We were a pretty quiet bunch for the six days it took us to sail from Peleliu to Pavuvu. A destroyer escort tailed us most of the way, a reminder that enemy submarines were lurking. Hillbilly Jones wasn’t there with his guitar, so we didn’t have our sing-alongs on the deck of the Sea Runner. There wasn’t any point in polishing and repairing weapons. We were worn down and sobered. What we’d been through hadn’t sunk in, and whatever it was we were heading to wasn’t yet a reality.
Pavuvu looked about the same as we pulled into Macquitti Bay. We were returning to the same rows of tents, the same streets, the same palm trees, the same rats and land crabs, but they’d made a few changes. The Higgins boats took us in to a new steel pier, so we knew the Seabees had been at work. The first thing we saw on the beach was half a dozen Red Cross girls, standing behind decorated tables. They offered us paper cups of grapefruit juice. I suppose it was somebody’s idea of a welcome, but after what we’d been through it just hit me as the strangest thing on earth. What were they doing out here in the middle of the war? I walked on by, along with a few of the others. But Snafu and Santos headed straight for the girls.
They had started construction on a USO canteen near the beach. I never did visit it much, but it was there for those who wanted it.
We sat around until trucks drove us up to Third Battalion’s bivouac area. They’d surfaced the grid of streets with crushed coral since we’d left, and the last of the rotting coconuts had been cleared away. The tents were new, with plywood decks. Seabags with our personal stuff had been piled in the center of each tent. As soon as we started unpacking, the land crabs came skittering out in every direction.
We had showers and a laundry and electric lights. The screened-in battalion mess hall had a concrete floor and rows of tables where we could play cards or just sit around in the evening. But most of us old-timers just went back to our tents, or wandered from tent to tent, looking for old buddies who were in different outfits. We found that many of them had not come back.
Some of the guys complained about the chow not being all that great. But if a Marine isn’t complaining, he isn’t happy. No, it wasn’t Mom’s home cooking. But it was good enough. And there was plenty of it. We weren’t short. We had fresh meat, Coca-Cola and two cans of watery beer a week.
For those just off Peleliu who had spent so much time bitching about everything the first time around, Pavuvu looked pretty good by now. At least nobody was shooting at us.
We didn’t do much of anything for the first ten days or so. They just let us alone to rest and regain our strength, and to mourn for those we’d lost. Then they started us to work, and that helped. Not to forget, but to put everything behind you, to move on. Gradually they picked up the pace and the training got harder. Our platoon now had three mortars and new guns were issued to replace those that had worn out.
While we had been at sea, the First Division was assigned a new commander. Major General Pedro del Valle replaced General Rupertus. General del Valle was a spit-and-polish man, and soon he was putting us through inspections and reviews and close-order drill on the resurfaced parade ground. Like I said, the Marines always knew which buttons to push.
We found our replacements from the States lounging around the tents. The First Division had about forty-five hundred new men to absorb, and we set to work immediately teaching them what we knew. We had now become the division’s “old men.” The Guadalcanal vets got ready for rotation back home. One night late in November Johnny Marmet came into my tent and sat on the cot.
“You know your promotion to sergeant is in the works,” he said.
“Yeah, I knew that,” I said. “Thanks for recommending me.”
That’s when he told me that Captain Haldane had been about to write me up for a Silver Star.
We said our good-byes, and he left. I would miss Johnny. He was one of the best.
Since it looked like I would be replacing him, I set about reorganizing the mortars. I needed a couple ammo carriers. I’d met some of the new replacements and found out that two of them were from Texas—T. L. Hudson and Clyde Cummings. I went down to the end of the company street to the sergeant in charge and told him I wanted both men for my platoon.
“Oh, you do, do you?” he said. “Just why in the hell do you want those particular two?”
“Well, in the first place they’re Texans,” I said. “In the second place, both are good, strong young men. I need two good ammunition carriers and they can do the job. And I want them in my platoon.”
