Grunts (12 page)

In fact, the Americans had little idea of how strong the Point really was, because they could not see its defenses. “It was totally overgrown with little shrub trees,” Sergeant George Peto, a mortar forward observer in K Company, recalled. “It was so camouflaged. It just looked like a bunch of brush. You couldn’t really see nothing. It was one of the best fortified places I’ve seen or heard of.” The pre-landing bombardment had not even touched the Point. The Navy had mainly fired at observable targets. They saw nothing to shoot at on the Point, so they left it alone. Only on the ground, then, could the Americans truly understand what they were up against. The Point’s machine guns were raking the landing beaches. Japanese riflemen and light machine gunners even tied themselves onto the tops of trees. From that vantage point, they could pour accurate, aimed fire at the crowd of Marines all along the beach. “The entire beach was swarming with tractors, men evacuating wounded, and unloading supplies,” one Marine recalled. “The sands were black with milling men.”
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Basically, K Company had to take the Point or those milling men might well be slaughtered. When Hunt’s outfit hit the beach, it was over-strength, with 235 Marines, plus a couple of radiomen, three Joint Air Sea Communications Operator (JASCO) teams, along with a few stretcher bearers and demolition teams. The captain would literally need every man to accomplish his challenging mission. Most of the company landed one hundred yards too far south. The 2nd Platoon pushed inland about seventy-five yards, right into a diamond-shaped ditch that the Japanese had dug to ensnare American tanks. The trap “was about 10 ft. high and 15 ft. wide and possibly 150 yards in length,” Braswell Deen, a BAR man, wrote. He and the other 2nd Platoon men naturally gravitated to the trap for cover, only to find that it was a killing ground. Caught in the trap, Private Deen saw enemy bullets slam into his platoon leader and several other men. The Japanese small-arms and machine-gun fire was frighteningly accurate. Deen and the others were trying to fire back but they were pinned down “by a devastating cross fire from coral ridges, concrete pillboxes, caves and formidable fighting holes.” Deen’s assistant gunner took a bullet right between the eyes. His lifeless body slid down into the ditch. One by one, others got hit, many of them with mortal wounds. “Everybody was split up and separated,” another private remembered, “and guys with blood on ’em were all over the tank trap. Any time anybody tried to climb out and keep attackin’, they was shot.” The temperature was hovering near one hundred degrees. Water and ammo were already running low. The platoon was combat-ineffective, pinned down, and cut off from the company for the rest of the day. Only with the support of Sherman tanks could the survivors escape that night.
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Minus his 2nd Platoon, Captain Hunt threw the rest of his company at the Point. Initially his men tried a frontal assault along the beach, but Japanese opposition was too intense, so Hunt’s Marines, mainly in small groups, fought their way inland to attack the Point defenders from behind. “For nearly two hours they fought it out in a steady exchange of fire,” the regimental after action report declared. “The protecting [Japanese] troops were killed or driven off first, leaving the pillboxes open to annihilation from their blind spots.” That statement was accurate and straightforward, but it did not even begin to describe what the fighting was like for the infantrymen who had to do it. They fought the Japanese at close range, usually within twenty or thirty yards. It was personal combat. Men saw their quarry, aimed, and shot to kill. The main weapons of decision in this fight were grenades and small arms, not impersonal mortars or artillery pieces.

A few men did most of the grisly work. One such man, Private Fred Fox, noticed a stairway cut into the coral, leading to a dugout. He threw a white phosphorous grenade down the stairs. A couple other men threw fragmentation grenades. After the smoke from the explosions cleared, Fox raised his tommy gun and began edging down the steps. All at once, he saw a wounded Japanese officer at the bottom of the steps. “His left arm was burnt black but he was leaning on his right elbow with a Nambu pistol in his hand aimed at me. I pressed the trigger on the tommy gun firing four or five rounds into him.” The .45-caliber bullets tore holes in the officer and he fell dead. Fox moved past him, into the dugout, where he found several bodies, including another officer who had apparently committed suicide by disemboweling himself.

