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

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

Colonel Shofner, who had fought the enemy with a few rusty World War I Enfield rifles as a guerrilla on Mindanao, must have been amazed by the sophistication of the technologies and organizations that made such offensive might possible. Even better, he could control some of it himself. Shofner would come ashore with his own team from JASCO ( Joint Assault Signal Company). It consisted of a naval gunfire officer, an aviation liaison officer, and a shore party officer, as well as their assistants and communications equipment. "Once ashore," the assault plan stated, "the Battalion Commander had only to turn to an officer at his side and heavy guns firing shells up to 16 inch or planes capable bombing, strafing, or launching rockets were at his disposal."¹⁷⁶ Now that was fire support.

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

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

EUGENE SLEDGE NOTED NO SPECIAL INTENSITY OF THE TRAINING LATE IN THE summer. He did notice an additional sergeant had joined K/3/5. Sergeant "Pop" Haney had a reputation for being more than a little loony, or "Asiatic," as the saying went. Burgin called him a "crazy jap killer," because Pop Haney had earned a Silver Star on Cape Gloucester. The word was Haney had served with King Company in World War I. He kept being rotated or transferred, but whenever the shooting was about to start, Pop came back to King. With only twenty- four veterans of the Canal in his 240-man company, Captain Haldane gave Haney permission to attach again.¹⁷⁷ The old and grizzled vet joined the young marines on their marches, mostly keeping to himself.

Eugene kept his mind off the drudgery and boredom of training by watching for birds. The habits and mannerisms of the blue kingfishers and white cockatoos delighted him. As on New Caledonia, the cockatoos seemed to look down from the coconut trees with resentment. "I think the birds are the only ones who want the groves. I know I don't." The red parakeets left red streaks as they flew through the jungle. A marine caught one and he let Gene put it on his shoulder. The bird "climbed on my arms and head and had a big-time scratching in my hair." In the evening, Gene might relax by watching the bats leave their nests high up in the palms to hunt. Sergeant Pop Haney, meanwhile, frequently decided that he had not performed well during the day and assigned himself extra guard duty or conducted a bayonet drill solo.¹⁷⁸ The sight of Pop disciplining himself struck everyone as weird. Pop's vigorous use of a GI brush--with bristles so stiff they'd remove skin--to scrub his body clean was painful to watch. Sledge, who had memorized many of Rudyard Kipling's poems about fighting men with his friend Sid, must have seen the resemblance Pop Haney bore to Kipling's famous character Gunga Din.

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

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

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

BOMBING TWO AND ITS TASK GROUP SPENT EARLY AUGUST BACK IN THE BONIN Islands. Lieutenant Micheel and his division made the third strike on a convoy of four troop transports and their escort destroyers in the port of Chichi Jima. The target brought out the reckless streak in them. The wolves increased their dive angles somewhat to score hits. Clouds of AA flak boiled around them as the Helldivers dropped down into the steep-sided bowl that was Chichi Jima's harbor. They scored two hits and two near misses with their five-hundred-pound bombs. The sorties continued until all of the enemy ships had been sunk. All of the squadrons of Admiral Jocko Clark's Task Group 58.1 roamed at will around the Bonins, seeking out any resistance on Iwo Jima, Haha Jima, Ototo Jima--it turned out that the Japanese word for "island" was "jima."

By early August 1944, Task Group 58.1 owned "the Jimas," just five hundred miles from Tokyo. The men of Air Group Two decided to create the "Jocko- Jima Development Corp." They printed certificates of their initial stock offering, one for each Hornet pilot, certifying the holder of one share in a company that offered "Choice Locations of All types in Iwo, Chichi, Haha & Muko Jima."¹⁷⁹ The corporation's president, Jocko Clark, signed the certificates and sent stock share number one to his boss, Admiral Mitscher.

Clark took his carrier group back to Saipan where, on August 9, Admiral Mitscher came aboard the Hornet. All hands gathered on the flight deck in their dress uniforms. Mitscher presented numerous awards to the men of TG 58.1, including Navy Crosses for Admiral Jocko Clark, Lieutenant Commander Campbell, and Hal Buell. Buell had earned his for firing a bomb into an Imperial Japanese Fleet carrier in the Philippine Sea.

WHILE MR. AND MRS. BASILONE ENJOYED THEIR HONEYMOON IN OREGON, President Roosevelt had visited Camp Pendleton to watch the Twenty-sixth Marines practice a full-scale amphibious assault on the Pacific coast. Days later, the Twenty-sixth had loaded up and shipped out, to become the floating reserve for the Third Marines' invasion of Guam. The regiment's departure, as the Basilones learned upon their return, had not noticeably increased the number of available apartments to rent in the town of Oceanside. " The superintendents and landlords all said the same thing; we're all full up."¹⁸⁰ Lena thought John should be a bit more assertive. " Tell 'em who you are, you'll get one."

"No," he replied, "I ain't gonna use my name to get no apartment."¹⁸¹ So they continued to live in separate barracks on base. Lena began the process of changing her last name in her official USMC file. John used his last name to bail a few of his marines out of jail for drinking or fighting.¹⁸² The regiment's impending departure had encouraged the marines of Charlie Company to be a little overly energetic.

On August 11, they got word they were leaving the next day on buses for the port of San Diego. Johnny found his wife on duty, cooking for the officers' mess. "We might be shipping out," said John, "so I wanted to be with you."¹⁸³ Lena's friend, who had an apartment in Oceanside, said, "Why don't you take my key and use my room tonight?" Lena accepted. John hung around for her shift to end. The phone rang. It was for John. He had to go back immediately.¹⁸⁴ They knew this was it. He was shipping out and it would be months before he saw her again. "I'll be back," he said.

Just after three a.m., the buses carrying two regiments of the 5th Division began rolling out the gate of Camp Pendleton and down the coast highway. As the morning wore on, the word got out. Wives and kids and friends lined the road beyond the gate, waving and cheering as hard as they could as the buses passed.¹⁸⁵ At the docks in San Diego, long lines of marines carried their rifles, packs, and machine guns up the gangways of the troopships. John's ship, USS Baxter, departed on August 12, making its way around North Island and into the open sea. With the ship safely under way, a number of dogs appeared on deck--all mascots smuggled aboard.¹⁸⁶ The next day they learned over the ship's public address system that they were bound for the town of Hilo, on the big island of Hawaii.

Baxter's Higgins boats took the 1/27 into shore at Hilo a week later. No beautiful native women in grass skirts danced for them.¹⁸⁷ They were told to wait. Word came that a polio infection had broken out. The 1st Battalion was quarantined just off the beach in a public park. So they set up their pup tents, dug slit trenches, and waited. The stores across the street, some of which had signs in Japanese, were off-limits. The quarantine order had a hard time sticking, though, when the guys ran out of cigarettes and candy. There was too much time to kill. A rumor ran around that when the marines of the 2nd Division had unloaded here after Tarawa, some of them had seen Japanese faces in the crowd. The Japanese supposedly had cheered when they saw how badly mauled the marines had been. So the marines had fired into the crowd.¹⁸⁸

WEEKS OF STAFF WORK AND SOME BASIC MATHEMATICS PRODUCED A DETAILED plan of assault on Peleliu. The "Shofner Group" consisted of the 3rd Battalion, Fifth Marines, totaling 38 officers and 885 enlisted men. To the 3/5 had been attached a platoon of engineers, a platoon of artillery, some pioneers (who unloaded ships), and his JASCO team (who communicated with ships and aircraft). His group also included the amtrac crews driving them to shore and the DUKW crews supporting their assault, so the total reached 1,300 men and 60 officers.¹⁸⁹ More than 250 of them, however, drove vehicles. Half of these men expected to serve on the front line in combat.

The combat marines of the 3/5 would come ashore in six waves. Thirteen of the amtracs with the 75mm cannon would land first. Eight LVTs carrying about 192 riflemen landed in wave two. Wave three had twelve amtracs carrying 288 fully equipped marines. Five more of the amtracs with the cannons landed on wave four, followed by twelve amtracs of wave five. The DUKWs carrying the artillery arrived as wave six. This left Shofner with two LVTs to carry ammo; one DUKW to carry the main radio; one LVT to carry part of the division staff; and one amtrac for himself and his battalion HQ. These were scheduled to arrive after the fourth wave. Shofner, under the guidance of his regimental team, also worked out the order of another six waves, by which the reserve company of his battalion (Love Company) and the other essential elements of the Fifth Regiment arrived.

Loading all of these waves had not been worked out because the navy had not sent along detailed information about the number and type of ships. The seventeen troop transport ships for the division arrived August 10, so the staff of Transport Group Three came ashore to work with the marines. The Shofner Group would sail to Peleliu in LSTs, which also carried their LVTs. The flotilla of thirty LSTs for the division arrived on August 11. Assigning his assault teams was easy: King Company would go aboard LST 661, Item on 268, and Love and Headquarters on 271 and 276. The marine officers had come up with a creative way to bring more of their necessary cargo--ammo, spools of barbed wire, drums of drinking water--by loading them first, adding a protective layer, and driving the LVTs in on top. The navy captains rejected the idea of "under-stowing," which just added to the challenge of working out all of these details quickly.¹⁹⁰

Like all battalion commanders, Shofner had to fight to get what he needed aboard ship, had to find solutions to a hundred other problems, and had to keep his men on a training schedule. In late August his boss, Bucky Harris, began to worry about Shofner's agitated state.¹⁹¹ The stress seemed to be getting the better of Lieutenant Colonel Shofner, and the stress level only increased. The navy informed the 1st Division that, due to limited space, it could only carry thirty of the marines' forty-six tanks. Although each of his assault squads was entitled to a flamethrower, not enough of the improved M2-2 flamethrower had arrived. Once the marines at last embarked on their ships, someone discovered that the troopships had loaded improperly. The follow-up waves of the Fifth Marines and the Seventh Marines would--unless they changed--have to cross one another on the trip to shore, making it quite likely they would land on the wrong beaches. It had to be rectified. On nine ships, the marines unloaded off of one and loaded onto another. With all of the problems, though, the marines departed Pavuvu on schedule. Their ships lifted anchors on August 26 for the short trip to Guadalcanal.

TASK FORCE 58, THE AIRCRAFT CARRIERS OF THE FIFTH FLEET, RETURNED TO anchorage in the Marshall Islands, specifically the atolls of Eniwetok and Majuro, in early August. All hands enjoyed some time off. A USO show, featuring "five real live girls," performed. Fresh food arrived and was served immediately. When the rest period ended and Bombing Two started to prepare for the next mission, they learned that some big changes had occurred. The navy had decided to give Admirals Mitscher and Clark a rest. Their Task Force, 58, would become known as Task Force 38, as Admiral Bill Halsey took over the helm. Jocko Clark's Task Group 58.1 would become 38.1 under Admiral "Slew" McCain and his leadership team. Clark would remain aboard for a time while McCain and his staff learned the ropes. Another big change, instigated by Clark, arrived simultaneously.

As the new version of the Helldiver, the SB2C-3, arrived at the atoll to replace the older and problematic "dash twos" of Micheel's squadron, fewer of them came aboard Hornet. Clark had had it with the Beast. If the Helldiver could only carry one five-hundred-pound bomb on the centerline rack because of technical malfunctions, the dive-bomber pilots might as well fly Hellcats, the navy's fighter aircraft. It could carry the five hundred pounds, although it lacked a bomb bay. In mid-August Bombing Two received fifteen fewer SB2C-3s and fifteen more F6F Hellcats. The latter would become a new group: the fighter- bombers.

The skipper of Bombing Two gave Lieutenant Micheel command of Hornet's new fighter-bomber wing, which was something of an experiment.¹⁹² Lieutenant Commander Campbell might have handed the plum assignment to his executive officer, but for some time now Campbell had acknowledged that Lieutenant Micheel would make a superior squadron leader. Command of Fighter-Bomber Two represented a big step toward that. The former dairy farmer from Iowa had earned the respect of the Annapolis man after all.

On August 26, 1944, Lieutenant Micheel finally escaped the Beast. Mike selected nineteen pilots from Bombing Two to join him as he began operational training in the F6F Hellcat, the navy's fighter. From the airstrip on Eniwetok, they tested the F6F's capabilities as a dive-bomber. Test "hops" acquainted them with their new aircraft. At idle, the aircraft had a distinctive, unbalanced sound because its Pratt & Whitney R2800 engine had eighteen cylinders and ten exhaust outlets.¹⁹³ Mike immediately loved it. The Hellcat throbbed with power, raced across the sky with tremendous speed, and turned with agility and grace. It flew smoothly, allowing its pilots to trust it. "It's like a Cadillac and a Ford," Mike said, trying to compare the F6F with the SB2C, "or maybe I ought to say a Cadillac and a Mack truck!"

The task group had a schedule to keep, as usual, so Micheel's training period was abbreviated. They flew formation, made a few gunnery passes; the next day they tried six to eight practice landings on the atoll's airfield. Training ended on the twenty-eighth when the word came from on high, probably from Jocko, "Now get aboard!" On the twenty-ninth, he and his men took off from the flattop to practice runs on a sled towed behind the ship. Mike made his first carrier landing in the F6F Hellcat, the 103rd carrier landing of his lifetime, that day. It was his fighter-bomber group's one and only practice landing.

Armed with four air groups, Hornet and her task group steamed for Peleliu. During the trip, Mike was asked to cut his team from twenty to thirteen pilots as the experiment evolved. The task group steamed nearly directly west, no longer circling south to avoid the enemy bases on Truk or Yap. On September 7, the air group commander decided a fighter sweep was unnecessary. At 0531 with the island bearing 331 degrees, at a distance of eighty miles, Hornet set up a huge strike of fighters, then fighter-bombers, then torpedo planes and a deckload of SB2Cs. The eight Hellcats of Lieutenant Micheel's strike carried the same load as SB2Cs carried, only they leapt off the flight deck and charged into the sky. Strike groups from two other carrier squadrons rendezvoused with them. The big formation made visual contact at 7:05 a.m. Aircraft from Wasp went first while Air Group Two circled east of the island. From his vantage point, Micheel could see that the enemy AA flak had dropped off considerably since the last time he had sortied for Peleliu.

