Grunts: Inside the American Infantry Combat Experience, World War II Through Iraq

by John C. McManus

  By the eve of the July 21 invasion (code-named W-day by the commanders), the teams had accomplished all their missions with the loss of one man killed. They had cleared paths through the reefs, negating palm log barriers filled with coral cement, wire cable, and four-foot-high wire cages also filled with coral cement. They had also blown up, mainly with hand-placed charges, nearly one thousand obstacles on the beaches. They even had time to leave behind a nice message for their Marine brothers who would soon hit the beach. They nailed a large sign to a tree that read: “Welcome Marines! USO that way!” Rear Admiral Richard Conolly, commander of Task Force 53, whose responsibility was to transport, land, and support the invasion troops, later wrote that none of this would have been possible without the work of the UDTs and their “successfully prosecuted clearance operations.” The only downside was that the UDTs, through the sheer weight of their efforts, made it quite obvious to the Japanese where the invasion would happen.1

  In July 1944, the Americans wanted Guam for several reasons. It had once been an American colonial possession. The Japanese had seized it in 1941. The population, mainly Chamorros, had always been pro-American but were especially inclined toward the Americans after several years of difficult Japanese occupation. The locals were itching for liberation and the Americans intended to give them just that. Guam, with excellent airfields, anchorages, and hospitals, was a vital stepping-stone to Japan and ultimate victory.

  The Americans planned a two-pronged invasion. In the north, the entire 3rd Marine Division, consisting of three infantry regiments and one artillery regiment, plus many attached units, would land between Adelup Point to the north and Asan Point to the south. The 3rd Marine Regiment would hit Red Beach on the left (north) flank. The 21st Marine Regiment would land in the middle at Green Beach. On the right (south) flank, the 9th Marine Regiment would take Blue Beach. The artillerymen would follow in successive waves. A few miles to the south, just below Orote Point—a fingerlike peninsula that jutted into the sea—the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade, consisting of the 22nd and 4th Marine Regiments, were to land at Yellow and White Beaches, respectively, near a village called Agat. They would be reinforced by the Army’s 77th Infantry Division, a New York National Guard outfit nicknamed the “Statue of Liberty” Division. All of these ground forces were lumped under the III Marine Amphibious Corps, commanded by Major General Roy Geiger, a judicious, meticulous Marine with an aviation background. The obvious post-invasion plan for all of these units was to push inland, subdue Japanese resistance, and secure the island.2

  Aboard the troopships that were cruising a few miles off Guam’s shores in the early hours of July 21, most of the assault force Marines were actually eager to go ashore. Because they had comprised a floating reserve for the previous invasion of Saipan, they had been cooped up aboard their cramped, hot, austere ships nearly every day since the middle of June. Enlisted men slept belowdecks in cramped bunks stacked from the floor to the ceiling. The bunks inevitably sagged under the weight of their occupants. Only a few inches separated a man’s nose from the hindquarters of the Marine above him. Showers were of the saltwater variety, making true cleanliness a veritable impossibility. The heads were usually crowded. Sometimes toilets overflowed, spilling a nauseating brew of salt water and human waste that flowed from the head into adjacent areas, including sometimes troop quarters. Navy chow was pretty good but, on most of the troopships, meals were only served in the galley twice a day. One ship was permeated with the stench of rotting potatoes in the galley “spud locker.” Officers and sergeants put their Marines through physical training each day, but the fitness level of the men was bound to taper off in such conditions. Men passed the time by playing cards, writing letters, conversing with their buddies, or just plain thinking in solitude. Tempers flared and morale declined. “We were fighting each other,” Private First Class William Morgan, a rifleman in the 3rd Marine Regiment, recalled. “We’d have fought hell itself . . . to get off that damned ship.”3

  Shrouded in inky darkness, the vast invasion armada settled into place off Guam’s western shores. Admiral Conolly had amassed a powerful task force consisting of six battleships, six cruisers, seven destroyers, plus a dizzying array of aircraft carriers, submarines, support vessels, and troopships. At 0200, loudspeakers came to life aboard the troopships: “Now hear this, reveille, chow down for troops!” Nervous young Marines crowded into galleys, inching their way through steaming chow lines. On most ships, navy cooks served the traditional invasion fare of steak, eggs, biscuits, fruit juice, and coffee. Some of the men ate heartily. Some were too anxious to enjoy their meal or even eat at all. “There was very little conversation,” one Marine later wrote, “many of the Marines were still half asleep. The rest of us were deeply engaged in our own personal thoughts.”4

