You read nowadays that the Battle of Peleliu should never have been fought. We should never have invaded, experts say. And I agree.
We took that island to secure the airfield so the Japs couldn’t use it against MacArthur when he was landing on Mindanao, to the west. But we had already bombed that airfield three months before, and we could have gone on bombing it 24-7. We could have made it absolutely unusable. There was no way the Japs could have rebuilt it in time. They were finished as an air power.
Just days before our landing at Peleliu, Admiral Bull Halsey wanted to pull out, but Admiral Nimitz, his superior, refused. General MacArthur wanted to take the island as well, and President Roosevelt approved it. We were committed.
Those of us on the ground didn’t know anything about all that. Good idea or bad idea, we didn’t have time to dwell on it. The First Marines under Colonel Lewis Puller—nicknamed Chesty—were fighting for their lives on the Point, a hump of coral rock on the northwestern tip of the island. We were lost in the forest east of the airfield, no idea where we were. Every one of us was fighting for his life. We talked about it a lot after the fact. But not while we were there. We were pretty well occupied.
Peleliu would keep us busier than anybody ever imagined. General Rupertus was off the mark when he said we’d be in and out in two or three days. The maps and photographs and the model we’d all studied so carefully didn’t tell the whole story. They didn’t tell us that a lot of that level ground was thick mangrove swamp. They didn’t tell us that beneath the tops of the trees the ridges were steep, and honeycombed with more than five hundred limestone caves and man-made tunnels. One of them was big enough to hide fifteen hundred troops. They didn’t tell us that before it was over we’d have to fight our way from one cave to the next. One of our generals said it was like fighting in Swiss cheese.
The Japs had been on Peleliu since they seized it from the Germans during World War I. They’d had plenty of time to dig in. Starting in the 1930s they’d put the natives to work and brought in hundreds of Korean tunnel diggers, enlarging the caves and connecting them until the whole place was like a termite nest.
The island was coral rock, shaped like a crab claw with two prongs, a larger and a smaller, pointing northeast. A series of parallel ridges ran up the bigger prong of the claw. Roads skirted either side of the ridges and joined at the north end of the island, where the Japs had a phosphate mine. From there, a five-hundred-foot causeway led to a smaller island, Ngesebus. Ngesebus was mostly flat, and the Japs had started building a smaller airfield there. We’d have to take care of that sooner or later.
Peleliu was just north of the equator. We didn’t think about just how hot and dry it would get until we got there. We had no idea how sharp that coral was, how it could shred your clothes and boondockers and tear your skin. How even a minor wound would fester and seem to take weeks to heal.
With all the other things we were to face the first couple of days, the most aggravating was thirst. Most of us had come ashore with two full canteens. By the time K Company dug in that first night, lost somewhere in the scrub and out of touch with the rest of our units, we could shake our canteens and hear the last few drops slosh around. The daytime temperature had been well over a hundred degrees. We’d been gulping water like we had an endless supply.
I didn’t know where the information was coming from, but we were hearing that it had been a bad day for the whole First Division. We had lost more than a thousand men wounded or killed. It’s probably a good thing we didn’t know just how bad the situation was, or that the First Regiment was fighting for their lives, barely clinging to the Point. We knew our battalion commander was out of action, either wounded or killed, and that his executive officer was dead. We didn’t know who was running things.
Just before midnight we found out.
We were expecting Jap infiltrators when two figures walked out of the brush and gave the password. It was Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Walt, our battalion commander on New Britain, and his runner. After Shofner had been taken out to a hospital ship, Walt, who was now the Fifth Regiment’s executive officer, had taken charge of Third Battalion. With communications still down, he set out in the darkness to find his scattered companies and put them back into some kind of order. He’d already rounded up I and L companies. When he found us he led us back toward the airfield and positioned us facing south just behind Second Battalion, which was facing north. We’d be watching one another’s backs through the rest of the night.
We dug mortar emplacements, registered the two guns with a couple test rounds, laid out our KA-BARS where they’d be handy, and settled in for a long, restless night.
