CHAPTER SIX
New Britain
On the coast, K Company rested and tried to recuperate in spite of the island’s elements.
T. I. MILLER
Each morning while we were in reserve, when I got out of my hammock, I was covered with this strange pink stuff. This went on for a few days. I didn’t know what the pink stuff was. I went all through my pack and hammock. Out crawled a huge jungle spider. The pink stuff was the spider’s web.
R. V. BURGIN
During the monsoon season it rained and it rained, and if you weren’t wet from the rain, you’d have your poncho on and be wet from sweat. It sometimes rained thirty-four inches in twenty-four hours.
A lot of guys went down with malaria, dysentery, and jungle rot. Jungle rot looked like little yellow pustules on your skin, each blister about the size of a match head. They’d show up under your arms, on your legs, your ankles, around your crotch, anywhere your skin came into close contact with your clothes. We all had it. That stuff ate us alive. Corpsmen would put a purple medication on them. It would clear up, but then be back again in a week.
T. I. MILLER
That Washing Machine Charlie would buzz around at night, and a lot of times we wouldn’t even bother to get out of our hammocks. One night he dropped a bomb, and a piece of that bomb, a rivet, it hit the ground under my hammock and was still hot enough that it bounced and burned a hole through the hammock, through my jacket, and into my skin. So my buddy—Jack Windgate from Florida—I had him run his hand down the back of my jacket to see if he could find a hole in my back. He put his hand down there and jerked it right back out. He said, “Hellfire, T.I.! That thing burned my hand!”
The rivet fell out of my back when he done that. I should have kept that rivet (laughs). Jack always did think I got a Purple Heart from that, but I didn’t even go to sick bay for it. He always kidded me, “Why didn’t they give me a Purple Heart? I burnt my hand!”
JIM ANDERSON
I was in the hospital about a month and a half. Then they discharged me. They gave me all they had—Army clothes, which was a little of an insult to a Marine.
I hitchhiked by LST back to Cape Gloucester, to my outfit. They don’t always send you back to your same company, but I was going to be certain I got back to my company. Everyone thought I was crazy for hurrying back.
Meanwhile, in early February, D Company and the 7th Marines prepared to move south through the center of New Britain to pursue the retreating Japanese…
RICHARD GREER
New Britain wasn’t a place fit for a fight. They had four hundred inches of rainfall a year. Your shoes would rot off your feet in a month. The sling would rot off your rifle in a month and a half. It was the biggest damn mess I ever saw in my life. Mud up over your knees. Water over your jeep’s hood. It flooded all the time. Just impossible conditions.
If you were with Chesty Puller, man, you sure got your share of combat. That Louie Puller was something else. Puller volunteered us for every damn mission there was. The biggest thing I was in on was called the “Puller Patrol.” Puller had recently been promoted to executive officer (second in command) of the 7th Marines. He gathered everybody and their brother, close to four hundred men. He took everybody that wasn’t on the line shooting and said, “Come on, boy, get your rifle, we’re going hunting.” We went out in the boondocks and went after the Japs wholesale.
He had been practicing for that moment for heaven knows how long. He always talked about when he was growing up and everybody around him was some old man who had been in the Confederate War. He lived for that stuff. Hell, I had been on many a damn practice maneuver when he was practicing combat patrols. I can hear him now, “A combat patrol is a patrol that goes out and kills every damn thing in its way.” Puller was bigger than life, I don’t think many people will argue with that.
There was two ways for the Japs to escape across New Britain to Rabaul in the northeast: the north coastal road and the south road. We went south, and on those trails we found them.
We just raised hell and killed everything in our path. It was a fearsome thing to be with hundreds of Marines being jacked up by Puller to slaughter everything in your path. He was always up front.
If someone got bogged down with the Japanese, they would call somebody in the weapons company to come up and bring a machine gun. Our first platoon would go off and assist A Company, the second would assist B Company, and so on. They would do some firing, we’d break through, and go on farther. We were so thick in the weeds they had to supply us by air, from Piper Cubs and B-17s.
I never knew whether Puller was being a wildcat or not in inventing that patrol. I always thought he had nothing to do so he grabbed all those Marines and took us out there. When we ran the Japs down and eliminated them, they were already starving to death. They were a sad-looking bunch. They weren’t able to fight, but they were still fighting when they should just have surrendered. The jungle got as many of them as we did. It was the wettest, stinking-est place I ever saw. They were on the run from our patrol and damn few of them escaped.