Elsewhere, one of Hunt’s platoon leaders, Lieutenant William Willis, led a group of Marines in assaulting the pillboxes that made the Point so formidable. One of his men, Private King, attacked one pillbox by himself. As he was hurling grenades at the pillbox’s embrasure, a bullet tore through his helmet but, by some miracle, it did not hit his head. Another bullet caromed off his cartridge belt. Instead of fleeing, King stayed put and threw another grenade at the embrasure, killing most of the Japanese in the pillbox. The rest tried to flee. “My boys lined up as though they were in a shooting gallery at Coney Island and proceeded to pick them off with ease!” Lieutenant Willis later testified. “I remember one Jap who left a trail of smoke behind him, his pack evidently on fire. He was screaming like a frightened monkey. Then he fell down, still burning up, and didn’t move.” The monkey reference was no accident. Willis and the other Marines thought of the Japanese as animals, thus dehumanizing them. This stoked their own hatred and willingness to kill. Another one of Willis’s men launched a perfect rifle grenade shot, right through the embrasure of the pillbox, scoring a direct hit on the 47-millimeter gun. The lieutenant watched in delight as the pillbox imploded. “After a big explosion, the pillbox burst into flame, and black smoke poured out of the embrasure and the exit. I heard the Japs screaming and their ammunition spitting and snapping as the heat exploded it.” Three screaming Japanese “raced from the exit, waving their arms and letting out yells of pain. The squad I had placed there finished them off.”
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As of 1015, the Americans controlled the Point. By Captain Hunt’s estimate, he had lost about two-thirds of his company. His Marines had killed 110 Japanese soldiers. Already the steamy air was filled with the putrefying stench of the dead. Wounded men and dead bodies were strewn all over the shaggy, jagged coral of the Point. “The human wreckage I saw was a grim and tragic sight,” the captain commented. “I saw a ghastly mixture of bandages; bloody and mutilated skin; men gritting their teeth, resigned to their wounds; men groaning and writhing in their agonies; men outstretched or twisted or grotesquely transfixed in the attitudes of death; men with their entrails exposed or whole chunks of body ripped out of them.” The mere act of taking this position was a triumph of near epic proportions, and a testament to the potency of well-trained, well-led infantrymen who were determined to fight hard and work together as a team. With the equivalent of only a couple hard-pressed platoons, armed with only light infantry weapons, Hunt’s men had taken five concrete pillboxes, numerous dugouts, and had killed over one hundred enemy soldiers, in less than an hour’s fighting. They had done this with no fire support at all, not even mortars.
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K Company’s ordeal was far from over, though. The men were exhausted and on the verge of dehydration from the intense heat of the tropical sun. Their uniforms were filthy, torn, and salt-encrusted. “Damn, it was hot and we were thirsty,” one of the Marines later wrote. Some resorted to crawling into no-man’s-land and stripping canteens from the maggot-infested bodies of their enemies. The Marines were also low on ammo and had little food. Hunt had so few able-bodied men left (thirty-eight, according to the records) that his fighting positions were spread quite thin, over the course of about eighty or ninety yards. Although K Company’s possession of the Point had eliminated the deadly fire that had been saturating the landing beaches, the company was cut off. The men were under constant Japanese mortar and sniper fire. The mortars were especially effective. As the shells hit and exploded, they sent shards of rock and steel flying in all directions. At one point, a Japanese artillery piece lobbed heavier shells against the Point, wounding several men. Air and naval fire subsequently destroyed the gun. It was difficult to dig into the gnarled coral ridge, so the Marines stacked rocks and logs around their hasty fighting positions. Hunt was in radio communication with his battalion commander, but his radio batteries were running out of juice.

Fortunately for K Company, a supply LVT, crewed by four black Marines, made it into the Point just before evening. They dropped their ramp and unloaded boxes of ammunition, hand grenades, barbed wire, a flamethrower, and several surviving members of the 2nd Platoon. The LVT crew also brought a fifty-five-gallon drum of water, but this did not do much good. “The drum had not been cleaned,” Private Fred Fox wrote, “and the water tasted awful, sickening. It was oil and water and no way could we drink it.” For now, Fox and the others had to make do with captured Japanese canteens. K Company loaded several of their most seriously wounded comrades aboard the LVT, and it left.
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The resupply came just in time, because the Japanese fully understood the Point’s significance and were determined to retake it. They had launched a few jabs during the day, but a sharper attack began at midnight with a ferocious mortar barrage, followed by a company-sized probe. Instead of hurling themselves forward with a wasteful banzai attack, the Japanese used the darkness to edge in close to the American lines. Their mortars forced the Americans to crouch low, behind their rocks, “like they were our mother’s arms,” in the words of one veteran, hoping the shells would hit somewhere far away. The shrapnel from the mortar shells showered the Point’s scraggly trees and tinkled off the jagged rocks. The fragments also scored several hits on men and the air was filled with plaintive cries for corpsmen.