The water situation hadn’t improved, and by dawn there were a lot of empty canteens. The coral never cooled during all the time we were on Peleliu. Even at night it stayed warm, and the morning sun soon turned it into a griddle. Some of our guys went searching and found a cistern at the edge of the airstrip with a little pool of stagnant water about ten or twelve feet down. Word spread and guys started to gather around, passing their canteens down to be filled. We were an excellent target. The water didn’t look too good to me, silty and probably polluted. But none of us were picky at that point. Before long they managed to bring up a couple of the fifty-gallon drums from the beach, old diesel containers that were supposed to have been steam-cleaned on Pavuvu before they were filled with water. We lined up to fill our canteens, but it was even worse than the water from the cistern, tea-colored and smelling strongly of fuel oil. Guys would take a mouthful and spit it out. Those that swallowed it would throw up a few minutes later. Some of them had the dry heaves all morning.
I thought, If anyone lights a match around us we’ll all be turned into human flamethrowers.
About this time the Japs opened up on us from the high ground overlooking the airfield. We called it Bloody Nose Ridge, and it bloodied us good. They could see us in the morning light, but we couldn’t see them. The Navy’s guns and our own heavy artillery on the beach answered, but I don’t think we had much effect. The Japs were shooting from the mouths of caves a couple hundred feet up, where we couldn’t get at them. They’d wheel a gun to the entrance, fire, and wheel it back out of sight.
As the enemy poured steel down on us, we got the word to prepare to move out. The whole Fifth Regiment was to attack straight across the airfield, then swing north. We’d be on the right, moving across the southern end. Second Battalion was on our left. They’d take the middle. Then on their left, First Battalion, which had hooked up with elements of the First Marines’ Second Battalion. Off on our right in the scrub jungle were the Seventh Marines.
We’d practiced the drill on Pavuvu. Stay down until the signal. Keep a distance between one another so we present a scattered target. Move fast and don’t stop until we get to the far side. A moving target is harder to hit. We crouched in the underbrush, listening to the guns bang away at one another. Then the word came: “Move out!”
That was the longest walk I ever took in my life. We were on the go. We were moving, bent over at a trot. Everything was coming at us—mortars, artillery, machine-gun and rifle fire. You heard the hiss and zing of shrapnel and bullets all around you. We were as exposed as bugs on a breakfast table. I kept yelling, “Keep moving! Keep moving!”
The field was littered with scraps from the tank battle the day before, empty ammo boxes, chunks of shrapnel bouncing and skittering along. There were a couple wrecked Jap warplanes, including one of their twin-engine “Betty” bombers.
I saw Merriel “Snafu” Shelton go down, carrying the mortar tube. Sledgehammer went down right behind him, cradling a bag of mortar shells in his arms. Neither was hit and both got up and started off again.
We couldn’t fire back at our tormentors because we were on the run. We didn’t want to expose ourselves any longer than we had to. But it was frustrating. After what seemed like ages, a line of brush appeared in front of us. We dove into the shade, panting and sweating. For the first time I realized how hot we had been coming across. It was like the Japs had one more weapon on their side, the sun.
Everyone was accounted for. Mortar section hadn’t lost a man in the mad dash. But K Company lost two dead and five wounded. One of them was Private First Class Robert Oswalt, shot through the head. He was the one I had almost shot between the eyes myself on New Britain when he came crawling out of his foxhole at night begging for a drink of water. Suddenly I felt awful.
Once we were across the airfield, our orders were to swing north and head for the low area east of Bloody Nose Ridge, near the coast. There we’d link up with the Second Battalion. As we started north we found our battalion getting squeezed between the Second Battalion and the Seventh Marines, who were still clearing out the swamps.
At the north edge of the field, a few yards on our left, we passed a two-story concrete shell, evidently the air base headquarters. By the time we saw it, one of the battleships had blasted it with fourteen-inch guns, but the walls were at least a foot thick with steel reinforcing, and it was still standing. Some other Marine unit had dislodged the Japs there and moved in.
