CHAPTER THREE
Guadalcanal
SID PHILLIPS
Not long after the Battle of the Tenaru my eighteenth birthday came along, on September 2. I walked over to the beach, sat down, and had a five-minute meditation, all alone.
We’d had a lot of action by then. The C rations had run out. There was no real food, just that damn Jap rice to eat twice a day. You went through the chow line and there were no seconds. The flies got so bad you finally almost didn’t notice them, they were simply always around. If you took out your spoon to eat a meal, they’d be on your spoon. If you went through the chow line, the flies would be all in the food. It had some sort of bugs in it. After a while everybody ate the bugs, too. As a nation, we were poorly prepared for war. To get a task force at sea, ready to fight, is not something you could do except with a great deal of preparation. Or even to issue rifles to all the men in your military. You’ve got to have ammunition for the ships. That all takes time. When the war began for us, I’d say Japan was probably twice as strong in the Pacific as we were.
I remember looking at the ocean and thinking, This water goes all the way to my front door in Mobile. I wished I could walk on water and go home.
ART PENDLETON
We still had virtually no navy. The Japanese were kicking our ass for a long time out in the ocean. When my gun was on the beach, we often watched the Japanese come cruising along the coast with submarines and ships, just a few hundred yards out. Because there was no competition for them, the subs would surface and their crews would walk the deck.
We would all stand on the beach thumbing our nose at them, dancing around, and doing every obscene gesture that we could think of because we were half-naked anyways. They couldn’t do anything except unplug the deck gun and shoot at us. The coconut trees would get knocked down and everything would go to hell. We’d jump in our holes, and then as soon as they stopped we’d come out and start the whole thing over again.
Eventually, we brought up a 75mm cannon on a half-track to shoot at the sub. It was going to be a heck of a surprise for them. But before we could fire, Colonel Pollock rushed in and gave the gunners hell. He did not want them to fire that 75mm gun. He was afraid it would reveal some of our firepower. We didn’t know at the time what the Japanese had coming our way, so he didn’t want to tip our hand. I can understand his point. I thought, What a disappointment!
Shortly after that an Australian two-engine bomber flew in for reconnaissance; he was taking pictures. He saw the sub, circled around, and dropped a bomb on the fantail of the sub. The bomb messed them up. The sub couldn’t dive. It was going around in circles. We were having a blast cheering, adding insult to injury.
JIM YOUNG
The Navy tried to supply us with ammo and food. They would sneak in as fast as they could, and we’d help unload so they could get away before the Jap air raids began again. I never understood why the Japs always came at the same time every day. It got so you could set your watch by them.
A destroyer brought gasoline for our airplanes. We were towed out to the ship on a barge, which was then tied to the ship. We had put about fifteen drums of gas on the barge when we got word of a Jap air raid coming. The destroyer had to get under way. It started to leave and was dragging the barge with it. We were yelling our heads off for them to cut us loose. We ended up having to use our own knives. Right about that time the Jap planes arrived, and we jumped into the sea and started to swim for shore. The Japs went after the ship, but they didn’t hit it.
The next day I was put on another working party. A destroyer took a chance and brought in more gas. We had almost unloaded it when we got a surprise air raid. A Jap plane must have flown in from a Jap cruiser. It went into a dive and released one bomb, which struck the ship on the fantail, where its racks were full of depth charges. There was a tremendous explosion. The ship’s bow rose straight up, and the ship slid under the water with almost all hands still aboard.
SID PHILLIPS
Every day the machine gunners would come to eat at the battalion mess tent. They would walk right by the mortar platoon. The story got out that Leckie’s father back home had asked if he needed his dress uniform, his dress blues. It was such an absurd idea that anybody would have a dress uniform there in that nasty, filthy, dirty situation we were in. It made everybody laugh.
When Leckie would come walking down, we would ask him, just about every day, “Hey, Lucky, has your dad sent your blues yet?” and he would say, “I’m looking for them tomorrow. I’m pretty sure they’ll be here tomorrow.” Leckie had a good sense of humor.
ROY GERLACH
We had a galley near the Tenaru in a coconut grove. There was no place for the men to sit down. We served whatever we could find. Mostly corned beef and cabbage, although we didn’t have too much cabbage. We had plenty of corned beef though, because we were close to Australia and they were known for their corned beef. So that’s what we cooked. Corned beef patties. Corned beef hash. The troops would get to chattering because they didn’t have anything else. Cans and cans of corned beef. We didn’t even have any bread, because we had no bake shop set up. We discovered where the Japs had stored a barn full of rice. So we took that, too. Then we ate corned beef and rice.
The troops had this joke. They always wanted to know what kind of corned beef we were having today. They’d make up a sign and put it where we fed everybody. Today’s menu: Corned beef without catsup. Corned beef without pickles. Corned beef without catsup or pickles. Jap rice without raisins. Jap rice without peaches. Rice pudding without pudding. And so on.
