The Pacific

by Hugh Ambrose

  Lieutenant Micheel knew the navy would assign him to a naval air station somewhere in the States. The younger men could only guess what would happen next. They all knew they had been one small part of the team that had decisively defeated the enemy's carrier fleet. When its enemy fled the battlefield, the U.S. Navy's fast carrier task forces had denied the enemy the use of "the Jimas" as well as the port of Manila, albeit for short periods. The once vast Empire of Japan had withered. To the extent Mike and his friends considered the future course of the Pacific War, they "worried about what was going to happen with the ground fighters when they make their landing in Japan. How were we going to handle some big country like that? We had a lot of carriers and a lot of ships, but they're pretty small when you put them against a whole country and area and people."

  NAVY CRUISERS AND DESTROYERS BEGAN FIRING AT NGESEBUS AT SIX A.M. THE Fifth Regiment's artillery ranged in as well. The firestorm had come again, so close that the 3/5 had a ringside seat. Amid the swelling tempo of destruction, forty amtracs, forty of the assault amtracs with the snub-nosed 75mm, and fifteen swimming tanks lined up on the beach on the northwestern corner of Peleliu.312 The preinvasion bombardment lasted three hours. Navy and Marine Corps planes made passes over the target, strafing and bombing. One of King Company's riflemen, Bill Leyden, noted that the USMC pilots, flying in their distinctive Corsairs, "always seemed to come in lower, to try harder to knock out jap positions, and the marines loved them for it." The Corsairs' last pass came with the lead tanks thirty yards offshore.313 After an eleven-minute run, the first wave of twenty of the assault amtracs landed on Ngesebus at nine eleven a.m. An enemy soldier attacked one of the LVTs with a Bangalore torpedo.314 The amtrac threw a track and the lone assailant was killed. A few minutes later, King Company landed on the left flank of the beach, Item on the right. Riding in a new amtrac with a rear ramp, Sledge did not have to clamber over the side. As the troops disembarked and charged forward, the assault amtracs aimed their cannons and fired at the defensive bunkers from close range.315 Behind them the Sherman tanks swam ashore. The whole battalion assault team had landed by nine thirty a.m.

  Securing the beachhead went quickly and the rifle squads led the way inland. The enemy's return fire increased rapidly as the marines raced across the small airfield to the buildings and taxiways at nine forty-two a.m. In the scrub beyond, they encountered a stiff resistance that stopped forward momentum. A series of caves, bunkers, and pillboxes had to be "reduced," as the officers liked to put it. The terrain within King's area became rugged and more difficult for the tanks to support.

  Burgin's #2 gun squad halted as they saw the riflemen take cover ahead. Using a bunker as cover, Snafu and Sledge set up the 60mm to be prepared to fire. Burgin needed to figure out how best to support the assault teams. Sledge said, "Burgin, there's some Japs in that thing." Burgin glanced at the oddly shaped little building half buried in the sand. It stood about five feet tall, was about sixteen feet in length, and four feet wide. His sergeant had told him "there wasn't any japs in there," so he replied, "Oh, Sledgehammer, do you know what you're talking about?"316

  "Yeah, I can hear them jabbering." Burgin saw a small ventilation port near him. "I crawled up on the side of that bunker and looked into there, and that jap had his face right up against the hole. . . . Well, I pumped about four or five shots on him before he could get his head down." Even after he emptied his clip, "they kept jabbering and a machine gun came out and fired a few rounds." They threw grenades out of the ports as well.

  "Sledge," Burgin ordered, "look up and see what you can see." Sledgehammer ran over and peeked over the side of the door. He fell to the ground just as fast. A machine gun fired. "Well, him being a rookie," Burgin concluded, "I shouldn't have never sent him up there to begin with." The #2 gun squad leader also began to wonder "how many japs is in that thing, you know, I need to do something here. Uh, if we don't, we might all get killed." The enemy's grenades went off, and fragments hit two of his squad. Burgin sized up the bunker. The thick concrete would stop anything he had; they had a machine gun in there, grenades--who knew what else. He "decided that we weren't doing a very damn good job, you know, and I knew that if we kept messing around there, there's somebody going to get killed." R. V. Burgin ran back to get some firepower.