Beyond the northeast corner of the airfield, we found ourselves in dense scrub again. Beyond lay a patch of swamp with the sea shimmering in the distance. The main road running north along the east side of the island cut through here, but we stayed out of sight. We found a clear space where we could set up the mortars and pound in the aiming stakes to orient the weapons. Late in the afternoon we fired a few rounds to register the guns and scraped out foxholes in the hard coral, piling up rocks and logs around them. All the time we kept our eyes on the wall of scrub around us, expecting a banzai attack any minute. It never came. In fact, the Japs never charged us banzai-style on Peleliu like they had on New Britain. They knew better. Now they waited until dark. Then they came creeping out of their caves to slit our throats.
As it happened, our second night passed quietly. Orders for the next day were to continue to advance north and relieve First Battalion. They had been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the Japs all afternoon, working their way along the lower slopes of the ridge. Whenever they moved forward, Jap mortars and artillery shells would come pouring down on them from the hills. Whenever they stopped, the fire stopped.
Next morning we set out for our rendezvous with First Battalion, still picking our way through dense scrub. I could tell it was going to be a hot one. As the sun climbed higher guys started dropping out with heat prostration, and we had to stop more and more frequently. We were burning through our salt tablets.
The east flank of Bloody Nose Ridge rose up on our right, and as we advanced we started coming under vicious artillery and mortar fire from the heights. We couldn’t use our own mortars for fear of dropping them on First Battalion, which was somewhere between us and the ridge. By noon we had linked up with them and we took their place in the front lines. When we started forward again we almost immediately ran into a wall of fire that kept pinning us down all afternoon. When we tried to move forward, the Japs would open up on us. There’s no feeling on earth as vulnerable as having somebody fire shells down on you from up above.
Second Battalion had pulled to our right and was making better progress through the mangroves. Behind them somewhere was the Seventh Marines. Our company finally found our own little patch of mangroves and pushed through until we came out in a coconut grove and, on the far side, an open area. This had once been a native village, but the Japs had taken over and built rows of barracks. During the landing we had bombed and shelled the area pretty thoroughly, and there wasn’t much left but piles of charred lumber.
Our supplies caught up with us by late afternoon, including some precious water. Things seemed about to take a turn for the better.
The next morning Second Battalion was ordered east across a narrow neck of land that joined the larger of Peleliu’s crab claws to the smaller. Japs had been spotted in that area. The Marines had just started across when a group of Navy fighters came roaring over, strafing the column from one end to the other. This mistake cost the Corps almost three dozen men. Our battalion was hurried forward to reinforce them. We were coming up on the same neck of land, following a crude road with swamp on either side of us, when shells—big shells—started raining down on us. I knew they were ours because they were screaming right over our backs and crashing just in front, showering us with mud and coral rock. We could feel the thump of the concussions on our dungarees before we all hit the ground.
We’d been stringing out communication wire as we went. I grabbed the sound-powered phone to the command post.
“We’re taking fire from behind us up here!” I shouted.
“No, that can’t be ours!”
“Don’t by God tell me it’s not ours! It’s coming from the damned airfield, and we’ve got the airfield. I’m telling you what the hell it is! It’s our damned artillery and it’s a 155. I’m looking at it as it lands. Get word back to them to cut it out. They’re too damned close.”
That was the first time I ever experienced an airburst. Those things are wicked. The shell comes in and explodes before it hits the ground, and the shrapnel slices down through anything that isn’t under cover. A foxhole or a trench—it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference where you’re at. There’s no place to hide from an airburst. I thought for sure that stuff was going to eat us up. But by some miracle, nobody was hit.
After the artillery let up we moved on. By early afternoon we dug in south of the Second Battalion.
The Japs had their main base up on Babelthuap, a larger island about forty miles north of Peleliu. Our intelligence had information that they might send a force across to relieve their Peleliu garrison and drive us off the island. It wasn’t clear to us what a couple hundred Marines could do to stop a major landing, but at least we could sound the alarm and hold them off for a while. As we pushed through the swamps on the smaller claw we ran into an occasional sniper. But the next day or two was about the quietest we were to experience on Peleliu.
The third day they sent about forty of us on an extended patrol down to the tip of a long, narrow peninsula running along the southeast coast of the island. Hillbilly Jones was in charge and we had an Army man with a war dog, a big Doberman that could smell the Japs.
There were a couple of islands off the tip, and we were told about two thousand Japs were hidden there. When the tide went out it would be easy for them to wade across, come up the peninsula and catch us by surprise. We were supposed to set up and watch for them.
