CHAPTER FIVE
New Britain
On December 26, 1943, the Marines landed on the western tip of the island of New Britain, at a place called Cape Gloucester. On the opposite end of the island lay Japan’s South Pacific battle capital, the fortress port of Rabaul. The Marines were not there to attack Rabaul but instead to seize the island’s western airfield, isolating Rabaul so it would die on the vine.
ART PENDLETON
On the way to Cape Gloucester, I can remember more than once that we discussed how we’re not gonna make it this time. The odds were against us. Everyone was saying, “This is my address. Be sure and get in touch with so and so.”
JIM YOUNG
We landed the day after Christmas, December 26, 1943. The main body of the 1st Marine Division landed fifteen miles north of us, near the airbase that they wanted to take. Our battalion landed further down the beach to establish roadblocks to stop any retreating Japs.
SID PHILLIPS
The monsoon season had just begun. It rained and rained and rained. That summed up New Britain. It rained as soon as we landed, and it rained the whole damn time we were there. Day and night, it rained. It was just a miserable place.
ART PENDLETON
The mud was ankle-deep where we landed. We found an open space to set up our bivouac, a spot our Navy had cleaned out during their shelling. There was still trees standing; however they were barren, like in the middle of a swamp.
The jungle on New Britain was so thick that if you walked a hundred feet off the trail, you would be lost. No question about it. The trails were only wide enough for one person to walk through at a time. Because of the terrain, you could not just walk or move troops where you wanted to. You had to stay on that trail.
SID PHILLIPS
Our job was to block the coastal trail. Really, the trail was nothing more than a footpath cut by the natives that wound up and down the coast.
ART PENDLETON
A ridge overlooked the coastal trail. The ridge was extremely steep and narrow at the top. That’s where we set up, with the ocean and the trail to our backs. We only had to worry about what was out in front of us. We didn’t block the top of the ridge with barbed wire; we left that open so they would come along the top of the ridge and into our sights. There were footpaths there that led from ridge to ridge.
The foxholes were spaced apart, separated by thick underbrush. That was part of our defense—it’s stuff so thick you can’t see a person five feet away from you. We had only one gun on the ridge; there wasn’t room for more. My squad was probably ten guys with the one machine gun. We had other weapons, too. We didn’t have sandbags at our position. We did have a chance to dig a hole and put the gun in place.
Behind our gun position we dug a depression that a couple of guys could lay in. That depression would fill with water, and at nighttime, when you wanted to take a nap, two guys would crawl in that water and their bodies would keep it warm. There was a drawback to that because your skin would all shrink up.
SID PHILLIPS
We expected the Japs to retreat down the trail from the main fight where the division was or to try to get reinforcements up there. Our lines were like a half circle arcing in from the beach. The front lines were up on the hill so we fortified a spot for our mortars behind them, maybe fifty yards in from the beach. We unrolled barbed wire and set up our mortars in the center.
JIM YOUNG
We were right up against the jungle. It was a ridiculous spot. We had a young lieutenant, a new one, and he insisted on overhead cover on the mortar pits with just a little opening for the tube to stick out. The guns were aiming north at the time, up the coast where we expected the enemy to come. I asked the lieutenant, “Suppose they attack from some other way? We can’t turn around in a spot like that.” He ignored us.
Worse, we heard that the men on the front lines were in hollering distance of each other, not that close together. It was a bad defensive line.
SID PHILLIPS
It was a tricky, spooky situation we were in. A mortar crew has to know what it’s doing. As a shell comes out of a mortar, if it hits a tree it would go off and you’re dead. The military term for that is “mass clearance,” in other words, if you’re going to clear everything in front of you. Before you drop a shell into a mortar, you’re supposed to flip the top of your site back and look through it, and that will show if you have mass clearance or not. At night, when you were firing in the dark, you needed to have memorized your mass clearance and not go below it.
ART PENDLETON
I strung a strand of barb wire on either side of our gun pit and hung grenades on it. You pulled the pin halfway out and hung the grenade on the barb. Then if someone touched the thing it would fall and go off. The banking was so steep that it would roll down the bank. Usually there would be more enemy coming up the bank, so it would be effective.
That was kind of a dumb thing to do because in the heavy rain—the rain was unbelievably heavy—it would knock those things off sometimes. In the morning, we would have to go out and pick up the grenades and gently push the pin back in. It was not a nice thing to do.
At 1:55 A.M. on December 30, 1943, during monsoon rains and shielded by the crash of thunder, the Japanese would attack, not from the trail but from the east where a land bridge connected the ridges. The ensuing fight would be remembered as the Battle of Coffin Corner.
SID PHILLIPS
The monsoon was wild and howling. The rain was pouring. It was a dark night and you could only see things between flashes of wild lightning. That storm was just raging.
ART PENDLETON
It was a game of wait, wait, and wait. You have plenty of time, you aren’t going anywhere. The idea is you stay on guard in order to catch the enemy off guard.
It was raining, so talking was something you didn’t do a lot of because it was difficult. You had a helmet on and rain beating on a steel helmet doesn’t improve the hearing any. You couldn’t see anything. They couldn’t see anything either. You can sense it. Don’t forget, you’re no longer a civilian. You develop senses that you don’t think you have. You can tell when someone is close. You were like an animal really. You’re in a war area, a place where you can get killed. You have to be on the alert. Again like an animal. You don’t even have to speak, all you have to do is touch somebody and they know what you’re saying. You’re in a whole different world.
The Japs got very close that night. Like I said, the open space I was watching was ahead of me. That would be the obvious place for someone to try to move and that’s what happened.
I was at the gun and you could hear them talking. The rain was certainly no help. They weren’t aware that we were there.
They were almost close enough to touch you when we opened fire. They could only come two at a time since there was no room for more on the top of that ridge. Our gun could pump out 250 rounds a minute, so that’s a lot of light and a lot of ammunition. You still couldn’t see very far, but all you cared about was what was right in front of you. We were firing point-blank into them.
