by E. B. Sledge
Today the 5th Marines still forms a part of the 1st Marine Division. Stationed on the west coast, the division can deploy units for duty in the western Pacific.
The trucks drove along winding coral roads by the bay and through coconut groves. We stopped and unloaded our gear near a sign that said “3rd Bn., 5th Marines.” An NCO assigned me to Company K. Soon a lieutenant came along and took aside the fifteen or so men who had received crew-served weapons training (mortars and machine guns) in the States. He asked each of us which weapon he wanted to be assigned to in the company. I asked for 60mm mortars and tried to look too small to carry a seventy-pound flamethrower. He assigned me to mortars, and I moved my gear into a tent that housed the second squad of the 60mm mortar section.
For the next several weeks I spent most of my time during the day on work parties building up the camp. The top sergeant of Company K, 1st Sergeant Malone, would come down the company street shouting, “All new men outside for a work party, on the double.” Most of the time the company's veterans weren't included. Pavuvu was supposed to be a rest camp for them after the long, wet, debilitating jungle campaign on Cape Gloucester. When Malone needed a large work party he would call out, “I need every available man.” So we referred to him as “Available” Malone.
None of us, old hands or replacements, could fathom why the division command chose Pavuvu. Only after the war did I find out that the leaders were trying to avoid the kind of situation the 3d Marine Division endured when it went into camp on Guadalcanal after its campaign on Bougainville. Facilities on Guadalcanal, by then a large rear-area base, were reasonably good, but the high command ordered the 3d Division to furnish about a thousand men each day for working parties all over the island. Not only did the Bougainville veterans get little or no rest, but when replacements came, the division had difficulty carrying out its training schedule in preparation for the next campaign, Guam.
If Pavuvu seemed something less than a tropical paradise to us replacements fresh from the States and New Caledonia, it was a bitter shock to the Gloucester veterans.* When ships entered Macquitti Bay, as the General Howze had, Pavuvu looked picturesque. But once ashore, one found the extensive coconut groves choked with rotting coconuts. The apparently solid ground was soft and turned quickly to mud when subjected to foot or vehicular traffic.
Pavuvu was the classical embodiment of the Marine term “boondocks.” It was impossible to explain after the war what life on Pavuvu was like. Most of the griping about being “rock happy” and bored in the Pacific came from men stationed at the big rear-echelon bases like Hawaii or New Caledonia. Among their main complaints were that the ice cream wasn't good, the beer not cold enough, or the USO shows too infrequent. But on Pavuvu, simply living was difficult.
For example, most of the work parties I went on in June and July were pick-and-shovel details to improve drainage or pave walkways with crushed coral, just to get us out of the water. Regulations called for wooden decks in all tents, but I never saw one on Pavuvu.
Of all the work parties, the one we hated most was collecting rotten coconuts. We loaded them onto trucks to be dumped into a swamp. If we were lucky, the coconut sprout served as a handle. But more often, the thing fell apart, spilling stinking coconut milk over us.
We made sardonic, absurd jokes about the vital, essential, classified work we were doing for the war effort and about the profundity and wisdom of the orders we received. In short, we were becoming “Asiatic,” a Marine Corps term denoting a singular type of eccentric behavior characteristic of men who had served too long in the Far East. I had done a good deal of complaining about Pavuvu's chow and general conditions during my first week there; one of the veterans in our company, who later became a close friend, told me in a restrained but matter-of-fact way that, until I had been in combat, there was really nothing to complain about. Things could be a good deal worse, he said, and advised me to shut up and quit whining. He shamed me thoroughly. But for the first weeks on Pavuvu, the stench of rotting coconuts permeated the air. We could even taste it in the drinking water. I'm still repulsed even today by the smell of fresh coconut.
