Back to the States and to Home
Everyone who had not gotten to go back was sent this time. For me this meant Berger, Bormann, Dyer, Cornwall among others.
We came back through the Fleet Marine Force Headquarters in Pearl Harbor. I was glad to see Honolulu again with its familiar Dole Pineapple water tower and Diamondhead.
Then we came back to San Diego. As we were being transported from the ship to the Marine Corps base, platoon Sergeant Cornwall stuck his hand through the opening of a sidewall of a truck and vaulted over. He had a large Marine Corps Ring which caught and pulled his finger along with a tendon about two feet long out of his arm. I have never worn a large ring since.
I said goodbye to Berger. Borman and I rode a train to El Paso together. We parted in a restaurant there. Borman said “So long, Jack, See you next war!” I found out much later that he had stayed in the Corps and had been the Sergeant Major at the San Diego Marine Base before he retired.
I came home to a devoted family, received a heroes welcome, wore dress blues around for a month. During that time the atomic bombs had been dropped. I reported to the Naval Operating base at Alexandria, La. for duty. “Do you want to get out of the Marine Corps, Mr. Langston?” I said yes and 30 days later my war was over. The last thing that happened was as I was being taken in a Jeep by a corporal to my train and just as we were going through the base gates, the corporal asked me what time it was. I looked at my watch and told him. He said, “I’ll take that watch.” My last treasure, my 17 jewel Hamilton watch was taken from me. I got home with both of my dogtags!
END OF MY WAR
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Okinawa My Battle
OKINAWA, THE BATTLE FOR, 1944
When we got back on Saipan, we got involved in a campaign of cleaning out the caves and other hiding places. Then we got busy training. Somebody built us a very nice school tent. It was about 16’ X 30’. It had a table down the center and benches for seats one each side of it. We practiced everything about communication there. Morse code by the hour; Semaphore, blinker. We had chemical warfare school. We trained on nomenclature of many weapons, on hand to hand combat. We boxed, we wrestled. We had bayonet training. We had new people. We had reveille at 5:00 every morning and all went for a pretty good run. Then we did calisthenics. We had great food. We got healthy. We gained some weight. But we got dengue. This was a disease much like malaria.
Every Saturday morning we had a battalion inspection and parade. We had a band and I loved to march to the March music. We had a reviewing area where eight of us stood and watched the marching groups. In the group was the Battalion staff officers, (Colonel Jones and three of his staff.) What was memorable for me was that four staff NCO’s including me stood with them.
Many of us got medals of one kind or other. I got a Bronze Star. We got some pictures made. I still have one of me with my Bronze Star. Also we made a picture of all the personnel who were still in the outfit that had begun the battle on Guadalcanal. There were only about 8 of us. Me, Berger, Borman, Carrington, Vrogindewey, Colonel Jones, Captain Calkins. This was out of over 1000 who started. I still have that picture, too.
On one of these Saturday mornings, we were in the company street when we saw two Jap Zeroes coming south along our beach about two miles north of us. A little back there were two of our P47’s trying to catch up with the zeroes. Then suddenly we saw two P 38’s coming behind the 47’s. They climbed over the two P 47’s, came down over the Zero’s and casually shot both of them down. Then they headed straight up in the skies and headed back where they had come from. I really never knew where they were based. It was nice to see that our side had the best planes now. It had been a different story on Guadalcanal when the Zeroes were much better thn our P 40’s and SBD’s!
Another story from those days :
As I was the top NCO in our platoon of 56 men, I really had a lot of responsibilities. We had a lot of inspections and two of our naval corpsmen were in the last tent on the second row. When we had inspections they were supposed to be in just as shipshape as the rest of us. But they didn’t seem to want to cooperate. They were always late. One Saturday Reveille blew; we fell out and I was to report that all the platoon was “present and accounted for, Sir”. The darned corpsmen weren’t there. I was furious. I went down to their tent and rolled them out of their sacks. They didn’t like it much, but they got with it.
We had a good inspection and it was all over about 11:30. I was up by the Lister bag when a bullet whizzed by me and continued on its way. I immediately thought of the two corpsmen. “I must have been a little harder on them than they liked”.
Things like happened. I found that the shot had come from Division Headquarters about a quarter of a mile away. It wasn’t the corpsmen at all, and I never had any trouble with them after this.
It was in this period that I got drunk for the only time in my life. I don’t know what the occasion for celebrating was but Lt. Walsh who my boss asked me to dome over to his tent to talk. Lt. Walsh was a drinker and couldn’t handle his liquor very well. When I got up there, he broke out a bottle of gin. He asked me to take a drink with him. I tried to beg out of it but he insisted. “This is not much more powerful than a Coke; it is mixed with pineapple juice. You will like it.” I took a glass and began sipping on it. He liked to talk and he told me all about his troubles. He had been a newspaper reporter and was well educated, but he didn’t please the Colonel very well. He talked about his family and about wars in general and military strategy. I liked him so I listened until about 11:30 PM.
He refilled my glass a time or two. I didn’t really like it. The pineapple juice made it too sweet and the gin gave it an alcoholic taste that I have never liked, but it was something to do.
I went on back down to my tent and went to bed. In about two hours I got sick as a dog and got rid of the gin and pineapple juice. To this day I remember that night when I eat pineapple! (I should add that Walsh became a favorite of Jones after the war and he called upon him for information for some articles he wrote.)
About this time I began wondering if I would make it alive through the war. I had been through so
much and had seen so many men killed, I began to think that I probably wouldn’t make it through another battle. Tough ones were ahead of us.
I made out my will and put it away in my seabag so it would be found if I were killed.
Sgt Lorne (Ham) Berger had a little game. When we got ready for a battle we would put a bottle of Budweiser beer in our seabag. The seabag would be kept in the rear echelon. We went aboard ship to battle with the two parts of our packs and a bedroll and didn’t see our seabags until the battle was over and we got back into a rest area. The arrangement was that if one of us were killed the survivor would get to drink the unlucky one’s beer. It never happened. We both survived, much to our disappointment. We always griped when we found that we didn’t get to drink the other guy’s beer!
In October we heard and saw the largest airplane we had ever seen in our lives. The big B-29 came into sight and ever so slowly, it approached and made its landing on Tinian. More and more of them came in. I went over to Tinian to see one of my men (Eddie Grieco)in the big general hospital there. There were scores of the big planes on the strip there. They began bombing Tokyo and other large Japanese cities. The Japanese had lost the war but we still had to win it.
I did my best to make my peace with God. I felt that I probably not make it through another battle. I didn’t pray to God to let me live through it. I thought that since I had seen so many men die that I couldn’t expect to come through unharmed.
We went through some changes in our position in the war. We were incorporated into the Third Amphibious Corps and the Third Corps was placed into the Tenth Army under General Simon Buckner.
On April 1st, 1945, the Tenth Army invaded the island of Okinawa. This was 1200 miles closer to Japan and was a logical site for a nearer airfield for our bombers and it would make a good jumping off place for us to invade Japan proper.
We were briefed on Okinawa after we got aboard ship and warned about the snakes there. The whole army only saw one snake while it was there.
We (the 2nd Division) were to be the Army reserve but we were to be the first troops in action. We were to make a diversionary feint landing on “Love Day”. We had been in on this same thing on Tinian and still saw plenty of action. We didn’t mind at all making our feint and then going in on a beachhead that had already been secured. We thought it would be nice to have an early breakfast, get into our landing boats, head for the beach, turn around and come back to the transport for a nice nap!
We were up at about 3:30 and had some breakfast. As we got in position for our feint landing, we began to hear the roar of many airplanes. At first I thought they were ours. I soon found they were enemies. There were hordes of them. I began to think we were going to be bombed and then I thought about torpedoes. But these Japanese pilots were not bombers or torpedo planes. They were “Kamikaze” pilots who were on one way trips. The sea was covered with around 1600 of our ships. You couldn’t see the end of them. The air was filled with black shellbursts where our navy was trying to bring down the kamikaze before they could get to our transports. One explosion could have caused more casualties than days of battle. They were pretty effective. It is hard to bring down a pilot who doesn’t intend to come back alive. Several of them plunged into ships and the sea near us. I thought that maybe this was where I would die. One of them found an LST in which some of our second regiment people were sailing and caused it to finally have to be abandoned.
Our feint was very successful in that a lot of the Japanese came down to cover us. The First and Sixth Divisions of Marines landed on further north without losing a man. We had not even made a landing and had been the only units to have casualties.
The second day we made another feint landing. This one didn’t make much difference. We stayed aboard our transport ship another day while the Army and Marines on shore routed the Japanese. Our work was strenuous but not real dangerous. Our main danger was that we were sitting around the area with hundreds of men in a perilous position if we should get any more Kamikaze attacks. A decision had to be made either to commit us or to send us home. The decision was made to send us back to Saipan.
The battle was rough for many, even costing General Buckner his life, but for me it was just like maneuvers. We got back to camp, looked in our seabags, drank our bottle of Budweiser and began training for Japan. I didn’t know it then but my war was over.
When we got back on Saipan, we got involved in a campaign of cleaning out the caves and other hiding places. Then we got busy training. Somebody built us a very nice school tent. It was about 16’ X 30’. It had a table down the center and benches for seats one each side of it. We practiced everything about communication there. Morse code by the hour; Semaphore, blinker. We had chemical warfare school. We trained on nomenclature of many weapons, on hand to hand combat. We boxed, we wrestled. We had bayonet training. We had new people. We had reveille at 5:00 every morning and all went for a pretty good run. Then we did calisthenics. We had great food. We got healthy. We gained some weight. But we got dengue. This was a disease much like malaria.
Every Saturday morning we had a battalion inspection and parade. We had a band and I loved to march to the March music. We had a reviewing area where eight of us stood and watched the marching groups. In the group was the Battalion staff officers, (Colonel Jones and three of his staff.) What was memorable for me was that four staff NCO’s including me stood with them.
Many of us got medals of one kind or other. I got a Bronze Star. We got some pictures made. I still have one of me with my Bronze Star. Also we made a picture of all the personnel who were still in the outfit that had begun the battle on Guadalcanal. There were only about 8 of us. Me, Berger, Borman, Carrington, Vrogindewey, Colonel Jones, Captain Calkins. This was out of over 1000 who started. I still have that picture, too.
On one of these Saturday mornings, we were in the company street when we saw two Jap Zeroes coming south along our beach about two miles north of us. A little back there were two of our P47’s trying to catch up with the zeroes. Then suddenly we saw two P 38’s coming behind the 47’s. They climbed over the two P 47’s, came down over the Zero’s and casually shot both of them down. Then they headed straight up in the skies and headed back where they had come from. I really never knew where they were based. It was nice to see that our side had the best planes now. It had been a different story on Guadalcanal when the Zeroes were much better thn our P 40’s and SBD’s!
Another story from those days :
As I was the top NCO in our platoon of 56 men, I really had a lot of responsibilities. We had a lot of inspections and two of our naval corpsmen were in the last tent on the second row. When we had inspections they were supposed to be in just as shipshape as the rest of us. But they didn’t seem to want to cooperate. They were always late. One Saturday Reveille blew; we fell out and I was to report that all the platoon was “present and accounted for, Sir”. The darned corpsmen weren’t there. I was furious. I went down to their tent and rolled them out of their sacks. They didn’t like it much, but they got with it.
We had a good inspection and it was all over about 11:30. I was up by the Lister bag when a bullet whizzed by me and continued on its way. I immediately thought of the two corpsmen. “I must have been a little harder on them than they liked”.
Things like happened. I found that the shot had come from Division Headquarters about a quarter of a mile away. It wasn’t the corpsmen at all, and I never had any trouble with them after this.
It was in this period that I got drunk for the only time in my life. I don’t know what the occasion for celebrating was but Lt. Walsh who my boss asked me to dome over to his tent to talk. Lt. Walsh was a drinker and couldn’t handle his liquor very well. When I got up there, he broke out a bottle of gin. He asked me to take a drink with him. I tried to beg out of it but he insisted. “This is not much more powerful than a Coke; it is mixed with pineapple juice. You will like it.” I took a glass and began sipping on it. He liked to talk and he told me all about his troubles. He had been a newspaper reporter and was well educated, but he didn’t please the Colonel very well. He talked about his family and about wars in general and military strategy. I liked him so I listened until about 11:30 PM.
He refilled my glass a time or two. I didn’t really like it. The pineapple juice made it too sweet and the gin gave it an alcoholic taste that I have never liked, but it was something to do.
I went on back down to my tent and went to bed. In about two hours I got sick as a dog and got rid of the gin and pineapple juice. To this day I remember that night when I eat pineapple! (I should add that Walsh became a favorite of Jones after the war and he called upon him for information for some articles he wrote.)
About this time I began wondering if I would make it alive through the war. I had been through so
much and had seen so many men killed, I began to think that I probably wouldn’t make it through another battle. Tough ones were ahead of us.
I made out my will and put it away in my seabag so it would be found if I were killed.
Sgt Lorne (Ham) Berger had a little game. When we got ready for a battle we would put a bottle of Budweiser beer in our seabag. The seabag would be kept in the rear echelon. We went aboard ship to battle with the two parts of our packs and a bedroll and didn’t see our seabags until the battle was over and we got back into a rest area. The arrangement was that if one of us were killed the survivor would get to drink the unlucky one’s beer. It never happened. We both survived, much to our disappointment. We always griped when we found that we didn’t get to drink the other guy’s beer!
In October we heard and saw the largest airplane we had ever seen in our lives. The big B-29 came into sight and ever so slowly, it approached and made its landing on Tinian. More and more of them came in. I went over to Tinian to see one of my men (Eddie Grieco)in the big general hospital there. There were scores of the big planes on the strip there. They began bombing Tokyo and other large Japanese cities. The Japanese had lost the war but we still had to win it.
I did my best to make my peace with God. I felt that I probably not make it through another battle. I didn’t pray to God to let me live through it. I thought that since I had seen so many men die that I couldn’t expect to come through unharmed.
We went through some changes in our position in the war. We were incorporated into the Third Amphibious Corps and the Third Corps was placed into the Tenth Army under General Simon Buckner.
On April 1st, 1945, the Tenth Army invaded the island of Okinawa. This was 1200 miles closer to Japan and was a logical site for a nearer airfield for our bombers and it would make a good jumping off place for us to invade Japan proper.
We were briefed on Okinawa after we got aboard ship and warned about the snakes there. The whole army only saw one snake while it was there.
We (the 2nd Division) were to be the Army reserve but we were to be the first troops in action. We were to make a diversionary feint landing on “Love Day”. We had been in on this same thing on Tinian and still saw plenty of action. We didn’t mind at all making our feint and then going in on a beachhead that had already been secured. We thought it would be nice to have an early breakfast, get into our landing boats, head for the beach, turn around and come back to the transport for a nice nap!
We were up at about 3:30 and had some breakfast. As we got in position for our feint landing, we began to hear the roar of many airplanes. At first I thought they were ours. I soon found they were enemies. There were hordes of them. I began to think we were going to be bombed and then I thought about torpedoes. But these Japanese pilots were not bombers or torpedo planes. They were “Kamikaze” pilots who were on one way trips. The sea was covered with around 1600 of our ships. You couldn’t see the end of them. The air was filled with black shellbursts where our navy was trying to bring down the kamikaze before they could get to our transports. One explosion could have caused more casualties than days of battle. They were pretty effective. It is hard to bring down a pilot who doesn’t intend to come back alive. Several of them plunged into ships and the sea near us. I thought that maybe this was where I would die. One of them found an LST in which some of our second regiment people were sailing and caused it to finally have to be abandoned.
Our feint was very successful in that a lot of the Japanese came down to cover us. The First and Sixth Divisions of Marines landed on further north without losing a man. We had not even made a landing and had been the only units to have casualties.
The second day we made another feint landing. This one didn’t make much difference. We stayed aboard our transport ship another day while the Army and Marines on shore routed the Japanese. Our work was strenuous but not real dangerous. Our main danger was that we were sitting around the area with hundreds of men in a perilous position if we should get any more Kamikaze attacks. A decision had to be made either to commit us or to send us home. The decision was made to send us back to Saipan.
The battle was rough for many, even costing General Buckner his life, but for me it was just like maneuvers. We got back to camp, looked in our seabags, drank our bottle of Budweiser and began training for Japan. I didn’t know it then but my war was over.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Tinian, As I saw it.
TINIAN, BATTLE OF, July 24-August 2nd,1944
The conquering of Tinian was a lot more important than we thought when we took it. It was from there that the B-29’s began to seriously bomb Japan. It was from there that a pilot named Tibbets took the Enola Gay with its atomic bomb to completely destroy a major Japanese city.
