by R. V. Burgin
* * *
The Marines never gave you advance warning when they were about to send you someplace. You were the last to know. One morning at Camp Elliott we got word, “Fall out. We’re shipping out.” For all we knew, it might have been another drill, but this time it wasn’t. We rode trucks down to the San Diego docks and climbed aboard the USS Mount Vernon.
The next day, March 12, 1943, we sailed.
The ship stopped off in Honolulu, Fiji, and New Caledonia, but we never went ashore. I figured they were pulling in for supplies or more troops. It was an uneventful trip. For lack of anything better to do, we spent a lot of time just standing on deck trading rumors. At Fiji I looked over the side and watched dark hammerhead sharks swarming around the ship. I got to be pretty good friends with another Marine, Jim Burke. He was from Clinton, Iowa, where his brother owned a bar.
On the last day of March, we pulled into Port Melbourne, Australia. We were trucked forty miles southeast of the city to Camp Balcombe. It was a pretty place with green fields and gentle hills that reminded me of Texas. The camp was full of Marines from the First Division’s Fifth Regiment, resting up and retraining after the Battle of Guadalcanal. We were just raw recruits from the Ninth Replacement Battalion, the newcomers. They put us in with the veterans. In the months ahead they became our teachers.
For the first week or so we didn’t do much. We were assigned to occasional work parties, policing the grounds, picking up trash, dumping the garbage, doing whatever needed to be done. Then I was sent to the Fifth Regiment Headquarters and Service Company, where I was put on KP. Not as punishment for anything I’d done, but just to keep me busy and because somebody had to do the work.
One of the sights around camp was Lou Diamond, the legendary 60mm sharpshooter and one of the Marines’ Old Breed. He had fought in World War I and after that at Shanghai and finally at Guadalcanal. Now he was assigned as sergeant of the guard at the brig while awaiting shipment home because he was too old to fight. He wore a little goatee and the word was he drank Australian beer by the case.
Diamond had an old cat, and every morning you’d hear that foghorn voice of his calling, “Come on, Tom. Come on, Tom.” That cat would follow him everywhere, all day, like a dog.
After I’d been on KP for about three months, they pulled me out and said, “You’re going up to Third Battalion, K Company. Mortars.”
It was my specialty, but in the Marines you never know where they’ll put you. You just wait.
I moved a couple hundred yards from headquarters. The barracks was large enough to hold both the machine gun and mortar sections. Jim Burke was there.
They began to train us constantly. At the rifle range, I shot poorly with the BAR—Browning Automatic Rifle—but finally shot Expert with the M1, which was just being issued. Shortly after that I was promoted to private first class.
We marched. We would head out in the mornings, early, head up the road twenty miles and get back in the afternoons, late, carrying a full pack and our weapons.
One day we had a competition to detail strip a machine gun, an M1, and mortar, see who could tear it down and put it back together the fastest. I could put that mortar together and get it on target faster than anybody. I mean, I was the head dog. I made gunner immediately and was issued a .45, which I wore from then on.
I think that competition was when I was first noticed. I was a gunner on New Britain. On Peleliu I was a corporal, an observer and squad leader. By Okinawa I would be sergeant in charge of the mortar section.
* * *
The Australians had been in the war longer than we had. They sent their Diggers—as they called soldiers—to fight the Germans in 1940 when I was still picking cotton and playing high school football. The day before the Japanese bombed us at Pearl Harbor, Australian airplanes fired on a Jap convoy off the coast of Malaya. Two months later, Japanese planes bombed Darwin on Australia’s northern coast. In March 1943, they were expecting a Jap invasion at any time.
Even at Melbourne, on the southern coast, the war seemed pretty close. U.S. Marines were everywhere—the First Marine Division had taken over the new Royal Melbourne Hospital for the wounded and malaria cases from Guadalcanal. The division’s First Marine Regiment was quartered on the city’s cricket grounds, and the Seventh Marines were out at Mount Martha, right up the hill from Camp Balcombe. On weekends and leave days we poured into the city to enjoy the beautiful parks and broad streets, the bars and sweetshops. And to tell the truth, the girls, who were at least as pretty as American girls.
