Islands of the Damned

by R. V. Burgin

  Someone at battalion headquarters hit on an idea—they blanketed the beach on Ngesebus with smoke shells, letting the clouds drift across the channel. Then five amtracs waded into the channel and turned their 75s on the hill. They targeted the largest cave entrance with round after round until return fire was silenced. Then, with tanks leading the way, an amtrac with a mounted flamethrower moved in and torched every cave opening they could find. As a final touch a team of engineers blasted the entrances shut.

  Meanwhile we were waiting back at the junction of the west and east roads. Late in the afternoon we got word that the way was clear. We’d cross to Ngesebus at nine the next morning, September 28.

  It could be that General Rupertus was embarrassed that the invasion of Peleliu had gone on long past the three days he had predicted. It could be that by now the division command was as frustrated with the place as we were and wanted to see some kind of clear-cut victory. But our assault on Ngesebus was planned to a tee. It was to be a textbook exercise. The next morning every senior officer on Peleliu and from the surrounding fleet who wasn’t otherwise engaged was assembled at a point where they could look out over the channel and watch us go in. We had no idea we were playing to such distinguished spectators. They said afterward the reviewing stand must have been armor-plated.

  We were at the north point of Peleliu, near the phosphate plant, by eight a.m. We boarded the amtracs and then, as usual, we waited. While we were waiting we were treated to a spectacular sound-and-light show by the Navy and our own fighter planes.

  The battleship Mississippi and cruisers Columbus and Denver were parked out west of the strait, and for forty minutes they slammed the beach across from us from one end to the other with fourteen-inch and eight-inch shells. When that let up, the Corsairs started in. Two dozen had arrived from the Lexington, and boy, were we happy to see them. For the first time in the war, we had Marine pilots supporting Marine troops in a landing operation. They were taking off from the Peleliu airstrip and coming in from behind us. We watched as they peeled off, diving through the smoke and the dust, working the beach over with bombs, rockets and machine guns. As each plane finished its run it would fly back for another load. Some pilots cut it very close. We’d watch them dive and disappear into the columns of smoke. Just when we were sure they’d crashed, they’d pull into the clear, leaving the smoke swirling in their wake. Man, those guys were good!

  The Corsairs were still at work at 9:05 when we started across, and they continued almost to the minute we drove up onto the sand and bailed out. Thirteen Sherman tanks led the way, waterproof for amphibious operation. Three were swamped, but the rest made it. We followed, packed into thirty-five amtracs. Most of them mounted 75mm howitzers and they were firing almost the whole way across. There were about seven hundred of us, all that was left of the Third Battalion. Two weeks ago, when we’d stormed ashore on Orange Beach Two, there had been a thousand. Like then, we were sweating and scared. Nothing on Peleliu had come easy. We were sure this wasn’t going to be any different.

  Ngesebus was even smaller than Peleliu, hardly a mile square, and flat except for one low hill. There were none of the high ridges and limestone cliffs that had made Peleliu a death trap. But Ngesebus had its own surprises waiting for us.

  * * *

  It took the amtracs about six minutes to churn the five hundred yards. We expected any minute to run into the kind of firestorm the Japs had met us with on Peleliu’s beaches, but there was only scattered fire from pillboxes and behind the few ragged trees the Navy and the Corsairs had left standing.

  K Company was on the extreme left. This time we had the new model amtracs with the drop-down hatches in back. They rolled up on the beach and several yards inland before coming to a stop. We piled out and ran forward. Once again, the old lesson echoed in our heads: Get off the beach! Navy shells were landing farther inland now, and we had the airfield right in front of us, if you could even call it an airfield. The whole thing didn’t amount to more than a single landing strip surfaced with crushed coral, and a crude taxiway. I’d be surprised if the Japs had ever landed anything bigger than a spotting plane.

  We were still taking fire from among the scattered trees. A sniper winged one of our riflemen in the elbow, and when the mortar section corpsman, Ken Caswell, went to his aid, another Marine who was helpfully cutting the man’s backpack free with his KA-BAR accidentally slashed Caswell across the face. The two men went back to first aid. We’d see both of them again.

