Ngesebus lay in plain sight. The channel separating it from the northern tip of Peleliu was about five hundred yards across and only four feet deep in places. There had been a wooden causeway between the two islands, but we’d bombed that out.
There was a small Japanese air base on Ngesebus, barely big enough for a Piper Cub, as well as the pair of big guns that had been pounding us across the strait. There was a chance that the Japs would barge reinforcements down from Babelthuap some night. At low tide they could easily wade across to Peleliu and surprise us like they had at Guadalcanal.
But for us, getting across was not going to be that easy.
The west road was the only approach. It ran to a phosphate refinery at the north end of Peleliu, passing along the foot of a low ridge. At right angles to the ridge a series of four round-top hills ran across Peleliu to the east coast. These hills were going to be a problem. But the real barrier to getting to Ngesebus was the ridge. Inside its northernmost tip the Japanese Navy had dug the granddaddy of all the cave-and-tunnel complexes. Entrances looked out in three directions with all sorts of cross tunnels and connections on several levels. It was equipped with electric lighting, communication lines, storerooms, and an infirmary. Everything the one thousand Japs inside would need to keep the west road bottled up and to survive an attack. Our planes and artillery hit that ridge over and over until we thought there was nothing left to hit. When the first of our tanks went clanking up the west road and into full view of the cave, the Japs fired down on it and stopped it dead. All this time the guns over on Ngesebus were also raining shells down on the north end of Peleliu. We had no way to launch an attack on the smaller island until we gained control of the ridge, the west road, and the channel beyond.
Someone at battalion headquarters hit on an idea—they blanketed the beach on Ngesebus with smoke shells, letting the clouds drift across the channel. Then five amtracs waded into the channel and turned their 75s on the hill. They targeted the largest cave entrance with round after round until return fire was silenced. Then, with tanks leading the way, an amtrac with a mounted flamethrower moved in and torched every cave opening they could find. As a final touch a team of engineers blasted the entrances shut.
Meanwhile we were waiting back at the junction of the west and east roads. Late in the afternoon we got word that the way was clear. We’d cross to Ngesebus at nine the next morning, September 28.
It could be that General Rupertus was embarrassed that the invasion of Peleliu had gone on long past the three days he had predicted. It could be that by now the division command was as frustrated with the place as we were and wanted to see some kind of clear-cut victory. But our assault on Ngesebus was planned to a tee. It was to be a textbook exercise. The next morning every senior officer on Peleliu and from the surrounding fleet who wasn’t otherwise engaged was assembled at a point where they could look out over the channel and watch us go in. We had no idea we were playing to such distinguished spectators. They said afterward the reviewing stand must have been armor-plated.
We were at the north point of Peleliu, near the phosphate plant, by eight a.m. We boarded the amtracs and then, as usual, we waited. While we were waiting we were treated to a spectacular sound-and-light show by the Navy and our own fighter planes.
The battleship Mississippi and cruisers Columbus and Denver were parked out west of the strait, and for forty minutes they slammed the beach across from us from one end to the other with fourteen-inch and eight-inch shells. When that let up, the Corsairs started in. Two dozen had arrived from the Lexington, and boy, were we happy to see them. For the first time in the war, we had Marine pilots supporting Marine troops in a landing operation. They were taking off from the Peleliu airstrip and coming in from behind us. We watched as they peeled off, diving through the smoke and the dust, working the beach over with bombs, rockets and machine guns. As each plane finished its run it would fly back for another load. Some pilots cut it very close. We’d watch them dive and disappear into the columns of smoke. Just when we were sure they’d crashed, they’d pull into the clear, leaving the smoke swirling in their wake. Man, those guys were good!
The Corsairs were still at work at 9:05 when we started across, and they continued almost to the minute we drove up onto the sand and bailed out. Thirteen Sherman tanks led the way, waterproof for amphibious operation. Three were swamped, but the rest made it. We followed, packed into thirty-five amtracs. Most of them mounted 75mm howitzers and they were firing almost the whole way across. There were about seven hundred of us, all that was left of the Third Battalion. Two weeks ago, when we’d stormed ashore on Orange Beach Two, there had been a thousand. Like then, we were sweating and scared. Nothing on Peleliu had come easy. We were sure this wasn’t going to be any different.
Ngesebus was even smaller than Peleliu, hardly a mile square, and flat except for one low hill. There were none of the high ridges and limestone cliffs that had made Peleliu a death trap. But Ngesebus had its own surprises waiting for us.
It took the amtracs about six minutes to churn the five hundred yards. We expected any minute to run into the kind of firestorm the Japs had met us with on Peleliu’s beaches, but there was only scattered fire from pillboxes and behind the few ragged trees the Navy and the Corsairs had left standing.