It was a spooky place to start with, gloomy and dark, with dense trees and thick vines snaking all over the place and tangles of roots that looked like the legs of some giant spider. Sledge was goggling at the birds, and I had to remind him to keep his mind on business. We settled near an abandoned Jap bunker, where Hillbilly set up his command post. The rest of us spread out and dug in. For a change the ground was soft enough to dig real foxholes. We set up our gun at the water’s edge and pointed it where we thought they’d try to cross. We didn’t dare fire a register round because every sound would carry right across the water. In fact, we were ordered to stay quiet, not light up a smoke, not advertise our presence in any way.
The sun went down, leaving us to our rations and to the mosquitoes. Sergeant Elmo Haney, who’d amused us with his antics on Pavuvu, had come along. He was more Asiatic than usual that night. He kept moving up and down the line urging everyone in a hoarse whisper to check their weapons, lock and load, stay alert. The Japs might come across at any minute with fixed bayonets, he warned. He disappeared, but pretty soon he was back again to see if we knew the password. Check your weapons. Stay alert. He was starting to get to us.
Fact is, we were more than alert. We were forty twitching bundles of nerves. We jumped at every sound. A fish splashing out in the water, some animal snapping a twig or some bird ruffling its feathers—anything could set us off. Nobody was getting any sleep.
I was near the command post around midnight when we all heard someone start to moan. “Ooooooooooh. Ooooooooh. Dog! They’re gonna kill me, dog! Help me! Ooooooooooooh!” It was the dog handler. He went on and on, getting louder, like some siren. Somebody shushed him, then somebody tackled him in the darkness. I could hear them thrashing around, grunts and moans.
“Quiet that man!” Hillbilly ordered. Someone else called for our corpsman.
The dog handler was screaming louder. “Help me. Oh, dog! God! Help me! Help me!”
“Shut that man up!” Hillbilly hissed.
Several of us were wrestling him now, while the corpsman got out his syringe. He gave him a shot of morphine, but it just seemed to egg him on. He howled louder, calling on his dog, or God, to save him.
“The Japs have got me! The Japs have got me! Save me, dog!”
The corpsman gave him another shot, enough morphine by now to kill a horse. Anything to shut him up. He went on yelling, kicking and punching at anyone who came near. If the Japs couldn’t hear him, we were sure they were deaf.
Hillbilly was trying to talk him down in low, soothing tones. “It’s okay, son. You’re going to be okay.”
He kept yelling.
Someone said, “Hit him! Shut him the hell up!” And someone else grabbed an entrenching tool and swung.
We heard a sharp whang!, and then silence.
We sat there for a long time, nobody talking. To tell the truth, we were more rattled than if the Japs had come.
Hillbilly got on the phone to battalion headquarters. Major John Gustafson had taken over from Colonel Walt as commander.
“John, we need to come out of here,” Hillbilly said.
We couldn’t hear the other side of the conversation.
“No, John. I’m telling you, we need to come out of here. We’ve had a situation here and everybody’s nerves are shot. We need to get the hell out.”
By daybreak a tank found its way to us through the jungle. We’d covered the body of the dog handler with his poncho and loaded it on the tank and started back, through the dripping trees.
Later we learned two barges full of Japs tried to land farther north that night and the night after. A Navy ship intercepted them and sank both vessels. But no Japs crossed over where we had been watching.
It was another one of those nights we didn’t talk about afterward. None of us was proud of it, but that dog handler had endangered all of us, the whole crew that was there in the jungle. We’d done what we had to do. I was as close as anybody to what happened, three or four feet away. I’d seen who’d swung the shovel. I knew who did it. He did something that needed to be done. As long as any of us is alive, none of us will reveal who it was.
The strange thing is that the Doberman was silent during the whole deal.
We continued our patrols for a couple of days until the smaller claw was declared secure. K Company dug in along the shore near an area that had been designated Purple Beach, where we’d been expecting a Jap landing. We had fared pretty well so far compared to other units. We lost thirty-seven men, killed or wounded. The mortar section hadn’t lost anybody.
