The Pacific (68 page)

Three days later, though, a stroke of luck had come. The division's provost marshal was wounded on October 3. Shifty received the assignment, as well as command of the division's headquarters battalion, while Harris's recommendation for his removal went off to higher authorities. The irony of Shofner's new staff job, which included the supervision of the enemy POWs, was lost on no one.

As he supervised the division HQ, Shofner became aware of Rupertus's difficult situation. He may not have known, however, that the general had turned over the future operations on Peleliu to Bucky Harris. Harris not only commanded the most powerful regiment, he had warned Rupertus not to continue battering the coral fortress head- on. When the Fifth and the Seventh's "all out attack" failed to make appreciable gains, the general called Bucky into a secret meeting at which he collapsed in tears and wailed, "I'm at the end of my rope." On October 5 he gave Harris permission to look for another way into the enemy's fastness.
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Colonel Bucky Harris went up into a small spotter plane and flew back and forth over the small area, looking for the right place to send in the Fifth Marines. His choice would affect the course of Shofner's life almost as much as those of the #2 gun squad.

THE #2 GUN SQUAD SPENT OCTOBER 6 HARASSING THE ENEMY.
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BURGIN CALLED in orders for searching fire to the left or right. Snafu dialed in the azimuth. Sledge removed the correct number of charges from the base of the shell, hung it, and dropped it down the barrel when ordered. Their fire and that of the other 60mms provided part of the cover for a lot of movement and reorganization on the front.

The Seventh Marines used the cover to extricate themselves from the front line. They were headed for Purple Beach and a trip to Pavuvu, leaving the battle to the Fifth. Bucky sent the 2/5 and most of his tanks around the West Road and up to the northern edge of the Japanese fortress. When ready, they would attack south. A hodgepodge of marines from artillery and support units manned a defensive line in front of the Five Sisters, the Horseshoe Valley, and the eastern ridge. Heavy artillery was brought up to help support these men. The 60mms of the 3/5 continued to fire while those men moved into position. Getting the Seventh Marines off the eastern ridge, where they had made some forward gain, required a lot of smoke and the cover of darkness. 1st Battalion took the Seventh's position--ordered to carry a unit of fire and a day's worth of rations with them.
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On October 7 all three of Bucky's battalions attacked from three directions. King Company remained in position, though, as Love and Item attempted to crack into the Five Sisters. The 2/5 came toward it from the other direction and the 1/5 fired at it from across Horseshoe Valley.
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The big guns of the Eleventh Marines, the artillery, supported the effort as usual. Item advanced about two hundred yards into the Horseshoe, the riflemen and their supporting tanks blasting and burning a lot of caves, before enemy bullets from three sides made their position untenable. Love had been stopped cold when it attempted to follow another ravine northward. The mortars belched smoke rounds all over the front to protect the withdrawal. Love and Item had lost eight men wounded and four killed. They rejoined King and the 3/5 spent the next two days just south of no-man's-land. The position put them in between the airport and the ridges.

Above the 3/5 flew the Corsairs of the USMC, their bombing missions of such short duration that the pilots had neither time nor necessity to pull up their wheels. On the eighth the planes dropped thousand- pound bombs into the gorges and on the cliffs as requested.
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Harris also had the planes drop hundreds of pounds of napalm on the western and northern parts of the Japanese stronghold, burning away more of their concealment. The colonel followed that up immediately with massed artillery fire on the new targets.
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He applied firepower at the maximum level available to him as two of his battalions, the 1/5 and 2/5, continued the fight in their respective zones of action for the next few days.

King lived amid the dead bodies, excrement, and broken buildings, eating cold C rations and waiting for their turn.
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The fly population had decreased, thankfully, as aircraft sprayed the island with chemicals. The marines went four days without suffering a casualty, while 105mm and 155mm howitzers fired point-blank at any openings in the coral walls.
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The mission Sledge's company received on the tenth and continued the next day was to find the sources of the sniper and mortar fire that continued to issue from the southernmost ridges--ridges that had been overrun by the First Marines weeks previously. The patrols along the edge of the ridges became a grim business for those on them--they found no clear evidence, much less a clear shot at the enemy--and suffered one killed and seven wounded.

The mortarmen rarely went on such patrols. Seeing his friends in the rifle platoons cut down by an unseen hand, though, made Corporal Burgin livid. This was not warfare as he knew it. Snipers shooting individuals could not halt the U.S. victory. It was just naked evil. The Texan choked on his frustration. The enemy "were in those damn caves and you just, and you didn't know who, what you, you didn't . . . you couldn't see what you was fighting. And they wouldn't come out and fight you. . . ." The Japanese stayed in their caves, silently keeping watch. When the Americans were looking the other way, "they'd shoot one or two rounds and then they'd disappear"; the patrols "had a hell of a time finding which cave they were shooting out of or where the cave was...."
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No antisniper patrols went forth on October 11. King's skipper, Haldane, and the other captains of the 3/5 went to meet the officers of the 2nd Battalion and be briefed on their position on the north side of the ridges. Another push into the coral chaos was on the horizon. Their officers were at least trying to find another way in. When such attempts were made, Sledge invariably heard marines exclaim, "Thank God 'Bucky' is our CO, and not Chesty." The delay increased the boredom that had crept into the marines of King Company, who had lived on the outer edge of the combat zone for nearly a week. Guys wanted to get souvenirs from the nearby caves. Although ordered not to hunt for Japanese Samurai swords and the like, some of the "hard heads," as Sledge called them, would "enter for souvenirs and never return."