JIM YOUNG
All hell broke loose. Just like I feared, the Japs hit the ridge to the east. So my gun was out of action since we were aiming north.
My group went to another gun and helped them open ammo boxes and load ammunition. The lightning would flash and it was pouring rain, a terrible night, just pouring rain. The sky was full of tracers and the Jap mortars were opening up on us. We fired as fast as we could, getting five rounds into the air before the first one even hit.
SID PHILLIPS
They had given each gunner a flashlight that put out a very dim light that you tried to shield. You could see your sites, but just barely. That night, I was the only one that had a flashlight that worked. The observation post on the hill directed our fire. They had a telephone and would call back to the gun positions. When we would fire, they would observe where the shell would hit and would call back and say, “You’re fifty yards too far, drop it in fifty yards closer.” They had us bringing in bursts just fifteen yards from our lines.
Talk about sheer terror. You’re praying you don’t get overrun. You’re opening canisters and removing shells during flashes of lightning. You’re adding increments to the shells in the dark, just by feel. You’re following the range card and checking your sights with a dim flashlight. You know that you’re firing just over your buddies’ heads and bringing shells down so close they could reach out and catch them.
ART PENDLETON
I would assume there were a lot of Japs. They attacked in several different spots and overran some positions along the ridge. That’s where our other guns got involved.
JIM YOUNG
We heard that the Japs were overrunning our machine gun positions. Two of our buddies from the mortar platoon were up the hill on the main line. They were on OP, or observation post duty, when the Japs hit. Dick Carr was in a pit with Sergeant Marty Grogan. They’re the ones who would call back and tell us the targets, give us the azimuth [aiming direction], and so forth. Marty was the fellow who married an Australian girl who was hysterical when she saw him leaving.
When the Japs overran our lines, they managed to jump into the pit and knock Marty down. When he fell over, he knocked Dick down, too. The Japs stabbed Marty with their bayonets and killed him, but they didn’t touch Dick because Marty’s body was over his. Marty’s body was bleeding all over him and the blood was dripping on Dick’s face, which helped keep him alive because he looked dead.
The Japs set up their own machine gun in the pit and started firing at other Marines. All the while, Dick was there with Marty’s body laying on him, afraid to cough or move.
ART PENDLETON
There was a lot of fire coming back at us and grenades. You’re down where you could duck and keep the gun going. You have to be careful, though, because that’s how John Rivers got killed. You want to shoot in bursts so it makes it very difficult to zero in on you. I was worried all the time.
JIM YOUNG
One of the Japs must have broken through and threw a grenade right down our throats, because all of a sudden a Jap grenade landed in our gun pit. I was just handing ammo to Punchy Legraff when it exploded and took out five of our guys. I was in back of Punchy, who took hits in his face, neck, and arms. Several of the other boys were also hit. Somehow, I wasn’t scratched.
In the morning our guys ran the Japs off the hill. When the fighting ceased, it had lasted about five or six hours, but we had won.
ART PENDLETON
There were probably a dozen or more dead Japanese in front of our position. We had stopped them and that’s what we were there to do. They just turned around on that ridge and got away as far as they could.
I got wounded, on my leg. A corpsman patched me up.
JIM YOUNG
We could see our wounded being brought down, slipping and falling in the mud. We spotted Dick Carr being helped by two other Marines. They were just dragging him down to the sick bay because he could not use his legs on his own. Carr couldn’t walk for a full day, he was that stiff. He was in shock and didn’t know me. He just kept staring.
Later, he told me he was breathing so hard under Marty’s body he felt for sure the Japs were going to hear him. He was going to risk crawling or moving but decided that would guarantee he’d be killed. So he remained under Marty’s body for five hours.*
SID PHILLIPS
I first had the desire to go into medicine that morning on Cape Gloucester. Watching all our wounded being carried in, in the rain, in the mud, and not having a clue what to do to help them. We weren’t taught anything but basic first aid to try and stop the bleeding.
When we collected up the range cards—one came in each canister of shells—some of the cards had red lipstick on them. The girls at the ammunition factory had kissed them. Some even wrote notes in lipstick, like “Love you! Betty.” It was still raining, but we passed the cards around and kissed the red lip marks.
ART PENDLETON
While on patrol I found an enemy machine gun. It was small and unique. I had never seen anything like it. The gun was made in Czechoslovakia. The way that we figured it had fallen into the hands of the Russians and then into the hands of the Japanese. I was able to take it all apart, clean it up, and put it into my backpack in pieces. After returning to our original area, I went through my pack and discovered that someone had stolen my machine gun. I raised hell about this. An officer came by and said the gun was needed for an investigation. I said to the guys, “Who told the officer that I had this?” They said they didn’t know how the word got out. This officer somehow knew and he came and picked it up. That was it. You don’t argue with an officer in the USMC.
SID PHILLIPS
That was our biggest firefight on Cape Gloucester. The Japs were not there in as much strength as we imagined. Militarily, they didn’t have a ghost of a chance. They began evacuating Cape Gloucester and heading east for Rabaul.
We were left to fight the elements. It was the worst jungle. No matter how hard you tried, you could not even get the lay of the land. It never stopped raining. It rained day after day after day, until you thought you would lose your mind. We just bitched and moaned and cursed and groaned.
To the old Marines this was nothing. Nothing was as bad as it was in “the old corps” back in 1927. No outfit was as good as the ones they had been in in the old corps. They were always tougher than you would ever be. They had always seen worse than you would ever see. They were the epitome of everything. Those old Marines would endlessly talk about that. We called it smokestacking. The term was derived from the idea of blowing smoke up our asses (laughs). We would say, “Oh shut up! We’re tired of your smokestacking. We don’t believe any of that shit anyways.”
