CHAPTER ELEVEN
Peleliu
The second day on Peleliu, September 16, 1944…
STERLING MACE
The next morning you see shapes of guys walking around. You hear “Corpsman! Corpsman!” and think, “Geez, the Japs are already up and around at the crack of dawn.”
There was sort of a mist in the morning between the heat and the ground. A foggy mist. That added to the spookiness.
That’s how it was that next day. Then somebody would say, “Okay, K Company, we’re moving up!”
JIM ANDERSON
Captain Haldane treated a private just like a lieutenant. He would call us by first name if he knew us. He always called me “Andy.”
As a runner, sometimes Captain Haldane would give me a message, like “Andy, go over there and tell the Third Platoon to move up.” So I’d go over there and tell the Third Platoon commander that Captain Haldane wanted such and such a thing. Then I’d go back to company headquarters, to where the captain was. And he’d say, “Good work, now go back and tell the mortars to go over here.” So I would. I was only a PFC and he treated me like a gentleman. Captain Haldane was 100 percent professional.* He was there to defeat the Japanese, and he did it in the most efficient manner he could.
R. V. BURGIN
I had a guy named Sam who was a screwup in our outfit. He was a slacker. He was our bazooka man. We were marching in single file, then stopped for a little bit. When we moved out again, I looked down and there was a bazooka laying there. Hell, I knew whose bazooka it was. I picked the bazooka up and gave it to Sam. I had a few choice words for him. Being a bazooka man was a dangerous job, but so was carrying a rifle or a mortar.
The Marines prepared to launch a sweeping attack across the airfield with H Company on the far left of the attack and K Company on the far right.
JIM YOUNG
We had some boys killed by Jap infiltrators during that first night, so we woke up on edge. Then our orders came. We were to attack across the airstrip at 0800 (8 A.M.). We tried to eat our rations. We hadn’t had a thing for twenty-four hours. The temperature was already ninety-five degrees. We needed lots of water. I took salt tablets to replenish the salt your body sweats, but they made me sick and I threw up.
R. V. BURGIN
You wouldn’t believe how hot it was. Peleliu was just north of the equator. Hot and dry. During the days, it would be 120 degrees. It never did get below 100 degrees, not even at night. It never cooled off. Of course you had your pack on most of the time. You’re carrying your rifle, your pistol, and ammunition, your canteen. Besides the guys who were carrying the mortar plates and all. Your cuts would fester in the heat. The temperature never ceased to be unbearable.
We were always thirsty. Almost right from the start, there was never enough water. It seemed like your canteen was always empty. If there was water in it, it came from the water supply brought up from the beach in old fuel drums. It was the color of rust and always tasted like oil. Some of the men who drunk it got sick. I’ve been hungry, and I’ve been thirsty—and I’ll take hungry any day of the week. When a man’s thirsty, he can get panicky.
STERLING MACE
We came across a Hellcat that had been shot down, right on the edge of the airstrip. The pilot was dead, still in his seat, but the Japs had wired his body with hand grenades—booby-trapped. Corporal Van Trump reached in and got a pistol. From then on, every spare moment he had, he was trying to clean that thing, because it was all burned.
JIM YOUNG
At 0800 waves of Marines started crossing the airfield. This was it. We could see our guys getting hit by Jap machine gunners and riflemen. Then it was our turn. There was no cover, so we ran as fast as we could. It reminded me of a dream I once had about being chased where my legs were only moving in slow motion.
STERLING MACE
We started heading across the airstrip. It was a big thing—a three-hundred to four-hundred-yard run at a stop-and-go. Japs were shelling us. There were explosions all around. We started out. Marines were running, heading right into that misery.
JIM ANDERSON
I started across, dodged and darted and so forth. There was practically no one ahead of me. I thought, Well here goes a fellow, and there goes a fellow. If they can make it, I’ll give it a whirl, too. The machine gun fire was extremely heavy. Part of the way over, I ran into a man from K Company named Guy Farrar. He’d been shot through the arm. I kept going, and here was a fellow named Frank Bachelor. He’d been shot in the leg. As we ran across the airport, I shot back. I didn’t see any Japanese soldiers to shoot at, but I shot at something that was firing at me to pin them down a bit. At times like these I was more mad than anything, mad at the Japanese for making us come all that way to fight them.
