Or you’d be moving along a trail, single file, and a Jap would get in behind the last man in the column and bayonet him or slit his throat. You’d never hear him go down. Then they’d get the next man, and the next, picking them off one by one.
I sat and listened whenever they were telling war stories, and I’d ask questions. What happened, when did it happen, how did it happen? I paid attention because I knew that we were soon going into the same situation, or something as bad.
They canceled all leaves, and we could no longer go into the city. I wrote Florence a long letter: “We are pretty busy getting ready for you know what. But from what I can find out we are going to be here for another 3 to 6 weeks…. We are making rubber boat landings up until Friday, I know, but I don’t know what is beyond that.”
We’d been at Camp Balcombe five months. One evening they told us to get our gear together. We were moving out.
We marched out of camp about dusk and hiked all that night. We’d walk for fifty minutes and break for ten, walk fifty minutes and break for ten. In the morning, field cooks met us and had breakfast ready. Then we took off again and hiked all day, fifty and ten all the way. That night we stopped and ate again. Me and Jim Burke figured we were going to spend the night, so we pitched our pup tent. About the time we got it up, someone yelled “Fall in!”
You never saw two Marines tear down a pup tent and get back in formation so fast in your life.
We had a pace we had to maintain, and we wore our full transport packs, upper and lower part, with a bedroll. The whole thing weighed about forty pounds. We were carrying our M1s and I had that .45 strapped to my side and was carrying the butt plate for the mortar. Whenever they hollered “break,” I’d just lean back on that pack and instantly I was gone. I must have slept nine minutes out of every ten-minute break.
We hiked all that second night, and starting the next morning we pulled maneuvers all day long. Sherman tanks, artillery, machine guns, all firing live ammunition, aircraft bombing and strafing out ahead of us. We’d be crawling along on our bellies and they were firing right over our heads. You’d hear the bullets zinging. It was as near combat as you could get.
About four o’clock in the afternoon we started hiking back. Somewhere along the way, they sent trucks out to pick us up, and what a blessing that was. It was Friday afternoon. We’d been at it since Wednesday. And as tired as everyone was, we still went into town on Saturday.
By now Florence and I had most of six months together. I don’t know that there was one moment when I could have said that we were in love. It was just a slow process in which we began to care for each other. We talked about me going into the war. We knew that it was going to happen sooner or later. We didn’t know when.
Toward the end of September they took our dress uniforms, our greens and hats and shoes. We went on liberty wearing our khakis and combat boots. We called them “boondockers.” Florence hadn’t even been expecting me. I looked all over town for her and finally found her with a bunch of her girlfriends in St. Kilda Park, where we had sat and talked so often.
She knew the minute she saw me.
We just hung on to each other. I kept saying, “I’ll be all right. I’ll be all right.”
I would have loved to have married her right then. But I had sense enough to know what was ahead of me. I didn’t have a clue how long it would last. I knew I couldn’t even think about marrying her and going off and getting killed and leaving her a widow.
“I’ll be all right,” I said. “I’ll come back for you when it’s over.”
But I was wrong.
CHAPTER 3
Green Hell
The Sunday morning after Florence and I said our good-byes, they rousted us out of bed at six and told us to get our gear together. The First and Second battalions had already shipped out by the end of August. Shortly afterward the Seventh Marines had moved to the docks. We knew we were next.
After breakfast we were trucked down to Port Melbourne. We stood around all morning before finally climbing the ramp to the
Then we waited some more.
All that day and into the night we stood along the rails and watched the
That ship sure wasn’t designed to carry troops. We were stuffed into the cargo hold with our gear. We’d sleep in hammocks stacked four and five high and slung between riveted bulkheads and columns. Make-do plumbing facilities were up on the open deck. The chow lines were slow and stretched for yards.
We steamed out of Port Phillip Bay into the ocean the next morning, September 27, then swung around to the north. We had only a general idea where we were headed—to some island someplace. To the war.
We sailed on for a little over a week without incident before pulling in one afternoon at Goodenough Island off the eastern coast of New Guinea. The Australians had cleaned the Japs out the year before, and the First Battalion had already set up an advance camp. We were able to disembark and walk around for a couple hours and get our land legs back. After the gentle, rolling country around Melbourne, Goodenough was a change in scenery and a glimpse of things to come. There was a coastal strip of jungle, then a steep, rugged slope leading up to a sharp volcanic peak. That night we were back aboard ship when a Jap plane came over, low. You couldn’t see him but you could hear him. He dropped a bomb without hitting anything and flew off. But he let us know we were in the war zone.
The next morning we pulled out and three days later, on October 11, we landed at Milne Bay, New Guinea. That would be our home for almost three months. The letters Florence had been writing in Melbourne—the first of hundreds—finally caught up with me. And I wrote my first letters to her.
We found a camp scraped out of the jungle. Rows of tents were set up on either side of a sort of road bulldozed through the mud. The rains came and went, and came and went again. The tents were wet, the ground was wet, our clothes were wet. When we went to lie down, our cots would sink into the muck so that we soon found ourselves sleeping on the ground with only a layer of canvas beneath us. Mornings we stood in formation, ankle-deep in the muddy “street.” Between rains we dried out a little. They scattered some crushed rock around, and that helped a bit.
Mud or not, we still observed the old Marine tradition of cleanliness. Company headquarters was down at the end of the street, and right behind that was a little branch creek. It became our laundry. We’d take a bar of Marine soap and a scrub brush and go down there and find a rock, maybe about a foot wide and not too jagged. We’d lay out our clothes one by one—dungarees, shirt, underwear—soap them up, scrub them with the brush, turn them over and do the same thing. Then we’d rinse them in the running creek and lay them out to dry. If it was sunny, it didn’t take too long. If it wasn’t, we wore them wet.
We were never idle. We were learning the new art of jungle warfare, at it every day with mock combat or with marches, rifle range, pistol range.
In November, Third Battalion got a new commander, and we met him in a strange way. Lieutenant Colonel Austin Shofner had just come up from Australia, where he had been personally decorated by General Douglas MacArthur with the Distinguished Service Cross. In 1942 when he was a captain, Shofner was captured on Corregidor Island and survived the Bataan Death March. After almost a year in a prison camp, he and a dozen others—American Marines, soldiers, and sailors and Filipino soldiers—escaped into the jungle, where they joined local guerrillas to fight the Japs.
We were down in a creek bed shooting our .45s when someone came thrashing out of the underbrush and the vines. It was Colonel Shofner. He asked what we were doing, then told one of the guys, “Set me up a