We were on Saipan, completely worn out. We had a few days in which we were able to change and wash our clothing, receive a lot of mail. My mother wrote me almost every day and sent cookies every two weeks. I also had a lot of friend’s back home that wrote me. I received more mail than anyone I knew. Our outgoing mail was censored, but my folks said there was never anything cut out or blacked out from my mail. We used “V-mail” and didn’t have to have any postage from my end.
We set up a camp with a company area. Our company had two streets about 100 yards long. Remember that we were still in our pup tents, two men to a tent. They were about 30 inches high when set up properly. Corpier and I were able to get some new shelter halves. It rained a lot so we had mucho trouble keeping things dry. The Seabees had set up a shower not far away (cold water only) and that helped. Our main gathering place was the “Lister Bag”. This was a large (probably 30-gallon) canvas bag with spigots around the bottom for drinking water. We put up a bulletin board there.
We all had to go to sick bay where the Navy doctors and pharmacists gave us a comprehensive inspection. This resulted in a trip back to the states for some, but not me.
We received many young replacements and, as always, I was delighted with the quality. Maybe I can remember which ones I got before I finish writing this. They were in awe of us and we had no discipline problems at all. This might be a good time to mention that I had a little Gideon New Testament with me all during my war. It had a paperback and I still have it. More about it later.
There was never any doubt that Tinian would have to conquered and there was not much doubt who would be doing it. There was a while when planes from Tinian would strafe us on Saipan. A pretty short bombing mission!
Our ships had been shelling Tinian ever since we started the Saipan invasion. After the Saipan operation was finished, our 155’s turned around and bombarded Tinian from the few miles away.
Some of my men, including Bill (“Killer”) Kearns and others I can’t remember, maybe Barney Coudayre, accompanied Major James Jones in a submarine to actually go ashore at night and look over the landing situation on the beaches.
It didn’t look bad to me and it turned out that it wasn’t a rough battle.
The Fourth Marine Division was to make the initial assault. The Eighth Marines and the Second Marines were in transports and our Sixth Marines would board LST’s at Garapan. The Fourth Division had established a beachhead without too many casualties,and had dug in and put out barbed wire. They expected a banzai attack and after midnight it came. The Japs were so disorganized and the Marines were so well prepared that about 1500 Japs were uselessly sacrificed.
THE TIME HAS COME
The next day, July 25, the Second Division began to come ashore. We landed on wooden docks from our LST’s during the night. What heroes. I walked from our boat up dock and saw a scene I will never forget. I looked to my right and saw a Marine 2 ½ ton truck. In it were the driver and one passenger. The passenger was nearest me. He was horribly burned. All the regular skin had been burned off his face and neck. He looked like what I thought a leper would look like. Our eyes met and I had to turn mine away. Immediately I thought, “What a coward!” How it must have hurt him when I looked away.
We landed on the extreme north part of the island and we could see the Ushi Airdrome just over our left and right ahead.
We got ashore, didn’t have to worry too much about attacks since we had a division and a half of Marines between us and the Japs. I was pretty experienced by this time and just saw to it that we were in place to get ready for the next morning.
Everything went well the next day. We just walked through the grass and the cane fields with no opposition to speak of. Noticed that we were going through some watermelons. This was a big treat for a farm boy from Oklahoma.
I haven’t mentioned this as yet but my communication platoon had received a brand new radio Jeep. Most of the time, later, I put a private or a Corporal in the Jeep to be the Battalion Command Post operator, but this time, the Colonel expected me to accompany him. So I did. I had a transmitter key strapped to my leg and I tapped out messages to the Sixth Marine Regimental Headquarters. I used voice to talk to our companies. Out of two divisions, we lost two men that day. Fourteen wounded.
That night we got another attack. We didn’t lose anyone and 137 Japs were killed.
The next day we just walked across good terrain with almost no opposition and covered about 2000 yards. The terrain here was so much different than at Saipan or Guadalcanal. It was just fairly level cultivated fields. We could see cliffs ahead of us but they were no threat yet.
One thing bad was it was so hot. I was in the Jeep a good part of the day and in the shade, but our outfit was an infantry battalion and everyone walked. I offered Colonel Jones a ride but he never took it.
The next day we got in range of the cliffs. We were right out in the open with absolutely no cover. Our rifle companies ahead of us began taking fire. We were not getting any yet. Jones would call me Langston most of the time, but in times of stress he always called me Jack. He ran the few feet to where I was in the Jeep. “Langston, call for some tanks!” I did. In about a minute three Sherman tanks were pulling up right beside my Jeep. They began firing at the cliffs. Immediately we began getting fire right on our heads. They were firing at the tanks. Jones shouted, “Jack, Get those damned tanks out of here!” I did. This made for some amusing conversations after the battle was over and we reminisced.
The Shermans cleared those cliffs completely. We never heard from them again. Later we walked over machine gun emplacements and mortar pits and dead Japs.
We were having our way with the Japs but then it began to rain. We were in a typhoon, I think. I have never seen it rain harder and longer. We tried completely unsuccessfully to keep dry.
The battle was not very tough for me the rest of the time. The Japs made three or four more counter attacks but not real close to me. The one thing that I remember very well was that about August 1st after the island had been declared “secured”, a bunch of Japs who had been bypassed attacked the Command Post of 3/6 and Lt Col John Easley was killed. We watched him die when the Jeep that was taking him back stopped so Col. Jones could speak to him. Easley was a fine, qualified officer and a good man. I wonder how old he was when he was killed. I thought of him as an older man.
Our Second Division only lost 104 men at Tinian. For those 104 and their loved ones that “easy” campaign was the worst of the war.
As we got near the end of the island the Japs began
committing “harikari”. They jumped off the cliffs at
Marpi Point.(They had jumped off at Marpo Point on
Saipan.)
Back to Saipan
After Tinian was over, we moved back to the same camp
area on Saipan where we were before. This time there
were 6 man squad tents set up and waiting for us.
We made lots of patrols up in th Tapotchau area. We
built a pretty chapel with bleached sandbags for seats
a canvas tarp for a roof. I began to enjoy going to
chapel. We had a Presbyterian Minister for a Protestant
chaplain. He was very good and Betty and I met him in
Kansas City forty years later. He was still a good man.
We had a movie and we had some USO troupes visit us.
There was Betty Hutton and Gene Autry. There was big
mouth Joe E. Brown. I think his son was a Marine nd
with us.
We finally got some rotation going. Around 64 officers
and 1200 enlisted men got furlough back in the states.
You had to have 50 points to go back. But you had to
have a replacement. My replacement broke his leg
when he landed on Saipan and and I waited. I was Staff
Sergeant, doing the work of a Tech Sergeant and was
considered indispensable. I didn’t worry about it.
Somehow I thought I would have to stay until it was over.
We built a Staff NCO Mess. This was somewhat between the regulation mess hall and the Officer’s Mess. We had regular chow and augmented it with various goodies for which we paid a monthly fee. We ate on china dishes and had cloth tablecloths. I guess the main reason we had it was that it served liquor. I never ever drank hard liquor didn’t drink beer but very little.
We saw the intense buildup and knew that our warfare was not over. We were still a ways from Japan and there would probably be more islands and then we would have to invade Japan.
END OF THE THINGS I WANT TO WRITE ABOUT TINIAN
The conquering of Tinian was a lot more important than we thought when we took it. It was from there that the B-29’s began to seriously bomb Japan. It was from there that a pilot named Tibbets took the Enola Gay with its atomic bomb to completely destroy a major Japanese city.
We were on Saipan, completely worn out. We had a few days in which we were able to change and wash our clothing, receive a lot of mail. My mother wrote me almost every day and sent cookies every two weeks. I also had a lot of friend’s back home that wrote me. I received more mail than anyone I knew. Our outgoing mail was censored, but my folks said there was never anything cut out or blacked out from my mail. We used “V-mail” and didn’t have to have any postage from my end.
We set up a camp with a company area. Our company had two streets about 100 yards long. Remember that we were still in our pup tents, two men to a tent. They were about 30 inches high when set up properly. Corpier and I were able to get some new shelter halves. It rained a lot so we had mucho trouble keeping things dry. The Seabees had set up a shower not far away (cold water only) and that helped. Our main gathering place was the “Lister Bag”. This was a large (probably 30-gallon) canvas bag with spigots around the bottom for drinking water. We put up a bulletin board there.
We all had to go to sick bay where the Navy doctors and pharmacists gave us a comprehensive inspection. This resulted in a trip back to the states for some, but not me.
We received many young replacements and, as always, I was delighted with the quality. Maybe I can remember which ones I got before I finish writing this. They were in awe of us and we had no discipline problems at all. This might be a good time to mention that I had a little Gideon New Testament with me all during my war. It had a paperback and I still have it. More about it later.
There was never any doubt that Tinian would have to conquered and there was not much doubt who would be doing it. There was a while when planes from Tinian would strafe us on Saipan. A pretty short bombing mission!
Our ships had been shelling Tinian ever since we started the Saipan invasion. After the Saipan operation was finished, our 155’s turned around and bombarded Tinian from the few miles away.
Some of my men, including Bill (“Killer”) Kearns and others I can’t remember, maybe Barney Coudayre, accompanied Major James Jones in a submarine to actually go ashore at night and look over the landing situation on the beaches.
It didn’t look bad to me and it turned out that it wasn’t a rough battle.
The Fourth Marine Division was to make the initial assault. The Eighth Marines and the Second Marines were in transports and our Sixth Marines would board LST’s at Garapan. The Fourth Division had established a beachhead without too many casualties,and had dug in and put out barbed wire. They expected a banzai attack and after midnight it came. The Japs were so disorganized and the Marines were so well prepared that about 1500 Japs were uselessly sacrificed.
THE TIME HAS COME
The next day, July 25, the Second Division began to come ashore. We landed on wooden docks from our LST’s during the night. What heroes. I walked from our boat up dock and saw a scene I will never forget. I looked to my right and saw a Marine 2 ½ ton truck. In it were the driver and one passenger. The passenger was nearest me. He was horribly burned. All the regular skin had been burned off his face and neck. He looked like what I thought a leper would look like. Our eyes met and I had to turn mine away. Immediately I thought, “What a coward!” How it must have hurt him when I looked away.
We landed on the extreme north part of the island and we could see the Ushi Airdrome just over our left and right ahead.
We got ashore, didn’t have to worry too much about attacks since we had a division and a half of Marines between us and the Japs. I was pretty experienced by this time and just saw to it that we were in place to get ready for the next morning.
Everything went well the next day. We just walked through the grass and the cane fields with no opposition to speak of. Noticed that we were going through some watermelons. This was a big treat for a farm boy from Oklahoma.
I haven’t mentioned this as yet but my communication platoon had received a brand new radio Jeep. Most of the time, later, I put a private or a Corporal in the Jeep to be the Battalion Command Post operator, but this time, the Colonel expected me to accompany him. So I did. I had a transmitter key strapped to my leg and I tapped out messages to the Sixth Marine Regimental Headquarters. I used voice to talk to our companies. Out of two divisions, we lost two men that day. Fourteen wounded.
That night we got another attack. We didn’t lose anyone and 137 Japs were killed.
The next day we just walked across good terrain with almost no opposition and covered about 2000 yards. The terrain here was so much different than at Saipan or Guadalcanal. It was just fairly level cultivated fields. We could see cliffs ahead of us but they were no threat yet.
One thing bad was it was so hot. I was in the Jeep a good part of the day and in the shade, but our outfit was an infantry battalion and everyone walked. I offered Colonel Jones a ride but he never took it.
The next day we got in range of the cliffs. We were right out in the open with absolutely no cover. Our rifle companies ahead of us began taking fire. We were not getting any yet. Jones would call me Langston most of the time, but in times of stress he always called me Jack. He ran the few feet to where I was in the Jeep. “Langston, call for some tanks!” I did. In about a minute three Sherman tanks were pulling up right beside my Jeep. They began firing at the cliffs. Immediately we began getting fire right on our heads. They were firing at the tanks. Jones shouted, “Jack, Get those damned tanks out of here!” I did. This made for some amusing conversations after the battle was over and we reminisced.
The Shermans cleared those cliffs completely. We never heard from them again. Later we walked over machine gun emplacements and mortar pits and dead Japs.
We were having our way with the Japs but then it began to rain. We were in a typhoon, I think. I have never seen it rain harder and longer. We tried completely unsuccessfully to keep dry.
The battle was not very tough for me the rest of the time. The Japs made three or four more counter attacks but not real close to me. The one thing that I remember very well was that about August 1st after the island had been declared “secured”, a bunch of Japs who had been bypassed attacked the Command Post of 3/6 and Lt Col John Easley was killed. We watched him die when the Jeep that was taking him back stopped so Col. Jones could speak to him. Easley was a fine, qualified officer and a good man. I wonder how old he was when he was killed. I thought of him as an older man.
Our Second Division only lost 104 men at Tinian. For those 104 and their loved ones that “easy” campaign was the worst of the war.
As we got near the end of the island the Japs began
committing “harikari”. They jumped off the cliffs at
Marpi Point.(They had jumped off at Marpo Point on
Saipan.)
Back to Saipan
After Tinian was over, we moved back to the same camp
area on Saipan where we were before. This time there
were 6 man squad tents set up and waiting for us.
We made lots of patrols up in th Tapotchau area. We
built a pretty chapel with bleached sandbags for seats
a canvas tarp for a roof. I began to enjoy going to
chapel. We had a Presbyterian Minister for a Protestant
chaplain. He was very good and Betty and I met him in
Kansas City forty years later. He was still a good man.
We had a movie and we had some USO troupes visit us.
There was Betty Hutton and Gene Autry. There was big
mouth Joe E. Brown. I think his son was a Marine nd
with us.
We finally got some rotation going. Around 64 officers
and 1200 enlisted men got furlough back in the states.
You had to have 50 points to go back. But you had to
have a replacement. My replacement broke his leg
when he landed on Saipan and and I waited. I was Staff
Sergeant, doing the work of a Tech Sergeant and was
considered indispensable. I didn’t worry about it.
Somehow I thought I would have to stay until it was over.
We built a Staff NCO Mess. This was somewhat between the regulation mess hall and the Officer’s Mess. We had regular chow and augmented it with various goodies for which we paid a monthly fee. We ate on china dishes and had cloth tablecloths. I guess the main reason we had it was that it served liquor. I never ever drank hard liquor didn’t drink beer but very little.
We saw the intense buildup and knew that our warfare was not over. We were still a ways from Japan and there would probably be more islands and then we would have to invade Japan.
END OF THE THINGS I WANT TO WRITE ABOUT TINIAN
Saipan,The Battle, as I saw it.
SAIPAN
MAY, 1944
We got on ships and made maneuvers, landing on the coast of Maui. We trained for fighting, in sugar cane fields. We went into Pearl Harbor, here a lot of our troops moved over to LSTs (Landing Ship Tanks). These ships were filled with amphibious tractors. We would go in our next battle in these things. They had very little armor. We had gone into Guadalcanal in Higgins boats, and into Tarawa in rubber boats. There were some bad accidents in Hawaii with the LSTs and the tractors. I didn’t know about it until well after the war was over.
I’m not sure what transport I was aboard, but it seems like the Monrovia. We pulled out of Pearl Harbor, picking up ships right and left. There were more APAs (troop transports) with more Marines. There were destroyers, DE’s(destroyer escorts). Later we picked up cruisers and battleships. I think I remember the Washington and maybe the Indiana. The LST’s had gone on about two days ahead of us. At this time my boss was a Lieutenant Brown. After Tarawa Captain Stegemerten was promoted to Major and moved to Regimental headquarters. Brown was an OC (Officer Candidate). He was less than a Lieutenant, (he made it before we landed on Saipan), doing the job of a Captain. I was a staff sergeant doing the job of a Tech Sergeant. (Promotions come slow in the Marine Corps.)
After we were at sea for two days, Brown brought me an attaché case full of information. We were told we were going to attack Saipan in the Mariana Islands. We started working with maps and intelligence information. I was briefed and then I held daily meetings with my men. I never saw Brown again until we had landed on Saipan. We were to land on Red Beach One in support of 2/6(second battalion, 6th Marine Regiment) and 3/6. Piece of cake!
We had smooth sailing for hundreds of miles. Then we saw land. As we got closer we saw it was friendly. It was Eniwetok, one of the Carolinas. Our new General Watson had conquered it just three months earlier with the 4th Division. It seemed as though the whole fleet gathered in the harbor, (we couldn’t have done this earlier). We messed around here for a day. Here we were transferred into an LST. It took us six more days in that lovely boat to get to the Marianas.
