With the Old Breed

by E. B. Sledge

  To say that he was “Asiatic” would be to miss the point entirely. Haney transcended that condition. The company had many rugged individualists, characters, old salts, and men who were “Asiatic,” but Haney was in a category by himself. I felt that he was not a man born of woman, but that God had issued him to the Marine Corps.

  Despite his personal idiosyncracies, Haney inspired us youngsters in Company K. He provided us with a direct link to the “Old Corps.” To us he was the old breed. We admired him—and we loved him.

  Then there was Company K's commanding officer, Capt. “Ack Ack” Haldane.* Bowdoin College annually honors the memory of Captain Haldane by presenting the Haldane Cup to the graduating senior who has displayed outstanding qualities of leadership and character. The cup was a gift from officers who had served with Captain Haldane in the Pacific. Among them was the late senator from Illinois, Paul Douglas, himself a member of the 5th Marines on Peleliu and Okinawa.

  I grinned at Haldane and said, “Not exactly, sir.” He recognized me as a replacement and asked how I liked the company. I told him I thought it was a fine outfit.

  “You're a Southerner, aren't you?” he asked. I told him I was from Alabama. He wanted to know all about my family, home, and education. As we talked the gloom seemed to disappear, and I felt warm inside. Finally he told me it wouldn't rain forever, and we could get dry soon. He moved along the column talking to other men as he had to me. His sincere interest in each of us as a human being helped to dispel the feeling that we were just animals training to fight.

  Acclaimed by superiors and subordinates alike for his leadership abilities, Captain Haldane was the finest and most popular officer I ever knew. All of the Marines in Company K shared my feelings. Called the “skipper,” he had a strong face full of character, a large, prominent jaw, and the kindest eyes I ever saw. No matter how often he shaved or how hard he tried, he always had a five o'clock shadow. He was so large that the combat pack on his back reminded me of the bulge of his wallet, while mine covered me from neck to waist.

  Although he insisted on strict discipline, the captain was a quiet man who gave orders without shouting. He had a rare combination of intelligence, courage, self-confidence, and compassion that commanded our respect and admiration. We were thankful that Ack Ack was our skipper, felt more secure in it, and felt sorry for other companies not so fortunate. While some officers on Pavuvu thought it necessary to strut or order us around to impress us with their status, Haldane quietly told us what to do. We loved him for it and did the best job we knew how.

  Our level of training rose in August and so did the intensity of “chicken” discipline. We suffered through an increasing number of weapons and equipment inspections, work parties, and petty cleanup details around the camp. The step-up in harassment, coupled with the constant discomforts and harsh living conditions of Pavuvu, drove us all into a state of intense exasperation and disgust with our existence before we embarked for Peleliu.

  “I used to think the lieutenant was a pretty good joe, but damned if I ain't about decided he ain't nothin’ but a hoss's ass,” grumbled one Marine.

  “You said that right, ole buddy,” came back another.

  “Hell, he ain't the only one that's gone crazy over insisting that everything be just so, and then bawlin’ us out if it ain't. The gunny's mean as hell, and nothin’ suits him anymore,” responded yet another man.

  “Don't let it get you down, boys. It's just part of the USMC plan for keeping the troops in fighting shape,” calmly remarked a philosophical old salt of prewar service.

  “What the hell you talking about?” snapped an irritated listener.

  “Well, it's this way,” answered the philosopher. “If they get us mad enough, they figure we'll take it out on the Nips when we hit this beach coming up. I saw it happen before Guadalcanal and Gloucester. They don't pull this kind of stuff on rear-echelon boys. They want us to be mean, mad, and malicious. That's straight dope, I'm telling you. I've seen it happen every time before we go on a campaign.”

  “Sounds logical. You may be right. But what's malicious?” someone said.

  “Forget it, you nitwit,” the philosopher growled.

  “Right or not, I'm sure tired of Pavuvu,” I said.

  “That's the plan, Sledgehammer. Get you fed up with Pavuvu, or wherever the hell you happen to be, and you'll be hot to go anywhere else even if the Nips are there waiting for you,” the philosopher said.

  We fell silent, thinking about that and finally concluded he was right. Many of the more thoughtful men I knew shared his view.