The strictures about radio silence had long since lapsed. Micheel got a call when the other squadron completed its mission and his wing was on deck. He brought his Hellcats around from the north, increasing speed as he nosed down to nine thousand feet before breaking into a seventy- degree dive. He and the two planes on his wing pointed their bombs at an AA battery on the tip of the small island a stone's throw from Peleliu called Ngesebus. As he fell below three thousand feet at 430 knots indicated airspeed, Mike would have noticed the small bridge that connected the two islands as he released the bomb. He pulled out at two thousand feet and felt the F6F roar back skyward. The new antiblackout suits made it a lot easier to withstand the terrific g-force experienced in a pullout. In front of him the SB2Cs of Bombing Two were hitting the main island of Peleliu. Behind him and his wingmen the other fighter-bombers aimed for revetments and bunkers around the airfield on Ngesebus. Micheel's team rendezvoused with the others two miles east of the target and all returned. In the reports on their missions all of the air group pilots admitted they could not discern the amount of damage they had inflicted on their targets. Peleliu and Ngesebus "appeared to be badly damaged by previous attacks."

The afternoon strikes took off to hit Angaur, the most southern of the Palau chain, which also had an airfield. The pilots of Bombing Two reported that their new SB2Cs, the dash threes, performed better than the SB2C-2s. The task group retired to the east that night, the standard procedure to make a night attack difficult for enemy aircraft. The only bogeys, though, turned out to be friendlies. The next day, September 8, while the squadrons made a few more strikes just for good measure, Admiral Clark's task group continued west, bound for the island of Mindanao, in the Philippines. The destroyers and battlewagons, which had been escorting the flattops for months, took the opportunity to surround Peleliu and shell every target on their maps.

THE 1ST MARINE DIVISION AND THE REGIMENTAL COMBAT TEAM (RCT) OF the 81st Infantry Division--together the Third Amphibious Corps--conducted its practice landings on Guadalcanal on August 27 through 29. Carrier air support, naval gunfire (NGF), and all the amphibious craft delivered the punch that General Rupertus intended on the western end of the famous island. The exercises went well. Afterward, the marines were allowed to visit the big military base and its PX, which offered all sorts of delights.¹⁹⁴ Few of them had ever been to Guadalcanal before, but by 1944 the women of the Red Cross had been stationed there for almost a year.¹⁹⁵ Most marine units passed through the Canal on their way somewhere else. Burgin got to the PX and managed to eat a handful of ice-cream bars.

The fun ended on September 4, when the 3/5 boarded their LSTs and steamed northeast toward Peleliu through several days of rain. The LSTs, called Large Slow Targets for a reason, departed first; the other ships would catch them easily en route. Sledge's LST 661 had a Landing Craft Tank lashed on the weather deck, as well as two large pontoons used for making a floating dock after the assault. The 661 would become the LVT repair ship after discharging its cargo, so a large crane and piles of maintenance equipment left little free space. Below the main deck, on either side of the big hold filled with the amtracs, were two long aisles filled with metal bunks where King Company slept. An LST had the flat bottom of an amphibious craft, giving it the seagoing stability of a cork. Luckily the rain and heavy seas cleared on September 7. The men at the point of the Third Amphibious Corps sailed through twenty-one hundred miles of calm ocean ahead of schedule. Every day on the aft deck, Sergeant Pop Haney conducted his one-man bayonet drill.¹⁹⁶

LIEUTENANT COLONEL SHOFNER LOOKED FORWARD TO COMBAT. HE WOULD LEAD a massive offensive. Its destructive power exceeded what he had endured on Corregidor. Although his troops were not landing on Mindanao, Shifty could take comfort that this assault marked the opening salvo of the invasion of Mindanao, scheduled for mid-October. The POWs at the Davao Penal Colony would soon be free. Shofner's state of mind did not come across as ferociousness to his regimental CO, Bucky Harris, though. Harris could see his 3/5 commander making every effort to succeed, but a high level of irritability seemed to be affecting his leadership.

THE FINAL DAY OF SID PHILLIPS'S ONE- MONTH LEAVE IN MOBILE HAD COME quickly. He had spent a lot of time with his friends, enjoying every moment, every glass of clean water, every moment in a dry bed with clean sheets. Dr. and Mrs. Sledge had loaned him Gene's car. Dr. Sledge used it for bird hunting, so it smelled like wet dog. Sid had driven it down to the courthouse, "took the drivers test, told the policeman a bunch of war stories, and drove away with a driver's license." The good doctor had kindly left it with a full tank, which meant a lot since gasoline was still rationed.

The last day of his leave found him and his friend George strolling through the Merchant's Bank. George stopped to say hello to one of the tellers. Sid recognized her immediately. Her name was Mary Houston. "I nearly collapsed right on the floor." It had been years since he had seen her in Murphy High School and he had just assumed she had married. "She was even prettier than I remembered." Sid walked out of the bank kicking himself for drinking beer with the boys on the Gulf while he could have been trying to make time with Mary Houston. He boarded a bus the next day, bound for his next duty station: the Naval Air Station at Boca Chica, Florida. All the seats were filled. Private First Class Phillips stood in the bus's center aisle for twenty-four hours.

BY TRUCK AND BY TRAIN, SERGEANT BASILONE'S 1/27 DEPARTED HILO FOR THEIR camp. The old salts knew they were approaching their new base when their vehicles exited the lush rain forest and entered a high desert. Of course Camp Tarawa, named by the 2nd Marine Division, had been built in the desert, a dozen miles from the sea. The wind blew reddish volcanic ash against a few buildings, a few Quonset huts, and a great sea of eight-man tents.¹⁹⁷ Leave it to the Marine Corps to find the ugliest part of Hawaii. "No wonder," said one wag, "the 2nd Division was so happy to invade Saipan. . . ."¹⁹⁸ The Twenty-sixth Regiment had arrived first and taken the best part of the camp. The Twenty-seventh Regiment at least got the second choice and left the hindquarter to the Twenty-eighth.

John wrote his family, who must have been astonished to see that he was keeping his promise to write often. "Dearest Mother and Dad and all," he told them, "I'm back in the South West Pacific." After inquiring after everyone's health, he asked, "Have you heard from my wife, I sure wish she can get time off and come to see you all. For she sure [would] love to go to Raritan and see you all. How do you like our wedding picture." He hoped to get to see his brother George, whose 4th Division was also stationed in the Hawaiian Islands. "Mom you should see me now I got all my hair cut off and am getting black as a negro." The gunny, his buddies Clint, Ed, and Rinaldo, and the machine gunners in his section had also shaved their heads bald, on a lark.¹⁹⁹ John wasn't sure what he could write that would get past the censor. "It is a beautiful place its hot in the days and cold in the nights." He sent them all hugs and kisses and "Don't forget," he signed off, to write him soon and to send one "also to my wife."²⁰⁰

TASK FORCE 38 HAD ROAMED AT WILL ALONG THE PHILIPPINE COAST. ITS ATTACKS on Mindanao, which began September 9, had met little resistance, much to everyone's surprise.²⁰¹ Air Group Two shot up the small ships they found in Davao Harbor and ignited the planes they found parked on the airfields near the city. Although six days had been scheduled, Mindanao took only two. Up the island chain the fleet steamed, hitting Leyte and waiting for the Japanese to respond. Micheel led his fighter-bombers across Leyte to the island of Negros, on the western side of the Philippines. While his group strafed a sampan, Micheel spotted two enemy fighters and went after them. He made several gunnery passes, but they escaped. The squadrons of Air Group Two saw more planes lining the runways than they encountered in the sky. On September 12, one of the fighter pilots went down near the island of Leyte. He arrived back aboard Hornet the same day; having made it to shore in his rubber boat, he had been picked up by guerrillas. The guerrillas had contacted the fleet and had him home by lunchtime.

The returned pilot, Ensign Thomas Tillar, brought with him news from the locals that the Japanese airfields of Leyte had been emptied. His report confirmed the experience of the pilots thus far. The war was not here. Admiral Clark sent Tillar's report on to the new carrier commander, Admiral Bill Halsey.^ab The wolves kept up the chase. Lieutenant Micheel made a run in an SB2C that same day, diving through some "meager" AA fire to destroy four planes he spotted on Saravia Airfield on Negros Island. Upon his return, Mike brought his plane around the end of Hornet, took the cut, and caught a wire. The wire pulled the tail hook off, sending the SB2C into the crash barrier. The spinning prop tore itself into pieces as deckhands dove for cover. It was the last time Mike flew the Beast.

The odd enemy plane came within the ship's radar as Hornet steamed south. On September 14, Micheel's fighter-bomber group met in the ready room before five thirty a.m. to get their assignment. "With Davao bearing 284deg, 112 miles," Strike 1 would launch at six a.m. A solid wall of clouds blocked the sky at thirteen thousand feet. At five thousand feet they could get good visibility. The leader of the fighter sweep, a few minutes ahead of Micheel's group and Buell's SB2Cs, radioed that he had spotted an enemy destroyer in the gulf outside the harbor of Davao. Micheel, behind Buell, watched him break his eleven Helldivers to port. As he approached Davao, he saw Buell's wing coming north, toward them. While Mike's team circled, Buell scored a direct hit on the destroyer. Others followed. The destroyer threw up a fair amount of AA fire, but to no effect. The Beasts blew the aft portion of the ship off, and then it "settled rapidly by the stern, disappearing under the water, bow last, inside of two to three minutes. . . ."²⁰² Mike and his comrades worked over the airfield, looking for revetments hiding aircraft or storage tanks. He took them out over the gulf, where Buell's team were circling over the oil slick--all that was left of the IJN destroyer--and they turned toward Hornet. Later, the skipper would lead in another strike, just to make sure the enemy knew: the port of Davao was now closed. Mindanao had been cut off from the Empire of Japan.

SOMEWHERE OUT OF SIGHT BUT CLOSE BY, SIX ESCORT CARRIERS STEAMED, providing security to the Shofner Group. Lieutenant Colonel Shofner's marines would have lots of close air support. Another four of the navy's smaller carriers waited for them off Peleliu. These carriers, operating with five battleships, four cruisers, and fourteen destroyers, had begun plastering Peleliu on September 12. On D-day minus 1, or September 14, the LSTs neared the target. The troop transports, which had left the Canal well after them, caught up. Shofner and the other officers opened a sealed letter from the commanding officer of the 1st Marine Division. In it, General Rupertus informed his troops that the battle for Peleliu would be "extremely tough but short, not more than four days." While this message was delivered to all of the marines, men at Shofner's level would have heard another bit of good news. The big navy guns providing the preinvasion bombardment (NGF) had begun to run out of targets. It was a welcome change from the last report received before departing Pavuvu: aerial photographic reconnaissance had spotted tank tracks up near the airport. The division's tanks had been shifted north, out of Shofner's immediate zone of operations.

ON AND OFF DURING THE TRIP, EUGENE SLEDGE HAD TRIED TO READ HIS NEW book, River Out of Eden, about a boy's adventure traveling up the Mississippi River on a flatboat. On D-day minus 1, though, he wrote some V-mails. He wrote Sid, thanking him for the photos of Spanish Fort and continuing to make plans for their trip after the war to visit Civil War battlefields. Gene also described the scene around him on the weather deck: groups of card players crowded every corner. The sergeants of King Company stepped over and around the bodies, bellowing orders that seemed to always begin with "You people!"²⁰³ Gene's description made it by the censor easily, even though it informed Private First Class Phillips that his friend Ugin would soon be in harm's way.

Eugene also wrote his parents a letter, one much shorter than his usual. He never once betrayed any hint of where he was or what the next day held. Most of it consisted of a continuation of his Christmas wish list, since his parents would purchase his gifts early in an attempt to mail them in time. He reminded his mother of their trip to New Orleans, the memory of it a treasure to him. As dusk gave way to darkness, few men moved below to sleep. The cool breeze on deck provided some relief from the heat. Those who could not sleep could pace. The low baritone hum of the engines had been forgotten about until they switched off. The quiet felt sudden and ominous.²⁰⁴

ON SEPTEMBER 14, JOHN BASILONE "PULLED RANK." WHEN HE FOUND OUT THAT there was a fair amount of air traffic between his base on Hawaii and his brother's base on Maui, he requested a ride.²⁰⁵ John flew over to see George, who was training with the 4th Division. They had last seen one another in August 1943. George had participated in the invasion of Kwajalein, in the Marshall Islands, and in the invasion of Saipan, in the Marianas. Unlike John, though, George did not serve in a rifle company.²⁰⁶ He handled supplies. John sent both his mother and his wife a photo of him and George. Dora Basilone allowed the newspaper to use her copy of the photo in a small news item entitled "Basilones Meet in the Pacific."

AFTER BREAKFAST, MORE THAN A FEW K/3/5 MEN CLIMBED A LADDER TOPSIDE. They watched the sun rise behind Peleliu, framing the dark little island, and shining into their eyes. With each passing moment the volume of the bombardment grew. The great thundering cannons of the battleships punctuated the faster, point-blank shooting of the destroyers and the angry buzz of the navy planes on their bombing runs. The staccato blended into a vast storm. Each marine told himself that this violence was a good thing. No enemy could survive such fury. The island disappeared inside a dark pall of smoke and debris, lit by fires churning underneath. Apprehension grew inside them. It was all so big, so far beyond the power of the individual. "Everybody belowdeck." ²⁰⁷ Noticing that some of the new men in his squad seemed nervous, Burgin told them, "Just keep your calm and everything will turn out all right. Just do your job."

Down the ladder and into the metal cavern of the LST, the men of King Company found their thirteen amtracs.²⁰⁸ The engines' exhaust fouled the air. The three nearest the bow door had a cannon mounted on them. The next four LVTs were newer models with rear ramps; these also carried King's 37mm antitank guns. The marines in the six remaining amtracs had to climb up the sides to get in. Sledge's #2 gun squad was assigned LVT 13. It would be in the second wave of amtracs carrying troops. A light opened at the far end of the chamber. The engines gunned, and one by one they drove out toward daylight.

After their craft splashed into the ocean, the heads of the mortarmen were about the height of sea level. Everything loomed above them. Swabbies in T-shirts took in the scene with keen interest, a cup of coffee in one hand.²⁰⁹ A few waved cheerfully at the helmeted figures below. The other three LSTs of the 3rd Battalion lay at anchor nearby, disgorging assault craft as well. The amtracs churned slowly toward their positions. Inside the assault craft, the noise of bombardment began to separate the men. Only by yelling in a man's ear could Sledge communicate. Snafu offered Sledge a cigarette. Sledge said he did not smoke. To which Snafu replied, "You will."²¹⁰ Burgin laughed.