He laughed. “Yeah, go on and take them.”
They were good men, and I put them to good use.
Florence’s letters caught up with me, and I was writing her whenever I got time, two or three times a week. I couldn’t say much. Our mail was censored. We couldn’t write anything about where we were or where we’d been or what we were doing. Just, Hello, I miss you terribly, I love you, I hope to see you soon, Good-bye.
I wrote Florence that if I had my pick of babies, I would like a little girl. She said she told her mother that she planned to have a dozen boys. I kept having dreams that we were married already, living in a little house back in Texas. I longed to wake up and find her in my arms. My letters were short, two or three pages. I could never think of anything to say. Hers were long, six pages and more, and full of news from Australia. She sent me newspapers. One day a fruitcake arrived. I took a piece down to Jim Burke, and when I got back to my tent the rest of the guys had cleaned out every crumb. I told them the next time Florence sent a cake they wouldn’t even know about it.
Our battalion had organized a volleyball team and a basketball team, and I wanted to play on both, but they usually had games at the same time. So volleyball won out. We also played baseball and we had boxing matches. The evening before Thanksgiving they showed a movie. Afterward I just sat there for half an hour listening to records, and then I went back to my tent. Some nights on Pavuvu were just beautiful, with a huge moon hanging over the sea. I would have enjoyed them if only I had Florence there to share them.
President Roosevelt had proclaimed November 23, 1944, a day of national thanksgiving. I gave thanks I was still alive to think about my loved ones even if I couldn’t be with them. “I am a very happy yet a lonesome boy,” I wrote to Florence. We had six boxing matches during the day, then turkey with all the trimmings. Afterward there was an amateur talent show, another movie, and cold drinks.
We didn’t know it yet, but the week before Thanksgiving the Army’s Eighty-first Division Wildcats had wrapped things up on Peleliu. Colonel Kunio Nakagawa, the Japanese commander, radioed his headquarters on Babelthuap that it was “all over.” All he had left in the Pocket was 120 men and most of them were wounded. He and his aide burned the ceremonial colors and, as we knew they’d do all along, committed ritual suicide.
So we could take pride in a job well done.
I guess I had something else to be thankful for. Legs, the lieutenant who had given me so much trouble for so long, had been transferred. Our new mortar section leader was Lieutenant Robert Mackenzie, a blond New England college kid fresh out of Officer Candidates School. We called him Scotty.
In With the Old Breed, Gene Sledge was pretty hard on Scotty, but I didn’t share his hard feelings. Scotty and I were good friends then and we stayed good friends right up until he died in 2003.
Sledge was right about one thing, though. Scotty certainly came to Pavuvu with a gung ho attitude. Right away he made it plain that he was one tough Marine. The first time the Japs hit, he assured us, he’d charge them with a KA-BAR clenched in his teeth and a .45 clutched in his hand. He was going to do this and he was going to do that. It was comical to us—some of us had already faced the Japs. We knew better.
I think in the beginning Scotty actually believed it himself. We tried to set him straight, but he wasn’t listening. Guys like him grew up in a hurry. He’d come right out of OCS into the combat area. He hadn’t been around veterans. The only thing in his mind was what he had seen in the movies. It was just the rookie in him talking. I thought he was green as a gourd.
Still, I liked him. Later on I’d get so mad at him sometimes I’d want to kill him. Then thirty minutes later he’d have me laughing about something so hard I’d forgotten all about it. But he did pull some dumb things.
Late in December after my sergeant’s commission came through, they started calling some of us up to interview us for field commissions. Those chosen would be made second lieutenants. I’d been interviewed for Officer Candidates School on New Britain, but I had not attended college and that was the end of that. Now my chance for promotion came again.
After lunch I put on fresh khakis and went down to headquarters, where they were holding interviews. There were four of us, myself, Hank Boyes and Ted Hendricks from K Company, and a guy I didn’t know from L Company.