But on the opposite side of Peleliu the First Marines were in terrible shape. After the bitter down-to-the-last-man fight for the Point, Chesty Puller had pushed them on to fight for the high ground beyond the airfield. Bloody Nose Ridge was just the start of it. Behind that and continuing halfway up the island was a series of steep-sided coral ridges, the tallest about five hundred feet, with narrow canyons between. These were the Umurbrogol Mountains. The photographs had shown only a thick carpet of trees. Even after we’d bombed and napalmed most of the cover, you couldn’t make sense of the terrain. The slopes tilted every which way and they were shot through with cracks, crevices, caves and tunnels where the Japs were dug in and waiting. This was our nightmare for the rest of the time we fought on Peleliu, and long after we’d left.
The First Marines’ Third Battalion was on the west side, the coastal flats. But their First and Second battalions had tackled the Umurbrogols head-on. No sooner had they fought to the top of one ridge than the Japs on the ridge behind had thrown them back. It was cave-to-cave fighting. There was no way they could dig them out. They’d seal up one entrance with a satchel charge and the Japs would fire at them from two other entrances. There wasn’t anything you could call a front line, like we’d had on New Britain and we’d have on Okinawa. It was a different kind of warfare.
Out in the mangrove jungle, we’d escaped the worst of it. But we’d get our own taste soon enough.
After a week fighting on the Point and then on the ridges, there was hardly anything left of the First Marines. Puller was ordered to pull the First Regiment back. Over the protests of General Rupertus, who wanted Peleliu to be an all-Marine show, the Army’s 321st Regimental Combat Team was brought in. They’d just come off a brief but successful fight for Angaur, a small island about six miles south of Peleliu.
This was the start of a whole different approach to the fight for the Umurbrogols, and the Fifth Marines were going to play our part.
About September 25, elements of the First Marines started settling in our area out on the smaller claw, waiting for a ship to take them back to Pavuvu for a well-earned rest. We got an order to withdraw to the east road, where trucks would be waiting for us. We gathered all our gear and started back the way we’d come. Somewhere near the neck where we’d taken friendly fire, we were marching along single file on the side of the road when we met the raggedest bunch of Marines I’d ever seen, coming our direction along the other side of the road. They were all that was left of Puller’s First Regiment. We stopped and swapped news. We found out they had lost about three-quarters of their regiment. What was left looked like ghosts of Marines. They went their way and we went ours, wondering what we were getting into.
The trucks were waiting. We slung our gear aboard, climbed on and headed south, back toward the airfield. Things had changed. We no longer came under sustained fire from the ridge. The trucks turned west across the northern edge of the field, and we got a look at what had been going on since we had crossed it the week before.
The Seabees had arrived and gone to work. Bulldozers and graders were all over the place, and a cloud of fine coral dust hung over the scene. The carcasses of Jap planes had been dragged off the field and the pockmarked runways had been filled in and smoothed out. Little spotter planes were flitting around. As frogmen had blasted passages through the reef so the LSTs could come ashore, the grasshoppers had arrived on the beach in crates. Crews had put them together in a day or two, and now they were spotting for artillery. A group of stubby Hellcat fighters had flown in and taken up residence, even though the edge of the field was still within range of Jap mortars. The Seabees and aircrews were living in neat rows of tents, and they’d set up a mess hall. It was downright luxurious.
We went our dusty, bouncing way to the west road and turned north. The farther we rode, the closer the shore came in on our left and the rugged ridges of the Umurbrogols on our right. We’d gone just a short distance before we started seeing dogfaces, Army troops from the 321st. The trucks stopped and let us out. We exchanged scuttlebutt with the soldiers, who were going to stay behind while we moved through them. The road already had a reputation. They were calling it Sniper’s Alley.
We waited an hour or two for a couple Sherman tanks and then started north. We were close enough to the ocean to hear waves slapping the rocks along the shore. Trees closed in on our right, and as the afternoon wore on the shadows of the ridge started to fall across the road. Corporal John Teskevich and several of our riflemen had climbed on board and were riding along when a Jap sniper that nobody ever saw shot Teskevich through the stomach. I was maybe fifty yards away. He died on the spot.