SHOFNER CLIMBED INTO HIS AMTRAC TO RIDE IN WITH WAVE THREE, OR THE second troop wave. Once in the water, he could not see much, but all seemed to be well. The NGF had begun firing precisely at five thirty a.m. and continued to fire shells over his head. The calm sea stirred with each titanic broadside of the battleships, as the recoil rocked the ship and created a wave. At 0800, the circle of assault LVTs broke, fanned out into a line, and started toward the beach.²¹¹ The small circle of wave two followed and then his own trip began.

THE FIRST QUESTIONS THAT CAME TO SLEDGE'S MIND WERE "WOULD I DO MY duty or be a coward? Could I kill?"²¹² The salvos of the big guns and their attendant concussions isolated each man. It was so loud, so intense, Sledge could hardly think. "Would I ever see my family again?" The great forces unleashed the first flush of panic at the thought of being tiny and vulnerable amid the unforgiving steel. Sledge's amtrac came to the coral reef and began to crawl over it.²¹³ The engine stalled. A few moments passed. Explosions sent geysers of water in the air nearby--the enemy was shooting back. The powerful fear it awakened within him surprised him: "you wonder why someone wouldn't have thought of it sooner . . . for the first time I thought, My God, that metal will absolutely tear through somebody's flesh." He went weak from fear and braced himself against the side of the tractor. Terror, frantic and certain, gripped him so hard, he thought, "I might wet my pants."²¹⁴ The engine came to life. Up and over the reef they went. Peeking over the rim, the mortarmen could see amtracs had been hit and were burning. Eugene "saw several amtracs get hit and it was just awful because Marines just got blown into the air and some of the amtracs burst into flame . . . I found solace in just cussing the Japs."²¹⁵ Individual marines were bobbing in the water, struggling to get to shore. Fires burned onshore, roiling beneath a tall cliff of black smoke. The sight of it made the eyes of the combat veterans, like Burgin, grow wide. This was a new level of danger. Burgin said to himself, "God, take care of me, I'm yours." A stream of bullets smacked into the front of the craft. Someone yelled, "Keep your heads down or they'll get blown off."

THE TWO WAVES OF AMTRACS AHEAD OF SHOFNER HAD BEGUN TO BUNCH UP. Inside the reef, large "coral boulders" combined with some man-made obstacles narrowed the open tidal area into a few avenues of approach. Most of the amtracs crowded into the free lanes as others bellied up on the coral boulders and became stuck.²¹⁶ Nearing shore, they came under fire from a 47mm antiboat gun firing from a tiny islet jutting out from shore to their right.²¹⁷ The ships' batteries could not hit it because it was located behind the islet, and the carrier planes above could not see it. Its fire devastated the fleet of amtracs using beaches Orange Two and Orange Three.

THE AMTRAC CRAWLED OUT OF THE WATER AND STOPPED. SLEDGE HEARD, "HIT the beach!"²¹⁸ The mortar squad clambered over the side of their LVT. He followed Snafu, but lost his footing and landed on the beach in a heap. Every shell, every white stream of machine-gun bullets seemed to be aimed directly at them. Although the beach was white and smooth, it consisted not of sand but of hard coral. The burdens of his rifle, apron of 60mm mortar shells, and personal equipment became ungainly in the storm and Gene struggled to catch up with the squad. Strands of barbed wire, attached to metal stakes, crisscrossed the area, preventing men from crawling.

Across the strip of white coral he came to a shelf of vegetation, most of which was burning or had been burnt. Sledge nearly stepped on a land mine. He noted the inches separating his foot from the triggering plate. He looked up and saw a marine step on one "and he just atomized, just disappeared." Inside the copse of coconut trees, broken and angular, the men of King Company ran into the tank trap.²¹⁹ The depth kept them out of the line of fire. One of King's sergeants, Hank Boyes, noticed "everyone was very content to stay there in what seemed a safe spot."²²⁰ Bullets passed over their heads. Gene said, "Burgin, give me a cigarette."

"Gene, you don't smoke."

"Give me a cigarette." Burgin handed him one. Gene "took it and I looked at him, and he had it between his lips. I looked back a few seconds later and he was chewing it, that's how nervous he was." Burgin saw Sledge's eyes "bugged out" and told him not to pay too much attention to the bullets snapping overhead. "Like hell," Gene said, "those are real bullets."²²¹

THE CO OF 3RD BATTALION LANDED AND FOUND A LOT OF MARINES WAITING FOR other marines to move forward. Shofner stood up and yelled, "Come on, there's not a Jap alive on the island!"²²² He ran forward to a shell hole twenty-five yards in from the shore. He had his carbine, map case, and a radioman.²²³ He tried to get a handle on the situation. Item Company had moved inland. His other company, King, was confused. His junior officers were struggling to get their men organized. The noise made verbal communication all but impossible. All of their training in small-unit tactics relied on the integrity of the squads and platoons. Time passed. Part of one platoon came in from the left, where Item had landed.²²⁴ After fifteen minutes, they identified the holdup. The antiboat gun off to their right had driven amtracs of the Seventh Marines onto Shofner's section of beach. Worse, the unit of the Seventh that had landed with them was King Company, 3rd Battalion. Two King Companies were struggling to get their men sorted out. The amtrac containing Shofner's communications equipment was hit. Some of the men swam ashore, but without the bulky machinery. Just as Shofner's platoons prepared to move out, the enemy mortars began exploding all around them. A shell killed Shofner's executive officer. Movement in King's area of the beach stopped. The last of Item, to the left, moved out.

The barrage lasted thirty minutes. The drive inland began when it lifted. Shofner pushed forward to an antitank trench and established the 3/5's command post, although, without a powerful radio, his knowledge of and control over events became limited. The radio carried by his assistant might reach his company commanders, the colonel leading the 1/5, or even the regiment, or it might not. He needed runners. His wrote a message and gave it to a runner to give to division CP: "3/5 progressing in tight contact with" the Seventh Marines. "Urgently require communication personnel," and "Request latest in progress" of First Marines.²²⁵ Some updates reached him. Item Company had attained its objective and was tied in with the 1/5, to his left. The 1/5 had halted because the unit on its left, the First Marines, had been halted by fierce resistance. To Shofner's right, King Company had begun to push forward.

THE NEXT PUSH OF KING TOOK IT OUT OF THE DITCH AND THROUGH THE SCRUB. To one of the riflemen, it did not look like anybody "knew where they were going. It was just: jump in a hole, stay there, and look at everybody else. If they moved, you moved."²²⁶ The dense thickets kept visibility low. The cannonading continued around them. The mortarmen carried their rifles at the ready, waiting to meet the enemy, trying to keep together in the tangle of dense brush. They came upon the skirmish line of the riflemen, who had stopped at the edge of the vast clearing that held the airfield.²²⁷ A number of pillboxes barred the way. Sergeant Hank Boyes was yelling for his men to shift their line of advance to the right. King was not tied in with the 3/7 on its right and the gap was dangerous.²²⁸

SHOFNER "WAS TORN BETWEEN HIS REQUIREMENTS TO MAINTAIN CONTACT WITH his higher headquarters, the Fifth Marines, and his need to keep his rifle companies in a coordinated effort against a possible Japanese counterattack." Love Company landed and he sent it to cover a gap emerging between Item on the left and King on the right. His battalion was at last pushing inland. Shofner may have heard that half of the tanks had been hit before they reached the shore. The 2/5, the last of the regiment's three battalions to land, began arriving just before ten a.m. It began to march into the gap between the 1/5 on the far left and Shofner's 3/5 on the right.

AT THE EDGE OF A GREAT OPEN PLAIN, CORPORAL BURGIN AND HIS #2 MORTAR squad had caught up to some riflemen. Burgin saw an enemy artillery piece near the airstrip. As he watched, the Japanese crew rotated positions every time the gun fired. It seemed odd that each man had to take a turn hefting ammunition; there was no set gunner. Each of the crew exceeded six feet in height, though, so they made good targets. Burgin got his men to start "picking them off one at a time." The attack began to gather steam and the push developed around to his right, where the field gave way to jungle. A marine tank appeared. It mistook King Company for the enemy and began to come at them. The #2 gun squad began to yell their unit name, but it seemed hopeless. The Sherman tank had no infantry around it to hear them.

Staring down the barrel of the Sherman's 75mm shocked everybody. One marine near it ran over to stop it. He was hit by something and fell. Sergeant Hank Boyes got around to the back of the tank, where the phone was. He jumped up on the back of the tank, which put him in an exposed position. The phone must have been broken. Most of King Company watched in amazement as he rode it like a cowboy. The enemy concentrated its fire on the most direct threat: Boyes's tank. Boyes directed the Sherman's fire at the artillery piece and three other pillboxes, the tank's 75mm shells penetrating inside and exploding each in turn.²²⁹ The assault continued to the right, away from the airfield and into the jungle.

WITH THE 2/5 TAKING OVER ON HIS LEFT FLANK, SHOFNER HAD PULLED ITEM Company off the left flank, brought it around the back of Love Company, and sent it forward to connect Love to King. He heard about King encountering some bunkers and called in an air strike.²³⁰ King had resumed the advance when Shofner received a radio message from the Seventh Marines on his right flank. The 3/7's CO said his "left flank unit was on a north-south trail about 200 yards ahead of 3/5's right flank element."²³¹ The two officers agreed that the 3/7 would hold its position until King reached them. Shofner sent an order for Item and King to press forward.

A HUNDRED YARDS BROUGHT KING'S RIFLE SQUADS TO A LARGE TRAIL RUNNING perpendicular to their eastward advance. They halted there for a time. Captain Haldane needed to get connected to the units on either side of him. Item Company came up on his left. Both companies advanced across the trail and eastward again through the brush.²³² King Company's first platoon halted before noon, when they could see water ahead of them. They had nearly crossed the island. The other parts of the company caught up as an hour passed. No one had contact with the battalion CP.²³³ The water levels in the two canteens of water each man carried began to get low. The heat and the physical exertion made each man in #2 mortar "wringing wet with sweat."²³⁴ They prepared to defend themselves from a counterattack.

ABOUT THREE P.M., SHOFNER DID NOT KNOW EXACTLY WHERE HIS KING COMPANY was, but he heard where it wasn't. The 3/7's CO radioed Shofner that "the position of 3/7's left- wing unit had been given incorrectly."²³⁵ It had not advanced as far as he had told Shofner earlier. His unit was not in contact with Shofner's King. That meant that the 3/5's assault teams were well out in front of the entire division's front line, exposed on both flanks to enemy attack. When he understood the situation, Shofner ordered Company K to bend its right flank back in an effort to tie in with the 3/7. He had also become worried about Item, in the center of his line. Love Company, on his left, was fine: in touch with its flank, the Fifth Marines, and making steady progress across the airfield.

BURGIN HAD SLEDGE AND SNAFU SET UP THE GUN ON THE FAR SIDE OF THE VAST open plain that held the airstrip. They found a crater for their gun position. "Snafu put the gun down, flipped the buckle on the strap, opened the bipod out, stretched the legs out, tightened them up, snapped the sight on." A simple device, the sight had two bubbles that were leveled for elevation and windage. Snafu "took a quick compass reading on an area that they told us to fire on and we put a stake out there at the edge of this crater."²³⁶ The order came to fire. Snafu looked at the range card that stated the number of increments. Sledge "repeated the range and pulled off the right number of increments to leave on the correct number, pulled the safety wire and held the shell up" with his left hand. The thumb on the left hand held down the shell's firing pin. When he let it go, it slid down the tube, hit the bottom, and discharged with a soft hollow whisper. The order came to cease fire or secure. The mortar team waited. The heat was crushing. The old salts predicted the enemy "would pull a banzai tonight and try to push us off the island. We'll tear 'em up."²³⁷

Sledge looked north, across the great distance of the airfield. He saw some vehicles moving amid the explosions. "What are all those amtracs doing out there next to the jap lines?"

"Hey, you idiot," Snafu replied, "those are jap tanks." Sledge felt his heart nearly stop at the thought of enemy tanks.²³⁸

AS LATE AS FIVE P.M., SHOFNER WAS STILL STRUGGLING WITH A FAULTY COMMUNICATIONS network to get his men tied in properly. The communications officer of the Fifth Regiment arrived. The two began to sort out a solution when a mortar shell exploded near them. Shofner's "mouth was dry and his breath was short, he had no feeling in his left arm and he looked down and could see the bones of his forearm, the skin and muscle torn away by shrapnel. He looked up and tried to speak but there is no one to speak to. Then as if in slow motion, he saw Marines from the adjacent units spill over into the shell crater. He heard the cry for Corpsman, and he heard some Marine yell that 'the damned japs had got Shifty.' Then things went black."

He awoke on a stretcher, being carried across the beach and onto a Higgins boat. His arm had been bandaged and he was receiving plasma. Shofner "tried to protest, but his head was in a cloud, and he suspected he [had] received a shot of morphine." A marine said, "Don't worry, Mac. You be OK." Unconsciousness slipped over Shifty again. When his eyes opened again, he saw he was lying in the cavernous amtrac deck of an LST. His head ached badly. He "felt the sheets under him. He was naked except for his bed linen. His left arm throbbed." The navy's medical teams moved quickly to handle a lot of wounded men. A corpsman noticed he had awakened and called over to his supervisor, "Well, Colonel Shofner, you are a lucky man"; he would make a full recovery. Austin wanted to know what had happened and was told he "was the sole survivor of his command group." Colonel Shofner asked about returning to his unit. The corpsman "became evasive and suggested that he rest for a while."