K Company was on the extreme left. This time we had the new model amtracs with the drop-down hatches in back. They rolled up on the beach and several yards inland before coming to a stop. We piled out and ran forward. Once again, the old lesson echoed in our heads: Get off the beach! Navy shells were landing farther inland now, and we had the airfield right in front of us, if you could even call it an airfield. The whole thing didn’t amount to more than a single landing strip surfaced with crushed coral, and a crude taxiway. I’d be surprised if the Japs had ever landed anything bigger than a spotting plane.
We were still taking fire from among the scattered trees. A sniper winged one of our riflemen in the elbow, and when the mortar section corpsman, Ken Caswell, went to his aid, another Marine who was helpfully cutting the man’s backpack free with his KA-BAR accidentally slashed Caswell across the face. The two men went back to first aid. We’d see both of them again.
In less than half an hour we made it across the landing strip and a few dozen yards beyond. There we came upon a low gray bunker that faced the channel.
Our orders were to set up our two guns on the far side of the bunker. K Company’s gunny sergeant, W. R. Saunders, assured us it was clear. He said riflemen had already checked it out, dropping a couple grenades down a vent and moving on. So we went around it and started to dig in. About forty-five or fifty yards ahead, our other squad leader, Corporal Tom Matheney, and our sergeant, Johnny Marmet, were stringing phone wire to a forward observation post. I had no idea where Legs, our lieutenant, might be. That left me in charge, the only NCO on the scene.
After I had made corporal on Pavuvu I never fired the mortar again. I trained guys on it. But as squad leader my job was to be out front with the riflemen, observing and directing the gunner by phone, telling him how many yards to the target, how many degrees left or right.
I was working with good men. They had their quirks. But we were an effective team.
Private First Class George Sarrett, the guy I’d spooked with the land crab on New Britain, was one of the best Marines that ever put on a uniform. He was smart and fearless, and he was fiercely individualistic. I never had a bit of trouble from him, but I never saw him back down from anybody, either. I liked him because he was a fellow Texan.
Our gunner was Jim Burke. Gene Sledge, in With the Old Breed, called Jim a fatalist. I disagree. Jim was calm, like Sarrett. The only time I ever saw him get rattled was when Piss-call Charley bombed his foxhole on New Britain and he was calling over and over for a corpsman.
The assistant gunner was Private First Class Merriel Shelton. I’m the one who stuck Shelton with the nickname “Snafu.” We were in the barracks at Camp Balcombe getting ready to go on liberty. Snafu was always talking, and when he’d get excited you couldn’t always understand him. He was a Louisiana Cajun from down around Francisville, and he had that accent that kind of swallowed up his words.
That day he had his Australian money lying out on the cot. I said, “How much you got there, Shelton?”
He counted up the bills. “Well, I’ve got ten or eleven pounds,” he said. Then he went through the small change. “And I must have eight or ten ounces.”
I looked at him. “You’re screwed up or something. You’re just a snafu waiting to happen.”
And that was it. From then on he was Snafu Shelton.
Whenever we got into a firefight Snafu would hunker down behind something and mutter over and over, “They need to send more men up here! We need more men here!”
I used to think, You get your ass up out of that hole and behind that gun and see what’s going on, you might could take care of a few of them yourself. But I never said anything. Besides, he was a good man.
Private First Class Eugene Sledge was an ammo carrier. I never had to tell Sledge to do a thing twice. You asked him to do it, and he’d do it. He might be scared half to death, and a lot of the time he probably was. But he would do it. That’s all you can ask of a man.
Private First Class John Redifer was our other ammo carrier. He was the type of person who likes to think things over. Slow and deliberate, but rock-solid. Nothing unnerved him. I never saw him panic. He and his buddy Private First Class Vincent Santos, a gunner and a Texan, used to go fishing on Pavuvu with hand grenades until somebody higher up put a stop to it.
All of these men were sure-enough Marines. I can’t think of a higher compliment to pay them. You could count on them.
We’d been there around the bunker for a few minutes when Sledge called out.
“Burgin, there’s Japs in this bunker!”
You never assumed your back was safe on Peleliu. We hadn’t been watching our backs. Now, if Sledge was right, we had more than an isolated sniper behind us. We had a whole bunker full of them.
“I think you’re cracking up, Sledgehammer,” I yelled. “Saunders says it’s clear.”
Sledge, Vincent Santos, Snafu and Redifer were crouching in front of the bunker, watching several horizontal slits along its wall.