A first lieutenant met me and ushered me inside. There was a long table with three or four officers from captain on up sitting along either side. I wasn’t nervous. If they wanted to make me an officer, that was fine. But I wasn’t seeking it. They made me feel at ease and asked me to sit at the head of the table.
There were a lot of questions. How did I like the Marines? I said I liked the Marines just fine. They asked about my combat experience, and what did I feel about ordering men into action, where they might be killed? I said I was okay with that. I had done it before when I’d sent men out to be stretcher bearers.
One of them asked if I planned to make the Marine Corps my career.
I said, “No, sir, I’m not making the Marine Corps a career.”
“Why not?”
“Well, sir, I joined the Marine Corps to fight the Japs. And whenever we whup their butts, I’m going home.”
Another officer was looking over some papers. “Have you been saving any money since you joined the Marine Corps?” he asked.
“Yes, sir, I have.”
“And you’ve been sending money home?”
“Yes, sir, I have.”
He repeated the question. “And you’re sending money home?”
“Yes, sir, I am.”
“How much money have you sent home?”
I knew the exact figure. “Over two thousand dollars, sir.”
“Two thousand dollars?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hmmm.” He tapped his finger on the table. “You’ve been a private, a private first class, a corporal and a sergeant. You were making fifty-five dollars and you’re now drawing sixty-five dollars a month. And you’ve sent two thousand dollars home?”
“Yes, sir.”
He said, “Sergeant Burgin, do you shoot crap?”
“No, sir, I do not.”
“You have that kind of money going home. You sure you don’t shoot crap?”
I said, “No, sir.”
He didn’t ask if I played poker.
The truth of it was, I was sending ten dollars a month home, plus whatever money I won in poker. I was far from a skillful poker player compared to some of them in the company. We had about five or six guys that were the real poker players. And they didn’t even start until about a week or ten days after we got our paychecks. They’d hold back and let these little games like I was in run their course, letting the money gather. Then they’d play poker. Big fish eating the little fish.
Maurice Darsey, our first sergeant, and Snafu were our regulars, the real players. For a time I was company clerk. Mo would give me $1,000 and tell me to go to the post office and buy money orders. I had to buy ten because you couldn’t get a money order for more than $100 at the time. So I’d buy ten money orders and bring them back and Mo would put them in an envelope and mail it home. He’d say, “Ah, that’s another mule on the farm.”
We played poker mostly evenings in the tents. And it was a rare tent that didn’t have a coffee can of jungle juice brewing somewhere out in back. We’d take any kind of dried fruit we could get our hands on, usually raisins, prunes or apricots. Put a little sugar and water in, partly seal it and let it ferment. Some of the guys would hang their can in a palm tree. In a week or so it would be ready.
Jungle juice was pretty bad stuff, but it would do the job. I remember the first time T. L. Hudson, a private and ammo carrier, got drunk on that stuff, maybe the first time he got drunk in his life. Some Marines had a can of jungle juice they’d made with dried peaches. They’d already drunk all the juice, and there was nothing left in the can except the fruit at the bottom. Hudson kept sticking his hand in there, pulling out those alcohol-soaked peaches and eating them. We called him “Peaches” for a long time after that.
Four times a year, the Marine Corps would lay out a feast for the men—Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and November 10, the anniversary of the creation of the Corps. We had refrigeration units on Pavuvu now, so we had fresh meat a couple times a week, plus a kind of mutton stew we called “corn-willie.”
For Christmas they brought over turkeys from Banika and roasted them, with dressing, mashed potatoes, gravy, pea soup, cranberry sauce, apple pie and coffee. While we ate, the loudspeakers played Bing Crosby Christmas carols and big-band music by Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey.
Tommy Dorsey brought up old memories. Back at Camp Elliott near San Diego, whenever we got weekend liberty a buddy and I would hitchhike up to Los Angeles. In those days anybody would pick you up if you were in uniform. On Saturday nights we would go to the Hollywood Palladium. They had all the big-name bands there. I remember Tommy Dorsey played two nights, and one of the nights Betty Grable was in the club. I was just another lowly Marine, rubbing shoulders with all that Hollywood glamour.
