The Pacific

by Hugh Ambrose

  Boyes was the last of the company to return.506 He had a bullet hole in his cap and some shrapnel in his leg.507 His company had lost another rifle platoon leader, a platoon sergeant, and nine riflemen. So far as Gene Sledge could tell, the whole attack had been "a disaster."508 From the rear, marines brought up more ammo for his 60mm mortar. Among the men carrying the boxes was a captain who was a staff officer with the division HQ. Paul Douglas did not have to be running through a rice paddy to bring Sledge ammo. Some of the young marines thought he was a crazy old coot. Despite Douglas's gray hair and captain's bars, he carried more ammo and made more trips than the others.509 No one was surprised. He had done the same on Peleliu.

  King needed to reorganize its units. The next day it remained near the battalion aid station while Love and Item pushed forward, gaining the redoubt they had taken to calling Knob Hill in a ferocious firefight. Tanks were able to support their advance on the far side of the ridge. An air strike came in. Some of its rockets hit Item men. Toward the end of the day, King moved up to the rear of Item's position. Love and Item fought off a counterattack at about nine p.m. that evening, which seemed to break the resistance, because in the following two days they gained six hundred yards. King still took casualties, including two more second lieutenants who were hit a few yards from their foxholes. Hank Boyes happened to be nearby and tackled one of the wounded men, who was trying to run on his one leg, so that they could get some morphine into him and get him treated.

  On the afternoon of May 5, King advanced to clean out the area on the battalion's left flank. On moves such as these, Burgin would go back to his mortar squads to make sure he was tied in properly. Positioning the mortars, under fire, could be difficult work. Burgin often found, when he came back to the mortar squad, it had set itself up in a bad spot. "For God sakes," he'd yell. "I want to show you something. Look at the terrain. Look where you're at." Bad positioning could "get your ass killed." Burgin ordered them to move. Moving the guns meant breaking them down, hauling them through the mud, and digging new foxholes and gun pits. Invariably, someone would grumble that "Scotty" (Lieutenant MacKenzie) had told them to set them up in that spot. Burgin said, " 'Scotty, we need to move this over here.' He never did argue with me." Scotty knew enough to listen. The rifle platoon called for a lot of smoke rounds that day.

  The 3/5 spent three days mopping up their area. Flamethrowing tanks arrived to spread napalm on problem spots. Ahead of them, the USMC Corsairs dropped tons of napalm and the battalions of artillery battered the ridges. The shelling on May 8 featured one gigantic salvo by all available guns from artillery battalions and the navy ships, to honor the Victory in Europe. "I can't see how the beasts stand the terrific pounding we give them day and night," Sledge wondered. " They can't be human and are probably doped up to the fullest."510 In the meantime the marines used tanks and the M-7, a self-propelled 155mm howitzer, to clean out caves by firing point-blank into them. Riflemen had to accompany the vehicles to protect them from suicide squads armed with mines. The battalion lost thirty men in the process. Among the losses were men suffering from concussions caused by the endless explosions.511

  On the afternoon of May 9, after the big guns had done all they could do, King and Item moved forward into Awacha Draw. Burgin watched the riflemen move forward. Even after all of those fusillades, the enemy popped up and started returning fire. The IJA's mortars could not, Burgin reasoned, be in the cliff face. They had to be in some kind of declivity up on top, which might explain why ordnance expended against the faces of the ridges was not completely effective. He had an idea. "I made up my mind that I was gonna saturate that thing with 60 millimeter mortar shells."512

  He got on the phone back to his mortar platoon and laid out his plan. The #1 gun would fire at a position on the left, then walk its barrage to the right. Snafu's #2 squad would aim fifteen yards farther at a position on the right and walk it to the left. The #3 would fire another fifteen yards farther south, and move left to right. When Burgin said he wanted each gun to fire twenty rounds, he heard his lieutenant, Scotty, get on the phone.

  "Hell no, we're not gonna fire no twenty rounds--we don't have that much ammunition, you know, that could put us completely out of ammunition."