This was an experience. An LST is no pleasure cruiser. There were no bunks for us. We all had to sleep on the deck. The deck was crowded with amphibious tractors, Sherman tanks, and millions of fifty gallon barrels. The thing reeked of gasoline. A spark would have blown us all to eternity. Naturally, there was no smoking.
We went over new aerial photos, maps, and other intelligence information that we just received. The overall responsibility for the protection of the landings rested upon the giant 5th Fleet under Admiral Raymond A. Spruance. The fleet of over 800 ships was “the largest ever assembled in the Pacific”. Vice Admiral Marc A. Mitscher commanded the fast carriers, most of them brand new.
The day before “D” Day, underwater demolition teams went in. They might have blown up some things if there had been anything to blow up. We got their report. There was no coral barrier reef. There were no mines. There were pillboxes and trenches. They missed something most of us saw the next day; the registration flags that the Japanese would use to get accurate fire on us as we came in.
On June 15, 1944, sixty three years ago, we closed on Saipan. We were awakened early. Troops on transports had steak and eggs, but not us. We had our C’s, and loaded into our Amtrak. We wouldn’t get wet this trip. The amtraks would take us clear up on the beach (it says here!). Kearns was with Colonel Jones. We started for land about 8:15 in the morning.
About 200 yards from shore, Captain Triplett, our BN-3 officer, who was in the LVT with Jones, raised his head to get a glimpse of the beach. His head was blown off. Jones and Burga came ashore with blood all over them. I was in the second command Amtrak with Grieco and Corona. Our Amtrak halted about 50 yards from shore, couldn’t go any further. By this time, bullets were whizzing all around us. We jumped over the side with our equipment. The water was about four feet deep. We got to shore in a flash!
We fell down in the protection of the beach. Corona and I lay side by side. Corona said quietly, “Jack, I’m hit.” It must have been a mortar fragment. I found a corpsman for him. The corpsman told him, “The war is over for you”. He pointed out to the harbor. There was a beautiful white hospital ship with a big Red Cross on it. I never saw Corona again. (But I heard from him. He became an attorney in Corpus Christie, Texas.)
I had suspected that we were going in too far to my left, and soon found that our guide boat leaders had allowed the current to drift us about a 1/4th of a mile north of our Red Beach Two. We lost considerable time after we landed in getting over to the place where we belonged.
Unlike the Second Division, whose plan was to disembark from our vehicles as soon as we got to shore, the Fourth Division was to stay in their LVT (A) vehicles. They had 75MM cannons mounted in the noses. I could look over there and see a lot of them getting out just like we were. I never knew why.
We were ashore, but we had only gotten about fifteen feet of beach under control. All heck broke loose, the fire just got heavier. As long as we could keep down, the machine gun and rifle fire couldn’t get to us. I could hear the stuff going over my head like angry bees. I turned and looked backward, and could see the stuff hitting the water about 100 yards out. I was pretty happy down behind that seawall. Then they got us zeroed in with their mortars and it became plain that we couldn’t stay there any longer. Even their artillery began to shorten up and get down on the beach. We HAD to move forward. At this time, every Marine was a rifleman, no matter what his specialty was.
I never had noticed the smell of gunpowder so much in my previous battles. You could hardly breathe It got hotter and hotter. I was getting more and more of my men together. We had new gas masks going in, but I figured they were shot, because of the sea water and the sand. Some of my guys asked if I would okay it if they dropped them. I told them I couldn’t authorize them to do that. Soon I could see that every one was ditching them. They were soggy and heavy. I was one of the last to dump mine, carrying it another 24 hours. This action would haunt us in another 36 hours.
We moved forward, and began trying to get our communication job going. Soon I found Art Kirchoeffer. Art had been shot; he would also go to the hospital ship. Soon Lieutenant Brown found me. He had a wound in an arm. It didn’t look very bad to me. He said, “I will be going back to Pearl. You have the platoon, and I can’t think of anyone who will do a better job than you”. I thought, “Yes, you ---!”. I never saw him again, either. Out of the 56 men we started out with, there were only 19 when I finally got a tally. Fortunately, they were good ones.
Jones sent out runners and assembled his four company commanders at his command post, (which means he was in a somewhat sheltered area). One of the runners came back with a story about a Catholic priest who had gotten two gas mask covers and filled one with fried chicken and one with Scotch whiskey. The runner said he watched as the priest knelt by a wounded Marine. The young Marine asked the question asked by so many, “Am I going to live?” “Sure, you are”, came the cheerful reply. “How about a piece of fried chicken, and a swig of Scotch?” I never saw a chaplain or a corpsman that slacked his duty. These people were Navy.
We moved ahead slowly all the rest of the day. We were experiencing some very heavy fire. We weren’t keeping up with the Fourth Marine Division on our right. In fact, the Fourth, by simply making their objective, were in a dangerous situation. There was nobody on their right or left. If the Japanese had been able, they could have flanked them, and probably wiped them out.
At about noon, three enemy tanks attacked our “A” Company, and an adjoining company from 2/6. Our guys put them out with rocket launchers.
The areas behind us were filling up with Marines, and I knew that food, water, and ammunition were coming in. We had a beach head!
At night, we set up a Battalion Command Post. Arkie Howell manned the switchboard and we had phone and radio communication with each of our rifle companies, our special Weapons Company and Sixth Marines CP. I was with Jones and Kearns. That night, 2/6 got the expected banzai attack. They fought and held. The next morning over 700 Japanese troops were found. The rest straggled back toward Garapan.
Day 2:
We strengthened our positions. Several more of my lesser wounded men came back to join us. It helped. It had been a tough day on colonels and majors. Of the four battalions in the Sixth Marines, only Jones was still in command. The rest were commanded by executive officers.(Majors) We (1/6) had lost two of our captains. We had captured Charon Konoa by afternoon.
That night, (D plus 2), the army’s 27th Division landed, but they were a mile or so back of us by now.
We heard that a Japanese fleet was headed our way to relieve their beat-up troops. The Fifth Fleet moved out to take them on. Our transports and supply ships moved out for safety. We were left on our own again. Shades of Guadalcanal!
We really dug in this night. We dug three foot deep trenches, and put our main equipment between trees and four feet of dirt. I took over the battalion watch so the operator could get some sleep. Colonel Jones and I were right together. Anything he needed, I would handle. We put out listening posts and ate cold “C” rations.
We were in pretty good shape. There were some guys from the Intelligence section to my right, and Corporal Burton, who, while in camp was the battalion mail clerk, was about 75 feet behind me. We were all close to form a defensive line, and we were supposed to hold it if necessary.
It began to get dark. There was firing close by, and further away. There wasn’t one second you couldn’t hear gunfire. Every man had his own little piece of earth and line to hold.
Then, Burton got hit. I think it was in the arm or shoulder. He really “took on”, really howling. I asked Jones if I should go back to him. Jones didn’t think we could afford to leave when at any moment, we might hear from one of our line companies, and we would need to do something,. Burton began cursing us. I really wanted to go back to him, but I couldn’t. He called us everything he could think of, and I sure wasn’t looking forward to hearing him all night.
Then I had something else to think about. We got word from Captain Thomas and Captain Durfee that a Japanese tank unit with infantry was coming toward them. They asked for 37 MM anti-tank guns, and Jones ordered them to move up. He also requested illumination of the area from the Navy. We found the next morning that there were about 24 of those tanks. Our guys didn’t have much to fight them off with. They did all kinds of heroic things with grenades.
We lost Captain Norman K. Thomas in this tank fight. He had been a hero on Tarawa, but he gave his life that night on Saipan.
We were about 200 yards from where the battle was going on. Bullets were zinging all around. If you wanted a purple heart that night, all you had to do was to stick up a finger! I was going to do what I could with a carbine and an M1 if they kept coming, but they didn’t. One of the weapons we had that could do some damage to those tanks was the bazookas. We had a special weapons platoon that had 37MM guns, and they could do damage, and I guess they did. One of the guys in one of the rifle companies was Dean Squires. I knew him pretty well. He was from Oklahoma. There were some good stories about how he fought that night. I didn’t fire a shot, neither did Colonel Jones. We made it through the night.
Day 3, June 18, 1944
The next day began with no food or water. I still had some “C” rations and some water in my canteen, but since a lot of the guys didn’t have anything, I didn’t eat anything either. We needed to go forward, so we did.
Lt. Gen. Holland M. (Howling Mad) Smith was in command of the operation. The orders that day were for the Second and Fourth Marine Divisions to attack.
The rifle companies were out in front of us, and it sounded like they were getting some action. Then we heard the very bad news that Captain Durfee, the “A” Company commander, had been killed.(Durfee was an Annapolis man and I worshipped him.)
We had crossed a little ravine and were going forward when I heard someone say, “Look ahead!” I could see a cloud of white out ahead of us. It wasn’t more than 50 feet high, and very deadly looking. “Gas”!!
“Oh, Lord!” No one had a gas mask. We had trained for this, but we didn’t have any masks! We had dumped them, full of sand and salt water back at the beach.
This was a time when we would have learned if we had a coward in our outfit. I still can’t believe that no one ran. I began thinking of how I could manage. I had a good “battle towel” in my pack. I got it out and wet it as good as I could, and thought I would hold it over my face. I wondered if it were mustard gas, or something else that would burn. I think we all thought that our time had probably come. It rolled in on us. I closed my eyes, wondering if the gas would be accompanied by a banzai attack of Japs with gas masks. No one said anything. It was very silent. I heard an officer say, “Don’t open your eyes”. My ears and neck began to burn. Then I heard Arkie Howell say, “Ammonium Hydroxide”.
“A” Company called, and said that a fertilizer plant had been blown up, and the cloud was scary, but not dangerous. Nobody was hurt, but I think we all had a higher degree of respect for the men around us after seeing how they reacted in the face of terrible danger. What a relief!
About 10:00AM, our wonderful cooks and bakers came up behind us with a marvelous breakfast. There was bacon, lovely powdered eggs, SOS (chipped beef in gravy on toast), and hot coffee. Wow! It was all in aluminum containers.
Berger and I got to talking. “Ten years from now, we’ll really have something to tell anyone who will listen. But nobody will listen”. (Betty’s note: But we did listen. I loved to hear Jack and Lorne Berger talk about their war experiences, and just laugh and laugh about things that happened, like the poison gas scare. Some of the men used extraordinary means to moisten something to put over their faces, remember they had no water, and that was one of Lorne’s stories. We did love that man.)
I took off my steel helmet. It was so heavy. It seemed like I had worn it for a hundred years. I had been in three campaigns now. There was a lot of this one left. Would the war ever end? I had only one pair of underclothes nice and clean in my pack. I had used all my socks once. My shoes had been through salt water and sand. Would they be the last ones I would ever have?
I didn’t have too much time for this kind of thinking. We advanced about a mile. It seemed like twenty. We were relieved by some group. We walked back over the ground. We dug our protective fox holes and settled down for a night of rest and sleep (without anything to eat.)
Day 4:
We were going up a long hill without opposition. I heard a whamming noise about 100 yards. It was a BIG old bullet, the projectile from one of our cruisers in the Garapan harbor. They were firing to help us, and they were supposed to be just ahead of us, but they were firing right in on us. We found out later that it was the Omaha.
Colonel Jones got on the radio, and got it stopped. These were big old shells, and we could see them bouncing along. I don’t know why they didn’t explode.
While Jones was using the radio, he told regimental headquarters that he would be setting up his command post in a building that was a couple of hundred yards up ahead. I guess the Japanese heard it, because in just a few minutes the building was blown to smithereens. Jones never forgot that radio transmission. We had a tough time getting up that hill!
W moved on up, and to the seaward side a little. I helped one of the wiremen run a line out to a rifle company. When I got back, I looked at where my little platoon had dug their foxholes. They were in a regular line, and they looked like a bunch of graves, and they were certainly in sight of the Japanese if there were any out in front of us. I made them move under a crest of a hill. Some of them didn’t like it very much, but by the time we got dug in for the night and had put up our pup tents, several round of enemy mortar fire had made the area where we had been look like a plowed field.
I haven’t mentioned this, but our pup tents consisted of two “shelter halves”, one belonging to one man, and one to another. I was fortunate in that I had a private first class named Corpier, a Cajun from Louisiana who would put up our tent while I was winding down, looking over everything, and getting assignments made for the night. He could do a really good job, bringing the sides down, and covering the edges with dirt so the tent wouldn’t blow away in the rains that came almost every night. I loved Corpier!
From here on, the days are blurred.
We moved on up Mount Tapotchau. By then, it was about D+7. We kept working on up, and then one day we were in position. The Eighth Marines, the Fourth Marine Division, and the Army 106th Infantry were to make a push and we were to be in reserve. At the right time, the 8th and the 4th Division jumped, but the 106th didn’t. After some conversation, Marine Gen. H.M. Smith relieved Army Major General Ralph Smith of the 27th Division. There are still discussions about that act.
As in many cases, it was not my outfit that reached the top of Mount Tapotchau. I think it was some of the 8th and the 29th Marines. But it relieved us of having the Japs looking down at us, and seeing our every move.
At about this time I got a new boss. He was Lieutenant Edward Walsh. He was a really good fellow, and our friendship lasted throughout the rest of the war, and until his death a few years ago. (Betty’s note: Jack was Ed’s hero, and he never failed to let us know how he admired him.) He had been a newspaper reporter from Sea Girt, New Jersey. He really knew almost nothing he needed to know, but he let me do my job, and supported me to the Nth degree. He came between Colonel Jones and me, so instead of getting my orders directly from Jones, I got them through Walsh. This didn’t cause any problem at all.
One of the little things I won’t ever forget happened while we were up there. We were about a mile behind the front lines. We had a little command post set up, and settled down a little. To the west of us just about 50 yards was a sheer cliff that rose about 100 feet. Suddenly, some Japanese came out of a cave that we hadn’t noticed, and started shooting and throwing grenades into us. I had left my carbine about 30 feet away, but I found one lying by me, and I picked it up and started firing into the Japs. Here again, I may have killed Japanese. I aimed and shot and people fell. But there were several others firing into them, so I never knew for sure. That’s fine with me.
I emptied a clip and heard Corporal Cunningham yelling at me to give him his gun. I handed it to him, and then I noticed that the Japanese had run out of ammunition and were throwing rocks and dirt.
I made our guys stop firing. Cunningham never forgave me for that incident. Years after, he would tell the story and say, “The only chance I ever had to kill a Jap, and that --- Langston picked up my rifle instead of his own”. We called in one of our intelligence people who got an interpreter. The Japs came out of the cave, kept coming, kept coming, and finally there were about 125 of them, including some Chamorros and women and children. They were taken back toward Charon Kanoa.
We stayed awhile on this hillside. There was a lot of cleaning up, getting the enemy out of caves, etc. We had bypassed scores of them, and they kept coming out behind us and bumping off our people.
Colonel Jones informed Walsh that up ahead of us where we had been and secured a couple of days earlier, there was a Japanese supply dump that had a lot of communication gear in it. He asked Walsh to send someone and me to look it over, and see if any of it was of value to us.
I took Corporal James Weber. We traded our carbines for Colt 45 automatics that would be easier to carry. We went up and looked it over. It was pretty tempting, because there was a lot of the stuff that was very sophisticated. It was really no good for us in our tactical situation. We made some notes, and picked up four of their walkie-talkies and started back.
Immediately, we heard mortar shells exploding back in our command post. They were really zeroed in on it. As we started back, three Japanese soldiers came out of somewhere and began firing at us. I thought, “Brother, of all the times to be carrying a 45”. I had qualified as sharpshooter with one in boot camp, but I knew I couldn’t hit a barn with one. We got down behind some fallen trees and had a little Cowboy and Indian battle for a while. I could hear some of our riflemen coming up to help us out. One of the Japs got up from where he had been hiding and started to run toward me. I fired the 45 at him, and he fell. He got halfway in a hole and started firing again. Some of our riflemen finished him off. The only time I fired a 45 I knocked down a Jap. Pretty good!
We joined in with the rifle platoon and went back to our CP. We had taken a direct hit on our BD71 switchboard. Arkie Howell, a corporal in the wire section, had been hit pretty badly. I said good bye to him as they were taking him back to the rear. That was all the war for Arkie. He was from Lone Oak, Arkansas, his brother was Dixie Howell, a professional football player. Mayence, an intelligence platoon man with whom I had played baseball back in Hawaii, was hit in the right shoulder. He was under contract to play for the St. Louis Cardinals.
We began putting the pieces back together. Replacements began to come in to help us. I was surprised to see how well prepared they were. We were about to go down and tackle Garapan.