Once I was assigned to KP duty I lost no time working out a deal with the mess sergeant. I would work a straight twenty-four hours, then get twenty-four hours off to go into town. As soon as I was free, I’d shower, put on a fresh uniform, find Jim Burke, and we’d head out.
We’d catch what we called the cattle car, an eighteen-wheeler with a trailer that had board benches along the sides and down the middle. You could sit on that or straddle it—neither was comfortable—for the ride to Frankston, where we’d catch the train into Melbourne.
The city had streetcars and buses, the first double-decker buses I ever saw. Trains left for the suburbs every three or four minutes. You could go anywhere and you didn’t have to wait all day to do it.
We’d pull into the big Flinders Street Station about ten a.m. Jim usually spent the day across the street in the bar at the Young & Jackson Hotel, where the big attraction, other than strong beer, was Chloe, a very big and very pink painting of a naked young lady. Every GI in Melbourne had to pay his respects to Chloe at least once.
I might have a couple beers with Jim, but then I would go sightseeing. But first we would have some business to attend to.
Jim had requested that the Marines send his allotment home to Clinton so his folks could bank it for him. But for some reason, the Corps went on paying him full salary, too. By the time someone caught the mix-up, he owed the Marines a lot of money. So they cut him to $5 a payday until it was paid off. That wasn’t enough to go on liberty.
Before we went out on the town, Jim and I would go to the PX and each buy three cartons of cigarettes at fifty cents per carton. We were getting good American brands—Lucky Strikes, Camels and Chesterfields—not those wartime cigarettes like Fleetwoods. We’d hide them in the short wool jackets they’d issued us—Eisenhower jackets—take them into Melbourne and walk down the street until we sold them. We were getting two and a half Australian pounds a carton, and the exchange rate was about two and a half American dollars on the pound. You could buy a pint of beer for about twelve cents. Steak and eggs cost fifty cents. About thirty cents would get you into a movie. So six cartons would get Jim through liberty that weekend.
Late one Sunday afternoon in April, Jim and I were walking down Collins Street when we found ourselves following two young women, a blonde and a brunette, both very pretty. When they stepped into a milk bar—a combination sweetshop and soda fountain very popular in Melbourne—Jim and I stopped and looked at each other.
“The brunette’s mine,” I said.
“I’ll take the blonde,” he said.
We stepped inside, where the salesgirl was just weighing the candy the girls bought. “I’ll wait on you next,” she said.
“Never mind,” Jim said, nodding at the two girls. “We’re with them.”
“I’ll have what she’s having,” I said, indicating the brunette.
Outside the shop we asked their names. The brunette was Florence Riseley and her friend was Doris Moran. They said they were eighteen. They had come downtown from Albert Park, a suburb, to meet Florence’s mother and three-year-old brother, who were from Tasmania and would be taking a train that evening. Since none of us had anything to do for a couple hours, the girls offered to show us the Melbourne Museum, which was a few blocks away.
The museum’s main attraction turned out to be a stuffed racehorse named Phar Lap, which Doris informed us had been poisoned by “you Yanks” while racing in the United States. After about
thirty minutes in the museum, staring at exhibits, Jim complained that everything in the place was starting to smell as dead as the horse.
“We told you that you Yanks killed him,” the girls said and laughed.
We walked them back to Flinders Street Station, where Florence’s mother and little brother had already arrived and were waiting to catch a local to the suburbs in an hour.
While Florence and her mother talked, Jim and I took turns entertaining her brother with train sounds and piggyback rides up and down the platform. It was the right move.
“They seem to be nice,” Florence’s mother whispered to her daughter. “Anybody who plays with a child like that can’t be all bad.”
When it came time to go and we said our good-byes, Florence’s mother slipped her a twenty-pound note. “I was wondering where we were going to eat,” Jim muttered to me. Florence heard him.
