The Things Our Fathers Saw—The Untold Stories of the World War II Generation From Hometown, USA-Volume I: Voices of the Pacific Theater

by Matthew Rozell

  Robert Addison

  It was four or five o’clock in the afternoon when we got towards Guadalcanal. They were debating whether to have us stay on ship overnight or take us to shore. They decided to take us to shore. We had no sooner stepped on Guadalcanal, and the ship was gone! The Japs came over and bombed it, and in three minutes, it was down. That was one of the first close calls that we would remember.

  The Raiders spent the next eighteen hours trying to rescue the oil slicked survivors of the disaster. Six nights later two other transports were cut to pieces by Japanese destroyers, and the survivors deliberately run over and machine gunned in the water.[31] For the Marines on shore, such actions by the enemy would steel their hearts.

  The First Raider Battalion was now tasked to the village of Tasimboko, where the Japanese reinforcements were landing. They also secured vital supplies and information about the intention of the Japanese to retake American-held positions.

  Gerry West

  We were there about eight days and they decided we’d make a raid on a place called Tasimboko because the Japanese had been landing troops, night after night. They would send a few hundred down on destroyers, land them and get out of there before daylight. The general [Vandegrift] kind of wanted to know what was going on, so that was the only way to find out. We made a landing early in the morning of September the 8th and found out that, yes, there was a considerable force at Tasimboko, which had already left there.

  Robert Addison

  Prior to our landing, the main force had moved back up into the jungles, and I think there were probably about 3500 of them, and they left four pieces of artillery there which they were going to use on us when they attacked us. So we destroyed the artillery and pulled it out to sea. We blew up an ammunition dump, and we destroyed the food that we could not carry back with us. They had bicycles and everything there.

  The Battle of Bloody Ridge

  Gerry West

  So the colonel [Edson] came back and the next morning, he told the general the situation. He estimated there were three or four thousand troops there and that’s when we went up and manned this position, which turned out to be where the Battle of Bloody Ridge was three days later.

  Most of the Japanese at Tasimboko had pulled back into the jungle. The Raiders took as much food and medicine that they could carry, and destroyed the rest, cutting open sacks of rice and fouling it with urine or gasoline. They also captured intelligence documents that showed a major action was planned to retake the airstrip that the Marines held, now dubbed Henderson Field. Colonel Edson convinced General Vandegrift to allow him to set up his Raiders on the ridge overlooking the airfield. The subsequent two-night battle of Bloody Ridge would prove to be one of the most decisive of the six-month long engagement.

  Robert Addison

  We got back into that perimeter defense. There was this spot on the longer ridge that was not covered, so that’s where we were, because Colonel Edson had served in China before the war with contact with the Japanese military, so he knew the Japs—in fact sometimes he knew what they were going to do before they did! He just knew that that was where they were going to attack. Again they fought at night, and the first night they were scrimmaging, they were feeling us out and so forth… [And] the more we read and learn about this today, the scarier it gets. Poor Gerry, after our book came out, he couldn’t sleep for three nights because he found out that first night he was out on patrol, he didn’t know it, but he was within a hundred yards or so of a whole battalion of Japanese! Fortunately they didn’t meet, and about that same time I was out on an outpost that night. They didn’t hit my outpost, but they did hit a couple others and overran them.

  Gerry West

  It’s kind of hard to explain because you can’t say you’re scared then because there are too many things going on. You’re probably more scared afterwards, when you think about all the things that happened, than you are right when it’s happening.

  One or two Raiders were captured, interrogated and tortured with blades during the first night. The whole battalion could hear their screams, remembered one Marine[32]. The Japanese would also taunt, trying to get the Americans to reveal their positions.

  Well, anyway, the next day, Colonel Edson pulled us back a little more and the next night, they hit us in an onslaught! Another thing that helped protect us was the 11th Marines, which were artillery, and they were lobbing in 75s, 105s [mm shells], within 100 yards of us. If the Japanese had probed a little bit when they attacked us that second night, they would have found that we had nothing on our left flank, nothing. They could have probed and essentially surrounded us, and when I looked back the next morning, I thought they had. But it was the 5th Marine Regiment who had been back there waiting, and there they started to move up forward through us.

  Anyway, they did not get through us, if they had gotten through, they would’ve had the airstrip back. The next morning, a Japanese plane was so confident of victory that he came in to land, and you can imagine the reception he got! Anyway, so we went through off the ridge, and it became known now as ‘Edson’s Ridge’, or most of us just refer to it as ‘Bloody Ridge’. We had 50% casualties that night, and we went back into the coconut grove [the original base of operations].

  On September 14th, 1942, first light revealed over a thousand Japanese dead on the ridge.[33] Outnumbered five to one, for two nights the Raiders held on against Japanese shelling by sea and Imperial troops, and the battle has become legendary in Marine Corps history.

