CHAPTER NINE
Pavuvu
Meanwhile on Pavuvu, the 1st Marine Division prepared for its next battle…
R. V. BURGIN
We trained quite a bit on Pavuvu. Marches. Drills. Inspections. Rifle range. Maneuvers. Forced runs at night. I was promoted to corporal.
JIM ANDERSON
I still couldn’t walk very good, so, in the military’s wisdom, they reassigned me to be a runner for Captain Haldane. I had more contact with him when I was a runner. He was very well liked by all the men. He always treated everyone—from a private on up—as a man, rather than a servant to be ordered around. He wasn’t afraid to get right up on the front lines either. Some officers would stay back, but Captain Haldane never would.
Replacements came in to take the place of the old-timers and lottery winners. Among these new Marines were Dan Lawler and Sterling Mace.
DAN LAWLER
Pearl Harbor was a Sunday afternoon. Just a light snow on the ground, I remember. I was at the Paramount Theater in my hometown—Glens Falls, New York. The manager turned the lights on and said, “The Japs have just bombed Pearl Harbor.” Somebody said, “Where the hell’s Pearl Harbor?” Nobody knew.
I ran home to see if my mother had it on the radio. She did. At that time my older brother, Jack, was in school in Canada. He came right down to Albany the next day and enlisted in the Marine Corps.
I wanted to enlist but had a problem. When I was a baby in the hospital, a nurse was powdering her face. She dropped the can of powder, and some got in my right eye. She wiped it out but didn’t say anything. When I got home, my eye got infected and it left me cross-eyed. So I wore thick glasses as a boy. High school was really rough. Everybody used to call me “Igor” because I was six-foot-two and cross-eyed. I couldn’t study too well. I couldn’t play any sports or anything. I loved the outdoors though. I did a lot of deer hunting and fishing since we had a camp on a lake. They had ponds in the city that I ice skated on. I went to the movies a lot, too, and read a lot of comic books. On Sundays I was an altar boy at church.
Even with my bad eyes, I wanted to be a Marine. My older brother was in the service, and I wanted to do whatever he did.* So I went down to the recruiting office. They took a look at me and said, “You couldn’t get into the Salvation Army with those eyes!” I went home, my mother said, “How’d you make out?” I told her, so she said, “Well, let’s get those eyes operated on.”
So we did and my eyes got fixed. That’s how I got in. I’ve still got a 4-F card with my name on it. I didn’t have to go in the service if I didn’t want to. I was only in my second year of high school. But I wanted to enlist. Nobody wanted to be left behind.
On the first day of boot camp, I remember this kid from New York had just signed up and he was wearing this big overcoat. They told you to wear just a sweater, but he had a big coat on. He was from a gang or something, because he had these two young henchmen with him, and all three of them had pistols. I thought, “Holy shit, this will be good.”
When the drill instructor came to the kid with the overcoat, he reached down, grabbed the kid’s pistol, and held it to the kid’s head.
“You wouldn’t dare,” said the kid.
“You want to try me?” said the DI.
“If you weren’t holding my pistol right now, I’d kick the shit out of you,” said the kid.
The DI threw the pistol to one side. “Come on and try,” he said.
The kid took a poke at the DI, but the kid swung wide. When the DI got through with him, the kid bled for two days.
That’s what the Marine Corps did. They broke you down so they could build you back up. They knew what it was going to be like once you got into combat.
When I left the States, they put us all in different outfits. On Pavuvu they assigned me to K Company, K-3-5.
STERLING MACE
I was born and raised in Queens, a borough just miles away from Manhattan. Back then it was a blue collar neighborhood near the Italian district. My dad had medical problems, so financially we had it tough. I worked at Philip Morris, in the mail room.
When Pearl Harbor happened, we were getting ready to play a county league football game. We were out on the field, and cars are starting to pull up and park along the sideline. There was a lot of commotion. They all had the radios on, and the fans were starting to gather around the cars.
So I tossed the ball to this guy and said, “I am gonna see what’s going on over there.” I went over, and we were listening to the news report. I mentioned it: “Where the hell is this Pearl Harbor?” That was it. As far as I was concerned I was too young to get involved.