  In less than half an hour we made it across the landing strip and a few dozen yards beyond. There we came upon a low gray bunker that faced the channel.

  Our orders were to set up our two guns on the far side of the bunker. K Company’s gunny sergeant, W. R. Saunders, assured us it was clear. He said riflemen had already checked it out, dropping a couple grenades down a vent and moving on. So we went around it and started to dig in. About forty-five or fifty yards ahead, our other squad leader, Corporal Tom Matheney, and our sergeant, Johnny Marmet, were stringing phone wire to a forward observation post. I had no idea where Legs, our lieutenant, might be. That left me in charge, the only NCO on the scene.

  After I had made corporal on Pavuvu I never fired the mortar again. I trained guys on it. But as squad leader my job was to be out front with the riflemen, observing and directing the gunner by phone, telling him how many yards to the target, how many degrees left or right.

  I was working with good men. They had their quirks. But we were an effective team.

  Private First Class George Sarrett, the guy I’d spooked with the land crab on New Britain, was one of the best Marines that ever put on a uniform. He was smart and fearless, and he was fiercely individualistic. I never had a bit of trouble from him, but I never saw him back down from anybody, either. I liked him because he was a fellow Texan.

  Our gunner was Jim Burke. Gene Sledge, in With the Old Breed, called Jim a fatalist. I disagree. Jim was calm, like Sarrett. The only time I ever saw him get rattled was when Piss-call Charley bombed his foxhole on New Britain and he was calling over and over for a corpsman.

  The assistant gunner was Private First Class Merriel Shelton. I’m the one who stuck Shelton with the nickname “Snafu.” We were in the barracks at Camp Balcombe getting ready to go on liberty. Snafu was always talking, and when he’d get excited you couldn’t always understand him. He was a Louisiana Cajun from down around Francisville, and he had that accent that kind of swallowed up his words.

  That day he had his Australian money lying out on the cot. I said, “How much you got there, Shelton?”

  He counted up the bills. “Well, I’ve got ten or eleven pounds,” he said. Then he went through the small change. “And I must have eight or ten ounces.”

  I looked at him. “You’re screwed up or something. You’re just a snafu waiting to happen.”

  And that was it. From then on he was Snafu Shelton.

  Whenever we got into a firefight Snafu would hunker down behind something and mutter over and over, “They need to send more men up here! We need more men here!”

  I used to think, You get your ass up out of that hole and behind that gun and see what’s going on, you might could take care of a few of them yourself. But I never said anything. Besides, he was a good man.

  Private First Class Eugene Sledge was an ammo carrier. I never had to tell Sledge to do a thing twice. You asked him to do it, and he’d do it. He might be scared half to death, and a lot of the time he probably was. But he would do it. That’s all you can ask of a man.

  Private First Class John Redifer was our other ammo carrier. He was the type of person who likes to think things over. Slow and deliberate, but rock-solid. Nothing unnerved him. I never saw him panic. He and his buddy Private First Class Vincent Santos, a gunner and a Texan, used to go fishing on Pavuvu with hand grenades until somebody higher up put a stop to it.

  All of these men were sure-enough Marines. I can’t think of a higher compliment to pay them. You could count on
them.

  We’d been there around the bunker for a few minutes when Sledge called out.

  “Burgin, there’s Japs in this bunker!”

  You never assumed your back was safe on Peleliu. We hadn’t been watching our backs. Now, if Sledge was right, we had more than an isolated sniper behind us. We had a whole bunker full of them.

  “I think you’re cracking up, Sledgehammer,” I yelled. “Saunders says it’s clear.”

  Sledge, Vincent Santos, Snafu and Redifer were crouching in front of the bunker, watching several horizontal slits along its wall.

  “I don’t give a damn what Saunders told you,” Sledge yelled back. “There’s Japs in this thing. I can hear voices.”

  I went back to look over the situation. From what I could see, the low mound of coral sand about four feet high concealed a concrete box about twenty feet long and five feet wide. At each end steps led down behind an embankment and around a corner to a low entrance. You’d have to stoop to get in. The slits everyone had their eyes on were about eight inches long and two inches high with steel bars, like a jail cell.