  I griped as loudly as anyone about our living conditions and discipline. In retrospect, however, I doubt seriously whether I could have coped with the psychological and physical shock and stress encountered on Peleliu and Okinawa had it been otherwise. The Japanese fought to win. It was a savage, brutal, inhumane, exhausting, and dirty business. Our commanders knew that if we were to win and survive, we must be trained realistically for it whether we liked it or not.*

  * The U.S. Marine Corps still uses Ka-Bar's fine fighting knife. The manufacturer's name now has become to Marines a noun (kabar) meaning their fighting knife.

  * The history of the 5th Marines continued after World War II. The regiment fought in the Korean War and again in Vietnam. Thus it is the only Marine regiment to have fought in all of the nation's major wars in this century.

  * After Guadalcanal, the 1st Marine Division went to Melbourne, Australia, for rest and refitting for the New Britain campaign. When Cape Gloucester ended, the men assumed they were headed back to Australia. Instead they were dumped on a deserted island in the Russell Islands group, sixty miles from Guadalcanal.

  * During the first week of the Guadalcanal campaign, the Marines captured a Japanese soldier who claimed some of his starving comrades west of the Matanikau River would surrender if the Marines would “liberate” them. With twenty-five picked men (scouts, intelligence specialists, a surgeon, and a linguist) from the division's headquarters and the 5th Marines, Col. Frank Goettge—the division's intelligence officer—went on a mission more humanitarian than military. The Japanese ambushed the patrol as it debarked from landing craft in the darkness. Only three Marines escaped.

  * I renewed my acquaintance with Bob Hope last spring when he played in a charity golf tournament in Birmingham, Alabama. Earlier I had sent him copies of the Marine Corps Gazette (November and December 1979 and January 1980) that had serialized portions of my Peleliu story. He was enthusiastic about the account and remembered well the young Marines of the 1st Marine Division on Pavuvu. Despite a clamoring public on a hectic day in Birmingham, this most gracious man took the time to reminisce with me about the old breed.

  * Gunnery Sgt. Elmo M. Haney served with Company K, 3d Battalion, 5th Marines in France during World War I. Between the two world wars, he taught school in Arkansas for about four years, then rejoined the Marine Corps where he was assigned to his old unit. He fought on Guadalcanal and at Cape Gloucester with Company K. In the latter action he won a Silver Star for heroism when he “took care of some Japs by himself with a few hand grenades,” as one Marine described the scene.

  Haney was more than fifty years old when the 1st Marine Division assaulted Peleliu. Although a gunnery sergeant by rank, he held no official position in Company K's chain of command. In the field he seemed to be everywhere at once, correcting mistakes and helping out. He withdrew himself from the front lines on the second day of Peleliu, admitting sadly that he could no longer take the heat and the battle.

  * Capt. Andrew Allison Haldane, USMCR, was born 22 August 1917 in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He graduated from Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, in 1941.

  Captain Haldane served with the 1st Marine Division on Guadalcanal and was commanding officer of Company K at Cape Gloucester, where he won the Silver Star. During a five-day battle, he and his Marines repulsed five Japanese bayonet charges within one hour in the predawn darkness. He led Company K through most of the figh
t for Peleliu. On 12 October 1944, three days before the Marines came off the lines, he died in action. The Marines of Company K, and the rest of the division who knew him, suffered no greater loss during the entire war.

  Late one afternoon as we left the rifle range, a heavy rain set in. As we plodded along Pavuvu's muddy roads, slipping and sliding under the downpour, we began to feel that whoever was leading the column had taken a wrong turn and that we were lost. At dusk in the heavy rain, every road looked alike: a flooded trail cut deeply with ruts, bordered by towering palms, winding aimlessly through the gloom. As I struggled along feeling chilled and forlorn and trying to keep my balance in the mud, a big man came striding from the rear of the column. He walked with the ease of a pedestrian on a city sidewalk. As he pulled abreast of me, the man looked at me and said, “Lovely weather, isn't it, son?”

  * In the postwar years, the Marine Corps came in for a great deal of undeserved criticism, in my opinion, from well-meaning persons who did not comprehend the magnitude of stress and horror that combat can be. The technology that developed the rifled barrel, the machine gun, and high-explosive shells has turned war into prolonged, subhuman slaughter. Men must be trained realistically if they are to survive it without breaking mentally and physically.

