The Pacific (66 page)

The laughter would have faded as they passed the junction of the West Road, which they were on, with the East Road, which led south on the other side of Bloody Nose Ridge.
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They halted with orders to stand by. Up ahead of them, the 1/5 massed the firepower of tanks and Zippos to savage a collection of hills that the Japanese engineers apparently had turned into hunks of Swiss cheese with their tunnels. The regimental CO, Bucky Harris, had added to his firepower by borrowing a huge 155mm gun from the army. Colonel Harris ordered the massive howitzer to fire point-blank into the caves.
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The shells created a painful double concussion as the ignition and the shells' explosions occurred within a second of one another. Waves of crushed coral slid off the face. The marines of the 1/5, however, still could not advance. The enemy's rifle and machine-gun fire coming out of those infinite holes was buttressed by mortar fire coming from behind the hill mass. Worse, the 1/5 was taking fire from the opposite direction.

From their positions on a tiny island a hundred yards away called Ngesebus, the Japanese were essentially hitting the 1/5 and the 2/5 in the rear. Those battalions had a difficult day as the shit hit the fan. Late in the afternoon, nine tanks churned past King Company. They found a point from which to shell Ngesebus, close to where a small man-made bridge connected the two islands, and unleashed a barrage with their 75mms, every fourth shell a smoke shell. The tanks provided covering fire for four LVTs. These drove into the water and around the northern point of Peleliu, where they located the nexus of the Japanese defense of the high ground. The LVTs fired point-blank into a large blockhouse. The enemy resistance on the near side began to crumble without its heavy mortar support. Tank dozers drove up the north road and pushed coral and earth into the lower pillboxes.
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Although the area to their north was far from secure, the 3/5 would not be needed. Late in the day, army units relieved the 3/5 at the crossroads. King, Item, and Love moved south to an assembly point near the regimental HQ. To shield their movement, the artillery provided another screen with its smoke shells. A short round landed near the regimental HQ and, to everyone's horror, "squarely in the midst of the war dogs." The dogs had been brought up to help protect the marines from night infiltration. The white phosphorus used to produce "smoke" covered them and burned through their flesh. The dogs shrieked and yelped at the merciless pain. Bucky Harris saw no other way. He ordered the war dog handlers to shoot them, which they did, "all of them with eyes brimming with tears."
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At dusk on September 27, word came that the 3/5 would invade the small island they could see a hundred yards away called Ngesebus.
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The Japanese over there had not only been firing at the marines on Peleliu, they had been sending over barges filled with reinforcements at night. Sledge's stomach churned at the thought of another amphibious assault. During the past few days, King had suffered only one or two casualties a day.
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An amphibious assault on another island would likely increase that ratio. Dug in near an army unit, Sledge had a chance to speak with them. The soldiers of the 321st Regimental Combat Team had already secured the small island of Angaur a few dozen miles away. They had come to Peleliu to reinforce the 1st Division, and E. B. Sledge welcomed them as comrades in arms and respected them as equals.
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The Eugene Sledge who once had laughed at the "damn doggies" for being sloppy and pathetic had disappeared.

USS
HORNET
SAILED AWAY FROM THE PHILIPPINES TO THE RHYTHMS OF GENERAL quarters, flight ops, and gunnery practice for the AA batteries--all of the ceaseless preparations that had brought her to a high state of combat effectiveness--even though she had earned a break. On September 27, Rear Admiral Joseph "Jocko" Clark assembled the crew, both black shoe and brown shoe, on the flight deck to present decorations for jobs well done. The following day the carrier docked in Berth 16 of Seeadler Harbor, Manus Island, Admiralty Group. Air Group Two had completed its mission and began to disembark. Reporting aboard the following day would be its replacement, Air Group Eleven. Jocko Clark held a farewell dinner for his pilots. The host thanked his naval aviators for their efforts while the guests tucked into their steaks, potatoes, fruit and vegetables, topped off with a cigar. In a few days Lieutenant Vernon Micheel and the wolves would board a troopship for the ride home. In the six and a half months of their squadron's combat tour, thirteen of the forty-six pilots of Bombing Two had given their lives in the service of their country, as had fifteen rear seat gunners.
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Micheel hated to distinguish between the deaths classified as "operational" as opposed to "combat related."