For New Year’s Eve, the Corps repeated the turkey feast. Someone decided we were going to get at least one of those turkeys, maybe two, and bring them back to K Company. I don’t remember everyone who was in on that scheme, but I know Peter Fouts and Howard Nease were involved, both corporals. Fouts had been wounded in the arm by a machine gun on the beach at Peleliu, but he had recovered and was back with us. Nease would soon be killed by shrapnel on Okinawa.
We finished dinner and were back in our tents when we heard cries of “Fire! Fire!” We looked out and saw a bunch of people running around the battalion mess hall. A pretty good fire was going in a brush pile near the entrance.
Later that night somebody shook my shoulder, waking me up. “Psst, Burgin! You want some turkey?”
I said, “Yeah, yeah.”
“Well, come on!” I hopped off my cot and followed him to a nearby tent, where everybody was sitting around eating turkey and drinking beer. Nease carved off a couple slices with his KA-BAR and handed them to me while they told and retold the whole story.
It seems somebody had carelessly left a can of gasoline in that brush pile. While the mess crew was cleaning up after supper, the brush had mysteriously burst into flame. The sentry on duty yelled “Fire!” and while everybody was running around trying to put it out, two leftover turkeys vanished from the galley.
We finished our midnight snack.
“Make damn sure you don’t leave any of this stuff lying around,” somebody reminded us. We took the bones and carcasses over to I Company’s bivouac and dumped them in their trash can.
Guess who got the blame the next day for stealing the turkeys.
As the new year began the rumor mill kicked into high gear. There were the usual stories that somebody had shot himself. For a time there was speculation that the Marines were about to be absorbed into the Army. That one had popped up again and again over the years. There was a tale they were putting saltpeter into our food to cool down our sex drive. I don’t know what they thought we might do, with only a handful of Red Cross girls on the island, safe behind barbed wire most of the time. Our tents were about three-quarters of a mile from the beach, and I didn’t bother to go down to the USO canteen just to be hanging out there. From time to time I’d go to company headquarters to visit a friend of mine I’d gone to school with. Whenever I went down there I’d see the Navajo code talkers hanging around, but I never got acquainted with any of them.
Mostly the rumors were about where we were going next.
Our training now emphasized street fighting and mutual support between tanks and infantry. That led some of us to think that we were headed for Formosa or mainland China, or even to Japan itself. There was a map of a long, narrow island in circulation, but none of us recognized it.
In late January the whole division shipped out to Guadalcanal for amphibious maneuvers in LCIs—Landing Craft, Infantry. These were a newer and smaller version of the LSTs we’d taken to Peleliu, but with ramps running down the side instead of bow doors. They could carry an infantry company plus a couple of jeeps. We’d go out and make a run for the beach. When we got on shore we’d bail out and move in a few dozen yards. Then we’d get back on the LCIs, go out and do it all over again, eight or ten times a day. The mortar platoon also practiced setting up with three guns until we could do it in our sleep.
Guadalcanal had the same long, thick kunai grass we’d seen around the airfield at Cape Gloucester. It reminded me of the Johnson grass back home. In the grass we found these big lizards, about two feet long, with flickering tongues, like a snake’s. The natives called them goannas, and we had a lot of fun with those things. When we came up on one we’d all gather around a circle daring each other to grab him. Of course when that rascal came charging, we all gave him plenty of space.
All this time we were listening to the Armed Forces Radio Service, so we got word whenever the Marines hit another island. I didn’t know how many of those islands there were out there, but I knew every one of them was on the way to Tokyo. We’d gone from Guadalcanal in 1942 to Tarawa, to Kwajalein, Saipan, Guam and Peleliu. When we returned to Pavuvu from maneuvers, the Third, Fourth, and Fifth divisions invaded Iwo Jima. We listened closely to every news report. Once again the Japs had holed up in caves and fought to the last man. It sounded a lot like what we had been through on Peleliu, but shorter and with three times the casualties. We knew we would be next. And we knew we were in for a helluva fight.
