The Pacific (58 page)

Ensign Doherty's problem resembled a problem Ensign Reynolds had had recently. After a sharp dive over Guam, Reynolds's plane had "snapped violently over on its back, causing him to black out momentarily." He had recovered and righted his SB2C. "By holding his right rudder and using full right aileron he was able to return to the formation. Here he noticed that at low speeds the left aileron flapped up and down, with control being maintained only on the right aileron. He climbed to 9500 ft. where he and his gunner parachuted safely in front of the task group formation, being recovered by destroyers."

Noting the similarity of Reynolds's and Doherty's problems, Campbell told his engineering officer, Lieutenant Micheel, to "go find out what's wrong with these planes." The manufacturer of the Helldiver, Curtiss-Wright, had a representative on board
Hornet
. He climbed into the back of an Avenger on July 11 and Mike flew them both to Saipan. Ensign Doherty would have greeted them with some enthusiasm. Saipan's airfield may have been secure, but the island was not safe. Only three days previously, more than three thousand Japanese soldiers had launched a suicide charge against the army and marine lines.

The aircraft company man knew exactly what to examine. It took him only a few moments before he said, "I found the answer." Inside the wing, the wire controlling the ailerons ran through a bell crank. Both bell cranks on Doherty's plane had snapped. Mike examined them and saw they were made out of a white metal. Reynolds's plane had obviously snapped only one bell crank in his dive, and when he had tried to pull them flush, the one that had not moved had sent his plane into a roll. Mike said, "Well, what's the solution?"

"Get more bell cranks." It seemed simple enough. Mike's borrowed Avenger had room for all three, so they flew back to
Hornet
. After hearing his engineering officer's report, Campbell checked his documents and found Change Order No. 71, dated June 3, had specified "steel bell cranks and aileron push rods."
¹⁶⁹
Put another way, more than a month ago, Curtiss-Wright knew the bell cranks were failing. The company's representative had said nothing. Bombing Two had received many new SB2Cs in late June to replace those lost during the Battle of the Philippine Sea. These aircraft had had defective bell cranks. As the import of all this became understood, the aircraft rep would have found himself in hot water. Steep dives caused the bell cranks to fail. A failure on one side had made it look like the pilot was attempting to perform a victory roll as he pulled out of the dive. "It is possible," the skipper reported to the air group commander, "that many previous losses over the target were the result of this failure rather than of enemy antiaircraft fire as previously supposed." The truth was "hard on a bombing squadron's morale."

Campbell recommended that the SB2C "be restricted from dive bombing or high speed attacks of any sort . . ." until the defective parts were replaced. The ship's storerooms contained no spare bell cranks. Mike watched as "the guy from Curtis Wright went down to the engineering department and started manufacturing them out of steel." He fixed about half of them on July 13, which he hoped would last until new parts arrived.
Hornet
spent the thirteenth refueling. On July 14, Lieutenant Micheel was among those who climbed back into a Helldiver to continue their missions against Guam and Rota. Admiral Clark's flagship had not missed a beat. "Dives," Campbell noted, "were made from a comparatively shallow angle. . . ."

THE MASS DEPARTURES AND THE FLOOD OF REPLACEMENTS CREATED A LOT OF change within the 1st Division. Experienced men were promoted, creating the need for reassignments. On July 16, King Company's mortar platoon held a contest. Lieutenant Ellington, who commanded the platoon, tested each man's proficiency with the 60mm mortar. Private First Class Eugene Sledge won. He now served next to Snafu Shelton on #2 gun. Snafu served as gunner and Corporal Burgin ran the squad, which included a number of ammo carriers.

Sledge might have been a college boy who could compute an azimuth faster than the others, but he was also a volunteer. That made it easier for him to get to know the men in his squad. Snafu Shelton enjoyed smoking and drinking, was a whiz at poker from his years serving drinks in a saloon called the 400 Club, and spoke with an accent few could decipher. Snafu did not know the names of the towns in which his parents had been born.
¹⁷⁰
Corporal Burgin had been a traveling salesman for a few years after high school. Burgin had volunteered for the Marine Corps on November 13, 1942, because he had to--it was either that or be drafted.
¹⁷¹
He shared with Sledge a strong faith, for all of his bluster. Both Snafu and R.V. had missed Guadalcanal, joining King Company while in Australia. Merriell Shelton had earned his nickname, Snafu, in Australia for his wild behavior.
^aa