ART PENDLETON
One time, a torpedo that missed its target floated in. I don’t know whether that was American or Japanese. It must have been about twenty feet long. One of the fellows said, “Oh, I know all about those torpedoes. Let’s go down and get it.” So we swam in and brought the thing to shore. This thing was monstrous you know. One of the fellows got to the nose of it and unscrewed the nose cone. He knew what he was doing because inside the nose cone was alcohol. Alcohol kept the firing pin in good order I guess. So we got the alcohol out of the torpedo and fifty of us drank one gulp apiece.
JIM YOUNG
I had come down with a bad case of hemorrhoids. Of all times, the lieutenant told me to take twelve men down to the beach to help unload a destroyer that was sneaking in. I told the lieutenant that I could barely walk, much less unload a ship, so he called for the corpsman to check me out. The corpsman confirmed there was no way I could handle the work party. So the lieutenant called another corporal, Clifton Barter, to take over my job. Corporal Barter asked if he could use my .45-caliber pistol so he wouldn’t have to carry a rifle. I said, “Sure,” and off they went. While they were unloading, the air raids started. The men all jumped on the truck and tried to make a run back to our area. It was too late. Bombs were raining down on them. They stopped at an old bomb crater and all jumped in. Damned if one of the bombs didn’t fall right on top of them.
One of the Marines, a sixteen-year-old boy who was later sent home, survived the blast and ran back to our company with the news. The lieutenant, a few other guys, and me jumped into a jeep and raced to the spot. It was awful. At least five were dead and others badly wounded. You could hardly tell who was who.
I finally located Corporal Barter. He was badly wounded and asking for water. A fragment about the size of a softball had hit him. It had gone through the bottom of his rib cage and was sticking out the other side of his chest. The corpsman told me to give him whatever he wanted. There wasn’t anything more we could do for him. As we were loading the truck with the wounded, Corporal Barter died. The lieutenant told me to go get my .45-caliber pistol from Barter’s body. It wasn’t easy for me to do that. It was my fault that he was killed instead of me. That’s how I felt about it then. That’s how I feel about it today, too.
SID PHILLIPS
We had no medicine. Everybody had diarrhea, dysentery. Some had it worse than others. W.O. had it worse than others. There was a chance that he might not survive. He became emaciated, couldn’t even stand up. We had one boy in the hospital, it was a big tent. No cots. No beds. They just had the boys lying on the ground. Nobody wanted to go to the hospital. They didn’t have any medicine anyway.
W.O. and maybe two others were bad. I didn’t think they were going to live. They looked like they’d just been released from Dachau. Everything went right through them. It got so bad, they couldn’t even sit on our pole head. They just lay on the ground in their own diarrhea. It was a real medical nightmare for the corpsman, because they didn’t have anything to give them.
We had some little Jap pushcarts that the Japanese had used, like a cart on two bicycle wheels. Every day I pushed W.O. over to the ocean so he could get clean. His clothes were full of crap. We washed those out. We just told him he was pretending to be sick. We wished to hell he’d quit pretending and get well. We just told him he was a pain in the ass. Nobody gave anybody any sympathy or compassion—ever! It was good-natured ribbing, yeah. But that was typical of the military all through WWII. It was a way of showing camaraderie. It didn’t really help a person to sympathize with him. It would depress him if you did. But if you kidded him, it would make him smile, and he’d fire back some wisecrack at you.
So we nursed our sick right there where we were. We had them stretched out on the ground. We could give them water. But it was just bad. I really didn’t think W.O. was going to survive. Our corpsman got ahold of some Japanese paregoric and gave it to W.O. and to another boy, and they improved a little bit. And then when they began to eat a little bit, they began to improve more rapidly.
ART PENDLETON
I was wounded twice on the ’Canal. The first wound I got was during a patrol when I got hit in the ankle with shrapnel. I was treated in the field by a corpsman since we didn’t have hospitals.
The second time, I had a case of diarrhea. When we went to the toilet, we had slit trenches that we dug. The trench was twenty-four inches wide, probably four to five feet deep, and maybe eight feet long. You would set a pole across and place your behind on the pole. This was our toilet facilities.
During one of the bombings, which were constant every day and night, I got blown off the pole along with what clothes I had on. I didn’t land in the waste but woke up on the ground beside the trench. My clothes and a shoe were blown clean off. A wild pig was laying beside me, dead. That wasn’t a good thing—we didn’t eat those animals because they were full of worms. After that I went to my gun emplacement, which was a hundred feet away on the river. I was so ill from the blast that I couldn’t move for two or three weeks. My back never fully recovered from that.
