The Pacific (67 page)

When the word came, they walked back to the invasion beach to the sound of artillery on Peleliu. An army unit relieved the 3/5 at six p.m. The amtracs carried King to Peleliu, and trucks ran them south, around Bloody Nose Ridge, then east across the first causeway to the regimental HQ on the first islet. Being so near Purple Beach, the new port area, brought the hope that they were going there in preparation to ship out.
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After a decent night's sleep, King Company had a long rainy day off to clean their weapons, get some hot chow from the mess hall, and wonder if the scuttlebutt was true.
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PRIVATE FIRST CLASS SIDNEY PHILLIPS WAS NOT CRAZY ABOUT LIFE AT BOCA Chica Naval Air Station, even though it turned out to be only seven miles to the north of Key West, Florida. Most of the marine unit stationed there were, like him, recently arrived veterans of the 1st Division. They all disliked being stationed out in the boonies or, more correctly, on one of the little islands sticking out into the Gulf of Mexico. A marine could only get to Miami if he had a long weekend liberty. The jobs of guarding the front gate, the gasoline storage tanks, and other important government property seemed almost pointless.

Most of the navy pilots stationed there had just graduated from flight school and received their wings of gold. The first taste of the glamour of being a pilot as well as the pay and the respect accorded an officer often went to their heads. Ensigns were likely to look down on a lowly marine at the gate and might decide to thank him for "guarding our airplanes." The senior officers sometimes knew better than to treat a salty marine that way, but one afternoon a car with four captains drove up to the main gate. Sid noticed the four stripes on their uniforms. He also noticed one of them lacked an ID card. He did not wave them through. The salty veteran with the big "1" on his shoulder patch started to ask about the missing ID when the car started to move forward. Sid "placed my hand on my revolver, and told them to stop, made them all get out and go into the guard house for clearance. This was all done with firm politeness, and snappy salutes."

Sid and the other veterans enjoyed playing games with the swabbies. Other navy officers coming to the front gate might be asked to get out and open their trunks for inspection. Sailors ducking through an illegal hole in the fence around the base might hear a gunshot. They assumed it had been aimed at them and it got them to stop their unauthorized egress. These kinds of stunts also earned Sid and his friends a reputation as the "mean and bad Pacific veterans."

He did venture into Key West a few times. One bar sat next to another bar, next to another. Sid visited too many of them on one trip and woke up in a strip club, drunk. He observed his friends explaining to the MPs why they did not need to bother with him. By his right elbow he soon noticed a girl "bumping and grinding . . . to the tune of the Hawaiian War Chant." She was lathered in sweat and had long stringy hair. "My thought was up close she isn't very attractive and then I slid to the floor. Deacon would have given me several of his long lectures."

AT EIGHT A.M. ON OCTOBER 1, IT BECAME THE 3/5'S TURN. THE OTHER TWO battalions of the Fifth remained in relative safety while Sledgehammer and his comrades walked toward Bloody Nose Ridge.
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The 3rd Battalion had been attached to the Seventh Marines, whose CO announced his unit would "make an all out drive to erase the remaining jap garrison."
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The Seventh would continue the push north begun by Chesty Puller's First. The walk to the front line for King, Item, and Love was not very far. The ridge came into view. The ceaseless battering by every weapon in the corps' vast arsenal upon the high ground had burned and blasted away the jungle, exposing several dreadful columns of Bloody Nose Ridge.

The 3/5 relieved the 2/7 on the eastern side of the main ridge complex. Some company-sized units of the 2/7 came down from the heights that had already been taken. The men being relieved had not eaten hot food or enjoyed a safe place to sleep since September 17. Just getting ammo and medical supplies and the wounded out had been difficult, their officers reported, since snipers were everywhere and the terrain was crazy.
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A few of them led the men of Item Company back up the steep paths into the coral walls to show them their positions. King and Love remained on the valley floor, back from the point of furthest penetration. The air over the forbidding terrain shimmered with heat and malevolence. The sound of gunfire at all times attested to the fact that somewhere nearby, someone was getting hurt. As the platoons of King found their places that afternoon, snipers killed two men and wounded two others.