“I don’t give a damn what Saunders told you,” Sledge yelled back. “There’s Japs in this thing. I can hear voices.”
I went back to look over the situation. From what I could see, the low mound of coral sand about four feet high concealed a concrete box about twenty feet long and five feet wide. At each end steps led down behind an embankment and around a corner to a low entrance. You’d have to stoop to get in. The slits everyone had their eyes on were about eight inches long and two inches high with steel bars, like a jail cell.
“I could hear them jabbering in there,” Sledge said.
I bent to look into one of the slits and a face looked back at me.
Before he could duck I stuck my M1 between the bars and got off two or three rounds. The face vanished. I’m sure I hit him. There was a sudden commotion in the bunker, like you’d hear from a beehive if you slapped a hollow tree.
I stuck the rifle in the slit again and emptied the clip, turning the barrel right and left, trying to get at every corner of that thing. Bullets were singing, ricocheting all over.
When the racket died down I could still hear jabbering. I couldn’t tell how many there were in there. But I knew there had to be a bunch.
Just then a grenade came bouncing out of one of the side entrances. Everyone dove for cover as it went off. Two or three more grenades followed.
Redifer, Santos, Shelton and Private First Class Leslie Porter, another ammo carrier, climbed on top of the mound and the rest of us crawled around to the front—the beach side—and hunkered down.
“Sledge,” I called out, “take a look in the end of that thing and tell me what you see.”
Sledge poked his head over the embankment and ducked back. Instantly there was a burst of machine-gun fire from inside.
“You all right, Sledge?” I called out. He managed a weak croak, then disappeared around the corner of the bunker and climbed on top to join Redifer, Santos and Shelton.
Redifer was on his belly above one of the entrances when the barrel of a machine gun poked out. Before the gunner could fire, Redifer reached down and grabbed the barrel. The Jap jerked it back inside.
“There’s an automatic weapon in here,” Redifer shouted.
“It’s just rifles,” Snafu said.
That was Snafu. He could argue whether the sun came up.
While Snafu and Redifer bickered, Santos found a pipe sticking a couple inches above the bunker, probably the same one where Saunders’s riflemen had dropped in their grenades. Santos started dropping grenades down the pipe as fast as he could pull the pins—and believe me, that was fast. Santos was a little guy but he was quick. When he ran out, Sledge and Snafu passed him their own grenades. We could hear a dull thump each time one exploded in the bunker below. It was hard to see how anybody inside could be alive after that. There was a moment of silence, then two Jap grenades flew out the side of the bunker. Most of us were clear, but Redifer and Porter, who were standing closest, raised their arms to shield their faces just as the grenades went off.
Both were peppered with fragments. Doc Caswell had returned, his face swathed in bandages. He worked over their forearms and soon had them patched up enough so they were able to go on. But I was thinking, This could go on forever. We’re pinned down here. There’s no need in getting my men killed. I motioned everybody back a few dozen yards to a couple bomb craters.
I knew one of the amtracs was idling down by the beach and it had a 75 mounted in a turret. I figured if we could get that amtrac to blast a hole in the bunker, we could make short work of the Japs and finish our business. While I was thinking, four or five Japs scrambled out of the bunker and took off to our right, running for a thicket. They were carrying rifles with bayonets, but they weren’t shooting. What struck me as funny was they were running clutching their pants, which seemed half falling off. We cut them down before they got to the woods. I thought, What kind of army sends its men into battle without belts to hold up their pants?
I told everyone to stand by while I trotted down toward the beach. On my way I found Corporal Charlie Womack, I Company’s red-bearded flamethrower specialist, and his assistant, Private First Class William Lewis. Lewis had a combat shotgun. Womack was broad-shouldered and big as a football lineman. He needed to be—he carried seventy pounds of napalm and nitrogen in tanks strapped to his back. I told him to wait while I got the amtrac. When I had rounded everyone up we rumbled through the brush the hundred yards or so back to the bunker.
“Here’s what I need,” I told the amtrac’s gunner. “Knock me a hole in that thing at least two feet wide to where a flamethrower can get in and scorch ’em.”
We ducked into the bomb craters to watch. The amtrac pulled closer to the bunker, then let loose with three or four deafening rounds that left our ears ringing for minutes afterward. Coral sand and chunks of concrete rattled down on us and the mortars. Seconds passed before we could make out anything through the smoke and dust. But sure enough, the 75 had done its work, opening a hole in the bunker about four feet wide. One shell had gone clean through. We could see through to the other side.
How anybody could survive that blast puzzles me to this day. But a Jap suddenly popped up in the hole, waving a grenade over his head and yelling something. Sledge and a couple others fired and he went down still clutching the grenade, which went off where he lay.