Their time in Australia entitled Snafu and Burgin to use Aussie slang, like "cobber" for buddy, but they idolized men like Sergeants Johnnie Marmet and Hank Boyes, both of whom had fought the battle of Guadalcanal. Marmet's stories about

Sledge wanted to hear about Gloucester. King Company, led by Captain Haldane, had repulsed half a dozen banzai charges the night after they landed. "Before the banzai charge"--Burgin told the story easily--"the japs--they had one jap out there that could speak English and our platoon sergeant, Harry Raider, was in charge of the machine guns. And, this Jap would say, 'Harry, Harry, why you no shoot? Harry, why you no shoot?' In a very calm voice Raider said, 'Give him a short burst of about 250 rounds.' " The burst had let the enemy know the machine gun's position. Before dawn the charge had come. "One of the Japs come in . . . to the foxhole where I was at. I stuck my bayonet in his upper stomach and shot him off . . . and just threw him over my shoulder, and I think I got about three rounds off on him before I lost him . . . I think I stuck that bayonet all the way through him. And, later on in--in the morning in the same banzai charge I killed one jap that was within three feet of me, just right in--almost right in my face . . . I don't remember how many japs that we killed that night, but it--it was a bunch of them, it was a lot of japs that . . . committed suicide that night."

Killing the enemy bothered Burgin about as much as "killing a mad dog." He hated the Japanese for the brutality they inflicted on marines. He did not take prisoners. Along with explaining banzai charges, Burgie may have told Sledge and the other new men about fighting in the jungle: the snipers in the trees, the shooting lanes cut through the jungle, the enemy's trick of yelling for a corpsman during a battle. Corporal Romus Valton Burgin also taught his men not to expect him to repeat an order. When Gene's friend Private First Class Jay de L'Eau started having trouble getting out of his bunk in the morning, Burgin walked in, dumped a pail of water on Jay, flipped his bunk over, and walked out without saying a word.

The men of King Company trained together and played together and lived together. Pavuvu offered no alternatives. Gene began to become a part of his #2 gun squad. He missed Sid, of course, and was delighted to receive a letter from him in mid-July. Sid wrote to tell him he had made it to the West Coast. America, he confided, had never looked so beautiful. Sid also repeated his promise to send Gene anything he needed. The letter caused Eugene to imagine Sid's arrival in Mobile. The image made him smile. Sidney Phillips had done his share and deserved his homecoming. Eugene trusted his friend to set the civilians straight on what the war was really like. After careful consideration Sledge decided that it did not matter that Sid came from a low ranking in Mobile society. "He is the best friend I have."

SID'S TROOPSHIP HAD PULLED INTO SAN DIEGO HARBOR ON A SUNNY MORNING in mid-July. On the dock, the marine band struck up "Semper Fidelis" and "Stars and Stripes Forever," as the grizzled vets stepped down the gangway. When the band burst into "Dixie," Sid Phillips got choked up. It had been so long since he had heard a live band. It had been so long since he had been home. Some men knelt to kiss the dock. Trucks took the veterans to the USMC Recruit Depot in San Diego. They dropped their gear, such as it was, in a tent camp.

For chow, they walked over to the great mess hall. Sid noticed that he and the other "lean Atabrine-yellow old timers" attracted a fair amount of attention from the endless numbers of clean-cut young marines in the line for the cafeteria. Sid and a cobber grabbed their trays and walked along until they came to the lettuce. "We asked if there was any limit on the lettuce, and when told there was not, we loaded our trays with nothing but lettuce. The lettuce was cut into one fourth heads, and we went again and again for more. A crowd of curious mess men gathered around us and watched us eat lettuce, and eat lettuce and eat lettuce. We hadn't had any lettuce for over two years; Australians didn't eat lettuce."

FOR COLONEL SHOFNER, THE WORK NEVER ENDED ON PAVUVU. ONCE THE briefings started in earnest, he learned the plans for the next operation were still being worked out between the 1st Division's CO, the CO of the provisional corps to which the 1st was attached, and the navy. Each had their own interpretation of the orders that had come from the office of the Commander in Chief, Pacific Ocean Areas, Admiral Nimitz, in May.