DAN LAWLER
Machine gun fire was always on us, but as we ran we’d count a random number between one and five, then hit the dirt on that number. It might be one. It might be three. The next time four. Always different. So the Japs could never zero in their sites on us.
Halfway across the airstrip, a big artillery shell landed by me. I said, “Geez, that was close.” All I remember was the pavement coming up to meet me. When I woke up, I put my hand down. It was all bloody. I said, “Shit, I’ve been hit.” The corpsman came along and said, “Well, you got some broken fingers here.” So he wrapped them up. I’d broken three fingers and a thumb. I started to get up, but he said, “Wait a minute; you got something sticking out of your back, too.” He reached over and pulled this piece of shrapnel out of the middle of my back. I never felt any of it. That stuff is red-hot. It’s just like a poker when it goes in. Everything freezes up. All I remember about the whole experience was going down. I don’t remember getting hit. You’re looking out for everybody. Your friends—did they make it? Did they get across? It’s tough, because a lot of guys didn’t.
Anyway, I could still walk, so I got up and hiked back to the beach and was transported to a hospital ship.
STERLING MACE
I was running, running. Finally I came to a hole. This hole had to have been dug with some kind of machine because it was perfectly round, about four and a half feet deep. Inside at the bottom was a dead Jap. He must have been put out there to knock some of us off before he got it. He was huddled up in the fetal position. We made it across the airstrip, got to the other side, and everybody sort of asked, “What now? Where we going?” I think we had six or seven killed, running across that damn airstrip.
JIM ANDERSON
By the grace of God, I made it to the brush on the east side of the airstrip. We moved along the edge of the airport. There were some buildings there, and I shot around those buildings, although I did not ever see any live Japanese soldiers. There were some dead ones lying around. Somebody had knocked out a Japanese short-barreled howitzer, and it was lying beside the trail with a couple of dead Japanese soldiers lying beside it. But you tried to move fast and not pay too much attention to them. I understand that they had quite a fight over at the main buildings at the airport.
JIM YOUNG
We crossed but lost eight men from H Company on our run. I was sure glad the guys talked me into becoming a mortar man and not a machine gunner or rifleman. Those boys went first and were slaughtered. Our losses in the 2nd Battalion were tremendous. At least half of them were dead or wounded. We had very few officers left. However, our lieutenant from our landing craft rejoined us and had completely recovered from his combat fear.
We were exhausted from the crossing and all very thirsty. The temperature was now around 120 degrees, and our clothes looked like we were caught in a rain shower, because they were drenched with sweat.
They brought water to us, but we could hardly drink it. What they had done was try to wash our fifty-five-gallon drums of gasoline and then put drinking water in. We had to drink it anyway, and a lot of us got sick.
After the crossing, H Company settled in at the foot of the ridges north of the airfield while K Company swung east to clear the swamps on the airfield’s flank. That night, K Company dug in “with our backs to the sea,” as one Marine remembered, along the island’s eastern cliffs.
R. V. BURGIN
We fought both day and night on that island. During the day we fought the Japs. Then at night, they came out of caves and tried to infiltrate our lines. You just couldn’t sleep, hardly even a nap at night—if you did, you were a dead man. They’d sneak up on you and try to get within range to throw a grenade. If you slept, you knew you could be dead within a minute. The Japs wore those split-toed shoes with rubber soles like sneakers. You could barely hear them coming. You could look to the left, then look to the right, then by the time you looked straight ahead he’d be there. You just couldn’t see them. It wears you down physically, but it also wears you down mentally.
At night, we’d try to get close enough where you could reach out and touch the next guy. One guy would stay awake for an hour, one guy would sleep, then you’d switch off. Once, during the night I heard scuffling from down the line. It was the fourth man down from me. I couldn’t see what was going on, but I knew there was a Jap involved. And then a long, bloodcurdling scream. The guy told me the story later.
He was sleeping flat on his back when he felt this weight on his chest. He woke up with fingers around his throat. The Jap had snuck in, sat on the Marine’s stomach, and started to choke him. The Marine could feel himself going under, losing consciousness. He knew he was choking to death.
Like lightning, everything that he had ever been taught about self-defense ran through his mind. He reached behind the Jap’s head, grabbed him by the hair, and gouged his fingers in the Jap’s eyes. The Jap released his choke hold, and the Marine broke loose. He got up, grabbed the Jap by the nape of the neck and seat of his pants, and threw him over the cliff.