Now everybody was firing. “Get that flamethrower up here, Red,” I yelled. “Everyone else, keep shooting!”
Flamethrowers are a wicked weapon, no doubt about it, but we never had any qualms about using them. They would do the job.
While we poured shots into the hole left by the amtrac, Womack and Lewis moved up to about five yards from the bunker. Lewis twisted a valve on one of the tanks. There was a jetlike whoosh, and a flash of heat and a torrent of orange flame splashed against the concrete and through the hole. We heard screams, and three more Japs came stumbling out the side, wreathed in flames. They went down in a burst of carbine fire, and as they lay writhing on the ground still burning, a couple of us ran forward to finish them off.
We waited for the smoke to clear, then Redifer and I ducked down and entered. Redifer was the kind of man you want with you in a situation like that.
When our eyes adjusted to the dark we could see why we’d had such a hard time digging them out of there. The whole length of the bunker was divided into a series of compartments separated by low openings. The openings were offset one from another so that a blast in one compartment would not reach the men in the adjoining compartments. Each had a narrow slit to the outside, a firing port. They could probably have holed up in there indefinitely, slipping out at night to bayonet us or slit our throats, like they had on Peleliu.
There were weapons scattered everywhere—a machine gun, rifles, grenades. We could smell charred flesh. In one of the compartments we found three or four blackened bodies heaped in a pile. The one sprawled over the top didn’t look quite right. Something about the way he was lying there caught my attention—maybe I caught a slight movement. I motioned to Redifer to stop. Then I gave the Jap a kick in the ribs just beneath his arm. He grunted. I yanked my .45 out of its holster and fired into the back of his head, point-blank.
Altogether, we counted ten dead in the bunker, including the Jap I’d just shot. Seven bodies lay outside. That was seventeen Japs that we knocked out without losing a man, two only slightly wounded. I felt pretty good about that.
For the rest of the day K Company mopped up the west end of the island, including a small hill north of the runway that was full of caves. We dug in late that afternoon at the foot of the hill, two to a foxhole, taking turns sleeping and watching. I shared a bomb crater with the guy who’d dropped the bazooka back on the first day on Peleliu. I took the first hour’s watch, then he took over. The wind came up, carrying the sharp smell of smoke and burnt flesh. Sometime during the night a rain squall passed over. It was his turn to stand watch again and I gratefully fell asleep. For some reason I awoke in a short time. My companion was sprawled against the side of the crater, peacefully snoring. I sat on him and grabbed him by the lapels and slammed his head against the coral. Before he was half awake I had my hands around his throat.
“You son of a bitch,” I said. “If ever I catch you asleep again when you’re standing guard, you’ll never wake up!”
After we got off Ngesebus, I went to Captain Haldane about the incident. I said, “I don’t want that SOB in my platoon. Not if I can’t depend on him.”
We had one more day of fighting ahead of us, on a narrow peninsula jutting a few hundred yards to the northwest, where the Japs had located the big guns that had been giving us such fits. Three of our tanks knocked them out by early afternoon, and our invasion of Ngesebus was over. We’d faced about five hundred enemy defenders, but they were the best soldiers in the Imperial Japanese Army, veterans hardened by several years fighting in China and Manchuria. Our battalion lost forty-eight Marines—fifteen killed and thirty-three wounded. We’d killed 470 Japs. Only twenty-three had surrendered.
Late in the day the Army came across the island and relieved us. We boarded Higgins boats and went down the east coast of Peleliu to Purple Beach, where we would go into reserves. There we found Chesty Puller’s First Marines, still waiting for a ship to take them to Pavuvu.
As we were starting our rest, the Fifth Regiment’s First and Second battalions were being thrown against the remaining Jap positions on the northern end of Peleliu. Second Battalion mopped up around the phosphate plant. First Battalion attacked and occupied the third of the four hills extending west to east across the island. The next day they turned their attention to the fourth and highest hill, which had a Jap radar on top. By late afternoon they were on the summit. The next day, September 30, they climbed into trucks and amtracs for the ride down the east road to the smaller claw, where they joined us at Purple Beach.
The last concentration of Japs on Peleliu were holed up in the rocky heart of the Umurbrogol, in a hellish jumble of coral rock called the Pocket. The only clear way into the Pocket was through a narrow valley called the Horseshoe that dead-ended in a steep slope, what Texans would call a box canyon. Beyond the Horseshoe was a seemingly endless series of ridges and valleys—Hill 140, Ridge 3, Boyd Ridge, Baldy, Wattie Ridge, Hill 120, Hill 100A. It went on and on.