  Gerry West

  It was probably the decisive battle of the whole campaign. In fact, history will record that without the Raider Battalion, we probably would not have held Guadalcanal. No question about it. I’m not saying that because I was in the Raider Battalion, but anyone who has studied Marine Corps history can attest to the fact that we saved the airfield those nights, because without it, it would have been another Bataan Death March. In the Battle of Bloody Ridge, just to give you an idea, two men in our battalion received the Congressional Medal of Honor and there were thirteen Navy Crosses awarded to men in our battalion just for that one battle, which is unheard of.

  The Battle of the Matanikau River

  The First Marine Raider Battalion would then be assigned to assist Lt. Col. Chesty Puller at the Battles of the Matanikau River, a jungle river about two hundred yards wide where it emptied into the bay near the airfield. It would change hands several times, and the fighting would be equally brutal. Nerves were also on edge. In total darkness, jungle noises, reptilian sounds, exotic birds screeching and calling to one another through the thick and rotting foliage increased the tension and terror—some of the men had been told that the Japanese signaled to each other imitating these sounds.

  Gerry West

  I think probably the strangest thing that happened to me was in the first Battle of the Matanikau River, I think about a week or ten days after Bloody Ridge when we went up the Matanikau for the first time. I was standing watch on a machine gun and it was raining when I heard a big thud. I thought of the Japanese; they [snipers] used to tie themselves in trees. I didn’t know what it was, I heard this big thud. It really scared the heck out of me, and it was a big iguana about a foot long that had fallen out of this tree. He hit the ground and scampered off. He probably was as scared as I was!

  They were on one side and we were on the other, but we were able to hold them off. We went out there a second time, on October 9th and 10th, about three or four days before we left the island. In the second battle of the Matanikau, we lost quite a few guys that night.

  More than 700 Japanese were killed and the Raiders drove the Japanese back into the jungle, suffering 200 of their own casualties.

  Malaria

  The Marines were exhausted. Rain was constant, bivouacs flooded, clothing rotted away. The air was hot, humid, fetid, and foul. Tropical insects and illnesses plagued the men.

  Gerry West

  One captain got sick and then the next
day another one got sick. By that time, we had lost quite a few to both dengue fever and malaria. They hadn’t necessarily been evacuated from there, we got some of them back, but they were in sick bay, you know, to recover. [34]

  Tom Jones

  Now one thing about Guadalcanal was malaria. Boy, we all got that! That is something. You get chills or a fever and you could be in the hot sun, the temperature well in the 100s, and you get those chills of malaria, your teeth are chattering and you’re cold. I mean cold! And that lasts just so long and then you get a fever and you think you’re going to boil over! It wasn’t long after that they came out with a new drug called Atabrine, which was a preventive for malaria. A mosquito carries malaria; if you had malaria in your blood and a mosquito goes in and siphons out a little of your blood and he goes and bites someone else now he’s transferred it to the next one. That’s how it spreads.[35]

  By mid-November, the Navy in the South Pacific had re-grouped under Admiral Bull Halsey and won the significant naval Battle of Guadalcanal, enabling it to bring supplies and Army reinforcements to the island. Suppressed from the public at the time, more than 7000 U.S. Marines, soldiers and sailors had died at Guadalcanal. Japanese losses were much higher. By the time the last starving and dispirited Japanese troops left in Feb. 1943, further Japanese expansion into the South Pacific was halted.

  Robert Addison

  They called it Hell Island, the Japanese, because they had to live out in the jungles… They had lost over 26,000 men. A lot of them died of starvation and diseases… When they left, they left 26,000 behind. [36]

  Bob Addison and Gerry West and the rest of the Raiders departed in October for New Caledonia for ‘R R’, and to prepare for a vanguard assault on New Georgia in the Solomons. Tom Jones would be joined by thousands of fresh American troops, closing out a four-month stand of isolation. In the words of historian and Pacific veteran William Manchester, “There have been few such stands in history.” Winston Churchill, in his later study of the battle, concluded with his assessment: “Long may the tale be told in the great Republic.” [37] Though the fight was far from over, and hard lessons were still to be learned, astounded Japanese strategists now thought that the situation was serious indeed: the Americans would fight.

  Gerry West and Robert Addison, 2011.

  Portrait by Robert H. Miller.

  Robert Addison

  You know, the word ‘Guadalcanal’ to me is just like Hudson Falls, Glens Falls, Queensbury, and Fort Edward… [He recites]: ‘Guadalcanal, Tulagi, Tasimboko, Matanikau, Enogai, Bairoko’. You know, engrained in me. I will never forget them—it’s just like yesterday.[38]

  *

  Striking at the Serpent’s Head

  John A. Leary, the Navy pilot, was particularly fond of the Marines on the ground that he would protect, flying missions out of the newly secured Henderson Field for months and inching forward with the Marines on death-dealing raids under heavy fire.

  Solomon Islands Campaign.

  John A. Leary

  With one very short leave, we went from Guadalcanal and we ended up on Bougainville, so we covered the Solomon Islands [by air], all of them. And that cut the Japanese off because it destroyed their largest base at Rabaul Harbor, on New Britain. Rabaul had five Japanese airfields, a great harbor and we could hit it from Bougainville, and we did.

