by E. B. Sledge
We pulled alongside a big merchant troopship, the Sea Runner, and prepared to climb a cargo net to get aboard. We had done this sort of thing countless times in our training but never when we were so terribly exhausted. We had a hard time even getting started up the net because we kept bobbing up and down in the heavy sea. Several men stopped to rest on the way, but no one fell. As I struggled upward with my load of equipment, I felt like a weary insect climbing a vine. But at last I was crawling up out of the abyss of Peleliu!
We were assigned to quarters in troop compartments be-lowdecks. I stowed my gear on my rack and went topside. The salt air was delicious to breathe. What a luxury to inhale long deep breaths of fresh clean air, air that wasn't heavy with the fetid stench of death.
The cost in casualties for a tiny island was terrible. The fine 1st Marine Division was shattered. It suffered a total loss of 6,526 men (1,252 dead and 5,274 wounded). The casualties in the division s infantry regiments were: 1st Marines, 1,749; 5th Marines, 1,378; 7th Marines, 1,497. These were severe losses considering that each infantry regiment started with about 3,000 men. The army's 81st Infantry Division would lose another 3,278 men (542 dead and 2,736 wounded) before it secured the island.
Most of the enemy garrison on Peleliu died. Only a few were captured. Estimates as to the exact losses by the Japanese vary somewhat, but conservatively, 10,900 Japanese soldiers died and 302 became prisoners. Of the prisoners only 7 were soldiers and 12 sailors. The remainder were laborers of other oriental extractions.
Company K, 3d Battalion, 5th Marines went into Peleliu with approximately 235 men, the normal size of a World War II Marine rifle company. It left with only 85 unhurt. It suffered 64 percent casualties. Of its original seven officers, two remained for the return to Pavuvu.For its actions on Peleliu and Ngesebus, the 1st Marine Division received the Presidential Unit Citation.
Even at a distance Peleliu was ugly with the jagged ridges and shattered trees. Haney came up alongside me and leaned on the rail. He looked gloomily at the island and puffed a cigarette.
“Well, Haney, what did you think of Peleliu?” I asked. I really was curious what a veteran with a combat record that included some of the big battles of the Western Front during World War I thought of the first battle in which I had participated. I had nothing in my experience to make a comparison with Peleliu.
Instead of the usual old salt comment—something like, “You think that was bad, you oughta been in the old Corps,”—Haney answered with an unexpected, “Boy, that was terrible! I ain't never seen nothin’ like it. I'm ready to go back to the States. I've had enough after that.”
A common perception has it that the “worst battle” to any man is the one he had been in himself. In view of Haney's comments, I concluded that Peleliu must have been as bad as I thought it was even though it was my first battle. Haney's long Marine Corps career as a combat infantryman certainly qualified him as a good judge of how bad a battle had been. His simple words were enough to convince me about the severity of the fight we had just been through.
None of us would ever be the same after what we had endured. To some degree that is true, of course, of all human experience. But something in me died at Peleliu. Perhaps it was a childish innocence that accepted as faith the claim that man is basically good. Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places who do not have to endure war's savagery will ever stop blundering and sending others to endure it.
But I also learned important things on Peleliu. A man's ability to depend on his comrades and immediate leadership is absolutely necessary. I'm convinced that our discipline, esprit de corps, and tough training were the ingredients that equipped me to survive the ordeal physically and mentally— given a lot of good luck, of course. I learned realism, too. To defeat an enemy as tough and dedicated as the Japanese, we had to be just as tough. We had to be just as dedicated to America as they were to their emperor. I think this was the essence of Marine Corps doctrine in World War II, and that history vindicates this doctrine.
To this private first class, Peleliu was also a vindication of Marine Corps training, particularly of boot camp. I speak only from a personal viewpoint and make no generalizations, but for me, in the final analysis, Peleliu was:
thirty days of severe, unrelenting inhuman emotional and physical stress;
proof that I could trust and depend completely on the Marine on each side of me and on our leadership;
proof that I could use my weapons and equipment efficiently under severe stress; and
proof that the critical factor in combat stress is duration of the combat rather than the severity.