I suppose Garapan was one of the firsts of the Marine’s street fighting in a real city. It was not hard for my outfit. Again, elements from the Second and Eight were right in there with us. This time, we had Sherman tanks and half-tracks to open the way. We got through on the 3rd of July. The word back home was that the island was secured, and we celebrated on the fourth of July.
The fighting was not nearly over. There was mopping up everywhere. Even almost a week later, we cleared Marpi Point and over 2,000 Japanese were killed. Here we had to watch as soldiers and Japanese civilians jumped to their death from the cliff. The civilians had been brainwashed by the military about the cruelty of the Marines. We saved hundreds of them, along with a lot of the Chamarros. They were taken back toward Charon Kanoa where a prisoner of war camp had been set up.
The end was in sight for the Japanese leaders. General Saito did the best he could to set up a final banzai charge in which there was no hope for victory. Then he committed hari-kari. They cremated his body so we never saw it. He was the general in charge of the attack on Pear Harbor. The outfit that relieved us was an army outfit (27th Division?)
The banzai attack indeed took place. Most of the fury was spent on the 105th Army regiment. It was hand to hand fighting at its worst. They really had a terrible battle. We could hear the sounds. They pushed all the way back to the 10th Marines artillery. The next day, we went through them. There were soldiers and Japanese lying all over the ground. They had been in hand to hand battles. You could hardly walk without stepping on them. The soldier’s gear was all-new. I worried that they might have been inexperienced and in their first and only battle. Many of our Marines took off canteen belts, canteens, weapons and outer clothing from the soldier’s bodies. I couldn’t see anything I wanted bad enough to take.
This pretty well ended the official fighting. On the 15th of July, Army garrison troops took over the responsibility for the island. This time we didn’t go back to Hawaii or New Zealand. We set up tent camps right on Saipan. We knew Tinian and Guam had to be conquered. Artillery from Tinian came in on us every once in a while. There would be very little time for rest. But there would be some. Showers and roads had been set up by the Sea-Bees. We continued to get reinforcements. We knew we would be fighting again soon
MAY, 1944
We got on ships and made maneuvers, landing on the coast of Maui. We trained for fighting, in sugar cane fields. We went into Pearl Harbor, here a lot of our troops moved over to LSTs (Landing Ship Tanks). These ships were filled with amphibious tractors. We would go in our next battle in these things. They had very little armor. We had gone into Guadalcanal in Higgins boats, and into Tarawa in rubber boats. There were some bad accidents in Hawaii with the LSTs and the tractors. I didn’t know about it until well after the war was over.
I’m not sure what transport I was aboard, but it seems like the Monrovia. We pulled out of Pearl Harbor, picking up ships right and left. There were more APAs (troop transports) with more Marines. There were destroyers, DE’s(destroyer escorts). Later we picked up cruisers and battleships. I think I remember the Washington and maybe the Indiana. The LST’s had gone on about two days ahead of us. At this time my boss was a Lieutenant Brown. After Tarawa Captain Stegemerten was promoted to Major and moved to Regimental headquarters. Brown was an OC (Officer Candidate). He was less than a Lieutenant, (he made it before we landed on Saipan), doing the job of a Captain. I was a staff sergeant doing the job of a Tech Sergeant. (Promotions come slow in the Marine Corps.)
After we were at sea for two days, Brown brought me an attaché case full of information. We were told we were going to attack Saipan in the Mariana Islands. We started working with maps and intelligence information. I was briefed and then I held daily meetings with my men. I never saw Brown again until we had landed on Saipan. We were to land on Red Beach One in support of 2/6(second battalion, 6th Marine Regiment) and 3/6. Piece of cake!
We had smooth sailing for hundreds of miles. Then we saw land. As we got closer we saw it was friendly. It was Eniwetok, one of the Carolinas. Our new General Watson had conquered it just three months earlier with the 4th Division. It seemed as though the whole fleet gathered in the harbor, (we couldn’t have done this earlier). We messed around here for a day. Here we were transferred into an LST. It took us six more days in that lovely boat to get to the Marianas.
This was an experience. An LST is no pleasure cruiser. There were no bunks for us. We all had to sleep on the deck. The deck was crowded with amphibious tractors, Sherman tanks, and millions of fifty gallon barrels. The thing reeked of gasoline. A spark would have blown us all to eternity. Naturally, there was no smoking.
We went over new aerial photos, maps, and other intelligence information that we just received. The overall responsibility for the protection of the landings rested upon the giant 5th Fleet under Admiral Raymond A. Spruance. The fleet of over 800 ships was “the largest ever assembled in the Pacific”. Vice Admiral Marc A. Mitscher commanded the fast carriers, most of them brand new.
The day before “D” Day, underwater demolition teams went in. They might have blown up some things if there had been anything to blow up. We got their report. There was no coral barrier reef. There were no mines. There were pillboxes and trenches. They missed something most of us saw the next day; the registration flags that the Japanese would use to get accurate fire on us as we came in.
On June 15, 1944, sixty three years ago, we closed on Saipan. We were awakened early. Troops on transports had steak and eggs, but not us. We had our C’s, and loaded into our Amtrak. We wouldn’t get wet this trip. The amtraks would take us clear up on the beach (it says here!). Kearns was with Colonel Jones. We started for land about 8:15 in the morning.
About 200 yards from shore, Captain Triplett, our BN-3 officer, who was in the LVT with Jones, raised his head to get a glimpse of the beach. His head was blown off. Jones and Burga came ashore with blood all over them. I was in the second command Amtrak with Grieco and Corona. Our Amtrak halted about 50 yards from shore, couldn’t go any further. By this time, bullets were whizzing all around us. We jumped over the side with our equipment. The water was about four feet deep. We got to shore in a flash!
We fell down in the protection of the beach. Corona and I lay side by side. Corona said quietly, “Jack, I’m hit.” It must have been a mortar fragment. I found a corpsman for him. The corpsman told him, “The war is over for you”. He pointed out to the harbor. There was a beautiful white hospital ship with a big Red Cross on it. I never saw Corona again. (But I heard from him. He became an attorney in Corpus Christie, Texas.)
I had suspected that we were going in too far to my left, and soon found that our guide boat leaders had allowed the current to drift us about a 1/4th of a mile north of our Red Beach Two. We lost considerable time after we landed in getting over to the place where we belonged.
Unlike the Second Division, whose plan was to disembark from our vehicles as soon as we got to shore, the Fourth Division was to stay in their LVT (A) vehicles. They had 75MM cannons mounted in the noses. I could look over there and see a lot of them getting out just like we were. I never knew why.
We were ashore, but we had only gotten about fifteen feet of beach under control. All heck broke loose, the fire just got heavier. As long as we could keep down, the machine gun and rifle fire couldn’t get to us. I could hear the stuff going over my head like angry bees. I turned and looked backward, and could see the stuff hitting the water about 100 yards out. I was pretty happy down behind that seawall. Then they got us zeroed in with their mortars and it became plain that we couldn’t stay there any longer. Even their artillery began to shorten up and get down on the beach. We HAD to move forward. At this time, every Marine was a rifleman, no matter what his specialty was.
I never had noticed the smell of gunpowder so much in my previous battles. You could hardly breathe It got hotter and hotter. I was getting more and more of my men together. We had new gas masks going in, but I figured they were shot, because of the sea water and the sand. Some of my guys asked if I would okay it if they dropped them. I told them I couldn’t authorize them to do that. Soon I could see that every one was ditching them. They were soggy and heavy. I was one of the last to dump mine, carrying it another 24 hours. This action would haunt us in another 36 hours.
We moved forward, and began trying to get our communication job going. Soon I found Art Kirchoeffer. Art had been shot; he would also go to the hospital ship. Soon Lieutenant Brown found me. He had a wound in an arm. It didn’t look very bad to me. He said, “I will be going back to Pearl. You have the platoon, and I can’t think of anyone who will do a better job than you”. I thought, “Yes, you ---!”. I never saw him again, either. Out of the 56 men we started out with, there were only 19 when I finally got a tally. Fortunately, they were good ones.
Jones sent out runners and assembled his four company commanders at his command post, (which means he was in a somewhat sheltered area). One of the runners came back with a story about a Catholic priest who had gotten two gas mask covers and filled one with fried chicken and one with Scotch whiskey. The runner said he watched as the priest knelt by a wounded Marine. The young Marine asked the question asked by so many, “Am I going to live?” “Sure, you are”, came the cheerful reply. “How about a piece of fried chicken, and a swig of Scotch?” I never saw a chaplain or a corpsman that slacked his duty. These people were Navy.
We moved ahead slowly all the rest of the day. We were experiencing some very heavy fire. We weren’t keeping up with the Fourth Marine Division on our right. In fact, the Fourth, by simply making their objective, were in a dangerous situation. There was nobody on their right or left. If the Japanese had been able, they could have flanked them, and probably wiped them out.
At about noon, three enemy tanks attacked our “A” Company, and an adjoining company from 2/6. Our guys put them out with rocket launchers.
The areas behind us were filling up with Marines, and I knew that food, water, and ammunition were coming in. We had a beach head!
At night, we set up a Battalion Command Post. Arkie Howell manned the switchboard and we had phone and radio communication with each of our rifle companies, our special Weapons Company and Sixth Marines CP. I was with Jones and Kearns. That night, 2/6 got the expected banzai attack. They fought and held. The next morning over 700 Japanese troops were found. The rest straggled back toward Garapan.
Day 2:
We strengthened our positions. Several more of my lesser wounded men came back to join us. It helped. It had been a tough day on colonels and majors. Of the four battalions in the Sixth Marines, only Jones was still in command. The rest were commanded by executive officers.(Majors) We (1/6) had lost two of our captains. We had captured Charon Konoa by afternoon.
That night, (D plus 2), the army’s 27th Division landed, but they were a mile or so back of us by now.
We heard that a Japanese fleet was headed our way to relieve their beat-up troops. The Fifth Fleet moved out to take them on. Our transports and supply ships moved out for safety. We were left on our own again. Shades of Guadalcanal!
We really dug in this night. We dug three foot deep trenches, and put our main equipment between trees and four feet of dirt. I took over the battalion watch so the operator could get some sleep. Colonel Jones and I were right together. Anything he needed, I would handle. We put out listening posts and ate cold “C” rations.
We were in pretty good shape. There were some guys from the Intelligence section to my right, and Corporal Burton, who, while in camp was the battalion mail clerk, was about 75 feet behind me. We were all close to form a defensive line, and we were supposed to hold it if necessary.
It began to get dark. There was firing close by, and further away. There wasn’t one second you couldn’t hear gunfire. Every man had his own little piece of earth and line to hold.
Then, Burton got hit. I think it was in the arm or shoulder. He really “took on”, really howling. I asked Jones if I should go back to him. Jones didn’t think we could afford to leave when at any moment, we might hear from one of our line companies, and we would need to do something,. Burton began cursing us. I really wanted to go back to him, but I couldn’t. He called us everything he could think of, and I sure wasn’t looking forward to hearing him all night.
Then I had something else to think about. We got word from Captain Thomas and Captain Durfee that a Japanese tank unit with infantry was coming toward them. They asked for 37 MM anti-tank guns, and Jones ordered them to move up. He also requested illumination of the area from the Navy. We found the next morning that there were about 24 of those tanks. Our guys didn’t have much to fight them off with. They did all kinds of heroic things with grenades.
We lost Captain Norman K. Thomas in this tank fight. He had been a hero on Tarawa, but he gave his life that night on Saipan.
We were about 200 yards from where the battle was going on. Bullets were zinging all around. If you wanted a purple heart that night, all you had to do was to stick up a finger! I was going to do what I could with a carbine and an M1 if they kept coming, but they didn’t. One of the weapons we had that could do some damage to those tanks was the bazookas. We had a special weapons platoon that had 37MM guns, and they could do damage, and I guess they did. One of the guys in one of the rifle companies was Dean Squires. I knew him pretty well. He was from Oklahoma. There were some good stories about how he fought that night. I didn’t fire a shot, neither did Colonel Jones. We made it through the night.
Day 3, June 18, 1944
The next day began with no food or water. I still had some “C” rations and some water in my canteen, but since a lot of the guys didn’t have anything, I didn’t eat anything either. We needed to go forward, so we did.
Lt. Gen. Holland M. (Howling Mad) Smith was in command of the operation. The orders that day were for the Second and Fourth Marine Divisions to attack.
The rifle companies were out in front of us, and it sounded like they were getting some action. Then we heard the very bad news that Captain Durfee, the “A” Company commander, had been killed.(Durfee was an Annapolis man and I worshipped him.)
We had crossed a little ravine and were going forward when I heard someone say, “Look ahead!” I could see a cloud of white out ahead of us. It wasn’t more than 50 feet high, and very deadly looking. “Gas”!!
“Oh, Lord!” No one had a gas mask. We had trained for this, but we didn’t have any masks! We had dumped them, full of sand and salt water back at the beach.
This was a time when we would have learned if we had a coward in our outfit. I still can’t believe that no one ran. I began thinking of how I could manage. I had a good “battle towel” in my pack. I got it out and wet it as good as I could, and thought I would hold it over my face. I wondered if it were mustard gas, or something else that would burn. I think we all thought that our time had probably come. It rolled in on us. I closed my eyes, wondering if the gas would be accompanied by a banzai attack of Japs with gas masks. No one said anything. It was very silent. I heard an officer say, “Don’t open your eyes”. My ears and neck began to burn. Then I heard Arkie Howell say, “Ammonium Hydroxide”.
“A” Company called, and said that a fertilizer plant had been blown up, and the cloud was scary, but not dangerous. Nobody was hurt, but I think we all had a higher degree of respect for the men around us after seeing how they reacted in the face of terrible danger. What a relief!
About 10:00AM, our wonderful cooks and bakers came up behind us with a marvelous breakfast. There was bacon, lovely powdered eggs, SOS (chipped beef in gravy on toast), and hot coffee. Wow! It was all in aluminum containers.
Berger and I got to talking. “Ten years from now, we’ll really have something to tell anyone who will listen. But nobody will listen”. (Betty’s note: But we did listen. I loved to hear Jack and Lorne Berger talk about their war experiences, and just laugh and laugh about things that happened, like the poison gas scare. Some of the men used extraordinary means to moisten something to put over their faces, remember they had no water, and that was one of Lorne’s stories. We did love that man.)
I took off my steel helmet. It was so heavy. It seemed like I had worn it for a hundred years. I had been in three campaigns now. There was a lot of this one left. Would the war ever end? I had only one pair of underclothes nice and clean in my pack. I had used all my socks once. My shoes had been through salt water and sand. Would they be the last ones I would ever have?
I didn’t have too much time for this kind of thinking. We advanced about a mile. It seemed like twenty. We were relieved by some group. We walked back over the ground. We dug our protective fox holes and settled down for a night of rest and sleep (without anything to eat.)
Day 4:
We were going up a long hill without opposition. I heard a whamming noise about 100 yards. It was a BIG old bullet, the projectile from one of our cruisers in the Garapan harbor. They were firing to help us, and they were supposed to be just ahead of us, but they were firing right in on us. We found out later that it was the Omaha.
Colonel Jones got on the radio, and got it stopped. These were big old shells, and we could see them bouncing along. I don’t know why they didn’t explode.
While Jones was using the radio, he told regimental headquarters that he would be setting up his command post in a building that was a couple of hundred yards up ahead. I guess the Japanese heard it, because in just a few minutes the building was blown to smithereens. Jones never forgot that radio transmission. We had a tough time getting up that hill!
W moved on up, and to the seaward side a little. I helped one of the wiremen run a line out to a rifle company. When I got back, I looked at where my little platoon had dug their foxholes. They were in a regular line, and they looked like a bunch of graves, and they were certainly in sight of the Japanese if there were any out in front of us. I made them move under a crest of a hill. Some of them didn’t like it very much, but by the time we got dug in for the night and had put up our pup tents, several round of enemy mortar fire had made the area where we had been look like a plowed field.
I haven’t mentioned this, but our pup tents consisted of two “shelter halves”, one belonging to one man, and one to another. I was fortunate in that I had a private first class named Corpier, a Cajun from Louisiana who would put up our tent while I was winding down, looking over everything, and getting assignments made for the night. He could do a really good job, bringing the sides down, and covering the edges with dirt so the tent wouldn’t blow away in the rains that came almost every night. I loved Corpier!
From here on, the days are blurred.
We moved on up Mount Tapotchau. By then, it was about D+7. We kept working on up, and then one day we were in position. The Eighth Marines, the Fourth Marine Division, and the Army 106th Infantry were to make a push and we were to be in reserve. At the right time, the 8th and the 4th Division jumped, but the 106th didn’t. After some conversation, Marine Gen. H.M. Smith relieved Army Major General Ralph Smith of the 27th Division. There are still discussions about that act.