Teskevich was a good Marine. A tough, scrappy coal miner from Pennsylvania with a head of thick black hair and a big handlebar mustache that was his pride and joy, he had been one of our crew that Captain Haldane sent over to guard the beer storehouse on Banika. One morning while he was still sleeping, someone snuck into his tent and shaved off half of his mustache. Teskevich came roaring out, yelling that he’d fight the whole bunch of us. He looked pretty comical with half a mustache. Sergeant Jim Day got him calmed down, but I really do believe he would have taken us all on at once. I don’t know who did that, probably never will know.
Occasional sniper fire continued as we moved on, but nobody else was hit. When we stopped for the evening word was passed along to watch for infiltrators. Our line extended from the road to the shoreline, no more than 150 feet to our left. We were under the eyes of the Japs up in the caves on the ridge, and we knew there were more scattered through the woods to the right of the road. But Captain Haldane thought the Japs might try to wade along the shore and come in on our left. Jim Burke and I scraped out foxholes a few feet apart where we had a clear view of the water. Again it was impossible to dig deep in the hard coral, so we piled up rocks around our positions and waited. Just before dark, Captain Haldane ordered artillery to work over the woods in front of us along the base of the ridge. It was satisfying to hear those incoming 75s. We’d soon find out if they did much good.
A little after dark, Jim whispered that he heard someone splashing out in the water. A low-hanging half-moon cast a long bar of light across the waves. We watched and waited, and pretty soon we heard voices from that direction. I never could figure out why the Japs would jabber when they were trying to sneak around in the dark. But they always did.
Jim saw him first, a silhouette moving along in the moonlight just offshore. He said later all he really saw at first was the head and shoulders.
“Burgin, give me your rifle,” he whispered. He had been carrying only his .45. “I can see that son of a bitch.”
I eased my M1 over to him. I heard the safety softly click.
We waited for five or ten seconds. Then Jim fired and there was a splash.
“Got him,” I said.
Jim handed my rifle back. “Thank you very much,” he said.
Then he shouted, “Heads up, you guys. There’s more of them out there.”
Up closer to the road Sledgehammer and Snafu Shelton were sharing a foxhole. The drill was that one man would sleep while the other kept watch. An hour on, an hour off.
Sledge was on watch a few hours before dawn. Snafu was sleeping, snoring as usual and occasionally muttering to himself. Probably something like “We need more men in here!” That was his constant complaint no matter where we were.
In the moonlight, the coral road was a bright ribbon through the dark wall of trees. While Sledge watched, two figures popped out of the darkness on the other side of the road, yelling something in Japanese and waving their arms. One of them cut to Sledge’s right, ran down the road and disappeared to where Sledge knew another company was dug in.
The other figure ran straight for Sledge, waving a bayonet over his head.
Sledge grabbed his carbine, but hesitated. Other Marines lay in his line of fire.
With a yell, the oncoming Jap disappeared into a nearer foxhole. There was a series of thuds and grunts and yells, the sounds of a wild struggle. Then as Sledge watched, a figure jumped out of the hole and started in the direction of the command post nearby. Just then a Marine stood up and swung his rifle by the barrel, clubbing the running figure and bringing him down in midstride.
Down the road, where the first Jap had disappeared, someone started screaming wildly—Jap or Marine, Sledge couldn’t tell. Then the screaming stopped. The figure clubbed with the rifle lay in the road groaning.
There was a rifle shot from the foxhole just in front of Sledge, and someone yelled, “I got him.”
Everyone was awake now, but nobody knew what had happened.
“How many were there?” somebody asked.
“I saw two,” Sledge said.
“There must have been more,” somebody else said.
No, Sledge insisted. Two. One ran across the road and the other ran down to the right, where he got shot.
Then who was that groaning in the road? the other Marine asked.
“I don’t know,” Sledge said. “I didn’t see but two of them. I’m sure of it.”
“I’ll check it out,” somebody said and crawled out onto the road in the direction the groans were coming from. There was a sharp report of a .45, and the Marine crawled back to his foxhole.
In the graying light before dawn, Sledge looked over at the figure lying in the road. Somehow it didn’t look Jap. He wore Marine leggings. Sledge crawled over for a closer look.