We found another milk bar nearby and the four of us had a pretty good meal by Australian standards—meat pies and milk shakes. When the waitress brought the bill, Jim and I pointed to Florence.
“It’s hers,” we said.
As we got up to go I saw Florence’s eyes flash and her jaw tighten. Just as we got to the cash register, I slipped the bill out of her hand and, as I’d planned all along, paid it myself. We all had a good laugh over that.
The evening was young. The train back to Frankston didn’t leave until 11:55 and the girls’ train to the suburbs left at midnight. So we took a boat ride on the Yarra River. If you get a bunch of Australians together, no matter where, pretty soon they’ll start to sing. So we drifted down the Yarra River, passengers singing “A Boy in Khaki” and “Bye for Now,” and, of course, “Waltzing Matilda.”
At the station, they gave us big hugs, and we agreed to meet the following Saturday at seven p.m. under the station clocks. At six minutes to midnight, Jim and I climbed aboard the train to Frankston, which started rolling almost as soon as we took our seats. Through the window we could see Florence and Doris take off on a dead run. Their train was several platforms over and it left in just five minutes. I noticed Florence had long legs.
Almost every Saturday for the next three months, Jim and I would meet Florence and Doris at Flinders Street. We’d ride around in one of the city’s horse-drawn buggies, cracking American jokes, which the girls seemed to enjoy. Sometimes, we’d pay six pence and walk downstairs to a movie house where they showed continuous newsreels of the war, or we’d go out to Luna Park, an amusement park by the river.
Florence and I spent a lot of time just sitting on benches in the city’s gardens—Melbourne had some of the most beautiful flower gardens in the world—talking about our families, about what was going on in the world and about life before the war. And after. She was easy to talk with.
I found out her father operated a steam shovel in the coal mines at Yollourn North, about ninety miles from Melbourne, and that he had fought in France during World War I, where he had been gassed. I also found out that she was sixteen, not eighteen. She had lied about her age to get a job at a factory making biscuits for the troops. Her boss had been so impressed by her work that he made her assistant floor supervisor over twenty-four other girls, and the company was sending her to night school to study management. So I knew she was smart.
One weekend I rode the train with her to Albert Park, where she lived with her uncle. At her front yard, she stepped inside the gate and swung it closed between us. Then she leaned forward and gave me my first kiss.
We’ve laughed about that over the years—that she had to put the gate between us.
On August 13, my birthday, Jim and I met the girls, and since it was a special day, we had some drinks. Then we all went to the Tivoli Theatre, where they had beautiful dancing girls wearing big feathers and not much else. The show was almost sold out, but we got tickets for the third balcony. I remember stumbling up the stairs, Florence in front of me, counting steps and trying to remember if we had passed the second balcony. I also remember we finished the evening in a movie theater, where Florence held my dizzy head in her lap and gently kissed me.
* * *
Something was in the wind. They were picking up the pace of training over the whole division. We started pulling field exercises with the Guadalcanal vets, crawling under barbed wire with our rifles, live ammunition zinging a few feet over our heads. We’d run, hit the deck, get up and run again. We’d practice making landings in rubber boats, all of it as if the enemy were right in front of us. The Guadalcanal vets had already been through it with real Japs. Just hanging around the barracks listening to those guys was an education. They’d tell stories about how they nearly starved to death on Guadalcanal, how they came down with malaria or dysentery, how they had to fight the Japs stationed on the island and then had to fight the reinforcements the Japs brought in. Just good talk between fighting men.
More than anything, we learned about tactics, both ours and the enemy’s. Of course, they’d taught us all that in boot camp and at Camp Elliott—we knew enough that when someone called out “Hit the deck!” we shouldn’t stand there asking questions. But the men from Guadalcanal were an advanced course. They’d been there and they’d done it.
Jap snipers would tie themselves in the treetops. You couldn’t see them, but they were there, watching and waiting. They’d cut fire lanes through the trees, narrow breaks about three or four feet wide at right angles to our line of march. They’d set up a machine gun and when a line of Marines would come along they’d open fire. You’d be like pins in a bowling alley.