Lieutenant Micheel knew the navy would assign him to a naval air station somewhere in the States. The younger men could only guess what would happen next. They all knew they had been one small part of the team that had decisively defeated the enemy's carrier fleet. When its enemy fled the battlefield, the U.S. Navy's fast carrier task forces had denied the enemy the use of "the Jimas" as well as the port of Manila, albeit for short periods. The once vast Empire of Japan had withered. To the extent Mike and his friends considered the future course of the Pacific War, they "worried about what was going to happen with the ground fighters when they make their landing in Japan. How were we going to handle some big country like that? We had a lot of carriers and a lot of ships, but they're pretty small when you put them against a whole country and area and people."

NAVY CRUISERS AND DESTROYERS BEGAN FIRING AT NGESEBUS AT SIX A.M. THE Fifth Regiment's artillery ranged in as well. The firestorm had come again, so close that the 3/5 had a ringside seat. Amid the swelling tempo of destruction, forty amtracs, forty of the assault amtracs with the snub-nosed 75mm, and fifteen swimming tanks lined up on the beach on the northwestern corner of Peleliu.
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The preinvasion bombardment lasted three hours. Navy and Marine Corps planes made passes over the target, strafing and bombing. One of King Company's riflemen, Bill Leyden, noted that the USMC pilots, flying in their distinctive Corsairs, "always seemed to come in lower, to try harder to knock out jap positions, and the marines loved them for it." The Corsairs' last pass came with the lead tanks thirty yards offshore.
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After an eleven-minute run, the first wave of twenty of the assault amtracs landed on Ngesebus at nine eleven a.m. An enemy soldier attacked one of the LVTs with a Bangalore torpedo.
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The amtrac threw a track and the lone assailant was killed. A few minutes later, King Company landed on the left flank of the beach, Item on the right. Riding in a new amtrac with a rear ramp, Sledge did not have to clamber over the side. As the troops disembarked and charged forward, the assault amtracs aimed their cannons and fired at the defensive bunkers from close range.
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Behind them the Sherman tanks swam ashore. The whole battalion assault team had landed by nine thirty a.m.

Securing the beachhead went quickly and the rifle squads led the way inland. The enemy's return fire increased rapidly as the marines raced across the small airfield to the buildings and taxiways at nine forty-two a.m. In the scrub beyond, they encountered a stiff resistance that stopped forward momentum. A series of caves, bunkers, and pillboxes had to be "reduced," as the officers liked to put it. The terrain within King's area became rugged and more difficult for the tanks to support.

Burgin's #2 gun squad halted as they saw the riflemen take cover ahead. Using a bunker as cover, Snafu and Sledge set up the 60mm to be prepared to fire. Burgin needed to figure out how best to support the assault teams. Sledge said, "Burgin, there's some Japs in that thing." Burgin glanced at the oddly shaped little building half buried in the sand. It stood about five feet tall, was about sixteen feet in length, and four feet wide. His sergeant had told him "there wasn't any japs in there," so he replied, "Oh, Sledgehammer, do you know what you're talking about?"
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"Yeah, I can hear them jabbering." Burgin saw a small ventilation port near him. "I crawled up on the side of that bunker and looked into there, and that jap had his face right up against the hole. . . . Well, I pumped about four or five shots on him before he could get his head down." Even after he emptied his clip, "they kept jabbering and a machine gun came out and fired a few rounds." They threw grenades out of the ports as well.

"Sledge," Burgin ordered, "look up and see what you can see." Sledgehammer ran over and peeked over the side of the door. He fell to the ground just as fast. A machine gun fired. "Well, him being a rookie," Burgin concluded, "I shouldn't have never sent him up there to begin with." The #2 gun squad leader also began to wonder "how many japs is in that thing, you know, I need to do something here. Uh, if we don't, we might all get killed." The enemy's grenades went off, and fragments hit two of his squad. Burgin sized up the bunker. The thick concrete would stop anything he had; they had a machine gun in there, grenades--who knew what else. He "decided that we weren't doing a very damn good job, you know, and I knew that if we kept messing around there, there's somebody going to get killed." R. V. Burgin ran back to get some firepower.