JIM YOUNG
They ordered our battalion to rejoin the main body at Cape Gloucester. It was about twenty miles from where we were. We marched to the Cape, finding dead Japs along the trail and a few dead ones hanging from the trees. Snipers harassed us. While on the march, we saw giant bats with faces that looked like foxes. Their wingspan was almost seven feet wide. One of the guys shot one, and the colonel put a stop to that and told us they were harmless and just fruit eaters.
SID PHILLIPS
Every day was gloomy and the jungle was thick, so that jungle became almost as dark as night. I don’t remember anything in color in Cape Gloucester; everything is in black-and-white.
One day W. O. Brown and I went roaming about five hundred yards from our bivouac and found an abandoned Japanese hospital tent. All the dead Japs that were in there were reduced to skeletons. They were in uniforms still, with wrapped leggings. Evidently they hadn’t had a chance to treat most of them. It was a weird sight. I remember a beautiful microscope sitting on a table.
ART PENDLETON
Once on a patrol we more or less surprised this group of Japanese. I ended up standing less than three feet from a Japanese officer. I had an automatic weapon pointed at his body. We just were staring at each other. I didn’t know whether I should shoot him, because he wasn’t holding a gun.
Then I saw he was holding a hand grenade to his upper chest with the back of his hand towards me. I just stood there looking at him. It seemed like a long time, but it was probably only seconds. He intended to die. He knew he was going to die and he wanted me to know that. Shooting him was not an option.
As he triggered the hand grenade, I dove out of the way. When the hand grenade exploded it blew all of his body parts on me. I was covered with the blood and stuff.
The others in his group ran and we chased them. We finally eradicated them. These men were starving to death at the time, and we found pieces of dried meat in some of the packs. Then we found a man whose leg pieces had been carved off. They were eating each other.
JIM YOUNG
We joined the rest of the division and set up a camp. Most of the fighting was over for H Company, but the misery had only begun. We were in the midst of monsoon season. From then on it was constant rain and heavy gales. In our outfit we had three men killed and about ten hurt by the storms and falling trees.
ROY GERLACH
Being a cook was not without its dangers. One time, near our camp, we had this big tree. Termites were in the tree. We had a galley set up by then, and we had a corporal by then who was mess sergeant. Well this tree fell apart and crashed on the mess sergeant, right when he was in his hammock. Killed him. He never knew what hit him.
SID PHILLIPS
Everything we owned soon rotted—your clothes, your shoelaces. You couldn’t ever get dried out. We all developed all kinds of fungus infections and skin diseases on our extremities. You soon threw away all your socks and underwear. You just lived in your dungaree pants and jacket.
I’d say that the harder a situation got, like on Guadalcanal or New Britain, the more the humor increased, not decreased. We didn’t sit down and cry. We cracked jokes about it. There was a lot of joking in spite of all the horror. It went on twenty-four hours a day. Foolishness kept us going.
We saw a bulldozer disappear one day in the mud—they had to throw a line to the driver and haul him, sliding across this pond of mud. That bulldozer went down in this pond of mud with the engine running and the treads turning. The last thing that went down was the exhaust stack. It was still going pft, pft, pft, when it finally went under. We laughed at it.
The Marines came to call New Britain “the Green Inferno,” after its steamy jungles. To the men of H Company, the island would earn another negative distinction during “Night of the Deluge.”
JIM YOUNG
We were issued hammocks with rubber roofs and mosquito-netting sides with zipper entrances. The bottom was also rubber. But the rain was so heavy and the wind so strong that the hammock’s “roof” tilted sideways in the wind and the rain came in on you through the mesh sides. We had to cut holes in the bottom to let the rain drain or else we had to lie in six inches of water. There was another drawback: When you zippered up the netting to keep the bugs out, the hammock became a death trap. Jap infiltrators were known to cut the hammock ropes and you would be all tangled and unable to defend yourself.
ROY GERLACH
We set up our galley and we started cooking right away. I never did see any Japanese on Cape Gloucester after they all ran to the hills.
SID PHILLIPS
Les Clark and I were given mess duty, which was undesirable. No Marine wanted to clean up from meals, all that slop. The battalion mess tent was near a small creek that was about twelve feet wide, about one and a half feet deep. Beautiful clear water racing through it. We’d wade into the water with those big Army pots, to clean them.
At night, Les and I couldn’t find any more good trees to hang our hammocks from near the mess tent. The cooks had taken all the good spots. So Les and I hung our hammocks on a little ridge, maybe twenty-five yards up from the tent. Japs were no longer a problem. When this unreal, mother of all rainstorms broke on us one night, that little stream turned into a roaring river. The cooks awoke to the water rising up into the hammocks with them. It was pitch-black dark, so they would’ve drowned if they stayed there. In the dark, they had to climb trees, in order not to drown.
ROY GERLACH
I had the end of my hammock tied onto a tree near a riverbank. In the middle of the night I woke up and my hammock was bouncing up and down. I thought somebody was playing a trick on me. So I rolled over and saw that the water had rose and the stream had washed the dirt away from the tree I’d tied onto. The tree was about ready to go down the stream with my hammock, with me in it. I took my knife and cut the rope my hammock was tied onto. On the ground I got the hell out of that hammock, grabbed my Garand rifle, and scrambled to higher ground. Right as I did that, why, the tree took off and floated down the river.
SID PHILLIPS
When daylight came, Clark and I were high up on our ridge, and no water had gotten to us. We looked down and there were all the rest of the men sitting on limbs of trees, just hanging there, clinging to the trunks of trees, and they were all naked as jaybirds because you slept naked in your hammock at night, since your clothes were wet.
We just burst into tears laughing at them. They’d lost their clothes, their weapons, their hammocks; all the stoves were gone out of the galley, all the food supplies were gone, the mess tent was gone. This wall of water just hit and carried it all downstream. And we wouldn’t give them any sympathy. We just laughed at them. The water didn’t go down for several hours after daylight, so they were stuck in those trees.