SID PHILLIPS
You were always filthy. The only way to wash was to go to one of the rivers and take a bath. We loved that. Whenever we could, we would get permission to go and take a bath. This was once every ten days or two weeks.
General Vandegrift was the leader of our division. He was kind of a dumpy guy, not very handsome. Everybody knew him on sight. On one of my bathing episodes over there, he was on a log maybe twenty yards upstream from us. We didn’t know he was there. This bar of perfumed cashmere bath soap came sailing by in the current. That was most unusual, because none of us had any soap, except the occasional bar of GI soap—it came in square brown blocks and you could cut off a hunk of it, if the galley had any. So when this bar of fine-looking soap came along in the stream, I snatched it up and hollered, “Who lost this?!” This hand went up, upstream. It was General Vandegrift, naked as the day he was born. His orderly came down and I gave it to him. All the guys wanted to smell my hand afterward. They joked that I must be having a date that night, to be using that fine stuff.
On September 18, a glimmer of hope landed on Guadalcanal’s shores. The 1st Marine Division’s 7th Regiment—the 7th Marines—arrived as reinforcements with support units. Some four thousand men strong, they had been preparing the island of Samoa to resist a Japanese invasion until the call for reinforcements came from the ’Canal. One of the 7th Marines was Sergeant Richard Greer…
RICHARD GREER
When we arrived on Guadalcanal, I heard word that Colonel Edson, the leader of 1st Marine Raiders, said to his men, “Here comes some competition, boys.” He was right.
I’ll be ninety-six on my next birthday. When Pearl Harbor occurred I was twenty-four, older than a lot of new recruits then, and had a decent job working as office manager for Burlington Mills. We had 496 looms and were making parachute cloth. Due to my job being considered essential services, I had a deferment from the war. But I just ignored it. Right away the next morning I called the office and said, “I won’t be in this morning. I have some business to take care of.”
I knew the Marine recruiter in Roanoke, and when he opened the office I walked in and said, “Well, I’m ready to sign up.”
“It’ll take you a while to get to officer’s school,” he said.
“No, I don’t want to be an officer,” I said. “I’ve thought about this. I want to be a mud Marine. I want to go, and go now. I’m not going to stay with the Corps forever. I’ve got the rest of my life planned. But I’ll go and fight as long as the enemy’s out there.”
Pretty soon I was in Parris Island. That went real easy for me. Besides holding a job with a multinational company, I was also an outdoorsy guy. I used to spend time on the rivers, creeks, and mountains. Every night I was out fox hunting or coon hunting for half the night, along the river. Boot camp didn’t matter to me any more than going around the block.
In late February 1942, I was sent to Camp Lejeune, and was assigned to D Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, a weapons company, the heart of the battalion in those days. The company had 278 men in it, and we had 81mm mortars, a 37mm cannon, and twenty-four water-cooled machine guns spread across three platoons.
John Basilone and I had gotten to be friends pretty early on. He was a sergeant and I was a corporal but we were really close. John was happy-go-lucky and easy to get along with. He was absolutely a nut about teaching people machine guns. He knew a machine gun like damn few people ever did. When he put his duty belt on, he was totally duty. But otherwise he was always having a good time and carrying on.
He used to practice taking his .45 out of his holster, seeing how fast he could do it. He was always practicing his quick draw. We used to walk out of the movies on base and he’d throw his left hand down, grab his .45, and draw it out of his holster. He said, “Greer, you don’t ever practice that. You better start.” I said, “John, don’t worry. I’m going to have my .45 in my hand the whole time.”
I was a machine gunner, but I could also read naval regulations and understand them because I had studied business administration in college. So they often used me for administration duties. I could write reports, court-marshals, muster rolls, and stuff like that. I don’t know how they’d found out, but they would pull me off the line to do those things.
Lieutenant Colonel Chesty Puller was our battalion commander. I was a runner for him part of the time. I took messages from the D Company commander to the battalion commander, who was Puller, many times. I played ball on the same team as Puller when we weren’t in combat. He was a catcher. He seemed to know everybody, even if he knew our names or not. He had fought bandits in Nicaragua and called people by Spanish names like “hombre.”
We went through five first sergeants on Guadalcanal for one reason or another. Off and on, I was acting first sergeant. It was because of maturity. I was older and knew what the hell was going on. They would call me out of the first platoon and say, “Come on down to the first sergeant’s tent, something’s happened to him.” That’s when I saw Puller on a regular basis. Gunnery sergeants and first sergeants set up the defenses or FPLs [final protected lines]. As acting first sergeant for D Company, I would tell Colonel Puller, “Sir, Captain Rogers said we’re ready for your inspection. The defenses are set up.” Before inspection I would go through and talk to those platoon sergeants and tell them, “If any of you damn right move anything with this setup, I’m gonna damn well see that you get court-marshaled.” After inspection, Colonel Puller always said, “Beautiful job, boys. Beautiful job.”