The attack northward did not jump off the next day. The 2/7 shifted to the right in order to face a solitary ridge along the island's eastern shore. The plan worked out for October 3 involved the Seventh Marines seizing the ridge in front of it. To the left of the Seventh's ridge, across a flat open valley, stood the coral redoubt known as the Five Sisters, the object of the 3/5.
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The #2 mortar squad joined the chorus of mortars that began firing at six thirty a.m. Fifteen minutes later, the heavy artillery opened up, trying to force the Japanese back from their firing positions and therefore allow the riflemen to close with their targets. The high-explosive shells gave way to smoke shells at six fifty- five. The riflemen of Item and King took the point, moving forward along the flat and open ground, the bulk of Bloody Nose Ridge running along to their left and the Five Sisters five hundred yards dead ahead. On the 3/5's right flank, two tanks and three half-tracks of the Seventh nosed into the long valley known as the Horseshoe. On the far right, the riflemen of the Seventh assaulted the ridge on the shoreline.
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The 60mm mortarmen were not leading the charge, but they still came under direct fire. "Almost every cave in the side of the ridge on the left flank was full of japs," as King's skipper, Captain Haldane, discovered. "Tanks, portable flamethrowers, grenades, bazooka, and demolition charges were used to eliminate them." To Love Company fell the task of mopping up the areas behind the advancing King and Item.
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The seemingly endless permutations of hardened coral faces demanded the marines' attention to detail in the face of punishing small-arms fire. In the course of such work the marines learned to dislike the flamethrowing LVTs, or "Ronsons."
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To be effective with flame, the tank had to get very close to its target, and, since troops and tanks had to work together, that meant the troops had to approach the pillbox closer than they would have had to with a standard Sherman tank. Anything the Ronson could hit with flame, the Sherman could hit with a 75mm shell from a safer distance. For all of the frightening hostility of napalm's sticky sheet of flame, it caused less damage than an HE round and King Company measured its gains in yards of violent destruction.

The lead elements of King reached the base of the Five Sisters at noon. One platoon found a sharp ravine on the left side of the sisters and took a tank in with them to investigate. Love came up on their right, Item fell back to mop up, and the riflemen began to scale sisters one, three, four, and five. The mortarmen waited, ready to lay down suppressing fire or smoke rounds. Knowing when to press the attack and when to fall back demanded a cold assessment of a combat situation the likes of which no one there had endured. It fell to Captain Haldane, the skipper, to expend his men's lives as judiciously as possible, while producing the gains his superiors demanded. Haldane made sure he made that decision from the front. At that moment there was seemingly no cover. Rifle fire from unknown locations drove King to the ground.
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The volume of fire increased. The call for the smoke rounds came to the mortarmen. As the 60mm mortar tubes coughed, King fell back two hundred yards. Over to their right, the Seventh had also had to withdraw out of the Horseshoe because of the casualties in men and to its armored vehicles. Some of the caves held guns big enough to destroy a tank.
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The assault cost King Company seven killed and about thirty wounded, including Sergeant Hank Boyes.
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The high number of casualties came as a shock.
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The men spooned out some K rations, all too aware of what the night would bring. The mortar section had nearly used up its supply of 60mm mortar illumination rounds.
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The enemy must have watched the marines dig in because they seemed to know which foxhole to jump in and where to throw their grenades. The infiltrators came all night long. It got so bad that when a sergeant hollered, "You guys need help up there?" he got a quick, "Shut the fuck up!" for his trouble.
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At daybreak, Sledge heard men call out, "Get down, Joe," and "Get down, Pete," as they shot the remaining infiltrators scant feet from one another.
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Once secure, the marines counted twenty-seven dead enemy bodies within the company's small perimeter.
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They moved out and up into the Five Sisters again. Burgin and the mortarmen made it to the base of the escarpment. Even though he had heard about the cave system it amazed Burgin to see it. "A jap could run into one entrance and reappear on the other side of the ridge." A few feet past the entrance, the tunnel usually took a ninety- degree turn to the left or the right and another a few feet farther. These twists and turns helped shield the inhabitants. "Some of the caves had a steel door on them," he noticed. "We finally got the artillery up and busted the doors down and used the flamethrowers, and weeded them out of there."