The kid across the street, Sunny Campbell, he went and joined the Navy. He sent me a picture of himself in his Navy uniform, holding a rifle. That looked pretty good to me. He later got killed on the carrier Hornet off the Solomon Islands.
Anyway, I went down to Wall Street to enlist in the Navy. I was rejected because of my right eye. I didn’t realize it, but they said I had no depth perception. The reason I could play football and all was because one eye compensated for the other so I never had a problem—until I took an eye test.
I went down to the Marine Corps. This time I was clever. As we stood in line I studied the chart and watched how the guys ahead of me did it. That’s how I got into the Marines.
Boot camp to me was depressing. When I got to the riflery range, everybody had to shoot right-handed. But I was left-handed—always a lefty. They could care less. I barely qualified shooting right-handed with my weak right eye. I think you needed 267 to pass, and I got 268.* At Pavuvu I ended up in K Company, Third Platoon. I don’t know when the civilians left, but we knew it had been a coconut plantation. There were signs like palmolive pete’s plantation, 1903.
The first thing we did was go to our tent. As we’re passing the tents, one of my best friends, a Jewish kid named Seymour Levy, was looking at all the other tents and saw how the guys were using Coke bottles with gasoline in them for light, since there was no electricity. So Levy made one, but he did something wrong with his cocktail. It exploded and set our tent on fire and it burnt down. This gunny Malone, he was a veteran, he said, “Boy, we got some good recruits here, in five minutes they’re burning the tents down!” Then he put us in a working party.
DAN LAWLER
I met Eugene Sledge as soon as I got to Pavuvu, and we became friends. Sledge was a mortar man, a Rebel from Alabama, and I used to raise hell with him because I was a Yankee. We had a lot of fun teasing each other. He would say in his deep drawl, “Hey, Lawler!” And I would say, “You talk just like you’ve got marbles in your mouth!” He would get madder than hell. He chased me down the goddamn road. He was a good egg and took it.
STERLING MACE
When the company would fall out in the street in the morning, someone would come along handing out the anti-malaria Atabrine pills. When the company went back to their tents, you could see the pills all over the ground. The guys weren’t taking them. The ones who did turned sorta yellow in their faces, like yellow jaundice.
I didn’t have a weapon or assignment yet but wanted to be a company runner. I heard about Jimmy Anderson, so I went down and I spoke with Captain Haldane, and we couldn’t come to an agreement. I was kidding around saying I would run in the other direction. He just looked at me and said, “I’ve got a better job for you, Mace. Try the BAR.”
One day I spotted George McDevin, a kid I went to high school with, on a work party on Pavuvu. He was a Marine, too. He used to live across the ball field from me in Queens. He was in a base regiment, and he came over one night to visit me. He brought me a slice of cake. There was a big difference between his cook and our cook. I mean, they had cake four times a week. We got it every two weeks. So I found two cigars somewhere and we went out to the movie. He had a BAR and got cut in the face on New Britain by a Jap with a knife— not bad, but enough to get the hell out of there. He told me the BAR was the closest thing to a left-handed weapon.
So I asked for the BAR. They gave me one, and I went down to the rifle range just to shoot it, just to feel what the hell it was like, and I was very happy with it. So I became a BAR man.
They had little tents set up where we could hang out, not too far off the beach. Like a sideshow, the veterans from different outfits would come down and look for friends and tell us their bullshit stories. This one guy, I can still remember him, he had blond hair, and me and Levy went over to talk to him, and he had this little sack around his neck, like a little string sack for tobacco if you rolled your own cigarettes. He says, “You want to see something?” So we says, “Yeah.” He opened it up, and it had gold caps removed from teeth. Not the teeth themselves. People think all the guys were taking pliers and pulling teeth from dead Japs, but they were just taking the gold caps. Levy said, “You probably got about a hundred dollars’ worth of stuff there!” The guy said, “Are you kidding? There’s gonna be a thousand dollars in it!” After he left, Levy said, “Why, don’t we associate with a f--king bunch of cannibals.”
JIM YOUNG
Brownie, my ammo corporal, had to stay behind with me, and we got to know the replacements. We didn’t end up training the new guys. They had already been trained.
The new guys asked us all the time to tell them about our combat experience. They thought we were heroes and listened to every word we had to say. I hoped they would do well when the shooting started.