Seventy-five yards back toward the beach, he found a Sherman tank and Womack, one of the men in King who carried a flamethrower. Burgin told Womack he needed his help and started to guide the tank from behind, using the phone. The return trip took just a few anxious minutes. The Sherman fired three or four rounds at close range until one shell penetrated the concrete and exploded inside. Womack stepped forward and loosed a great gush of flame into the breach. The violence of it made Burgin think the enemy must have been killed, but they came running out the side doors, some holding up their pants with one hand, some with splotches of burning napalm on their bodies. Most of them carried rifles.

Snafu and Sledgehammer and the others shot the enemy as they emerged. A short pause after the first rush of men ended when another Japanese soldier emerged. Sledge "lined up my sights on his chest and began squeezing off shots. As the first bullet hit him, his face contorted in agony . . . the grenade slipped from his hand."
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The moment became seared into Gene's heart as his sharp eyes noted every detail of the first time he killed another human being. "The expression on that man's face filled me with shame and then disgust for the war. . . ." Another thought struck him hard: the foolishness of "feeling ashamed because I shot a damned foe before he could throw a grenade at me!"

Burgin waited a moment before walking around to the narrow passage leading inside. Stooping his six-foot frame, he entered the room to find out how they could have absorbed such punishment. "There was a jap laying there that I didn't think looked dead to me, and, uh, I stuck my foot in his--in his, uh, rib cage and--and, uh, attempted to roll him over. And he wasn't dead, so I plugged that one." He counted seventeen bodies on the floor as he moved through the different rooms. They had been heavily armed. Burgin realized "we was damn lucky that nobody didn't get killed." The two wounded men in his squad did not require evacuation, so he gave himself a pat for "a pretty good job well done."

A number of similar successes along the line allowed the 3/5 to cross the enemy's main defensive line at twelve fifty p.m.
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The Japanese never gave up, though, and the ships of the navy had finished their work as artillery batteries and ceased firing.
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King and Item had advanced only 350 yards by five p.m. when they dug in for the night. A few platoons of reinforcements came up an hour later. The infiltrators would creep toward them hours later causing brief, vicious exchanges. All over Peleliu and Ngesebus, mortar teams fired their illumination rounds, sometimes keeping a few floating in the air above them at one time.
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The next morning the attack jumped off at six thirty a.m. and at eight a.m. the first marines began to reach the far shore of Ngesebus.
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Before they could relax, "a large jap 77mm gun fired point-blank at the rifle companies."
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King Company did not take part in the firefight, which eliminated the enemy's gun crew. It had already sustained the highest casualties of any company in the battle for Ngesebus (three killed and nine wounded) and the worst losses since the invasion.
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Most of the day was spent "mopping up," which meant carefully making sure no enemy concentrations had been overlooked. It also gave the marines time to find souvenirs. Stripping enemy bodies was, so far as Corporal Burgin was concerned, "common practice."

The vulgarity of his friends stripping dead bodies combined with the aftershock of the sudden devastation wreaked by the enemy's 77mm gun filled Gene's eyes with tears. "I was so terribly tired and emotionally wrung out from being afraid for ten days on end that I seemed to have no reserve strength left."
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E. B. Sledge would take note of the words of encouragement he received at that moment from the mortar platoon lieutenant, Charles Ellington. Nicknamed "Duke" because he shared a last name with the famous black jazz musician Duke Ellington, the lieutenant had seen him struggle and said, "I feel the same way." The gesture helped Eugene. He looked up to Duke, just as he revered all of the officers of King Company. He saw them as strong, brave, and true of heart. His opinion reflected his innate love of order and his deference to authority. He needed to believe now more than ever in the courage and righteousness of his commanders. E. B. Sledge's perception, however, overlooked the growing anger within Corporal Burgin, who doubted Lieutenant Ellington's bravery in battle. Duke never seemed to be where the action was.
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