With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa

by Eugene B. Sledge

idiots think you don’t need to follow my orders, just step right out here and I’ll beat your ass right now. Your soul may belong to Jesus, but your ass belongs to the Marines.

During the first few days, Doherty once asked one of the recruits a question about his rifle. In answering, the hapless recruit referred to his rifle as “my gun.” The DI muttered some instructions to him, and the recruit blushed. He began trotting up and down in front of the huts holding his rifle in one hand and his penis in the other, chanting, “This is my rifle,” as he held up his M1, “and this is my gun,” as he moved his other arm. “This is for Japs,” he again held aloft his M1; “and this is for fun,” he held up his other arm. Needless to say, none of us ever again used the word “gun” unless referring to a shotgun, mortar, artillery piece, or naval gun.

At five feet nine inches, I was about two-thirds of the way back from the front guide of Platoon 984. One day while returning from the bayonet course, I got out of step and couldn’t pick up the cadence. Corporal Doherty marched along beside me. In his icy tone, he said, “Boy, if you don’t get in step and stay in step, I’m gonna kick you so hard in the behind that they’re gonna have to take both of us to sick bay. It’ll take a major operation to get my foot outa your ass.” With those inspiring words ringing in my ears, I picked up the cadence and never ever lost it again.

This, I realized, was the difference between war and hunting. When I survived the former, I gave up the latter.

“Don’t hesitate to fight the Japs dirty. Most Americans, from the time they are kids, are taught not to hit below the belt. It’s not sportsmanlike. Well, nobody has taught the Japs that, and war ain’t sport. Kick him in the balls before he kicks you in yours,” growled our instructor.

If you guys were gonna fight Germans, I’d guess you’d never need a fighting knife, but with the Japs it’s different. I guarantee that you or the man in the next foxhole will use a Ka-Bar on a Jap infiltrator before the war is over.” He was right.*

Maybe it was the naive optimism of youth, but the awesome reality that we were training to be cannon fodder in a global war that had already snuffed out millions of lives never seemed to occur to us. The fact that our lives might end violently or that we might be crippled while we were still boys didn’t seem to register. The only thing that we seemed to be truly concerned about was that we might be too afraid to do our jobs under fire. An apprehension nagged at each of us that he might appear to be “yellow” if he were afraid.

One day, as we moved along some nameless companionway in a chow line, I passed a porthole that gave me a view into the officers’ mess. There I saw Navy and Marine officers clad neatly in starched khakis sitting at tables in a well-ventilated room. White-coated waiters served them pie and ice cream. As we inched along the hot companionway to our steaming joe and dehydrated fare, I wondered if my haste to leave the V-12 college life hadn’t been a mistake. After all, it would have been nice to have been declared a gentleman by Congress and to have lived like a human being aboard ship. To my immense satisfaction, however, I discovered later that such niceties and privileges of rank were few on the front lines.

I had done a good deal of complaining about Pavuvu’s chow and general conditions during my first week there; one of the veterans in our company, who later became a close friend, told me in a restrained but matter-of-fact way that, until I had been in combat, there was really nothing to complain about.

We had no bathing facilities at first. Shaving each morning with a helmet full of water was simple enough, but a bath was another matter. Each afternoon when the inevitable tropical downpour commenced, we stripped and dashed into the company street, soap in hand. The trick was to lather, scrub, and rinse before the rain stopped. The weather was so capricious that the duration of a shower was impossible to estimate. Each downpour ended as abruptly as it had begun and never failed to leave at least one or more fully lathered, cursing Marines with no rinse water.

“I think the Marine Corps has forgotten where Pavuvu is,” one man said. “I think God has forgotten where Pavuvu is,” came a reply. “God couldn’t forget because he made everything.” “Then I bet he wishes he could forget he made Pavuvu.”

But we had another motivating factor, as well: a passionate hatred for the Japanese burned through all Marines I knew. The fate of the Goettge patrol was the sort of thing that spawned such hatred.*

This collective attitude, Marine and Japanese, resulted in savage, ferocious fighting with no holds barred. This was not the dispassionate killing seen on other fronts or in other wars. This was a brutish, primitive hatred, as characteristic of the horror of war in the Pacific as the palm trees and the islands. To comprehend what the troops endured then and there, one must take into full account this aspect of the nature of the Marines’ war.

Bob asked Jerry how he liked the trip over from Banika, and Jerry answered that it was “tough sledding.” When asked why, he replied, “No snow.” We thought it was the funniest thing we had ever heard.

To shoot the enemy with bullets or kill him with shrapnel was one of the grim necessities of war, but to fry him to death was too gruesome to contemplate. I was to learn soon, however, that the Japanese couldn’t be routed from their island defenses without it.

I always had the feeling that sailors looked on Marine infantrymen as though we were a bit crazy, wild, or reckless. Maybe we were. But maybe we had to develop a don’t-give-a-damn attitude to keep our sanity in the face of what we were about to endure.