  "Uh, yeah," Burgin said, "we are gonna fire that." Scotty, who was back with the mortars, began to bluster and Burgin would have none of it. "I finally told him if, uh, he was gonna do the damn observing, get his ass up there on the front line and not a hundred yards back, or let me do the observing."

  "Well, Burgin, we just don't have the ammunition. I mean, we'll be completely out of ammunition," Scotty said.

  Whereupon Burgin asked the switchboard to connect the call to the command post. When he heard someone pick up, he asked, "CP?"

  "Yup."

  "This is Burgin. Can you get me a hundred rounds of HE up here pronto?"

  "It's on the way." Burgin addressed his mortar platoon, which was still on the line: "Fire at my command." The gun crews got their mortars' sights adjusted, gave their forward observer the prompt, and he unleashed the first salvo. Just after four p.m. King Company and Item Company moved out. They seized the crest of a ridge at the mouth of the Awacha Draw by seven p.m. They had their objective. Fire from the next ridge farther south halted them. It was time to dig in before it got dark.

  Burgin could not wait to see what he had hit. Behind the ridge the ground sloped sharply down to a road that ran parallel with it. Behind the road, the ground rose back up another fifteen to twenty feet. The roadway, then, had complete defilade. The Japanese had set their mortars inside this deep cut, while their observers and riflemen manned positions on the ridge. The marines' artillery and the navy's shelling had been either hitting the front face of the ridge, where it did little good, or the shells went over and landed in the field behind the second fold of ridge. Burgin's 60mm rounds, however, had come straight down. More than fifty bodies lay on the road. He counted them.

  The next morning the Fifth Marine Regiment began the assault on Dakeshi Ridge with the help of the Seventh Marines. The aircraft providing ground support dropped their bombs forty to fifty yards ahead of the 3/5's lines. King Company made a small advance; by doing so, they established the connection between the two regiments. The units that had closed with Dakeshi Ridge at midday found themselves pushed back that evening. Another twenty-nine men of the 3/5 had fallen, with little to show for it.

  It was on a night like this that Burgin, Scotty MacKenzie, and a few others happened to share a foxhole. Burgin listened as Scotty and the others discussed the wounded and the dead. It was a common conversation. MacKenzie observed that a lot of the casualties were officers. Burgin said, "Yeah, the second lieutenants are worth about a dime a dozen when it comes to combat," because they get killed or wounded quickly. Junior officers weren't the only ones disappearing. King Company's first sergeant, W. R. Saunders, turned in sick without telling anyone. Gunnery Sergeant Boyes took on the task of going from foxhole to foxhole, "to get the muster and find out what happened to each missing man for the morning report."513

  The Seventh Regiment pressed on to assault the heights of Dakeshi on May 11. The Fifth stayed where it was, giving its men some rest. The noise diminished and three days passed without observing the enemy. Everybody knew that bypassed Japanese could come out at night to attack unwary marines or that its artillery could find them. It was still better than being on the front. The following day Boyes sent Snafu back to the hospital to recover from a bad infection in his lungs.

  THE MOPPING UP OF DIE-HARD ENEMY SOLDIERS ON IWO JIMA WAS STILL CONTINUING when the 5th Marine Division dedicated its cemetery. A chaplain stood before them and confessed that he was struggling to find words. "Some of us have buried our closest friends here. . . . Indeed, some of us are alive and breathing at this very moment because men who lie here beneath us had the courage and strength to give their lives for ours." Some of the men buried here had served their country just as their forefathers had in the Revolution
ary War. Others "loved her with equal passion because they themselves or their own fathers escaped from oppression to her blessed shores." Rich and poor, black and white, enlisted men and officers, these marines lay here in "the highest and purest democracy." The chaplain asked all to make sure their sacrifice had not been in vain. From the suffering must come "the birth of a new freedom for the sons of men everywhere."514

  One of the marines listening to the chaplain was John's brother George Basilone. In mid-May, George wrote Lena a letter from Iwo Jima to let her know that John had had a proper burial. One day he would tell her all about it.515

  Lena had heard enough about John. The news of his death had been well reported. It revived interest in his service on Guadalcanal and on the Third War Loan Drive. The kicker to the story was what reporters called "Manila John's choice."516 As a star and a hero "he could have stayed safe in the United States." In the coming months she would receive a kind note from Johnny's commanding officer on Iwo Jima, who referred to himself as John's "friend and fellow worker," and his personal effects.517 It was not much, consisting primarily of a locket of hair, a rosary, his wedding band, and a few photos.

