by Don DeNevi
Upon disembarking by filing down the troop ships’ gangplanks, the 16,000 Marines with their 550 plus officers, as well as medical support personnel and Seabees, found that Pavuvu, the supposed “most exclusive playground in the Pacific”, was so insufferable many vomited.
What the island-selection committee and 1st Division officials didn’t investigate and ponder was why in the 1920’s the 350 Polynesian Lavukal natives fled Pavuvu to resettle on Tikopia. Only after the buildup on the island, and the arrival of the 1st Division, did anyone bother to question the refugees. Through translators, the Lavukaleves said that not only did the land crabs hate the island so much they began eating each other and the rugged coral coastline, but also insisted the coconuts were prematurely ripening so they could fall heavier on the heads of humans.
Once assembled on the landing platforms, the debilitated 1st began to smother in the hot, humid mugginess accentuated by the horrible smell of putrid milk from rotting coconuts and decaying land crabs, guaranteeing few stomachs would settle until before departure. The fresh Marine replacements from Melbourne who followed the Cape Gloucester—Guadalcanal veterans were heavily burdened with gear and weapons waiting to board buses for their bivouacs. “Tent City” could not escape the shower of rotting coconuts thrown at them by giggling earlier Marine arrivals hiding atop the roofs of the pier facilities. Despite sitting comfortably aboard the buses, and observing the well-groomed lanes of recently planted coconut saplings and rows of smart, green Quonset-hut warehouses, no one was impressed or amused with rancid, smelly milk all over their uniforms.
In a matter of minutes, the arriving 1st Division, followed by the contingent of replacements, would learn the true horridness of life on Pavuvu—the swamps, smell, repulsive, sordid waters of malaria-breeding mosquitos. When entering the nearby jungles, steamy and virulent, or terrain, shaggy and arduous, all, no exceptions, were warned to take their regularly-issued, bitter, bright-yellow Atabrine tablets that restrained the chills and fever of infectious malaria sooner or later, claimed by the N.C.O.’s and other officers, “Everyone in the 1st Division, from the Major General to the private, will contract the disease which in more than half the cases will last for years. Don’t forget: everyone is susceptible.”
Slightly less loathing but nonetheless abhorrent was the body odor of the island everyone carried with him. No one knew where it came from, or what to call it, not even the staff officers of the 1st Division. But, the smell was evident whenever someone approached another. Within the pitched pyramidal tents, with six to eight Marines on cots or hammocks, the smell was intensified, leading a Marine to chuckle, “It’s not the smell of dysentery or burned-out flesh. If anything, it’s the smell of unharvested coconuts that because of the war have been in a state of putrescence for more than two years.”
Compounding everyone’s misery was how soft and deep and mushy the topsoil was. Composed of decomposing non-integrating, workable coral, most of the men chose to walk shoeless since much of the island was a few inches or feet under water. After the heavy downpours, flooding was common.
Hardly had the 1st Division and equipment arrived on shore, and realized Pavuvu was not the promised playground of unlimited land and water sports including scuba diving and exploration, nicknames for it began to crop up: “Hell Hole”, “Ringworm Rental”, “Rupertus’ Punishment”, “Jungle Rot”, “Bliss and Piss Cellulitis Center”, “Morale Lost”, “C and K Rations, Plus Insects”, etc.
Such pet names lasted as long as they were audibly uttered, then forgotten as new ones were uttered, then forgotten. One name, however, overrode all others. Even the officers, employed its use: “This f---ing birdshit island.”
The chow was tolerated because “There ain’t any restaurants around here”. Heated Spam, coupled with dehydrated everything, was served on tin plates every day, for lunch and dinner. Only the Spam, the main course, occasionally changed. Most Marines felt the Spam tasted worse than the drinking water which some believed the Japanese had somehow poisoned.
Hatred increased for the loathsome mosquitos and detested land crabs which nightly overran the base and Tent City usually to settle next to the cot or hammocks foot lockers. Particularly bothersome was the lack of bathing facilities and proper toilets. Bathing was accomplished during the frequent cloudbursts, the muddy open roads in front of the rows of tents serving as shower stalls. Bodily infections were common, especially in the feet of the tired Marines. The island’s high humidity prolonged the healing process, especially in those areas around the toes and toenails. Pavuvu’s remoteness, isolation, desolation, and boredom led to several sentry suicides while on duty with their Garand M-1 rifles.