But when combat would start, Puller was always screaming at his platoon leaders, his lieutenants, and anyone who wasn’t performing like he wanted them to. He would pop up here, disappear, and pop up ten feet over there. He did it all time. He told us later that was how he learned to fight as a Marine down in Nicaragua and Haiti. He won two Navy Crosses down there and would soon win a third on Guadalcanal.
SID PHILLIPS
People sometimes ask me what the worst part of Guadalcanal was. During those weeks and months on end when everybody had dysentery—there was no toilet paper. Here we were, all with diarrhea, some of us had it worse than others—but we all had it, and there was no toilet paper! The living conditions were just awful. Flies were everywhere. Flies. Flies. Flies.
But, seriously, ask any Marine what the worst part of Guadalcanal was, and they’d say the night the battleships bombarded us.
On October 13, the American Army landed 2,800 reinforcements from the 164th Infantry Regiment on Guadalcanal to aid the Marines. At 1:30 A.M. the next morning, the Japanese battleships Kongo and Haruna anchored offshore with smaller warships.
JIM YOUNG
I had the midnight watch with William Howard Brown, my ammo carrier and good buddy. I called him “Brownie.” He was eighteen and I was twenty-one. Everyone else was asleep. We were sitting along the beach, looking out to sea when we saw what we thought was heat lightning or a storm over the ocean. We both said the same thing. “Great, now we’re going to have to be sitting here in the rain.” All of a sudden we heard a terrible noise, something like a train going past real close. Then there were more and more flashes out at sea. Two Japanese battleships with fourteen-inch guns were shelling us. Big, fourteen-inch-wide shells were coming in that sounded like train cars flying overhead. The first thing we’d done was start screaming “Condition Red!” which told everyone to run for the foxholes. I doubt they needed the urging.
This turned out to be one of the most frightening experiences we ever had. We had one big dugout that held about eight of us. We had one little candle going in there. Some of the guys were praying through the explosions. Our roof would shake just like an earthquake. I thought, This is it for us.
RICHARD GREER
The Jap ships were bold enough to anchor off Lunga Point. They were hitting Henderson Field and the defenses around it. Each one of those damn shells will knock down a city block!
I was in a slit trench at the company command post. Hell, the shells hit so close it’d knock you out of the trench. I’d been tossed out of my damn hole ten to fifteen feet. You would just scramble back like a rat into that hole. It scared the living hell out of you. All I could think of was Where is our Navy? Your head was ringing. A lot of guys had concussions, bad concussions, and a concussion can kill you just like anything else. I lost my hearing.
People don’t know that it was the worst shelling the Marines took in World War II. If you know anything about World War I, the worst shelling was at Passchendaele in Belgium. This was equal to Passchendaele.
ROY GERLACH
Once again it was really good to be a cook. Our galley was near the Tenaru River, so to hit the airport they had to shoot over our heads. I looked up and saw those shells, red-hot, flying through the air.
SID PHILLIPS
We were on the eastern end of the runway when those two battleships started shelling. There would be a flash of light, when those big shells would burst, that made the outside look like a brilliant, bright light. When those shells would go off, it was like being thrown off of a two-story house and landing on your stomach. It would knock all the air out of you and you couldn’t breathe, like you got punched in the gut. It was awful and it went on and on and on and on. Hunks of shrapnel, red-hot, would sit on the ground and glow.
I saw grown men sobbing. You could always tell a Catholic boy because he’d start reciting the Hail Mary. We were pretty well dug in, with dirt-covered logs over our foxholes, but the roof would jump up in the air, up to four feet. The dirt sifted down through the logs on top of us. The concussion was so tremendous that you just sort of became drunk from it, groggy. You stay in your hole for hours with all those shells exploding close by. Our shelter fell down on us and we were chest-deep in dirt. Uh, man. That’s scary to me, I mean the idea of suffocating underneath the pile of logs and dirt.
When it was all over, nobody said anything for what seemed like an hour. Your ears—you couldn’t hear anything for a while. Finally, Ransom said, “I hope to hell Tojo doesn’t get that idea again!” Somebody else joked how those Jap gunners couldn’t hit a bull in the ass with a bass fiddle. We started laughing. But we had been really scared during that whole bombardment—even though nobody would admit it out loud. You didn’t know if the next one was going to land right in your hole. We had a lot of casualties.
I was praying all the while, just trying to hold on. I was raised in the Christian church and had gone to Sunday school as a boy. You had to—it wasn’t optional. But I’d say my faith wasn’t really unshakeable until much later in life. The idea of faith is that you hope He’s real. But faith beyond that is that you know He’s real. And I now know that God is real.
JIM YOUNG
I smoked my first cigarette after that. Someone said they help calm your nerves. It didn’t. Everybody was semi-shocked, I guess. They fired 970 of those huge shells that night. They destroyed airplanes. Gasoline dumps. Everything.