Of course, there was no food for anybody then. The whole battalion went hungry. That wasn’t as much fun, but it was so miserable all you could do was laugh about it.
ROY GERLACH
All my gear, the mess tents, and all the cooking equipment washed away, down to the beach. We went and gathered up all the stuff that we could find, pulled up our boots, and started over again. The labels fell off all our cans, so we would open them and separate them by meat, vegetable, or fruit. Then we served it all. The men said it was our best cooking yet and they hoped for another flood soon. That wasn’t very nice.
JIM YOUNG
After all that rain I went off by myself to clean my Thompson submachine gun. While doing so, a Marine came by and sat across from me. I had just finished cleaning the gun and was putting the clip in when I tapped the clip to put it in place. The gun fired, grazing the Marine’s stomach. Fortunately he recovered in a few days and returned to duty. But I was court-martialed and had to go to trial. The court found that the gun had a faulty sear pin, the reason it had gone off. I was acquitted of all charges. The Marine who was shot said he would never sit in front of a gun again. Needless to say, I was pleased with the verdict.
SID PHILLIPS
We were always wet, always hungry, always dirty, always exhausted, day after day. Weeks went by, and we didn’t receive any news from the outside world at all. Then if we did, it might be all just rumors, scuttlebutt. You got so you didn’t believe anything. We didn’t fear the Japanese by then. Mostly we were just disgusted.
ART PENDLETON
Cape Gloucester was like going to sleep and having a nightmare that wasn’t even real. It was way out there. It wasn’t even war. You felt like you were sent there to die and that was about the size of it.
On a ship off New Britain’s northern coast, R. V. Burgin and the men of K Company, 5th Marines, had been held in reserve. They were called into action after the enemy and the elements proved surprisingly stubborn.
R. V. BURGIN
We didn’t go in until New Year’s Day, January 1, 1944. We didn’t have any resistance at all, because the 1st and 7th Marines had already cleared that out. That first day we moved into the island, while bearing east.
Whenever you’re fighting a jungle warfare, it’s amazing how close you can get to someone but not be able to see them—enemies as well as your own men. Going through the jungle, you know there’s a Marine on your right and your left. But you can’t see them. You get to feeling like you’re fighting this war alone.
I was a 60mm mortar gunner, but there was no hope of firing the mortars on account of the overhead, the trees and things in the jungle. So we were riflemen, I would say, 75 percent of the time when we were on Gloucester.
We hiked all that afternoon, a few miles, and started to dig in that night. There was a little creek running through there with weeds about waist-high. Everything was pretty quiet for a while. Really tense, though. All of a sudden about fifteen Japs came barreling out of those weeds with their rifles, hollering “Marine, you die!”
You can picture it: a line of enemy soldiers with their rifles in their hands running straight at you. Instead of running like we run, they had a funny fast-paced trot. Leggings. These split-toe shoes. That brownish uniform. That silly looking helmet. That long rifle with mechanical sites. Squint-eyed. Unbelievable determination in his face—like nothing was going to stop him. That was the first time I had ever encountered an enemy soldier.
I was carrying the mortar base plate, so I didn’t have any weapon on me except a little .45 pistol. Quick-like I drew it, fired, and killed one Jap—I shot him right through the chest while he was still on the run. Killed him. All around me, other Marines were firing at the enemy and knocked down all but two, who escaped back into the bush. When the firefight was over I thought, That first Jap got too damn close. So I picked myself up an M1 rifle and carried that in addition to my pistol. I didn’t want one of the enemy ever getting that close to me again if I could help it.
That was the first time I killed a man. I felt relief. I got him and he didn’t get me. That was first order of business—to stay alive. To tell you the truth, I was real proud of myself. I did what the Marines had trained me to do—kill the enemy and don’t let him kill you. We were put in a situation where you either killed or you were killed. That was the bottom line for us. And me—I preferred to live.
Everything seemed pretty damn scary after that first banzai charge. That night we moved back up a ridge and dug in. I don’t think anyone slept. The land crabs were up there on that ridge and rattling around in the leaves. It was a very nerve-wracking night. You always thought it was the Japs coming for you. But they didn’t. Not that night, anyway.
New to island warfare, Burgin and others looked to K Company’s ’Canal veterans and Old Breed Marines for leadership, men like Platoon Sergeant T. I. Miller from West Virginia.
T. I. MILLER
Before I went into the Marine Corps, I would never bother nobody, but I worried my parents a whole lot. When you get to around sixteen or seventeen years old, you want to find out who you are. I was pretty independent. Sometimes I would go down there to the railroad tracks and catch me a train and ride down close to Charles Town or Montgomery, West Virginia. Sometimes I would take off and hitchhike down to North Carolina. Just leave and be gone a week. My parents didn’t know where I was at so I worried them.
I more or less minded my own business, but occasionally I would get in a fight if someone threatened me. I wasn’t one of these bullying kind of guys. But I never was afraid of getting in a fight either. I would stand up and tell them to bring it on.
I’ll tell you one thing I did do. I stuck around when my family needed me. I helped my dad get the crops down and stuff like that. When there wasn’t any farm work to be done, that’s when I did my running. I was a hardworking kid when it was necessary. I never shirked my duties.
I enlisted in the Marine Corps before Pearl Harbor, on September 3, 1940. I was only twenty then but saw the war coming. I liked the looks of the way they did things in the Corps. The Marines were relatively small when I joined. The total strength then was only twenty-five thousand Marines. At the end of the war there were five hundred thousand Marines. I was really one of the first—a bona fide member of the Old Breed.
By the time Pearl Harbor was bombed, I’d already been in the Marines for fifteen months and was a three-stripe sergeant. I fought with K Company on Guadalcanal, the place we nicknamed “the Island of Death.” I can’t think of any good times we had there. Only the nasty stuff sticks in my mind. Like the Goettge patrol.
