Battalion had already gone into reserve. That left us the last Marine battalion fighting on Peleliu.
The death of Hillbilly Jones had been a blow. Soon we would absorb another.
Command’s idea had been to plant a 75mm pack howitzer on the top of the hill. But the crest was too sharp and narrow for a gun emplacement, and soon both gun and crew had been dislodged by Japanese fire.
When the Third Battalion arrived, Second Battalion was taking fire from three sides. Where the hill dropped into the Horseshoe, there was no protecting flank. In effect, they held the hill on just three sides. The other was exposed. Orders for Third Battalion were to secure the south side and take the bend out of the line.
In the morning they started working their way up the hill to where Second Battalion was dug in just short of the crest. Everybody was warning them not to show their heads over the top. Jap snipers on the far side were alert, and deadly. But someone needed to see what was beyond the hill in order to direct the battalion’s fire.
Captain Haldane, Johnny Marmet, Sergeant Jim McEnery and a couple other NCOs had made their way to the top and were flat on their bellies trying to figure out how to get a look at the other side. Second Battalion’s own machine gunners were dug in so low, they could hardly see what they were shooting at. They had to sight their guns by looking under the barrels.
This was not satisfactory to Captain Haldane, who was himself an old machine gunner. He slithered forward a few feet and cautiously raised his head.
Everybody heard a sharp
We had just arrived at the foot of the hill, looking for our new positions, when Sergeant Marmet came stumbling down the slope, a Thompson submachine gun dangling from his hand by the strap. I knew the moment I saw his face something had happened.
“Hey, Johnny,” I said. “What’s going on?”
He shuffled his feet and gazed off for a moment. “Okay, guys, let’s get squared away here,” he said. Then silence. We looked at one another.
“What the hell’s wrong?” I asked.
“The Japs got the skipper a few minutes ago on the ridge,” he said. It was like a kick in the stomach. Somebody threw down the base plate and the mortar tube. Somebody said, “Goddamn.” Sledge turned away. We stood there paralyzed and silent.
Finally Marmet pulled himself together. “All right,” he said. “All right. Let’s move out.” And we did.
It was more than a death in the family, losing Hillbilly Jones and Andy Haldane like that. They had been on Guadalcanal together, on New Britain and Peleliu. I found out later Haldane had been about to recommend me for the Silver Star for our action at the bunker on Ngesebus. He was killed before he could write it up. It didn’t make things any better and it didn’t make things any worse, as far as I was concerned. Hillbilly and Ack-Ack had been the core of our officers, leaders of men. Leaders of Marines.
First Lieutenant Thomas “Stumpy” Stanley was brought in from the battalion command post to take charge. The mortar squads were lobbing shells over the rim of Hill 140 into the northern end of the Horseshoe and at Walt Ridge beyond.
Jap artillery was answering us less and less. We got the feeling they were just waiting in their holes, like spiders. It rained off and on, and when the sun came out the rain turned to steam. The smell of death and the flies hung over everything, worse than ever. From where we looked out there wasn’t a speck of green anywhere on the island. We’d stripped it bare. All that was left was gray rock and rolling smoke.
On the thirteenth, K Company advanced 150 yards and straightened out the lines. We spent part of the next day with demo squads, sealing caves and stringing communication wire to hinder infiltrators. We figured the more pressure we put on them, the more determined the Japs would be to infiltrate, or even to break out. We heard that the Eighty-first Army Division, the “Wildcat” Division, was on its way from Angaur to relieve us. We also heard that command had declared the assault phase of the invasion—whatever that meant—officially ended. It had been twenty-eight days since we came ashore on Orange Beach Two.
This is where we finished our war on Peleliu. At dawn on October 15, the Army troops marched in, looking grim. They had six more weeks of combat ahead of them. We were headed out. We boarded trucks to the north end of the island, where the Seabees had set up a new bivouac area. For the first time in months we slept in tents, and the tents had plywood decks, which we hadn’t even had on Pavuvu. There were showers, a cookhouse, a mess tent where we could eat sitting down at tables. They had hung a sheet between trees where they could show movies. We shaved, washed our hair, brushed our teeth. Then we brushed our teeth again, just because we could do it.
This idyllic life didn’t last long for the mortar section. We were sent out to the east road and told to set up our guns facing the sea, just in case the Japs tried a landing. (It was not such a far-fetched idea. We heard later the Japs sent a small force over from Babelthuap in mid-January. It was intercepted and all but two of the eighty or so invaders were killed.) A few miles to the south we could hear the Army’s guns pounding away at the Pocket.
Finally they sent us down to Purple Beach to await transport back to Pavuvu. We were issued fresh uniforms, new boondockers, and that wonder of wonders, clean white socks. We burned the rags of our old uniforms and slept in hammocks, our sleep occasionally disturbed by tracers from the distant fighting. I dreamed of Florence, of the little bungalow we’d set up someday, of children running around the house.
A new cemetery appeared alongside the main runway at the airfield. Somewhere among the crosses Hillbilly Jones and Andrew Haldane were at rest. Altogether, the First Marine Division had lost more than 1,250 Marines on Peleliu. More than 5,400 had been wounded. There was no way to count the Japs, but we had killed more than ten thousand for certain. I read somewhere afterward that we had fired almost 16 million rounds of ammunition of all kinds during our time on Peleliu. That works out to more than 1,500 rounds per Jap. That seems about right.
The Fifth Marines had been the only regiment to achieve all its combat objectives. We had established our beachhead, crossed the airfield, occupied Ngesebus, secured northern Peleliu and whittled hundreds of yards off the Pocket. Of course none of us was thinking about any of this while we were at Purple Beach. We were just waiting for our ship to come in.
Transports arrived and one by one the other battalions departed, until we were the last Marine unit on the island. Finally, on October 26, the USS
The next morning Higgins boats took us out through heavy seas. The
The day before we left Peleliu for the
And you know what? I have absolutely no memory of having that picture taken.
CHAPTER 7
Second Battle of Pavuvu
We were a pretty quiet bunch for the six days it took us to sail from Peleliu to Pavuvu. A destroyer escort tailed us most of the way, a reminder that enemy submarines were lurking. Hillbilly Jones wasn’t there with his guitar, so we didn’t have our sing-alongs on the deck of the