The Japs came in and were unloading thousands of troops, way down the island. We could see them from the top of the hills. We had no way of stopping them now without our planes. We were very low on ammo and supplies.
We were ordered to board trucks and head to the lines closest to the landing. Our convoy of trucks was caught in an air raid, midway across the airstrip. We were like sitting ducks. The trucks stopped and we hid under them. In the scramble my helmet was knocked off and a piece of shrapnel hit the top of my head. I was lucky it hit a glancing blow and just made a minor wound. The corpsman said, “Oh, that isn’t much.” He put some sulfur powder on it and that was that. I never did get a Purple Heart for it.
We didn’t expect a land attack for a few more days because they were about six miles down the beach and had to make their way through the jungles, which were very thick. The general told us the situation was grave and that we could decide for ourselves. We could surrender or take off into the jungle and hope that the USA would finally retake the island.
RICHARD GREER
We didn’t think we were gonna lose. We always thought we were gonna win, even when Roosevelt was considering pulling us out of Guadalcanal and hitting the island again later. We got word that we might have to go to the hills to fight as guerillas, but we had known that could happen the whole time.
We knew that a fight was coming. We were preparing our sector for a long time before the Japs got there. We went down there and found every wrecked plane on the airfield and pulled every .50-caliber out and set it up. We probably had 50 percent more ordnance than the table of organization called for.
SID PHILLIPS
There was a radio communicator with us on Guadalcanal. And when the situation looked really hopeless, he’d pick up that field telephone and spin that handle, and he could disguise his voice so it didn’t sound like him at all. He’d say, “This is Sergeant Sacaraoiuoiasdfasdf, and I want to inform that the Japanese blahladfoiuadsofasf.” He could talk double talk so the guys on the other end wouldn’t know what in the hell he was saying. It almost made sense, but it didn’t. You knew that if you were on the other end hearing it, it just sounded like static. He’d throw the word “Japanese” in there every once in a while, and “might attack,” and “what should we do,” and then hang up. The phone would ring in a few minutes, and it would be our major on the other line. Then the communicator would say, “Yes sir, no sir, I have no idea sir, we have not used our phone at all.” Then he’d hang up and we’d all howl.
“There ain’t no brig,” he’d say to us. “What are they going to do to me?”
We’d all almost cry laughing. He was just doing it to be an idiot.
JIM YOUNG
We were moved from the Tenaru area, across the airport, and down south to bolster that line. That night we knew they were coming and waited to see what part of our lines would be attacked.
The climactic battle of Guadalcanal, the Battle for Henderson Field, reached a crescendo just after midnight on October 25, 1942, when the Japanese emerged from the jungles south of the airport, located the Marine lines, and charged with fixed bayonets.
JIM YOUNG
We were lucky. They didn’t attack H Company but instead hit the regiment that was tied into our line to the west—the 7th Marines—Chesty Puller’s outfit.
RICHARD GREER
About 1 A.M. it was like the hordes of hell were turned loose. The Japanese were all over the damn place. They were hopped up on some kind of damn drug, throwing dynamite, throwing hand grenades, wielding swords and rifles. They were screaming and yelling “Banzai!” “Kikiboo!” “Marine you die!” “Blood for the emperor!” and derogatory things about Eleanor Roosevelt, Babe Ruth, and all that kind of crap. We would yell back, “Eat shit, Jap!” It was a little low, but some Jap screamed at us, “Screw Eleanor!” and some Marine yelled back, “You screw her! I don’t want it!”
The Battle of Henderson Field had begun. They loaded the machine gun belts as fast as they could, and we took them to the line where all hell was breaking loose. You know a twelve-hundred-yard front line is not a big front, and you got seven thousand Japanese attacking it. You couldn’t hear yourself think!
Our company had three machine gun platoons and so you got twenty-four guns there and they were spread out to support the other companies—A, B, and C. John Basilone’s guns were attached to C Company at the time. I had to travel about a thousand yards to get the ammo to John’s guns. About three-fifths of a mile. It was a good old trek, in the jungle. I could see it pretty good, especially when the flares were floating down. Otherwise you had to feel your way in the black night. We had cleaned out seven hundred yards of jungle in front of the guns, but it was still thick as hell. We had been in there about a month, and in a month you get to know every tree.
I got to near Basilone’s gun, and I handed him a belt of ammunition or two. He was strong, so he could easily carry the 250 rounds in one belt. That belt’s a long and heavy son of a gun. At one point I carried five belts plus my Springfield rifle, and that really just about tore my legs off! Basilone said, “You don’t have to bring them to the guns.” I said, “Hell, I can bring it to the guns.” John had his .45 on him, and I remembered the times he used to practice his quick draw. That night he killed a bunch of Japs with it. He took the ammo from me and went back to keeping the machine guns hopping.