THE 1ST DIVISION HQ HAD GROWN INTO AN IMPRESSIVE COMPLEX ON THE AIRFIELD. Thousands of men operated the airport and supported the combat troops. The foxholes of the combat troops situated on the southern end of the ridges were not too far from the men who lived in tents and went about their daily work.
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Thus the commander of the division's headquarters battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Shofner, lived in close proximity to combat troops as he endured his mundane chores. Some of his marines kept the division HQ neat and tidy. In typical Shofner fashion, he made sure they did their job.
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In his other job as provost marshal, Shofner commanded the division's unit of military police, or MPs. The MPs guarded key storage dumps and kept the traffic flowing. His men also picked up any stragglers and brought them back to their assigned units. While the stragglers included marines from line companies who could not explain why they were so far from their foxholes, stragglers also included men from service units who could not explain to the MPs why they were on the front line. The problem of "marines from supporting units making their way into the hills . . . to find souvenirs to trade with sailors" became big enough for a number of officers to arrive at the same solution at about the same time. Shofner ordered "marines near the front without their weapons" to be "issued new ones and assigned to a rifle company in the assault, where they remained until their own officers came to retrieve them. All Marines leaving the front line were required to haul stretchers of wounded down the steep hills to awaiting ambulances."
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With other officers having issued similar orders, the tourist and salvage trips ended abruptly.

Shofner, the man who wanted to return to combat, was punishing wayward marines by sending them to the front while he served as a staff officer, or, as expressed in marine parlance, served "in the rear with the gear." Only one thing could have been worse for Shifty Shofner--being sent home.

His assignment as provost marshal had one interesting aspect: being in charge of the POWs. No one expected Imperial Japanese soldiers to surrender, although an attempt had been made. Two weeks earlier the garrison in the ridges had been given the opportunity from noon to four p.m.
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Six men had come out. More recently, a rumor had gone around that marines had discovered a cave of seventy-five female Japanese. The women had also refused to come out, so the cave had been sealed. Nonetheless the provost marshal had internees for whom to care. The POWs spoke freely, providing valuable intelligence. One man said his recently formed unit had been instructed to "enter the water naked" at the time of an invasion, and "swim out as far as possible and then attempt to knock out landing craft with explosives."
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In all, a few hundred men from the enemy garrison had been captured thus far. A lot of those were Koreans who had been conscripted as workers.
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At least seventeen of the POWs incarcerated in the stockade were Okinawans.
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They had been brought in to build the airport. When food had run short, the Japanese had allowed the Okinawans, clad only in breechcloths, to surrender.
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The few captured enemy combatants, which included members of Japan's navy as well as its army, had either been wounded or were so weak from malnutrition and thirst they had not been able to resist. The U.S. stockade provided them cots, blankets, and water. Twice a day they walked to the supply depot to draw rations. Colonel Shofner made sure that angry marines did not shoot the prisoners "like fish in a barrel." So far as the provost marshal could tell, however, the recovery of their health elicited disdain, not gratitude, from the Japanese prisoners. With the help of the USMC's language officers, Shifty made sure the captives understood that he had seen how the Japanese treated their POWs in China. In some detail he described his own experience as a POW in the Philippines. He ordered the translator to emphasize that "compared to the conditions that he had endured, they were living like kings."
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The point Shifty most wanted to make--his hatred of them--he drove home himself, uttering it in the "prison camp Japanese" he had learned the hard way.

ON OCTOBER 12, THE 3/5 DEPARTED EARLY. THEY WENT UP THE WEST ROAD. Before reaching the junction with the East Road and Starlight Hill, they turned off to the right. At seven a.m., the 3/5 began to relieve the 2/5 on the northern side of the Japanese's final defensive stronghold deep inside the ridges.
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The mad jumble of terrain features had been given nicknames by the units that had been there previously. The army had held a blocking position in the area weeks ago. The Seventh had begun an assault there that eventually had been taken up by the 2/5. The problem with nicknames, however, was that men could disagree upon their application--particularly in

In order to orientate himself that morning, King Company's skipper, "Ack-Ack" Haldane, crept forward to review his sector. Japanese machine guns had pinned down the unit that his company was there to relieve. The substitution would be tricky. He needed to know where the enemy was. A sniper spotted him and shot him in the head. Up until that moment, Captain Andrew A. Haldane had been big enough to keep the men in his company believing they could accomplish this mission because, while other officers told their men, "You will do this," he had said, "We'll do this."
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Word spread that the skipper had been killed. Haldane's runner, Dick Higgins, went berserk at the news and had to be held down by four men and carried to the rear. The loss touched everyone. It engulfed Gene Sledge in grief at the waste of such a talented, charismatic man.
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Captain Haldane had embodied everything E. B. Sledge loved about the United States Marine Corps. The skipper had quietly expected his King Company to give only as much as he did: 100 percent. In shock and under fire, King Company found it difficult to get into position.

The company's executive officer, Lieutenant Thomas J. "Stumpy" Stanley, became the new skipper. The relief of the 2/5 went slowly that morning and lasted into the afternoon as the skipper ordered his platoon leaders to lead their men into forward positions.
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The area the 3/5 entered had been prepared by Sherman tanks firing point-blank and Ronsons hosing down swaths hundreds of yards in diameter with napalm.
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The departing marines left their spare grenades and ammunition in the foxholes to help the new guys.
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The demolition crews reported that the three large caves in the area "had 400 to 500 japs dead or unconscious from the tank shells and napalm."
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To get tied in, communications wire needed to be run to each of the platoons and the mortars situated in a secure spot. The marines also manhandled a 75mm pack howitzer up to a high point of their forward position, Waddie Ridge, and assembled it.
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Short of both sandbags and sand, the marines also carried up pieces of armor in an attempt to create a safe emplacement for the operators of the gun. In these processes a few of the men from 2nd Battalion who were trying to get out of there were hit by enemy gunfire, which also wounded seven and killed one man in King.
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