So the bloodcurdling scream I heard had been from the Jap, screaming all the way down until he hit the ground. I’d never heard anybody scream like that before and haven’t since.
The next day, the Marines attacked northward. As K Company cleared the eastern shoreline, H Company attacked Peleliu’s most formidable landmark in the island’s center—the Umurbrogol ridges. There, the Japanese had built countless interconnecting gun positions into the coral ridges.
JIM YOUNG
We set up our four mortar emplacements at the base of the Umurbrogol. We couldn’t dig regular pits because the soil was all coral, so we used chunks of bombed buildings for protection from shrapnel. We were lucky we placed our mortars in this spot because we started to receive very heavy enemy big gun fire. Every barrage flew about 20 feet over our heads and hit about 150 yards in back of us. We couldn’t figure out what kind of guns they were. The shells were shaped like ash cans, and the explosions were deafening. Only one guy was hit.
We received word from our OP [observation post] that the Japs were also setting up mortar batteries. The OP gave us the range and we opened up on them. They were trying to get us before we got them. It turned into a battle royal. We fired fast and furious. Our gun tubes grew so hot that our loaders were getting their hands burned. We wrapped the tubes with burlap bags and kept pouring water on them to keep them as cool as possible. The Japs got a mortar round close to our number four gun and wounded three guys. But they were able to go back to the beach without help. We must have fired three or four hundred rounds. The OP said to cease fire because we put the Jap battery out of action.
We took a break and tried to find some shade. Our lips were cracked and bleeding from the heat and dehydration. By then we had not had sleep for three days. When we sat for a catnap, the sweat ran down our faces, hit our eyelids, and coagulated. You couldn’t open your eyes until you soaked them in water. This was scary the first time it happened.
I had just picked a spot in the shade when a bullet hit the coral about two inches from my head. I got out of there quick! Private Bender was close by, and the sniper took a shot at him and missed. The lieutenant then sent a runner to the command post and requested them to send up a Marine with a war dog. Shortly after they arrived, the dog located the sniper and that ended that.
Meanwhile, hospital ships whisked Wayburn Hall and Dan Lawler toward a Navy base in the Admiralty Islands…
DAN LAWLER
The ship was a tough place. Wounded soldiers everywhere. I was considered “walking wounded,” so I went to work right away, helping out wherever I could. It was all volunteer, but these were your friends, you know, so you pitched in wherever you could. I could still use one of my hands, and my back wasn’t hurting too bad. Lots of guys were dead when they were brought in. Others died on the operating table. One doctor I know of operated around the clock for so long he finally dropped dead from exhaustion. Anyway, the bodies piled up. We had to have room. More were coming. The worst thing I ever had to do was burial at sea—to slide Marines’ bodies off the back of that ship.
During training at Camp Lejeune, I had made three friends all from upstate New York, like me. Harold Chapman from Gansevoort. Jim Butterfield from Glens Falls. John Murray from Hudson Falls. We stayed together as good friends and all went to Camp Pendleton for further training, although later we all went to different units. Harold got killed on Peleliu. He got outnumbered in a bayonet fight. Course I never told his folks that. John got his kneecap blown off. And Jimmy got both eyes blown out by a mortar blast. So we all got hit.
After I was patched up, I went back to Pavuvu and rejoined the 1st Marine Division.
WAYBURN HALL
We sailed for the Admiralty Islands, where there was a Navy hospital. They put a bunch of us up in a Seabee camp. Those guys were great, the best friends we ever had during the war. They brought everything they could think of to us—cigarettes and candy and beer.
I couldn’t keep up with time, but another ship came by and they put us on that. They took us back to Pavuvu, where we had come from. I went right back to our camp and went straight to my cot, which was still set up. The idea was that we weren’t supposed to be fighting too long on Peleliu. So, I just healed up on Pavuvu.
Back on Peleliu, on September 19, K Company conducted a combat patrol of the island’s eastern swamps.
R. V. BURGIN
About forty of us were sent out on an extended patrol down to the tip of a long, narrow peninsula that ran along the southeast coast of the island. Hillbilly Jones was in charge of a group. A dog handler came with us, an army man with a big Doberman that could smell Japs.