I carried ammo to all three platoons of D Company that night and the other companies in the battalion. The guns were arranged with fields of fire that crossed each other so that a damn rabbit couldn’t get through. You’d sit behind your gun, and even in the black of the night if something crossed in front of it, it’ll register in your sight. You’d squeeze off a burst of three or five rounds. There’s none of that Hollywood shit where you burn up a belt.
The Japs they kept coming and we kept firing. There was mortars and there was artillery, there were any number of machine guns. The sky was flashing with color from the tracer ammo and the blasts of the artillery. It’s something that you never dreamed you’d ever live through. I give the Japs one thing—they were sure as hell bold in their attacks. They were crack troops of the 17th Army, which had swept all the way down the China coast and cleaned out Singapore.
JIM YOUNG
We could see and hear all the guns firing. We could hear the Japs screaming their heads off. We were all expecting to get hit, too. The word was that a few had broken through and were within fifty feet of the Colonel’s command post! That’s when John Basilone done his thing. He ended up saving the day by running guns up to the line and firing a machine gun from the hip.
RICHARD GREER
I have no idea how many ammo runs I made during the first night of battle. On one trip going up to Basilone I had three belts of ammo around my neck—750 bullets—which was pretty damn heavy. But he needed them. John was burning through them. Those belts are long, so I had to double them up around my neck. I was really being constricted. I came around a corner and a flare went off and there was a Jap colonel sitting right there against a tree. I threw my rifle up and then another flare went off and I noticed somebody had taken half the top of his head off already.
D Company’s old Master Gunnery Sergeant Fowel was the best mortar man on Guadalcanal. He had four 81mm mortars and was dropping those 81mm mortar shells right smack on the Japs, right smack in front of the lines. He was short and stocky and he had gotten pretty fat, but damn did he know mortars. The company command post was no more than twenty-five yards behind the line, the battalion command post was another fifty yards back, and that’s about where the mortars were. Man I tell you what, they put out some ammo that night. Old Gunnery Sergeant Fowel had cancer and the guys really loved him. If we had a can of milk, we’d save the milk and give it to the Gunny.
The breakthrough came during the early morning, between two of the rifle companies, right near the D Company command post. The Japs broke through and stopped to rest between the front lines and the mortars. A few of us from the command post—me, Gunny Farrel, Sergeant Sanner, and one other Marine—and about ten guys from the mortar platoon went and wiped them out. It didn’t amount to a hill of beans. I’ll tell you, I’m almost 100 percent sure that when we reached them the Japs were all asleep.
After that, one of the Marines who was with us, why, he blew his stack. He mentally lost it. The only Marine I ever saw lose it. The guy was raving and waving his rifle with that long bayonet on the end. Puller came up and ordered me to disarm him. I laid my rifle down but then thought he was going to cut me. I took the bayonet off my rifle and moved in on him. I hit him, not too hard, with a butt stroke on the side of the head. It knocked him right out. By that time, two MPs came up and they carried him off. I got no sleep that night. I would never dream of it.
After a day of scattered fighting, Greer, Basilone, and the 7th Marines rebuilt their defenses and prepared for another round.
RICHARD GREER
That night they came again. They came out of the jungles throwing grenades, dynamite, and shooting their guns. It was kinda hairy. There was a little breakthrough, but it was pretty quickly sealed up. It was basically a repetition of the first night. I was doing the same thing again, running ammo. Basilone was on the line, working the machine guns, as was everybody. The Japs made pass after pass. Suicide attacks. But we held.
After that second night, I looked at the pile of dead enemy bodies in front of our lines and said to my old buddy, Tom Boyle, “Tom, I wonder what killed all those dead Japanese—small arms fire, artillery, or mortars?” So we went out there and took a look at the Japanese dead. We were curious. They were piled up several feet high. In some places they were as high as the barbed wire. We turned them over and looked. Small arms fire. That’s what got them. Basilone’s section killed an entire company worth. I know one damn thing, there were even more dead Japs in front of A Company than anywhere. You never hear about that. They were in a more vulnerable position, but they had the benefit of cross fire from an Army cannon.
After the battle they brought a bunch of bulldozers, dug a long trench, and buried those Japanese in there, around 3,500 of them. To this day, I can’t believe the slaughter. It was an expensive campaign for them.
I don’t know who relieved us, but we went up on Bloody Ridge. It was quiet up there. Just about at dark, I lit a cigarette and some Jap across the ridge opened up on me with one of those Nambu machine guns and shot the hell out of the gun emplacement around me. I damn near got killed. Never did that again.
After the Marines and Army defeated the Japanese in the Battle for Henderson Field, the Navy scored a follow-up victory at sea. The tide turned and supplies flowed regularly in to the Marines—food from Australia, ammunition from the States, and mail from home.
