CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Into the Hills of Hell

Peleliu

In early October 1944, K Company and the 5th Marines attacked the coral ridges in the island’s center. All of Peleliu was in American hands except this, the Umurbrogol Pocket. There, in a series of rugged peaks and jagged valleys just four hundred yards wide by twelve hundred yards long, the enemy had concentrated a complex of caves and bunkers. These ridges had chewed up H Company before. Now K Company moved to take their place.

STERLING MACE

We were headed alongside this long ridge, about sixty feet high, toward an area called the Five Sisters (due to the ridge’s five sharp peaks). We were in an open area with rough ground, no trees. On our left was the ridge. On our extreme right you could see the airport and the ocean. The airport was like a busy little city—people were walking around like nothing was going on. They didn’t realize that just a few hundred yards away guys were getting killed.

Throughout the ridge were little caves here and there. We got to one, a bit larger. With us was a tank with a flamethrower on it. We fired up into the cave entrance and waited awhile. After we thought the place was sealed up, along came a guy, Raymond Grawet—real macho, open jacket, bare chest exposed, a .45 in his hand—and he went right up dead center to the entrance of the cave, thinking it’s secured. He promptly got shot in the chest and killed.

JIM ANDERSON

The fighting in those ridges was tough. The heat we had to put up with during the days, it got up to over 110 degrees, and we had steel helmets on, packs on our backs, and we had to climb, which caused us to sweat.

Sometimes you didn’t see a pillbox until you walked right up to it, they were so camouflaged with rocks. Captain Haldane would sometimes get an interpreter up there and try to talk to them inside the pillbox to get them to surrender. In three campaigns, I never saw one Japanese soldier surrender. Not one.

When they wouldn’t surrender, we would call for a guy with a flamethrower. When he arrived, two or three of us would fire into the pillbox slit to keep them back. This guy with the flamethrower would come up, and he would shoot the flame into that pillbox and incinerate anyone inside. I always admired the courage of the Marines who operated the flamethrowers. We wouldn’t go into the pillbox after that.

STERLING MACE

We walked up the trail, headed for the ridges. A pretty good shell dropped in and hit a couple of guys, including my platoon sergeant. I spotted him sitting by himself with blood dripping from the side of his head and went over, trying to help comfort him.

“Mace,” he said. “What does it look like? Is it bad?”

“I don’t know what kind of neighborhood you come from, Harry,” I said. “But it looks like some kind of wise-ass kid threw a rock and hit you in the head. That’s all it is.” So he felt better about it then.

We kept going, knocked out a couple of other caves, got up to the Five Sisters, and spread out.

R. V. BURGIN

We were setting up there on top of one of those ridges, trying to dig in. The cliff we were on was about sixty feet to the ground, almost straight up and down. A guy was setting up to my left. From across the valley, a Jap shot him right between the eyes.

The names of the ridges on Peleliu all run together anymore. I didn’t put myself in a position back then where I cared to remember their names. A ridge was just another damn ridge to me, one damn ridge after another.

STERLING MACE

At the top of this ridge there were these swaths of white everywhere. I thought it had snowed up there. You know what it was? Used toilet paper. There was a lump of crap on each piece of toilet paper.

Then there were all these dead Jap bodies up there, decomposing. That’s where we had to stay. The stink—forget about it.

We got set there and got into position. After about ten minutes you heard the crack of a rifle. Nobody said, “Corpsman,” so I figured it was probably a miss. We sat there awhile longer. Finally I said to Charlie, “Hold the fort. I’m going down to see Levy. He’s got my cigarettes.” Because he could put them in his pack and keep them dry.

So I got down to where Levy was, but I didn’t see him. I said, “Frank. Where’s Levy?”

“I didn’t want to tell you, Mace,” Frank said. “But Levy took one in the head.”

“Christ Almighty,” I said.

“Yeah,” Frank said. “Levy was sitting there shooting the breeze with the lieutenant. He turned around and said, ‘I’m tired of this shit.’ He looked up and bing. Wasn’t two seconds later, and they got him.”

JIM ANDERSON

At night you settled into a foxhole with a good friend. You’re not supposed to fire at all, unless you’re in heavy action. You see something out there in the dark, and it grows arms and legs, but then it turns out to be a stump. So your imagination gets you a lot of times. I tell ya—I was more afraid at night than I was in the daylight.