The NCOs run things when the shootin’ starts.”*

As the sun disappeared below the horizon and its glare no longer reflected off a glassy sea, I thought of how beautiful the sunsets always were in the Pacific. They were even more beautiful than over Mobile Bay. Suddenly a thought hit me like a thunderbolt. Would I live to see the sunset tomorrow? My knees nearly buckled as panic swept over me. I squeezed the railing and tried to appear interested in our conversation.

Now the force of events unleashed on that two-mile by six-mile piece of unfriendly coral rock would carry us forward unrelentingly, each to his individual fate. Everything my life had been before and has been after pales in the light of that awesome moment when my amtrac started in amid a thunderous bombardment toward the flaming, smoke-shrouded beach for the assault on Peleliu.

My own plight forgotten momentarily, I felt sickened to the depths of my soul. I asked God, “Why, why, why?” I turned my face away and wished that I were imagining it all. I had tasted the bitterest essence of war, the sight of helpless comrades being slaughtered, and it filled me with disgust.

To be killed by a bullet seemed so clean and surgical. But shells would not only tear and rip the body, they tortured one’s mind almost beyond the brink of sanity. After each shell I was wrung out, limp and exhausted. During prolonged shelling, I often had to restrain myself and fight back a wild, inexorable urge to scream, to sob, and to cry.

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff comfort me.…”

The attack across Peleliu’s airfield was the worst combat experience I had during the entire war. It surpassed, by the intensity of the blast and shock of the bursting shells, all the subsequent horrifying ordeals on Peleliu and Okinawa.

The heat was incredibly intense. The temperature that day reached 105 degrees in the shade (we were not in the shade) and would soar to 115 degrees on subsequent days. Corpsmen tagged numerous Marines with heat prostration as being too weak to continue. We evacuated them. My boondockers were so full of sweat that my feet felt squishy when I walked. Lying on my back, I held up first one foot and then the other. Water literally poured out of each shoe.

What a waste, I thought. War is such self-defeating, organized madness the way it destroys a nation’s best. I wondered also about the hopes and aspirations of a dead Japanese we had just dragged out of the water. But those of us caught up in the maelstrom of combat had little compassion for the enemy. As a wise, salty NCO had put it one day on Pavuvu when asked by a replacement if he ever felt sorry for the Japanese when they got hit, “Hell no! It’s them or us!”

Courage meant overcoming fear and doing one’s duty in the presence of danger, not being unafraid.

Slowly the reality of it all formed in my mind: we were expendable! It was difficult to accept. We come from a nation and a culture that values life and the individual. To find oneself in a situation where your life seems of little value is the ultimate in

loneliness. It is a humbling experience.

Reporters and historians like to write about interservice rivalry among military men; it certainly exists, but I found that frontline combatants in all branches of the services showed a sincere mutual respect when they faced the same danger and misery. Combat soldiers and sailors might call us “gyrenes,” and we called them “dogfaces” and “swabbies,” but we respected each other completely.

We all liked Bill a great deal. He was a nice young guy, probably in his teens. On the neatly typewritten muster roll for the 3d Battalion, 5th Marines on 25 September 1944, one reads these stark words: “___________, William S., killed in action against the enemy (wound, gunshot, head)—remains interred in grave #3/M.” So simply stated. Such an economy of words. But to someone who was there, they convey a tragic story. What a waste.

I learned that those blood-chilling screams had come from the Japanese I had seen run to the right. He had jumped into a foxhole where he met an alert Marine. In the ensuing struggle each had lost his weapon. The desperate Marine had jammed his forefinger into his enemy’s eye socket and killed him. Such was the physical horror and brutish reality of war for us.

Being trained to take orders without question, I raised my head above the sand bank and peered into the door of the bunker. It nearly cost me my life. Not more than six feet from me crouched a Japanese machine gunner. His eyes were black dots in a tan, impassive face topped with the familiar mushroom helmet. The muzzle of his light machine gun stared at me like a gigantic third eye.

We felt no pity for them but exulted over their fate. We had been shot at and shelled too much and had lost too many friends to have compassion for the enemy when we had him cornered.

But even before the dust settled, I saw a Japanese soldier appear at the blasted opening. He was grim determination personified as he drew back his arm to throw a grenade at us. My carbine was already up. When he appeared, I lined up my sights on his chest and began squeezing off shots. As the first bullet hit him, his face contorted in agony. His knees buckled. The grenade slipped from his grasp. All the men near me, including the amtrac machine gunner, had seen him and began firing. The soldier collapsed in the fusillade, and the grenade went off at his feet. Even in the midst of these fast-moving events, I looked down at my carbine with sober reflection. I had just killed a man at close range. That I had seen clearly the pain on his face when my bullets hit him came as a jolt. It suddenly made the war a very personal affair. The expression on that man’s face filled me with shame and then disgust for the war and all the misery it was causing.