THE ENEMY TANKS NEVER GOT VERY FAR SOUTH. THE GREAT WHITE AIRFIELD AND the plain that encompassed it were mostly empty. Although the sound of the big guns filled the air, Sledge and his mortar team were threatened mostly by small-arms fire. With his rifle platoons already committed, King Company's skipper, Captain Haldane, ordered his headquarters personnel to help tie his line in with the Seventh Marines, but to no avail. The skipper ordered his company into a perimeter defense. The hard white coral could not be dug out by hand. Marines picked up what chunks of coral they could to provide some small cover for their bodies. Darkness found King Company still in an exposed position, still not tied in with either the left or the right, but ready to hold their ground.²³⁹ The big fear was a banzai attack. King had strung its barbed wire, the mortars and machine guns had registered sound rounds, and Captain Haldane had a telephone line back to the artillery. As far as Eugene Sledge could tell, though, "we were alone and confused in the middle of a rumbling chaos with snipers everywhere and with no contact with any other units. I thought all of us would be lost."²⁴⁰

The small-arms fire slackened as it grew dark. After a couple hours, the word came to pack up, King was pulling back. Battalion wanted it tied in with Item on the left and the unit of the Seventh on the right before the banzai began. Stumbling in the dark through the wild thickets and scrub jungle along the edge of the field made for a lot of cursing, but they moved close enough to the right spot to be allowed to dig in.²⁴¹

Although not properly tied in with Item, Love Company, or the Seventh Marines, King Company marines began to string barbed wire along the edge of the airfield to hold off the banzai attack.²⁴² The sound of howitzers and the naval gunfire and heavy mortars and machine guns continued all night long. Much of it emanated from the north end of the airfield and from the ships offshore, although enemy mortars rained on the beach. The navy ships also fired huge flares, which swung slowly in the sky as they fell, skittering shadows across a broken and burning landscape.²⁴³ The marines of the #2 gun squad piled rocks around themselves and slid into shell holes to get below the line of fire. In the darkness, Sledge took off his boots because his feet were sloshing in his sweat. Snafu yelled, "What the hell you doing, you better get those damn boots back on . . . By God, you don't never know when you're going to have to take off [running]."²⁴⁴ Lying nearby, Burgin laughed as Snafu cursed the new guy for being "a stupid son of a bitch." Corporal Burgin expected the enemy charge to come, just like on Gloucester. He worried about the dwindling levels of water in his squad's canteens and began chewing on a salt tablet.

In the early hours of September 16, Burgin was proved right: a charge did come. A ferocious concentration of machine-gun fire on his left, the guns of the 2/5, knocked down the dark shapes of running men.²⁴⁵ The #2 gun shot up a lot of illumination rounds, each lasting about thirty seconds. With a few flares hanging up there, it was light enough to see that no hordes of Japanese were running at King. The cacophony of hard fighting continued on both sides of them.

When dawn broke, those still trying to sleep had to abandon it. The canteens of Burgin's mortar crew were empty. The support teams brought up water in five- gallon cans and fifty-gallon drums and everyone was mad to get it. The first sip brought a nasty shock to the #2 gun. It tasted like diesel. Some of the guys around them drank it anyway. Burgin joked that he could blow on a match and be a flamethrower. Stomach cramps followed and a few puked. As usual, though, a trooper's fate hung in the luck of the draw. Other squads in King Company received two canteens of clean water.²⁴⁶

The task facing them was to cross the airfield. It looked like a long way. Burgin guessed it was over three hundred yards. At the signal, the skirmish lines of marines ran out into the open field and across the hard white coral runway. The Japanese unleashed a barrage upon them as expected. Large shells, mortars, and machine- gun bullets cut the air around them as the marines ran east for all they were worth. Much of the enemy's fire came from its positions on the northern end of the airfield, to King's left. Most of their regiment and all of the First Marines, therefore, stood between King and the guns. Love Company ran on their immediate left. Every step felt like their last. As he ran, Gene "was reciting the 23 Psalm and Snafu was right next to me and I couldn't hear what he was saying, but most of it was cussing."²⁴⁷ Burgin watched the white tracers flash past him until he found cover on the far side. "I don't know how we didn't all get killed--I really don't."²⁴⁸ No one else did either.

The thick scrub they entered slowed their progress toward the ocean, but resistance was light. They came to a wild thicket of mangrove swamp that marked the shoreline. King tied in with the Seventh Marines on their right. The Seventh had its hands full with securing the southern tip of the island. To their left, farther north along the eastern shore, Love Company tied in with them. Item Company, the other component of the 3/5, marched still farther north. King Company dug in as ordered, out of sight and away from the battle.²⁴⁹

With time to catch his breath and reflect, Sledge realized the last thirty-six hours had been "the defining moment in my life."²⁵⁰ Much of what he thought he knew--from the Civil War books he had read to the "Barrack-Room Ballads" he had memorized--had had nothing to do with the carnage, the chaos, the electric fear threatening to engulf him. Gene had watched a wounded marine die and was aghast at the waste and inhumanity. He had watched two marines pluck souvenirs from two dead Japanese and wondered whether the war would "dehumanize me." He needed to process these experiences. He felt a duty to document his battle for his family, so they would know what the future books about Peleliu left out. Eugene B. Sledge decided to write himself notes in his pocket Bible so that he would not forget the horrors he witnessed.²⁵¹ "The attack across Peleliu's airfield," E. B. Sledge later wrote from those notes, "was the worst combat experience I had during the entire war."²⁵²

He had seen marines fall during his run across the airfield, even though he had tried to look straight ahead as he ran. The number of wounded went uncounted because the invasion day's tally and the fierce battle the First Marines were having up north had overwhelmed the system.^ac One marine had been killed for sure, though. Private First Class Robert Oswalt, Gene's friend, had been hit in the head by a bullet or a fragment from a shell.

The big guns found King's position before dark. Burgin lay on his stomach, hugging the earth and listening to the quick swishing noises and feeling the concussions. He thought those shells were so big he could see them. Chunks of coral, mud, and mangrove splattered down upon the men of #2 gun. The size of the explosions left them sick with fear. A line of communication wire had been tied to a phone in Burgin's foxhole. It connected him to the other platoons, Haldane's company CP, and from there further back to battalion. Burgin got on the phone, heard someone answer (he wasn't sure who), and reported that his position was taking friendly fire. He heard the man reply, "No, that's not ours--that's jap."

"No, that's ours," Burgin replied, and began cursing. "I know where we just came from, and that artillery is coming where we've already been, so I know it's ours. So get it ceased." The other marine remained unconvinced. Burgin could tell the shells were 155s and yelled, "If you're going to fire . . . go out a little further than that because you're going to kill my whole damn bunch."²⁵³ The barrage increased and worsened. Shells burst about twenty or thirty feet above the ground, sending searing shards of metal down upon them. King had had almost no cover. They could only hold on and wait till it ended.

As the shelling, both U.S. and Japanese, slackened, the marines tried to get water. Some found a grayish liquid in the bottom of some of the deeper shell holes--the water table was very high on Peleliu. The men who drank it became sick, even the ones who strained out the big particles by keeping their teeth closed. In the mortar squads, Stepnowski, a big guy from Georgia they called Ski, dropped out. The heat and the dehydration were too much. He was turned over to the medics, who took him back. Lack of water caused one-third of the casualties.²⁵⁴ Sledge noted that the big men tended to give in to heat exhaustion more often than those of slighter build. The day ended with stringing barbed wire in preparation for a banzai attack.

When the night passed without an attack, King Company had so far gotten off easier than others and some of them knew it--not E. B. Sledge, however. The dead and wounded men he had seen and the punishing concussions of high explosives left him terrified. He hung on gamely, lugging mortar shells and preparing to fire the #2 gun. During the next day, they watched as the ridge to the north took a horrendous pounding from the ships' guns, from navy planes, and from the howitzers of the Eleventh Marines. King marched toward the ridge that morning, behind the rest of the 3/5. Along the east side of the airfield, they saw millions of jagged shards of metal-- shrapnel--covering it.²⁵⁵ The wreckage of airplanes included more than two dozen medium bombers and dozens of fighters.²⁵⁶ King arrived at the junction of the cross runway. Item Company dug in there, inexplicably, while Love and King closed with the village that draped around the north end of the airfield. The volume of small-arms fire picked up precipitously. They were not on the front line yet, though. The 2/5 was ahead of them and, beyond them, units of the First Marines.²⁵⁷

King soon moved along the eastern edge of a mad jumble of craters, airstrip, and demolished buildings. Most buildings were farther west, on their left. Love Company was over there, tied in with units of the First Marines, in the thick of the fighting by the sounds of it. Item Company remained behind them. By the end of the day, #2 gun had advanced through the small collection of buildings to a point where they could see the northern ridges. King tied in with elements of the 2/5.²⁵⁸ To their left, west, were the ridges; to the north and to the east, roads led into terra incognita. They watched the other units attempt to move north. "Anytime anybody got up, the Japanese started throwing not just machine- gun or rifle fire, but shell fire."²⁵⁹ Watching it happen, Gene could not see the enemy positions, only a riot of confusion, fear, and pain. The Japanese fired so many weapons, the coral ridges were so impregnable, he thought, "we had absolutely hit a stone wall." The soft malice of the incoming mortar rounds sounded to him like "some goulish witch telling you that 'Well, I may not get you this time, but I'll get you next time.' " The sound of combat never ceased that night, although the enemy again failed to mount a banzai charge. Burgin began to think "there was something up. They were fighting with different tactics altogether."

The next day, the third day of the "three-day campaign," as someone surely noted, King moved east. The roads and buildings gave way to swamp. A small road crossed the marsh on a natural causeway of earth about a hundred yards in length. It widened into a clearing where the riflemen met some resistance. The #2 gun, along with marines from Item Company, ran across the narrow causeway and supported the assault on a small group of buildings in the larger clearing on the far side.²⁶⁰ The Japanese had abandoned most of their bivouac sites there, but there was a blockhouse with large antenna above it.²⁶¹ King, supported by Item and elements of the 2/5, worked through the small-arms and mortar fire of the garrison and wiped out all resistance. King lost thirteen men wounded in action, its first day of double-digit loss.²⁶² Nearly surrounded by thick mangrove swamp, King and Item dug in facing the only avenue toward solid ground and the enemy: south.

THREE DAYS HAD PASSED BEFORE LIEUTENANT COLONEL SHOFNER STEPPED back ashore on Peleliu. He did not know why they had held him for so long. A small neat bandage covered the wound on his arm.²⁶³ He set off to find the regimental headquarters of the Fifth Marines and report to Colonel "Bucky" Harris. No one would have been in a good mood at regimental HQ, and Shofner's first impression would have been that the battle was not going well at all. Losses were high and progress slow. Harris had been wounded in the knee by a shell that had burst in his CP, killing a man near him; he had refused evacuation and now walked with a painful limp. Bucky informed Shofner that he would not be returning to command 3rd Battalion. A major had been given the job and so far he was doing well. The colonel designated Lieutenant Colonel Shofner his regimental liaison officer with division HQ.

Shofner considered the liaison appointment a make-work job. As a colonel with access both to the regiment and the division, though, he was in a position to learn a lot about what was happening on the battlefield. There was a lot of bad news. The jungle canopy had obscured the terrain beneath it. The aerial reconnaissance photographs had shown a ridge north of the airfield; combat had revealed a much bigger problem.²⁶⁴ The bomb blasts and the engulfing flames of napalm had exposed an expanse of roughly five ugly, wartlike coral ridges, twisted and cut into a maze of peaks and gullies. The enemy had turned each of these myriad facets into a fortress, the coral escarpments riddled with pillboxes, caves, and nasty little spider holes.

Against this fortress Chesty Puller had driven his First Marine Regiment. The First Marines had always known that their mission was the toughest. Every day since D-day, Chesty had lashed his men, exhorting them to attack, to breach the defenses. His battalions had sustained horrendous casualties. The delay in cracking open the bastion just north of the airfield had angered Chesty's boss, General Rupertus. Rupertus's dour disposition had become nearly insufferable.²⁶⁵ He hobbled around division headquarters, pained by an ankle injury sustained a few weeks earlier, demanding results.²⁶⁶ The plan was for the Seventh Marines, who were finishing up their conquest of the southern tip of Peleliu, to support the First Marines' attack on the ridges. The Fifth Marines would continue to receive the easiest of the three assignments.

AFTER A QUIET NIGHT, KING COMPANY SPENT SEPTEMBER 19 MOVING SOUTH across another strip of land and onto another islet on the east side of Peleliu.²⁶⁷ A road ran through the open area bordered by mangrove swamps and dotted with a few buildings. On their left flank, Item got into a short firefight at a blockhouse. King faced almost no resistance.²⁶⁸ Behind them, the enemy's heavy artillery fire began to slacken. It also became harassing fire because it was obviously not targeted.²⁶⁹

The job of patrolling this confusing checkerboard of soil and swamp was not completed by the end of the day. The temperature relented, though, dropping into the high eighties.²⁷⁰ The next morning most of King Company walked out to still another islet, this one with a coastline on the Pacific, and set up camp on Purple Beach. Captain Haldane ordered a reinforced patrol; he joined Burgin's #2 gun, the war dog and his handler, and a machine- gunner squad to the riflemen of the First Platoon, their mission to search the southern tip of the larger islet behind Purple Beach.²⁷¹ They moved out. Eugene eyed the war dog curiously because he loved dogs, but he had learned back on Pavuvu never to attempt to pet one.

The patrol went well during the day. They dug in near a lagoon in the late afternoon, the dense mangrove trees cutting visibility to a few feet. Another peninsula could be glimpsed on the far side of the cove. No one knew exactly how all of these pieces of land fit together. The word was there were fifteen hundred enemy troops over there. "We were there," as the #2 gun squad understood it, "to see that they didn't cross that lagoon while the tide was out." When someone reported hearing voices over there, the men began to wonder just when the tide went out. The vegetation rendered the 60mm mortar all but useless. Burgin took one last look before dark and concluded, "If the japs came across in mass swarms, they'd have killed every one of us."²⁷² He had been with King Company during the Battle of Cape Gloucester, when it had held off a series of banzai attacks, but it had taken a lot more men and a lot more firepower to do it. They sat in the darkness waiting for the shit to hit the fan.

"It wasn't too long after dark this guy began to scream and holler." It horrified everyone. Even in the pitch-black darkness Burgin could tell the yelling came from the war dog handler because he was "within arm's reach." Orders to shut his mouth failed to stop his growing insanity. A medic found his way over and administered morphine. One shot made no effect. Burgin watched as "he gave him enough morphine to kill a horse. And it didn't affect him any more than if it had been water in the needle that he was using. And he went completely berserk, and he was hollering and screaming and he was giving our position away and, you know, that couldn't happen. And, uh, so he was killed with an entrenching tool that night, to shut him up." From the sound of it the crazed marine did not die immediately.

In the light of the next morning, it had to be faced. "One of their own" had been killed by one of their own. Most men concluded that it had had to happen. Burgin was grateful that he had not had to do it himself. Sergeant Hank Boyes called it "a terrifying night."²⁷³ No one spoke the name of the man who had wielded the entrenching tool. The lieutenant, a rifle platoon leader nicknamed Hillbilly, called Captain Haldane and "told him that he was bringing the troops in--he wasn't staying another night there." His small force could not hold off a force of that size."And so the company commander told him, 'Okay, bring them back.' So we come back and joined the company."²⁷⁴

King Company had set itself up on the northern tip of the islet called Purple Beach because it fronted the ocean, far from the battle but not far from infiltrating Japanese. Gunshots could be heard on an islet across the canebrake from them. The shots came from marines in Item Company, who cleared it out and came over to say they had killed "about 25 japs."²⁷⁵ That day, September 21, ended without any casualties in King. Its men had survived six days on Peleliu. Their thoughts might have been with their friends in Love Company, still attacking the ridges near the airfield, and also with the thirty-four wounded and four marines killed thus far.²⁷⁶ These figures did not include the war dog handler, since he had not been on King's muster roll, but they represented a hefty toll on the 240 men who were.

