CHAPTER SEVEN
Pavuvu
After three days of sailing, on May 5, 1944, the 1st Marine Division landed on Pavuvu, an eight-mile-wide island northwest of Guadalcanal. To sixteen thousand Marines, Pavuvu would be “home” for the next four months. The island would prove an unforgettable place.
SID PHILLIPS
I remember loading aboard a ship to leave New Britain. We had all figured we were going to go somewhere great, like back to Australia, and we kept that rumor going. Back to Melbourne! I don’t remember anything about that trip, but I remember feeling intense disappointment about where we landed.
T. I. MILLER
Anybody who’s been to Pavuvu will never forget it. A bunch of brass flew over the island, and all they did was look down and see how pretty it was, so they figured it would make a good place for the 1st Division to rest and recuperate. Boy, were they wrong.
RICHARD GREER
From up in the air, I’m sure Pavuvu looked perfect. It was a hellhole. Pavuvu was the land of four million land crabs and six million rats. Rivers full of crocks. A real stink hole. We built streets and all that stuff, finally made an okay place out of it. But it was a bad, bad choice.
SID PHILLIPS
Pavuvu was an old coconut plantation, and it had been neglected for the whole war. Similar weather as New Britain. It hadn’t been taken care of since before Pearl Harbor. There were millions and millions of sprouting coconuts. A coconut falls off a tree, and when it lays there during the rainy season, it sprouts. A big ole shoot comes out of the coconut, maybe a foot and a half long. They were all over the ground. They had a sour, stinking smell. They were just covering the ground. We had to collect these in order to do anything. We’d just pick them up all day long, and pile them up in huge piles. We spent days and days doing this, moving those damn coconuts around.
We had earthquakes on Pavuvu. If somebody was asleep, it would wake ’em up, and they thought you were shaking their cot just to be mean. They’d cuss you out. Then there were millions of land crabs everywhere. At night, they crawled into your tent, into everything you had. In the morning they’d be in your shoes, your clothes.
ART PENDLETON
There were millions of islands out there, millions. They selected Pavuvu probably because of its size and its location, but they picked a place that was in disarray. There were probably ten rats to every person. I thought, Why would they ever put people in a place like this? I wasn’t there long enough to really understand why.
My appendix burst and I became completely ill. They decided to haul me away to the Navy hospital on Banika, an island just east of Pavuvu. I can remember lying on a stretcher on the dock waiting for a boat, and I’m talking to the guy on the stretcher beside me, and he wouldn’t answer me. Finally I was turned over and was about to give him hell for not speaking when I saw he was dead.
I was in the hospital with Leckie when he was there. He said he was there for urinary problems. I had an appendectomy.
After they removed my appendix, the doctors said, “You can’t heal fast enough in this climate,” so they decided to send me home.
JIM YOUNG
They had rows of tents set up with lots of broken cots to sleep on. Who could sleep anyway? The tents were very old and leaked like sieves. Rats nested in the coconut trees during the day, and at night they came down to feed on the rotten coconuts on the ground. At night, they ran all over the place, leaping from one tent to another.
Instead of resting we worked our butts off. We got rid of all coconuts laying around and killed all the rats we could. This place also stunk. Mainly because it was the migrating season and thousands and thousands of land crabs were heading for the sea to do their thing. There were so many that you could hear them crawling along their way. Our roads were covered solid with them, and our trucks and tanks kept mashing them. The smell was awful.
T. I. MILLER
Right after we got our tents set up, a monsoon came up. The next morning I got up and hit water with my feet. The water was almost up to the sides of our cots. The water went down, but then the streets were a real muddy mess. The rats got in that mud and ran up and down your tent.*
SID PHILLIPS
The place was infested with rats. Big rats. Those Norwegian wharf rats. If it was a moonlit night, you could see them running up and down the tent lines. We would name ’em, and cuss ’em, but there wasn’t any way of killing them. We didn’t have any ammunition then, or poison. It would have been a disaster anyway, to poison them all at once. We would have been ankle deep in their carcasses. So we just lived with them. And named them. After a while you could distinguish which one was which. There was Oscar, and Tommy. They got to be pets: really, really gross pets.
