The Pacific (59 page)

Of necessity, training on Pavuvu focused on the individual, the platoon, and the company. An infiltration course forced men to crawl forward under live fire. Instructors demonstrated techniques for hand-to-hand fighting with knives, bayonets, and anything handy. Time on the rifle range included practice throwing grenades as well as an introduction to other weapons that the rifle platoons had begun to receive in quantity: the bazookas and the portable flamethrower.

Colonel Shofner believed physical conditioning to be the essential ingredient for successful combat troops. The challenges he had endured on Corregidor, in Cabanatuan, and across Mindanao had taught him how "to make men give more than they thought they had." He intended to lead men into battle who had the strength to fight. Once again, though, the size of Pavuvu limited his options. Long hikes with full packs and equipment had long been used to harden marines for the rigors of combat. In order to have the men march with full packs, most officers put their columns on the shore road. Since the road only circled part of the island, they marched in a circle, down one side of the road and up the other clockwise, while other units did the same counterclockwise. The marching units kept bumping into one another.

Shofner began to earn a reputation among the other battalion commanders as a hard driver, an officer particularly demanding of his captains and lieutenants.
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Harris and the other senior officers, however, were impressed by Shifty's efforts with his men and his grasp of his responsibilities in the upcoming campaign. The NCOs of the 3/5 like Hank Boyes and the battalion's enlisted men like Eugene Sledge thought Shofner was terrific.
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AFTER WEEKS OF TURNING GUAM INTO A ROCK PILE, BOMBING TWO SUPPORTED the 3rd Marine Division's landing there on July 21. Lieutenant Micheel took off at five fifty a.m. with nine Helldivers, thirteen Hellcats, and six Avengers on his wing. He led them to Point Nan, on the northern tip of the island, before reporting in to the commander of support aircraft, who had them circle at ten thousand feet until he was ready. The first target was the Red Landing Beaches. The dive-bombers swooped down in shallow dives to drop the five- hundred-pound general-purpose bomb in their belly racks. The second target turned out to be a ridge with defensive positions set into it. At his release point about two thousand feet above it, Mike noticed "the ridges . . . were well covered with bomb hits." He released the bombs in the wing racks. No flak burst around him. The strike group began landing aboard at eight thirty-four a.m. He didn't fly again that day or the next. On July 22, the task group set off for the next mission: the island of Yap. During a busy week of strike missions there, Lieutenant Micheel made his one hundredth carrier landing.

All of the Beast's problems remained: its 20mm cannon jammed 30 percent of the time and Bombing Two had stopped using the bomb racks because of their tendency to release the bomb not on the target but on
Hornet
's flight deck during landing. Worse, the Beast killed another of Micheel's comrades that week. "As the plane started to nose up out of its dive," the skipper reported to the air group commander, "the left wing was seen to drop, and the plane rolled onto its back and plummeted vertically to the ground. As there was no AA fire at the time of this attack, it is presumed that the failure of the aileron bell crank was responsible for the crash." The wolves eased the angle of their dives to forty-five degrees. Their bombs started falling short of their targets.

AT DINNER ONE EVENING SHOFNER HAPPENED TO BE SITTING NEAR CHESTY Puller when a messenger arrived. Lieutenant Colonel Sam Puller, Chesty's younger brother, had been killed during the invasion of Guam. Chesty became reflective, and he invited Shofner to have a drink. He wanted to spend some time with an old China Marine like himself. Chesty had been the executive officer of the 2nd Battalion, Fourth Marines, when Shofner arrived in Shanghai in June of 1941. Puller spent the night "nursing a bottle of bourbon and telling Shofner stories about Lou and Sam Puller growing up in Tidewater Virginia."

Puller and Shofner's next assignment had come into focus quickly with the arrival of some new information and the return of General Geiger, the commander of the X-Ray Amphibious Force, now called the Third Amphibious Corps. Geiger learned from documents captured on Saipan that the enemy garrison on Peleliu numbered eleven thousand men, a lot more than previously expected. In late July, frogmen had swum close to the beaches looking for mines and other obstacles. The western beaches had not been heavily fortified. General Geiger forced some changes on General Rupertus of the 1st Division.