One newly-arrived Marine replacement feeling the fever and sweat, the first symptoms of malaria, was overheard asking a battle-worn Guadalcanal veteran rehabilitating on the hospital sun porch. “Do you think that any evil was forgotten by God when he formed this place?”
Without hesitation, the veteran responded.
“Only one, a week-long murder spree.”
CHAPTER THREE
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“A Jap straggler or infiltrator, you think?”
Tuesday, August 1, 1944
Minutes past midnight, in the earliest morning hour of that tragic Tuesday, the typical tropical shower, violently teeming while lasting less than a moment, abruptly ceased. A billion sparkling stars shone through long rifts in the swiftly moving clouds, basking the entire Russell Island Group in illuminating moonlight. For a Pacific equatorial summer, the night air seemed unusually fragrant, lighter, and certainly cooler.
By 1:00am, the weather changed. Brusquely, the prevailing high winds of the Coral Sea began to howl down through the narrow slot in a southeasterly direction and sweep over Pavuvu, the largest of the Russell’s two main islands toward Guadalcanal 65 miles away. For a murderer looming in the shadows of several open tarpaulin posts and platforms, the ferocity of the gusts and blusters was commensurable with his intense urge to slaughter.
Although Pavuvu was uninhabitable, rugged, rocky, and swamp-riddled, its coral terrain allowed enough solidity to accommodate a thousand tents for the 1st Marine Division combat veterans and stateside replacements recently arrived from Guadalcanal to relax and refit for the pending invasion of Guam.
Now, silhouetted against the shadow of a rolled up tarpaulin cover, a killer, dressed in officer clothing, was poised for an onslaught upon a randomly selected victim within a medically-modified, mosquito-netted canvas tent in the middle of the last row of more than 75 amply-spaced tents lined in a row in some 180 rows.
Within the targeted tent, stretched out under warm, soft navy hospital blankets were PFC Johnny C. Houser, a rifleman from the Fourth Marines, 5th Division; PFC Leo Cass, infantryman, 10th Defense Battalion, 1st Division; and, PFC Richard Mosequeda, 1st Raider Battalion, 1st Division. Lame and in pain, all three were recovering from wounds inflicted by shell bursts from the dreaded Japanese 150mm gun hidden in a protected hill emplacement during the final phase of fighting for Cape Gloucester, New Britain, months earlier. Under each of their cots was a Garand M1 rifle. Mosequeda, a 1st Raider Battalion Purple Heart recipient, also possessed a M1928 Thompson. All four weapons, the three Garands and Thompson, were fully loaded and cocked for firing.
Drowsily aware of strange steps outside the back of his tent, then a barely audible ripping sound of canvas overhead, PFC Houser, recuperating from numerous deep lacerations over his entire body, breathed quietly and listened lazily.
With the high winds partially muffling the cadence of the slow tearing sounds by some sort of sharp instrument, he grew increasingly puzzled, then concerned. Opening his eyes, he was shocked the pitch-black tent was suddenly lit by moonlight. A large flap was cut open and was hanging loosely at one corner less than a foot above his face. Silver rays of moonlight illumined a human head enshrouded by a tan scarf gazing down upon him. The object’s brown hood over the tan scarf wrapped about his neck and face couldn’t conceal huge, penetratin
g eyes staring straight down on him.
Stiffly, Houser struggled to rise, frightened beyond physical pain or even belief, especially when in the bright moonlight he glimpsed the glint of a shiny, wide-blade butcher knife rising in a slow, grim mechanical manner to engage in murderous work.
In one swift motion, without a single decibel of sound stirring the two tentmates slumbering soundly, a USMC-issued burnished razor-sharp Ka-Bar fighting knife cut out the large flap on the tent over Houser’s head, and, in full force, plunged into the hapless PFC’s abdomen, penetrating deep to the lumber vertebra. One poignant, piercing shriek in the fright and pain of a death throe was uttered by Houser as he feebly clutched his stomach and keeled over onto the floor’s wooden plank, tumbling the cot on its side, tangling Houser amid the blankets and mosquito netting. Cutting the rest of the flap open to allow himself in, the killer entered, then pounced upon the enmeshed, dying PFC, repeatedly thrusting the bloodied blade into all of Houser’s abdomen organs. The dull thudding of stabbing sounds on the soft surface of the tragic victim’s stomach, blending with spattering and splashing of blood throughout the middle of the tent interior, finally stirred the other two sleepers into realization that something horrific was happening.