JUST AFTER FIVE A.M. ON SEPTEMBER 21 THE PHONES RANG IN THE STATEROOMS OF the wolves aboard the flattop USS Hornet. They assembled in the ready room to get their preflight briefing on their target: the city known as the Pearl of the Orient, Manila. The wolves were here to start the process by which the Filipinos and the American POWs would be liberated. With the city of Manila bearing 250 degrees and 142 miles away, the skipper led the first deckload of SB2Cs off the deck at seven fifty-nine a.m.²⁷⁷ Mike walked out to the flight deck at about eight thirty. The clouds and squalls of rain surrounding Hornet would add another challenge to the day's mission. No rear seat gunner met him. The Hellcat, clad in a dark navy blue with white roundels, had clean, angular lines, which contrasted sharply with the rounded forms of the Helldivers spotted on the stern. For the carrier's second strike of the day, twelve fighters took off first, then Lieutenant Micheel's six fighter-bombers, followed by twelve SB2Cs.

The sky cleared of mist as they arrived over Manila Bay. Campbell's earlier strike had left a fleet oiler of the IJN smoking badly and listing hard. It was just one of about fifteen ships out in the center of the vast natural harbor. Mike could see another ten ships inside the breakwater of Manila's port.^ad Most of them looked small enough to qualify as interisland steamers, sampans, or boats. He focused on the most important ship, the destroyer. His fighter-bombers went first, the echelon rolling over into steep dives to avoid the canopy of flak with which the destroyer covered itself. The F6F could handle a steep dive. The destroyer turned too fast, though, and all six five-hundred-pound bombs missed. The SB2Cs made the second pass and also missed the "tin can." After their runs, the Helldivers joined up to return home, their gas tanks reading half empty.

Unlike the Beasts, though, the F6Fs had plenty of gasoline. They also had rockets under their wings. Mike set his men free to hunt for "targets of opportunity." Downtown Manila was off-limits and they ignored the island of Corregidor. Some of them went looking for airfields. Most followed Mike, racing along the shore of Manila. Japan's three- inch and five-inch AA guns emplaced along Dewey Boulevard threw up lots of flak, but they failed to so much as dent the fighter- bombers. With their rockets, Mike's wing of Hellcats set the small ships at the piers on fire. At the outskirts of the city, he triggered the six .50-caliber machine guns on "anything that looked like Army vehicles running down the road." He noted with satisfaction, as the others joined up on his wing, that "there wasn't much left."

Micheel landed back aboard in time for lunch. Two more strikes on Manila and its environs were launched off his flattop later that day. His friend Hal Buell took a turn.

The next morning began with bogeys flying toward their task group. Two raiders appeared on the radar screens just after five a.m. These faded from the screens after the CAP was routed out to meet them, and the first strikes against Manila took off. The bogeys kept coming, though, dancing in and out of the radar's range. Hornet began to lead her group in a series of course and speed changes as more enemy aircraft popped onto her radar screens. The Hellcats of the CAP reported "splashing" a few bogeys, but just before seven a.m. "two bomb explosions in the water on port bow, 225deg, 2700 yards," made everyone jumpy. Had the two bombs been jettisoned by a U.S. plane? No one could say for sure. Mike's flattop continued her evasive maneuvers, signaling its task group "to form cruising disposition 5V." Changing direction away from one bogey, though, sent it toward another, and she came about again. Fifteen minutes later, a bogey attacked Monterey, off Hornet's starboard quarter, dropping two bombs that landed a few hundred yards from her port- side bow.

Hornet signaled "for emergency speed 25, turn right to 300deg." The carrier came out of its left-hand turn and swung right (starboard) as she sped up. The port battery of AA opened up on a Zeke, or an enemy fighter, "diving from clouds 190deg relative, approximate range 4500'." The aft battery also fired as the bogey made a strafing run on the aft flight deck, the pilot matching his plane's 7.7 machine guns and 20mm cannon against Hornet's five-inch, 40mm, and 20mm guns. "The plane then made a sharp left turn and pulled up and away on port quarter." Its bullets had hit one of the carrier's gun tubes and left the wooden planking of the flight deck smoldering. The screening vessels continued to fire at the Zeke and the CAP vectored out after it. With her guns blazing at a second bogey, Mike's carrier continued her sharp turn until she almost collided with Wasp. As the captains evaded one another, Hornet's gunners opened fire "on Zeke on [the] port quarter bow outside of screen."²⁷⁸ Firing at an enemy plane off the far side of their destroyer screen meant they were jumpy. The bogey got away again. In the break, a lot of talk between the ships of the task group concerned AA guns firing too close to other ships of the group. The sky cleared enough for strike waves to be launched and recovered. Another wave of bogeys arrived around eleven a.m., though, and the flattop remained on high alert for the rest of the day, as the ship's gunners and her combat air patrol protected their carrier.

The task group steamed south that evening, away from the hive of bogeys it had encountered. The reaction to this retreat by Jocko Clark, who was on board as an advisor to the new task group commander but not empowered to make decisions, was to tell the new admiral he needed a better fighter director. The morning of the twenty-third began with preparations for more incoming bogeys. When the air remained clear, Hornet held funeral services for two crew members who had been killed by the strafing attack. The task group steamed south along the Philippine Islands. Micheel and the wolves flew a few more missions, and the fighter- bombers got credit for one clear hit and several near misses on a troop transport before the task group set course for the fleet anchorage. The anchorage had moved to a new harbor in the Admiralty Islands.

FOR FOUR DAYS, KING COMPANY LIVED ON PURPLE BEACH, SENDING OUT PATROLS to look for snipers and awaiting orders. It sustained no casualties. The division HQ, knowing how important mail call was to morale, began sending forward bags of mail to the line companies.²⁷⁹ The marines ate both C and K rations, supplemented by issues of canned fruit and fruit juice. The weather remained cool. The notes Gene kept about his experiences in battle included none of these facts. His mind was still reeling with all he had seen. The keen observer, he knew already that the battle for Peleliu was far worse than anything the 1st Marine Division had yet encountered.

From his pack he took his copy of Rudyard Kipling's poems. The sprawling, bawdy antics of "Gunga Din" no longer captivated him though. A different Kipling verse, entitled "Prelude," grabbed him.²⁸⁰ In it, the poet admitted that the verses he had written about war were a bad joke to anybody who knew better. Until September 15, 1944, Sledge had been one of the "sheltered people" who had laughed at the antics of "Gunga Din" because the ballad danced past the truth he now knew. Many of the men Gene had come to love were going to die in extreme pain. His mind recoiled at the thought. Gene had sacrificed a lot to become a United States Marine. He was so fiercely proud of having bonded with the men of King Company. Kipling's question to the "dear hearts across the seas," he now apprehended, put into words the grief and bitterness in the soul of any veteran whose friends lay buried on some foreign battlefield. Private First Class Eugene Sledge was not at all sure that the death of Robert Oswalt could ever be justified. It felt like a colossal waste.

Beyond the prospect of death (his own or that of his friends), Gene saw plainly that this battle might cost him his soul. Combat reduced men to savages. Sledge respected order. He prided himself on his cleanliness of habits and mind. He did not doubt that the marines would win through to victory. In his heart he knew the stains created by what his marines were being forced to do--to kill a brother with an entrenching tool--were permanent and, perhaps, overwhelming. They had been forced to kill the war dog handler because of Japanese fanaticism and it made him hate the enemy all the more.

Gene sought solace from these thoughts by wading along the shore. He found some tiny shells he thought beautiful and decided to take a few for his mother, so she would know he had always been thinking of her.

On the morning of September 25 the remains of the First Marine Regiment began to arrive on Purple Beach.²⁸¹ Puller's marines had sustained 54 percent casualties, a rate seldom reached in warfare. As the First Marines took over Item and King's positions, Sledge heard plenty about what had happened on "Bloody Nose Ridge." All of the navy's ordnance had not destroyed the enemy's positions. To assault one pillbox meant putting the squad under fire from a myriad of other positions. The riflemen could not see the openings from which all the bullets had come. Colonel Puller had kept the pressure up, had kept ordering his marines to race into the enemy's interlocking streams of machine-gun bullets, even after his battalions had broken, his companies had shattered, his squads had disintegrated. One man said Puller "was trying to get us all killed."²⁸² Looking at the few exhausted, dirty men who survived, Sledge found Chesty's conduct of the battle "inexcusable."²⁸³

In the few hours the men of King Company had with the First, the veterans of the battle for the ridge would have tried to communicate other, more specific truths. Men from the 2/1 reported that the Japanese had tried to use the 2/1's passwords and countersigns to approach their line. The 1/1 reported that "the bodies of jap officers"--the ones carrying the coveted Samurai swords--had been booby-trapped. ²⁸⁴ They also had determined that the rifle grenades were all defective and should be thrown away.²⁸⁵ Wishing the First well, King Company walked across the narrow causeway of solid ground that led to the larger islet. The Fifth Marines' regimental HQ had been set up there.²⁸⁶ Field kitchens, equipment, and the staffs of both the regiment and of the 3/5 had taken up residence there. Item Company joined them. Love Company was still in combat near the ridges.

The word was the Fifth Marines had been ordered to secure the northern end of Peleliu. Marines in combat were running short on ammunition, officers said, "so take everything you had with you."²⁸⁷ At one p.m., trucks began hauling away the 1st Battalion, followed by Eugene's 3rd, with the 2nd Battalion coming later.²⁸⁸ They drove back across the causeway to Peleliu, swinging southwest through the ruins of the buildings around the airfield. The division artillery was shelling the ridges to their right. The Seventh Marines were fighting into that high, broken country. To his left, service troops had set up supply depots. Gene noticed some of the Seabees looking at him. "They wore neat caps and dungarees, were clean-shaven, and seemed relaxed. They eyed us curiously, as though we were wild animals in a circus parade."²⁸⁹ E. B. Sledge described himself as "unshaven, filthy, tired, and haggard." The grizzled veteran of three days in combat and four days on Purple Beach found "the sight of clean comfortable noncombatants [the Seabees] . . . depressing."

IN LATE SEPTEMBER GUNNERY SERGEANT JOHN BASILONE AND THE OTHER senior NCOs in Hawaii heard that their 5th Division had been placed on "alert status." It had to be prepared to reinforce the 1st Marine Division on Peleliu quickly, if the call came.²⁹⁰ The officers of John's division held daily briefings on the Peleliu operation. Not a lot of details would have trickled out of those meetings, but the alert clearly signaled that the battle, code-named "Operation Stalemate," was not going well.

In light of the Battle of Peleliu, the focus of the men's training in the 5th Division changed.²⁹¹ Instruction in jungle warfare disappeared. The fire teams of each rifle squad hereafter honed the application of their different weapons (M1 rifles, grenades, and Browning automatic rifles), and their smooth coordination with supporting weapons (flamethrowers, bazookas, and machine guns), in the assault on hardened enemy positions. It had become clear the demolition men completed the process by hurling a satchel of C-2 explosives into it and collapsing the pillbox's firing port. Peleliu and other recent battles had also seen a high number of casualties among the junior officers (lieutenants and captains) and NCOs. The revised training schedule emphasized the need for every man to assume any role of the fire team or use any of its weapons.²⁹² Enlisted men in the 1/27 took a turn firing a .30-caliber machine gun and watched as someone demonstrated the flamethrower.

DESPITE THE CASUALTIES, BUCKY HARRIS REFUSED TO GIVE SHOFNER ANOTHER command. Perhaps Shifty had already guessed that his new position had to do with his performance on September 15. The companies in his battalion had been confused throughout D-day; nightfall had found two of them dangerously isolated. Shofner, when he confronted this talk, would have pointed out that some of the confusion resulted from having two 3rd Battalions (his and the Seventh's) land next to one another. When the landing craft dumped them in the wrong spot, as they often did, chaos had ensued because there were two King Companies, two Love Companies, and so on. More important, the destruction of his CP and communications equipment had severely hampered his efforts. The radios were not reliable. Such arguments, however, did not explain why Shofner had not, once he understood the situation, hiked out to King and Item companies and set it straight.

Whispers around the HQ questioned why Shofner had located his CP in an antitank trench. Everyone knew the enemy had these trenches preregistered with artillery. Poor judgment, the gossip went, had helped that mortar shell hit him. Worst of all, though, was the story that when he was hit, Lieutenant Colonel Shofner had tried to turn over his command to the battalion doctor. Word had it that, at a critical moment, Shifty had "gone bananas."²⁹³ Had he heard the whispers, Shifty Shofner would have demanded to know how a man could be held responsible for what he said after being hit by the blast of a mortar shell. His bell had been rung. More likely, though, he knew only that before he again fought the Japanese, he would have to fight for the job.