  Rabaul hosted hundreds of Japanese fighter planes and tens of thousands of troops. In November, 1943, John Leary and his fellow pilots of squadron VC-38 [composed of fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo planes] commenced attacks in support of the Marine Corps landings below at Bougainville and hitting supporting bases nearby. Bombing and strafing Japanese positions at Empress Augusta Bay on the 14th, 18 torpedo bomber fighters hit Imperial Japanese Army positions with pinpoint precision within 100 yards of the attacking Marines.

  A radioman of his group recorded in his war diary: ‘November 14, 1943—Attack Jap ground troops in the Empress Augusta Bay Region. Our ground troops had too much to handle so we dropped our hundred lb. bombs by their direction. We killed about 300 Japs and those who were still alive were stunned so that our troops just stuck them with a knife…’[39]

  Two nights later Leary was back in a night attack, sowing mines in the Buka Passage. For the next several weeks he and his radioman and gunner would be bombing and strafing Japanese positions in support of the ground campaign below. On December 13th, he made a lone attack at heavy anti-aircraft positions on Puk Puk Island, scoring a direct hit with a 2000 lb. bomb and successfully setting a radar building afire with his .50–caliber guns. At one point during his missions, Leary’s plane was hit by anti-aircraft shrapnel, and a four-lb. glowing shard lodged in his cockpit near his foot as he focused on guiding the plane back to base at Munda in New Georgia.

  (L-R) Gunner L.E. Dale, Pilot John A. Leary,

  Radioman Dale Greslie. Courtesy Leary family.

  On February 17, 1944, Leary was part of a mission of two dozen torpedo bombers to attack Japanese naval vessels near Rabaul. Diving in at masthead level, Leary’s plane scored a direct hit with a 2000 lb. bomb on a packed Japanese cargo ship.

  John A. Leary

  Those ships were reported by one of our submarines and they couldn’t do anything about it because they had just finished up a patrol and were out of torpedoes. They followed these people with their naval escort into Rabaul Harbor. We were then called because we were the oldest outfit there. We were briefed, then set out somewhere around midnight, we hit them around dawn….I was probably about 55, or 70 feet above the ship…

  Matthew Rozell: They could look up and see you if they wanted to. Were they firing at you pretty heavily?

  Yes, they were, and it’s rather difficult to fly when you have a rosary in each hand. I took more fellas in with me than I brought home that day, unfortunately. So the score wasn’t ‘twelve to nothing’. I was about 23 or 24. It was the principal Japanese airbase. They had five Japanese airfields defending it. They had about 200 to 250 Japanese fighters there, which could have been interesting. I was banged up a bit, but always made it back.[40]

  For his actions against Rabaul and elsewhere in the South Pacific, Leary was a recipient of the Silver Star and also the Navy Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor.

  chapter six

  Sea Action

  In 2003, I set out to interview a retiree living on the quiet boulevard leading up to our high school. I sat on his backporch with him for a few hours on a late spring afternoon. Born in 1922, he was in the Navy, serving as a radioman on a destroyer escort, and he seemed to be everywhere in the Pacific during World War II. Like John Leary, he also spent a great deal of time supporting the Marines, and saw his first action in the South Pacific in the reduction of the massive Japanese base at Rabaul on New Britain.

  Alvin Peachman

  I am from the coal-mining district of southwestern Pennsylvania, from a remote rural setting. I grew up in the horse and buggy days. I do remember Herbert Hoover, and I think when I was very young, a little bit about President Coolidge, too. When I was a boy we had the Great Depression, in which things were very rough. So I do remember that.

  Most people then spoke of World War I. My father and his brother and my two other uncles were there. They had gone to France, and they all spoke of the western front in World War I. My great-grandfather was in the Civil War, but I didn’t ever meet him. But at that time when I was a boy they still had Civil War veterans who were alive. I have a book from my hometown that shows them marching, and then they went by wagon, parading when they got a bit older, and then finally a few of them were in a truck or car, and then there were not any of them left; they got too old.

  I was educated at a small country schoolhouse with two rooms. And then I walked to high school, three miles each way. I graduated in a class of 50; it was a fairly big school. The discipline was quite exact. I found our teachers were quite efficient.

  When I heard about Pearl Harbor, I was playing ping-pong. I
had just come into New York City because I had to get work. I found work on merchant ships, really as a longshoreman. I was doing it for about a week and a half when the war started. And so it didn’t last long until I enlisted.

  Since I had worked on ships and got to meet people, I thought I might like to be on a ship. So I enlisted in the Navy in 1942. I thought they were having a pretty good fight in the Pacific, and I was ready to get into it at that time. I was just about 20, not quite, yes, I was just about 20. A year after I got out of high school.

  I went to Great Lakes, Illinois, to the University of Chicago where I got my training, and then they gave us a lot of tests there and they determined it would be better for me to be in radio. I wanted to go into gunnery. But, they gave you aptitude tests and they determine what field you should go in. I wasn't enthused about anything connected with radio at the time, but I then went into radio school. They said that was the best place for me. And I stayed there about four months for learning, and one month for guard duty; it was a very well operated school.