  CHAPTER THREE

  On to Peleliu

  In late August we completed our training. About the 26th, Company K boarded LST (landing ship, tank) 661* for a voyage that would end three weeks later on the beach at Peleliu.

  Each rifle company assigned to the assault waves against Peleliu made the trip in an LST carrying the amtracs that would take the men ashore. Our LST lacked sufficient troop compartment space to accommodate all of the men of the company, so the platoon leaders drew straws for the available space. The mortar section got lucky. We were assigned to a troop compartment in the forecastle with an entrance on the main deck. Some of the other platoons had to make themselves as comfortable as possible on the main deck under and around landing boats and gear secured there.

  Once loaded, we weighed anchor and headed straight for Guadalcanal, where the division held maneuvers in the Tas-safaronga area. This area bore little resemblance to the beaches we would have to hit on Peleliu, but we spent several days in large- and small-unit amphibious landing exercises.

  Some of our Guadalcanal veterans wanted to visit the island's cemetery to pay their respects to buddies killed during the division's first campaign. The veterans I knew were not allowed to make the trip to the cemetery, and there was a great deal of understandable bitterness and resentment on their part because of this.

  Between training exercises, some of us explored the beach area and looked over the stranded wrecks of Japanese landing barges, the troopship Yamazuki Maru, and a two-man submarine. One of the Guadalcanal veterans told us what a helpless feeling it had been to sit back in the hills and watch Japanese reinforcements come ashore unopposed during the dark days of the campaign when the Japanese navy was so powerful in the Solomon Islands. Evidence of earlier fighting remained in the goodly number of shattered trees and several human skeletons we found in the jungle growth.

  We also had our lighter moments. When the amtracs returned us to the LST each afternoon, we hurried to our quarters, stowed our gear, stripped, and went below to the tank deck. After all the amtracs were aboard, the ship's CO (commanding officer) obligingly left the bow doors open and the ramp down so we could swim in the blue waters of Sealark Channel (called more appropriately Iron Bottom Bay because of all the ships that had been sunk there during the Guadalcanal campaign). We dove, swam, and splashed in the beautiful water like a bunch of little boys, and for a few fleeting hours forgot why we were there.

  The thirty LSTs carrying the 1st Marine Division's assault companies finally weighed anchor early on the morning of 4 September to make the approximately 2,100-mile voyage to Peleliu. The trip proved to be uneventful. The sea was smooth, and we ran into rain squalls only once or twice.

  After chow each morning, several of us went aft to the ship's fantail to watch Gunnery Sergeant Haney's show. Dressed in khaki shorts, boondockers, and leggings, Haney went through his ritual of bayonet drill and rifle cleaning. He kept the scabbard on his bayonet and used a canvas-covered stanchion running down from the ship's superstructure as his target. It was a poor substitute for a moving parry stick, but Haney didn't let that stop him. For about an hour he went through his routine, complete with monologue, while dozens of Company K men lounged around on coils of rope and other gear, smoking and talking. Sometimes a spirited game of pinochle went on almost under his feet. He was as oblivious of the players as they were of him. Occasionally a sailor would come by and stare in disbelief at Haney. Several asked me if he were Asiatic. Not being able to overcome the temptation to kid them a bit, I told them no, he was just typical of our outfit. Then they would stare at me as they had at Haney.

  I always had the feeling that sailors looked on Marine infantrymen as though we were a bit crazy, wild, or reckless. Maybe we were. But maybe we had to develop a don't-give-a-damn attitude to keep our sanity in the face of what we were about to endure.

  In the ranks, we knew little about the nature of the island that was our objective. During a training lecture on Pavuvu we learned that Peleliu must be taken to secure Gen. Douglas MacArthur's right flank for his invasion of the Philippines, and that it had a good airfield that could support MacArthur. I don't recall when we heard the name of the island, although we viewed relief maps and models during lectures. (It had a nice sounding name, Pel’ e loo.) Although our letters from Pavuvu were carefully censored, our officers apparently feared taking a chance on some character writing in code to someone back home that we were to hit an island named Peleliu. As a buddy said to me later, however, no one back home would have known where to look for it on a map anyway.