Awakening, Cass and Mosequeda threw their blankets off, struggling for their firearms, or own fighting knives, recklessly placed atop their small lockers at the foot of their cots. Believing Japanese infiltrators, or stragglers, had penetrated the camp’s perimeters and were now attacking the bivouac of slumbering Marines; they were up in a flash, seeing the assassin leap off dead Houser, and dash through the open canvas’ swinging flap. Within a moment, he was past the rolled up tarpaulin covering, scurrying over plywood floors, and vanishing into an area of jumbled warehouses tents, Quonsets, and other small facilities. Mosqueda, upon grasping the full carnage, angrily fired off a full burst from the Thompson, with no thought of aiming.
Turning on the light within the tent, the two PFCs were the first to observe the full extent of the butchery, hearing a final, barely discernable deflating gasping hiss from the victim who was believed dead. With all four quadrants of Houser’s mid-section punctured and oozing bloodily, all the two Marines could do was feel for a hint of life, which they did so until sickened. Only the hideously contorted facial express and its gaping mouth confirmed the tragedy.
CHAPTER FOUR
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“ . . . no beast so fierce knows but some touch of pity... “
Tuesday, August 1, 1944
Gloomily, PFC Leo Cass, in his underwear clutching his Garand M1, and PFC Richard Mosequeda, now in combat fatigues holding his MI928 Thompson, both numb and bewildered, turned their backs upon the bloody corpse of PFC Houser and stepped outside the tent. All they could do was wait in pensive thought.
Outside, in the light of the full bright moon, with the heavy winds slacking, thick, black clouds could be seen swarming swiftly across the northern Coral Sea toward them on desolate Pavuvu. The air was much colder than earlier, stinging all human flesh it touched. A ferocious storm was on its way and, although Tent City and the base seemed deserted in the early morning hour, all hell was breaking loose.
With the loud burst from the Thompson erupting the island into chaos, sirens sounding, and search lights turned on, every available M. P. scoured the base, especially the deep shadows cast by tents, tarpaulin coverings, posts, from the warehouses, docking, and storage areas, including vehicle and garage ports, to the darkest corners of the tent rows. Meanwhile, armed sentries and guards raced to and fro, lit fires, formed search parties and dispersed with heavy-duty flashlights, everyone shouting and issuing orders. All this as the sirens continued to blare harshly, nonstop.
At the murder scene, two military police officers were the first to arrive, one a captain, the other a lieutenant. They were followed by cautious Marines from neighboring tents, fully armed and combat- ready, some jokingly demanding of the PFCs, “Bad dreams, boys?”, or “No time for sex-crazy nightmares, men! We’re Marines!”Cass would then hold the tent entrance flap open and motion for the loudmouths to glance inside. Turning away, some vowed openly to kill every “…goddamn Jap in the universe.”
As PFC’s Cass and Mosqueda stood outside the front of the gruesome scene with the first contingent of MPs to arrive, a second jeep loaded with MP investigators and medical personnel pulled up.
Upon hearing the sudden spurt of shots from the Thompson in the middle of the night, several Marines recovering from malaria at the nearby newly Seabee-constructed Pavuvu Station Hospital arrived in several jeeps. Quietly resting prior to embarkation later that afternoon on board the hospital ship, USS General Robert L Howze, for departure to San Francisco hospitals, some still in pajamas, took up positions behind the murder tent, all gleefully armed with recently issued Reising submachine guns.
Cass, leaning against the tent post, rifle still in hand, turned around to see a stout, heavy-set military police officer climb out of the jeep’s front passenger seat.
“Holy Moley, it’ll be Captain Marvel, himself!” Cass exclaimed, referring to the popular comic book hero. “None other than Captain ‘Slim’, himself!”