R. V. BURGIN

The Japs weren’t on the island. They were in the island. All over the islands were these caves. The Japs had been on the island since WWI, and they’d brought in hundreds of Korean tunnel diggers in the years that followed. One cave was big enough to house about fifteen hundred Jap soldiers. This big cave started on one side of a ridge, went all the way under, and came out the other side. They had a dispensary set up in there, a hospital. All kinds of stuff. We had to close three or four entrances to those caves. If you used a charge to close one entrance, you didn’t do much damage. They’d come out of another entrance and take another shot at you. So we did that, one cave by one cave.

K Company lost eight men in the Five Sisters before pulling out to rest.

R. V. BURGIN

You get so worn down, so exhausted. We fought them during the days, then at night they’d come out of their rat holes and infiltrate the lines. You get to the point where you don’t give a damn whether you live or die.

We had come off the ridges and were down below the Five Sisters there. I’d been up and spent two straight nights with the men on the line. Not a wink of sleep. The third afternoon I found I couldn’t focus my eyes anymore, so I called my sergeant, Johnny Marmet, and told him I need to come off the front line. So John said, “Yeah, come on in.”

We had two mortars, each firing mostly harassment rounds. There was a shell hole right in front of one of the guns, and I crawled right into that hole. They fired those guns every two to three minutes. I went straight to sleep at eight that night. John woke me up the next morning at 8 A.M. Those guns had fired the whole time I’d been asleep, right over my head. But I’d slept all night in that racket, a full twelve hours, and I’d never once heard those guns.

STERLING MACE

We pulled back about fifty yards and set up lines that extended from the ridge toward the direction of the airport. The front was a U shape, and the back was open, because there wasn’t supposed to be anybody behind us. Okay. You talk about a jury-rigged hunk of junk. A piece of wood here, a rock there. That was our security.

Everybody was all set up and keeping an eye on the Five Sisters. The password was Bull Run, because you gotta have everything with L’s in it. The Japs can’t say L’s. Just as it got dark, we heard, “Corpsman!” When you hear this, you know there are problems. I looked and saw these two guys running toward me. I wasn’t putting things together at first. I said to my assistant gunner, “Charlie, you see these guys coming? Are they stretcher bearers or what?” I held off shooting because I’m looking for a word of assurance from him, but Charlie didn’t say a word. They peeled off to the right. They were two Japs. Evidently we passed a cave, went right by it, and they spent the whole day in the cave watching us set up our lines. So they knew where to run.

The Japs kept running and came to the machine gun squad. A guy named Gilbert Amdur saw them and challenged them. He hesitated and challenged them a second time instead of opening fire. That was inexperience on his part. After he hesitated, the grenade that killed him was already on its way.

I thought to myself, I bet there are more Japs in the caves. It got darker. Soon enough I saw silhouettes coming right at me. Four or five. We’re watching. I took my BAR and just let the whole BAR go. I could hear them tumbling down. Charlie said to me, “What are you shooting at?”

“I’ll show you in the morning,” I said.

It grew quiet. Next thing you knew, the same thing. Another four or five silhouettes. I mowed them down again.

I had a magazine of tracers. I got those out of there and stuck another magazine on. Out came the Japs again—three or four. I got them again. Again, I heard more coming. Without thinking, I grabbed the tracers, shoved the magazine up, and pulled the trigger. It lit the place up. I could tell that the Jap on the end of the line could see the flash from my BAR. He peeled off to his right and hid.

I couldn’t tell exactly where he was, but figured he was no more than five feet away from me. I turned around to Charlie and held my finger to my mouth and pointed. Charlie didn’t say a word. I changed my position and got down on my right knee with the BAR resting on my left knee. I aimed right where I thought this Jap was. He was waiting for me to make a noise. I was waiting for him to make a noise. It might have been five, ten minutes, whatever. The Jap flipped something. I let twenty rounds go.

Charlie said, “What are you shooting at?”

“I’ll show you in the morning,” I said again.

The next morning there was this dead Jap. He took twenty rounds right dead center of his stomach. Half of his face was blue. That was the first time I’d ever seen a blue face on a dead Nip, so I asked a corpsman about it. “We all have blue blood inside our body,” he said. “When it comes out, it comes out red. The reason it looks blue now is that you hit him so fast, the blood in his body didn’t have a chance to flow.”

All those Japs I shot were night fighters. They wore black pajamas. Sneakers. No uniforms except for the guy with blue blood. None wore helmets. They were armed with hand grenades, but that was it. They’d plopped on top of each other.