We went looking for the Goettge patrol just days after they were lost. We went out with only a reinforced platoon, about forty men. A. L. “Scoop” Adams was our platoon leader. He had orders to see if he could find any remains of the Goettge patrol. We were not to engage in any firefights unless we were fired upon.
We reached the beach where the ambush supposedly happened. There was a sandspit out there. It was low tide so we walked out to it. Only a few of us went across to the sandspit. That’s where we came upon the body parts. They were not decomposed at all. There was a head bobbing in the surf. That head was still in the helmet. When the waves would come in, they would pick it up, and down, up and down, all the time we were there. Then there was a shirt that didn’t have no head, no arms, no legs—it was just a torso. The Japs cut all the appendages off. A leg was laying there with the boot still on. I asked Scoop, “Do we bury these Marines or just leave them here?” He replied, “My orders are, whatever we find, leave it there and come back and make a report.” That was it. What he reported, I don’t know if it ever showed up in a report or not. But we all got to know our enemy really well that day.
When I first got to New Britain, I had a little old Reising gun. I didn’t think much of it since it was about as useless as tits on a boar hog. They manufactured that little gun where the climate was dry. When they brought it to the humidity of those jungles, every time you fired that thing the mechanism would jam back on the wood since it swelled up. You would have to take your knife out and whittle down the wood to release it. We had to constantly work on that thing to get it to operate. Soon after we landed, me and another fellow were walking on a trail near the ocean. There was a jeep parked. We got to looking and there wasn’t anyone in it, but there was a Thompson submachine gun in it, with one of those drum-type magazines. I sneaked up and took it. I put that Reising gun in its place and took off into that jungle. That’s how I got my Thompson. But I didn’t have any extra ammo for it, but I held on to it since somebody had to give an account of that weapon (laughs).
The next morning we got in a firefight with the 7th Marines, and they wounded one of our men before we got it stopped. Everybody was edgy, and the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing.
K Company approached a twenty-foot-wide creek with swift-flowing water. One of the first to reach the water was K Company scout Jim Anderson, a new Marine in his first campaign.
JIM ANDERSON
I was the second scout in K Company’s 3rd platoon. I carried an M1 Garand rifle. Being a scout was pretty dangerous because you were the first to run into problems. I think I got that job because they knew I would take it. It was my nature to try to get along with everybody—the noncoms, the officers, everyone.
I wouldn’t say I ever developed a mean streak in the Marines. I couldn’t figure out why they had to be so aggressive or mean to a person in boot camp. The other thing I couldn’t figure out was why there had to be so much terrible swearing, every other word. A lot of it was not necessary. Now, somebody like Burgin, I never heard him utter a swear word in his life. I think it came from the guys who were trying to impress their friends or act tough when they were really scared.
All that roughness offended me because I wasn’t accustomed to it. I came from a pretty average life. We lived on a farm in Wisconsin. My folks had me go to Sunday school. In high school I played a little basketball and some football, but I wasn’t terribly athletic. I enjoyed hunting, but I wouldn’t say I was a good shot. We were in good fishing country, but I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about fishing. I won’t even talk about how I was with the girls (laughs). But I was a strong farmhand. During the summer, they were raising peas around my home, so I got a job working as a pea viner. Tending boxes and carrying peas, I made good money and I followed orders well.
As Anderson and K Company prepared to cross the creek, Japanese snipers struck and the opposite bank erupted with fire. “It’s salted with pillboxes!” a Marine shouted. The swift waters would earn a name that day: “Suicide Creek.”
JIM ANDERSON
My first experience in combat was brief and violent. The creek wasn’t too wide or too deep that we couldn’t wade through it—the fire was just so heavy. As we were moving through the jungle along the bank, trying to find a crossing, a machine gun cut loose. The fellow ahead of me stood up, and rat-a-tat-tat, he fell over. I crawled up to where he was lying. I looked at the fellow. He had three or four bullet holes in him. He was dead.
The machine gun was still working. Rifles were still firing. Mortars were falling. It grew heavier and heavier. If I was a little bit smarter about combat, I would have known better than to do this, but I stood up, and of course the same machine gun cut loose, rat-a-tat-tat. It felt like a baseball bat hit me in the left side.
Two of the bullets pierced my left side. Others hit my cartridge belt. I knew right away I was badly wounded. I fell over and tried to crawl to the rear. I left all my equipment right there—my rifle, everything. Mortars were exploding on my left and right. I got maybe twenty feet back and stopped to rest or pass out, I’m still not sure. Pretty soon a mortar shell lit up about fifteen feet away from me and put a lot of shrapnel in my left leg. At the same time, a sniper was firing at me. He was missing me by only a foot or so every time he shot. I knew I was a dead man unless I moved.
I kept going and crawled up a hill that was behind our side of the creek. Two corpsmen found me and patched up my leg. They rolled me into a stretcher and carried me to an amphibious tractor [amtrac]. An amtrac had tracks like a tank and a hull like a boat. It could drive on land or swim in the sea. They put me on board and took me back to the beach.
R. V. BURGIN
We had a hell of a fight. The Japs were all dug in along the other side of this creek, maybe twenty feet wide with steep banks, and anytime any of our men tried to cross the creek to flank them, they mowed us down. A lot of good men were lost there. The Japs were really dug in. Really hard to see them in the thick jungle.
T. I. MILLER
We held on to our position, close to the banks. A little later on, our platoons got all mingled up. I was the platoon sergeant of the third platoon at that time, but somehow the commander of Second Platoon, a man named Dykstra, he and I ended up behind the same log. While we were there, he got his elbow shot in two. I only had one compress left on my belt. So I put that on him there. I wrapped it up as best I could. I took two or three little pieces of timber, I took my mosquito net off my helmet, and tied that around the splint. The corpsman came and got him after that. He was in some pain, but he never did say anything.*
R. V. BURGIN
Someone had set up a five-gallon can of water with a canteen cup on it. In a lull during the fight, I stepped down there and poured me a canteen of water and drank it. Jim Burke decided he wanted a drink, too, but just as he reached for the cup, a Jap shot the cup out from under him. Jim took about three steps back, turned to me, grinned, and said, “I don’t think I’m that damn thirsty.”