In the center of the Horseshoe was a large sink that contained the only standing fresh water on the island. Japs would sneak out at night to fill their canteens here. The east wall of the Horseshoe was formed by a steep ridge that was anchored on the south by Hill 100. Hills seemed to be named for their elevation in feet. The ridge had been named for Lieutenant Colonel Walt, the regiment’s executive officer who’d come looking for us the night we were lost in the scrub.
Overlooking the Horseshoe from the west was a row of crags and knobs starting with Five Sisters on the south, then Five Brothers. West of these was another valley, Wildcat Bowl. Beyond that rose a sheer cliff called the China Wall. The other side of that was Death Valley. From most of these ridges, the Japs could fire down on the west road.
For two weeks, the First Marines then Seventh Marines had thrown themselves at the Pocket, carving away slices from one side or the other until the Japs were pushed into an area no more than five hundred by a thousand yards. But this area was shot through with caves, most of them screened by thick brush. Our Shermans had advanced into the Horseshoe with the Seventh Marines and blasted every cave opening they could find. Then for some reason we never understood, headquarters had ordered the tanks withdrawn and sent back to Pavuvu. In their place came Shermans from the Army’s 710th Tank Battalion. They went in and pounded the same caves. Marine Corsairs dropped napalm, which burned off the covering trees until the ridges were as bare and scruffy as a mangy dog. That helped some.
On October 1 we got word to stand by to join the Seventh Marines for a final assault on the Pocket. The morning of October 3, trucks dumped us north of the airfield, where the east and west roads came together. We started west toward the Five Sisters. Our move on the Five Sisters was supposed to divert the Japs’ attention from the Seventh Marines. Far to our right, they were moving down the east road to make another attack on Walt Ridge.
We led off with a heavy artillery barrage, then our Corsairs took over. They’d leave the airstrip, which was just behind us, and drop napalm on the rocky spires just in front of us. Then they’d wheel around, return to the airstrip and reload. The whole circuit couldn’t have taken more than a minute or two. Most of the pilots didn’t even bother to draw up their landing gear. It must have been the shortest bombing mission in the war.
Meanwhile we set up our guns and laid down heavy mortar fire in front of the advancing riflemen. They got to the first of the pinnacles about noon and within a few hours had taken four of the five. Their problem was the second pinnacle in the chain, which lay north of the others. To get to it, we had to squeeze between two of the other Sisters into Death Valley. We soon found out where it got its name.
Two weeks of fighting had stripped the trees bare and littered the ground with a knotted mess of tree limbs and rock. As we advanced, the Japs had a clear view from their caves up in the crags to our right. Our mortars were dug in a few dozen yards behind the riflemen, who were making good progress until, late in the afternoon, rifle and machine-gun fire started hitting them from everywhere at once. I’ll say this about the Japs, they were disciplined. They’d hold their fire until we walked right into them.
The whole company was thrown back. There were calls for corpsmen everywhere. It got so bad that ammo carriers ran forward to help carry stretchers, leaving just a few of us to man the guns. Jap snipers seemed to single out corpsmen and stretcher carriers, and we tried to shield them by throwing smoke grenades. Every man’s worst nightmare was that he would be hit while carrying a stretcher and dump a wounded Marine on the ground.
Before we got out of there, we’d lost five killed and fifteen wounded. It was K Company’s worst day on Peleliu. We fell back and set up a new line just before sunset and waited for them to come creeping out of their caves. We were only a few hundred yards ahead of where we’d started out that morning. But we were in the open, where it would make it easier to spot infiltrators. During the night artillery fired star shells, which burst overhead, catching our visitors like a flashbulb. They came single or in pairs all through the night. At sunup we counted twenty-one dead Japs around us.
The next two days were the same story. We moved forward into the Five Sisters, ran into intense fire and fell back. We lost nine more men, one of them killed.
All the time we kept up the mortar fire. George Sarrett and I were on the front lines, observing. Neither of us had caught a wink of sleep in three days. Just before it got dark I found I couldn’t focus my eyes anymore. I called John Marmet on the phone.
“John, I gotta come in. I’m absolutely dead.”
“Okay, come on in.”
George and I scrambled back through the twilight until we got to where we’d set up the guns. There were two of them, each firing a round every two or three minutes, for harassment as much as anything. In front of one of the guns was a shell crater, and I flopped in. You get in front of a 60mm mortar, it’s loud. The guns were firing right over my head every couple minutes all night long.
I don’t even remember falling asleep. The next thing I knew Marmet was nudging me awake. It was eight o’clock the next morning. I’d slept in all that racket for twelve hours.