One of H Company’s replacements was an eighteen-year-old Texan named Wayburn Hall.
WAYBURN HALL
I came into Pavuvu as a replacement, along with about fifteen hundred other guys, and was assigned as an 81mm mortar man to H-2-1. A lot of the old guys had already been on two campaigns, so they sent some of those older guys back home. Sid Phillips was a mortar man in H-2-1 just like me, but I never met him. He was on the way out while I was coming in. I could have been his replacement.
I was from Sugar Land, Texas. There were just thirteen boys and twelve girls in my senior class in high school if that tells you anything. I still didn’t do too well. I wasn’t too good at studying. I was small, just five foot seven inches and just over one hundred pounds. I broke my leg and ankle playing football, so I became a manager. Got nowhere with the girls. Being short didn’t help. But we had some nice girls—I loved them all.
As a young person I was mischievous, I guess you’d say. I always wound up in trouble, but not real bad trouble. I lost a lot of fistfights to bullies. I was quick to jump on somebody bigger than me. We’d shoot marbles, and if somebody tried to push me around, I’d be quick to go to fist city! They’d pull us apart of course. Just part of growing up back then.
When the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor, I was living in what was called a Humble camp outside of Sugar Land. It was a small community, just a dozen small houses and a company store owned by the Humble Oil and Refining Company. My daddy worked in the hardware department of the store.
We had a little battery-powered radio, where we got the news. I was still in high school, just fifteen years old, but Pearl Harbor hit me hard. I looked forward to getting involved.
In February ’43 I joined the Marine Corps at age seventeen, just a youngster. In boot camp, when a Marine platoon is lined up, the tallest man is in the front and that line tapers back to the shortest guy. Well I was one of the ones that brought up the back end of the platoon. We short guys took a lot of grief from some guys who were six-foot-two or -three. I had a tangle with one or two of the big guys in boot camp, much larger than I was, but we had a guy in our platoon who could box who really saved me from this one guy who would have beaten me up badly. This guy stepped in and took the big guy on. I will never forget that incident. The guy who saved me was named Bayling.
On Pavuvu, when I got integrated into the platoon, I found all the guys were all pretty friendly. We had a good platoon sergeant, John “Deacon” Tatum from Alabama—he’s one of the best guys I ever knew. Tatum was one of the most friendly, experienced sergeants you’d ever want. He never treated a guy badly.
If you’ve ever been in a hellhole, you’d know what Pavuvu is like. It rained three days out of every five. In places, the mud came to your knees. We had no running water, no lights, no electricity. To get a shower, you waited until it started raining, shucked off your clothes, and got a helmet full of water. If it stopped raining before you were finished, well, you dumped the helmet full of water on you.
Anyhow, we got into our training for the next big fight.
STERLING MACE
We shipped out to Guadalcanal for maneuvers. We landed on a beach near one of those Jap freighters that had run aground. Beforehand I found a machete. I got this gung-ho idea: We’re going to hit the beach, and I’m going to go smashing through the jungle like Zorba the Greek. And, I tell you, when I ran up the beach with that heavy BAR and that machete in the other hand, that machete got tossed within ten yards. The hell with this. I was back to being just a BAR man.
WAYBURN HALL
The scuttlebutt was flying that they were getting ready for another push, as they called it. We didn’t know where we were going, but all kinds of names were being talked about. We wound up going to a place called Peleliu.
On September 4, 1944, the Marines boarded ships at Guadalcanal for the 2,100-mile cruise to Peleliu.
JIM YOUNG
The transport ships and LSTs arrived and we got ready to leave. Our ship was an LST and was loaded with anything and everything needed for combat.
One bit of cargo caught my eye and gave me an odd feeling. It was pallets of grave markers, hundreds and hundreds of them.
* Dan Lawler would remember, “My brother went all the way through boot camp, then they gave him an examination before he went into the elite Marine Raiders. They found out he had a leaky heart, so they discharged him right then and he came home. Later, while I was overseas, my older brother was studying medicine when he died from heart failure. He was only twenty-five.”
* Sterling Mace would remember, “I may have been a miserable shot stateside, but I shot expert overseas where it really counted (laughs).”