ROY GERLACH
We had slit trenches to do our business in. A board went over it with some holes in it. Every so often, it got too full, so they poured gasoline over it and lit it, for sanitary reasons. One day a guy came along, opened the lid, and sat down. He went to light a cigarette and threw the match down between his legs. The methane fumes caught and exploded, burning his butt pretty bad. He spent the next couple weeks in sick bay lying on his belly.
T. I. MILLER
There were four gunnery sergeants in our tent, including me. We had been getting up to hold reveille each morning, so we made it so we could take turns. Monday morning was going to be my time to hold reveille with the company.
Well, the officers got in a shipment of liquor and wine. They gave the first sergeant, us gunnery sergeants, and the platoon sergeants each a fifth of wine.
It had been about nine months since any of us had any alcohol. Me and Gunnery Sergeant Malone had decided that we would open just one bottle of wine. We opened it at about ten o’clock on Sunday morning. We drunk a little of it, only a third of it, but in that tropical heat, combined with the fact that we hadn’t any alcohol in our bodies, it just knocked us out.
Now, there is a certain time in the evening when you look out and it looks exactly like a certain time in the morning. Well, I woke up startled. It looked exactly like morning out there. I figured I was late to hold reveille so I ran out there and yelled, “K Company, outside!”
Here they come, straggling out. Some of them had just their pants on, some barefoot, no shirt, no hats. A motley-looking bunch. I got them all lined up. I got the reports from the platoon sergeants, and I done an about-face and was going to salute the company commander.
By the time I did the about-face, I felt the sand oozing up between my toes. I looked down and realized that not only had I called the company out that Sunday evening instead of Monday morning, but I was wearing nothing but my skivvies! I never have lived it down.*
JIM ANDERSON
The food was quite bad on Pavuvu. There was no refrigeration. The eggs were so bad they smelled. I always covered mine with ketchup so I could get ’em down. This was the first part of the war yet, so it was hard to get fresh food over to where we were.
SID PHILLIPS
It seemed I was always stuck on KP, tending the fires we used to wash our mess gear in. Now, officers seldom talk to enlisted men, unless they’re giving orders, but Colonel Chesty Puller always would. Almost every late afternoon, maybe thirty minutes before chow, the colonel came out of his tent, walked over to the galley, and talked to the cooks and the men like me tending the fires. He’d light this short little stubby pipe he always smoked and just talk to us.
I had always enjoyed reading about the Civil War, and somehow one day we got talking about that subject. We ended up having several long conversations about Stonewall Jackson and the campaigns in the Valley of the Shenandoah and all. He was from Virginia, but I think his interest as a Marine officer was probably more in Jackson’s tactics than North versus South. You could tell he really knew what he was talking about.
This happened several afternoons, these conversations with the colonel. I always spoke to him in formal tones, of course, always “Yes, sir,” “No, sir.” But what I experienced was certainly a different picture than the Colonel Puller you read about.
He’s often portrayed as a tough guy, or shown as the general he later became. He would become one of the most decorated Marines of all time. He wasn’t any of those things those afternoons on Pavuvu when I was tending those fires. Sometimes we would talk for hours. To me, I’d say we became as much friends as a colonel and a private could ever be.
T. I. MILLER
At Pavavu I was still in charge of a platoon. I had a new Marine who was a good old boy from Oklahoma, and he was always sounding off in ranks, being disobedient. One day during a platoon assembly, I dismissed the platoon, but I called out his name and had him stand in place. I told the rest of the platoon, “Go back to your bunks and lay facedown and don’t look until you hear me whistling, coming up the company street.”
I didn’t have nothing on but my T-shirt and slacks. I told that boy, “You’ve been sounding off in ranks and causing trouble. Now, I’m just going to be a plain old Marine like you are—not a gunny. Down there are a clump of bushes, let’s go down there and we’ll have it out, and one of us will walk back up here.”
So I went on down toward the bushes. I didn’t hear him following, so I turned around and looked, and that boy was sitting on a log with his head down between his knees, balling like a little young’un. I walked up to him. He told me, “Sergeant, I hate this outfit. When I left Oklahoma, I had never been out of my county. I’ve just been scared to death and homesick and just plain miserable.” I just sat there with him until he cried it out. I told him, “Now, anytime you want to talk, you come down to my tent. All right?” He nodded, sniffling. So I said, “We’ll go back there and sit down and talk, and you can tell me about your troubles.”