  “I could hear them jabbering in there,” Sledge said.

  I bent to look into one of the slits and a face looked back at me.

  Before he could duck I stuck my M1 between the bars and got off two or three rounds. The face vanished. I’m sure I hit him. There was a sudden commotion in the bunker, like you’d hear from a beehive if you slapped a hollow tree.

  I stuck the rifle in the slit again and emptied the clip, turning the barrel right and left, trying to get at every corner of that thing. Bullets were singing, ricocheting all over.

  When the racket died down I could still hear jabbering. I couldn’t tell how many there were in there. But I knew there had to be a bunch.

  Just then a grenade came bouncing out of one of the side entrances. Everyone dove for cover as it went off. Two or three more grenades followed.

  Redifer, Santos, Shelton and Private First Class Leslie Porter, another ammo carrier, climbed on top of the mound and the rest of us crawled around to the front—the beach side—and hunkered down.

  “Sledge,” I called out, “take a look in the end of that thing and tell me what you see.”

  Sledge poked his head over the embankment and ducked back. Instantly there was a burst of machine-gun fire from inside.

  “You all right, Sledge?” I called out. He managed a weak croak, then disappeared around the corner of the bunker and climbed on top to join Redifer, Santos and Shelton.

  Redifer was on his belly above one of the entrances when the barrel of a machine gun poked out. Before the gunner could fire, Redifer reached down and grabbed the barrel. The Jap jerked it back inside.

  “There’s an automatic weapon in here,” Redifer shouted.

  “It’s just rifles,” Snafu said.

  That was Snafu. He could argue whether the sun came up.

  While Snafu and Redifer bickered, Santos found a pipe sticking a couple inches above the bunker, probably the same one where Saunders’s riflemen had dropped in their grenades. Santos started dropping grenades down the pipe as fast as he could pull the pins—and believe me, that was fast. Santos was a little guy but he was quick. When he ran out, Sledge and Snafu passed him their own grenades. We could hear a dull thump each time one exploded in the bunker below. It was hard to see how anybody inside could be alive after that. There was a moment of silence, then two Jap grenades flew out the side of the bunker. Most of us were clear, but Redifer and Porter, who were standing closest, raised their arms to shield their faces just as the grenades went off.

  Both were peppered with fragments. Doc Caswell had returned, his face swathed in bandages. He worked over their forearms and soon had them patched up enough so they were able to go on. But I was thinking, This could go on forever. We’re pinned down here. There’s no need in getting my men killed. I motioned everybody back a few dozen yards to a couple bomb craters.

  I knew one of the amtracs was idling down by the beach and it had a 75 mounted in a turret. I figured if we could get that amtrac to blast a hole in the bunker, we could make short work of the Japs and finish our business. While I was thinking, four or five Japs scrambled out of the bunker and took off to our right, running for a thicket. They were carrying rifles with bayonets, but they weren’t shooting. What struck me as funny was they were running clutching their pants, which seemed half falling off. We cut them down before they got to the woods. I thought, What kind of army sends its men into battle without belts to hold up their pants?

  I told everyone to stand by while I trotted down toward the beach. On my way I found Corporal Charlie Womack, I Company’s red-bearded flamethrower specialist, and his assistant, Private First Class William Lewis. Lewis had a combat shotgun. Womack was broad-shouldered and big as a football lineman. He needed to be—he carried seventy pounds of napalm and nitrogen in tanks strapped to his back. I told him to wait while I got the amtrac. When I had rounded everyone up we rumbled through the brush the hundred yards or so back to the bunker.

  “Here’s what I need,” I told the amtrac’s gunner. “Knock me a hole in that thing at least two feet wide to where a flamethrower can get in and scorch ’em.”