" The difficulty," Sledge noticed about the destruction of a cave, was "getting anywhere near it 'cause of crossing fire from other caves."
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As a forward observer for his team, Burgin went forward with an intelligence-gathering team. He came across a few marines who had been tied up and used for bayonet practice. The dead men had had "their testicles cut out and their throat cut, you know, and mutilated. And, any one of the bayonet deals would have killed a man. But they [the Japanese]--they didn't know when to quit. They just kept brutalizing the--the marine. And you don't have to see very much of that until you--you get a great hatred before you." Tanks pulled up at the base of the Five Sisters to evacuate the wounded just before ten a.m.
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The riflemen ahead and above Burgin found that the caves they had cleared the day before were active again. The enemy killed in the mouth of the cave the day before might look like "frankfurters on a grill, they're sizzling and popping," from the flamethrower treatment, but a bullet or a stream of bullets could issue forth at any moment.
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The squads of King and Love gained the ridge while other marines worked through the ravine on the left. Both were trying to get to the second sister, just out of reach to the north. Too much rifle fire from too many holes forced the marines to pull back again. The smoke rounds started falling in the early afternoon and by five p.m. the line had pulled back about seventy-five yards from the sisters.
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A half hour later a 155mm mortar shell exploded near the 3/5 aid station.
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The day's casualty list grew to six men killed and thirteen wounded.
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Captain Haldane kept some men with him to hold the front line about three hundred yards south of the Five Sisters overnight. He sent King farther south until it backed around the southern base of Bloody Nose Ridge.

Sledge's company moved into the area where the First Marine Regiment had been cut into small pieces on D-day. Many Seventh Marines had fallen here as well. Their bodies had been removed. The enemy's dead, however, had not been. Looking around, Burgin could see corpses in all directions. The bodies "would bloat up and flies would be going all through their body from their mouth on out." With so much food, these green blowflies reproduced quickly and soon there were great swarms. His movement near one corpse caused a huge number to dash noisily into the air, "so thick that they would make a shadow, just like a cloud came over between them and the--between them and the sun." The flies made it difficult for the marines to eat. They could land on a ration in that short moment from when it was opened to when it was to be inserted into the mouth. Brush one off and another took his place. So brash, "you couldn't chew them off." The stench of the decaying corpses mixed with that of the exposed excrement suffused their existence. The odor "was something that I don't think any human being ought to ever have to endure."

Exhausted after the assault on the Five Sisters, Burgin got permission to find a spot a little farther back. He lay down in a shell hole near the 81mm mortar batteries and fell asleep. The mortars fired all night long, harassing the enemy and providing illumination with star shells. "I heard about three shells and that was it" until his sergeant woke him the next morning at eight a.m.

DAYBREAK ON OCTOBER 5 FOUND THE CO OF THE 1ST DIVISION, GENERAL RUPERTUS, in a difficult position. One of his regiments had been shipped back to Pavuvu, broken. Another, the Seventh, had lost its combat effectiveness. The Fifth's recent foray into the ridges had produced casualties at a similarly alarming rate. Little advance on the battlefield had been made. As one senior officer described it, "a sense of gloom and futility was rife."
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Lieutenant Colonel Shofner witnessed this because recently he had been banished permanently to Rupertus's division HQ.

Colonel Harold D. "Bucky" Harris of the Fifth Marines had sat Shofner down at the end of September and told him he thought he was a fine officer in many ways, and an excellent marine. Harris had, however, recommended Shofner "be returned to the United States for a period of one year before serving again in the field." The Fifth Marines' CO "believed that the strain caused during his imprisonment by the Japanese has left a nervous condition that makes it undesirable for this officer to remain in the field at this time." Colonel Harris knew that he was ending Shofner's career as a line officer with this fitness report. Shofner, who only wanted to fight, knew as much when he signed it.
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