The idea of a second landing, to catch the enemy in a pincer movement, was abandoned once and for all. Geiger also revised Rupertus's plan to employ two of his regiments and hold the third in reserve. More marines were needed. All three infantry regiments of the division would land abreast of one another. One battalion would remain in reserve. Geiger did not, however, force Rupertus to include the soldiers. Since the other island target, Angaur, would not be invaded until the marines had a firm hold on Peleliu, Geiger designated the 81st RCT as the marines' reserve. He and Rupertus thought that would suffice. As a recent graduate of the USMC's school, though, Shofner would have known that the optimum ratio of attackers to defenders in an amphibious operation is three to one. The 1st Division's three regiments would not quite muster a one-to-one ratio.

Part of the discrepancy in ground troops would be made up by the Fifth Fleet. The navy's carrier-based aircraft had struck Peleliu hard already and would soon return. Days before the invasion, the fleet's great battlewagons would circle the tiny island. Salvos from dozens of five-inch, twelve-inch, and sixteen-inch guns--the latter far larger and more destructive than land-based artillery--would unleash a firestorm of unheard-of proportions. Nothing would survive. The Japanese empire had no navy with which to impede, much less threaten, the U.S. fleet, although the admirals certainly looked forward to the next sortie by the remaining Japanese carriers so as to complete the job left unfinished near Saipan. Men had taken to calling the carrier battle near Saipan "the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot" because scores of Japanese pilots had been killed. Peleliu, well south of the Marianas, was not expected to become the setting for the final carrier battle. The Japanese, however, had to stand and fight sometime, somewhere.

The Japanese on Peleliu who survived the Fifth Fleet's shellacking would be overwhelmed by speed. At 4.5 mph, the waterborne speed of an amtrac did not seem like much. The staff estimated the trip from the reef to the beach would take fifteen minutes. Enough LVTs had been promised, though, to create a giant conveyor belt. At H hour, amtracs with the 37mm antitank guns would crawl ashore and drive inland to blow up bunkers. One minute later the first wave of marine riflemen would land, with more waves landing every five minutes. In twenty minutes, five battalions of forty- five hundred men would be on their assigned beaches. Immediate fire support would come from the division's tanks, whose flotation devices enabled them to make the trip from the reef to shore, as well as from the 75mm pack howitzers loaded in some of the amtracs. The regimental weapons companies would begin landing five minutes later, their larger 105mm howitzers brought in by "ducks" (floating trucks officially designated DUKWs) fitted with a mechanical hoist. In the meantime, the empty amtracs would drive back out to the reef, pick up more troops, and return. Eighty-five minutes after H hour, three more infantry battalions would be ashore. Eight thousand combat marines would sweep across Peleliu as the first of the division's seventeen thousand support troops landed to provide the supplies and logistics to sustain the drive.

Colonel Shofner, who had fought the enemy with a few rusty World War I Enfield rifles as a guerrilla on Mindanao, must have been amazed by the sophistication of the technologies and organizations that made such offensive might possible. Even better, he could control some of it himself. Shofner would come ashore with his own team from JASCO ( Joint Assault Signal Company). It consisted of a naval gunfire officer, an aviation liaison officer, and a shore party officer, as well as their assistants and communications equipment. "Once ashore," the assault plan stated, "the Battalion Commander had only to turn to an officer at his side and heavy guns firing shells up to 16 inch or planes capable bombing, strafing, or launching rockets were at his disposal."
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Now that was fire support.

Harris picked Shofner's 3/5 to land at H hour, next to the 1/5. The 2/5 would land behind them. The Fifth would drive across the great flat plain of Peleliu, some of it jungle and some of it the airfield. By reaching the far shore, the Fifth Marines would cut the defenders in half and be in possession of most of the airfield. On Shofner's right, battalions of the Seventh Marines would assault the rocky little southern tip of the island. Once they secured the tip, the Seventh would turn north, cross through the Fifth's area, and help Chesty Puller's First Marines. The First Regiment, because it would come across Peleliu's northern beaches, faced the challenge of seizing the high ground north of the airfield as well as the enemy's main troop concentration. The invasion barrage by the navy's battlewagons would engage the enemy bunkers on the ridge while the marines stormed ashore. Four hours after landing, the 155mm artillery of the Eleventh Marine Regiment would have come ashore behind the Fifth and stood ready to mass fire on any hard points in front of the First or the Fifth.