We went out and got set up out in the jungle before dark. Pop Haney was with us on that one, and he began to get nervous, almost panicky, telling us to come around and lock and load, check out bayonets, stuff we had already done. It grew dark. We were close enough to the Japs that you could hear them talking every once in a while.
All of a sudden, the dog handler began to talk, to call out, and talk pretty loud. “Help me, help me, help me, dog. They’re going to kill me. Help me, dog.” We didn’t want that, because it gave away our position. He just got worse and worse, louder and louder. He was cracking up. Everybody was whispering, “Shut that man up. Every damn Jap on the island will know where we are.” The doc gave him morphine, but that didn’t seem to faze him at all. The doc gave him another shot. Still no effect. Another. I think he gave enough morphine to him to kill a horse, but he kept getting louder and louder. I was right in the middle of it. Holding him down, trying to keep him quiet. Finally one of our men hit him in the head with his entrenching tool.
It was just one of those things that had to be done. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. It was either him or all of our lives. It killed him. The action actually saved the lives of others. I hated it, but at the same time I never regretted it. If the Japs had come across us, we’d have been in a hell of a shape. There’s never been anyone that I know of that told who used the shovel. I know who it was. He wasn’t proud of it. Even though that guy’s already dead, I’ll carry that secret to my grave without telling anyone who did it.
As K Company fought northward along the coast, they heard the fury of battle as H Company and the 1st Marines fought in the Umurbrogol ridges. “We pitied the 1st Marines attacking the ridges,” Eugene Sledge would write.
JIM YOUNG
We got word that our riflemen were having a terrible time climbing these jagged mountains and were being shot at from all sides. We’d had about two hundred riflemen in the company, and they said there were only about forty-five left. A wounded Marine came through our line without a helmet on. His head was wrapped with a bloody bandage. One ear hung by a small piece of skin, and his head bled through the bandage in spurts with every heartbeat. Our lieutenant sent a Marine to help him get back to the beach. I don’t think he would have made it without help.
Casualties were extremely high. It grew so bad they couldn’t get the wounded out. They pushed some of the wounded off the ledges in the hope that they survived the fall and the stretcher bearers could get to them. The luckiest thing about this battle so far was that the Japanese had not attacked us from the air or sea.
After a week, our colonel, Chesty Puller (who had been promoted to lead our regiment) was ordered by the general to withdraw the entire 1st Marines from action because of our severe losses. We were worn out physically and mentally. It didn’t help that Puller’s style was to keep going even if it was just about impossible.
On our way out, the column was stopped by the MPs. We were told that there were some Jap machine gun nests on both sides of a pass we had to go through. We were ordered to run through the pass in groups of ten and as fast as we could. The MPs would give us cover fire from their machine guns. Most of us made it through the pass. But we had about ten guys hit who needed to be rescued by stretcher bearers.
On our way we passed several stacks of dead Marines. They were piled five one way and five the other way. The stacks were about five feet high. Seeing this gave me an awful feeling. It’s a sight I’ll never forget.
The near destruction of Puller’s regiment convinced the operation’s commander, Marine General Geiger, to send in reinforcements. On September 23, the Army’s 81st Infantry Division relieved Puller’s regiment and H Company.
JIM YOUNG
We finally arrived at the other end of the island and were fed our first hot meal in over a week. While in the chow line, a Jap sniper started firing and we had to scatter. It wasn’t long before they had the war dogs on the Jap’s ass, then it was back to that hot meal.
Word came in. We were leaving. The regiment was no longer deemed capable for combat and we were returning to Pavuvu. The official word is that our regiment suffered 60 percent casualties.
* K Company veteran Jesse Googe was the company’s youngest Marine and one of Haldane’s runners. He passed away just before this book began. He once told the author, “Ack Ack would come to the front and talk to us, trying to spot any guy on the edge. One day, a guy that he was trying to help just snapped. He started flailing and screaming. Ack Ack reached out to grab his shoulders and calm him down, and the guy kicked the Skipper in the groin—hard. Ack Ack fell, rolling in agony. He didn’t scream or curse. He just took it. But you bet someone ‘secured’ the offender and dragged him away. When Ack Ack returned to his senses, he told me: ‘It can happen to any man, at any time.’ Then he limped away.”