Boot camp taught me that I was expected to excel, or try to, even under stress. My drill instructor was a small man. He didn't have a big mouth. He was neither cruel nor sadistic. He wasn't a bully. But he was a strict disciplinarian, a total realist about our future, and an absolute perfectionist dedicated to excellence. To him more than to my disciplined home life, a year of college ROTC before boot camp, and months of infantry training afterward I attribute my ability to have withstood the stress of Peleliu.
The Japanese were as dedicated to military excellence as U.S. Marines. Consequently, on Peleliu the opposing forces were like two scorpions in a bottle. One was annihilated, the other nearly so. Only Americans who excelled could have defeated them.
Okinawa would be the longest and largest battle of the Pacific war. There my division would suffer about as many casualties as it did on Peleliu. Again the enemy garrison would fight to the death. On Okinawa I would be shelled and shot at more, see more enemy soldiers, and fire at more of them with my mortar and with small arms than on Peleliu. But there was a ferocious, vicious nature to the fighting on Peleliu that made it unique for me. Many of my veteran comrades agreed. Perhaps we can say of Peleliu as the Englishman, Robert Graves, said of World War I, that it:
…gave us infantrymen so convenient a measuring-stick for discomfort, grief, pain, fear, and horror, that nothing since has greatly daunted us. But it also brought new meanings of courage, patience, loyalty, and greatness of spirit; incommunicable, we found to later times.*
As I crawled out of the abyss of combat and over the rail of the Sea Runner, I realized that compassion for the sufferings of others is a burden to those who have it. As Wilfred Owen's poem “Insensibility” puts it so well, those who feel most for others suffer most in war.
* My memory of the remaining events of horror and death and violence amid the Peleliu ridges is as clear and distinct as a long nightmare where specific events are recalled vividly the next day. I remember clearly the details of certain episodes that occurred before or after certain others and can verify these with my notes and the historical references. But time and duration have absolutely no meaning in relation to those events from one date to the next. I was well aware of this sensation then.
*K/⅗ lost eight killed and twenty-two wounded at the Five Sisters.
* At the time of Captain Haldane's death, the bulk of Company K was operating with its parent battalion (⅗) on Hill 140 within the Umurbrogol Pocket. In an attempt to orient himself to the strange terrain his company was occupying, Haldane raised his head and looked over a ridge. A sniper's bullet killed him instantly. First Lt. Thomas J. (“Stumpy”) Stanley succeeded him as commander of K/⅗. Stanley led Company K through the remainder of the Peleliu campaign and on to Okinawa the following spring.
* By 15 October, the Marines had compressed the Umurbrogol Pocket to an area of about 400 to 500 yards. Yet the soldiers of the 81st Infantry Division faced six more weeks of fighting before the process of constant pressure and attrition wiped out the final vestiges of Japanese opposition. One day a buddy told me he had a unique souvenir to show me. We sat on a rock as he carefully removed a package from his combat pack. He unwrapped layers of waxed paper that had originally covered rations and proudly held out his prize for me to see.
* A knapsack was the lower half of the two-part World War II Marine combat pack. The upp
er part was called the haversack. The latter half was the part a Marine normally carried with him into a fight.
†I later wore this same lucky jacket through the long, muddy Okinawa campaign. Faded now, it hangs peacefully in my closet, one of my most prized possessions.
*Graves, Robert, “Introduction” in Old Soldiers Never Die by Frank Richards, Berkley Publishing Corp., N.Y. 1966
PART II
Okinawa:
The Final Triumph
FOREWORD TO PART II
Peleliu took its toll. As the executive officer and then commander of Company K, 3d Battalion, 5th Marines, I saw in the eyes of each survivor the price he paid for thirty days of unrelenting close combat on that hunk of blasted coral.