  Seventy-five yards back toward the beach, he found a Sherman tank and Womack, one of the men in King who carried a flamethrower. Burgin told Womack he needed his help and started to guide the tank from behind, using the phone. The return trip took just a few anxious minutes. The Sherman fired three or four rounds at close range until one shell penetrated the concrete and exploded inside. Womack stepped forward and loosed a great gush of flame into the breach. The violence of it made Burgin think the enemy must have been killed, but they came running out the side doors, some holding up their pants with one hand, some with splotches of burning napalm on their bodies. Most of them carried rifles.

  Snafu and Sledgehammer and the others shot the enemy as they emerged. A short pause after the first rush of men ended when another Japanese soldier emerged. Sledge "lined up my sights on his chest and began squeezing off shots. As the first bullet hit him, his face contorted in agony . . . the grenade slipped from his hand."317 The moment became seared into Gene's heart as his sharp eyes noted every detail of the first time he killed another human being. "The expression on that man's face filled me with shame and then disgust for the war. . . ." Another thought struck him hard: the foolishness of "feeling ashamed because I shot a damned foe before he could throw a grenade at me!"

  Burgin waited a moment before walking around to the narrow passage leading inside. Stooping his six-foot frame, he entered the room to find out how they could have absorbed such punishment. "There was a jap laying there that I didn't think looked dead to me, and, uh, I stuck my foot in his--in his, uh, rib cage and--and, uh, attempted to roll him over. And he wasn't dead, so I plugged that one." He counted seventeen bodies on the floor as he moved through the different rooms. They had been heavily armed. Burgin realized "we was damn lucky that nobody didn't get killed." The two wounded men in his squad did not require evacuation, so he gave himself a pat for "a pretty good job well done."

  A number of similar successes along the line allowed the 3/5 to cross the enemy's main defensive line at twelve fifty p.m.318 The Japanese never gave up, though, and the ships of the navy had finished their work as artillery batteries and ceased firing. 319 King and Item had advanced only 350 yards by five p.m. when they dug in for the night. A few platoons of reinforcements came up an hour later. The infiltrators would creep toward them hours later causing brief, vicious exchanges. All over Peleliu and Ngesebus, mortar teams fired their illumination rounds, sometimes keeping a few floating in the air above them at one time.320

  The next morning the attack jumped off at six thirty a.m. and at eight a.m. the first marines began to reach the far shore of Ngesebus.321 Before they could relax, "a large jap 77mm gun fired point-blank at the rifle companies."322 King Company did not take part in the firefight, which eliminated the enemy's gun crew. It had already sustained the highest casualties of any company in the battle for Ngesebus (three killed and nine wounded) and the worst losses since the invasion.323 Most of the day was spent "mopping up," which meant carefully making sure no enemy concentrations had been overlooked. It also gave the marines time to find souvenirs. Stripping enemy bodies was, so far as Corporal Burgin was concerned, "common practice."

  The vulgarity of his friends stripping dead bodies combined with the aftershock of the sudden devastation wreaked by the enemy's 77mm gun filled Gene's eyes with tears. "I was so terribly tired and emotionally wrung out from being afraid for ten days on end that I seemed to have no reserve strength left."324 E. B. Sledge would take note of the words of encouragement he received at that moment from the mortar platoon lieutenant, Charles Ellington. Nicknamed "Duke" because he shared a last name with the famous black jazz musician Duke Ellington, the lieutenant had seen him struggle a
nd said, "I feel the same way." The gesture helped Eugene. He looked up to Duke, just as he revered all of the officers of King Company. He saw them as strong, brave, and true of heart. His opinion reflected his innate love of order and his deference to authority. He needed to believe now more than ever in the courage and righteousness of his commanders. E. B. Sledge's perception, however, overlooked the growing anger within Corporal Burgin, who doubted Lieutenant Ellington's bravery in battle. Duke never seemed to be where the action was.325

