by R. V. Burgin
The division had been battered pretty badly. We’d lost 1,347 men. Those of us who were left had oozing red rashes from jungle rot, or dysentery—“the shits”—or malaria.
We’d all heard we were headed back to Melbourne, and I prayed I would soon see Florence again.
We were in for an unpleasant surprise.
CHAPTER 4
First Battle of Pavuvu
So we were at sea again. The scuttlebutt was already circulating a day or two out when the USS Elmore’s loudspeaker squawked to life and confirmed the bad news. We weren’t going back to Australia. We would disembark at a place we’d never heard of—Pavuvu, in the Russell I slands.
Before long we’d all wish we’d never heard of Pavuvu and would never hear of it again.
The story was that some Army officers had picked out the island from the air. Never set a foot on it. They were flying around in a little spotter plane and they looked down and saw the neat rows of palm trees. And somebody said, “Yup, this’ll do.” Just decided then and there that Pavuvu was where we’d be going for rehab and retraining.
Later we found out that we couldn’t blame it on the Army. One of our own had chosen Pavuvu—Major General Roy S. Geiger, commander of the Third Amphibious Corps. Guadalcanal was just sixty miles east. But Geiger didn’t want us there after what had happened to the Third Marine Division: after Bougainville they’d been sent to Guadalcanal for R & R, and the island command had run the men absolutely ragged on work parties. They were too worn out to fight.
So Pavuvu was it for us.
At first it didn’t look so bad. We pulled in late on May 7, 1944, and anchored in Macquitti Bay. From the deck of the Elmore we could see palm trees, a lagoon and sandy beaches. We didn’t get to disembark until the next morning, in the kind of rain we thought we’d left behind on New Britain. That’s when we got a close look at our new home.
The Navy’s construction battalions, the Seabees, had been there, but they hadn’t done much. There was one pier and a muddy road gouged through the palms. The flat part of the island, about six hundred acres, was covered by layers of rotten coconuts, and beneath that was mud. The place had been a plantation until the war started, when the people who owned and worked it took off. Ever since, those coconuts had been falling off the trees and rotting on the ground. Every now and then you’d hear one hit with a thwack! You learned to give the trees a wide berth. The smell was overwhelming. It was years before I could eat coconut again in any form.
Since the Seabees hadn’t finished the job, the first arrivals had to build the camp. They found the tents and cots piled on the beach, most of them soaked through by the rains. The ones on the bottom of the piles were moldy. Some of the cots would come apart in your hands. The bivouac areas were ankle-deep in slop. The new guys stood in the rain, patching the holes in the tents, trying to get a footing, trying to find a dry place to pound in the tent stakes, only to see them float away. There were no wooden platforms—there were never any platforms beneath our tents, from start to finish—and when you’d lie down on the cots they’d sink into the mud like they had on New Britain. Some of the men decided to hell with it and strung hammocks between palm trees.
By the time we got there things had improved a little. The six-man pyramid tents were up, but they were full of holes. There was still plenty of mud and rotting coconuts around and there wasn’t any electricity anywhere on the island, so we had no lights. Marines can improvise under any circumstances. We rounded up tin cans and bottles, filled them with sand, poured in gasoline, inserted a piece of rope and rigged up lamps. They started fires here and there, but at least we had enough light to read or write letters, which was all there was to do for a time.
Worse than the rotting coconuts, the rain, and the mud were the rats and the land crabs. They had pretty much taken over the place. You’d see and hear the rats mostly at night, skittering across the tents or sliding down the tent ropes. They lived in the tops of the palm trees, where it was almost impossible to get at them.
We’d encountered land crabs before, but here they were absolutely everywhere. They were about the size of a fist, and their black and blue color reminded me of a bruise. I’d get up in the morning and they’d be down in my boots. I’d shake them and two or three would fall out and go scuttling sideways across the floor of the tent. They’d get into our clothes, they’d get into our bedclothes. Some of the guys got so aggravated that one Sunday morning they went on a land crab roundup, gathering them by the hundreds and dumping them in the street, where they poured gasoline over them and set them on fire. The stink from the burning crabs made us forget the rotting coconuts for a while.