The campaign had been originally conceived to include three main islands in the Palau group (Angaur, Peleliu, and Babelthuap), as well as the Japanese bases on Yap and Ulithi. After much discussion, the mission became focused on those islands that held airfields: Angaur, Peleliu, and an islet just off Peleliu called Ngesebus. The other targets were dropped because their enemy garrisons posed no threat. Ulithi remained, however, because it would be easy to take and provide a magnificent fleet anchorage. The 1st Division would seize some of these objectives as part of the X-Ray Provisional Corps, which included some other units, most notably a regimental combat team (RCT) from the army's 81st Infantry Division.

The CO of the 1st Marine Division fought with his navy counterparts on the order in which the objectives should be taken. The navy wanted the island of Angaur taken first. General Rupertus insisted that Peleliu and Ngesebus be first. Rupertus not only disagreed with the navy, he also disliked his own assistant division commander, Brigadier General Oliver Smith. Smith, who had been working on the plans longer than Rupertus, was removed from the process.
¹⁷²
Rupertus also insisted that his division could take Peleliu by itself. He flatly refused to include the army's 81st RCT. Rupertus planned to assault Peleliu with two regiments from his division, with his remaining regiment as reserve. So far as he was concerned, the doggies could take Angaur afterward. These were big fights to be having in July for an operation set to begin on September 15.

While the outcome of the strategic catfight would affect the tactical invasion plans, the marine battalion commanders like Shofner had been told they would invade Peleliu and there were a lot of parts to it they could work on. Bucky Harris, Shofner's CO, had helped glue a mass of photographs of Peleliu onto sheets of plywood to create a huge portrait of the target. Taken by navy pilots in March and later by army bomber crews, the photographs allowed terrain features to be studied. Photos of the beaches had been taken by USS
Seawolf
, a submarine, affording a ground-level view of the immediate objective. Along with the images, the senior officers consulted a map of Peleliu drawn to the scale of 1 to 20,000. Comparisons of this detailed information to the hand-drawn, grossly inaccurate map of Guadalcanal that Vandegrift had carried ashore on August 7, 1942, were surely drawn by Harris.

Peleliu had a lot of beaches suitable for amphibious assault. The planners had long been drawn to the western edge of the island, where the beach ran essentially twenty-two hundred yards in length. Made of hard coral, the beach rose only slightly from the water's edge to the scrub jungle. Although the enemy had cut the ground with lengths of antitank ditches and erected minefields and log barriers, the LVTs and amphibious tanks could roll over flat ground all the way to the airfield. The island's entire road system found its locus at the village on the north side of the airfield. North of the village of Asias, aerial reconnaissance had revealed high ground. The jungle canopy obscured the hills, but any trained artillerist would emplace his guns up there to command the airfield and the beaches.

The 1st Division had confronted IJA positions on the high ground on Cape Gloucester. It had never crossed a barrier reef, however. The reef that encircled Peleliu undulated off the western shoreline about four hundred to six hundred yards. In his studies at the USMC Command and Staff School, Shofner would certainly have learned that a reef just like this one had been a key factor in the debacle of the invasion of Tarawa. It had inhibited the speed of the assault. Speed and power were the keys to success in any amphibious operation. The Japanese could be expected to use Peleliu's reef to its advantage. A lot of specialized amphibious equipment had been developed since Tarawa, however, and the senior staff spent a lot of time planning for its use.

The specialized equipment of most immediate concern to a battalion commander was the LVT, or amtrac. The tracks of these vehicles would carry his men over the reef and onto shore. A few of them, instead of carrying marines, carried a 37mm antitank gun. These new LVTs would drive inland with the men while the troop carriers went back out to the reef to get more men. It all sounded great to Shofner, except that the 1st Division had nowhere close to the number of amtracs it needed. None of the new LVTs had arrived. He did not have enough marines who knew how to drive an LVT and no one could train on the new ones. In desperation, the staff gave some enlisted men the new LVT's operations manuals to read.

Training the men proved difficult on the tiny island of Pavuvu. Shofner informed his officers that the men of the 3/5 "had to be drilled so that they could do their job when exhausted, afraid, wounded, hungry and thirsty, and in shock from the violence of battle." While his officers no doubt agreed, there were some problems. Battalion-sized exercises were out. The island was so small that attempts to hold large-scale field problems had seen men "slipping between the tents and mess halls of their bivouac area."
¹⁷³
As a former guerrilla leader, Shofner had become accustomed to making do with whatever was available.