Before Mosqueda could respond, the huge man was upon them.
“Gentlemen,” he beamed, chuckling. “We were just radioed there was a little sprinkling of blood this way. You boys fighting? No need for a gun barrage to excite.”
“Yes, Captain Oscar ‘Slim’ Del Barbra. I know you from Copperoplis, California. Known you on ‘Canal’, too. We’ve both seen a lot of blood, but nothing like this.”
“You from Copperoplis, too? Don’t know you,” asked the captain, quizzically.
“Galt, sir. Right down the road form Copperopolis. Knew your younger brother, Louie. We played hardball for the Sego Milk Company team, the Horny Cows, in the ‘Central Valley Baseball League for Stupid Boys’, as my dad used to say.”
Oscar ‘Slim’ roared with laughter, then responded hoarsely,
“Yup, that’s the name our dad gave that league, too, private. Right now, show me what the commotion is all about.”
Both Cass and Mosequeda knew of “Slim’s” reputation. He was one of the heaviest men in the whole 1st Marine Division, and everyone still called him ‘Slim’. According to Corps veterans who served with him, the middle-aged captain had broken more than his share of bones, arms, legs, and heads, while arresting Marine ‘jack-offs’ and criminals galore, shooting three, killing one. Bred along the low, hot hills of the eastern San Joaquin Valley, he boasted to anyone who would listen his sole purpose on this ‘Godforsaken earth’ was to anger bad people so they would assault him and he, in turn, could “break them into little pieces.” Friends and victims alike claimed he was a “smoldering volcano.”
Cass insisted “Holy Moley, Captain Marvel, himself, the Biggest Fist the American Military Police Has” was the type of man you either loved dearly or wanted to kill violently. Others said Slim was a passionate man who inspired passion in others. With a resounding belly laugh, a devil-may-care snickering defiance that filled the entirety of his round face to the jowls, the captain feared no one, especially anyone who wore medals or decorations, referring to anyone with a medal hanging from his chest as an “asshole wasting cloth.”
“He’s a queer one, alright,” Cass whispered to Mosequeda, as the captain pulled the front flap of the tent open and entered the now well-lit enclosure. “He brags that he is neither of the body nor senses, but of the intellect and spirit. I heard he likes his sex very much and is the first to the whorehouses, regardless of the city, or in what country. So goes one of the legends that abound about him,” the PFC concluded.
There was little question this more than 300-pound man, slouchy, was one of the most baffling, well-respected officers in the entire United States Marine Corps.
Leaping from the jeep’s driver seat was Second Lieutenant Leo Guidi. As a commissioned officer of the lowest rank, he catered well to Captain Del Barbra, always two or three steps b
ehind him, and, if possible, in his shadow. Guidi was his opposite -- quiet, bland, mild-mannered, and radiating a general air of sincerity. In short, the military police officer was a casual, unhurried, perpetually smiling man who spoke easily with a quiet dignity. If called upon in an emergency, however, he was no nonsense, deadly serious, and capable of shooting any Marine malcontent of any rank, if deserved.
Entering the murder scene behind his captain who was stone silent from the shock of what lay before him, the second lieutenant recoiled in horror.
For a long quiet moment, neither spoke. Then, the captain asked softly,
“So, lieutenant?”
“Jap infiltrator, or straggler?”
“Neither, not from what I’m seeing”
“But who . . .? Can’t believe…”
“I can’t either…”, responded Del Barbra. Then, after a pause, he chuckled,
“Never thought one of our boys would go off the deep end because he hated the island’s smell of rotten coconuts and land crabs.”
Guidi, shocked, turned to stare at his captain in anger, then bit his tongue lest his thought, if spoken, be instantly regretted, “Why you shallow, stupid, pallid ton of sickening fat flesh, how dare you find humor in the merciless, sadistic mutilation of one of our men who survived being shot at crawling in the steaming jungles and slogging the muddy mountains trails on that hell island of death over there called, ‘F - - - - - - Canal!’
“Well, what say you, second lieutenant?” insisted the captain. “You’re supposed to be the veritable mountain of high intelligence around here. I wait, you homely, bow-legged vociferous little peewee?” Roaring with laughter, he added, “You ready to ballet through blood.”