  We ducked into the bomb craters to watch. The amtrac pulled closer to the bunker, then let loose with three or four deafening rounds that left our ears ringing for minutes afterward. Coral sand and chunks of concrete rattled down on us and the mortars. Seconds passed before we could make out anything through the smoke and dust. But sure enough, the 75 had done its work, opening a hole in the bunker about four feet wide. One shell had gone clean through. We could see through to the other side.

  How anybody could survive that blast puzzles me to this day. But a Jap suddenly popped up in the hole, waving a grenade over his head and yelling something. Sledge and a couple others fired and he went down still clutching the grenade, which went off where he lay.

  Now everybody was firing. “Get that flamethrower up here, Red,” I yelled. “Everyone else, keep shooting!”

  Flamethrowers are a wicked weapon, no doubt about it, but we never had any qualms about using them. They would do the job.

  While we poured shots into the hole left by the amtrac, Womack and Lewis moved up to about five yards from the bunker. Lewis twisted a valve on one of the tanks. There was a jetlike whoosh, and a flash of heat and a torrent of orange flame splashed against the concrete and through the hole. We heard screams, and three more Japs came stumbling out the side, wreathed in flames. They went down in a burst of carbine fire, and as they lay writhing on the ground still burning, a couple of us ran forward to finish them off.

  We waited for the smoke to clear, then Redifer and I ducked down and entered. Redifer was the kind of man you want with you in a situation like that.

  When our eyes adjusted to the dark we could see why we’d had such a hard time digging them out of there. The whole length of the bunker was divided into a series of compartments separated by low openings. The openings were offset one from another so that a blast in one compartment would not reach the men in the adjoining compartments. Each had a narrow slit to the outside, a firing port. They could probably have holed up in there indefinitely, slipping out at night to bayonet us or slit our throats, like they had on Peleliu.

  There were weapons scattered everywhere—a machine gun, rifles, grenades. We could smell charred flesh. In one of the compartments we found three or four blackened bodies heaped in a pile. The one sprawled over the top didn’t look quite right. Something about the way he was lying there caught my attention—maybe I caught a slight movement. I motioned to Redifer to stop. Then I gave the Jap a kick in the ribs just beneath his arm. He grunted. I yanked my .45 out of its holster and fired into the back of his head, point-blank.

  Altogether, we counted ten dead in the bunker, including the Jap I’d just shot. Seven bodies lay outside. That was seventeen Japs that we knocked out without losing a man, two only slightly wounded. I felt pretty good
about that.

  For the rest of the day K Company mopped up the west end of the island, including a small hill north of the runway that was full of caves. We dug in late that afternoon at the foot of the hill, two to a foxhole, taking turns sleeping and watching. I shared a bomb crater with the guy who’d dropped the bazooka back on the first day on Peleliu. I took the first hour’s watch, then he took over. The wind came up, carrying the sharp smell of smoke and burnt flesh. Sometime during the night a rain squall passed over. It was his turn to stand watch again and I gratefully fell asleep. For some reason I awoke in a short time. My companion was sprawled against the side of the crater, peacefully snoring. I sat on him and grabbed him by the lapels and slammed his head against the coral. Before he was half awake I had my hands around his throat.

  “You son of a bitch,” I said. “If ever I catch you asleep again when you’re standing guard, you’ll never wake up!”

  After we got off Ngesebus, I went to Captain Haldane about the incident. I said, “I don’t want that SOB in my platoon. Not if I can’t depend on him.”

  We had one more day of fighting ahead of us, on a narrow peninsula jutting a few hundred yards to the northwest, where the Japs had located the big guns that had been giving us such fits. Three of our tanks knocked them out by early afternoon, and our invasion of Ngesebus was over. We’d faced about five hundred enemy defenders, but they were the best soldiers in the Imperial Japanese Army, veterans hardened by several years fighting in China and Manchuria. Our battalion lost forty-eight Marines—fifteen killed and thirty-three wounded. We’d killed 470 Japs. Only twenty-three had surrendered.

  Late in the day the Army came across the island and relieved us. We boarded Higgins boats and went down the east coast of Peleliu to Purple Beach, where we would go into reserves. There we found Chesty Puller’s First Marines, still waiting for a ship to take them to Pavuvu.

  * * *