During the days, work details went out to scoop up the layers of coconuts and truck them to a swamp. After we came off New Britain we had added one gun to the mortars and I was made corporal, so I was exempt. But I sent out my share of those work details. Everyone would come back stinking of sour coconut milk. There was no running water on the island, and you’d see somebody standing out in the daily downpour with a bar of good Marine soap and a brush, hoping to scrub off the smell before the rain stopped. The rain always started at the same time. You could set your watch by it. But it stopped without a warning, like somebody turned off a big faucet in the sky. Even after such a “shower,” the stink of coconuts never seemed to go away.
When we weren’t moving coconuts, we had parties hauling crushed coral to pave the roads and lanes between the tents, trying to keep on top of the mud. We’d also fill our helmets with crushed coral and carry it in a bucket brigade to make a dry floor under our cots. If you could find a couple scraps of wood you were a rich man. You could put up a dry platform where you could stow your clothes and shoes and letters from home. I salvaged a board or two and propped up Florence’s photo. Guys were always showing off their girlfriends’ pictures, but I wanted to keep Florence to myself.
A week or so after I arrived at Pavuvu, my mail caught up to me. My sister Ila sent me a package of homemade strawberry jam and some cookies. They were all broken up in transit, but even the crumbs tasted good. Best of all, I got a bundle of letters from my precious Florence. I sat down and read them right away. I was also writing her whenever I had the time to spare. It cost seventy cents to send an airmail letter to Australia. Surface mail was free. Even though I was making only sixty-four dollars a month, I sent them by air as often as I could.
Florence wrote that she was still working at the biscuit factory in Melbourne, putting in long hours. Her little brother—the one Jim Burke and I had carried piggyback on the Melbourne train platform—had chicken pox, but he was getting better. She told me she loved me and was waiting for my return.
I missed her terribly. Memories of the things we’d talked about and done together in Melbourne kept coming back. Our walks through the park full of flowers, buying fresh fruit from the little stand at Young & Jackson, just sitting on a bench in the sun. At night, lying in the tent, I’d think of the kisses we’d stolen. Or the times she teased me. Or my twenty-first birthday, when I drank a little too much and we sat in the dark movie theater and she cradled my spinning head in her arms and kept kissing me. Now my heart ached for her, and I wondered if I’d been wrong, if we should have got married when we had the chance, before I shipped out.
* * *
They cleared out some palm trees and hung up a sheet and started showing movies two or three nights a week. We sat on coconut logs, which cut into your backside after an hour or two. But those movies helped take our minds off things. We shouted advice to actors who seemed especially dumb around women—“Kiss her, you idiot!”—and whenever a pretty starlet appeared we’d yell and whistle at the projectionist to back up the film and show the scene again.
We no longer had to eat out in the rain or in our tents. They had battalion galleys up and working and screened against mosquitoes, which were everywhere. We were supposed to be taking the little yellow Atabrine pills to prevent malaria, but not everybody was going along with it.
They tasted bitter, they turned your skin yellow, and there was a rumor going around that they’d make you sterile. In the mornings when we lined up in front of the tents for roll call, a corpsman would walk down the line. We’d be ordered to open our mouths—wide—and he’d toss that pill in as far back as he could get it. We got our Atabrine whether we wanted it or not.
We still had no fresh meat, no fresh eggs, no fresh anything. Every now and then a ship pulled in from Banika, the supply island between Pavuvu and Guadalcanal. But we had no refrigeration and couldn’t keep anything perishable very long in the heat and humidity. The cooks managed to bake bread, but by the time it got to us the weevils had moved in. I guess they added some protein to our diet. Mostly we lived on heated C rations, which provided three daily meals in one carton. There was always Spam or some kind of potted meat-and-vegetable stew. These were greasy when warm and congealed when cold. There was always a can of crackers and a little cup of cheese you could spread. There were powdered eggs and powdered potatoes, and a powder that made up into a urine-colored lemonade we called “battery acid.” You could drink it, or you could use it to scrub down the deck.
