to fray.
Each day officers herded these bored and enervated Marines together and took them ashore in landing boats. They ran up to the reef and piled out. They waded ashore. They walked over the little islets and felt the burning coral through the thinning soles of their boondockers. Then they waded out to the reef again and went back to the ships—to ennui relieved only by a surprisingly inexhaustible supply of ice cream or an occasional good joke.
Such as that morning on which a group of Marines waded back to their boat:
“Anyone here from Texas?” one of the coxswains called.
A corporal brightened and pushed back his helmet.
“Ah’m from Lubbock,” he said, his voice proud and expectant.
The coxswain grinned impishly.
“You can swim out, mate,” he said.
They were laughing, too, on Pavuvu.
Chesty Puller had contributed another Pullerism to his legend. He had been made a full colonel and had taken command of the First Marine Regiment. And then some comfort-loving clod of a quartermaster officer had issued Chesty Puller’s men sleeping pads. They were all of a half-inch thick and to the comfort-hating Puller they were as corrosive and beguiling as the soft voices of sirens in the ears of Ulysses’ men. Chesty Puller ordered the pads gathered up and thrown into the bay.
“Goddamit,” he raged, “are they trying to make sissies out of my men?”
There were rubber boats standing off Tinian’s southern shore. There were 12 of them. They were filled with Japanese officers. Among them was a huge figure. Vice Admiral Kakuji Kakuda was more than six feet tall and his bulk of more than 200 pounds was big even by Western standards. By all standards, bald and burly Kakuda was a coward and a drunk.
He was the commander of the First Air Fleet on Tinian, but Kakuda could no more command than he could stop swilling saki or scheming for his own safety.
On this night of July 15 he had collected his headquarters staff and begun to paddle south toward Aguijan Island and the rendezvous he had arranged with a Japanese submarine. But the sub did not show up.
Admiral Kakuda paddled back to Tinian. He tried again for three more nights. Still the submarine did not appear. On the night of July 20 an American gunboat almost sent Kakuda’s rubber-boat flotilla to the bottom. The admiral retired in dismay. He hastened to a well-armored dugout on the eastern side of the island, and was never heard from again.
That was on July 21, the day the Americans came back to Guam.
10
There had been a typhoon scare.
Admiral Spruance had asked Close-in Conolly if he planned to postpone the Guam landings to avoid the typhoon headed his way. But Conolly’s weather officer assured him that July 21 would be a perfect day for landings.
It was. It dawned clear and slightly overcast, with a light wind and calm sea, and in that dawn a voice came over the bullhorns of the transport ships.
“Men, this is General Geiger. The eyes of a nation watch you as you go into battle to liberate this former American bastion from the enemy. Make no mistake, it will be a tough, bitter fight against a wily, stubborn foe who will doggedly defend Guam against this invasion. May the glorious traditions of the Marine
The general’s voice ceased. “The Marines’ Hymn” crashed out and the men began to go over the side.
It was an unusual D-Day morning, almost a theatrical one, but the Marines wanted Guam badly. Some of the NCO’s and officers going over the side had served there. Many of them had buddies among the 153 Marines who were taken prisoner when Guam surrendered. The recapture of Guam would heal an old hurt.
At eight o’clock the Third Division’s first wave had made the transfer from landing boats to amtracks. The men crouched low as the ungainly craft fanned out and roared ashore, heading for those beaches lying between the “devil’s horns” of Adelup Point on the left, Asan Point on the right. At eight-twenty an air observer reported:
“The rockets are landing and giving them hell. Good effect on beach. Landing craft seem to be about one thousand yards from beach.”
Seven minutes later came this report:
“First wave two hundred yards from beach.”
Naval gunfire lifted and began pounding targets inland. At eight thirty-three the air observer reported:
“Troops ashore on all beaches.”
The Marines had returned to Guam, and already, the sands below the bleak white face of Chonito Cliff were streaked crimson with their blood.
About six miles to the south, underneath Orote Peninsula, which formed the lower land arm of Apra Harbor, the First Brigade attacked with both regiments abreast. And heavy as the Guam bombardment had been, it had not knocked everything out. Japanese 75’s and 37’s were firing as the men of the Fourth and Twenty-second Marines rode their amtracks shoreward. Before the amphibians had waddled up on the sand, 24 of them were knocked out. Casualties mounted, and there was no one to care for them. Doctors and corpsmen were the heaviest hit. One battalion’s aid station took a direct hit from a 75 which killed and wounded all but one man.
Corpsman Robert Law saw a shellburst spread eight Marines around him. One of the men had a shattered leg and his life’s blood was spouting carmine from it. Law gave the man morphine. The man smiled and asked for something to hold. Law shoved clods of earth into his hands. He pulled out his combat knife and began to amputate the leg. The Marine squeezed the clods of earth to dust. But he made no sound. Law bandaged the stump. When he glanced up, the Marine smiled at him again. Then he sank into unconsciousness.
On the left, the Twenty-second Marines under Colonel Merlin Schneider were charging toward the rubble of Agat Village. Captain Charles Widdecke began to lead his company around Bob’s Hill, a mound overlooking the town. Machine-gun fire knocked them flat. They took cover in a trench. They dug in, expecting to stay there for the night. Down a trail straight toward them marched a dozen Japanese carrying the very machine guns which had pinned the Marines down. There was the crackling of American guns. The Japanese were slammed to earth and the way to the village was clear.
On the right, Colonel Alan Shapley’s Fourth Marines drove toward Mount Alifan, about 2,000 yards inland. They passed through a grove of palm trees and concealed snipers. Sherman tanks led them through a maze of pillboxes and blockhouses. They sprinted through the slippery muck of a rice paddy, leaping across its myriads of tiny interlacing streams. They ran the gantlet of machine-gun fire and mortar shells, they threaded the strong points of Alifan’s foothills while the lumbering tanks bucked and roared and sealed off cave after cave, and by nightfall they held a beachhead a mile deep.
Behind that beachhead, “The Old Bastards” were wading ashore.
They were not really so old, these dogfaces of the 77th Division’s 305th Infantry Regiment. But they were in their late twenties, something like an average of four to six years older than their youthful comrades in the First Marine Brigade.
They had to wade into the southern beaches from the reef simply because the Marine amtracks had suffered heavy losses and they had none of their own. Fortunately, the young bastards ahead of them were busily cleaning out the enemy. The soldiers had only the discomfort of waist-high water and occasional potholes to hinder their walk ashore. The entire regiment was on land by nightfall, the last to arrive being its commander, Colonel Vincent Tanzola, who was saved from being stranded on the reef when a rubber boat drifted by. He grabbed it and paddled ashore.