Or you’d be moving along a trail, single file, and a Jap would get in behind the last man in the column and bayonet him or slit his throat. You’d never hear him go down. Then they’d get the next man, and the next, picking them off one by one.
I sat and listened whenever they were telling war stories, and I’d ask questions. What happened, when did it happen, how did it happen? I paid attention because I knew that we were soon going into the same situation, or something as bad.
They canceled all leaves, and we could no longer go into the city. I wrote Florence a long letter: “We are pretty busy getting ready for you know what. But from what I can find out we are going to be here for another 3 to 6 weeks…. We are making rubber boat landings up until Friday, I know, but I don’t know what is beyond that.”
We’d been at Camp Balcombe five months. One evening they told us to get our gear together. We were moving out.
We marched out of camp about dusk and hiked all that night. We’d walk for fifty minutes and break for ten, walk fifty minutes and break for ten. In the morning, field cooks met us and had breakfast ready. Then we took off again and hiked all day, fifty and ten all the way. That night we stopped and ate again. Me and Jim Burke figured we were going to spend the night, so we pitched our pup tent. About the time we got it up, someone yelled “Fall in!”
You never saw two Marines tear down a pup tent and get back in formation so fast in your life.
We had a pace we had to maintain, and we wore our full transport packs, upper and lower part, with a bedroll. The whole thing weighed about forty pounds. We were carrying our M1s and I had that .45 strapped to my side and was carrying the butt plate for the mortar. Whenever they hollered “break,” I’d just lean back on that pack and instantly I was gone. I must have slept nine minutes out of every ten-minute break.
We hiked all that second night, and starting the next morning we pulled maneuvers all day long. Sherman tanks, artillery, machine guns, all firing live ammunition, aircraft bombing and strafing out ahead of us. We’d be crawling along on our bellies and they were firing right over our heads. You’d hear the bullets zinging. It was as near combat as you could get.
About four o’clock in the afternoon we started hiking back. Somewhere along the way, they sent trucks out to pick us up, and what a blessing that was. It was Friday afternoon. We’d been at it since Wednesday. And as tired as everyone was, we still went into town on Saturday.
By now Florence and I had most of six months together. I don’t know that there was one moment when I could have said that we were in love. It was just a slow process in which we began to care for each other. We talked about me going into the war. We knew that it was going to happen sooner or later. We didn’t know when.
Toward the end of September they took our dress uniforms, our greens and hats and shoes. We went on liberty wearing our khakis and combat boots. We called them “boondockers.” Florence hadn’t even been expecting me. I looked all over town for her and finally found her with a bunch of her girlfriends in St. Kilda Park, where we had sat and talked so often.
She knew the minute she saw me.
We just hung on to each other. I kept saying, “I’ll be all right. I’ll be all right.”
I would have loved to have married her right then. But I had sense enough to know what was ahead of me. I didn’t have a clue how long it would last. I knew I couldn’t even think about marrying her and going off and getting killed and leaving her a widow.
“I’ll be all right,” I said. “I’ll come back for you when it’s over.”
But I was wrong.
CHAPTER 3
Green Hell
The Sunday morning after Florence and I said our good-byes, they rousted us out of bed at six and told us to get our gear together. The First and Second battalions had already shipped out by the end of August. Shortly afterward the Seventh Marines had moved to the docks. We knew we were next.
After breakfast we were trucked down to Port Melbourne. We stood around all morning before finally climbing the ramp to the B. F. Shaw, a Liberty Ship.
Then we waited some more.
All that day and into the night we stood along the rails and watched the Shaw take on cargo. Little by little the mountains of crates piled all over the dock, the rows of trucks and jeeps, the artillery and deflated rafts and stacks of stretchers were lifted and lowered into the hold. I didn’t know a ship could carry so much. They had loading down to a science. The least important stuff went in first, then the more important, and finally whatever would be needed right away, like ammunition and drums of fuel. Last on, first off.