One guy had this wristwatch on. I tell ya, I’m not in for souvenirs. People ask, “What souvenirs did you bring back from the war?” and I say, “I’m sitting on it.” You know what I mean. But stupidly I took a piece of twine, all I could find, and put it around his wrist. I didn’t want to touch his hand. Finally it shook loose. So that wrist watch was one souvenir I had. I took the watch home to my mother. She went to a jeweler and had a new band put on it. But when I told her where I got it from, that was the end of that watch.

R. V. BURGIN

Pretty soon, dead corpses were all around. There was no dirt to cover the corpses on Peleliu. Just coral. If there was dirt, we would’ve covered them. They’d bloat up larger than they really were. You couldn’t bury them. The sour stench of those corpses was everywhere. You’d often be in a certain place and you’d have to stay there all day and night, three days sometimes, and a corpse would be right by you, within stepping distance. There was no way to get away from the corpses.

The flies were unbelievably thick. Big ole green blowflies would be everywhere on those corpses. I’ve seen flies so thick on a corpse, something would disturb the corpse and they’d form up like a bunch of blackbirds—flies so thick they cast a shadow. When you were trying to eat, you couldn’t shoo the flies off. You had to knock them off with your thumb. They’d come up from the body of a dead Jap, fly right out of his mouth or butt, and land on your food.

JIM ANDERSON

There was approximately eleven thousand Japanese soldiers on Peleliu. We killed the vast majority. Only half of them ever got buried. So you can imagine in the heat what it smelled like. Every day a plane came over and sprayed Peleliu with DDT to try and kill the flies and all the diseases. We didn’t see a difference.

After a brief rest, on October 7, K Company returned to the Umurbrogol Pocket. This time they avoided the ridges by staying in the valleys.

STERLING MACE

They told us we were going to do one more big push. But they always said that.

R. V. BURGIN

We were going in to clear out the pocket in a horseshoe-shaped valley. We were down low, with ridges in front of us and on both sides. The Japs had those caves set up in those ridges, higher in elevation than us. From three sides, they were looking down on us, and we were looking up at them. To me, that was a death trap. We were sitting ducks, going in there. But it had to be done.

JIM ANDERSON

At the Horseshoe Valley they assigned at least two Army Sherman tanks with their 75mm guns to K Company. Unlike the ridges, where the tanks couldn’t help us, this terrain was perfect for them.

When the tanks came up to our front line, a squad or platoon was assigned to each. We infantrymen would have to accompany them because the Japanese soldiers would often come running out of their caves in suicide attacks with sticky bombs or mines to knock them out.

At the Horseshoe we got about two hundred yards in, as far as the tanks could go, and got into a real battle. When we would run up against a pillbox where an enemy machine gun was firing from, we would get ahold of the telephone on the back end of the tank and say, “There’s a pillbox seventy-five yards to the right, give him a couple of rounds, would ya?” Eventually the tanks used up all their ammo, so we had to pull out with them. There would have been too many casualties otherwise.

K Company returned to the ridges. On October 12, the company found itself on a ridge named “Bloody Nose.”

R. V. BURGIN

We were heading up a ridge and taking fire from three sides. Someone needed to see what was beyond the hill, in order to direct the battalion’s counterfire. The captain’s runner, Jim Anderson, and his right-hand man, Dick Higgins, were with him. Someone had to look over the ridge to see what we were up against.

JIM ANDERSON

We were going through Bloody Nose Ridge when we moved up with Captain Haldane to an observation point on the ridge. We were all sick and tired of fighting. Captain Haldane was just as fatigued as the rest of us fellows.

Captain Haldane went to look over this coral ridge, down into the valley where K Company was going to advance. Dick Higgins and I were next to him, just below the ridge so the Japs couldn’t see us. When Captain Haldane peeked over the top of this ridge—bang—one shot was fired. He was shot right through the forehead. It killed him immediately. I was standing not more than a foot away, and he slumped right beside me. We don’t know where the shot came from. I’m guessing that some Jap rifleman had seen the activity there and had it all sighted in and ready to fire at whoever appeared over that ridge.

It just hit us—our leader had been killed.

R. V. BURGIN

We were about three-quarters of the way up the ridge. It was Johnny Marmet who came back and told us about Ack Ack’s death. The best I remember, he said, very simply, “We’ve lost our captain.”

JIM ANDERSON

A couple of us carried the captain’s body back down the hill from the front lines. The men of K Company took Captain Haldane’s death extremely hard. After all the fighting and suffering and misery we had already put up with, having our commander die seemed too much to bear. I seen some good hard fighting men just turn around and walk away because they didn’t want to be seen crying. I seen the gunny sergeant in our company, he just took a rock and threw it down on the ground and said a bunch of swear words.