But little by little we all started to put on weight.
A few weeks after we settled in, a transport arrived with the Forty-sixth Replacement Battalion, fresh men from the States. Many of the old Guadalcanal veterans turned in their gear and lined up to go home. They’d earned it. The First Division band assembled down at the dock and played them off with “California Here I Come,” ending, as always, with the “Marines’ Hymn.” There wasn’t a dry eye in the place.
Among the replacements who marched ashore was a young private first class, Gene Sledge. He was assigned to my mortar platoon. We’d soon be calling him “Sledgehammer.” Sledge was a little older than the other recruits. I learned later he had a couple years of college behind him, but to me he was just another kid, wet behind the ears. Those of us who had been on New Britain were a sorry-looking bunch, yellow from the Atabrine tablets, skin like leather—they didn’t call us Leathernecks for nothing. We were still skin and bones compared to the guys from stateside. I think our appearance shocked our replacements, and maybe gave them a little taste of what they’d look like, too, after combat.
Right away we sent the newcomers out on work details, hauling coconuts and coral. The first week or two you’d hear them bellyache about this and that. The food or the land crabs or the rotting coconuts and mud. I didn’t have much sympathy. I had just come off of four months of battle, where I was sleeping in foxholes when it would be raining and I’d wake up the next morning with water up to my chin. They’d been sleeping on momma’s white sheets in Marine Corps barracks. Now they thought they’d fallen into the hellhole of creation, and I guess from their point of view they had. That’s certainly what Sledge felt years later when he wrote about the experience in With the Old Breed, one of the great combat books of the war.
Overseas Marines and stateside Marines are two different breeds almost. We were a lot more relaxed as far as discipline. We didn’t go in for much of that parade stuff like they did back in the States. But we did calisthenics, and some mornings after roll call we’d fall out and run three miles before breakfast. We had a large field where we played baseball and volleyball. We went to the rifle range.
One thing I want to clear up.
You read in books about suicides on Pavuvu. Someone would get a Dear John letter, and there’d be a shot some night and later everyone would learn he’d put a rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
I think that’s a crock. I was in the Marine Corps, in the First Marine Division, from 1943 until 1945 and I know of only one suicide in that span. There were always rumors, especially on Pavuvu. For a while somebody was supposedly going around and knifing people at night. Just creep into your tent and slit your throat and vanish. That rumor got thick and heavy.
The funny thing was, it never happened here. It always happened somewhere else. There was no evidence that this was happening anywhere. But the rumors got pretty strong, and spread and grew from there. And to tell the truth, we all got a little edgy.
There was a guy named Al Flame. About the time the rumors of the knifings were going around, he was visiting somebody else’s tent in the next company over—Marines were always socializing from tent to tent at night. One evening, instead of going around the end of the tent rows and bypassing K Company, he decided to cut through. We’d heard all the stories. It was pitch dark when I spotted someone moving among the tents. I pulled my .45 and stuck it in his face and challenged him.
“You take another step and I’ll blow your head off.”
“Burgin,” he said. “This is me! Al Flame, dammit!”
I just said okay. Al went on about his business and I went on about mine. But it shows our frame of mind.
We called it “Going Asiatic.” Going crazy.
Sergeant Elmo Haney was the most Asiatic Marine I knew. He had been in the Corps since World War I and he’d seen it all. He was a platoon sergeant assigned to K Company, but he didn’t have a job—a platoon sergeant without a platoon. Sergeant Haney had gone Asiatic. He would do something wrong, what he imagined was some infraction, and he’d assign himself Extra Police Duty. He’d put on a full combat pack and march down the street muttering to himself, and at the end of the street he’d put himself through a full bayonet drill, all by himself.
You’d see him in the shower scrubbing all over his body with that Marine brush, even his testicles. And I mean those bristles were tough.
We’d heard they had stationed him back home once, and he had gone AWOL. He’d gone down to the docks and caught a freighter to the Pacific and worked his way back to K Company.
After Peleliu he went home for good. I heard he told someone, “This is a young man’s war.”