  "CHAPEL HILL," SO FAR AS SIDNEY PHILLIPS COULD TELL, "WAS HEAVEN ON EARTH to a Marine private."am Discipline was lax. The living quarters, though Spartan, were comfortable. The laundry service delighted him and the navy mess hall served great chow. Classes ran six days a week from eight a.m. to five p.m. in an accelerated semester program. He kept his nose in his books, delighted to be earning college course credits. Every two months the semester ended. Sid spent his two weeks in Mobile with Mary Houston. He "was a hopeless basket case of adoration for her." Impressing her parents seemed to go well, but he was concerned about her six older brothers, "four of them in the Navy and three of them officers. I knew they would not care for their beautiful sister to be dating a common disgusting Marine private. I therefore tried to pretend to have good sense."

  THE SIEGE IN WHICH THE 1ST DIVISION FOUND ITSELF, REMINISCENT OF THE trenches of World War I, made the job of the provost marshal a bit easier. Few civilians dared show their faces in the maelstrom and therefore collection dropped to near zero in the first few weeks of May.518 Shofner and his team maintained the mobile collection units, trying to alleviate one concern from the battalion commanders' shoulders. His hard work paid off. When one of the division's battalion commanders fell, the commanding general called for Shifty.

  Lieutenant Colonel Shofner turned over his duties "as quickly as he could" and reported to headquarters on May 10. He spent several days as the executive officer of the First Regiment in order to get up to speed. The battalion commander he was replacing had been wounded during the attack on Hill 60. His new battalion, the 1st Battalion of the First Marines, had suffered heavy casualties. It had swept over the top of Hill 60 in spite of the losses, however, in an amazing display of courage and teamwork. On May 13, 1945, Austin Shofner received what he had been fighting for since September 1944. He went forward to take command of the 1/1.

  The First Regiment assigned Shofner a radioman and the two set off for the 1/1's headquarters, about seven hundred yards away. They had hiked about three hundred yards when a sniper's bullet felled his radioman. The man was dead. Shofner yelled to some engineers nearby and ordered them to take care of the body. He strapped on the radio, picked up the codebooks, and pressed on. As he approached the front line, Shofner spied a large hole and slid into it. He found himself eyeball to eyeball with a marine rifleman.

  "Who are you?" asked Shofner.

  "I'm Pfc. Roberts, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, First Marines, and who are you?"

  "My name is Shifty Shofner, and I'm your new battalion commander, and you are my new radioman." Shofner led them to the battalion HQ, where he met his XO and his operations officer. He was told the 1/1 was in reserve. The big news of the day was that a code book had been found that identified the enemy unit facing the 1/1 as the Twelfth Independent Infantry Battalion.519 Shofner went to find his company commanders and scout the terrain. The other battalions of the First Marines had destroyed a Japanese counterattack that morning. The chance to see the enemy in large numbers in the open and kill them had given all hands a grim satisfaction. In the afternoon, just before Shofner's arrival, the 2/1 and 3/1 had attacked Wana Ridge, in support of the Seventh Marines' assault on Dakeshi. They had not advanced very close to the mouth of Wana Draw. It was after dark when Shofner made it back to his HQ. He sent his new radioman, Private First Class Roberts, back to his squad. The radio operators of the 1/1 were Navajo Indians, Shifty would have learned that day, "who spoke their own language openly on the radio, confident that it was completely unintelligible to the enemy."520

  The scouting work was a part of Shifty's determination "to use every trick in the book to continue the advance and yet save as many American lives as possible." He wanted to avoid the mistake of Colonel Chesty Puller, who Shofner felt had relied exclusively "on the frontal assault" on Peleliu. The ridges of high ground he confronted, however, stretched beyond his zone of action into the areas of other divisions, thus offering few opportunities for flanking maneuvers. The enemy seemed to have every avenue covered. The advance of the Tenth Army relied on massed firepower to break open a path for the riflemen.