  On a few ships, navy skippers heeded doctors’ advice to feed the troops a light meal since patients with empty bellies were easier to treat than those with full stomachs. On one of those ships, the USS Crescent City, the Marines were surprised, and miffed, to be fed a meager breakfast of white beans, bread, and coffee. They complained loudly, and unambiguously, to their navy hosts, so much so that the ship’s captain took to the loudspeaker to explain his rationale. After hearing the captain’s announcement, Private Eugene Peterson of the 12th Marine Regiment snuck back into the galley and discovered that the cooks were serving meat loaf to the ship’s crew. He asked for some of the tasty meat, but a sailor tried to shoo him away. “Beat it, Marine. We already fed you.” But the chief cook witnessed this silliness and interceded. “Wise up, punk,” he said to the cook. “This Marine is facing a day of bad news.” The chief wrapped a large chunk of meat loaf in a towel, gave it to Peterson, and wished him luck. Peterson thanked the chief, hurried back to his unit, and found a way to wedge the meat into his pack.5

  Meanwhile, aboard the myriad troopships, the assault troops were congregating topside, packs and equipment in place, rifles slung, anxiously waiting for orders to board their landing craft. The average infantryman was loaded down with about seventy pounds of gear. When the order came, they clambered, amid semi-organized chaos, over the sides of their ships, down huge cargo nets, into bobbing Landing Craft Vehicle Personnel boats (LCVPs), better known as Higgins boats. Having rehearsed this process many times, they knew to hold the vertical, not horizontal, grips on the cargo nets (so as to avoid having their hands stepped on by the man above them), while descending carefully step by step. At the bottom of the net, about three or four feet above the landing craft, they balanced themselves and then hopped into their waiting boats. One by one the Higgins boats filled up with Marines, then pulled away from the ships and circled in the darkness, waiting for the order to head for shore. Aboard the boats, the Marines, already wet from sea spray, jostled around, breathed stale diesel fumes, and tried to stave off nausea, whether sea- or nerve-induced.

  By 0530, just before sunrise, even as the troops were loading into their landing craft, the preinvasion bombardment was in full swing. To the assault troops, the sheer pyrotechnics of the aerial and naval bombardment were awe-inspiring. The ships themselves appeared as nothing more than gigantic hulks in the darkness. When they fired, their muzzle flashes lit up the night, followed by waves of concussion. In that fleeting instant, the troops got all too brief glimpses of the ships themselves or Guam’s coastline. The bombardment was an overwhelming cacophony of sound and violence. The men could feel the concussion in their chests. Their ears were assaulted by so much noise that they had trouble hearing the engines of their landing craft. Battleships spewed sixteen-inch shells at the shadowy hills beyond the beach. Cruisers added hundreds of eight-inch shells. The explosions “sent fire and smoke hundreds of feet into the air,” one Marine officer later wrote. “Small fires burned along the entire length of the beach. Destroyers were firing shells from close range. They roved back and forth, one firing a series of volleys, followed by another firing into the same area.” Each battleship, cruiser, and destroyer bristled w
ith multiple antiaircraft gun tubs. The crews lowered their guns to shoot in a flat trajectory and unloaded a dizzying array of small-caliber shells (mainly 40-millimeter) into preselected targets. Tracer rounds from these guns formed nearly solid orange and red lines that stabbed into the beach with seemingly geometric precision. As the sun began to rise, specially modified Landing Craft Infantry (LCI) ships hurried toward the shore and erupted in volleys of inaccurate but devastating rockets at Japanese pillboxes, command posts, and machine-gun nests. In total, on this day alone, they fired nearly 1,400 rounds of fourteen- and sixteen-inch shells, 1,332 rounds of eight-inch shells, 2,430 rounds of six-inch shells, 13,130 rounds of five-inch shells, along with 9,000 rockets.6

  The sun had risen by 0630, ushering in a sunny, warm day with near-perfect invasion conditions. If anything, the barrage only intensified in the daylight, obscuring the beaches in plumes of grayish smoke. At this moment, carrier-based fighters and torpedo planes, mostly from the USS Wasp and Yorktown, swooped in and unleashed a wave of bombs and strafing, mostly on the invasion beaches. Japanese antiaircraft opposition was desultory at best. In all, the strike planes flew nearly five hundred strafing sorties. They dropped over four hundred tons of bombs and shot at anything that moved on the ground, disrupting Japanese communications and mobility, destroying gun positions, blasting troop concentrations. Above the strike aircraft, spotter planes flew in lazy circles. Inside these planes, trained observers radioed target information back to the ships, enhancing the accuracy of the naval gunfire.