As in many cases, it was not my outfit that reached the top of Mount Tapotchau. I think it was some of the 8th and the 29th Marines. But it relieved us of having the Japs looking down at us, and seeing our every move.
At about this time I got a new boss. He was Lieutenant Edward Walsh. He was a really good fellow, and our friendship lasted throughout the rest of the war, and until his death a few years ago. (Betty’s note: Jack was Ed’s hero, and he never failed to let us know how he admired him.) He had been a newspaper reporter from Sea Girt, New Jersey. He really knew almost nothing he needed to know, but he let me do my job, and supported me to the Nth degree. He came between Colonel Jones and me, so instead of getting my orders directly from Jones, I got them through Walsh. This didn’t cause any problem at all.
One of the little things I won’t ever forget happened while we were up there. We were about a mile behind the front lines. We had a little command post set up, and settled down a little. To the west of us just about 50 yards was a sheer cliff that rose about 100 feet. Suddenly, some Japanese came out of a cave that we hadn’t noticed, and started shooting and throwing grenades into us. I had left my carbine about 30 feet away, but I found one lying by me, and I picked it up and started firing into the Japs. Here again, I may have killed Japanese. I aimed and shot and people fell. But there were several others firing into them, so I never knew for sure. That’s fine with me.
I emptied a clip and heard Corporal Cunningham yelling at me to give him his gun. I handed it to him, and then I noticed that the Japanese had run out of ammunition and were throwing rocks and dirt.
I made our guys stop firing. Cunningham never forgave me for that incident. Years after, he would tell the story and say, “The only chance I ever had to kill a Jap, and that --- Langston picked up my rifle instead of his own”. We called in one of our intelligence people who got an interpreter. The Japs came out of the cave, kept coming, kept coming, and finally there were about 125 of them, including some Chamorros and women and children. They were taken back toward Charon Kanoa.
We stayed awhile on this hillside. There was a lot of cleaning up, getting the enemy out of caves, etc. We had bypassed scores of them, and they kept coming out behind us and bumping off our people.
Colonel Jones informed Walsh that up ahead of us where we had been and secured a couple of days earlier, there was a Japanese supply dump that had a lot of communication gear in it. He asked Walsh to send someone and me to look it over, and see if any of it was of value to us.
I took Corporal James Weber. We traded our carbines for Colt 45 automatics that would be easier to carry. We went up and looked it over. It was pretty tempting, because there was a lot of the stuff that was very sophisticated. It was really no good for us in our tactical situation. We made some notes, and picked up four of their walkie-talkies and started back.
Immediately, we heard mortar shells exploding back in our command post. They were really zeroed in on it. As we started back, three Japanese soldiers came out of somewhere and began firing at us. I thought, “Brother, of all the times to be carrying a 45”. I had qualified as sharpshooter with one in boot camp, but I knew I couldn’t hit a barn with one. We got down behind some fallen trees and had a little Cowboy and Indian battle for a while. I could hear some of our riflemen coming up to help us out. One of the Japs got up from where he had been hiding and started to run toward me. I fired the 45 at him, and he fell. He got halfway in a hole and started firing again. Some of our riflemen finished him off. The only time I fired a 45 I knocked down a Jap. Pretty good!
We joined in with the rifle platoon and went back to our CP. We had taken a direct hit on our BD71 switchboard. Arkie Howell, a corporal in the wire section, had been hit pretty badly. I said good bye to him as they were taking him back to the rear. That was all the war for Arkie. He was from Lone Oak, Arkansas, his brother was Dixie Howell, a professional football player. Mayence, an intelligence platoon man with whom I had played baseball back in Hawaii, was hit in the right shoulder. He was under contract to play for the St. Louis Cardinals.
We began putting the pieces back together. Replacements began to come in to help us. I was surprised to see how well prepared they were. We were about to go down and tackle Garapan.
I suppose Garapan was one of the firsts of the Marine’s street fighting in a real city. It was not hard for my outfit. Again, elements from the Second and Eight were right in there with us. This time, we had Sherman tanks and half-tracks to open the way. We got through on the 3rd of July. The word back home was that the island was secured, and we celebrated on the fourth of July.
The fighting was not nearly over. There was mopping up everywhere. Even almost a week later, we cleared Marpi Point and over 2,000 Japanese were killed. Here we had to watch as soldiers and Japanese civilians jumped to their death from the cliff. The civilians had been brainwashed by the military about the cruelty of the Marines. We saved hundreds of them, along with a lot of the Chamarros. They were taken back toward Charon Kanoa where a prisoner of war camp had been set up.
The end was in sight for the Japanese leaders. General Saito did the best he could to set up a final banzai charge in which there was no hope for victory. Then he committed hari-kari. They cremated his body so we never saw it. He was the general in charge of the attack on Pear Harbor. The outfit that relieved us was an army outfit (27th Division?)
The banzai attack indeed took place. Most of the fury was spent on the 105th Army regiment. It was hand to hand fighting at its worst. They really had a terrible battle. We could hear the sounds. They pushed all the way back to the 10th Marines artillery. The next day, we went through them. There were soldiers and Japanese lying all over the ground. They had been in hand to hand battles. You could hardly walk without stepping on them. The soldier’s gear was all-new. I worried that they might have been inexperienced and in their first and only battle. Many of our Marines took off canteen belts, canteens, weapons and outer clothing from the soldier’s bodies. I couldn’t see anything I wanted bad enough to take.
This pretty well ended the official fighting. On the 15th of July, Army garrison troops took over the responsibility for the island. This time we didn’t go back to Hawaii or New Zealand. We set up tent camps right on Saipan. We knew Tinian and Guam had to be conquered. Artillery from Tinian came in on us every once in a while. There would be very little time for rest. But there would be some. Showers and roads had been set up by the Sea-Bees. We continued to get reinforcements. We knew we would be fighting again soon
From Tarawa to Hawaii
I. Back from Tarawa
a.Getting aboard ship for the return
We were pretty tired and beat up after our short stay on that little place. We gathered up our equipment which consisted of our top packs, cartridge belts, canteens, our mess gear which consisted of a spoon and a canteen cup. Our top packs contained a pair or two of green “skivvies” (T shirt and shorts),some extra socks and some scavenged “C” rations.
Beside this we had to carry our communication gear. The telephone section had to carry their “BD71” ? switch board. They also carried several EE8A field telephones and a few sound powered phones. Besides this, they had to carry a considerable amount of the thin, light field wire and some drums of heavier wire.
The Radio Section, which I was in charge of, had a Hallicrafters TBX, which was a long range tranceiver which communicated our battalion with our regimental headquarters, other units and which was capable of receiving transmissions from San Francisco. When we had pretty well secured Tarawa, we were set up to be in communication with our military units, but I came by and heard in code the call signs of the big News station in S.F. The big news was of the terrible battle in the Pacific that cost the lives of so many gallant Marines. We liked to hear this because we were heroes and we knew our folks and friends in the U.S. would be hearing it.
Lieutenant Brown who was one of our officers, and who could read code, also dropped by. I didn’t see him right away. He listened for a while and then had to act displeased and told me to get the TBX back on the regimental net.
The TBX came in three sections, the tranceiver, the hand cranked generator and the antenna. Each of these sections, along with a radioman’s regular pack and carbine mad a pretty good load.
The Radio section also carried about 8 TBY’s. these were portable units which a radioman carried and were dispatched to each company commander and to the Colonel W.K Jones, the battalion commander. These were pretty sorry. Getting wet coming in about ruined them. For them we had rechargeable batteries which were almost as heavy as a present day car battery. We wished we could dump them but we would have been sent to Leavenworth if we had.
The Message Center section carried its own supplies, which included encoding equipment, and helped with the Radio and Wire Section’s gear. On December 4,1943 we got ready to leave.
b. Aboard the USS President Harrison
We were picked up by ship’s boats and taken to our transport, The USS President Harrison. We were delighted to get away from Tarawa and back aboard a US Navy ship. The first thing we wanted was a cup of that good Navy coffee. The sailors, who had, of course, stayed aboard while we were fighting, were very, very nice to us. We had Ice Cream and we had a belated Marine Corps Birthday celebration with plum pudding and Turkey.
There were so many of us that it was just too crowded below decks, so most of us stayed topside. As we were right on the equator, the temperature was over 100 degrees in the daytime and we were on steel decks. We just hunted for shade and loved it.(for a while).
An interesting hobby developed on this trip. Some of the men who had a little talent had picked up aluminum from Jap Zeroes and probably from some of our own P-47’s. They fashioned bracelets, watch bands and other neat things from the metal. David R. Baker, who later was to be best man at my wedding was very good at this. Baker and I were very close friends and I was the recipient of at least one of whatever he made. I’m sorry to say that I never wound up with a single item. The iron deck was hard and hot, but at this time I could sleep anywhere.
Comparatively speaking, the journey to Hawaii was pretty bad. Most of us had lost all of our gear. There were a lot of wounded aboard. They kept the sick bay busy. Most of the time you could smell antiseptics. There were funerals every day and of course the burials at sea. But none of these wounded and dead were close to me.
As I had the Radio section and all of our men could read Morse code, we were lumped in with the ship’s signalmen and stood watches along with them in the “Radio Shack”. This was good duty. The radio shack was high up on the ship and it was cool and comfortable there. Also we could keep up on the world news. We, along with the Navy, published a daily one-page newspaper. One thing we always kept up with was the major league baseball scores. I guess, since this was November or later, we didn’t have any baseball scores. We also could get priority into the mess lines and could loaf around on the upper decks which were not so crowded and where we could find shade easier.
c. The Typhoon
As always, I enjoyed watching the flying fish along the side of the boat. They would come out of the water at the stern and fly all the way to the front of the boat. Sometimes we would see dolphins and always, there were sharks back of the fantail looking for garbage. Sometimes we would see birds hundreds of miles away from shore!
About the third day on the way to Hawaii, the clouds began to darken and the winds picked up. We were notified over the ship’s speaker system that we were in for a bad storm. Most everyone went below. I took my gear down and went up to the radio shack to see what would happen next.
What happened next was one of the worst typhoons in the history of the Pacific. The waves became 100 feet high. You could look out and see one towering over you away up there. The next thing it engulfed the ship with thousands (maybe millions) of gallons of water. It seemed as if it would just pound the ship into the sea and sink it. Then the wave would be past, the ship would drain off all the water and straighten out on its course. Only then another wave even larger would pound it. This was a very frightening experience for an Oklahoma boy and certainly one he never forgot. The ship must have been built very well and the ship’s Captain and other officers and men very capable. We rode it out. During this storm, many of the Navy’s ships sustained damage. The heavy Cruiser Omaha was broken in half. One part, which contained the electrical generators, was towed into Hilo, Hawaii. The power source of this town of several thousand had been destroyed. The Omaha furnished power for Hilo for several years.
d.Hawaii
We came into Pearl Harbor. I had seen beautiful water, but the water in Pearl Harbor was as beautiful as any I have ever seen. We saw the hulks of ships that had gone down two years before. Our shipping in this area was colossal. There were scores of tugs, battleships, aircraft carriers, destroyers, submarines, destroyer escorts, supply ships, huge wharves and scores of the tall cranes,
The docks were deluged with equipment and supplies. There were hundreds of jeeps, 2½ton trucks, and tanks. Never in the war had I doubted that we would emerge victorious, but seeing Pearl Harbor at this time I was made even more confident. I had been in two tough battles by then and thought I might be lucky enough to get a furlough and go home. I felt that, much as I would like to be home for a little while, it would be alright with me to stay and get it over with. I did begin to get serious about saving my money to begin farming when I got back. At this time I guess I was 22.
There were trucks waiting for us and we were taken to Fleet Marine Force, Pacific Headquarters. I saw two Oahu landmarks, Diamondhead and the Dole Pineapple water tower. Here we checked into wonderful clean barracks, barracks beds, white sheets, new green Marine blankets. We received Red Cross packets with razor, tooth brush, toothpaste, Ivory soap.
We went to chow where we ate on china plates with cloth napkins. The food was wonderful!
The next day we got a tour of Oahu. The big hotels had barbed wire on their beaches. Every one was in uniform. We toured the Dole plant. We got all the pineapple we wanted. But we knew the next day we would be going out to our camp. I didn’t know where it would be. I can’t remember how we got across from Oahu to Hawaii but it must have been on a boat. Maybe we hadn’t ever disembarked from the Harrison.
e.Hilo
We got off the boat and into trucks.
We disembarked in a nice little town and got into trucks with just our personal gear consisting of what we could get into the two sections of our packs and a bedroll.
We drove along the beach for several miles and saw the amazing sluices which carried water and sugar cane from the fields to the factories. Then we turned up toward the big mountains, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. We drove sixty miles from Hilo, into a small village called Kona and then Kaumea. We went on up the mountain where it was deliciously cool. We came to a place that was obviously going to be a military camp. The only thing was there were hundreds of squad tents but only a few were set up. We saw Lister bags for water and cold showers. We found we had to set up our own tents. They were delivered down company streets. We took them off the trucks and began setting them up. We were pretty much experts in this The tents were the same 6-man tents we had in New Zealand. There were floors that we set about a foot above ground.
By this time I was a Sergeant and had roommates in Loren Berger, Bormann, Art Kirchhoefer, -----.
There was a big tent for a kitchen and we used our mess gear that first night. Then we heard there was to be a movie at second division headquarters that was about ¾ mile away. It was a Gene Autry movie and I enjoyed it very much. Though it was pretty cool, I do not remember any stoves at this camp that was called Camp Tarawa.
f. Camp Tarawa
First, for some of the amusings;
Berger, who became one of my greatest friends, had been promoted to sergeant. He and someone had gone on liberty to Kamuela and had been caught in a store getting into a Coke cooler. They said they were absolutely innocent. Berger lost his stripes and had to stay in the brig for a day. I was elected to go get him out. I was ordered to bring my rifle and escort him “under arms” to our tent where he would be under house arrest for four days. He had to be escorted to chow and training “under arms” during that time. I had a delightful time marching him around and treating him like a criminal. Berger was a fantastic Marine in combat, and was promoted after every battle. But when he got back in peaceful areas he always lost the stripes. We didn’t have velcro in those days. It would have been handy for “Ham”.
On the poignant side, Platoon Sergeant Robert Dyer had lived in a Staff NCO tent in New Zealand with 5 other staff NCO’s. Each had different specialties and were separated on Tarawa. He expected them to be with him again in this camp. When he got to his tent,he found that He was the only one who had survived Tarawa. With help, he got the tent set up. He spent the first night in it alone. There would be other staff NCO’s to be in the tent with him eventually. He took a camp chair, sat it in the middle of the tent, set the tent afire and went back and sat down.
Of course he was rescued. The First Sergeant wanted to court-martial him and make him pay for the tent. Nothing happened. When the new NCO’s came, Dyer was gracious to them. There was a lot of talk about him being crazy. On the first day of training, Dyer took his platoon to the firing range and was his old self from then on. Dyer had been in the Raider Battalion on Guadalcanal. After Guadalcanal the Raider Battalion and the Parachute Battalions were disbanded and their personnel incorporated into regular units. We were lucky to get Dyer. He was the top enlisted man in the 81 Millimeter Mortar Platoon. Dyer stayed in the Corps for many years and retired as a Captain.
We had a newspaper published by Division headquarters. It was “Ta Ra Wa Boom De A”. It was put up on the bulletin boards. I wonder if there is a copy in existence. The only thing the editors got away with was they could ridicule “Dugout Doug”.
Berger and I had established a tradition.
Before we went into a battle, we would give up our seabags and only go aboard ship with packs. We would put a bottle of Budweiser in our seabag and if one of us didn’t make it through the battle, the other would get his Bud and drink to his memory. We got our seabags and each drank our own Bud.
It was always a big disappointment after each battle to find that Ham had made it through! We got two bottles of beer issued to us every day, I think. I didn’t really like it that much so I would just put it under my bunk and it would accumulate. Berger and Kirchoeffer could drink a dozen bottles during a card game. My hoard became very popular. I don’t think I ever charged them but I did trade for some favors.
g. We receive replacements
Personnel changes and promotions happened fast. Berger made corporal (he was made sergeant after Saipan). I made Staff Sergeant and was put in charge of the platoon. This job rated a Tech Sergeant but the Marine Corps always ran a bit behind on rates. Lieutenant Stegemerten, an Annapolis man whom I had worked for almost two years made Captain and became regimental communications Officer. Lt. B.B.Brown became our Battalion Communication Officer and was my immediate boss. He was okay, but I never really liked him. He was around at the required times but I was left with the responsibility of getting the platoon ready for our next action.