You get that way. You get to the point that you don’t give a damn if you live or die, you’re so exhausted. You’re living in a nightmare. It’s impossible to imagine the look and smell of a battlefield if you’ve never been on one, and impossible to forget if you have. The ground where we now found ourselves was littered with discarded combat gear, Jap rifles that we’d smashed so they couldn’t be used again, spent shells, empty ammo boxes, bloody dressings, half-eaten rations rotting in the sun.
Half of us had diarrhea. You tried to dispose of it in empty ration cans and the like, but you were never far from the stink of shit. We and the Japs both tried to retrieve our dead, but too many times they were left where they fell. In the heat and humidity it didn’t take them long to go sour, decaying and rotting and adding to the stench. Big metallic-green blowflies swarmed over everything. If you saw a corpse move, it would be maggots. Throw a rock into a bush and a cloud of flies would rise up thick enough to cast a shadow. They buzzed from the bodies and the shit. They were even crawling into our rations and into our canteen cups.
I don’t know when it was that they finally started coming over in planes, spraying everything with DDT to keep down the flies. If it had any effect, we didn’t notice. They were still thick as raisins.
Late one afternoon Sergeant Jim McEnery came upon the blackened and bloated bodies of four Marines in a ravine at the foot of one of the Five Sisters. They were laid out on stretchers as though somebody was carrying them to first aid. They’d been there at least two weeks.
A little later I found four more in a rock crevice. From their equipment I judged they’d been advance scouts from an intelligence unit. The Japs had hacked them to pieces. They’d cut off heads and hands. One of them, they’d cut off his penis and testicles and stuffed them in his mouth.
It made me dizzy and sick. We’d heard the stories. On New Britain Japs had tied Marines to trees and used them for bayonet practice. So I never had felt any regrets about killing a Jap in combat. Never remorse about any of it. But after the sight of those mutilated bodies, I guessed I’d hate Japs as long as I lived.
While we were throwing ourselves against the Five Sisters, the Seventh Marines walked into a slaughter north of Walt Ridge that cut them up so badly they were pulled out. The regiment had lost 46 percent of its fighting strength and was in no condition to carry on. Trucks picked up the survivors and drove them back to the Purple Beach rest area. The First Marines had already pulled out for Pavuvu with over 70 percent losses. That left us. Peleliu had cost us 36 percent of our men, wounded and killed. But we were the only Marines General Rupertus had left.
Our commander, Colonel Harold “Bucky” Harris, had a well-known philosophy. Expend ammunition, not men. He had been rethinking the whole campaign against the Pocket. Whatever happened next, it wouldn’t be another headlong rush. Under Colonel Harris, the Fifth would move slowly and deliberately, reducing the Pocket ridge by ridge and cave by cave. Foot by foot if necessary.
On October 6 Third Battalion was pulled back from the Five Sisters. At nine o’clock the next morning we went into the Horseshoe behind Army tanks. Twice that day we pounded the lower slopes of Walt Ridge and the Five Brothers. Midmorning, when the tanks ran out of ammo, we withdrew to refuel and rearm. Then we went back in, this time taking demolition teams and amtracs with flamethrowers. We went on until early afternoon, when the tanks ran out of ammo again. Then we pulled out and were sent south for a rest.
About this time a three-day typhoon swept over Peleliu. The temperatures fell into the eighties, which was a blessing. But it turned the coral dust into gumbo. The mud clogged our equipment and everything bogged down. Supplies couldn’t get in over the raging surf. Streams of Curtiss Commando cargo planes from Guam air-dropped essentials. After the storm passed temperatures shot up over a hundred again and the mud turned back into dust. Things were as they had been.
On October 10, K Company was pulled out of reserves and sent to clean out a nest of snipers who had been firing down on the west road. We were well behind the front lines, in territory that was supposed to be secure. But once again the Japs had hunkered down and waited. A week before, at a spot along the road called Dead Man’s Curve, they had fired on an Army convoy and brought it to a stop. Everyone bailed out and ran for cover, ducking down behind trucks or diving behind rocks at the side of the road. Colonel Joseph Hankins, commander of First Division’s Headquarters Company, had come along in his jeep to check on reports of snipers. When the convoy stopped, Colonel Hankins got out and walked forward to see what was holding things up. Just as everyone yelled at him to get down, he was hit in the chest. He died lying there in the roadway, the highest-ranking Marine killed on Peleliu.