The most loathsome vermin on Pavuvu were the land crabs. Their blue-black bodies were about the size of the palm of a man's hand, and bristles and spines covered their legs. These ugly creatures hid by day and roamed at night. Before putting on his boondockers each morning, every man in the 1st Marine Division shook his shoes to roust the land crabs. Many mornings I had one in each shoe and sometimes two. Periodically we reached the point of rage over these filthy things and chased them out from under boxes, seabags, and cots. We killed them with sticks, bayonets, and entrenching tools. After the action was over, we had to shovel them up and bury them, or a nauseating stench developed rapidly in the hot, humid air.
Each battalion had its own galley, but chow on Pavuvu consisted mainly of heated C rations: dehydrated eggs, dehydrated potatoes, and that detestable canned meat called Spam. The synthetic lemonade, so-called battery acid, that remained after chow was poured on the concrete slab deck of the galley to clean and bleach it. It did a nice job. As if hot C rations didn't get tedious week in and week out, we experienced a period of about four days when we were served oatmeal morning, noon, and night. Scuttlebutt was that the ship carrying our supplies had been sunk. Whatever the cause, our only relief from monotonous chow was tidbits in packages from home. The bread made by our bakers was so heavy that when you held a slice by one side, the rest of the slice broke away of its own weight. The flour was so massively infested with weevils that each slice of bread had more of the little beetles than there are seeds in a slice of rye bread. We became so inured to this sort of thing, however, that we ate the bread anyway; the wits said, “It's a good deal. Them beetles give you more meat in your diet.”
We had no bathing facilities at first. Shaving each morning with a helmet full of water was simple enough, but a bath was another matter. Each afternoon when the inevitable tropical downpour commenced, we stripped and dashed into the company street, soap in hand. The trick was to lather, scrub, and rinse before the rain stopped. The weather was so capricious that the duration of a shower was impossible to estimate. Each downpour ended as abruptly as it had begun and never failed to leave at least one or more fully lathered, cursing Marines with no rinse water.
Morning sick call was another bizarre sight during the early days on Pavuvu. The Gloucester veterans were in poor physical condition after the wettest campaign in World War II, during which men endured soakings for weeks on end. When I first joined the company, I was appalled at their condition: most were thin, some emaciated, with jungle rot in their armpits and on their ankles and wrists. At sick call they paired off with a bottle of gentian violet and cotton swabs, stood naked in the grove, and painted each other's sores. So many of them needed attention that they had to treat each other under a doctor's supervision. Some had to cut their boondockers into sandals, because their feet were so infected with rot they could hardly walk. Needless to say, Pavuvu's hot, humid climate prolonged the healing process.
“I think the Marine Corps has forgotten where Pavuvu is,” one man said.
“I think God has forgotten where Pavuvu is,” came a reply.
“God couldn't forget because he made everything.”
“Then I bet he wishes he could forget he made Pavuvu.”
This exchange indicates the feeling of remoteness and desolation we felt on Pavuvu. On the big island bases, men had the feeling of activity around their units and contact through air and sea traffic with other bases and with the States. On Pavuvu we felt as though we were a million miles from not only home but from anything else that bespoke of civilization.
I believe we took in stride all of Pavuvu's discomforts and frustrations for two reasons. First, the division was an elite combat unit. Discipline was stern. Our esprit de corps ran high. Each man knew what to do and what was expected of him. All did their duty well, even while grumbling.
NCOs answered our c
omplaining with, “Beat your gums. It's healthy.” Or, “Whatta ya griping for? You volunteered for the Marine Corps, didn't ya? You're just gettin’ what ya asked for.”
No matter how irritating or uncomfortable things were on Pavuvu, things could always be worse. After all, there were no Japanese, no bursting shells, no snapping and whining bullets. And we slept on cots. Second, makeup of the division was young: about 80 percent were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five; about half were under twenty-one when they came overseas. Well-disciplined young men can put up with a lot even though they don't like it; and we were a bunch of high-spirited boys proud of our unit.
But we had another motivating factor, as well: a passionate hatred for the Japanese burned through all Marines I knew. The fate of the Goettge patrol was the sort of thing that spawned such hatred.* One day as we piled stinking coconuts, a veteran Marine walked past and exchanged greetings with a couple of our “old men.” One of our group asked us if we knew who he was.