  The 1/1 led the attack on May 14 and it went well. The 1st Battalion reached its objective, the western tip of Wana Ridge. One of Shofner's companies, Charlie, had made the most progress. It began digging in to defend the gain. He sent Charlie their mail as a reward. Charlie could not, however, tie in to the Seventh Marines on the left. The gap left the company dangerously exposed. The first sign of danger came when four Sherman tanks tried to drive around the western tip of the ridge and were knocked out by a gun buried somewhere on the southern side of it.521 Just after seven p.m. the Japanese launched a rare daylight counterattack, swarming down the ridge to cut Charlie Company off and destroy it. Mortars crashed in Shofner's CP. The skipper called Shifty and asked for permission to pull back. The colonel assented, mostly because he could not get reinforcements up to help, and called for smoke rounds.522 The skipper of Charlie Company was wounded while getting his men and their wounded off Wana Ridge. The First Marines came out of the line on May 15, allowing the Fifth Marines to take the lead.

  Moving into regimental reserve put the First back far enough for its men to take a hot shower, get hot chow, and be issued clean uniforms.523 For the moment, though, the men were happy to collapse wherever they were.524

  THE FIFTH MARINES' ASSAULT ON WANA RIDGE AND WANA DRAW INVOLVED vast amounts of gunfire and napalm. Flamethrowing tanks, no longer the old Ronson but a more powerful version called a Satan, supported the infantry. The riflemen also enjoyed the support of the rocket platoon--one twelve-ton truck carrying the M7 rocket launcher firing the navy's 4.5- inch rocket. Eugene Sledge and the rest of the 3/5 were in reserve, though. The 3rd Battalion received replacements and waited as the other two battalions fought on one of the dominating features of the defensive system around Wana, Hill 55. On the afternoon of May 14, the enemy counterattacked toward King Company's position.

  Scotty could see that the mortar squads needed ammo badly. He formed a working party with some of the replacements. The enemy's 90mm mortars and 105mm howitzers began to fire at the mortar section in support of the assault. In his foxhole, Gene heard the 105 shells approach and felt like he was "being called to Jesus right there."525 The working party had picked up the boxes of mortar shells and was returning when the rounds started landing close. Scotty yelled, "We're all gonna be killed. Throw that stuff down and hit the deck." The men responded. Sledge noticed Snafu running out to the working party. Snafu's return was good news. Snafu was short, and because he had almost no neck, "when he had his helmet on he looked like a turtle but he was the meanest son of a gun" Sledge had ever known. Snafu pulled the clip out of his tommy gun and stuck it in his jacket. As he approached Scotty, he held his gun by its barrel. Sledge could not hear what he said, but Scotty got the
men under way. The ammo came up and the 60mm mortars played their role in beating off the enemy. Later, Sledge asked Snafu what he had told Scotty. "I told him, 'God damn your soul, if you don't get your ass on the ball and get them people to move this ammo up to the front, I'm gonna bust your brains out with this tommy gun.' " Sledge considered the incident more proof about Mad Mack. Sergeant Burgin, however, had come to respect Scotty. Unlike his predecessor, Duke Ellington, Scotty spent his time on the front line. Although he had made the wrong choice at that moment, he was learning.

  On May 17 Sledge put pen to paper to send a letter to his parents and thereby avoid the heartache they had all endured during Peleliu. After a "pretty tough" period, he admitted, the last few days had been okay and the good weather had held. He had been getting mail pretty frequently--surprising enough given the situation--and kept waiting to get the letter that said his brother Edward was on his way home. Gene sought to allay Dr. and Mrs. Sledge's worry that Ed would be sent "over here" by telling them that Ed's three Purple Hearts and Silver and Bronze stars meant a ticket home. As for himself, Gene was succinct: "I couldn't ask for a better name or finer heritage, and I know my parents are the two most lovable Christians in the world . . . when we are together at Georgia Cottage again, God will have filled my prayers."