In February we went back to Guadalcanal for two more weeks of exercises and maneuvers off Tassafaronga Point, where the Navy had suffered a big defeat by the Japs in 1942. They worked us even harder, adding cliff climbing to our exercises because, they said, we would be climbing a seawall to get onshore at our next destination. We camped in what had been the Third Division’s bivouac before they left for Iwo Jima and hoped that wasn’t an omen.
During our stay on Guadalcanal some of us discovered the Seabees’ mess hall, where the chow was better and more abundant than what the Marines had been feeding us. The Seabees were pretty generous, allowing us to join the chow line after they had been through.
T. L. Hudson—“Peaches”—and I discovered the PX at Henderson Field, where we could buy ice cream bars, something we’d never seen on Pavuvu. They were four inches long, two inches wide and half an inch thick, covered with chocolate, and they cost a nickel. We thought we’d died and gone to heaven. T.L. and I would get in line and buy one each—they’d only sell you one at a time. We’d eat those then get in line and get another one. Then we’d come back around again. They never caught on or they didn’t mind. Either way, we made four or five trips through that line.
We almost didn’t make it off of Guadalcanal. At the end of the last day of maneuvers, our squad waited on the beach for the Higgins boat that was to take us back out to our mother ship, the USS McCracken. We were dog tired. The sun was getting lower and lower until we were the last bunch left on the beach. The wind had come up and the sea was getting choppy. Finally the boat came nosing in and dropped its ramp on the sand. We climbed aboard wearily and stowed our weapons. The bay was full of ships, and we passed several on our way out, bouncing on the waves. I looked down and saw water sloshing beneath the deck. We were overloaded and taking on water. I went forward and told the coxswain, “We better get this thing to a ship.” He took one look and turned toward the nearest ship. Meanwhile the water was coming up under our feet and the Higgins boat was riding lower and lower in the waves. The coxswain started the bilge pumps. We pulled alongside an attack transport and yelled for help. They yelled back, asking where we were from and what was the problem. Our coxswain explained that we were from the McCracken and we were taking on water and they threw a couple lines down to us. The water was creeping up our ankles now. As our boat started going down we got the lines attached. We scrambled up the cargo net and spent the night on the transport. The next morning a Higgins boat took us back to the McCracken.
Things were moving faster. The McCracken took us not to Pavuvu, but to Banika, where we spent a week loading ships and getting the usual round of inoculations that come before a major campaign. Troopships began appearing offshore. On March 14 we boarded the McCracken again and the next morning sailed out of the harbor and north to Ulithi.
Ulithi had been secured without a fight by the Army’s Eighty-first Wildcat Division about a week after we went ashore at Peleliu. It was really a cluster of small islands surrounding a deepwater port, where the fleet for our next operation was coming together.
We knew by now we were headed for Okinawa. For once they didn’t wait until we got on board ship to tell us. Scotty showed us a map of the island. It was only 350 miles from Tokyo.
Now we understood why they had pushed street fighting and tank warfare in our training. Unlike Cape Gloucester and Peleliu, Okinawa had a lot of open cultivated ground, including not just villages but real towns.
If we hadn’t been told, we would have known anyway that this was going to be bigger than any operation we’d had so far. From the deck of the McCracken all we could see was ship after ship, hundreds of them spread all the way out to the far horizon. It was as though they had assembled the entire U.S. Navy at Ulithi, from the biggest battleships and aircraft carriers down to escorts and patrol boats.
While we were at Ulithi, the battered hulk of the USS Franklin limped in and docked right next to us. I was standing only thirty or forty feet away. While we had been under way to Ulithi on March 19, a single Jap bomber had appeared out of the clouds and dropped two five-hundred-pound bombs on the carrier. She was just fifty miles off Kyushu, the westernmost of Japan’s main islands. The bombs went right through the flight deck and exploded in the hangars, setting off ammunition and fuel. Almost 725 of her crew died and more than 250 were injured. We heard that many of the wounded were still on board.