We had a couple Army tanks along with us this time to provide cover. We were taking rifle and mortar fire from several places along a cliff, but we couldn’t see where it was coming from. Hillbilly Jones’s rifle squad was just up the road, and as the morning dragged on a couple of his men were hit, and one of them was killed. Hillbilly decided to try to get a better view of the shooters from one of the tanks. I was about 150 feet away directing mortar fire and I didn’t see everything that happened. But after discussing the situation briefly with a staff officer from battalion headquarters, Hillbilly climbed onto the back of the tank and scrambled forward to slap the side of the turret to alert the gunner what he was up to. He was just peeking around the turret when a single shot hit him in the side and knocked him down. He rolled off the tank into the road, and the call went out for a corpsman. While we watched, Hillbilly picked himself up, bleeding from the side, and pulled himself back onto the tank. Then he stood up. The next shot caught him in the chest and knocked him flat again. This time he didn’t move.
Word spread down the line—Hillbilly’s been hit. By the time I got to the tank, stretcher bearers had carried away the body. All the memories came flooding back. Hillbilly carrying his guitar down to our tents on Pavuvu. Lazy days singing and cracking jokes on the deck of a troopship. Guard duty drinking grapefruit juice and alcohol, and afterward the hangover, on Banika.
For the rest of the day and into the next we blasted away with machine guns, mortars, and rifle fire at every crack or opening we could find along the west road. We took plenty of fire in return, until eventually it tapered off. Not once during that time did we see a single live Jap.
The day after Hillbilly was killed, Second Battalion made it south all the way to the foot of Hill 140, at the head of the Horseshoe. By midafternoon they had taken it, and after that they held it against a sharp counterattack. The battalion had fought its way in from the east road past Baldy, where the Seventh Marines had been beaten so badly. This time bulldozers smoothed the way, clearing a path for flame-throwing amtracs and sealing caves as they advanced.
Command viewed Hill 140 as the key to the whole operation. Its west side fell away sharply to the floor of the Horseshoe. The top looked down on four of the Five Brothers, just to the south. K Company’s mortars were rushed back along the west road and let out at a place where we could proceed on foot to Hill 140. There we would rejoin the rest of Third Battalion, which was on its way to relieve the Second Battalion early the next day. First Battalion had already gone into reserve. That left us the last Marine battalion fighting on Peleliu.
The death of Hillbilly Jones had been a blow. Soon we would absorb another.
Command’s idea had been to plant a 75mm pack howitzer on the top of the hill. But the crest was too sharp and narrow for a gun emplacement, and soon both gun and crew had been dislodged by Japanese fire.
When the Third Battalion arrived, Second Battalion was taking fire from three sides. Where the hill dropped into the Horseshoe, there was no protecting flank. In effect, they held the hill on just three sides. The other was exposed. Orders for Third Battalion were to secure the south side and take the bend out of the line.
In the morning they started working their way up the hill to where Second Battalion was dug in just short of the crest. Everybody was warning them not to show their heads over the top. Jap snipers on the far side were alert, and deadly. But someone needed to see what was beyond the hill in order to direct the battalion’s fire.
Captain Haldane, Johnny Marmet, Sergeant Jim McEnery and a couple other NCOs had made their way to the top and were flat on their bellies trying to figure out how to get a look at the other side. Second Battalion’s own machine gunners were dug in so low, they could hardly see what they were shooting at. They had to sight their guns by looking under the barrels.
This was not satisfactory to Captain Haldane, who was himself an old machine gunner. He slithered forward a few feet and cautiously raised his head.
Everybody heard a sharp thwack and knew instantly what it meant. Those who were close enough said his head just exploded. There was no point in even calling for a corpsman.
We had just arrived at the foot of the hill, looking for our new positions, when Sergeant Marmet came stumbling down the slope, a Thompson submachine gun dangling from his hand by the strap. I knew the moment I saw his face something had happened.
“Hey, Johnny,” I said. “What’s going on?”
He shuffled his feet and gazed off for a moment. “Okay, guys, let’s get squared away here,” he said. Then silence. We looked at one another.
“What the hell’s wrong?” I asked.
“The Japs got the skipper a few minutes ago on the ridge,” he said. It was like a kick in the stomach. Somebody threw down the base plate and the mortar tube. Somebody said, “Goddamn.” Sledge turned away. We stood there paralyzed and silent.
Finally Marmet pulled himself together. “All right,” he said. “All right. Let’s move out.” And we did.
It was more than a death in the family, losing Hillbilly Jones and Andy Haldane like that. They had been on Guadalcanal together, on New Britain and Peleliu. I found out later Haldane had been about to recommend me for the Silver Star for our action at the bunker on Ngesebus. He was killed before he could write it up. It didn’t make things any better and it didn’t make things any worse, as far as I was concerned. Hillbilly and Ack-Ack had been the core of our officers, leaders of men. Leaders of Marines.