JIM YOUNG
Everybody had a comic book. I don’t know where we got hold of them but that’s about all we had. I read lots of them. Superman, Dick Tracy, and that kind of stuff.
SID PHILLIPS
In the Pacific, you got a detached feeling, like you were all alone, way out in the middle of nowhere. We received mail on Guadalcanal when ships came in. You just loved to get mail. I mean, our morale would shoot way up. Often you didn’t receive any mail at all for weeks and weeks on end, then you might get ten letters all at once. This was before the era of civilian travel. Back then, Hawaii, in our minds, was about as far as the moon is today. It took days by ship to get to Hawaii in 1941. There was no air service to any part of the world.
All the guys would sit around and everyone would read their mail. Someone would holler, “Betty got married! Son of a bitch.” The faithful writers to me were my mother, my sister Katharine, and my best friend back home, Eugene Sledge.
Eugene and I were in grade school together, in high school together. We both played snare drum in high school band. We both had the same hobbies—history and hiking in the woods. So we had thousands and thousands of experiences together. My sister has nailed down his personality—if you just think of the movie Gone with the Wind, and think of Ashley in the movie—he’s an exact reproduction of Eugene Sledge’s personality. Always polite, always a gentleman, always sincere, never rude, that’s Eugene exactly.
In high school Eugene had an old car, and we used to travel all around the county. We had a prank that we would play. In those days, Mobile still had streetcars, and the streetcars were on fixed tracks. We found if we could pretend to break down on the street car track we could block all traffic—literally hundreds of cars—up and down Government Street. Eugene would stop the car, and with a straight face I would get out and lift the hood and tinker with the engine while the traffic backed up. Eugene would hand me a screwdriver, and I’d say, “Try it again.” On the old six-volt system you could ground the starter with the ignition turned off. We’d act like we’d be trying to start that car for five or ten minutes, or until the police arrived. Finally, he’d turn on the ignition and the car would start. I’d exclaim, “You got it!” and we’d jump in and drive off. Nobody ever caught on that it was all just a hoax to tie up traffic.
I remember writing Eugene a letter, warning him not to join anything. “Stay out of the Boy Scouts, the Salvation Army, and particularly the Marines. Don’t join anything!”
ROY GERLACH
Right in the camp where we stayed, there was this Japanese tractor. A couple of the fellows and me got it running, and we’d drive down to the beach, to the food depot. You were supposed to have a voucher to get supplies. Well, you had to have a mess sergeant to get a voucher. But we didn’t have any mess sergeant. So no vouchers for us! How were we supposed to eat? You did a little lying and fibbing and got it the best way you could. We only took the good stuff, the fruit and whatnot, then drove back. When that routine stopped working, we tried something else.
We were bivouacked right along the road to the commissary, where they stored food. They used to go by us in trucks, piled up high with food. They’d have to go slow because the dirt road was rough. So we’d go down on the road, stop the truck, and grab a case of stuff off it. But they got wise to the idea and improved the road, smoothed it out so they could go faster. So we’d go down there and dig ditches across the road so the trucks couldn’t go so fast. Big ruts. That gave us a chance to get more food.
ART PENDLETON
We kept going on patrols, every day. That never stopped. I used to warn my men before we went out, “Don’t be a hero! You don’t win a war by getting yourself killed.” I would tell them, “If someone throws a hand grenade and you see it, don’t throw your body on it like the heroes do. If you wanna kick it out of the way, okay. If you wanna pick it up, okay—you might lose an arm or you might get killed, but whatever you do, don’t throw your body on it. You’re not gonna help win the war if you get dead.”
At first I carried a tommy gun, the same as what the gangsters used to use, complete with the drum magazine. We quickly gave up those guns because when you walked in the jungle you had to be very quiet and with every step the bullets would slide forward and hit the steel drum. You would get that bump, bump, bump all the time. We threw those away and then used Reising submachine guns, which were made with a wood stock and had a straight magazine that held a dozen rounds. They were okay except when you got into real firefight. The spring in the magazine would jam and the cartridge wouldn’t go into the chamber. So it didn’t take long for us to throw those things away either.
The Japanese were excellent at the jungle fighting. They were everywhere. You could be eating and you could have a Jap creeping up on you. I remember being worn to a frazzle just looking for them. We were out there every day. Eventually your shoes would rot from going in and out of the water. Your clothes were a mess. You wanted to get rid of them. We used Japanese sandals eventually.
One time there were about twenty of us on a patrol. We were out to capture Japanese alive, which was not a good job, believe me. We were on a mission to collect prisoners of war to exchange for Americans. This was what we were told at least.