Now we received the greatest group of replacements the world has ever seen. These became my guys. They were smart, dedicated, disciplined. They responded to my leadership. There was Coudayre, Kearns, Poland, Corpier, Corona, Grieco, Hansen, and a host of others. (if I ever edit this, I’ll put in more names)
After two campaigns, I knew I had to get these men really ready or we would wind up getting killed or failing to do our job in combat. I had plenty of help from Col. Jones from the physical and combat side. We fired several different weapons, the Colt 45, the 30 caliber carbine, the Thompson submachine gun, the Garand M1, the 30 caliber and 50 caliber machine guns, and several Japanese guns. We were up at 5:00 for calisthenics. We had field problems with maps and compasses. We had ground to air communication exercises. We hiked miles almost every day. We used up enormous amounts of live ammunition. I trained my guys in a school tent on Code. I trained them in Semaphore, in blinker lights. We had two Navajo talkers, Pete and Price that we used with the rifle companies day after day.
h. The big Rodeo
We had organized athletics in the afternoons twice a week. Kirchoeffer and I played on the division baseball team. We got to go all over the islands and play other military teams.
We were located on the huge Parker Ranch. The Ranch people organized a big rodeo and barbecue. Lots of our Marines were involved. I figured I probably could have done a lot better than a most of them but I had enough sense to just be a spectator in this event. But it was great fun.
We Get Ready
We were issued new 782 gear, new shoes, new gas masks (and got chemical warfare training), a certain amount of ammunition. I had a 30 caliber carbine, but resolved to get something else if I really got into battle.
We began hearing about the Marianas, Truk, Bougainville and the possibility of making a demonstration landing on a secluded coast of Japan itself. Tokyo Rose said the Second Marine Division would hit Saipan.
a.Getting aboard ship for the return
We were pretty tired and beat up after our short stay on that little place. We gathered up our equipment which consisted of our top packs, cartridge belts, canteens, our mess gear which consisted of a spoon and a canteen cup. Our top packs contained a pair or two of green “skivvies” (T shirt and shorts),some extra socks and some scavenged “C” rations.
Beside this we had to carry our communication gear. The telephone section had to carry their “BD71” ? switch board. They also carried several EE8A field telephones and a few sound powered phones. Besides this, they had to carry a considerable amount of the thin, light field wire and some drums of heavier wire.
The Radio Section, which I was in charge of, had a Hallicrafters TBX, which was a long range tranceiver which communicated our battalion with our regimental headquarters, other units and which was capable of receiving transmissions from San Francisco. When we had pretty well secured Tarawa, we were set up to be in communication with our military units, but I came by and heard in code the call signs of the big News station in S.F. The big news was of the terrible battle in the Pacific that cost the lives of so many gallant Marines. We liked to hear this because we were heroes and we knew our folks and friends in the U.S. would be hearing it.
Lieutenant Brown who was one of our officers, and who could read code, also dropped by. I didn’t see him right away. He listened for a while and then had to act displeased and told me to get the TBX back on the regimental net.
The TBX came in three sections, the tranceiver, the hand cranked generator and the antenna. Each of these sections, along with a radioman’s regular pack and carbine mad a pretty good load.
The Radio section also carried about 8 TBY’s. these were portable units which a radioman carried and were dispatched to each company commander and to the Colonel W.K Jones, the battalion commander. These were pretty sorry. Getting wet coming in about ruined them. For them we had rechargeable batteries which were almost as heavy as a present day car battery. We wished we could dump them but we would have been sent to Leavenworth if we had.
The Message Center section carried its own supplies, which included encoding equipment, and helped with the Radio and Wire Section’s gear. On December 4,1943 we got ready to leave.
b. Aboard the USS President Harrison
We were picked up by ship’s boats and taken to our transport, The USS President Harrison. We were delighted to get away from Tarawa and back aboard a US Navy ship. The first thing we wanted was a cup of that good Navy coffee. The sailors, who had, of course, stayed aboard while we were fighting, were very, very nice to us. We had Ice Cream and we had a belated Marine Corps Birthday celebration with plum pudding and Turkey.
There were so many of us that it was just too crowded below decks, so most of us stayed topside. As we were right on the equator, the temperature was over 100 degrees in the daytime and we were on steel decks. We just hunted for shade and loved it.(for a while).
An interesting hobby developed on this trip. Some of the men who had a little talent had picked up aluminum from Jap Zeroes and probably from some of our own P-47’s. They fashioned bracelets, watch bands and other neat things from the metal. David R. Baker, who later was to be best man at my wedding was very good at this. Baker and I were very close friends and I was the recipient of at least one of whatever he made. I’m sorry to say that I never wound up with a single item. The iron deck was hard and hot, but at this time I could sleep anywhere.
Comparatively speaking, the journey to Hawaii was pretty bad. Most of us had lost all of our gear. There were a lot of wounded aboard. They kept the sick bay busy. Most of the time you could smell antiseptics. There were funerals every day and of course the burials at sea. But none of these wounded and dead were close to me.
As I had the Radio section and all of our men could read Morse code, we were lumped in with the ship’s signalmen and stood watches along with them in the “Radio Shack”. This was good duty. The radio shack was high up on the ship and it was cool and comfortable there. Also we could keep up on the world news. We, along with the Navy, published a daily one-page newspaper. One thing we always kept up with was the major league baseball scores. I guess, since this was November or later, we didn’t have any baseball scores. We also could get priority into the mess lines and could loaf around on the upper decks which were not so crowded and where we could find shade easier.
c. The Typhoon
As always, I enjoyed watching the flying fish along the side of the boat. They would come out of the water at the stern and fly all the way to the front of the boat. Sometimes we would see dolphins and always, there were sharks back of the fantail looking for garbage. Sometimes we would see birds hundreds of miles away from shore!
About the third day on the way to Hawaii, the clouds began to darken and the winds picked up. We were notified over the ship’s speaker system that we were in for a bad storm. Most everyone went below. I took my gear down and went up to the radio shack to see what would happen next.
What happened next was one of the worst typhoons in the history of the Pacific. The waves became 100 feet high. You could look out and see one towering over you away up there. The next thing it engulfed the ship with thousands (maybe millions) of gallons of water. It seemed as if it would just pound the ship into the sea and sink it. Then the wave would be past, the ship would drain off all the water and straighten out on its course. Only then another wave even larger would pound it. This was a very frightening experience for an Oklahoma boy and certainly one he never forgot. The ship must have been built very well and the ship’s Captain and other officers and men very capable. We rode it out. During this storm, many of the Navy’s ships sustained damage. The heavy Cruiser Omaha was broken in half. One part, which contained the electrical generators, was towed into Hilo, Hawaii. The power source of this town of several thousand had been destroyed. The Omaha furnished power for Hilo for several years.
d.Hawaii
We came into Pearl Harbor. I had seen beautiful water, but the water in Pearl Harbor was as beautiful as any I have ever seen. We saw the hulks of ships that had gone down two years before. Our shipping in this area was colossal. There were scores of tugs, battleships, aircraft carriers, destroyers, submarines, destroyer escorts, supply ships, huge wharves and scores of the tall cranes,
The docks were deluged with equipment and supplies. There were hundreds of jeeps, 2½ton trucks, and tanks. Never in the war had I doubted that we would emerge victorious, but seeing Pearl Harbor at this time I was made even more confident. I had been in two tough battles by then and thought I might be lucky enough to get a furlough and go home. I felt that, much as I would like to be home for a little while, it would be alright with me to stay and get it over with. I did begin to get serious about saving my money to begin farming when I got back. At this time I guess I was 22.
There were trucks waiting for us and we were taken to Fleet Marine Force, Pacific Headquarters. I saw two Oahu landmarks, Diamondhead and the Dole Pineapple water tower. Here we checked into wonderful clean barracks, barracks beds, white sheets, new green Marine blankets. We received Red Cross packets with razor, tooth brush, toothpaste, Ivory soap.
We went to chow where we ate on china plates with cloth napkins. The food was wonderful!
The next day we got a tour of Oahu. The big hotels had barbed wire on their beaches. Every one was in uniform. We toured the Dole plant. We got all the pineapple we wanted. But we knew the next day we would be going out to our camp. I didn’t know where it would be. I can’t remember how we got across from Oahu to Hawaii but it must have been on a boat. Maybe we hadn’t ever disembarked from the Harrison.
e.Hilo
We got off the boat and into trucks.
We disembarked in a nice little town and got into trucks with just our personal gear consisting of what we could get into the two sections of our packs and a bedroll.
We drove along the beach for several miles and saw the amazing sluices which carried water and sugar cane from the fields to the factories. Then we turned up toward the big mountains, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. We drove sixty miles from Hilo, into a small village called Kona and then Kaumea. We went on up the mountain where it was deliciously cool. We came to a place that was obviously going to be a military camp. The only thing was there were hundreds of squad tents but only a few were set up. We saw Lister bags for water and cold showers. We found we had to set up our own tents. They were delivered down company streets. We took them off the trucks and began setting them up. We were pretty much experts in this The tents were the same 6-man tents we had in New Zealand. There were floors that we set about a foot above ground.
By this time I was a Sergeant and had roommates in Loren Berger, Bormann, Art Kirchhoefer, -----.
There was a big tent for a kitchen and we used our mess gear that first night. Then we heard there was to be a movie at second division headquarters that was about ¾ mile away. It was a Gene Autry movie and I enjoyed it very much. Though it was pretty cool, I do not remember any stoves at this camp that was called Camp Tarawa.
f. Camp Tarawa
First, for some of the amusings;
Berger, who became one of my greatest friends, had been promoted to sergeant. He and someone had gone on liberty to Kamuela and had been caught in a store getting into a Coke cooler. They said they were absolutely innocent. Berger lost his stripes and had to stay in the brig for a day. I was elected to go get him out. I was ordered to bring my rifle and escort him “under arms” to our tent where he would be under house arrest for four days. He had to be escorted to chow and training “under arms” during that time. I had a delightful time marching him around and treating him like a criminal. Berger was a fantastic Marine in combat, and was promoted after every battle. But when he got back in peaceful areas he always lost the stripes. We didn’t have velcro in those days. It would have been handy for “Ham”.
On the poignant side, Platoon Sergeant Robert Dyer had lived in a Staff NCO tent in New Zealand with 5 other staff NCO’s. Each had different specialties and were separated on Tarawa. He expected them to be with him again in this camp. When he got to his tent,he found that He was the only one who had survived Tarawa. With help, he got the tent set up. He spent the first night in it alone. There would be other staff NCO’s to be in the tent with him eventually. He took a camp chair, sat it in the middle of the tent, set the tent afire and went back and sat down.
Of course he was rescued. The First Sergeant wanted to court-martial him and make him pay for the tent. Nothing happened. When the new NCO’s came, Dyer was gracious to them. There was a lot of talk about him being crazy. On the first day of training, Dyer took his platoon to the firing range and was his old self from then on. Dyer had been in the Raider Battalion on Guadalcanal. After Guadalcanal the Raider Battalion and the Parachute Battalions were disbanded and their personnel incorporated into regular units. We were lucky to get Dyer. He was the top enlisted man in the 81 Millimeter Mortar Platoon. Dyer stayed in the Corps for many years and retired as a Captain.
We had a newspaper published by Division headquarters. It was “Ta Ra Wa Boom De A”. It was put up on the bulletin boards. I wonder if there is a copy in existence. The only thing the editors got away with was they could ridicule “Dugout Doug”.
Berger and I had established a tradition.
Before we went into a battle, we would give up our seabags and only go aboard ship with packs. We would put a bottle of Budweiser in our seabag and if one of us didn’t make it through the battle, the other would get his Bud and drink to his memory. We got our seabags and each drank our own Bud.
It was always a big disappointment after each battle to find that Ham had made it through! We got two bottles of beer issued to us every day, I think. I didn’t really like it that much so I would just put it under my bunk and it would accumulate. Berger and Kirchoeffer could drink a dozen bottles during a card game. My hoard became very popular. I don’t think I ever charged them but I did trade for some favors.
g. We receive replacements
Personnel changes and promotions happened fast. Berger made corporal (he was made sergeant after Saipan). I made Staff Sergeant and was put in charge of the platoon. This job rated a Tech Sergeant but the Marine Corps always ran a bit behind on rates. Lieutenant Stegemerten, an Annapolis man whom I had worked for almost two years made Captain and became regimental communications Officer. Lt. B.B.Brown became our Battalion Communication Officer and was my immediate boss. He was okay, but I never really liked him. He was around at the required times but I was left with the responsibility of getting the platoon ready for our next action.
Now we received the greatest group of replacements the world has ever seen. These became my guys. They were smart, dedicated, disciplined. They responded to my leadership. There was Coudayre, Kearns, Poland, Corpier, Corona, Grieco, Hansen, and a host of others. (if I ever edit this, I’ll put in more names)
After two campaigns, I knew I had to get these men really ready or we would wind up getting killed or failing to do our job in combat. I had plenty of help from Col. Jones from the physical and combat side. We fired several different weapons, the Colt 45, the 30 caliber carbine, the Thompson submachine gun, the Garand M1, the 30 caliber and 50 caliber machine guns, and several Japanese guns. We were up at 5:00 for calisthenics. We had field problems with maps and compasses. We had ground to air communication exercises. We hiked miles almost every day. We used up enormous amounts of live ammunition. I trained my guys in a school tent on Code. I trained them in Semaphore, in blinker lights. We had two Navajo talkers, Pete and Price that we used with the rifle companies day after day.
h. The big Rodeo
We had organized athletics in the afternoons twice a week. Kirchoeffer and I played on the division baseball team. We got to go all over the islands and play other military teams.
We were located on the huge Parker Ranch. The Ranch people organized a big rodeo and barbecue. Lots of our Marines were involved. I figured I probably could have done a lot better than a most of them but I had enough sense to just be a spectator in this event. But it was great fun.
We Get Ready
We were issued new 782 gear, new shoes, new gas masks (and got chemical warfare training), a certain amount of ammunition. I had a 30 caliber carbine, but resolved to get something else if I really got into battle.
We began hearing about the Marianas, Truk, Bougainville and the possibility of making a demonstration landing on a secluded coast of Japan itself. Tokyo Rose said the Second Marine Division would hit Saipan.
Tarawa, the battle as I saw it.
THE BATTLE FOR TARAWA AS I SAW IT
While recuperating in Mew Zealand, we began preparation got a new offensive. Division Commander General Marston was replaced by General Julian D. Smith and Colonel Merrit Edson became chief of staff. Edson, who had won the Medal of honor on Guadalcanal, did not come for a any desk job.
We, (1st Battalion, 6th Marines), sailed north to Hawkes Bay to practice amphibious landings. Colonel Maurice Holmes became regimental commander and Major William K. Jones was our commander. On October 28, 1943, we loaded on the USS Feland, a new transport. I thought it looked like a motor boat because the rear end was squared off like it was made to support an outboard motor.
Toward dawn on November 1, we left Wellington Bay at a speed of about 14 knots. We only knew that this was no drill. The convoy got bigger and bigger. We began to see cruisers and destroyers. On November 6, we began practice landings at Efati in French New Hebrides.
We were in boats for hours, smelling the fumes of the diesel motors I watched one of the coxswain’s mates braiding on a piece of rope. He painstakingly braided it into a continuous loop. I thought he was probably working on it as one of his projects for his next promotion. He seemed to finish it to his satisfaction; Raised it to look it over one last time. And then he tossed it over the side.
When we finished, we got back aboard the Feland. Some of the guys, who had a little fishing gear with them, broke it out. No rule against this, but there was a rule against diving from the fantail for a swim We had a bullet-headed guy about 5’8 tall and weighing about 250 pounds who dived off anyway. Lots of people yelled, “Man Overboard”. He didn’t come up. About four Marines dove in to try to save him . One got within about three feet of his outstretched hands. I will never forget him looking up at us. It was impossible to go any further. I think he was so heavy, that if we had gotten hold of him, he would have drowned someone. I heard his G.I. insurance was cancelled and his folks did not receive it. We saw a battleship. Later we found it was the Maryland. She had 16” guns.