First Lieutenant Thomas “Stumpy” Stanley was brought in from the battalion command post to take charge. The mortar squads were lobbing shells over the rim of Hill 140 into the northern end of the Horseshoe and at Walt Ridge beyond.
Jap artillery was answering us less and less. We got the feeling they were just waiting in their holes, like spiders. It rained off and on, and when the sun came out the rain turned to steam. The smell of death and the flies hung over everything, worse than ever. From where we looked out there wasn’t a speck of green anywhere on the island. We’d stripped it bare. All that was left was gray rock and rolling smoke.
On the thirteenth, K Company advanced 150 yards and straightened out the lines. We spent part of the next day with demo squads, sealing caves and stringing communication wire to hinder infiltrators. We figured the more pressure we put on them, the more determined the Japs would be to infiltrate, or even to break out. We heard that the Eighty-first Army Division, the “Wildcat” Division, was on its way from Angaur to relieve us. We also heard that command had declared the assault phase of the invasion—whatever that meant—officially ended. It had been twenty-eight days since we came ashore on Orange Beach Two.
This is where we finished our war on Peleliu. At dawn on October 15, the Army troops marched in, looking grim. They had six more weeks of combat ahead of them. We were headed out. We boarded trucks to the north end of the island, where the Seabees had set up a new bivouac area. For the first time in months we slept in tents, and the tents had plywood decks, which we hadn’t even had on Pavuvu. There were showers, a cookhouse, a mess tent where we could eat sitting down at tables. They had hung a sheet between trees where they could show movies. We shaved, washed our hair, brushed our teeth. Then we brushed our teeth again, just because we could do it.
This idyllic life didn’t last long for the mortar section. We were sent out to the east road and told to set up our guns facing the sea, just in case the Japs tried a landing. (It was not such a far-fetched idea. We heard later the Japs sent a small force over from Babelthuap in mid-January. It was intercepted and all but two of the eighty or so invaders were killed.) A few miles to the south we could hear the Army’s guns pounding away at the Pocket.
Finally they sent us down to Purple Beach to await transport back to Pavuvu. We were issued fresh uniforms, new boondockers, and that wonder of wonders, clean white socks. We burned the rags of our old uniforms and slept in hammocks, our sleep occasionally disturbed by tracers from the distant fighting. I dreamed of Florence, of the little bungalow we’d set up someday, of children running around the house.
A new cemetery appeared alongside the main runway at the airfield. Somewhere among the crosses Hillbilly Jones and Andrew Haldane were at rest. Altogether, the First Marine Division had lost more than 1,250 Marines on Peleliu. More than 5,400 had been wounded. There was no way to count the Japs, but we had killed more than ten thousand for certain. I read somewhere afterward that we had fired almost 16 million rounds of ammunition of all kinds during our time on Peleliu. That works out to more than 1,500 rounds per Jap. That seems about right.
The Fifth Marines had been the only regiment to achieve all its combat objectives. We had established our beachhead, crossed the airfield, occupied Ngesebus, secured northern Peleliu and whittled hundreds of yards off the Pocket. Of course none of us was thinking about any of this while we were at Purple Beach. We were just waiting for our ship to come in.
Transports arrived and one by one the other battalions departed, until we were the last Marine unit on the island. Finally, on October 26, the USS Sea Runner, a Navy troopship, appeared offshore.
The next morning Higgins boats took us out through heavy seas. The Sea Runner had thrown cargo nets over the side, and the little boats bucked on the waves while we tried to grab the nets and pull ourselves to. There wasn’t much talk, no grab-ass going on. We hung on to the nets and started up, hand over foot. I had to stop and rest. We had full packs and the climb seemed to go up and up forever. At the top, sailors reached over and hauled some of us aboard who couldn’t make it. We lay on the deck gasping. No doubt about it, we were a bunch of beat-up raggedy-ass Marines.
The day before we left Peleliu for the Sea Runner, K Company assembled on Purple Beach for a photographer. I have a framed print of the photo hanging in my living room right next to my KA-BAR, some plaques, a flag and some other Marine memorabilia. I look at it every so often. We’re standing there in the strong morning light, on coral sand under swaying palm trees. There are about eighty-five of us, out of the 235 who landed on Peleliu. All of us are skinny. I weighed 138 pounds, down from 165 pounds when I joined the Marines. About half of us are shirtless. None are smiling. I’m the tall one standing right in the middle of the front row.
And you know what? I have absolutely no memory of having that picture taken.