He recognized the fallen man instantly. It was Bill Middlebrook, one of the riflemen. He had a hole in his temple.
“My God,” Sledge gasped.
A sergeant ran over. “Did he get shot by one of the Japs?”
Sledge couldn’t answer.
The man who had crawled into the road to see who was groaning turned pale. With quivering lips, he went straight to the command post to report what had happened.
A little later that morning Captain Haldane appeared and, one by one, questioned the men who had been close enough to have seen at least part of what happened the night before. How many Japs? he wanted to know.
Two, Sledge told him. Only two.
Had Sledge seen who shot Middlebrook?
Yes, he had, Sledge replied.
Captain Haldane nodded. Sledge should keep that information to himself, he said. This had been a tragic mistake, and there was nothing now that would bring Middlebrook back. The Marine who shot him would feel it for the rest of his life.
Over the decades, those of us who know about the incident, who know who shot Middlebrook, have kept faith. Like those of us who know who killed the dog handler, it’s never spoken of. When we get together, the last few of us, we don’t talk about it.
Headquarters had sent our regiment north along the west road because there was a change in strategy. Instead of tackling the Umurbrogols head-on, they had decided to move around behind them and come down from the north. Our job was now to secure the north end of Peleliu. Once this was done we’d start working our way down the ridges and valleys, digging the Japs out of their caves as we went.
The morning after the terrible night along the west road, we moved through the ruins of a small village that Second Battalion had taken the day before. Then we attacked and overran a steep hill that overlooked a trail connecting the island’s west and east roads across a broad saddle. All the time we were taking Jap artillery fire from somewhere north of us and from a big gun over on Ngesebus Island. Every time it went off you could hear the whump! all over Peleliu.
North of our hill, a row of four round-topped hills extended across the island to the eastern shore. At right angles to these hills a ridge continued along the west road, overlooking the narrow channel that separated Peleliu from Ngesebus. Once the hills had been covered with thick trees, but we’d blasted them until they looked like they’d had a bad haircut. Still, they were full of hidden caves, and the caves were full of Japs. As long as they stood in front of us, there was no way to get at Ngesebus.
From the top of our hill we looked across a sixty-foot drop-off to the valley floor. On the hills opposite we could watch for Japs to appear in the cave openings and pick them off. And they could pick us off. There was a man on my left that afternoon, sitting about three or four feet away. I heard the whack of the bullet even before I heard the rifle shot. I knew instantly he was dead. I’d shot enough deer on the farm to know what a bullet sounds like when it hits. It got him about half an inch above his eyes, dead center.
There was no way to dig two-man foxholes, so once again we piled up rocks and hoped for the best. Normally we’d stay about six feet apart, almost at arm’s length so we could reach out and touch one another. Through the night we’d take turns sleeping. I’d watch and the next man over would sleep. The man beyond him would watch and the next one would sleep, and so on.
When the Japs came calling at night they wore these rubber-soled canvas shoes, a little like sneakers. They didn’t make a sound. You’d look out and not see a thing. You’d look the other way for a second and turn back. And there’d be a Jap right in front of you. Twenty feet away, where there was nothing at all before.
The fourth man down the line from me was sleeping. All of a sudden I heard this scuffle, these grunts, and then a long, drawn-out scream.
The guy had been sleeping flat on his back when he felt a weight on his chest and woke up with fingers around his throat. Afterward, when he was able to tell us what happened, he said he found this Jap sitting on him, choking him. He said he could feel himself going under, losing consciousness. He knew the man was going to kill him.
“Everything I was ever taught in training about judo, jujitsu, how to defend yourself ran through my mind like a streak of lightning,” he told us. “I just went through everything.
“I knew what I was going to do. I reached up and put my left hand behind his head and with my right hand I poked two fingers in his eyes. Hard.”
The Jap instantly released his hold and fell back.
“I grabbed him by the neck and the seat of the pants and threw him off the cliff.”
I heard that Jap screaming all the way down, from the second his eyes were gouged until he hit the bottom. I’ve never heard such a bloodcurdling sound in my life.
The next day the Army moved into our places on top of the hill. We got word that evening that Third Battalion had been picked for a special operation. We were going across to Ngesebus.