out corpsmen and stretcher carriers, and we tried to shield them by throwing smoke grenades. Every man’s worst nightmare was that he would be hit while carrying a stretcher and dump a wounded Marine on the ground.
Before we got out of there, we’d lost five killed and fifteen wounded. It was K Company’s worst day on Peleliu. We fell back and set up a new line just before sunset and waited for them to come creeping out of their caves. We were only a few hundred yards ahead of where we’d started out that morning. But we were in the open, where it would make it easier to spot infiltrators. During the night artillery fired star shells, which burst overhead, catching our visitors like a flashbulb. They came single or in pairs all through the night. At sunup we counted twenty-one dead Japs around us.
The next two days were the same story. We moved forward into the Five Sisters, ran into intense fire and fell back. We lost nine more men, one of them killed.
All the time we kept up the mortar fire. George Sarrett and I were on the front lines, observing. Neither of us had caught a wink of sleep in three days. Just before it got dark I found I couldn’t focus my eyes anymore. I called John Marmet on the phone.
“John, I gotta come in. I’m absolutely dead.”
“Okay, come on in.”
George and I scrambled back through the twilight until we got to where we’d set up the guns. There were two of them, each firing a round every two or three minutes, for harassment as much as anything. In front of one of the guns was a shell crater, and I flopped in. You get in front of a 60mm mortar, it’s loud. The guns were firing right over my head every couple minutes all night long.
I don’t even remember falling asleep. The next thing I knew Marmet was nudging me awake. It was eight o’clock the next morning. I’d slept in all that racket for twelve hours.
You get that way. You get to the point that you don’t give a damn if you live or die, you’re so exhausted. You’re living in a nightmare. It’s impossible to imagine the look and smell of a battlefield if you’ve never been on one, and impossible to forget if you have. The ground where we now found ourselves was littered with discarded combat gear, Jap rifles that we’d smashed so they couldn’t be used again, spent shells, empty ammo boxes, bloody dressings, half-eaten rations rotting in the sun.
Half of us had diarrhea. You tried to dispose of it in empty ration cans and the like, but you were never far from the stink of shit. We and the Japs both tried to retrieve our dead, but too many times they were left where they fell. In the heat and humidity it didn’t take them long to go sour, decaying and rotting and adding to the stench. Big metallic-green blowflies swarmed over everything. If you saw a corpse move, it would be maggots. Throw a rock into a bush and a cloud of flies would rise up thick enough to cast a shadow. They buzzed from the bodies and the shit. They were even crawling into our rations and into our canteen cups.
I don’t know when it was that they finally started coming over in planes, spraying everything with DDT to keep down the flies. If it had any effect, we didn’t notice. They were still thick as raisins.
Late one afternoon Sergeant Jim McEnery came upon the blackened and bloated bodies of four Marines in a ravine at the foot of one of the Five Sisters. They were laid out on stretchers as though somebody was carrying them to first aid. They’d been there at least two weeks.
A little later I found four more in a rock crevice. From their equipment I judged they’d been advance scouts from an intelligence unit. The Japs had hacked them to pieces. They’d cut off heads and hands. One of them, they’d cut off his penis and testicles and stuffed them in his mouth.
It made me dizzy and sick. We’d heard the stories. On New Britain Japs had tied Marines to trees and used them for bayonet practice. So I never had felt any regrets about killing a Jap in combat. Never remorse about any of it. But after the sight of those mutilated bodies, I guessed I’d hate Japs as long as I lived.
While we were throwing ourselves against the Five Sisters, the Seventh Marines walked into a slaughter north of Walt Ridge that cut them up so badly they were pulled out. The regiment had lost 46 percent of its fighting strength and was in no condition to carry on. Trucks picked up the survivors and drove them back to the Purple Beach rest area. The First Marines had already pulled out for Pavuvu with over 70 percent losses. That left us. Peleliu had cost us 36 percent of our men, wounded and killed. But we were the only Marines General Rupertus had left.