The job of flamethrower gunner was probably the least desirable of any open to a Marine infantryman. Carrying tanks with about seventy pounds of flammable jellied gasoline through enemy fire over rugged terrain in hot weather to squirt flames into the mouth of a cave or pillbox was an assignment that few survived but all carried out with magnificent courage.

During this lull the men stripped the packs and pockets of the enemy dead for souvenirs. This was a gruesome business, but Marines executed it in a most methodical manner. Helmet headbands were checked for flags, packs and pockets were emptied, and gold teeth were extracted. Sabers, pistols, and hari-kari knives were highly prized and carefully cared for until they could be sent to the folks back home or sold to some pilot or sailor for a fat price.

The men gloated over, compared, and often swapped their prizes. It was a brutal, ghastly ritual the likes of which have occurred since ancient times on battlefields where the antagonists have possessed a profound mutual hatred. It was uncivilized, as is all war, and was carried out with that particular savagery that characterized the struggle between the Marines and the Japanese. It wasn’t simply souvenir hunting or looting the enemy dead; it was more like Indian warriors taking scalps.

To the noncombatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement; but to those who entered the meat grinder itself, the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning; life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all. We existed in an environment totally incomprehensible to men behind the lines—service troops and civilians.

As we talked, I noticed a fellow mortarman sitting next to me. He held a handful of coral pebbles in his left hand. With his right hand he idly tossed them into the open skull of the

Japanese machine gunner.

We were resigned to the dismal conclusion that our battalion wasn’t going to leave the island until all the Japanese were killed, or we had all been hit. We merely existed from hour to hour, from day to day. Numbed by fear and fatigue, our minds thought only of personal survival. The only glimmer of hope was a million-dollar wound or for the battle to end soon. As it dragged on and on and casualties mounted, a sense of despair pervaded us. It seemed that the only escape was to be killed or wounded. The will for self-preservation weakened. Many men I knew became intensely fatalistic.

In our myopic view we respected and admired only those who got shot at, and to hell with everyone else. This was unfair to noncombatants who performed essential tasks, but we were so brutalized by war that we were incapable of making fair evaluations.

It is difficult to convey to anyone who has not experienced it the ghastly horror of having your sense of smell saturated constantly with the putrid odor of rotting human flesh day after day, night after night. This was something the men of an infantry battalion got a horrifying dose of during a long, protracted battle such as Peleliu. In the tropics the dead became bloated and gave off a terrific stench within a few hours after death.

As I looked at the stains on the coral, I recalled some of the eloquent phrases of politicians and newsmen about how “gallant” it is for a man to “shed his blood for his country,” and “to give his life’s blood as a sacrifice,” and so on. The words seemed so ridiculous. Only the flies benefited.

I was so indescribably weary physically and emotionally that I became fatalistic, praying only for my fate to be painless. The million-dollar wound seemed more of a blessing with every weary hour that dragged by. It seemed the only escape other than death or maiming. In addition to the terror and hardships of combat, each day brought some new dimension of dread for me: I witnessed some new, ghastly, macabre facet in the kaleidoscope of the unreal, as though designed by some fiendish ghoul to cause even the most hardened and calloused observer among us to recoil in horror and disbelief.

As we moved past the defilade, my buddy groaned, “Jesus!” I took a quick glance into the depression and recoiled in revulsion and pity at what I saw. The bodies were badly decomposed and nearly blackened by exposure. This was to be expected of the dead in the tropics, but these Marines had been mutilated hideously by the enemy. One man had been decapitated. His head lay on his chest; his hands had been severed from his wrists and also lay on his chest near his chin. In disbelief I stared at the face as I realized that the Japanese had cut off the dead Marine’s penis and stuffed it into his

mouth. The corpse next to him had been treated similarly. The third had been butchered, chopped up like a carcass torn by some predatory animal. My emotions solidified into rage and a hatred for the Japanese beyond anything I ever had experienced. From that moment on I never felt the least pity or compassion for them no matter what the circumstances. My comrades would fieldstrip their packs and pockets for souvenirs and take gold teeth, but I never saw a Marine commit the kind of barbaric mutilation the Japanese committed if they had access to our dead.

The cost in casualties for a tiny island was terrible. The fine 1st Marine Division was shattered. It suffered a total loss of 6,526 men (1,252 dead and 5,274 wounded). The casualties in the division’s infantry regiments were: 1st Marines, 1,749; 5th Marines, 1,378; 7th Marines, 1,497. These were severe losses considering that each infantry regiment started with about 3,000 men. The army’s 81st Infantry Division would lose another 3,278 men (542 dead and 2,736 wounded) before it secured the island.

“Well, Haney, what did you think of Peleliu?” I asked. I really was curious what a veteran with a combat record that included some of the big battles of the Western Front during World War I thought of the first battle in which I had

participated. I had nothing in my experience to make a comparison with Peleliu. Instead of the usual old salt comment—something like, “You think that was bad, you oughta been in the old Corps,”—Haney answered with an unexpected, “Boy, that was terrible! I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it. I’m ready to go back to the States. I’ve had enough after that.”