We surprised some Japanese and took them at gunpoint. One of the Japanese turned to me and he said in perfect English, “You know I went to the university in New York.” Now if that wouldn’t blow you away, I would like to know what would? What I said to him was totally stupid. I said, “It doesn’t make any difference. You’re my prisoner.” That was the end of the conversation. He never spoke after that to me.
In early November, Chesty Puller led Greer, Basilone, and their battalion against Japanese troops at a place on the coast, east of the airfield, called Koli Point. Many of the Japanese gathering there were survivors of the Battle of Henderson Field.
RICHARD GREER
On November 1, we were sent out to Koli Point. We must have had ten thousand men, Marines and Army. And the Japanese had a large concentration of troops there, too. On November 8 we could see the point up ahead. While everyone else encircled the Japs, we attacked up the beach. They saw us coming.
The enemy artillery fire opened up. It was an absolute surprise to us, but the Japs had landed a few field pieces by ship. The first round hit right beside our new first sergeant, a guy named Potts. He got hit in the back and cut in two. We ran for the trees. I got into the trees when a second round hit and knocked me unconscious, but not before shrapnel went through my shoe and stuck in my ankle. The same round put a hunk of shrapnel in Colonel Puller’s leg and killed another Marine.
When I came to, a “chancre mechanic” [slang for “corpsman”] was bandaging up my ankle. I was lucky as hell because that damn Marine shoe caught some of the shrapnel. I said, “Hell with that ankle!” I was more worried that I was spitting blood. Blood was coming out of my eyes and nose and ears. The corpsman said, “It’s a concussion. You’ll be all right since you’re healthy as hell.” It never bothered him. He fixed my ankle and I went back to duty.
We reorganized and headed back out on the offense. The day after I got hit, George Cooper, who was from my hometown of Rocky Mountain, Virginia, got five rounds from a machine gun right in the belly. I saw him going out and George said, “How bad is it?” I looked and I said, “If the medics get you on the boat in time, get you to a hospital ship, you’ll be all right.” They got him out of there, but they couldn’t find the damn boat. He died. I went to see his folks when I got back and that wasn’t easy. I still think about it a lot.
Before the Americans could encircle the Japanese, they escaped into the jungle toward the island’s center. An American Army sergeant would later remember, “The Americans learned once again that offensive operations against the Japanese were much more complicated and difficult than was defeating banzai charges.”
RICHARD GREER
They slipped away, but we tracked those jokers for thirty days out there in the jungle. They were all over hell and half of Georgia, but they didn’t have anywhere to run. Basilone called it “the Great Jap Hunt.” We had them good.
With Guadalcanal irreversibly in American hands, fresh Marine and Army units relieved the 1st Marine Division, whose men prepared to rotate out of the combat zone.
SID PHILLIPS
Finally, after weeks and weeks of fighting, they brought us off the line and down to the beach. Tex and I got put on a work detail, unloading a shipment of some canned food. Supplies in quantity finally had begun to arrive. The Navy pulled a couple steel barges in there, and you could unload off a ship onto that barge, easier than you could onto a landing craft. They put us in working parties, and we worked all the time. We soon had stacks and stacks of food, as high as a man could reach. You could create alleyways out of the food.
We had been starving to death for so long. Just hungry all the time. We couldn’t imagine having all this food. Tex and I got back there in one of those alleyways, and we each opened a can of sliced pineapple. We didn’t have anything to eat with, but we each ate a whole gallon can of it. We couldn’t keep it down. We just lay down on that barge and vomited overboard until we got rid of it. He would vomit and laugh, and then I’d vomit and laugh. He’d say, “That was too much, wasn’t it?”
JIM YOUNG
After five months of fighting on Guadalcanal, we were all in bad shape. Everyone was sick with malaria, dysentery, and jungle rot. The Army arrived and relieved us. The ships to take us away gathered just offshore. It was a great day. We had won the first major land campaign of the war, and Australia would never be threatened again.
On December 22, 1942, H Company would depart the island. Two weeks later, Greer, Basilone, and D Company would follow them.
SID PHILLIPS
After we left the beach, we got to a troop ship, and some of those were very high-sided. The only way to get aboard was to climb up the side on a big rope net, a long, long ways, to the top. We got about halfway up that thing, and we couldn’t go anymore. We were just too weak. I’d never seen a bunch of men weaker than we had become.
A man was afraid he was going to lose his grip and fall back into the boat, which could’ve killed him. The sailors soon realized we were that bad off, and they’d come down and grab you by your collar and give you a little help so you could get up another couple rungs. They’d reach down from the deck and pull you up. You were just completely exhausted at the top. I was five-ten and weighed 175 pounds when we started the campaign at Guadalcanal. I weighed 145 at the end.
Ransom lay on the deck in a heap. He looked up to the sailors with a grin and said, “Swabbies, Uncle Sam’s tough Marines are a wreck!”