  When the word came, they walked back to the invasion beach to the sound of artillery on Peleliu. An army unit relieved the 3/5 at six p.m. The amtracs carried King to Peleliu, and trucks ran them south, around Bloody Nose Ridge, then east across the first causeway to the regimental HQ on the first islet. Being so near Purple Beach, the new port area, brought the hope that they were going there in preparation to ship out.326 After a decent night's sleep, King Company had a long rainy day off to clean their weapons, get some hot chow from the mess hall, and wonder if the scuttlebutt was true.327

  PRIVATE FIRST CLASS SIDNEY PHILLIPS WAS NOT CRAZY ABOUT LIFE AT BOCA Chica Naval Air Station, even though it turned out to be only seven miles to the north of Key West, Florida. Most of the marine unit stationed there were, like him, recently arrived veterans of the 1st Division. They all disliked being stationed out in the boonies or, more correctly, on one of the little islands sticking out into the Gulf of Mexico. A marine could only get to Miami if he had a long weekend liberty. The jobs of guarding the front gate, the gasoline storage tanks, and other important government property seemed almost pointless.

  Most of the navy pilots stationed there had just graduated from flight school and received their wings of gold. The first taste of the glamour of being a pilot as well as the pay and the respect accorded an officer often went to their heads. Ensigns were likely to look down on a lowly marine at the gate and might decide to thank him for "guarding our airplanes." The senior officers sometimes knew better than to treat a salty marine that way, but one afternoon a car with four captains drove up to the main gate. Sid noticed the four stripes on their uniforms. He also noticed one of them lacked an ID card. He did not wave them through. The salty veteran with the big "1" on his shoulder patch started to ask about the missing ID when the car started to move forward. Sid "placed my hand on my revolver, and told them to stop, made them all get out and go into the guard house for clearance. This was all done with firm politeness, and snappy salutes."

  Sid and the other veterans enjoyed playing games with the swabbies. Other navy officers coming to the front gate might be asked to get out and open their trunks for inspection. Sailors ducking through an illegal hole in the fence around the base might hear a gunshot. They assumed it had been aimed at them and it got them to stop their unauthorized egress. These kinds of stunts also earned Sid and his friends a reputation as the "mean and bad Pacific veterans."

  He did venture into Key West a few times. One bar sat next to another bar, next to another. Sid visited too many of them on one trip and woke up in a strip club, drunk. He observed his friends explaining to the MPs why they did not need to bother with him. By his right elbow he soon noticed a girl "bumping and grinding . . . to the tune of the Hawaiian War Chant." She was lathered in sweat and had long stringy hair. "My thought was up close she isn't very attractive and then I slid to the floor. Deacon would have given me several of his long lectures."

  AT EIGHT A.M. ON OCTOBER 1, IT BECAME THE 3/5'S TURN. THE OTHER TWO battalions of the Fifth remained in relative safety while Sledgehammer and his comrades walked toward Bloody Nose Ridge.328 The 3rd Battalion had been attached to the Seventh Marines, whose CO announced his unit would "make an all out drive to erase the remaining jap garrison."329 The Seventh would continue the push north begun by Chesty Puller's First. The walk to the front line for King, Item, and Love was not very far. The ridge came into view. The ceaseless battering by every weapon in the corps' vast arsenal upon the high ground had burned and blasted away the jungle, exposing several dreadful columns of Bloody Nose Ridge.

  The 3/5 relieved the 2/7 on the eastern side of the main ridge complex. Some company-sized units of the 2/7 came down from the heights that had already been taken. The men being relieved had not eaten hot food or enjoyed a safe place to sleep since September 17. Just getting ammo and medical supplies and the wounded out had been difficult, their officers reported, since snipers were everywhere and the terrain was crazy.330 A few of them led the men of Item Company back up the steep paths into the coral walls to show them their positions. King and Love remained on the valley floor, back from the point of furthest penetration. The air over the forbidding terrain shimmered with heat and malevolence. The sound of gunfire at all times attested to the fact that somewhere nearby, someone was getting hurt. As the platoons of King found their places that afternoon, snipers killed two men and wounded two others.