On November 12, we sailed; the Colorado and the Tennessee joined us along with four cruisers. The scuttlebut (gossip) said we were going to retake Wake Island. On November 16 we got the message. We were going to open the offensive in the Central Pacific. Our target was Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands. There was supposed to be about 2500 Japanese Marines defending it We were going to take it by storm, secure the airfield. There were no plans for retreat. On D Day minus one planes from two carriers were to hit Tarawa. My friend Ed Martin was flying one of those planes. Army bombers were to begin daily strikes. The Navy was to put 2700 tons of metal on Tarawa before a single Marine started ashore. It was hard to believe that anything could survive such a battering. We seemed to hear that we could just comfortably ride in to shore and set up our tents while our burial details handled the dead Japanese! If we ever had to fire a gun the Navy hadn’t done its job.
We were designated as Corps Reserve, probably not even getting in on the landing at all. Lt. Col. Amey, whom I had been with on Guadalcanal, commanded Second Battalion, Second Marines.
He told his command they were very fortunate. They were going to be the first American troops to land against a well-defended beach, first over a coral reef, and the first to kick the h--- out of the Japanese in a hurry. They all agreed they were very lucky. We cleaned our equipment, played cards, studied maps, drank the good Navy coffee, wrote letters. The temperature began to rise over 100 degrees as we approached the equator.
We had many alarms. “General Quarters”, General Quarters, All hands to your Battle Stations!” There were submarine scares. We heard that the army bombers had received no antiaircraft fire from their target. We received a message from General Julian Smith saying part,“You are well trained and equipped for the task ahead of you. Your success will add new laurels to glorious tradition of our Corps. Good Luck and God bless you all!”
A battleship Commander had bragged, “ We have so
much armor we can take anything they throw back at us.”
General Smith said, “When the Marines land and meet the enemy at bayonet point, the only armor a Marine will have is his khaki shirt.”
The battle for Tarawa began at0900 on November 20,1943. It ended seventy six hours later at 1330 on the 24th day of November.
The Japanese fired their first shot. At 04:40 they sent up a star cluster. Then they began firing the big eight-inch guns they had taken from Singapore. Marines had begun leaving their transports in Higgins boats. The Battleships Maryland and Colorado moved in as close as they could. The Jap shells began to rattle off them. A naval air strike, which had been scheduled, failed to come off. The first waves learned a terrible truth. There was a very low tide and the Higgins boats could not float over the reefs. Only the amphibious tractors could be assured of making it to land. They learned something else, too. There were plenty of Japs left on Tarawa and they were firing with everything from rifles to 8-inch guns. They began to realize why Admiral Shibasaki had said that a million men could not take Tarawa. The amtracs began receiving fire at 2000 yards. Marines began to die. Many of them never reached shore; many became tangled in the garbed razor wire. Lt. Col Amey was killed as his amtrac stalled and he tried to wade to Red Beach 2. The heroism was almost belief.
Time after time they charged Japanese positions, ignoring the deadly fire and refusing to halt until they were mortally wounded or killed.
Some died in the deep water, sinking under the weight of their equipment. Others died close in, lying half exposed in the sand.
By mid afternoon our Sixth Marines were released from Corps Reserve.
The first battalion landed in rubber boats.
I was a sergeant in charge of the radio section of the Communication Platoon of Headquarters Company,First Battalion, Sixth Matrines. I had good bosses. Lt.Stegemerten, Tech Sergeant Brown and Lt. Col. Willie K. Jones.
I had about twenty five men with TBY radios which weighed about 45 pounds and were decidedly unreliable. I had radio operators with the Colonel, each of the rifle company commanders, with regimental headquarters. The operators had their packs and rifles, too, so they really had a load. Most of us had carbines, Reising guns and a few of the radio operators had Colt 45 automatics. Then another group had a TBX that would be set up when we arrived on shore to connect us with a lot of larger organizations.
We were dropped from the Feland about a mile and a half from shore. We had no motor. There were thirteen of us in each boat.
The boats were very heavy and sluggish as we rowed them through the water. As we got closer it began to drag on the coral. We got out and began pulling and pushing it. We began receiving fire. We could see the spray as a machine gun would circle across ahead and the water would splash up. We could see the bullets hitting the water; there would be time for us to get ourselves under before they came around to us. A problem was just how long would we need to stay under. That was solved for us. We couldn’t stay under very long! Most of us would drop through the coral every once in a while. You can imagine what this was doing to our equipment. There was no telling how deep the water was. We would pull each other and keep going. I looked over to my left and saw the Battleship Maryland (Tennessee?) She was closer to the shore than I was.
We moved in to about a quarter of a mile from shore. Gunfire was tearing up the water ahead of us. The island was smoking and blazing. The noise was deafening, The heat was almost unbearable. Most of us were carrying two canteens. I drank one of mine and then didn’t drink out of the other, wanting to be sure I didn’t run out. People were dropping right and left now. We had to go forward; we couldn’t have gotten back to our ship if we had tried. I don’t think the thought ever crossed anyone’s mind.
There were hundreds of dead Marines that we walked over and around.
We dragged the boat with our equipment on and on. Other boats were loaded with machine guns. Mortars and other gear were right alongside of us. We got it to the beach. It was about 3 feet high so we had to keep our heads down. We began pushing forward. We had only gotten about 200 yards before night began to set in and we were ordered to hold what we had until morning.
During the night Corporal David R. Baker, who later was the best man at my wedding, and I worked on radio equipment which was not working. I kept in touch with my men who were with the line companies. One of my good Buddies, Corporal Glen R. Smith was killed as a Japanese suicide person jumped in the tank trap where Smitty and a few others of our men were spending the night.
We were very thirsty. We finally received some 5-gallon cans of water from the rear, only to find that the cans had been painted on the inside and tasted like turpentine.
A lot of our people used one canteen for water and they put in two hand grenades in their other canteen cup and cover. I had two canteens and I put my grenades on one of my old belts and kept them around my neck.
We took canteens off dead Marines along with sometimes a little food. The “K” rations were a highly concentrated chocolate bar. I could never handle more than a half bar.
The nest morning we advanced along the south shore. All through the day we advanced, murderously slow. About 7:30 the Japs counter-attacked. When we held, they began to kill themselves.
About 4:00 in the morning several hundred of them attacked our “A” and “B” companies in a wild banzai charge.
It was 1st Lt. Norman K. Thomas, one of my friends was acting commander of “B” Company. He told Colonel Jones’ “ We are killing them as fast as they come at us, but we can’t hold much longer. We have to have reinforce-
ments.” There was no time to get reinforcements and a breakthrough would have put the Japs on our flank and we would have been in terrible shape. Jones told them, “ You’ve got to hold.” Somehow they held. Ater, one of them said, “Jones told us to hold, and, by God, we held!”
As we went forward, the ground was covered with dead Japs. They had made a bad choice trying to break through our battalion!
By sunup everything started working. The carrier fighters and bombers came in. I don’ think they killed any Japs, but they sure made them keep their heads down. We had good air support from the Navy from then on.
They came in, strafing, over what was left of the palm trees. Then the navy ships bombarded ahead of us.
We moved back into reserve and had a chance to regroup. One of the greatest helps was we had some Sherman tanks come in. Now, those things were a help. I will never forget that one of them had the name “China Gal” on its side. They had more armor than a khaki shirt. We moved forward again.
At 13:30 on November 23, General Julian Smith pronounced the atoll secured.
We had fought for honor, for self-respect,(and for our lives), and for the memory of Marines who had fought just as we did in the wars before us.
We were involved in mopping up. SeaBee bulldozers began working on the new airstrip. P47’s, including Ed Martin, from the carriers began to land.
Our burial details were doing their work. When we marched back to go aboard ship, we saw a new cemetery with row after row of white crosses. Beautiful but somber.
On a bare tree, a huge holiday flag with its stars and stripes was flying.
We had a ceremony. A bugler blew “To the Colors”. We raised the British flag. We turned around and went back. The bugler played “Taps”. We had to clean up the rest of the Gilbert Islands.
Some of our troops ran into a little opposition, but we didn’t have much. Some of us got to ride in a submarine over to one of the islands to reconnoiter. All we had to do was pick up 16 Japanese prisoners that the natives were proudly holding for us.
On December 4th we went aboard the USS Harris (Harrison?). Our destination: Hawaii!
While recuperating in Mew Zealand, we began preparation got a new offensive. Division Commander General Marston was replaced by General Julian D. Smith and Colonel Merrit Edson became chief of staff. Edson, who had won the Medal of honor on Guadalcanal, did not come for a any desk job.
We, (1st Battalion, 6th Marines), sailed north to Hawkes Bay to practice amphibious landings. Colonel Maurice Holmes became regimental commander and Major William K. Jones was our commander. On October 28, 1943, we loaded on the USS Feland, a new transport. I thought it looked like a motor boat because the rear end was squared off like it was made to support an outboard motor.
Toward dawn on November 1, we left Wellington Bay at a speed of about 14 knots. We only knew that this was no drill. The convoy got bigger and bigger. We began to see cruisers and destroyers. On November 6, we began practice landings at Efati in French New Hebrides.
We were in boats for hours, smelling the fumes of the diesel motors I watched one of the coxswain’s mates braiding on a piece of rope. He painstakingly braided it into a continuous loop. I thought he was probably working on it as one of his projects for his next promotion. He seemed to finish it to his satisfaction; Raised it to look it over one last time. And then he tossed it over the side.
When we finished, we got back aboard the Feland. Some of the guys, who had a little fishing gear with them, broke it out. No rule against this, but there was a rule against diving from the fantail for a swim We had a bullet-headed guy about 5’8 tall and weighing about 250 pounds who dived off anyway. Lots of people yelled, “Man Overboard”. He didn’t come up. About four Marines dove in to try to save him . One got within about three feet of his outstretched hands. I will never forget him looking up at us. It was impossible to go any further. I think he was so heavy, that if we had gotten hold of him, he would have drowned someone. I heard his G.I. insurance was cancelled and his folks did not receive it. We saw a battleship. Later we found it was the Maryland. She had 16” guns.
On November 12, we sailed; the Colorado and the Tennessee joined us along with four cruisers. The scuttlebut (gossip) said we were going to retake Wake Island. On November 16 we got the message. We were going to open the offensive in the Central Pacific. Our target was Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands. There was supposed to be about 2500 Japanese Marines defending it We were going to take it by storm, secure the airfield. There were no plans for retreat. On D Day minus one planes from two carriers were to hit Tarawa. My friend Ed Martin was flying one of those planes. Army bombers were to begin daily strikes. The Navy was to put 2700 tons of metal on Tarawa before a single Marine started ashore. It was hard to believe that anything could survive such a battering. We seemed to hear that we could just comfortably ride in to shore and set up our tents while our burial details handled the dead Japanese! If we ever had to fire a gun the Navy hadn’t done its job.
We were designated as Corps Reserve, probably not even getting in on the landing at all. Lt. Col. Amey, whom I had been with on Guadalcanal, commanded Second Battalion, Second Marines.
He told his command they were very fortunate. They were going to be the first American troops to land against a well-defended beach, first over a coral reef, and the first to kick the h--- out of the Japanese in a hurry. They all agreed they were very lucky. We cleaned our equipment, played cards, studied maps, drank the good Navy coffee, wrote letters. The temperature began to rise over 100 degrees as we approached the equator.
We had many alarms. “General Quarters”, General Quarters, All hands to your Battle Stations!” There were submarine scares. We heard that the army bombers had received no antiaircraft fire from their target. We received a message from General Julian Smith saying part,“You are well trained and equipped for the task ahead of you. Your success will add new laurels to glorious tradition of our Corps. Good Luck and God bless you all!”
A battleship Commander had bragged, “ We have so
much armor we can take anything they throw back at us.”
General Smith said, “When the Marines land and meet the enemy at bayonet point, the only armor a Marine will have is his khaki shirt.”
The battle for Tarawa began at0900 on November 20,1943. It ended seventy six hours later at 1330 on the 24th day of November.
The Japanese fired their first shot. At 04:40 they sent up a star cluster. Then they began firing the big eight-inch guns they had taken from Singapore. Marines had begun leaving their transports in Higgins boats. The Battleships Maryland and Colorado moved in as close as they could. The Jap shells began to rattle off them. A naval air strike, which had been scheduled, failed to come off. The first waves learned a terrible truth. There was a very low tide and the Higgins boats could not float over the reefs. Only the amphibious tractors could be assured of making it to land. They learned something else, too. There were plenty of Japs left on Tarawa and they were firing with everything from rifles to 8-inch guns. They began to realize why Admiral Shibasaki had said that a million men could not take Tarawa. The amtracs began receiving fire at 2000 yards. Marines began to die. Many of them never reached shore; many became tangled in the garbed razor wire. Lt. Col Amey was killed as his amtrac stalled and he tried to wade to Red Beach 2. The heroism was almost belief.
Time after time they charged Japanese positions, ignoring the deadly fire and refusing to halt until they were mortally wounded or killed.
Some died in the deep water, sinking under the weight of their equipment. Others died close in, lying half exposed in the sand.
By mid afternoon our Sixth Marines were released from Corps Reserve.
The first battalion landed in rubber boats.
I was a sergeant in charge of the radio section of the Communication Platoon of Headquarters Company,First Battalion, Sixth Matrines. I had good bosses. Lt.Stegemerten, Tech Sergeant Brown and Lt. Col. Willie K. Jones.
I had about twenty five men with TBY radios which weighed about 45 pounds and were decidedly unreliable. I had radio operators with the Colonel, each of the rifle company commanders, with regimental headquarters. The operators had their packs and rifles, too, so they really had a load. Most of us had carbines, Reising guns and a few of the radio operators had Colt 45 automatics. Then another group had a TBX that would be set up when we arrived on shore to connect us with a lot of larger organizations.
We were dropped from the Feland about a mile and a half from shore. We had no motor. There were thirteen of us in each boat.
The boats were very heavy and sluggish as we rowed them through the water. As we got closer it began to drag on the coral. We got out and began pulling and pushing it. We began receiving fire. We could see the spray as a machine gun would circle across ahead and the water would splash up. We could see the bullets hitting the water; there would be time for us to get ourselves under before they came around to us. A problem was just how long would we need to stay under. That was solved for us. We couldn’t stay under very long! Most of us would drop through the coral every once in a while. You can imagine what this was doing to our equipment. There was no telling how deep the water was. We would pull each other and keep going. I looked over to my left and saw the Battleship Maryland (Tennessee?) She was closer to the shore than I was.
We moved in to about a quarter of a mile from shore. Gunfire was tearing up the water ahead of us. The island was smoking and blazing. The noise was deafening, The heat was almost unbearable. Most of us were carrying two canteens. I drank one of mine and then didn’t drink out of the other, wanting to be sure I didn’t run out. People were dropping right and left now. We had to go forward; we couldn’t have gotten back to our ship if we had tried. I don’t think the thought ever crossed anyone’s mind.
There were hundreds of dead Marines that we walked over and around.
We dragged the boat with our equipment on and on. Other boats were loaded with machine guns. Mortars and other gear were right alongside of us. We got it to the beach. It was about 3 feet high so we had to keep our heads down. We began pushing forward. We had only gotten about 200 yards before night began to set in and we were ordered to hold what we had until morning.
During the night Corporal David R. Baker, who later was the best man at my wedding, and I worked on radio equipment which was not working. I kept in touch with my men who were with the line companies. One of my good Buddies, Corporal Glen R. Smith was killed as a Japanese suicide person jumped in the tank trap where Smitty and a few others of our men were spending the night.
We were very thirsty. We finally received some 5-gallon cans of water from the rear, only to find that the cans had been painted on the inside and tasted like turpentine.
A lot of our people used one canteen for water and they put in two hand grenades in their other canteen cup and cover. I had two canteens and I put my grenades on one of my old belts and kept them around my neck.
We took canteens off dead Marines along with sometimes a little food. The “K” rations were a highly concentrated chocolate bar. I could never handle more than a half bar.
The nest morning we advanced along the south shore. All through the day we advanced, murderously slow. About 7:30 the Japs counter-attacked. When we held, they began to kill themselves.
About 4:00 in the morning several hundred of them attacked our “A” and “B” companies in a wild banzai charge.
It was 1st Lt. Norman K. Thomas, one of my friends was acting commander of “B” Company. He told Colonel Jones’ “ We are killing them as fast as they come at us, but we can’t hold much longer. We have to have reinforce-
ments.” There was no time to get reinforcements and a breakthrough would have put the Japs on our flank and we would have been in terrible shape. Jones told them, “ You’ve got to hold.” Somehow they held. Ater, one of them said, “Jones told us to hold, and, by God, we held!”
As we went forward, the ground was covered with dead Japs. They had made a bad choice trying to break through our battalion!
By sunup everything started working. The carrier fighters and bombers came in. I don’ think they killed any Japs, but they sure made them keep their heads down. We had good air support from the Navy from then on.
They came in, strafing, over what was left of the palm trees. Then the navy ships bombarded ahead of us.