AFTER PASSING BLOODY NOSE RIDGE ON SLEDGE'S RIGHT, HIS TRUCK TOOK A right turn and drove north, on a flat coral road running between the ridge and the ocean on their left. The 3/5 passed through an abandoned Japanese bivouac site on the shoreline, now held by the U.S. Army as it waited in reserve. A "Zippo" accompanied King's trucks farther north.²⁹⁴ Named for a popular brand of cigarette lighter, the Zippo LVT had a big tank of napalm and a pump powerful enough to blow its sticky flame 150 yards. Farther along, the ridge on their right began to drop in height and back away from the road until the trucks stopped near a dense forest. They had gotten as close to the front line as a truck would take them. A few men had already been hit by sniper fire. The Fifth Marines' 1st Battalion had the task of continuing north along the road to secure a radio station area. While the 2/5 remained in reserve, the 3/5 struck off to the east to secure a conical-shaped hill that dominated the terrain. Item and King, rejoined by Love Company, broke into their skirmish lines and moved warily eastward, into the jungle. Love stayed in contact with the 1/5 to the north, where the enemy concentrated his artillery fire. King took the center and Item the right flank. They encountered a thick jungle and sporadic mortar fire.²⁹⁵

It was growing dark as the rifle squads approached the sharp coral hill. In the sky above them, giant star shells opened. The navy ships were hanging five-inchers up there and all of a sudden the way ahead was visible. The enemy shrank from the light, contesting the marines' drive to the top of the hill with occasional streams of their distinctive whitish blue tracers. Another half hour of star shells allowed the men to get their barbed wire strung, because they knew a counterattack would come.²⁹⁶ Creating a defensible line on the jagged landscape took time. The light made the mission so much easier; the officers who had called the navy for this help decided to call the conical hill Starlight Hill.²⁹⁷ Star shells, while helpful, also created the problem of "flare blindness." As soon as the light died, the men's eyes had to refocus. Smart NCOs, therefore, learned to order one of every two men in a foxhole to shut his eyes, and thus be unaffected and ready to fire.²⁹⁸

Just as expected, the Japanese attacked the front line that night. Back near the road, the 60mm mortar squads either did not have mass clearance to fire or lacked an FO, or forward observer, to aim their rounds. Artillery shells from the big howitzers in the rear began exploding in front of the 3/5's lines, effectively pulverizing the enemy. The attack broke, although one never knew for how long. Infiltrators came at the mortar section dug in near the road. Sledge saw two dark figures.²⁹⁹ Burgin saw three men dive into the foxholes near him.³⁰⁰ A few shots were fired and there were sounds of a struggle. When one of the figures emerged from the foxhole, he was killed. Everyone else sat tight, ready to fire.

In the morning, one marine lay dead. Sledge spoke to a number of men and arrived at a definite conclusion as to what had happened. Burgin and others disagreed, but while Sledge noted every grisly aspect of it, they knew they had to pass it off.³⁰¹ Burgin had seen the same thing on Cape Gloucester. The word came to move out. King and Love companies secured the craggy mass of Starlight Hill that morning. That night proved to be quieter and easier.

On the morning of September 27, King Company left Love and Item to hold Starlight Hill. Sledge's company marched north to support the 1/5's attack on a hill mass up there.³⁰² On the way up, the whole company was laughing at a story making the rounds. The previous night a scout in one of the rifle platoons, Bill Leyden, had eaten a can of Japanese food he had found in a cave on Starlight Hill. The tin of food had created an "intestinal fury" inside Bill that had led quickly to "the runs like I was going to explode."³⁰³ On the front line and unable to move from his foxhole, Bill had had to relieve himself in empty C ration containers. He then dropped the full containers off the side of the hill. The way the story went, shouts of disgust and protest could be heard coming from the enemy below; other marines thought the voices signaled an attack, and everybody started shooting. Leyden himself enjoyed mimicking the unintelligible outrage he had heard after he bestowed his gifts before he concluded: ". . . and you know, my God, you can only imagine what he was saying. He was definitely cursing in Japanese." Everyone could relate to the story because by this time everyone had had to relieve themselves in a C ration can.

The laughter would have faded as they passed the junction of the West Road, which they were on, with the East Road, which led south on the other side of Bloody Nose Ridge.³⁰⁴ They halted with orders to stand by. Up ahead of them, the 1/5 massed the firepower of tanks and Zippos to savage a collection of hills that the Japanese engineers apparently had turned into hunks of Swiss cheese with their tunnels. The regimental CO, Bucky Harris, had added to his firepower by borrowing a huge 155mm gun from the army. Colonel Harris ordered the massive howitzer to fire point-blank into the caves.³⁰⁵ The shells created a painful double concussion as the ignition and the shells' explosions occurred within a second of one another. Waves of crushed coral slid off the face. The marines of the 1/5, however, still could not advance. The enemy's rifle and machine-gun fire coming out of those infinite holes was buttressed by mortar fire coming from behind the hill mass. Worse, the 1/5 was taking fire from the opposite direction.

From their positions on a tiny island a hundred yards away called Ngesebus, the Japanese were essentially hitting the 1/5 and the 2/5 in the rear. Those battalions had a difficult day as the shit hit the fan. Late in the afternoon, nine tanks churned past King Company. They found a point from which to shell Ngesebus, close to where a small man-made bridge connected the two islands, and unleashed a barrage with their 75mms, every fourth shell a smoke shell. The tanks provided covering fire for four LVTs. These drove into the water and around the northern point of Peleliu, where they located the nexus of the Japanese defense of the high ground. The LVTs fired point-blank into a large blockhouse. The enemy resistance on the near side began to crumble without its heavy mortar support. Tank dozers drove up the north road and pushed coral and earth into the lower pillboxes.³⁰⁶

Although the area to their north was far from secure, the 3/5 would not be needed. Late in the day, army units relieved the 3/5 at the crossroads. King, Item, and Love moved south to an assembly point near the regimental HQ. To shield their movement, the artillery provided another screen with its smoke shells. A short round landed near the regimental HQ and, to everyone's horror, "squarely in the midst of the war dogs." The dogs had been brought up to help protect the marines from night infiltration. The white phosphorus used to produce "smoke" covered them and burned through their flesh. The dogs shrieked and yelped at the merciless pain. Bucky Harris saw no other way. He ordered the war dog handlers to shoot them, which they did, "all of them with eyes brimming with tears."³⁰⁷

At dusk on September 27, word came that the 3/5 would invade the small island they could see a hundred yards away called Ngesebus.³⁰⁸ The Japanese over there had not only been firing at the marines on Peleliu, they had been sending over barges filled with reinforcements at night. Sledge's stomach churned at the thought of another amphibious assault. During the past few days, King had suffered only one or two casualties a day.³⁰⁹ An amphibious assault on another island would likely increase that ratio. Dug in near an army unit, Sledge had a chance to speak with them. The soldiers of the 321st Regimental Combat Team had already secured the small island of Angaur a few dozen miles away. They had come to Peleliu to reinforce the 1st Division, and E. B. Sledge welcomed them as comrades in arms and respected them as equals.³¹⁰ The Eugene Sledge who once had laughed at the "damn doggies" for being sloppy and pathetic had disappeared.

USS HORNETSAILED AWAY FROM THE PHILIPPINES TO THE RHYTHMS OF GENERAL quarters, flight ops, and gunnery practice for the AA batteries--all of the ceaseless preparations that had brought her to a high state of combat effectiveness--even though she had earned a break. On September 27, Rear Admiral Joseph "Jocko" Clark assembled the crew, both black shoe and brown shoe, on the flight deck to present decorations for jobs well done. The following day the carrier docked in Berth 16 of Seeadler Harbor, Manus Island, Admiralty Group. Air Group Two had completed its mission and began to disembark. Reporting aboard the following day would be its replacement, Air Group Eleven. Jocko Clark held a farewell dinner for his pilots. The host thanked his naval aviators for their efforts while the guests tucked into their steaks, potatoes, fruit and vegetables, topped off with a cigar. In a few days Lieutenant Vernon Micheel and the wolves would board a troopship for the ride home. In the six and a half months of their squadron's combat tour, thirteen of the forty-six pilots of Bombing Two had given their lives in the service of their country, as had fifteen rear seat gunners.³¹¹ Micheel hated to distinguish between the deaths classified as "operational" as opposed to "combat related."

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

NAVY CRUISERS AND DESTROYERS BEGAN FIRING AT NGESEBUS AT SIX A.M. THE Fifth Regiment's artillery ranged in as well. The firestorm had come again, so close that the 3/5 had a ringside seat. Amid the swelling tempo of destruction, forty amtracs, forty of the assault amtracs with the snub-nosed 75mm, and fifteen swimming tanks lined up on the beach on the northwestern corner of Peleliu.³¹² The preinvasion bombardment lasted three hours. Navy and Marine Corps planes made passes over the target, strafing and bombing. One of King Company's riflemen, Bill Leyden, noted that the USMC pilots, flying in their distinctive Corsairs, "always seemed to come in lower, to try harder to knock out jap positions, and the marines loved them for it." The Corsairs' last pass came with the lead tanks thirty yards offshore.³¹³ After an eleven-minute run, the first wave of twenty of the assault amtracs landed on Ngesebus at nine eleven a.m. An enemy soldier attacked one of the LVTs with a Bangalore torpedo.³¹⁴ The amtrac threw a track and the lone assailant was killed. A few minutes later, King Company landed on the left flank of the beach, Item on the right. Riding in a new amtrac with a rear ramp, Sledge did not have to clamber over the side. As the troops disembarked and charged forward, the assault amtracs aimed their cannons and fired at the defensive bunkers from close range.³¹⁵ Behind them the Sherman tanks swam ashore. The whole battalion assault team had landed by nine thirty a.m.

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

Burgin's #2 gun squad halted as they saw the riflemen take cover ahead. Using a bunker as cover, Snafu and Sledge set up the 60mm to be prepared to fire. Burgin needed to figure out how best to support the assault teams. Sledge said, "Burgin, there's some Japs in that thing." Burgin glanced at the oddly shaped little building half buried in the sand. It stood about five feet tall, was about sixteen feet in length, and four feet wide. His sergeant had told him "there wasn't any japs in there," so he replied, "Oh, Sledgehammer, do you know what you're talking about?"³¹⁶

"Yeah, I can hear them jabbering." Burgin saw a small ventilation port near him. "I crawled up on the side of that bunker and looked into there, and that jap had his face right up against the hole. . . . Well, I pumped about four or five shots on him before he could get his head down." Even after he emptied his clip, "they kept jabbering and a machine gun came out and fired a few rounds." They threw grenades out of the ports as well.

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

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

Snafu and Sledgehammer and the others shot the enemy as they emerged. A short pause after the first rush of men ended when another Japanese soldier emerged. Sledge "lined up my sights on his chest and began squeezing off shots. As the first bullet hit him, his face contorted in agony . . . the grenade slipped from his hand."³¹⁷ The moment became seared into Gene's heart as his sharp eyes noted every detail of the first time he killed another human being. "The expression on that man's face filled me with shame and then disgust for the war. . . ." Another thought struck him hard: the foolishness of "feeling ashamed because I shot a damned foe before he could throw a grenade at me!"

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

A number of similar successes along the line allowed the 3/5 to cross the enemy's main defensive line at twelve fifty p.m.³¹⁸ The Japanese never gave up, though, and the ships of the navy had finished their work as artillery batteries and ceased firing. ³¹⁹ King and Item had advanced only 350 yards by five p.m. when they dug in for the night. A few platoons of reinforcements came up an hour later. The infiltrators would creep toward them hours later causing brief, vicious exchanges. All over Peleliu and Ngesebus, mortar teams fired their illumination rounds, sometimes keeping a few floating in the air above them at one time.³²⁰

The next morning the attack jumped off at six thirty a.m. and at eight a.m. the first marines began to reach the far shore of Ngesebus.³²¹ Before they could relax, "a large jap 77mm gun fired point-blank at the rifle companies."³²² King Company did not take part in the firefight, which eliminated the enemy's gun crew. It had already sustained the highest casualties of any company in the battle for Ngesebus (three killed and nine wounded) and the worst losses since the invasion.³²³ Most of the day was spent "mopping up," which meant carefully making sure no enemy concentrations had been overlooked. It also gave the marines time to find souvenirs. Stripping enemy bodies was, so far as Corporal Burgin was concerned, "common practice."

The vulgarity of his friends stripping dead bodies combined with the aftershock of the sudden devastation wreaked by the enemy's 77mm gun filled Gene's eyes with tears. "I was so terribly tired and emotionally wrung out from being afraid for ten days on end that I seemed to have no reserve strength left."³²⁴ E. B. Sledge would take note of the words of encouragement he received at that moment from the mortar platoon lieutenant, Charles Ellington. Nicknamed "Duke" because he shared a last name with the famous black jazz musician Duke Ellington, the lieutenant had seen him struggle and said, "I feel the same way." The gesture helped Eugene. He looked up to Duke, just as he revered all of the officers of King Company. He saw them as strong, brave, and true of heart. His opinion reflected his innate love of order and his deference to authority. He needed to believe now more than ever in the courage and righteousness of his commanders. E. B. Sledge's perception, however, overlooked the growing anger within Corporal Burgin, who doubted Lieutenant Ellington's bravery in battle. Duke never seemed to be where the action was.³²⁵

When the word came, they walked back to the invasion beach to the sound of artillery on Peleliu. An army unit relieved the 3/5 at six p.m. The amtracs carried King to Peleliu, and trucks ran them south, around Bloody Nose Ridge, then east across the first causeway to the regimental HQ on the first islet. Being so near Purple Beach, the new port area, brought the hope that they were going there in preparation to ship out.³²⁶ After a decent night's sleep, King Company had a long rainy day off to clean their weapons, get some hot chow from the mess hall, and wonder if the scuttlebutt was true.³²⁷

PRIVATE FIRST CLASS SIDNEY PHILLIPS WAS NOT CRAZY ABOUT LIFE AT BOCA Chica Naval Air Station, even though it turned out to be only seven miles to the north of Key West, Florida. Most of the marine unit stationed there were, like him, recently arrived veterans of the 1st Division. They all disliked being stationed out in the boonies or, more correctly, on one of the little islands sticking out into the Gulf of Mexico. A marine could only get to Miami if he had a long weekend liberty. The jobs of guarding the front gate, the gasoline storage tanks, and other important government property seemed almost pointless.

Most of the navy pilots stationed there had just graduated from flight school and received their wings of gold. The first taste of the glamour of being a pilot as well as the pay and the respect accorded an officer often went to their heads. Ensigns were likely to look down on a lowly marine at the gate and might decide to thank him for "guarding our airplanes." The senior officers sometimes knew better than to treat a salty marine that way, but one afternoon a car with four captains drove up to the main gate. Sid noticed the four stripes on their uniforms. He also noticed one of them lacked an ID card. He did not wave them through. The salty veteran with the big "1" on his shoulder patch started to ask about the missing ID when the car started to move forward. Sid "placed my hand on my revolver, and told them to stop, made them all get out and go into the guard house for clearance. This was all done with firm politeness, and snappy salutes."

Sid and the other veterans enjoyed playing games with the swabbies. Other navy officers coming to the front gate might be asked to get out and open their trunks for inspection. Sailors ducking through an illegal hole in the fence around the base might hear a gunshot. They assumed it had been aimed at them and it got them to stop their unauthorized egress. These kinds of stunts also earned Sid and his friends a reputation as the "mean and bad Pacific veterans."

He did venture into Key West a few times. One bar sat next to another bar, next to another. Sid visited too many of them on one trip and woke up in a strip club, drunk. He observed his friends explaining to the MPs why they did not need to bother with him. By his right elbow he soon noticed a girl "bumping and grinding . . . to the tune of the Hawaiian War Chant." She was lathered in sweat and had long stringy hair. "My thought was up close she isn't very attractive and then I slid to the floor. Deacon would have given me several of his long lectures."