Our commander, Colonel Harold “Bucky” Harris, had a well-known philosophy. Expend ammunition, not men. He had been rethinking the whole campaign against the Pocket. Whatever happened next, it wouldn’t be another headlong rush. Under Colonel Harris, the Fifth would move slowly and deliberately, reducing the Pocket ridge by ridge and cave by cave. Foot by foot if necessary.
On October 6 Third Battalion was pulled back from the Five Sisters. At nine o’clock the next morning we went into the Horseshoe behind Army tanks. Twice that day we pounded the lower slopes of Walt Ridge and the Five Brothers. Midmorning, when the tanks ran out of ammo, we withdrew to refuel and rearm. Then we went back in, this time taking demolition teams and amtracs with flamethrowers. We went on until early afternoon, when the tanks ran out of ammo again. Then we pulled out and were sent south for a rest.
About this time a three-day typhoon swept over Peleliu. The temperatures fell into the eighties, which was a blessing. But it turned the coral dust into gumbo. The mud clogged our equipment and everything bogged down. Supplies couldn’t get in over the raging surf. Streams of Curtiss Commando cargo planes from Guam air-dropped essentials. After the storm passed temperatures shot up over a hundred again and the mud turned back into dust. Things were as they had been.
On October 10, K Company was pulled out of reserves and sent to clean out a nest of snipers who had been firing down on the west road. We were well behind the front lines, in territory that was supposed to be secure. But once again the Japs had hunkered down and waited. A week before, at a spot along the road called Dead Man’s Curve, they had fired on an Army convoy and brought it to a stop. Everyone bailed out and ran for cover, ducking down behind trucks or diving behind rocks at the side of the road. Colonel Joseph Hankins, commander of First Division’s Headquarters Company, had come along in his jeep to check on reports of snipers. When the convoy stopped, Colonel Hankins got out and walked forward to see what was holding things up. Just as everyone yelled at him to get down, he was hit in the chest. He died lying there in the roadway, the highest-ranking Marine killed on Peleliu.
We had a couple Army tanks along with us this time to provide cover. We were taking rifle and mortar fire from several places along a cliff, but we couldn’t see where it was coming from. Hillbilly Jones’s rifle squad was just up the road, and as the morning dragged on a couple of his men were hit, and one of them was killed. Hillbilly decided to try to get a better view of the shooters from one of the tanks. I was about 150 feet away directing mortar fire and I didn’t see everything that happened. But after discussing the situation briefly with a staff officer from battalion headquarters, Hillbilly climbed onto the back of the tank and scrambled forward to slap the side of the turret to alert the gunner what he was up to. He was just peeking around the turret when a single shot hit him in the side and knocked him down. He rolled off the tank into the road, and the call went out for a corpsman. While we watched, Hillbilly picked himself up, bleeding from the side, and pulled himself back onto the tank. Then he stood up. The next shot caught him in the chest and knocked him flat again. This time he didn’t move.
Word spread down the line—Hillbilly’s been hit. By the time I got to the tank, stretcher bearers had carried away the body. All the memories came flooding back. Hillbilly carrying his guitar down to our tents on Pavuvu. Lazy days singing and cracking jokes on the deck of a troopship. Guard duty drinking grapefruit juice and alcohol, and afterward the hangover, on Banika.
For the rest of the day and into the next we blasted away with machine guns, mortars, and rifle fire at every crack or opening we could find along the west road. We took plenty of fire in return, until eventually it tapered off. Not once during that time did we see a single live Jap.
The day after Hillbilly was killed, Second Battalion made it south all the way to the foot of Hill 140, at the head of the Horseshoe. By midafternoon they had taken it, and after that they held it against a sharp counterattack. The battalion had fought its way in from the east road past Baldy, where the Seventh Marines had been beaten so badly. This time bulldozers smoothed the way, clearing a path for flame-throwing amtracs and sealing caves as they advanced.
Command viewed Hill 140 as the key to the whole operation. Its west side fell away sharply to the floor of the Horseshoe. The top looked down on four of the Five Brothers, just to the south. K Company’s mortars were rushed back along the west road and let out at a place where we could proceed on foot to Hill 140. There we would rejoin the rest of Third Battalion, which was on its way to relieve the Second Battalion early the next day. First