  The attack northward did not jump off the next day. The 2/7 shifted to the right in order to face a solitary ridge along the island's eastern shore. The plan worked out for October 3 involved the Seventh Marines seizing the ridge in front of it. To the left of the Seventh's ridge, across a flat open valley, stood the coral redoubt known as the Five Sisters, the object of the 3/5.331

  The #2 mortar squad joined the chorus of mortars that began firing at six thirty a.m. Fifteen minutes later, the heavy artillery opened up, trying to force the Japanese back from their firing positions and therefore allow the riflemen to close with their targets. The high-explosive shells gave way to smoke shells at six fifty- five. The riflemen of Item and King took the point, moving forward along the flat and open ground, the bulk of Bloody Nose Ridge running along to their left and the Five Sisters five hundred yards dead ahead. On the 3/5's right flank, two tanks and three half-tracks of the Seventh nosed into the long valley known as the Horseshoe. On the far right, the riflemen of the Seventh assaulted the ridge on the shoreline.332

  The 60mm mortarmen were not leading the charge, but they still came under direct fire. "Almost every cave in the side of the ridge on the left flank was full of japs," as King's skipper, Captain Haldane, discovered. "Tanks, portable flamethrowers, grenades, bazooka, and demolition charges were used to eliminate them." To Love Company fell the task of mopping up the areas behind the advancing King and Item.333 The seemingly endless permutations of hardened coral faces demanded the marines' attention to detail in the face of punishing small-arms fire. In the course of such work the marines learned to dislike the flamethrowing LVTs, or "Ronsons."334 To be effective with flame, the tank had to get very close to its target, and, since troops and tanks had to work together, that meant the troops had to approach the pillbox closer than they would have had to with a standard Sherman tank. Anything the Ronson could hit with flame, the Sherman could hit with a 75mm shell from a safer distance. For all of the frightening hostility of napalm's sticky sheet of flame, it caused less damage than an HE round and King Company measured its gains in yards of violent destruction.

  The lead elements of King reached the base of the Five Sisters at noon. One platoon found a sharp ravine on the left side of the sisters and took a tank in with them to investigate. Love came up on their right, Item fell back to mop up, and the riflemen began to scale sisters one, three, four, and five. The mortarmen waited, ready to lay down suppressing fire or smoke rounds. Knowing when to press the attack and when to fall back demanded a cold assessment of a combat situation the likes of which no one there had endured. It fell to Captain Haldane, the skipper, to expend his men's lives as judiciously as possible, while producing the gains his superiors demanded. Haldane made sure he made that decision from the front. At that moment there was seemingly no cover. Rifle fire from unknown locations drove King to the ground.335 The volume of fire increased. The call for the smoke rounds came to the mortarmen. As the 60mm mortar tubes coughed, King fell back two hundred yards. Over to their right, the Seventh had also had to withdraw out of the Horseshoe because of the casualties in men and to i
ts armored vehicles. Some of the caves held guns big enough to destroy a tank.336

  The assault cost King Company seven killed and about thirty wounded, including Sergeant Hank Boyes.337 The high number of casualties came as a shock.338 The men spooned out some K rations, all too aware of what the night would bring. The mortar section had nearly used up its supply of 60mm mortar illumination rounds.339 The enemy must have watched the marines dig in because they seemed to know which foxhole to jump in and where to throw their grenades. The infiltrators came all night long. It got so bad that when a sergeant hollered, "You guys need help up there?" he got a quick, "Shut the fuck up!" for his trouble.340 At daybreak, Sledge heard men call out, "Get down, Joe," and "Get down, Pete," as they shot the remaining infiltrators scant feet from one another.341 Once secure, the marines counted twenty-seven dead enemy bodies within the company's small perimeter.342 They moved out and up into the Five Sisters again. Burgin and the mortarmen made it to the base of the escarpment. Even though he had heard about the cave system it amazed Burgin to see it. "A jap could run into one entrance and reappear on the other side of the ridge." A few feet past the entrance, the tunnel usually took a ninety- degree turn to the left or the right and another a few feet farther. These twists and turns helped shield the inhabitants. "Some of the caves had a steel door on them," he noticed. "We finally got the artillery up and busted the doors down and used the flamethrowers, and weeded them out of there."