Whoever had taken a shot at us was up somewhere in the trees. Jim and I fired several rounds into the trees, but we never hit anything, so I called for a machine gunner and told him to rake the trees over to get the sniper. He took that .30-caliber machine gun and raked the trees. Bits of leaves and branches showered down. Then the Jap fell about halfway out and jerked to a stop twenty feet aboveground. He had tied himself to the tree with a rope around his waist and the rope around his rifle. We left the body there swinging.
T. I. MILLER
There was one guy named Ray Newcolmb; he was a redheaded boy from Tennessee. The last time I saw him they were carrying him down through the jungle there. He had his kneecap shot off. He saw me and hollered, “So long, T.I., I’m headed for Tennessee!”†
R. V. BURGIN
Finally three Sherman tanks showed up and stopped at the edge of the creek. But the banks were too high, so a bulldozer came forward to cut out the banks on both sides of the creek so the tanks could make it across. A sniper shot the bulldozer driver. Another Marine jumped in the driver’s seat, and the sniper got him, too. A third Marine jumped on the bulldozer, ducked down behind the controls, and got the job done. The tanks crossed the creek and the Japs pulled back.
K Company settled in for the evening on the American side of the creek. K Company’s commanding officer, Captain Andrew Haldane, dug in with them.
T. I. MILLER
Some people called Haldane “Ack Ack,” but I called him “Close Crop” ’cause he had his hair cut real close! The way I would sum up Haldane was that he had a quality about him, a sort of calming effect on people. He didn’t go off half-cocked. Haldane called me “T.I.,” which stood for my name, “Thurman Irving Miller.” Everybody called me T.I. We definitely did not call an officer or a noncom by their rank while we were in combat.
We were busy digging in on our side of Suicide Creek and thought we were relatively out of the line of fire. All of a sudden a group banzai charge of twenty Japs attacked Haldane and the guys around him at the company CP. When you’re digging in, you don’t always have your weapon at your disposal. It’s laying on its side, nearby. The Japs just ran in and tried to overrun that position. I was on down the line a little further from them with my platoon.
They barely had time to reach their weapons. Haldane rushed into the Japs, shooting his pistol as he ran. The others grabbed some weapons—rifles with bayonets, shovels, anything—and wiped out the banzai charge in some close-quarter fighting.
R. V. BURGIN
Captain Haldane was a real leader. He was well built, about five-eleven, and weighed about 180 pounds. From Massachusetts. He played football for Bowdoin College in Maine. Never heard him raise his voice, not one time, to anybody. He was a compassionate man yet a disciplined man. Whenever he spoke, you listened. He treated you like he wanted to be treated and never threw his weight around. He had the respect of every man in the company.
Meanwhile, on the beach…
JIM ANDERSON
They carried me onto a LST ship [landing ship, tank]. By then, my stretcher was filling up with blood. I said, “Something’s the matter here—I’m still bleeding!” A medic looked at me and said, “Oh my goodness, it’s running out your stomach!” Well, they doctored me up more on that LST.
From there I was taken to New Guinea, where they put me in an Army hospital, made out of tents. All I owned was the clothes on my back, and there at the hospital they cut them off and threw them away. That first evening they operated on my stomach. They took a couple of bullets out of me. The next day they operated on my leg. Later, they told me that the bullets had hit my cartridge belt and glanced off into my side.
Meanwhile, K Company crossed Suicide Creek and continued inland…
R. V. BURGIN
We began to move again. It was all thick jungle. Too thick to even think about using the mortars. Wet. Muddy. Lots of rain. Impossible to see anything. We moved forward a bit and had a firefight. Then they’d withdraw, and we’d catch up to them again and have another fight. We could never see the Japs until they opened up on us. You never know when the enemy’s right next to you. Everybody was nervous.
Night was no better. That small plane called “Washing Machine Charlie” or “Piss Call Charlie” would come over every night and drop a hundred-pound bomb on us, at about two o’clock. One night his bomb hit within our lines, and a piece of shrapnel hit the guy who shared a foxhole with Jim Burke that night. I remember Jim hollering for a corpsman. Just a second or two later he hollered “Corpsman!” again. A second or two later he hollered “Corpsman!” again. He knew that guy had been hit bad. Then he hollered it again. It only took the corpsman a minute to reach him, but Jim said it felt like ten minutes. That was the only time in my whole Marine Corps experience with Jim Burke that I ever saw him, the coolest Marine there ever was, really frustrated. The guy in his foxhole ended up dying later.
On January 8, K Company halted when the jungle began titling upward. They had hit a ridge, two hundred yards wide, with a gentle slope. K Company began climbing. Suddenly, a battalion of Japanese troops opened fire from fortifications above. “It was like all the seams of hell busted open,” a Marine would remember.
T. I. MILLER
Aogiri Ridge. Nobody knew that thing existed because it didn’t show up on the maps. In the final analysis, it proved one of the Japanese main strongholds because it overlooked their supply trail. They had mortars on the reverse slope. They also had bunkers built at the top of that ridge that could fire straight down. We were going up and there was a terrible lot of fire coming down at us.
We knew getting up there would take something special.
R. V. BURGIN
Our tanks couldn’t get near the ridge. We couldn’t bring in our artillery either because the jungle was so thick the shells would hit a tree and explode before they hit the ground. So Gunnery Sergeant Elmo “Pop” Haney said, “I’m going to get something to help,” and he ended up getting a 37mm cannon on two small wheels.
We called him “Pop” Haney, because he was forty-nine years old. Anyone in his forties in the Marine Corps was considered an old man. He had fought in WWI and then in WWII on Guadalcanal. He was about five foot eleven inches and skinny but tough.