He seemed to be all right after that. I don’t know what happened to him when I left, where he went, but I never had any more trouble with him while I was on Pavuvu. I had several boys who had come in as replacements, and I had to ride them a little bit. One thing you learned after you become a noncom was when you inspected their rifles and all that, it was a good time to sort of look ’em over. I had to be a self-appointed psychologist at that point. It was a natural thing that had come to me without me realizing it.
R. V. BURGIN
The “old salts” were my mentors. The old sergeants. Whatever they did I thought, I want to be like them. T. I. Miller, Harry Raider, John Marmet—those were some of my favorite people. All solid as the day is long.
Now, Captain Haldane and Lieutenant Hillbilly Jones were the two best officers I ever encountered in the Marine Corps, bar none. They were the best two. Neither one of them put up with any bullshit either. Hillbilly Jones was Haldane’s second in command. He was the most GI, strict guy I ever served under. He had served as a seagoing Marine for five years and was sharp—you’d never even see him sweat. When you fell out for inspection in the morning, your cuffs better be buttoned, same with the top button on your jacket, and you stood straight. “You are a Marine and you’re going to act like a Marine and look like a Marine”—that was his whole thing. Just because you are out here in the boonies doesn’t mean you’re going to slouch off.
Hillybilly wasn’t just all business. After hours, he’d come toting his guitar and we’d have a sing-along, songs like “Danny Boy” and the Australian ballad “Waltzing Matilda.” Hillbilly wasn’t from West Virginia or Kentucky—he was actually from the hills of southern Pennsylvania. In battle, you’d want Hillybilly close. He had a calm voice, a relaxing manner, and he wasn’t afraid of anything.
One day a few of us caught a real break. Captain Haldane gave about ten of us guard duty on Banika, the main base on the Russell Islands, where all of our main supplies came in. I tell you, he was a real fine officer. Firm but always kind. He’d been with us the night we fought off those five banzai charges, and they’d awarded him the Silver Star for that. We were handpicked, I know, for this duty. Everybody who went was an outstanding Marine from K Company. I didn’t include myself in this bunch, but I went along anyway. Lieutenant Hillbilly Jones, Sergeant John Teskevich, and a couple others. All the men there were real solid Marines.
Truly, this guard duty was meant to be R&R for us. I thank the captain for that. It was just guarding a big outdoor storage area and it was only four hours on duty every four days. We guarded soft drinks and beer. Real tough duty there. And we helped ourselves to the beer, even though it wasn’t cold. Banika was where the ships came in, and we’d go aboard the ships and eat lunch with the Navy. The first day I went into one of those ships, I was never so surprised in my life. They had white tablecloths and brought me a menu—I was from Texas so I ordered a streak and potatoes. They cooked it just right.
JIM YOUNG
After a while we got the place in good shape. We also got decent tents. Then all we did was play volleyball and basketball and look for shells at the beach. We got a big surprise. Bob Hope and his party flew in to put on a show for us. With him were Jerry Colonna, Lena Horne, Eddie Peabody, and dancer Patty Thomas. Some of the boys got to dance with Patty. We all really enjoyed the show.
SID PHILLIPS
Leckie was our unofficial company librarian. He had about four boxes full of paperback books. He had joined the company intelligence section by then, and they let him haul these books around, where the rest of us could have never done that. You had to carry everything on your back. I don’t know where he got all these books, but he must have had 150 of them. He had quite a little library—Ben-Hur, and joke books. He had one, I remember, Merriam Webster’s How to Improve Your Vocabulary. It was a yellow-and-blue cover. I’d take that thing over and read it, because I wanted to get some education. I wanted to get to college. So I’d go over to Leckie’s tent and borrow a book from his library. He’d make you sign it out, just like you were at a public library. You would have to give him your name and that you were in the mortar platoon or such and such squad. He would tell you when the book had to be back then he would write it down.
If you didn’t bring it back, he’d come to your tent and take it.
Hanging in his tent, Leckie had a picture of a girl. She was dressed in a white dress with lace, all set to go to church. But she had no underpants on and you could see everything. It was hilarious. The guys would go in there and look at it and laugh and come out beating one another on the back and all.
