a coral reef off the beach, the LST would stay farther out and the amtracs would rumble down the ramp into the water, form up and move to the beach in waves. That’s how it was supposed to work. Every now and then, we’d heard, an amtrac would go down the ramp, nose into the water, and sink. Just disappear.
The LST had a long deck for cargo. It could carry up to three hundred troops belowdecks and a couple dozen more in the forecastle, which was about two-thirds of the way back.
Our mortar section got lucky. The platoon leaders drew straws, and we were assigned to the troop quarters in the forecastle. Everyone else went belowdecks. All day long those steel sides and the deck soaked up that tropical sun, and all night they radiated the heat back into the compartments. Belowdecks was hot, cramped, stuffy. Pretty soon everyone was scrambling for any available place to sleep in and around the crates and equipment in the cargo area.
While we were at sea the division held landing rehearsals off Guadalcanal. Our amtracs and DUKWs had finally arrived, and they needed to practice launching them off the LSTs and getting them across a reef onto the beach. During one of these exercises, Major General William Rupertus, First Division’s commander, slipped while boarding an amtrac. He fell back on the coral, breaking his ankle. His foot would be in a cast during the whole invasion.
When we arrived at Guadalcanal, other ships were pulling in from Banika, Tulagi, Espirito Santo. From all over the southwest Pacific it seemed. Some of the Old Breed, the Guadalcanal veterans, wanted to go ashore to see where they’d fought and visit the military cemetery.
We got a pep talk from one of them, First Sergeant Paul Bailey. He was soft-spoken, down to earth. A helluva good Marine. He’d joined us on Pavuvu.
He told us for the first time where we were going—Peleliu. He said it wouldn’t be easy, that a lot of us wouldn’t be coming back. But we were going in and we were going to take it as quickly as possible with as few casualties as possible.
“Don’t be dumb,” Sergeant Bailey said. “We want to go in there and play it smart.” The faster we killed Japs, the sooner we’d get off that i sland.
I don’t know if those pep talks they always gave us before a battle helped or hindered. Those of us who had been through it already knew a lot of us weren’t coming back, that a lot of us would be killed, a lot would be wounded or maimed for the rest of our lives.
We knew any time you go into combat, it’s not pretty.
On September 4, we filed back on board LST 661 and weighed anchor. There were more than sixteen thousand of us, aboard thirty LSTs and a handful of troop transports. LSTs are slow, about seven knots. So we got a head start. The faster transport ships sailed four days later and gradually caught up with us. We headed northwest through the Solomon Islands, then along the east coast of New Guinea toward the equator. We passed through a couple rain squalls, but otherwise we were on a calm, beautiful sea. We sat on the deck cleaning and recleaning salt corrosion off our weapons. We took our ammo out of the clips, polished it and reloaded. We sharpened our KA-BARS, packed and re-packed our gear. Sometimes the Navy would throw a couple barrels overboard and their gunners would practice shooting at them.
Afternoons some of us gathered around Hillbilly Jones. We sang “Red River Valley” or some other favorite.
I liked to stand at the railing and watch the porpoises play in the wake of the ship, the flying fish glide over the crests of the waves. Off on the horizon I could see dozens of other ships. Aircraft carriers. Battleships. We had the Pennsylvania, Idaho, Maryland, Mississippi, and Tennessee with us. And smaller ships. Cruisers, I assumed. Closer in, destroyers and PT boats were escorting us. We were all zigzagging as we sailed along, changing direction every fifteen minutes or so. One afternoon the sirens sounded, a signal that there was a sub somewhere around us. The PT boats circled trying to locate him. They dropped some depth charges. I don’t know if they found him, but we got by without any of our ships being damaged.
I always loved those PT boats, ever since I saw them at Talasea. They were the Corsair fighter planes of the sea, sleek and agile. They were something else.
I read years later that somewhere along the way sealed envelopes were passed out to all the unit commanders and to the war correspondents that accompanied the fleet. The envelopes were not to be opened until September 14, the day before the invasion.
Inside was a message from General Rupertus. He predicted the battle for Peleliu would be rough but short. “A quickie,” he wrote. In and out in three days. Maybe in two.
Almost all the correspondents decided then and there that the invasion of Peleliu would not be worth their time. Most of them decided to stay with the ships and eventually move on to something more newsworthy.
I am convinced that’s why Peleliu never got the attention it deserves. The big battles that everyone’s heard of—Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal—they were highly publicized. But Peleliu, nobody’s ever heard of that.
We sailed twenty-one hundred miles in eleven days. Sometime after midnight September 14, I could feel the ship slow, then stop. As usual, I was up early—always the country boy. In the darkness I felt around for the ankle-high combat shoes we called boondockers, pulled them on and laced them up. I sat there for a few minutes. Then Johnny Marmet came in.
“Okay, Burgin. Let’s get ’em up.”
We yelled for everyone to hit the deck. In minutes there were men dressing, shaving, waiting for the toilets. We could already smell the steak and eggs from the galley, the traditional Marine Corps breakfast before battle. Some of us could eat, some of us couldn’t.
Private Vincent Santos could.
“When’s the last time you got steak and eggs?” he asked. “And when’s the next time you’re going to get steak and eggs? So I’m making the best of it.”
Santos would lose his steak and eggs on the amtrac.
After breakfast we lined up for the head and then stumbled out onto the deck. The brightest stars still hung in the sky. There was already a soft glow in the east.
About then one of those little Piper Cub-type spotter planes came buzzing along, maybe eight hundred to a thousand yards in front of us and just above the water. One of the forward antiaircraft guns barked, opening fire on him. Tracers went arcing into the darkness.
Everybody started yelling, “You damned idiot! That’s one of ours!”
The plane dodged and wobbled off, not hit, thank goodness.
Just as the sun showed above the horizon, all hell broke loose. Every gun in the Navy started in at once. The sea lit up like flashbulbs. Thunder rolled across the waves and rumbled back at us. A few minutes later the first planes from the carriers flew over, headed north, Hellcat fighters and Dauntless dive-bombers loaded with napalm and five-hundred-pound bombs. We could see pink and orange splashes in the distance and a few seconds later hear the thump-thump of the explosions.
In the growing light, smoke spread out into a long, low smudge across the northern horizon, east to west. It was the only cloud in the sky that morning. The bombardment let up long enough for the planes to get in, then picked up again.
The ship’s bell rang, and we got the order to stand by.
We helped one another with our packs and gear, snubbing up straps and making sure everything was secure. M1s and carbines slung over our left shoulders, we stood at the ladders leading down to the tank deck where the amtracs were waiting for us.
I just mumbled, “God, I’m in your hands. Take care of me.” That was always my prayer. I kept it short. I didn’t want to burden Him. He had other people to look after.