* * *
About this time I started having trouble with our platoon leader again, the officer we called Lieutenant Legs. The truth is, a lot of us had been having trouble with Lieutenant Legs since the canned peaches incident on New Britain.
As usual, Legs was making up the rules as he went along. We’d made a practice beach landing and gone in. He told us where to set up the mortars, and we did. Pretty soon a battalion commander came along.
“Who the hell set these up?” he barked at Legs. “Why did you set them up there?” Just chewed up his butt.
After he was gone, Legs started chewing me out. “What the hell were you thinking, setting up that way?” he yelled. “They’re supposed to be over there!”
He was getting worse. He’d tell us to do something and then he’d chew our ass for doing what he said. It was demoralizing. Our platoon sergeant, Johnny Marmet, knew something was wrong. Finally he called the mortar section together.
“All right, there’s something going on around here and I want to know what the hell it is.”
He went down the line, asking each man if he had a gripe. “Whatever the hell is on your mind, I want to hear it.”
Some didn’t have a problem with Legs. But some of us definitely did. I was the last one. Marmet dismissed everybody else. I was sitting there, and he said, “Burgin, what is it? What’s going on in this outfit?”
“John, Legs has been riding us for the stuff he’s been doing ever since New Britain,” I said. “He’s passing down the blame to me and everybody else for his own damn mistakes. I’m going to tell you something, John. You get that son of a bitch off of my ass or I’m going to get him off. And if I get him off, both of us are going to be sorry.”
Marmet just said, “I’ll take care of it.”
And he did, I guess. Because after that Lieutenant Legs didn’t give me any more problems for a long time.
A sergeant could do that—you’d better believe it. The first sergeant, gunny sergeant, he pretty well runs the company. Whatever he said went.
He’d just say, “Lieutenant, I need to have a word with you.” A wise lieutenant would listen. Because if he didn’t the sergeant wou
ld go to the captain and say, “Hey, we have a problem with Lieutenant So-and-So. This is what he’s doing, and it’s not right. And he’s not listening to me.”
Before long it would be fixed. The word of a sergeant carried a lot of weight. Yes, it did.
I had no trouble with other officers. Sledge, in his book With the Old Breed, was too hard on officers, in my opinion. But even Sledge liked Hillbilly Jones. We all liked Hillbilly.
First Lieutenant Edward A. Jones had been with us on New Britain, and he would be with us on Peleliu, for a time. He was the most—I don’t know what the word is—disciplinary officer I was ever around. He wasn’t a horse’s patoot. He didn’t make up his own rules. He went by the book. His mind-set was, You’re a Marine, and you’re going to act like a Marine whether you’re in the States or out here in combat. That’s the way it’s going to be.
Whenever we’d fall in for morning roll call, standing in ranks, he’d be out in front and he’d inspect the rifles. He’d spent five years as a seagoing Marine, so he was sharp. I mean he would pull that rifle—snap!—and twirl it—snap!—and it would come back to you—snap! He had it all. When you fell in, your collar was buttoned, your cuffs were buttoned. You stood erect. You didn’t slouch. You stood like a Marine. From reveille to recall in the afternoon he was as GI as they ever came, I’ll guarantee you.
But after recall turned us loose at four o’clock, Hillbilly was a different human being. He’d wander down to our tents carrying the guitar he always had with him and sit around and we’d sing and shoot the bull all night. Coming over from New Britain, we’d gather around Hillbilly on the deck of the Elmore singing one song after another. “Waltzing Matilda” was popular, from our stay in Melbourne. We sang “Danny Boy,” and “She’s Nobody’s Darling But Mine.” My own favorite was “San Antonio Rose.”
For some reason I always thought Hillbilly was from West Virginia, because he knew every country and western song. The fact of it is, he was from Red Lion, Pennsylvania, right on the Maryland border. Hillbilly was the leader of K Company’s machine-gun platoon, and the kind of officer you always wanted to have somewhere near you in a battle. He was soft-spoken, always calm and reassuring. Nothing rattled him. When everybody else was sweating and filthy, Hillbilly always looked fresh scrubbed. None of us knew how he did it.