RICHARD GREER
By that time we were on Pavuvu, we knew Basilone had returned to the fleet with a new outfit. That didn’t surprise Morgan and me at all. I don’t think John enjoyed the war bond tour, because as soon as he could he got himself transferred back into the fleet. By then he had been promoted twice, earning a stripe as platoon sergeant and then another as a gunnery sergeant. I wrote him a letter or two and got a response back. John wasn’t much of a writer. He would always get someone else to write for him. Morgan and me, we wrote his letters when we were with him. We even wrote his love letters!
R. V. BURGIN
I didn’t really reflect much during this time. You try not to think about what you’ve been through. Course, you can’t help but thinking about it from time to time. But you don’t need to have a pity party, thinking about what happened and who it happened to. I always figured if you sit around and dwell on it, well you’d go nuts. So I never did.
There’s a phrase, “going Asiatic,” it means to go off your rocker a bit. After you’ve been in a few battles, it can put you in a certain frame of mind. Sergeant Pop Haney was the most Asiatic man I knew. Whenever he took a shower, he scrubbed his whole body head to toe with that hard-bristled Marine brush we’d all been given. Even his testicles. I tell you, that Pop Haney was as tough as nails. He had skin like a rhinoceros hide.
We’d see him many, many times with a full transport pack on, coming down the street, and do physical drill under arms, muttering to himself. I think he’d done something that he felt he needed extra duty for. Pop Haney was okay in his head, just a bit off.
Around July 1944, the division began rotating home its “old-timers,” the veterans of Guadalcanal and New Britain.
RICHARD GREER
Some of our guys started to do pretty strange things, going “Asiatic.” Then some people came from Washington and saw this. In little or no time the military came up with a rotation plan to send us home. You got a point for each month overseas, five points for each campaign, five points if you had a Purple Heart. I qualified in the first go around.
SID PHILLIPS
When you first went overseas, you just figured you would be over there until the war ended. After two years went by, they had lots of replacements coming through training, and word got around that we were eligible to go home after twenty-four months overseas.
T. I. MILLER
If I remember correctly, the requirement to go home was 92 points. I had already chalked up 138. Captain Haldane called me to his tent to offer me the job of company first sergeant if I stayed on with him. He had at least two other gunnery sergeants he could have asked, so this was an honor. I had the utmost respect for him, but I wasn’t interested in the job. I’d had enough war the day we landed on Pavuvu. My response was “No, Close Crop, I think I’ll go home.” So that was the end of my combat. I was to be sent home.
The night before we shoved off from Pavuvu, Lieutenant Bauerschmidt come right up to my tent. He told me to come out in the company street because he wanted to talk with me for a few minutes. He thanked me and said, “I learned a lot from you. You helped me out a whole lot. I want to thank you for that.” I told him, “Well, that’s just part of my job. I would take care of a green lieutenant the same I would a green private.” I shook hands with him. He turned out to be a good officer.*
JIM YOUNG
All the platoons were called together for important news. We were going back to the States. We were so excited that the sarge had to quiet us down. He had at least two years overseas at that point. He said that was the good news, now for the bad. “Most of you are going home,” he said, “but not all of you.”
SID PHILLIPS
Just because you had enough points didn’t mean you were going to go home. It just meant that you were eligible. You can be sure that if they really needed you, you stayed. They couldn’t afford to send the whole division home.
So they did something strange. The regiment organized a lottery to see who got to go home. Literally life-and-death. Some would go home and some would stay for the next battle.
We understood they were doing this for morale purposes. After a guy had been there for twenty-four months, he knew how to goof off, he knew how to get out of doing anything, he knew how to hide and not work; the old-timers became almost worthless. They needed some fresh blood in there.
ROY GERLACH
The company held the lottery to go home. There were sixteen of us in the same category I was. You had to have two campaigns and a clean record to be eligible. So the sixteen of us lined up. The officer put sixteen slips of paper in a hat. If you drew a paper with a number on it, you were going home. If the paper was blank, well, you were devastated. I was the second one to draw a slip. It had a number. I still have that piece of paper.
SID PHILLIPS
When I pulled a number, I thought, “Hot dog, I may get to go home!” In the back of your mind you didn’t trust the Marine Corps. They were always telling you lies, giving you rumors that were not true. You didn’t believe anything in the Marine Corps until it happened.
JIM YOUNG
The sergeant told the rest of us a bunch of bull, that we had been handpicked by the captain because of our experience on 81mm mortars. “We want you guys to train the new replacements that are coming in,” he said. When the replacements arrived, the lottery winners would go aboard the same ships for deployment back to the USA.
