present a scattered target. Move fast and don’t stop until we get to the far side. A moving target is harder to hit. We crouched in the underbrush, listening to the guns bang away at one another. Then the word came: “Move out!”
That was the longest walk I ever took in my life. We were on the go. We were moving, bent over at a trot. Everything was coming at us—mortars, artillery, machine-gun and rifle fire. You heard the hiss and zing of shrapnel and bullets all around you. We were as exposed as bugs on a breakfast table. I kept yelling, “Keep moving! Keep moving!”
The field was littered with scraps from the tank battle the day before, empty ammo boxes, chunks of shrapnel bouncing and skittering along. There were a couple wrecked Jap warplanes, including one of their twin- engine “Betty” bombers.
I saw Merriel “Snafu” Shelton go down, carrying the mortar tube. Sledgehammer went down right behind him, cradling a bag of mortar shells in his arms. Neither was hit and both got up and started off again.
We couldn’t fire back at our tormentors because we were on the run. We didn’t want to expose ourselves any longer than we had to. But it was frustrating. After what seemed like ages, a line of brush appeared in front of us. We dove into the shade, panting and sweating. For the first time I realized how hot we had been coming across. It was like the Japs had one more weapon on their side, the sun.
Everyone was accounted for. Mortar section hadn’t lost a man in the mad dash. But K Company lost two dead and five wounded. One of them was Private First Class Robert Oswalt, shot through the head. He was the one I had almost shot between the eyes myself on New Britain when he came crawling out of his foxhole at night begging for a drink of water. Suddenly I felt awful.
Once we were across the airfield, our orders were to swing north and head for the low area east of Bloody Nose Ridge, near the coast. There we’d link up with the Second Battalion. As we started north we found our battalion getting squeezed between the Second Battalion and the Seventh Marines, who were still clearing out the swamps.
At the north edge of the field, a few yards on our left, we passed a two-story concrete shell, evidently the air base headquarters. By the time we saw it, one of the battleships had blasted it with fourteen-inch guns, but the walls were at least a foot thick with steel reinforcing, and it was still standing. Some other Marine unit had dislodged the Japs there and moved in.
Beyond the northeast corner of the airfield, we found ourselves in dense scrub again. Beyond lay a patch of swamp with the sea shimmering in the distance. The main road running north along the east side of the island cut through here, but we stayed out of sight. We found a clear space where we could set up the mortars and pound in the aiming stakes to orient the weapons. Late in the afternoon we fired a few rounds to register the guns and scraped out foxholes in the hard coral, piling up rocks and logs around them. All the time we kept our eyes on the wall of scrub around us, expecting a banzai attack any minute. It never came. In fact, the Japs never charged us banzai-style on Peleliu like they had on New Britain. They knew better. Now they waited until dark. Then they came creeping out of their caves to slit our throats.
As it happened, our second night passed quietly. Orders for the next day were to continue to advance north and relieve First Battalion. They had been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the Japs all afternoon, working their way along the lower slopes of the ridge. Whenever they moved forward, Jap mortars and artillery shells would come pouring down on them from the hills. Whenever they stopped, the fire stopped.
Next morning we set out for our rendezvous with First Battalion, still picking our way through dense scrub. I could tell it was going to be a hot one. As the sun climbed higher guys started dropping out with heat prostration, and we had to stop more and more frequently. We were burning through our salt tablets.
The east flank of Bloody Nose Ridge rose up on our right, and as we advanced we started coming under vicious artillery and mortar fire from the heights. We couldn’t use our own mortars for fear of dropping them on First Battalion, which was somewhere between us and the ridge. By noon we had linked up with them and we took their place in the front lines. When we started forward again we almost immediately ran into a wall of fire that kept pinning us down all afternoon. When we tried to move forward, the Japs would open up on us. There’s no feeling on earth as vulnerable as having somebody fire shells down on you from up above.
Second Battalion had pulled to our right and was making better progress through the mangroves. Behind them somewhere was the Seventh Marines. Our company finally found our own little patch of mangroves and pushed through until we came out in a coconut grove and, on the far side, an open area. This had once been a native village, but the Japs had taken over and built rows of barracks. During the landing we had bombed and shelled the area pretty thoroughly, and there wasn’t much left but piles of charred lumber.
Our supplies caught up with us by late afternoon, including some precious water. Things seemed about to take a turn for the better.
The next morning Second Battalion was ordered east across a narrow neck of land that joined the larger of Peleliu’s crab claws to the smaller. Japs had been spotted in that area. The Marines had just started across when a group of Navy fighters came roaring over, strafing the column from one end to the other. This mistake cost the Corps almost three dozen men. Our battalion was hurried forward to reinforce them. We were coming up on the same neck of land, following a crude road with swamp on either side of us, when shells—
We’d been stringing out communication wire as we went. I grabbed the sound-powered phone to the command post.
“We’re taking fire from behind us up here!” I shouted.
“No, that can’t be ours!”
“Don’t by God tell me it’s not ours! It’s coming from the damned airfield, and we’ve
That was the first time I ever experienced an airburst. Those things are wicked. The shell comes in and explodes before it hits the ground, and the shrapnel slices down through anything that isn’t under cover. A foxhole or a trench—it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference where you’re at. There’s no place to hide from an airburst. I thought for sure that stuff was going to eat us up. But by some miracle, nobody was hit.
After the artillery let up we moved on. By early afternoon we dug in south of the Second Battalion.
The Japs had their main base up on Babelthuap, a larger island about forty miles north of Peleliu. Our intelligence had information that they might send a force across to relieve their Peleliu garrison and drive us off the island. It wasn’t clear to us what a couple hundred Marines could do to stop a major landing, but at least we could sound the alarm and hold them off for a while. As we pushed through the swamps on the smaller claw we ran into an occasional sniper. But the next day or two was about the quietest we were to experience on Peleliu.
The third day they sent about forty of us on an extended patrol down to the tip of a long, narrow peninsula running along the southeast coast of the island. Hillbilly Jones was in charge and we had an Army man with a war dog, a big Doberman that could smell the Japs.
There were a couple of islands off the tip, and we were told about two thousand Japs were hidden there. When the tide went out it would be easy for them to wade across, come up the peninsula and catch us by surprise. We were supposed to set up and watch for them.
It was a spooky place to start with, gloomy and dark, with dense trees and thick vines snaking all over the place and tangles of roots that looked like the legs of some giant spider. Sledge was goggling at the birds, and I had to remind him to keep his mind on business. We settled near an abandoned Jap bunker, where Hillbilly set up his command post. The rest of us spread out and dug in. For a change the ground was soft enough to dig real foxholes. We set up our gun at the water’s edge and pointed it where we thought they’d try to cross. We didn’t dare fire a register round because every sound would carry right across the water. In fact, we were ordered to stay quiet, not light up a smoke, not advertise our presence in any way.
The sun went down, leaving us to our rations and to the mosquitoes. Sergeant Elmo Haney, who’d amused us with his antics on Pavuvu, had come along. He was more Asiatic than usual that night. He kept moving up and down the line urging everyone in a hoarse whisper to check their weapons, lock and load, stay alert. The Japs might come across at any minute with fixed bayonets, he warned. He disappeared, but pretty soon he was back again to see if