  Watching this grand spectacle from their landing craft, the assault troops were deeply impressed. The W-day bombardment was the culmination of seventeen days of aerial and naval pasting of Japanese defenses. “It made you wonder if anything could live through this pounding,” Private First Class William Welch, a first scout in L Company, 9th Marine Regiment, commented. Hundreds of other Marines had the same impression, especially those who were new to combat. To Corporal Maury Williams, a recon scout with the 21st Marines (the Corps often referred to its regiments, but never its divisions, in this fashion), the bombardment was so intense that “it seemed that the island itself would sink into the depths of the waters from the terrific pounding it was taking. I was convinced that not many Japs could survive that fire.”7

  Others, especially those with prior combat experience, knew better. In previous invasions, they had seen similarly impressive bombardments that failed even to dent Japanese resistance. So, in reality, how effective was this preinvasion barrage? “I would say that the [preinvasion] fires were the most effective of any operation in the Pacific,” Major L. A. Gilson, the III Marine Amphibious Corps naval gunfire officer, later wrote. Another Marine gunnery officer asserted that “when the morning of the landing arrived, it was known that the assault troops would meet little resistance.” Of course, in this passive-voice claim, the officer did not outline exactly who thought this and why. Certainly, though, the assault troops enjoyed no such certainty (although they definitely hoped resistance would be light). Navy sources were equally effusive, claiming that, after the bombardment, the Japanese could defend Guam’s west coast, where the landings were about to take place, with nothing bigger than machine guns.

  However, Japanese sources indicated otherwise. After the war, Lieutenant Colonel Hideyuki Takeda, the highest-ranking enemy survivor, indicated that the bombardment had done considerable damage, but not enough to negate powerful Japanese resistance. Takeda estimated that the bombs and shells eliminated about half of the field positions along the coast, all naval gun emplacements in the open, and about half of the guns that the Japanese were hiding in caves. In addition, the aerial strafing restricted the movement of Japanese soldiers and demolished buildings that were not reinforced by concrete. Casualties from all this ordnance were surprisingly low, although some enemy soldiers were destroyed mentally—the Americans called this psychoneurosis or combat fatigue; the Japanese thought of it as a “serious loss of spirit.” The American shells failed to do much damage to any emplacements with more than fifty centimeters of concrete. Nor did they disrupt enemy communications in any meaningful fashion. Basically, for the average Japanese soldier, it was possible to hunker down and wait out the bombardment, terrifying though it may have been.

  Without question, the seventeen-day bombardment degraded Japanese resistance in significant ways, but it could not work the miracle of eliminating resistance altogether. Admiral Conolly’s perspective reflected this reality of warfare: “Effectiveness cannot be measured . . . by a total absence of opposition but by what might have been had this [fire support] been lacking.” The bombardment, he felt, was the best he had seen up to that time. Undoubtedly he was right. His task force did an outstanding job. But, even in the absence of any meaningful Japanese air or sea opposition, Conolly knew that American naval and air units could only assist the ground troops, not do the job for them. “The bombardment cannot attain physical land objectives. There always must be fighting by the troops on the shore to secure the positions,” he wrote.8

  At 0800, the landing craft began to head into the smoke-shrouded beaches. From LSTs some of the troops had boarded directly onto LVTs (Landing Vehicle Tracked), which would take them on their actual beach runs. These specially designed amphibious vehicles were often called amtracs or alligators. They were ideal for breaching the coral reef. Other Marines transferred from their shallow-draft, untracked Higgins boats by climbing over the sides and hopping into bobbing LVTs just before reaching the reef.