“No, I never saw him,” someone said.
“He's one of the three guys who escaped when the Goettge patrol got wiped out on Guadalcanal. He was lucky as hell.”
“Why did the Japs ambush that patrol?” I asked naively.
A veteran looked at me with unbelief and said slowly and emphatically, “Because they're the meanest sonsabitches that ever lived.”
The Goettge patrol incident plus such Japanese tactics as playing dead and then throwing a grenade—or playing wounded, calling for a corpsman, and then knifing the medic when he came—plus the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, caused Marines to hate the Japanese intensely and to be reluctant to take prisoners.
The attitudes held toward the Japanese by noncombatants or even sailors or airmen often did not reflect the deep personal resentment felt by Marine infantrymen. Official histories and memoirs of Marine infantrymen written after the war rarely reflect that hatred. But at the time of battle, Marines felt it deeply, bitterly, and as certainly as danger itself. To deny this hatred or make light of it would be as much a lie as to deny or make light of the esprit de corps or the intense patriotism felt by the Marines with whom I served in the Pacific.
My experiences on Peleliu and Okinawa made me believe that the Japanese held mutual feelings for us. They were a fanatical enemy; that is to say, they believed in their cause with an intensity little understood by many postwar Americans— and possibly many Japanese, as well.
This collective attitude, Marine and Japanese, resulted in savage, ferocious fighting with no holds barred. This was not the dispassionate killing seen on other fronts or in other wars. This was a brutish, primitive hatred, as characteristic of the horror of war in the Pacific as the palm trees and the islands. To comprehend what the troops endured then and there, one must take into full account this aspect of the nature of the Marines'war
Probably the biggest boost to our morale about this time on Pavuvu was the announcement that Bob Hope would come over from Banika and put on a show for us. Most of the men in the division crowded a big open area and cheered as a Piper Cub circled over us. The pilot switched off the engine briefly, while Jerry Colonna poked his head out of the plane and gave his famous yell, “Ye ow ow ow ow ow.” We went wild with applause.
Bob Hope, Colonna, Frances Langford, and Patti Thomas put on a show on a little stage by the pier. Bob asked Jerry how he liked the trip over from Banika, and Jerry answered that it was “tough sledding.” When asked why, he replied, “No snow.” We thought it was the funniest thing we had ever heard. Patti gave several boys from the audience dancing lessons amid much grinning, cheering, and applause. Bob told many jokes and really boosted our spirits. It was the finest entertainment I ever saw overseas.*
Bob Hope's show remained the main topic of conversation as we got down to training in earnest for the coming campaign. Pavuvu was so small that most of our field exercises were of company size rather than battalion or regimental. Even so, we frequently got in the way of other units involved in their training exercises. It was funny to see a company move forward in combat formation through the groves and become intermingled with the rigid ranks of another company standing weapons inspection, the officers shouting orders to straighten things out.
We held numerous landing exercises—several times a week, it seemed—on the beaches and inlets around the island away from camp. We usually practiced from amtracs. The newest model had a tailgate that dropped as soon as the tractor was on the beach, allowing us to run out and deploy.
“Get off the beach fast. Get off the damned beach as fast as you can and move inland. The Nips are going to plaster it with everything they've got, so your chances are better the sooner you move inland,” shouted our officers and NCOs. We heard this over and over day after day. During each landing exercise, we would scramble out of our tractors, move inland about twenty-five yards, and then await orders to deploy and push forward.
The first wave of tractors landed rifle squads. The second wave landed more riflemen, machine gunners, bazooka gunners, flamethrowers, and 60mm mortar squads. Our second wave typically trailed about twenty-five yards behind the first as the machines churned through the water toward the beach. As soon as the first wave unloaded, its amtracs backed off, turned around, and headed past us out to sea to pick up supporting waves of infantry from Higgins boats circling offshore. It all worked nicely on Pavuvu. But there were no Japanese there.