SID PHILLIPS
By some stroke of luck for me and misfortune for him, my best friend from Mobile, Eugene Sledge, came to Pavuvu. Eugene, of course, didn’t sign up immediately for the war due to a minor heart condition that his father, a doctor, had detected. But he felt that he didn’t want to miss out, so eventually he convinced his parents and joined up.
Eugene and I exchanged letters every month or two. I knew that he had gone to boot camp in San Diego, on the West Coast, which was different than most Marines. There was an epidemic of meningitis at Parris Island just then, that’s why he didn’t go there instead.
He was put into an infantry training unit and sent out to the Pacific, and came out with a shipload of replacements to us in the 1st Marine Division on Pavuvu. They sent out two shiploads of replacements, and Eugene was in the first.
He came in one morning, and my buddy W. O. Brown went out on the same ship that Eugene came in on. But there were thousands of men, and they didn’t see each other. W.O. knew Eugene really well, but there was no way of knowing they were in such close proximity to each other.
So Eugene got permission to come over and find me in the camp. The second morning after he landed on Pavuvu, I saw him coming down the company street. He was my best friend. He was fifty yards away, but immediately I knew it was him. I jumped up and ran out of my tent, hollering his name. He ran to meet me. We hugged each other, and beat on each other. Actually, we were rolling around, wrestling on the ground. People thought we were fighting, and a big circle of guys formed. We stood up, and I introduced him around to all my friends.
We were with each other about two weeks before I shipped out. We would see each other every afternoon. They had training during the day, but late in the afternoon he could get off and come over to see me. He’d help me with my galley work. I had to empty the wash water out of those cans and put fresh water in. It would take me several hours to do it myself. But when I had him there, I could do it in half the time.
We’d go to my tent, or else sit under the trees. Twice a week they’d have a movie. They didn’t have any theater. It was just a clearing with coconut logs you could sit on. We’d just enjoy each other’s company.
R. V. BURGIN
Pavuvu was where I first met PFC Eugene Sledge. He was a replacement assigned to my squad as an assistant gunner. Sledge was just like any other raw recruit who stepped in, no different than anybody else. We knew pretty shortly that he had been in OCS and had a year or two of college behind him, but that didn’t impress anybody. He was just an ordinary green kid like I was whenever I first got there. His dad was a medical doctor, and they were pretty well off. They had a yard boy and a nanny and a cook, and Sledge’s only responsibility growing up was to feed his dog. For a kid coming out of an environment like that and coming into the Marine Corps, with all the physical and mental training we went through, he did pretty well. I always admired him for sticking it out like he did.
JIM ANDERSON
Pop Haney, some of us were kinda wondering about him. He could have gone home when they rotated out the guys with lots of time under their belts, but he chose to stay on Pavuvu. That alone should have got him sent home.
Every day he would jump around doing these exercises I’d never seen. He didn’t have many close friends; I guess because some of them figured he was just a little too long in the Corps.
JIM YOUNG
The sarge had a list and called off the names of guys who were going home. The reading took a while. I’ve never felt so low. Every one of my close friends was leaving, guys like Dick Carr. We had been together since boot camp. I would say this was the saddest day of my life.
Saying good-bye to my friends was very hard. I stood down at the dock and watched the ships until they were out of sight.
SID PHILLIPS
The next ship of replacements came in, and I went out. When I left Pavuvu, I couldn’t believe it. Nor could anyone else on the ship. We wouldn’t have been surprised if they had turned the ship around and taken us all back. Maybe two days after we got under way, we said, “Maybe this is really going to happen!”
When we actually touched the docks in San Diego and went ashore, it was unreal. I saw guys get down and kiss the docks. I think all of us had decided that none of us were going to survive the war.
We returning veterans were a curiosity. The recruits there in San Diego would come over in groups and stare at us. We were all orange from all that Atabrine, the anti-malarial drug. All thin. They’d actually stare at you, ask you what it was like. We’d make light of combat and say, “Well, if you can keep from going crazy, you’ll be all right.”
RICHARD GREER
We were on a fast Army transport without escort, and we were in San Diego in late July. I was sure glad to be home. We were quarantined and vaccinated. By then Basilone was just down the road at Camp Pendleton, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you could just up and leave to visit your friend.