We moved back into reserve and had a chance to regroup. One of the greatest helps was we had some Sherman tanks come in. Now, those things were a help. I will never forget that one of them had the name “China Gal” on its side. They had more armor than a khaki shirt. We moved forward again.
At 13:30 on November 23, General Julian Smith pronounced the atoll secured.
We had fought for honor, for self-respect,(and for our lives), and for the memory of Marines who had fought just as we did in the wars before us.
We were involved in mopping up. SeaBee bulldozers began working on the new airstrip. P47’s, including Ed Martin, from the carriers began to land.
Our burial details were doing their work. When we marched back to go aboard ship, we saw a new cemetery with row after row of white crosses. Beautiful but somber.
On a bare tree, a huge holiday flag with its stars and stripes was flying.
We had a ceremony. A bugler blew “To the Colors”. We raised the British flag. We turned around and went back. The bugler played “Taps”. We had to clean up the rest of the Gilbert Islands.
Some of our troops ran into a little opposition, but we didn’t have much. Some of us got to ride in a submarine over to one of the islands to reconnoiter. All we had to do was pick up 16 Japanese prisoners that the natives were proudly holding for us.
On December 4th we went aboard the USS Harris (Harrison?). Our destination: Hawaii!
Back to NewZealand
Back to New Zealand, February 19,1943
Sick, tired, weary, our First Battalion, Sixth Marines loaded our gear and got into Higgins boats for the short ride out to the “Unholy Four”, (the Hayes, Adams, Jackson and the Crescent City”.
Our ship was the Crescent City this time. It was built a little different from the President ships. I could always recognize it and many times later when I was aboard another ship in convoy, I would see it. It had a distinguishable cutout at its very rear. This was about 3 feet below the main deck and extended about 12 feet back forward. The cut was about 3 feet in depth. I think that a five-inch gun was mounted in there during some combat situations.
We had been on Guadalcanal for about six weeks. About four weeks of that had been in action. The Army joined us in mopping up and securing the island. By this time the airfield at Henderson Field was being used by scores of planes, including some bombers. The Japanese had intended using it as a stepping toward further action in the Pacific. Now we would use it as a stepping stone, a base on our way to Tokyo. We left Army troops to garrison the island.
Guadalcanal had been used by Lever Bros. as a source of material for its manufacture of soap. It was a beautiful island. The water was very clear and blue. I expect it is now a vacation paradise.
I had three souvenirs that I would have liked to bring or send home. Two were a pair of beautiful Japanese Swords. I got them fairly early and of course I had trouble carrying out my duties and transporting them with me. I marked a spot carefully and wrapping them in oilcloth, I buried them. I hoped to come back for them some day. I never got to do it. Another was a simple black notebook that had about 100 blank pages. It had been written in Japanese on a couple of pages. I was able to keep it and I still have it. I used it to keep schedules and minor information. It has the names of many of my friends of that time and keeps me from forgetting them. I also had a couple of small Japanese silk flags at that time. They just disappeared as time went by. The souvenir that most of wanted to bring back was both of our dogtags!
As I remember, we rode trucks back to Mackay,s Crossing and Camp Paekakiriki where we had been before. I had not contracted malaria on Guadalcanal but I came down with it fairly quickly here. We were housed in “squad tents” which slept 6 men on cots. In the center of the tent was a potbellied stove that was fueled by coal or kerosene. The climate, opposite to that in the United States was moving toward winter. Since we were sick and had lost a lot of weight, we thought we were going to freeze even though the temperature was above freezing. Everyone had his bout with the “bug”. It seemed to come about every other day. When you got it, you would grab the center pole of the tent and shake the whole place. I was one of the last to come down, but when I did, my temperature got up to 105 degrees. The sick bay doctor sent me to the naval hospital at Silverstream. I was loaded into a cattle truck along with about ten others and we rode the 30 or so miles in the open air. I spent about five days there.
Silverstream was a vacation type, spa town. There was harness racing that we could see from our hospital beds. Another thing I remembered was that there was a Scottish company stationed there and they would close order drill pretty early in the morning on the pavement outside hospital. They wore hobnailed boots and it was quite entertaining to here them, all in step and in cadence. Sometimes they wore kilts and even had a bagpipe playing.
We were very well taken care of. I think they gave us quinine here. We didn’t have it regularly. It seemed to knock the bug pretty well. Most of us never did quite get rid of the malaria, dengue and yellow fever. I had recurrences all the time I was in the Pacific, but only once after I got back in the States.
When I got back to camp, changes were occurring. Two of my friends, both corporals now, had a chance to go back to the States in what was called the V-12 program. They would go to college for whatever time needed to obtain a degree and then they would receive commissions in the Marine Corps. It was a wonderful break. I should have taken advantage of it, but my priority was to get the war over and return to farming. One of the men was Corporal Boggs, a handsome blonde young man, who was a special good friend and one of my tentmates. I might mention here that in the tent were Spicer and Smith, both corporals and both killed later on Tarawa. I think Berger was there, along with Marlow, one of two Jewish men. The other was Skora. We were in rest camp. Our duties were small and liberty was plentiful.
Liberty meant going in to Wellington where there was considerable interesting things to do. There was a USO where there was dancing. There was plenty of beer and some liquor. The New Zealand young men were mostly away fighting in North Africa and the girls were friendly to the Marines. I was never attracted to the New Zealand girls. They didn’t, as a rule, have good teeth. This had something to do with their water, I believe. I did hear that some of the rougher girls could open a beer bottle cap with their teeth, which didn’t arouse me very much.
Artie Shaw came to town while I was there and Eleanor Roosevelt visited us. I always had a warm feeling for her after this.
We had some leave coming and of course, we couldn’t go home so we took short trips. A Marine named Byrd from Carney, Nebraska and I took a trip to Palmerston North, a Spa town about 100 miles away. The New Zealand people liked us very much and we liked and respected them. We spent the night with a farmer and his family. They were surprised that I could milk a cow. They had a car that ran on charcoal some way. They had a son and a nephew who were fighting in North Africa. We promised to keep in touch with them, but didn’t.
Soon we began training for our next battle. We did exercises with maps and compasses. This was difficult for me, because all the time I was in New Zealand the sun came up in the North. I could force my brain to adjust but it would have been easier if it had felt natural. Another feature was that we had no North Star but used the Southern Cross for our reckoning. The Second Marine Division used the Southern Cross in its decal after this.
We had received replacements and we began to seriously train them for our next action. We had learned from Guadalcanal that ignorance or inattention could get us killed. In our wire section, we climbed poles and strung wire. I was promoted to sergeant and because the wire section had a sergeant and the radio section didn’t I was selected to take charge of the radio section.
This was a New World. Everyone in the section knew more about their work than I did. I didn’t let them know and I buckled down and when I held school for them. I learned, too. One of the things I learned was Morse code. We had TBY portable, (pack on your back) radios for our radiomen who would be with the infantry company commanders. One TBY operator was always with the battalion commander. These were heavy, tube-type radios with heavy batteries. They gave lots of trouble. There were some smaller handheld radios, which were given directly to the platoon commanders, but they were almost useless. We had a TBX Hallicrafter Transceiver that was very good and we used it to communicate with Sixth Regimental Headquarters Command Posts. We could receive international news from KFS San Francisco in code and sometimes we would publish a one sheet newspaper. We were hearing about Marines at some place like Vella Lavella and began thinking our next battle would be at Truk or Bougainville.
As Radio Section Chief, I was responsible for the effectiveness of a lot of this equipment and operators who would accompany battalion and company commanders. The men were superb but the equipment was lousy.
About this time our battalion made a training march with full battle gear up to Foxton (?) about 60 miles. It was plenty tough. Jeeps followed us, picking up people who dropped out. I don’t remember that any of my group dropped out. It rained on us. We spent the night on the road. The radios quit working. One of my memories was as I walked beside Colonel William K. Jones, a radioman named Corpier attached to Jones was carrying his wet radio along with his regular pack which made quite a load. “Poor Corpier,” said the Colonel, “you have to carry it and the darned thing doesn’t even work!”
We were issued new shoes that were smooth on the inside and rough on the outside. They were made by the Jarman company and were excellent. We had New Zealand woolen socks and some beautiful, wonderful New Zealand woolen blankets. About this time we were issued “Reising Guns” which were a poor man’s version of a Thompson machine gun. They had a “coat hanger” folding stock. They fired 45 caliber cartridges from a clip. They fired single fire, semi-automatic and full automatic. They didn’t carry very far and no one could hit anything with them. On full automatic they would rise too quickly and you could get rid of a clip in about 7 seconds. We fired them for record. I had always scored Expert or Sharpshooter. With them I barely qualified as “Marksman”. I knew that if I got into action I would try to get hold of a Springfield or a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle).
We made many more maneuvers. Sometimes we made practice landings from a new vehicle, an amphibious tractor. These could travel through the water, carrying about 25 troops and then keep on going when they got to land. It didn’t do either very well. They were about as reliable as my TBY radios. We were to use them in our next action. They were bad news!
Sick, tired, weary, our First Battalion, Sixth Marines loaded our gear and got into Higgins boats for the short ride out to the “Unholy Four”, (the Hayes, Adams, Jackson and the Crescent City”.
Our ship was the Crescent City this time. It was built a little different from the President ships. I could always recognize it and many times later when I was aboard another ship in convoy, I would see it. It had a distinguishable cutout at its very rear. This was about 3 feet below the main deck and extended about 12 feet back forward. The cut was about 3 feet in depth. I think that a five-inch gun was mounted in there during some combat situations.
We had been on Guadalcanal for about six weeks. About four weeks of that had been in action. The Army joined us in mopping up and securing the island. By this time the airfield at Henderson Field was being used by scores of planes, including some bombers. The Japanese had intended using it as a stepping toward further action in the Pacific. Now we would use it as a stepping stone, a base on our way to Tokyo. We left Army troops to garrison the island.
Guadalcanal had been used by Lever Bros. as a source of material for its manufacture of soap. It was a beautiful island. The water was very clear and blue. I expect it is now a vacation paradise.
I had three souvenirs that I would have liked to bring or send home. Two were a pair of beautiful Japanese Swords. I got them fairly early and of course I had trouble carrying out my duties and transporting them with me. I marked a spot carefully and wrapping them in oilcloth, I buried them. I hoped to come back for them some day. I never got to do it. Another was a simple black notebook that had about 100 blank pages. It had been written in Japanese on a couple of pages. I was able to keep it and I still have it. I used it to keep schedules and minor information. It has the names of many of my friends of that time and keeps me from forgetting them. I also had a couple of small Japanese silk flags at that time. They just disappeared as time went by. The souvenir that most of wanted to bring back was both of our dogtags!
As I remember, we rode trucks back to Mackay,s Crossing and Camp Paekakiriki where we had been before. I had not contracted malaria on Guadalcanal but I came down with it fairly quickly here. We were housed in “squad tents” which slept 6 men on cots. In the center of the tent was a potbellied stove that was fueled by coal or kerosene. The climate, opposite to that in the United States was moving toward winter. Since we were sick and had lost a lot of weight, we thought we were going to freeze even though the temperature was above freezing. Everyone had his bout with the “bug”. It seemed to come about every other day. When you got it, you would grab the center pole of the tent and shake the whole place. I was one of the last to come down, but when I did, my temperature got up to 105 degrees. The sick bay doctor sent me to the naval hospital at Silverstream. I was loaded into a cattle truck along with about ten others and we rode the 30 or so miles in the open air. I spent about five days there.
Silverstream was a vacation type, spa town. There was harness racing that we could see from our hospital beds. Another thing I remembered was that there was a Scottish company stationed there and they would close order drill pretty early in the morning on the pavement outside hospital. They wore hobnailed boots and it was quite entertaining to here them, all in step and in cadence. Sometimes they wore kilts and even had a bagpipe playing.
We were very well taken care of. I think they gave us quinine here. We didn’t have it regularly. It seemed to knock the bug pretty well. Most of us never did quite get rid of the malaria, dengue and yellow fever. I had recurrences all the time I was in the Pacific, but only once after I got back in the States.
When I got back to camp, changes were occurring. Two of my friends, both corporals now, had a chance to go back to the States in what was called the V-12 program. They would go to college for whatever time needed to obtain a degree and then they would receive commissions in the Marine Corps. It was a wonderful break. I should have taken advantage of it, but my priority was to get the war over and return to farming. One of the men was Corporal Boggs, a handsome blonde young man, who was a special good friend and one of my tentmates. I might mention here that in the tent were Spicer and Smith, both corporals and both killed later on Tarawa. I think Berger was there, along with Marlow, one of two Jewish men. The other was Skora. We were in rest camp. Our duties were small and liberty was plentiful.
Liberty meant going in to Wellington where there was considerable interesting things to do. There was a USO where there was dancing. There was plenty of beer and some liquor. The New Zealand young men were mostly away fighting in North Africa and the girls were friendly to the Marines. I was never attracted to the New Zealand girls. They didn’t, as a rule, have good teeth. This had something to do with their water, I believe. I did hear that some of the rougher girls could open a beer bottle cap with their teeth, which didn’t arouse me very much.
Artie Shaw came to town while I was there and Eleanor Roosevelt visited us. I always had a warm feeling for her after this.
We had some leave coming and of course, we couldn’t go home so we took short trips. A Marine named Byrd from Carney, Nebraska and I took a trip to Palmerston North, a Spa town about 100 miles away. The New Zealand people liked us very much and we liked and respected them. We spent the night with a farmer and his family. They were surprised that I could milk a cow. They had a car that ran on charcoal some way. They had a son and a nephew who were fighting in North Africa. We promised to keep in touch with them, but didn’t.
Soon we began training for our next battle. We did exercises with maps and compasses. This was difficult for me, because all the time I was in New Zealand the sun came up in the North. I could force my brain to adjust but it would have been easier if it had felt natural. Another feature was that we had no North Star but used the Southern Cross for our reckoning. The Second Marine Division used the Southern Cross in its decal after this.
We had received replacements and we began to seriously train them for our next action. We had learned from Guadalcanal that ignorance or inattention could get us killed. In our wire section, we climbed poles and strung wire. I was promoted to sergeant and because the wire section had a sergeant and the radio section didn’t I was selected to take charge of the radio section.
This was a New World. Everyone in the section knew more about their work than I did. I didn’t let them know and I buckled down and when I held school for them. I learned, too. One of the things I learned was Morse code. We had TBY portable, (pack on your back) radios for our radiomen who would be with the infantry company commanders. One TBY operator was always with the battalion commander. These were heavy, tube-type radios with heavy batteries. They gave lots of trouble. There were some smaller handheld radios, which were given directly to the platoon commanders, but they were almost useless. We had a TBX Hallicrafter Transceiver that was very good and we used it to communicate with Sixth Regimental Headquarters Command Posts. We could receive international news from KFS San Francisco in code and sometimes we would publish a one sheet newspaper. We were hearing about Marines at some place like Vella Lavella and began thinking our next battle would be at Truk or Bougainville.
As Radio Section Chief, I was responsible for the effectiveness of a lot of this equipment and operators who would accompany battalion and company commanders. The men were superb but the equipment was lousy.
About this time our battalion made a training march with full battle gear up to Foxton (?) about 60 miles. It was plenty tough. Jeeps followed us, picking up people who dropped out. I don’t remember that any of my group dropped out. It rained on us. We spent the night on the road. The radios quit working. One of my memories was as I walked beside Colonel William K. Jones, a radioman named Corpier attached to Jones was carrying his wet radio along with his regular pack which made quite a load. “Poor Corpier,” said the Colonel, “you have to carry it and the darned thing doesn’t even work!”
We were issued new shoes that were smooth on the inside and rough on the outside. They were made by the Jarman company and were excellent. We had New Zealand woolen socks and some beautiful, wonderful New Zealand woolen blankets. About this time we were issued “Reising Guns” which were a poor man’s version of a Thompson machine gun. They had a “coat hanger” folding stock. They fired 45 caliber cartridges from a clip. They fired single fire, semi-automatic and full automatic. They didn’t carry very far and no one could hit anything with them. On full automatic they would rise too quickly and you could get rid of a clip in about 7 seconds. We fired them for record. I had always scored Expert or Sharpshooter. With them I barely qualified as “Marksman”. I knew that if I got into action I would try to get hold of a Springfield or a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle).
We made many more maneuvers. Sometimes we made practice landings from a new vehicle, an amphibious tractor. These could travel through the water, carrying about 25 troops and then keep on going when they got to land. It didn’t do either very well. They were about as reliable as my TBY radios. We were to use them in our next action. They were bad news!
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