The Marines were very well disciplined. They did not give away their positions with wild, searching fire. Instead, they waited until the Japanese were within hand grenade range and then opened up. “We did a lot of shooting, a lot of grenade throwing,” Private Fox recalled. “There was screaming and a lot of explosions.” Sergeant Peto was on the extreme right of the company position, crouched behind a .30-caliber machine gun that he had taken from a disabled Sherman tank on the beach. Because the 81-millimeter mortars were not operational, he had become an impromptu machine gunner. By the light of flares, he fired at anything that moved beyond the rocks. “Whenever anybody heard a noise or there was some movement, everybody would open up. They were all around us. They were within . . . fifteen or twenty feet of us.” At this stage, the American fire was too much for the Japanese. “The attack subsided to occasional harassing mortar fire,” Captain Hunt wrote, “and by 0300 there was quiet.”

As the sun rose, the fighting once again intensified. The Japanese showered the American lines with mortar shells. Most of the enemy infantrymen were in a defiladed area within hand grenade range. Private Fox was manning a captured Japanese machine gun. Just to his right, a small group of Marines were hurling grenades at the enemy soldiers, who were about fifty yards away. “There was a big coral rock in front where our guys could stand up and get a nice throw at the Japs. The Japanese would throw back with their grenades hitting the rock, which would roll off to one side or the other.” Captain Hunt was near the center of the company position, barking orders, radioing for help, managing the battle. “Our machine guns raked across the draw riddling any Jap that stuck up his head. I saw a hand rise to throw a grenade. Our bullets reduced it to a bloody stump. The fight became a vicious melee of countless explosions, whining bullets, shrapnel whirring overhead or clinking off the rocks, hoarse shouts, shrill-screaming Japanese.” More and more Americans went down with wounds. Captain Hunt saw them walking, or being carried by stretcher teams, down to the beach, blood dripping from arms, torsos, and heads. Both sides continued to pour huge quantities of fire at each other. “I smelled the powder vapor, acrid, choking, could see it swirling white—sweat in my eyes, stinging—jacket was wet on my back—rock chips spattering at my feet.”
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The fighting finally died down around 0730. The rest of the day was comparatively quiet. This gave Colonel Lewis “Chesty” Puller the precious time he needed to send help to Hunt’s hard-pressed company. In the course of the day, the colonel sent more resupply amtracs, with reinforcements as well. Also, B Company of the 1st Marines attacked north and linked up with Hunt’s K Company late in the afternoon on September 16. By then, Hunt had 60-millimeter mortars in his own position and 81-millimeters a couple hundred yards down the beach, at his disposal, plus some artillery, too. In that sense, his company was stronger than before but his men were now in the throes of total exhaustion. Knowing the Point’s defenders were still vulnerable, Colonel Nakagawa amassed 350 infantry soldiers and launched a night attack. This was a well-planned assault to capture a key objective, not an immature banzai attack. Even so, the Americans, aided by the half-light of flares, mowed them down in droves. “Howls of pain which rose in front of our positions, dimly heard through the roar of our weapons, told us that we were hitting the mark,” Captain Hunt wrote. The captain knew this was a fight to the finish. “Give them hell!” he screamed at his men. “Kill every one of the bastards!”

The Japanese colonel had committed another 47-millimeter gun to support his carefully conceived attack, but American artillery destroyed the gun and its crew. “The bodies were stacked 4-deep over the gun,” Sergeant Peto wrote. Farther down the beach, the 81-millimeter mortar crews were firing at the absolute minimum range. “We were firing only 200 to 250 yards,” Corporal Albert Mikel, a member of a mortar crew, said. “Our mortars were pointing almost straight up. In fear that the mortars might fall backwards, we placed sandbags on the barrels of the mortars.” In spite of this blanket of firepower, some of the Japanese closed to within bayonet range. Several of them fell upon Private Fox, stabbing him repeatedly. He nearly bled to death but somehow held out in a delirium until another Marine rescued him.