  The Palaus, the westernmost part of the Caroline Islands chain, consist of several large islands and more than a hundred smaller ones. Except for Angaur in the south and a couple of small atolls in the north, the whole group lies within an encircling coral reef About five hundred miles to the west lie the southern Philippines. To the south at about the same distance is New Guinea.

  Peleliu, just inside the Palau reef is shaped like a lobster s claw, extending two arms of land. The southern arm reaches northeastward from flat ground to form a jumble of coral islets and tidal flats overgrown thickly with mangroves. Thelonger northern arm is dominated by the parallel coral ridges of Umurbrogol Mountain.

  North to south, the island is about six miles long, with a width of approximately two miles. On the wide, largely flat southern section, the Japanese had constructed an airfield shaped roughly like the numeral 4. The ridges and most of the island outside the airfield were thickly wooded; there were only occasional patches of wild palms and open grass areas. The thick scrub so completely masked the true nature of the terrain that aerial photographs and pre–D day photos taken by United States submarines gave intelligence officers no hint of its ruggedness.

  The treacherous reef along the landing beaches and the heavily defended coral ridges inland made the invasion of Peleliu a combination of the problems of Tarawa and of Saipan. The reef over six hundred yards long, was the most formidable natural obstacle. Because of it, troops and equipment making the assault had to be transported in amtracs; Higgins boats could not negotiate across the rough coral and the varying depths of water.

  Before leaving Pavuvu, we had been told that the 1st Marine Division would be reinforced to about 28,000 men for the assault on Peleliu. As every man in the ranks knew, however, a lot of those people included in the term reinforced were neither trained nor equipped as combat troops. They were specialists attached to the division to implement the landing and supply by working on ships and later on the beaches. They would not be doing the fighting.

  Upon sailing for Peleliu, the 1st Marine Division numbered 16,459 officers and men. (A rear echelon of 1,771 remained on Pavuvu.) Only about 9,000 were infantrymen in the th
ree infantry regiments. Intelligence sources estimated that we would face more than 10,000 Japanese defenders on Peleliu. The big topic of conversation among us troops had to do with those comparative strengths.

  “Hey, you guys, the lieutenant just told me that the 1st Division is gonna be the biggest Marine division to ever make a landing. He says we got reinforcements we never had before.”

  A veteran looked up from cleaning his .45 automatic and said, “Boy, has that shavetail lieutenant been smoke-stacking you!”

  “Why?”

  “Use your head, buddy. Sure we got the 1st Marines, the 5th Marines, and the 7th Marines; them's infantry. The 11th Marines is our division artillery. Where the hell's all them people who is supposed to ‘reinforce’ the division? Have you seen 'em? Who the hell are they, and where the hell are they?”

  “I don't know, I'm just telling you what the lieutenant said.”

  “Well, I'll tell you who them ‘reinforcements’ is. They's all what they call specialists, and they ain't line company Marines. Remember this, buster. When the stuff hits the fan, and you and me are trying to live through that shootin’ and the shellin’, them damned specialists'll be settin’ on they cans back at division CP [command post] on the beach, writin’ home about how war is hell. And who is gonna have all the casualties and lose all the men fightin’ the Nips? The 1st Marines, the 5th Marines, and the 7th Marines'll all catch hell, and the 11th Marines'll lose some men too. Wake up, boy, them shavetail lieutenants is as useless as tits on a boar hog. The NCOs run things when the shootin’ starts.”*

  D MINUS 1

  After evening chow on 14 September 1944, a buddy and I leaned against the rail of LST 661 and talked about what we would do after the war. I tried to appear unconcerned about the next day, and he did too. We may have fooled each other and ourselves a little, but not much. As the sun disappeared below the horizon and its glare no longer reflected off a glassy sea, I thought of how beautiful the sunsets always were in the Pacific. They were even more beautiful than over Mobile Bay. Suddenly a thought hit me like a thunderbolt. Would I live to see the sunset tomorrow? My knees nearly buckled as panic swept over me. I squeezed the railing and tried to appear interested in our conversation.