Having returned to fighting strength, in March, K Company boarded a ship and sailed eastward along the coast of New Britain to the Talasea Peninsula. A strange terrain of volcanic mountains and vacant coconut plantations, Talasea lay along the northern trail to Rabaul. There, K Company landed to mop up stragglers left behind during the Japanese retreat.
T. I. MILLER
We took off from the beach area and marched on up toward Rabaul. I know one time they told us they were going to send some air support. One day a little Piper Cub spotter plane flew over and everybody was laughing about it and saying, “So much for our Air Force!” The Japs were retreating. We would find their supply depots more than anything. We destroyed many of their rifles, sometimes in the crates with Cosmoline grease.
R. V. BURGIN
The Japs had set up booby traps. You’d hike toward them and they’d ambush you. They’d get you when you walked into their sights. Then they’d retreat and set up further down the road in the jungle. Then you’d have to do the same thing again.
We got smart and went out on patrol with a war dog. We’d sneak up on those little lean-tos where the Jap soldiers were sleeping. The first time we went out on patrol, we figured we’d be nice and captured three of them and took them back to battalion headquarters. We checked on them the next day, and hell, the military had given them all new socks, shoes, underwear, caps, and dungarees—the works. We’d been wearing the same rotting clothes for over a month. We thought, To hell with this. After we saw that, we didn’t take any more prisoners.
Sometimes we’d go out on patrols, and they’d be lying in there in those huts, and we’d go in both ends at the same time and bayonet or knife them. We didn’t want to shoot them for fear the sound would alert other enemy soldiers in the vicinity. The war dogs could put us right on them, right where they were at.
JIM ANDERSON
At Talasea I was still on light duty because my wounds were not fully healed. I didn’t see too much fighting up there. The others got in some firefights. It wasn’t heavy fighting, but they ran into occasional snipers. Incidentally, I was in the company CP on light duty. That’s when I first met Captain Haldane. My job was, frankly, nothing (laughs). I spent most of my days in my bunk. One of my buddies would even go to the chow line and bring my food to me.
R. V. BURGIN
After you get into fighting, day after day, it’s like a football player or basketball player or a boxer at the beginning of a game. You’re nervous. The adrenaline is really flowing. But then you get going and get into the first round, and after the first few minutes you just buckle down. You control your fears and do your job. That’s what we did, day after day after day.
Sure, there was still fear. Sure, I prayed. I’d pray to see Florence again. I grew up going to church and Sunday school and had all the faith in God in the world. But the way I figured it was that God had a lot of people to take care of, so I never wanted to bore him with any long prayers. I just always said, “God, my life is in your hands. Take care of me.” I used that same prayer all the way through the war.
I certainly never had any pity parties, crying out to God about all the trouble that came our way. You just do your damn job and let things fall where they fall. That’s what you’ve always got to remember. You’ve always got a job to do. You’re there to fight a war, and you’re there to get rid of the enemy. That was the business we were in.
T. I. MILLER
At Talasea I was still the platoon sergeant, in charge of K Company’s Third Platoon. A platoon sergeant’s job was to assist the platoon leader in keeping track of this, that, and the other thing. We got a new platoon leader to replace Tully, a lieutenant named Bill Bauerschmidt.
He was kind of green. It seemed that he had an attitude that he didn’t want to be seen like the rest of us. He wanted to look like an officer. I took it on myself to warn him to take his lieutenant’s bars off. If the Japanese would eye somebody with rank, he would automatically become a target. It wasn’t very long until his bars disappeared.
We were on this patrol on Talasea, and we came to a place where there was a stream of water coming right off the mountain. You know, how they form a pool? Bauerschmidt told all the men to come up and fill their canteens, but they just stood there. We were all single file, and they all looked at me. All I did was hold my hand up with two fingers, and they knew I meant “two at a time.” I explained to Bauerschmidt that if that whole platoon had congregated at that pool a grenade could have knocked them all out. After I did that, the men just came up two at a time and filled up their canteens until everybody had their canteens full and we went on about our business. Bauerschmidt was okay with it. He was learning.
R. V. BURGIN
New Britain never let up on us. Month after month it rained. The heels of my boots broke down. Both little toenails of mine rotted right off. We never got a change of clothes. The only time we ever got clean clothes was when we’d wade out in a stream or the ocean, wash them ourselves, and put our same clothes right back on again.