For those weary men returning to Pavuvu in November 1944, the war was far from over. Pavuvu was a better place the second time around than when we had left it. But it wasn't a rest haven. The survivors of Peleliu weren't allowed such a luxury. There was little time for licking wounds. We had to absorb a lot of new men as replacements for those lost on Peleliu and for the rotation home of the Guadalcanal veterans who by then had fought three campaigns.
Peleliu was something special for the Marines of K/⅗— for all of the 1st Marine Division. It has remained so down through the years. Yet Okinawa had its own character, more forbidding in many ways than its predecessor. There the 1st Marine Division fought a different war under a new set of rules where tactics and movement were used in a fashion previously unknown to the island-fighting Marines.
Okinawa is a large island, more than sixty miles long and from two to eighteen miles wide. It introduced the Marines to “land” warfare for the first time. Even in 1945 it had a city, towns and villages, several large airfields, an intricate road network, and a good-sized civilian population. Most important, the Japanese defended it with more than 100,000 of their best troops. Okinawa was Japanese territory. They knew it was our final stepping-stone to the home islands of Japan.
The Marines had learned a lot on the way to Okinawa. We had improved our force structure, tactics, and techniques for combat along the way. The Japanese had learned, too. On Okinawa we faced a set of defenses and defensive tactics made sophisticated by the Japanese through application of lessons learned from all of their previous losses. They also fought with an intensity born of a certain knowledge that if they failed, nothing remained to prevent our direct assault into their homeland.
Irrespective of the new elements, the battle for Okinawa was fought and ultimately decided the way all battles have been fought and won or lost. The men on both sides, facing each other day after day across the sights of a rifle, determined the outcome. Pfc. Eugene B. Sledge was one of those men. In this book he gives us a unique experience of seeing and feeling war at its most important level, that of the enlisted fighting man. His words ring true, clean of analysis and reaction to past events. They simply reflect what happened to him and, therefore, to all of the Marines who fought there. I know, because I fought with them.
For the men of the “old breed” who struggled, bled, died, and eventually won on Peleliu and Okinawa, Sledgehammer is their most eloquent spokesman. I'm proud to have served with them—and with him.
Capt. Thomas J. Stanley
U.S. Marine Corps Reserve (Ret.)
Houston, Texas
CHAPTER SEVEN
Rest and Rehabilitation
Early next morning the Sea Runner, in convoy with other ships including those carrying the survivors of the 7th Marines, put out for Pavuvu. I was glad to be aboard ship again, even a troopship. I drank gallons of ice cold water from the electrically cooled “scuttlebutts.”*
Most of my old friends in rifle companies had been wounded or killed. It was terribly depressing, and the full realization of our losses bore down heavily on me as we made inquiries. The survivors on board gave us all the details regarding our friends who hadn't made it through Peleliu. We thanked them and moved on. After a few of the visits and bad news about lost friends, I began to feel that I hadn't been just lucky but was a survivor of a major tragedy.
One day after noon chow a friend and I were sitting on our racks discussing things in general. The conversation drifted off, and we fell silent. Suddenly he looked at me with an intense, pained expression on his face and said, “Sledgehammer, why the hell did we have to take Peleliu?” I must have looked at him blankly, because he began to argue that our losses on Peleliu had been useless and hadn't helped the war effort at all, and that the island could have been bypassed. “Hell, the army landed troops on Morotai [Netherlands East Indies] with light opposition the same day we landed on Peleliu, and we caught hell, and the damn place still ain't secured. And while we were still on Peleliu, MacArthur hit Leyte [in the Philippines, 20 October] and walked ashore standing up. I just don't see where we did any good,” he continued.
I replied gloomily, “I don't know.” He just stared at the bulkhead and sadly shook his head. He was the same friend who had been with me the time we saw the three terribly mutilated Marine dead. I could imagine what he was thinking.