J. P. Morgan was on the same ship coming home that I was. He was in front of me when we got to the telephones to call our loved ones. He got his chance, hung up, and was kind of funny-looking. I said, “What’s the matter, Mo?” He said, “That damn wife of mine took that four thousand dollars that I made playing poker and took off with a damn 4-F’er.” A 4-F’er was someone who didn’t have to go to war due to medical issues. “Oh hell” was all I could think to say. We traveled across the country on the same train to Atlanta. I never saw Morgan again after that.*
I was assigned to Naval Air Station Norfolk. I’d been a first sergeant overseas, and they made me acting first sergeant in Norfolk. I was there through the end of the war.
T. I. MILLER
On Cape Gloucester I had lost all my weight again. When I got back to civilization, San Diego, I didn’t weigh more than 120 pounds.
On a bus going back to New River, I knew I’d come down with malaria. I got on that bus, and I don’t remember anything after that. When I came to, I was in the hospital. After I finally got well enough to report in, I’d been listed AWOL for fourteen days.
When I went home, I got married right away. I’d known Recie since she was four and I was eight. She lived down in a coal mining town, and I lived out on a farm about half a mile outside of her town. We were childhood sweethearts. I used to deliver milk to Recie and her baby sisters.
She was a very pretty woman. Beautiful. We’d always known we were going to get married. All the time we were overseas she wrote me letters. She asked me why we didn’t get married before I went overseas. I said, “Well, I didn’t know if I was coming back, and I didn’t want to saddle you with that.”
After we were married, Recie came down to New River (Camp Lejeune) with me. One night we went out for dinner in Winston-Salem. I was in my uniform complete with my Guadalcanal patch. We were in the restaurant, waiting on our order, when I noticed a middle-aged guy sitting four or five tables away. He was staring at me. Most of us who had come back, we were yellow-looking from taking all that Atabrine. I guess maybe I look obnoxious to him, I thought. I told my wife, “That guy over there has got something on his mind. If he starts over here towards us, you get up and leave and get away from the table.” About that time, I looked up, and there he stood, looking right down at me. I was thinking to myself, Uh-oh! This guy is going to do something!
He stuck his hand out and said, “Thank you, son.” His eyes were misty like he was starting to cry. I shook his hand. He turned around and walked out. I remember how humble I felt. I turned to my wife and told her, “That meant more to me than if they gave me a Silver Star. That citizen gave me all the awards he had available.” That really happened.
ROY GERLACH
There weren’t many units coming back yet from overseas. We were one of the first ones. I was down at Camp Lejeune and was a butcher in their kitchen for the next year and a half.
SID PHILLIPS
When I got home to Mobile, I was a bigger curiosity than in San Diego. The streets were not full of veterans yet. People would look at you and say, “Have you been overseas?” And I’d say, “Yeah I have.”
Coming back to my house, back to my parents and my sister Katharine—I just figured it would never happen. And now that it was actually happening, I couldn’t believe it. You’d just figure you’d wake up and find out you were in your hammock in Pavuvu. For a long time, I had that feeling—that I’m imagining all this, that it’s not really happening.
In the midst of this all, I met Mary Houston, the prettiest girl who ever lived. She was a teller at the local bank. I knew her in high school when I worked in the cafeteria and punched the cash register in the girls’ food line. I was an expert girl watcher back then. But I never imagined she would stay single and unmarried in time for me to grow up and make something of myself. There’s not much to tell except that she was perfect. I knew this was the girl I needed. We started dating, and for a moment I was glad there was a war on because it kept all the other boys away from Mary Houston.
It was summer 1944 when I came home. There was still another year of the war to go.
* T. I. Miller would remember, “As to Pavuvu, about fifteen years ago I ordered an official certificate saying that I was an official citizen of Pavuvu. I found it in the Leatherneck magazine.”
* T. I. Miller would remember, “If I go to a reunion right now and some guy who was at Pavuvu is attending, too, he’ll make me tell that story. I can’t escape it (laughs).”
* T. I. Miller would remember, “I never saw him again after that but heard he got shot in the stomach on Peleliu and bled out and died before they could get him to an aid station.”
* Richard Greer would remember, “I heard Morgan died in 1980, when he was sixty years old.”