AT EIGHT A.M. ON OCTOBER 1, IT BECAME THE 3/5'S TURN. THE OTHER TWO battalions of the Fifth remained in relative safety while Sledgehammer and his comrades walked toward Bloody Nose Ridge.³²⁸ The 3rd Battalion had been attached to the Seventh Marines, whose CO announced his unit would "make an all out drive to erase the remaining jap garrison."³²⁹ The Seventh would continue the push north begun by Chesty Puller's First. The walk to the front line for King, Item, and Love was not very far. The ridge came into view. The ceaseless battering by every weapon in the corps' vast arsenal upon the high ground had burned and blasted away the jungle, exposing several dreadful columns of Bloody Nose Ridge.

The 3/5 relieved the 2/7 on the eastern side of the main ridge complex. Some company-sized units of the 2/7 came down from the heights that had already been taken. The men being relieved had not eaten hot food or enjoyed a safe place to sleep since September 17. Just getting ammo and medical supplies and the wounded out had been difficult, their officers reported, since snipers were everywhere and the terrain was crazy.³³⁰ A few of them led the men of Item Company back up the steep paths into the coral walls to show them their positions. King and Love remained on the valley floor, back from the point of furthest penetration. The air over the forbidding terrain shimmered with heat and malevolence. The sound of gunfire at all times attested to the fact that somewhere nearby, someone was getting hurt. As the platoons of King found their places that afternoon, snipers killed two men and wounded two others.

The attack northward did not jump off the next day. The 2/7 shifted to the right in order to face a solitary ridge along the island's eastern shore. The plan worked out for October 3 involved the Seventh Marines seizing the ridge in front of it. To the left of the Seventh's ridge, across a flat open valley, stood the coral redoubt known as the Five Sisters, the object of the 3/5.³³¹

The #2 mortar squad joined the chorus of mortars that began firing at six thirty a.m. Fifteen minutes later, the heavy artillery opened up, trying to force the Japanese back from their firing positions and therefore allow the riflemen to close with their targets. The high-explosive shells gave way to smoke shells at six fifty- five. The riflemen of Item and King took the point, moving forward along the flat and open ground, the bulk of Bloody Nose Ridge running along to their left and the Five Sisters five hundred yards dead ahead. On the 3/5's right flank, two tanks and three half-tracks of the Seventh nosed into the long valley known as the Horseshoe. On the far right, the riflemen of the Seventh assaulted the ridge on the shoreline.³³²

The 60mm mortarmen were not leading the charge, but they still came under direct fire. "Almost every cave in the side of the ridge on the left flank was full of japs," as King's skipper, Captain Haldane, discovered. "Tanks, portable flamethrowers, grenades, bazooka, and demolition charges were used to eliminate them." To Love Company fell the task of mopping up the areas behind the advancing King and Item.³³³ The seemingly endless permutations of hardened coral faces demanded the marines' attention to detail in the face of punishing small-arms fire. In the course of such work the marines learned to dislike the flamethrowing LVTs, or "Ronsons."³³⁴ To be effective with flame, the tank had to get very close to its target, and, since troops and tanks had to work together, that meant the troops had to approach the pillbox closer than they would have had to with a standard Sherman tank. Anything the Ronson could hit with flame, the Sherman could hit with a 75mm shell from a safer distance. For all of the frightening hostility of napalm's sticky sheet of flame, it caused less damage than an HE round and King Company measured its gains in yards of violent destruction.

The lead elements of King reached the base of the Five Sisters at noon. One platoon found a sharp ravine on the left side of the sisters and took a tank in with them to investigate. Love came up on their right, Item fell back to mop up, and the riflemen began to scale sisters one, three, four, and five. The mortarmen waited, ready to lay down suppressing fire or smoke rounds. Knowing when to press the attack and when to fall back demanded a cold assessment of a combat situation the likes of which no one there had endured. It fell to Captain Haldane, the skipper, to expend his men's lives as judiciously as possible, while producing the gains his superiors demanded. Haldane made sure he made that decision from the front. At that moment there was seemingly no cover. Rifle fire from unknown locations drove King to the ground.³³⁵ The volume of fire increased. The call for the smoke rounds came to the mortarmen. As the 60mm mortar tubes coughed, King fell back two hundred yards. Over to their right, the Seventh had also had to withdraw out of the Horseshoe because of the casualties in men and to its armored vehicles. Some of the caves held guns big enough to destroy a tank.³³⁶

The assault cost King Company seven killed and about thirty wounded, including Sergeant Hank Boyes.³³⁷ The high number of casualties came as a shock.³³⁸ The men spooned out some K rations, all too aware of what the night would bring. The mortar section had nearly used up its supply of 60mm mortar illumination rounds.³³⁹ The enemy must have watched the marines dig in because they seemed to know which foxhole to jump in and where to throw their grenades. The infiltrators came all night long. It got so bad that when a sergeant hollered, "You guys need help up there?" he got a quick, "Shut the fuck up!" for his trouble.³⁴⁰ At daybreak, Sledge heard men call out, "Get down, Joe," and "Get down, Pete," as they shot the remaining infiltrators scant feet from one another.³⁴¹ Once secure, the marines counted twenty-seven dead enemy bodies within the company's small perimeter.³⁴² They moved out and up into the Five Sisters again. Burgin and the mortarmen made it to the base of the escarpment. Even though he had heard about the cave system it amazed Burgin to see it. "A jap could run into one entrance and reappear on the other side of the ridge." A few feet past the entrance, the tunnel usually took a ninety- degree turn to the left or the right and another a few feet farther. These twists and turns helped shield the inhabitants. "Some of the caves had a steel door on them," he noticed. "We finally got the artillery up and busted the doors down and used the flamethrowers, and weeded them out of there."

" The difficulty," Sledge noticed about the destruction of a cave, was "getting anywhere near it 'cause of crossing fire from other caves."³⁴³ As a forward observer for his team, Burgin went forward with an intelligence-gathering team. He came across a few marines who had been tied up and used for bayonet practice. The dead men had had "their testicles cut out and their throat cut, you know, and mutilated. And, any one of the bayonet deals would have killed a man. But they [the Japanese]--they didn't know when to quit. They just kept brutalizing the--the marine. And you don't have to see very much of that until you--you get a great hatred before you." Tanks pulled up at the base of the Five Sisters to evacuate the wounded just before ten a.m.³⁴⁴ The riflemen ahead and above Burgin found that the caves they had cleared the day before were active again. The enemy killed in the mouth of the cave the day before might look like "frankfurters on a grill, they're sizzling and popping," from the flamethrower treatment, but a bullet or a stream of bullets could issue forth at any moment.³⁴⁵

The squads of King and Love gained the ridge while other marines worked through the ravine on the left. Both were trying to get to the second sister, just out of reach to the north. Too much rifle fire from too many holes forced the marines to pull back again. The smoke rounds started falling in the early afternoon and by five p.m. the line had pulled back about seventy-five yards from the sisters.³⁴⁶ A half hour later a 155mm mortar shell exploded near the 3/5 aid station.³⁴⁷ The day's casualty list grew to six men killed and thirteen wounded.³⁴⁸ Captain Haldane kept some men with him to hold the front line about three hundred yards south of the Five Sisters overnight. He sent King farther south until it backed around the southern base of Bloody Nose Ridge.

Sledge's company moved into the area where the First Marine Regiment had been cut into small pieces on D-day. Many Seventh Marines had fallen here as well. Their bodies had been removed. The enemy's dead, however, had not been. Looking around, Burgin could see corpses in all directions. The bodies "would bloat up and flies would be going all through their body from their mouth on out." With so much food, these green blowflies reproduced quickly and soon there were great swarms. His movement near one corpse caused a huge number to dash noisily into the air, "so thick that they would make a shadow, just like a cloud came over between them and the--between them and the sun." The flies made it difficult for the marines to eat. They could land on a ration in that short moment from when it was opened to when it was to be inserted into the mouth. Brush one off and another took his place. So brash, "you couldn't chew them off." The stench of the decaying corpses mixed with that of the exposed excrement suffused their existence. The odor "was something that I don't think any human being ought to ever have to endure."

Exhausted after the assault on the Five Sisters, Burgin got permission to find a spot a little farther back. He lay down in a shell hole near the 81mm mortar batteries and fell asleep. The mortars fired all night long, harassing the enemy and providing illumination with star shells. "I heard about three shells and that was it" until his sergeant woke him the next morning at eight a.m.

DAYBREAK ON OCTOBER 5 FOUND THE CO OF THE 1ST DIVISION, GENERAL RUPERTUS, in a difficult position. One of his regiments had been shipped back to Pavuvu, broken. Another, the Seventh, had lost its combat effectiveness. The Fifth's recent foray into the ridges had produced casualties at a similarly alarming rate. Little advance on the battlefield had been made. As one senior officer described it, "a sense of gloom and futility was rife."³⁴⁹ Lieutenant Colonel Shofner witnessed this because recently he had been banished permanently to Rupertus's division HQ.

Colonel Harold D. "Bucky" Harris of the Fifth Marines had sat Shofner down at the end of September and told him he thought he was a fine officer in many ways, and an excellent marine. Harris had, however, recommended Shofner "be returned to the United States for a period of one year before serving again in the field." The Fifth Marines' CO "believed that the strain caused during his imprisonment by the Japanese has left a nervous condition that makes it undesirable for this officer to remain in the field at this time." Colonel Harris knew that he was ending Shofner's career as a line officer with this fitness report. Shofner, who only wanted to fight, knew as much when he signed it.³⁵⁰

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

As he supervised the division HQ, Shofner became aware of Rupertus's difficult situation. He may not have known, however, that the general had turned over the future operations on Peleliu to Bucky Harris. Harris not only commanded the most powerful regiment, he had warned Rupertus not to continue battering the coral fortress head- on. When the Fifth and the Seventh's "all out attack" failed to make appreciable gains, the general called Bucky into a secret meeting at which he collapsed in tears and wailed, "I'm at the end of my rope." On October 5 he gave Harris permission to look for another way into the enemy's fastness.³⁵¹

Colonel Bucky Harris went up into a small spotter plane and flew back and forth over the small area, looking for the right place to send in the Fifth Marines. His choice would affect the course of Shofner's life almost as much as those of the #2 gun squad.

THE #2 GUN SQUAD SPENT OCTOBER 6 HARASSING THE ENEMY.³⁵² BURGIN CALLED in orders for searching fire to the left or right. Snafu dialed in the azimuth. Sledge removed the correct number of charges from the base of the shell, hung it, and dropped it down the barrel when ordered. Their fire and that of the other 60mms provided part of the cover for a lot of movement and reorganization on the front.

The Seventh Marines used the cover to extricate themselves from the front line. They were headed for Purple Beach and a trip to Pavuvu, leaving the battle to the Fifth. Bucky sent the 2/5 and most of his tanks around the West Road and up to the northern edge of the Japanese fortress. When ready, they would attack south. A hodgepodge of marines from artillery and support units manned a defensive line in front of the Five Sisters, the Horseshoe Valley, and the eastern ridge. Heavy artillery was brought up to help support these men. The 60mms of the 3/5 continued to fire while those men moved into position. Getting the Seventh Marines off the eastern ridge, where they had made some forward gain, required a lot of smoke and the cover of darkness. 1st Battalion took the Seventh's position--ordered to carry a unit of fire and a day's worth of rations with them.^ae

On October 7 all three of Bucky's battalions attacked from three directions. King Company remained in position, though, as Love and Item attempted to crack into the Five Sisters. The 2/5 came toward it from the other direction and the 1/5 fired at it from across Horseshoe Valley.³⁵³ The big guns of the Eleventh Marines, the artillery, supported the effort as usual. Item advanced about two hundred yards into the Horseshoe, the riflemen and their supporting tanks blasting and burning a lot of caves, before enemy bullets from three sides made their position untenable. Love had been stopped cold when it attempted to follow another ravine northward. The mortars belched smoke rounds all over the front to protect the withdrawal. Love and Item had lost eight men wounded and four killed. They rejoined King and the 3/5 spent the next two days just south of no-man's-land. The position put them in between the airport and the ridges.

Above the 3/5 flew the Corsairs of the USMC, their bombing missions of such short duration that the pilots had neither time nor necessity to pull up their wheels. On the eighth the planes dropped thousand- pound bombs into the gorges and on the cliffs as requested.³⁵⁴ Harris also had the planes drop hundreds of pounds of napalm on the western and northern parts of the Japanese stronghold, burning away more of their concealment. The colonel followed that up immediately with massed artillery fire on the new targets.³⁵⁵ He applied firepower at the maximum level available to him as two of his battalions, the 1/5 and 2/5, continued the fight in their respective zones of action for the next few days.

King lived amid the dead bodies, excrement, and broken buildings, eating cold C rations and waiting for their turn.³⁵⁶ The fly population had decreased, thankfully, as aircraft sprayed the island with chemicals. The marines went four days without suffering a casualty, while 105mm and 155mm howitzers fired point-blank at any openings in the coral walls.³⁵⁷ The mission Sledge's company received on the tenth and continued the next day was to find the sources of the sniper and mortar fire that continued to issue from the southernmost ridges--ridges that had been overrun by the First Marines weeks previously. The patrols along the edge of the ridges became a grim business for those on them--they found no clear evidence, much less a clear shot at the enemy--and suffered one killed and seven wounded.

The mortarmen rarely went on such patrols. Seeing his friends in the rifle platoons cut down by an unseen hand, though, made Corporal Burgin livid. This was not warfare as he knew it. Snipers shooting individuals could not halt the U.S. victory. It was just naked evil. The Texan choked on his frustration. The enemy "were in those damn caves and you just, and you didn't know who, what you, you didn't . . . you couldn't see what you was fighting. And they wouldn't come out and fight you. . . ." The Japanese stayed in their caves, silently keeping watch. When the Americans were looking the other way, "they'd shoot one or two rounds and then they'd disappear"; the patrols "had a hell of a time finding which cave they were shooting out of or where the cave was...."³⁵⁸

No antisniper patrols went forth on October 11. King's skipper, Haldane, and the other captains of the 3/5 went to meet the officers of the 2nd Battalion and be briefed on their position on the north side of the ridges. Another push into the coral chaos was on the horizon. Their officers were at least trying to find another way in. When such attempts were made, Sledge invariably heard marines exclaim, "Thank God 'Bucky' is our CO, and not Chesty." The delay increased the boredom that had crept into the marines of King Company, who had lived on the outer edge of the combat zone for nearly a week. Guys wanted to get souvenirs from the nearby caves. Although ordered not to hunt for Japanese Samurai swords and the like, some of the "hard heads," as Sledge called them, would "enter for souvenirs and never return."