Despite these momentary lapses, the veterans of Peleliu knew they had accomplished something special. That these Marines had been able to survive the intense physical exertion of weeks of combat on Peleliu in that incredibly muggy heat gave ample evidence of their physical toughness. That we had survived emotionally—at least for the moment—was, and is, ample evidence to me that our training and discipline were the best. They prepared us for the worst, which is what we experienced on Peleliu.
On 7 November 1944, (three days after my twenty-first birthday) the Sea Runner entered Macquitti Bay. After passing familiar islets, she dropped anchor off Pavuvu's steel pier. I was surprised at how good Pavuvu looked after the desolation of Peleliu.
We picked up our gear and debarked shortly. On the beach we walked over to one of several tables set up nearby. There I saw—of all things—an American Red Cross girl. She was serving grapefruit juice in small paper cups. Some of my buddies looked at the Red Cross woman sullenly, sat on their helmets, and waited for orders. But together with several other men, I went over to the table where the young lady handed me a cup of juice, smiled, and said she hoped I liked it. I looked at her with confusion as I took the cup and thanked her. My mind was so benumbed by the shock and violence of Peleliu that the presence of an American girl on Pavuvu seemed totally out of context. I was bewildered. “What the hell is she doing here?” I thought. “She's got no more business here than some damn politician.” As we filed past to board trucks, I resented her deeply.
Next to a table counting off the men to board the trucks stood a brand-spanking-new boot second lieutenant. He was so obviously fresh from the States and officers’ candidate school that his khakis were new, and he wasn't even suntanned. As I moved slowly by the table he said, “OK, sonny, move out.” Since my enlistment in the Marine Corps, I had been called about everything imaginable—printable and unprintable. But fresh off of Peleliu I was unprepared for “sonny.” I turned to the officer and stared at him blankly. He returned my gaze and seemed to realize his mistake. He looked hurriedly away. My buddies’ eyes still carried that vacant, hollow look typical of men recently out of the shock of battle. Maybe that's what the young lieutenant saw in mine, and it made him uncomfortable.
The trucks sped past neat tent areas, much improved since we had last seen Pavuvu. We arrived at our familiar camp area to find numerous self-conscious replacements sitting and standing in and around the tents. We were the “old men” now. They appeared so relaxed and innocent of what lay ahead of us that I felt sorry for them. We took off our packs and settled into our tents. In the best way we could, we tried to unwind and relax.
Shortly after we arrived back at Pavuvu and on an occasion when all the replacements were out of the company area on work parties, 1st Sgt. David P. Bailey yelled “K Company, fall in.” As the survivors of Peleliu straggled out of their tents into the company street, I thought about how few remained out of t
he 235 men we started with.
Dressed in clean khakis and with his bald head shining, Bailey walked up to us and said, “At ease, men.” He was a real old-time salty Marine and a stern disciplinarian, but a mild-mannered man whom we highly respected. Bailey had something to say, and it wasn't merely a pep talk. Unfortunately, I don't remember his exact words, so I won't attempt to quote him, but he told us we should be proud. He said we had fought well in as tough a battle as the Marine Corps had ever been in, and we had upheld the honor of the Corps. He finished by saying, “You people have proved you are good Marines.” Then he dismissed us.
We returned silently and thoughtfully to our tents. I heard no cynical comments about Bailey's brief remarks. Words of praise were rare from the heart of such a stern old salt who expected every man to do his best and tolerated nothing less. His straightforward, sincere praise and statement of respect and admiration for what our outfit had done made me feel like I had won a medal. His talk was not the loud harangue of a politician or the cliché-studded speech of some rear-echelon officer or journalist. It was a quiet statement of praise from one who had endured the trials of Peleliu with us. As far as being a competent judge of us, there was nobody better qualified than an old combat Marine and a senior NCO like Bailey, who had observed us and endured the fight himself. His words meant a lot to me, and they apparently did to my comrades, too.