A funny thing about Pop Haney was that he didn’t have an assignment. He wasn’t assigned to any platoon. He did not have a job. He was just there. That was it. They let him come in and stay. They’d send him to a base back home, and he’d go AWOL and catch a freighter, come back to the Pacific, and work his way back to us. So they just put up with him, I guess.
T. I. MILLER
I didn’t see the cannon coming up the road, but I heard it coming. The pulled it by bulldozer on a corduroy road, which was nothing but a whole lot of logs laid across the mud. They did this for as far as they could get it. Then they pushed it by hand to the foot of the ridge.
The first time I laid eyes on Colonel Walt he was behind that 37mm gun. The day before our battalion commander had been shot, and his replacement was Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Walt. The cannon was his idea and he was behind it, pushing it up the hill with some other Marines. I was approximately ten feet away when a guy got hit, shot off the cannon. So I took his place. I joined them in pushing it a little ways then I got too far from my platoon so I rejoined them.
R. V. BURGIN
It had rained so much the ground was just oatmeal. We had to push that damn cannon up. Five or six of us would trade off, scraping and sliding up that hill. The Japs opened up on us every once in a while. The gun’s got about a quarter-inch steel shield that goes into a V where the gunner can get behind it. That shield was a lifesaver. They were bouncing them bullets right off it. It sounded similar to hail on a tin roof. It wasn’t a good sound. You knew that if it wasn’t for that shield you would be a goner.
T. I. MILLER
Walt and the others went on pushing it. They came to this big log that had been blown down and needed a real extra shove to get over it. They managed to get some 37mm antipersonnel ammunition up there, shells full of nuts, bolts, glass, and whatever they could cram in it. Seeing what that 37mm could accomplish boosted our confidence. You knew you had something that could destroy the enemy if you caught him.
They would fire off a shot and it literally blasted the jungle away. The shells cut all the bushes down in front of the gun. Then they would push it up as far as they could and do it again. It sounded like a twelve-gauge shotgun, only magnified some. That’s how we got it to the top. We were less than a hundred yards from the summit, and it took us three days to take it.
R. V. BURGIN
At the top of the ridgeline I fired the gun. That was the only reward. We knocked out a machine gun nest.
We were exhausted on top of that ridge. We could hear the Japanese in front of us as we were digging in. They were only about a dozen yards away. After it became dark, they started yelling. You could just see their silhouettes. “Raider, Raider,” they called. “Why you no fire, Raider? Why you no shoot?” Raider was our machine gun sergeant. Evidently, they’d been close enough to us where they’d heard us saying his name. So they were just taunting him. We were that close. Raider told his gunner, “Give him a short burst of about two hundred rounds.” He fired in the direction of the taunting. We didn’t hear them call to Raider after that.
T. I. MILLER
Night came. We dug in where we were. They put some guys in front of the 37mm with three .50-caliber machine guns to protect it. Our guys camouflaged that gun as best as they could. We knew the Japanese would try their best to get through to that 37mm. They knew if they could get that gun they had the battle won.
We hadn’t had any sleep for two or three nights. You would grab a few little winks here and there. You never knew what was in front of you. They would come any time, day or night. That was the night of all the banzai charges. We were down below the summit several yards. We could look up and see the silhouettes of them coming down.
R. V. BURGIN
About 4 A.M., they came screaming at us. I was in a foxhole with Jim Burke when the Japs charged. They were hollering, “Marine, you die! Marine, you die!”
One Jap charged right into my foxhole. I stuck my bayonet into his chest just as he was leaving his feet, heaved him right over my shoulder, and pulled the trigger, emptying my M1 into him. He was very dead when he hit the ground—I’ll tell you that. It all didn’t take but just a few seconds. I kicked him out of the way and didn’t give him another thought. I just got ready for whatever might come next.
After that first charge, things died down and there was silence. It was raining slightly. Just enough to make things miserable.
Then they charged again.
And again.
They kept charging and charging that night. You’re not thinking. You just try to get your sites on a man and get him down. That was all that was going through my mind—Kill that bastard! Don’t miss! Make sure you get him! I think most of us were wondering, My God, how many times are we going to need to do this?! For crying out loud, how many of them are out there?
T. I. MILLER
I had just picked up an M1 off some wounded man and was firing that. My Thompson was out of ammunition, but I kept it. Why I held on to it I don’t know.
In between attacks I spent quite a bit of time crawling along and checking up on my men. I would crawl along and see who was missing. Our guys were about out of ammunition after the third banzai charge, so I made a trip down to the company CP. There a gunnery sergeant named Manihan loaded my shoulders with three or four bandoliers for my men. I made that trip down and back up, real quick.
I’ll tell you one thing I saw that I’ll never forget. I saw our platoon leader, Tully, a lieutenant, raise up a big rock. It was about eighteen inches in diameter. The kind you couldn’t kick out of the way. He took his wedding ring off his finger. He looked at me and said, “T.I, I’m putting my wedding ring under here. I don’t want those yellow bastards getting it off my finger if I get killed.” And he hid that ring under that big flat rock. Tully was a good guy, real easygoing. He had just been married.
Dawn began to show on the horizon. The Marines on the summit had withstood four banzai charges. But at 6:15 A.M. they could hear the enemy preparing for a fifth charge.
T. I. MILLER
We were again almost out of ammunition. Out of gas and running on fumes. It was desperation. I told my men to hang in there. I told them to do their best, keep their heads down. I didn’t bother telling them to kill the enemy because that was a given (laughs).
While this was happening, Gunnery Sergeant Pop Haney was in the company CP. They put him in charge of getting the ammunition up to us. I had known Pop Haney since he was in my platoon down in Guantánamo Bay. Back then he was a platoon sergeant and I was just a plain sergeant. He was about the most “GI” Marine around. A real Government Issue Marine. I don’t think anybody ever called him that to his face though. Had I called him that to his face I would have probably got a lopsided grin from him.