You’d get so exhausted you’d lie down in your foxhole to sleep at night and wake up the next morning in a coffin of water; the water would be up to damn near your chin. You’d be lying there in a puddle of deep mud and filthy water, but you’d be so damn tired it wouldn’t wake you. It was like lying in a muddy bathtub with your head out of the water and your clothes on. Imagine doing that for a month or two.
T. I. MILLER
A boy in my platoon was named John Teskevich. He had a big mustache and was always cutting up and carrying on. We found out a general was going to patrol our front lines. We were set up on the edge of an extinct volcanic crater. Almost perpendicular ran a stream—it was only about two foot wide. Teskevich got himself a pole and put a string on it. He was sitting there fishing when the general came by. He thought it might have got him a Section 8 psycho discharge. But the general just walked by, looked at Teskevich, and said, “You catching any, son?” And went about his patrol. Teskevich threw his pole into the bushes and said, “The hell with this!”*
In May 1944, having driven the Japanese back to Rabaul, K Company and the 1st Marine Division prepared to leave New Britain.
R. V. BURGIN
While we waited to leave, we stayed at an abandoned mission on a hill overlooking a peaceful bay. We would swim and fish there. We ate hot food there for the first time—ham, potatoes, and cabbage.
We ran across some artesian wells. The water was warm. We all got in there and took hot baths. That was the first time we’d felt clean since Melbourne. We’d worn the same clothes the whole time. Everybody was in sorry shape. We all had red rashes from jungle rot. A lot of men had “the shits.” Others had severe fevers and chills from malaria. But we were alive.
In the Battle for Cape Gloucester, the division lost 1,347 men. In our company, 21 men got killed. We were there from January through the first part of May. That’s four months of fighting in the jungle. I lost forty pounds in those four months. I’d say we stayed wet 80 percent of the time we were on that damn island.
T. I. MILLER
They put us in reserve again on the coast. I had a Japanese flag and I traded that for a .45 automatic pistol. Then I traded the .45 automatic for a .38 Colt revolver with a cutaway holster. Down there we didn’t wear any clothes. All we had were shoes, what was left of them; most of the time we’d just run around in our skivvies. We would twirl them up and make them look sort of like a bikini. I put that belt carrying the .38 revolver around my waist, slung it down on the hip, and wore a big old pith helmet. Imagine the look of that.
ART PENDLETON
When we were on the beach, waiting to leave, the Japanese were lobbing some artillery on us, some pretty heavy shells. They must have still had a gun out in the jungle.
The shells were falling way too close for comfort when we were about to leave that place. One of the shells hit a DUKW amphibious vehicle and sank it. The guys all got killed.
We had some Japanese prisoners there on the beach. During this shelling, one of the guys who was standing guard told a Jap, “This is your chance, jump over that fence and get the hell out of here!” So the Jap did and the guard shot him dead.
Hell, that’s nothing. When the Japs were in China, they were throwing babies in the air and catching them on bayonets, you know.
T. I. MILLER
In our last day on Gloucester, Captain Haldane came and told me my promotion had come through for gunny sergeant. Then he asked me, “T.I., would you care to keep your platoon for the rest of the campaign?” He didn’t order me, he asked me. He knew I was familiar with the men in my platoon, and bringing a new guy in would create problems. That tells you a lot about the man, Haldane.
RICHARD GREER
We learned we weren’t going after Rabaul. Instead, we left the Japs up there to rot. Cut them off with airpower and Navy. We never had to invade Rabaul. We felt pretty damn good about that. We knew how strongly fortified Rabaul was.
ART PENDLETON
The whole campaign was for nothing. We didn’t accomplish a thing. We lost hundreds of men and it ended up being useless, as far as I know.
R. V. BURGIN
The rumor floating around was that we were heading back to Melbourne, Australia. That sounded good to me. More than anything else, I hoped to see Florence again.
Well, Melbourne didn’t happen. I’ll tell you that much.
* Jim Anderson was good friends with Teskevich and would remember, “Everybody in the company knew Teskevich. He was a very jolly fellow, with a mustache. We considered him an old-time Marine because he had been in before the war. On Peleliu, a sniper shot him as he was riding a tank up the west road. They took him off the tank, but he was gut shot and died in a ditch along the road.”