R. V. BURGIN

Some of the men took it very deeply. It affected different ones different ways. Some said, “Oh shit,” “Oh my God.” Some of us never said anything. But it was a real blow. Captain Haldane was as good a captain as ever led a company in the Marine Corps. Everybody liked the captain. He was an extraordinary man. A great leader. Whenever we marched into battle, he was the first to lead us in. It cost him his life.

The future Senator Paul Douglas was a Marine who served with our regiment. He was a politician who joined up at age fifty as a PFC, then became an officer to get overseas. He went to the same alma mater as Ack Ack, and this is how he remembered him: “His company always suffered fewer casualties than any other company, but in every engagement Andy was always wounded—always wounded and always wound up each engagement twenty or thirty pounds less than when he began because he would give his rations away. He would give his blankets away, he would give his shirts away; and we always had to protect him at Peleliu to see that he got enough food.”

JIM ANDERSON

After the captain got killed, we were still on the front lines for a while. We all felt really bad, all of us did. But you had to keep going. You had to do your job. The company’s executive officer, Thomas “Stumpy” Stanley, took over. It was near the end of the fighting, and the fighting was still going real hard. The Japanese that were left were real dug into their caves. They was very good soldiers. They put up with a lot. But to utterly throw their lives away seemed very foolish to me when they could have surrendered. When they stayed in those caves and pillboxes and we went in with flamethrowers, they could have surrendered first and still been alive today.

R. V. BURGIN

Did the Japanese soldier have a sense of surrender? Oh, hell no. On Peleliu, I believe there was ten or eleven thousand Japs on the island. We captured nineteen. And I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that some of them captured were Koreans or Okinawans that they had forced to come into their army. When it came to the Japanese soldier, you were going to have to kill them all.

They were brainwashed. The head of their government, their emperor, was divine in their eyes—literally a god that they could pray to. So the fighting became a religious thing for them. They were taught that it was an honor to commit suicide for their god. I’ve never actually seen a Japanese soldier commit hari-kari up close, but I’ve found plenty of their bodies after they did it, with a sword stuck through their gut. And I’ve seen plenty of them after they’d blown themselves up with hand grenades. I always thought, Well more power to them. I wish more of them would have done it. In their minds, it was an honor to kill themselves for the emperor. But I always thought the other way around—that it was an honor to live for Uncle Sam. I always wanted to live. I never wanted to die.

JIM ANDERSON

We was ordered back to this real tough, last-ditch fighting on Peleliu. The Japanese soldiers were fighting an effective defensive battle. They were very well disciplined. The Japanese were so dug into the caves that the artillery couldn’t touch them. So we would call in air support, Marine Corsair fighter planes, loaded with napalm. We laid out orange panels, “air panels” they were called, to mark the front lines so the pilots would know to not drop the bombs where we were.

The Corsairs would take off from the airstrip we had captured earlier in the campaign. They would not even retract their wheels—they would swing around and drop this jellied gasoline on the ridges, then they’d strafe the area and set it on fire to burn the Japs out. After that they would land, all within five minutes. We were told it was the shortest bombing run of WWII. They were a real help. That napalm did more damage to the Japanese than our artillery. It didn’t necessarily burn the Japs—it would burn the oxygen out of the cave and suffocate them. Napalm is terrible stuff.

On October 15, the Army relieved K Company and the 5th Marines and inherited the Umurbrogol Pocket, still four hundred yards wide by five hundred yards long. K Company moved to a secure area on the island’s north shore for evacuation to Pavuvu. Six weeks later the island would be declared “secure,” although the last thirty-four Japanese soldiers would not surrender until 1947.

STERLING MACE

The general had told us the campaign for Peleliu would last three days. We were there for forty-four.

R. V. BURGIN

When we got on that boat and left Peleliu, really, we hadn’t slept for a month. I was wiped out after thirty days of constant fighting. Exhausted. Mentally and physically. We all were. Some were barely able to climb the rope ladder to get aboard the ship to leave.

I don’t remember changing clothes for the whole damn time we were on Peleliu. The coral and sweat from the heat mixed together. Everyone’s clothes were raggedy, frayed, torn. Shoes were just about gone. Everybody stunk. Nobody was changing his socks. Many men are sick. There was a lot of diarrhea going on. We were a bunch of raggedy-ass Marines.

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