He always kept his equipment up to par. He tried to do everything by the book. He never did talk about his time in the First World War, at Belleau Wood, besides saying that it was “pretty rough.” When he addressed anybody in the platoon, he never ever used a first name. He would say “Corporal Jones.” I was “Sergeant Miller” to him, never T.I.
Haney came through that night. He and his men brought that ammo up to us right in time. They got it distributed about four minutes before that last banzai. The Japanese soldiers in the last banzai charge had been held on reserve on the opposite slope of that ridge. They were fresh troops, supposedly crack troops—Imperial Marines, who had captured our boys at Bataan. We were locked and loaded for them.
R. V. BURGIN
We defeated all five banzai charges that night. In the morning there were more than two hundred dead Japs in front of us. You could literally walk on them without stepping on the ground.
We found two of our men, Robert McCarthy and Lonnie Howard, had been killed that night when a short round of artillery hit a tree and exploded. It was our own artillery. Strangely enough, Lonnie had said to me that afternoon, “Burgin, if anything happens to me, I want you to have my watch.”
“You’re crazy,” I told him. “Nothing will happen to you. You’ll be okay.”
“No, I’m serious,” he said. “I want you to have my watch.”
He got killed that night. The corpsmen came and got his body and moved him to the cemetery. I have no idea what came of his watch.
T. I. MILLER
The next morning our company clerk came running over to me and said, “Tully got it last night.” Besides a wife, I believe he also had one child that he left behind. To this day, I’ve always wondered why I didn’t get his ring out from under that rock. I would imagine that ring is still on top of that ridge today.
Having won the Battle of Aogiri Ridge, the Marines occupied the high ground.
R. V. BURGIN
The second night on the ridge, Jim Burke and I were moved down to the very end of the line, so there were no other Marines on our right. We were it. It’s an unnerving feeling to not have any support next to you.
That was an eventful night, too. Jim and I set to work digging our new foxhole. One man stands guard while the other digs, then they trade off. Jim was digging, throwing the dirt in front of us to make a little mound, and I was on guard. Now, you’re not supposed to get out of your foxhole for anything. We’d all been told this. But through the underbrush, I could just make out the shape of someone crawling toward us on his belly. Quietly I reached over, put my hand on Jim’s helmet, pushed him down, and pointed toward the shape with my .45. The shape crawled up so close to me, I could nearly reach out and touch him. My pistol was within twenty-four inches of his forehead before I saw the silhouette of his helmet and recognized him as a Marine. He had to get that close.
It didn’t scare me. But I guarantee you that if I’d shot him in the head with my .45, he wouldn’t have moved ever again. It made me madder than hell that a man could be that stupid—or desperate maybe. I let the man speak first.
“Burgin,” he said, “you got any water. I’m thirsty as hell.”
It was Oswalt, another new guy.* “Yeah,” I said, and gave him my canteen. He drank some, then I told him, “Oswalt, you keep your ass in that foxhole. If you get out again, I’ll shoot you on general principles.”
Later that same night on the ridge, in the hours of darkness, I could just make out another black shape sneaking through the trees. The shape got close enough to where I saw a man’s silhouette. This was no Marine. I figured he was a lone Japanese scout, trying to get behind our line. I shot and killed him with my M1.
T. I. MILLER
When that battle was over, they brought a platoon up to replace my platoon. I don’t even know what unit they were from. At this point I was essentially the platoon commander. The lieutenant who was going to replace my platoon told me, “Well, I guess I better do this a squad at a time.” He was thinking he would send twelve of his men up, then I would send twelve of mine down, and we’d do that three times.
I told him, “If you just bring one squad you can replace my whole platoon.” Out of the forty-two or so men in my platoon we were down to thirteen men including myself. Some had died. Most of them had been wounded and taken off the line. Taking that ridge was about the worst fight I was ever in. We renamed the place “Walt’s Ridge.”
After we took Walt’s Ridge, we were sent back to the beach and put in reserve. We were out of danger there and recovering the best we could. There was hardly anybody left in K Company. New Britain, in some ways, was worse than Guadalcanal. There were 242 enlisted men and 10 officers in our company when we went ashore. Ten days later, our ranks had been reduced to 88 enlisted men and 2 officers.
R. V. BURGIN
It’s hard for people today to fully understand what exactly we were up against in the war in the Pacific. A sense of duty drives you more than anything else, sure. But anger factors in as well, and that anger grows. As the war progressed, I saw the brutality of what the Japanese soldiers did to some of our troops who they captured, and it makes a man angry, very angry. I saw our men with their testicles and penis cut out and stuffed in their mouth. I saw one of our men tied to a tree and used for bayonet practice. He had been stuck through thirty to forty times in the chest all the way up to his head. It was obvious that the Japs had not simply killed him, but had used his body that way. They were a brutal, sadistic enemy.
I believe I’ll hate the Jap soldiers for as long as I live. In recent years I’ve been to Japan, and I don’t hold any grudges against the Japanese people. But the Japanese soldier—I hate him. My wife talked to me a while back and said, “You think you should still be calling them Japs?” And I said, “I don’t give a damn if it’s proper or not. To me, he’s a damn Jap then, and he’s still a damn Jap. I’m talking about the soldier. And as long as I live I’ll hate him.”
* Jim Young would remember, “Dick Carr died of a brain tumor about ten years after we got back. I think that terrible experience shortened his life, really.”
* T. I. Miller would remember, “Later on, I ran into him down in Camp Lejeune, and I noticed that his elbow was still crooked. He never did get it straightened out.”
† T. I. Miller would remember, “Never did see him again. Tried to find him and couldn’t. If anyone knows where Ray is, let me know.”
* R. V. Burgin would remember, “Oswalt got killed later on Peleliu while going across the airfield. He was a fine Marine, but I was sure mad at him that night on the ridge.”