The survivors fought the raging fires, dodging exploding bombs and ammo, and managed to bring the ship hundreds of miles into Ulithi. She was listing 13 degrees to starboard when they got her docked, so we had a close-up view from the deck of the McCracken. Her sailors were crowded on her ruined flight deck, leaning against the tilt. Smoke still oozed from her side where the explosions had torn holes the size of a garage door. It wasn’t hard to imagine what the Franklin and her crew had been through. I guess every sailor who ever lived is also a firefighter. I had watched them hold drills on our transports. Every man knew exactly what to do and when to do it. I thought, At least on land we could dig foxholes and had some room to maneuver. On shipboard, there’s nowhere to go.
While we were in port at Ulithi a telegram came for me, from Jewett, Texas.
My younger brother, Joseph Delton Burgin, had joined the Army the year before and after basic training had been sent to France. Before he enlisted, J.D. had written to me asking about the Marine Corps. I had written back to discourage him. I thought he might have an easier time of it than I did if he joined the Navy. But I guess we were all in harm’s way, whether we were in the Marines or the Army or Navy.
Typical of J.D., he made up his own mind.
He was almost four years younger than me, always quiet, not a hell-raiser. But he would not be pushed around. When someone got in his face, you’d see those black eyes snapping in anger. When he was starting first grade, Momma made him a pair of overalls out of uncolored denim from cotton sacks. She had dyed them blue, so they looked like regular overalls. One morning she saw him sitting out on the porch cutting something with a pair of scissors.
“What are you doing out there, J.D.?”
“These overalls are hot, Momma. I’m cutting holes in them.”
She chased him all the way across the yard and under the fence, where he got hung up on the barbed wire.
J.D. and I used to go fishing together, and possum hunting at night with the dogs and a .410 shotgun. He was with me when I shot my first deer.
According to the telegram, J.D. had been killed by German artillery in Alsace-Lorraine. An Army officer wrote my folks that it had been sudden. J.D. hadn’t felt a thing.
Nights on the deck of the McCracken were cool and pleasant as we sailed north from Ulithi. We could almost forget we were getting closer to Japan. But a briefing from K Company’s officers sobered us right up. Okinawa would be the bloodiest campaign of the war, they warned us. We could expect 80 to 85 percent casualties.
Going in we would face heavy fire from a large Jap gun on the beach. Enemy paratroopers might drop in behind us, and there would probably be a banzai attack during our first night ashore. We were also facing a new tactic. Starting in October of 1944, Japanese pilots had been deliberately crashing their planes into American warships in a kind of aerial banzai attack.
The convoy that left Ulithi March 27 was the largest ever assembled in the Pacific. We had almost 1,300 ships of all kinds and more than 180,000 men from five Army divisions—the Seventy-seventh, Ninety-sixth, Twenty-seventh, Seventh and Eighty-first—and the First, Second and Sixth Marine divisions. We were facing at least 100,000 Jap troops who, we knew, would fight to the last man. Their back was to the wall.
The old bivouac rumor about the Marines being absorbed into the U.S. Army almost came true, in a way. The entire invasion force, called the Tenth Army, was under the command of Army Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner.
Because the Fifth Marines’ Third Battalion had been in the first wave at Peleliu, we were to be spared that distinction at Okinawa. We’d be held offshore in regimental reserve.
It had now been sixteen months and a couple days since Florence and I sat on that park bench in Melbourne kissing and saying our good-byes. I was no closer to returning for her as I’d promised, no closer to settling down in our little house together. In fact each island where I’d fought took me farther from her. How long would I be on Okinawa? And then where? Japan? We knew as we were getting closer that the enemy was getting weaker and more desperate. Standing there at nights on the deck of the McCracken, I just couldn’t see any end to it.