  Now was white-knuckle time. Most of the boats had been circling in the water for several hours, giving the Marines plenty of time to get wet, seasick, and very nervous about hitting the beach. Faces were drawn and tight. Stomachs were queasy. The raw fear stimulated adrenal glands, enhancing the senses. “Your senses are different when you’re about to invade,” one Marine explained. “The sun is never brighter, the sky is never bluer, the grass, the jungle is never greener, and the blood is never redder. All your senses are just tingling.”

  Even as friendly shells shrieked overhead, exploding at unseen targets a few hundred yards ahead on the coastline, the Japanese began shooting at the vulnerable landing craft. The UDTs had done their job so well that there was little to fear from mines or obstacles. Instead, the Japanese lobbed a disconcerting number of mortar and artillery shells at the American invaders. Machine guns splayed bullets along the line of boats, kicking up finger- and hand-sized splashes in the water from near misses. Marine infantrymen drew lower in their boats. Many of them could hear the pinging sound of bullets glancing off the protective armor of their LVTs. Gunners and coxswains had no choice but to remain in their exposed positions, swallowing their bileglobbed fear, praying silently that nothing would hit their boats. Corporal Williams could not resist the curious urge to peek over the side of his LVT to see what was going on. “Explosions and geysers were erupting all around us and I then came to know the fear that would live with me constantly, minute by minute, for the rest of that seemingly endless day.” He watched in stunned silence as an enemy shell scored a direct hit on a troop-laden amphibious truck (DUKW, generally called ducks) some twenty-five yards away. “It was at that point that I realized . . . my life was not as precious to the Japs as it was to my family and myself.” It was his disquieting introduction to the often impersonal killing of modern combat. All up and down the mighty lines of boats inexorably headed for Guam’s coast, some took direct hits; most did not. Smoke wafted in plumes overhead, while water splashed everywhere in a confusing mishmash of boat wakes and near misses.

  Aboard another LVT headed for Green Beach, radioman Jack Kerins glanced at his buddy Private Harold Boicourt and noticed how pale and waxy his face looked. Kerins reached out and touched Boicourt and the latter jerked in surprise “as if he’d been shot.” Kerins tried to cheer him up by referring to a song they both liked. Boicourt only stared back with glassy, dilated eyes, almost as if he could no longer comprehend English. A few moments later, an explosion rocke
d the right side of the boat. “When we looked up,” Kerins said, “our machine gunner was draped limply over his weapon . . . dead.” In a nearby boat, Private First Class Bill Conley, a machine gunner in K Company, 21st Marines, popped up for a look around and was impressed with how many dead fish were floating in the water, including “a barracuda three or four feet long.”9

  Between 0830 and 0900 the first waves landed on their respective beaches against varying levels of resistance. To the south, at Agat, the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade took intense fire at Yellow and White Beaches. “The beach defenses were well organized and consisted of numerous concrete pillboxes built in coral cliffs and an elaborate trench system extending inland from the water’s edge with many well-concealed machine gun emplacements and tank traps,” the brigade’s war diary vividly recorded. “Heavy resistance was encountered from enemy small arms, machine gun and mortar fire.” At Gaan Point, right in the middle of the landing beaches, a substantial blockhouse with one 37-millimeter gun and two 75-millimeter pieces savaged the approaching LVTs with enfilade (flanking) fire. “The blockhouse was covered by earth to form a large mound, and was well camouflaged,” Lieutenant Colonel Robert Shaw, the brigade’s intelligence officer, wrote. Protected by a four-foot-thick roof, and built into the very nose of the point, the blockhouse’s guns picked off one LVT after another. The shells tore through the thin American armor, igniting fuel tanks, spreading deadly shards, burning men and tearing them apart. Staff Sergeant John O’Neill, a platoon sergeant in L Company, 22nd Marines, was riding in an LVT that churned right into the kill zone. He could see six nearby LVTs already burning and could hear enemy fire above the engine noise. “There was a sudden explosion, a searing blast of heat. The heat and acid smell of black powder was in the air.” The LVT had taken a direct hit on the left side, igniting the driver’s compartment into flames. One of the crewmen was badly wounded, blood pouring from open wounds. Staff Sergeant O’Neill ordered everyone to inflate their life vests and hop over the side. They waded through waist-high water, under fire, some five hundred yards to the beach.