Shifty's battalion's landing on Orange Beach Two would be led by Item and King companies, with Love Company following. His company commanders received maps of their specific areas with scales of 1 to 5,000 and 1 to 10,000. The rifle companies trained for their specific missions as best they could on a tiny island with too few LVTs and too few tanks. When the assault LVTs arrived, they mounted a snub-nosed 75mm howitzer, not a 37mm antitank gun as shown in the operator manuals distributed to the men who were learning to drive them.

EUGENE SLEDGE NOTED NO SPECIAL INTENSITY OF THE TRAINING LATE IN THE summer. He did notice an additional sergeant had joined K/3/5. Sergeant "Pop" Haney had a reputation for being more than a little loony, or "Asiatic," as the saying went. Burgin called him a "crazy jap killer," because Pop Haney had earned a Silver Star on Cape Gloucester. The word was Haney had served with King Company in World War I. He kept being rotated or transferred, but whenever the shooting was about to start, Pop came back to King. With only twenty- four veterans of the Canal in his 240-man company, Captain Haldane gave Haney permission to attach again.
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The old and grizzled vet joined the young marines on their marches, mostly keeping to himself.

Eugene kept his mind off the drudgery and boredom of training by watching for birds. The habits and mannerisms of the blue kingfishers and white cockatoos delighted him. As on New Caledonia, the cockatoos seemed to look down from the coconut trees with resentment. "I think the birds are the only ones who want the groves. I know I don't." The red parakeets left red streaks as they flew through the jungle. A marine caught one and he let Gene put it on his shoulder. The bird "climbed on my arms and head and had a big-time scratching in my hair." In the evening, Gene might relax by watching the bats leave their nests high up in the palms to hunt. Sergeant Pop Haney, meanwhile, frequently decided that he had not performed well during the day and assigned himself extra guard duty or conducted a bayonet drill solo.
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The sight of Pop disciplining himself struck everyone as weird. Pop's vigorous use of a GI brush--with bristles so stiff they'd remove skin--to scrub his body clean was painful to watch. Sledge, who had memorized many of Rudyard Kipling's poems about fighting men with his friend Sid, must have seen the resemblance Pop Haney bore to Kipling's famous character Gunga Din.

The arrival of Pop Haney and more LVTs brought lots of scuttlebutt about the upcoming mission. As Eugene anticipated his first taste of combat, he received a newspaper clipping announcing that Lieutenant Edward Sledge had been awarded the Silver Star. Gene read the citation aloud to the men in his tent and showed the clipping's photo of Ed accepting the award. Gene knew he should be and was proud of his older brother, but the hill he felt he had to climb had become steeper.

SID PHILLIPS HAD GIVEN UP TRYING TO CALL HOME. LONG LINES OF MARINES stood in front of the few phones at the San Diego Recruit Depot. He sent a letter saying he "was back in the U.S.A. and would be home as soon as we are processed." In early August he departed on a troop train that wound its way through New Orleans. Sid stepped off in Meridian, saying good-bye to "Benny," Lieutenant Carl Benson, who had trained the #4 gun squad and had commanded the 81mm mortar platoon. The months of pot walloping to which Benny had condemned him left no hard feelings with Sid.

A bus took Sidney home to Mobile. He called home from the station. His family arrived soon thereafter. All of his hopes for a joyous reunion came true. "My family treated me like I had returned from the grave, and we stayed up and talked until almost to dawn." Sid found it hard to speak at first. Years of service with the Raggedy-Assed Marines, where most every other word was a cussword, forced him to concentrate on his speech to prevent something dreadful from tumbling out of his mouth. At last everyone went off to bed and he lay in his bed, in the room in which he had grown up, unable to close his eyes. He had a whole month of furlough before his war began again.