In addition to landing exercises and field problems before Peleliu, we received refresher instructions and practice firing all small arms assigned to the company: M1 rifle, BAR, carbine, .45 caliber pistol, and Thompson submachine gun. We also learned how to operate a flamethrower.
During instruction with the flamethrower, we used a palm stump for a target. When my turn came, I shouldered the heavy tanks, held the nozzle in both hands, pointed at the stump about twenty-five yards away, and pressed the trigger. With a whoosh, a stream of red flame squirted out, and the nozzle bucked. The napalm hit the stump with a loud splattering noise. I felt the heat on my face. A cloud of black smoke rushed upward. The thought of turning loose hellfire from a hose nozzle as easily as I'd water a lawn back home sobered me. To shoot the enemy with bullets or kill him with shrapnel was one of the grim necessities of war, but to fry him to death was too gruesome to contemplate. I was to learn soon, however, that the Japanese couldn't be routed from their island defenses without it.
About this time I began to feel a deeper appreciation for the influence of the old breed on us newer Marines. Gunnery Sergeant Haney* provided a vivid example of their impact.
I had seen Haney around the company area but first noticed him in the shower one day because of the way he bathed. About a dozen naked, soapy replacements, including myself, stared in wide-eyed amazement and shuddered as Haney held his genitals in his left hand while scrubbing them with a GI brush the way one buffs a shoe. When you consider that the GI brush had stiff, tough, split-fiber bristles embedded in a stout wooden handle and was designed to scrub heavy canvas 782 (web) gear, dungarees, and even floors, Haney's method of bathing becomes truly impressive.
I first saw him exert his authority one day on a pistol range where he was in charge of safety. A new second lieutenant, a replacement like myself, was firing from the position I was to assume. As he fired his last round, another new officer behind me called to him. The lieutenant turned to answer with his pistol in his hand. Haney was sitting next to me on a coconut-log bench and hadn't uttered a word except for the usual firing range commands. When the lieutenant turned the pistol's muzzle away from the target, Haney reacted like a cat leaping on its prey. He scooped up a large handful of coral gravel and flung it squarely into the lieutenant's face. He shook his fist at the bewildered officer and gave him the worst bawling out I ever heard. Everyone along the firing line froze, officers as well as enlisted men. The offending officer, with his gold bars shining brightly on his collar, cleared his weapon, holstered it, and took off rubbing his eyes and blushing visibly. Haney returned t
o his seat as though nothing had happened. Along the firing line, we thawed. Thereafter we were much more conscious of safety regulations.
Haney was about my size, at 135 pounds, with sandy crew-cut hair and a deep tan. He was lean, hard, and muscular. Although not broad-shouldered or well-proportioned, his torso reminded me of some anatomy sketch by Michelangelo: every muscle stood out in stark definition. He was slightly barrel-chested with muscles heaped up on the back of his shoulders so that he almost had a hump. Neither his arms nor his legs were large, but the muscles in them reminded me of steel bands. His face was small-featured with squinting eyes and looked as though it was covered with deeply tanned, wrinkled leather.
Haney was the only man I ever knew in the outfit who didn't seem to have a buddy. He wasn't a loner in the sense that he was sullen or unfriendly. He simply lived in a world all his own. I often felt that he didn't even see his surroundings; all he seemed to be aware of was his rifle, his bayonet, and his leggings. He was absolutely obsessed with wanting to bayonet the enemy.
We all cleaned our weapons daily, but Haney cleaned his M1 before muster, at noon chow, and after dismissal in the afternoon. It was a ritual. He would sit by himself, light a cigarette, fieldstrip his rifle, and meticulously clean every inch of it. Then he cleaned his bayonet. All the while he talked to himself quietly, grinned frequently, and puffed his cigarette down to a stump. When his rifle was cleaned he reassembled it, fixed his bayonet, and went through a few minutes of thrust, parry, and butt-stroke movements at thin air. Then Haney would light up another cigarette and sit quietly, talking to himself and grinning while awaiting orders. He carried out these proceedings as though totally unaware of the presence of the other 235 men of the company. He was like Robinson Crusoe on an island by himself.