THE 1ST DIVISION HQ HAD GROWN INTO AN IMPRESSIVE COMPLEX ON THE AIRFIELD. Thousands of men operated the airport and supported the combat troops. The foxholes of the combat troops situated on the southern end of the ridges were not too far from the men who lived in tents and went about their daily work.³⁵⁹ Thus the commander of the division's headquarters battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Shofner, lived in close proximity to combat troops as he endured his mundane chores. Some of his marines kept the division HQ neat and tidy. In typical Shofner fashion, he made sure they did their job.³⁶⁰

In his other job as provost marshal, Shofner commanded the division's unit of military police, or MPs. The MPs guarded key storage dumps and kept the traffic flowing. His men also picked up any stragglers and brought them back to their assigned units. While the stragglers included marines from line companies who could not explain why they were so far from their foxholes, stragglers also included men from service units who could not explain to the MPs why they were on the front line. The problem of "marines from supporting units making their way into the hills . . . to find souvenirs to trade with sailors" became big enough for a number of officers to arrive at the same solution at about the same time. Shofner ordered "marines near the front without their weapons" to be "issued new ones and assigned to a rifle company in the assault, where they remained until their own officers came to retrieve them. All Marines leaving the front line were required to haul stretchers of wounded down the steep hills to awaiting ambulances."³⁶¹ With other officers having issued similar orders, the tourist and salvage trips ended abruptly.

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

His assignment as provost marshal had one interesting aspect: being in charge of the POWs. No one expected Imperial Japanese soldiers to surrender, although an attempt had been made. Two weeks earlier the garrison in the ridges had been given the opportunity from noon to four p.m.³⁶² Six men had come out. More recently, a rumor had gone around that marines had discovered a cave of seventy-five female Japanese. The women had also refused to come out, so the cave had been sealed. Nonetheless the provost marshal had internees for whom to care. The POWs spoke freely, providing valuable intelligence. One man said his recently formed unit had been instructed to "enter the water naked" at the time of an invasion, and "swim out as far as possible and then attempt to knock out landing craft with explosives."³⁶³

In all, a few hundred men from the enemy garrison had been captured thus far. A lot of those were Koreans who had been conscripted as workers.³⁶⁴ At least seventeen of the POWs incarcerated in the stockade were Okinawans.³⁶⁵ They had been brought in to build the airport. When food had run short, the Japanese had allowed the Okinawans, clad only in breechcloths, to surrender.^af The few captured enemy combatants, which included members of Japan's navy as well as its army, had either been wounded or were so weak from malnutrition and thirst they had not been able to resist. The U.S. stockade provided them cots, blankets, and water. Twice a day they walked to the supply depot to draw rations. Colonel Shofner made sure that angry marines did not shoot the prisoners "like fish in a barrel." So far as the provost marshal could tell, however, the recovery of their health elicited disdain, not gratitude, from the Japanese prisoners. With the help of the USMC's language officers, Shifty made sure the captives understood that he had seen how the Japanese treated their POWs in China. In some detail he described his own experience as a POW in the Philippines. He ordered the translator to emphasize that "compared to the conditions that he had endured, they were living like kings."³⁶⁶ The point Shifty most wanted to make--his hatred of them--he drove home himself, uttering it in the "prison camp Japanese" he had learned the hard way.

ON OCTOBER 12, THE 3/5 DEPARTED EARLY. THEY WENT UP THE WEST ROAD. Before reaching the junction with the East Road and Starlight Hill, they turned off to the right. At seven a.m., the 3/5 began to relieve the 2/5 on the northern side of the Japanese's final defensive stronghold deep inside the ridges.³⁶⁷ The mad jumble of terrain features had been given nicknames by the units that had been there previously. The army had held a blocking position in the area weeks ago. The Seventh had begun an assault there that eventually had been taken up by the 2/5. The problem with nicknames, however, was that men could disagree upon their application--particularly in

In order to orientate himself that morning, King Company's skipper, "Ack-Ack" Haldane, crept forward to review his sector. Japanese machine guns had pinned down the unit that his company was there to relieve. The substitution would be tricky. He needed to know where the enemy was. A sniper spotted him and shot him in the head. Up until that moment, Captain Andrew A. Haldane had been big enough to keep the men in his company believing they could accomplish this mission because, while other officers told their men, "You will do this," he had said, "We'll do this."³⁶⁹ Word spread that the skipper had been killed. Haldane's runner, Dick Higgins, went berserk at the news and had to be held down by four men and carried to the rear. The loss touched everyone. It engulfed Gene Sledge in grief at the waste of such a talented, charismatic man.³⁷⁰ Captain Haldane had embodied everything E. B. Sledge loved about the United States Marine Corps. The skipper had quietly expected his King Company to give only as much as he did: 100 percent. In shock and under fire, King Company found it difficult to get into position.

The company's executive officer, Lieutenant Thomas J. "Stumpy" Stanley, became the new skipper. The relief of the 2/5 went slowly that morning and lasted into the afternoon as the skipper ordered his platoon leaders to lead their men into forward positions.³⁷¹ The area the 3/5 entered had been prepared by Sherman tanks firing point-blank and Ronsons hosing down swaths hundreds of yards in diameter with napalm.³⁷² The departing marines left their spare grenades and ammunition in the foxholes to help the new guys.³⁷³ The demolition crews reported that the three large caves in the area "had 400 to 500 japs dead or unconscious from the tank shells and napalm."³⁷⁴ To get tied in, communications wire needed to be run to each of the platoons and the mortars situated in a secure spot. The marines also manhandled a 75mm pack howitzer up to a high point of their forward position, Waddie Ridge, and assembled it.³⁷⁵ Short of both sandbags and sand, the marines also carried up pieces of armor in an attempt to create a safe emplacement for the operators of the gun. In these processes a few of the men from 2nd Battalion who were trying to get out of there were hit by enemy gunfire, which also wounded seven and killed one man in King.³⁷⁶

Burgin happened to be next to the man who was killed. A sniper had shot into his forehead. The corpsman came to take him away. Another marine took his place on the edge of the coral face, looking out over a steep drop of sixty feet to more ugly blobs of coral beyond. As a forward observer, Burgin took a place along the line, his #2 gun squad well behind him. Each man on the line carved out a place for himself within arm's reach of the other. "And we was sitting up there on the edge of that and firing across the valley and picking off any jap that showed himself on the other side." As night came, the men practiced their usual routine. Every other man on the line slept, while the others stood their turn on watch.

After midnight, Burgin heard two men fighting two holes away. He could not see much and he could not move from his position. Were more infiltrators coming? Would a marine get jumpy and begin shooting at the shadows? Burgin gripped his rifle and felt the adrenaline rush through him. A man screamed "one of the bloodiest screams I have ever known or heard in my life." It came from a body falling over the cliff. "And he screamed all the way down 'til he hit the bottom." Everyone went on alert, waiting to find out what happened next. When dawn broke hours later Burgin asked the man what had happened. "I knew that I was gonna die," he replied, "because I couldn't break his hold." He had started to black out. The answer had come like a flash. "I reached behind the jap's head with one hand; and clawed his eyes out . . . with the other one." When the hold on him broke, the marine grabbed his assailant "by the nape of the neck and the seat of the pants, and threw him over the cliff." His story was one of many in the company that morning. Even with flares hanging in the sky, it had been a night of "continuous activity."³⁷⁷

Burgin's mortar squad had a busy day, delivering fire on the forward areas to provide cover for the patrols seeking avenues of advance. The terrain prevented the employment of armored vehicles. Riflemen from Item Company made some progress in their sector. They closed some caves, allowing King to move along Hill 140. A pack howitzer was brought up to blast away more obstructions.³⁷⁸ Before dark, they strung some concertina wire in front of them. When they heard sounds that night, the marines pitched grenades. Daylight revealed six dead infiltrators.³⁷⁹ The OP of the 3/5 reported that they could see the enemy going to the pond in the canyon at night. That sounded promising. The artillery had a new mission. It would bracket the pond with a barrage occasionally each night. The first night he tried it, Bucky Harris reported his artillery "netted 24 nips, and the second night a round dozen."³⁸⁰

King was not there to see the second night's tally. On October 15, guides brought up soldiers from the army's 81st Division, the Wildcats. Enemy machinegun and sniper fire did not interrupt the relief of the marines' positions, a mark of the progress the 3/5 had made.³⁸¹ The 3rd Battalion, the next- to-last marine unit still in combat, walked out to the West Road, then north to the tip where they had once fought. While the rest of their regiment enjoyed the hot showers and screened mess halls near Purple Beach, the companies of the 3/5 took turns watching the northern ridge. More infiltrators were up there. Harris did send around a "generous beer ration" to them.

They had a day to relax. Once again, Sledge had a chance to speak with some soldiers. The army "seemed to regard us as rugged and doers of great things. It really amused me too, for we are no more rugged than they or any others. We are just American boys like they are." The 3/5 received word the following morning that they were going back into action. The army's assault team on Hill 140 had advanced too quickly and found itself under fire from positions on its flanks. The word was for the 3/5 to clean their weapons, top off their canteens, and wait. The trucks arrived. A few hours later, at eleven a.m., Colonel Harris told them to stand down. Since "he knew how grief stricken they would be at missing a last chance upon the hot coral ridges," Bucky issued another two cans of beer per man.³⁸²

In the days that followed, cots, hot food, showers, and movies became available. ³⁸³ The decompression required for some marines to enjoy these staples of civilian life could take time.³⁸⁴ King Company was reorganized into two platoons. The only officers the company had left were Stumpy Stanley and Duke Ellington. Gene estimated that it had suffered 64 percent casualties. As bad as it was, the men of the 3/5 knew that their regimental commander had stuck his neck out for them. Bucky Harris had demanded that a new route into the objective be tried, rather than continuing to batter itself northward against the Five Sisters. They were very grateful for it.³⁸⁵

Although the daily mail call resumed, three days passed before Eugene could write his parents. The letters he received from them became more frantic with each advancing postmark. Their growing alarm at the gap in letters had been stoked by news from Europe of their oldest son. Edward had been wounded in action for the second time. On October 18 Eugene sent a brief note special delivery to let them know he was all right. The Red Cross distributed some stationery and he composed a longer letter. He apologized for the delay, for he knew how concerned they were, "but we were always in action except for a little while here or there and there was no mail service." He assured them that his weekly letters would resume. Thoughts of his parents let his mind wander to the woods and fields around Georgia Cottage, where "fall is just breaking," and out of the tropics, where "it's always stifling and smelly." His father would soon be out in all those beautiful fall colors, with his new dogs, hunting. "Just realize how much I'd love to be with you," he wrote. He hoped Sid might get to join his father and asked that, if so, they take some photos. Gene also requested a picture of their new puppy. His parents had named their new dog Grunt.

On October 20 a brief ceremony took place at the U.S. Armed Forces Cemetery Peleliu Number One; 1,058 men from all service branches had been laid to rest about fifty yards inland from Orange Beach Two.³⁸⁶ Captain Haldane was buried just about exactly where he had led King Company ashore on D-day. If he attended, Gene would have dwelt once again on "Prelude," the Kipling poem that had been festering inside of him for four weeks:

I have eaten your bread and salt.
I have drunk your water and wine.
The deaths ye died I have watched beside,
And the lives ye led were mine.
Was there aught that I did not share
In vigil or toil or ease,--
One joy or woe that I did not know,
Dear hearts across the seas?
I have written the tale of our life
For a sheltered people's mirth,
In jesting guise--but ye are wise,
And ye know what the jest is worth.387

The enemy dead numbered approximately 10,685. The corpses not sealed inside their caves were dumped into mass graves at convenient locations by working parties from service units.³⁸⁸

ON OCTOBER 20 GENERAL MACARTHUR WADED ASHORE ON THE ISLAND OF LEYTE in the Philippines. In what was hailed as a daring move, MacArthur had bypassed the most southern island of the chain, Mindanao. His return received worldwide news coverage. The world considered it a dramatic step toward the end of the war. To Shifty Shofner, the man he reviled had chosen to invade a smaller and less important island. Skipping Mindanao meant that the hour of liberation for his friends in the Davao Penal Colony had been postponed. Their suffering would continue.

ALL THE INK DEVOTED TO THE ACCOUNTS OF MACARTHUR IN THE PHILIPPINES seemed to drive the Battle of Peleliu from the front pages of the newspapers. The reason for taking Peleliu, to protect MacArthur's flank while he invaded Mindanao, had obviously been rendered moot. As the men of King Company rested and read their mail and listened to the news, these two facts were clear to all who paid attention. Gene Sledge paid attention and the thought of all that sacrifice having been in vain engendered within him a profound bitterness. "It was all for nothing."³⁸⁹

Gene and his friends would have also noted unhappily that the units around the airfield and the rest of the Fifth Marines at Purple Beach enjoyed a higher standard of living than the 3/5 up on the northern tip of Peleliu. Where they were, enemy stragglers came down out of the hills occasionally. It never occurred to the enlisted men to try to get the Japanese to surrender. The marines shot them immediately.³⁹⁰ Burgin watched his friend Jim Burke casually borrow a rifle from a bystander, shoot a Japanese wading in the sea, and say thank you as he handed the weapon back. Watching Jim shoot to kill, Burgin was struck by "how damn calm he was."³⁹¹

Ten days of rest made barely a dent in their exhaustion. On October 27, trucks drove them out to Purple Beach. The 3/5 rejoined the rest of its regiment. A fleet of DUKWs began driving the regiment out to the troopship bit by bit.³⁹² King Company assembled on the beach and Sledge watched as "some joker broke out an old box camera from somewhere and took a posed picture of the survivors of K Co."³⁹³ More than a few managed to smile.

The Fifth Regiment had come to Peleliu in three troop transports and six LSTs. The "survivors," as Sledge called them, fit aboard one ship, USS Sea Runner.³⁹⁴ They struggled to climb the net from the DUKW up to the deck. The men of the 3/5 reported to compartment A2 of the ship, put their gear on their bunks and stood by until all men were loaded and the regulations were issued. The hours for chow were announced and each man would get in line with his mess kit and his new mess card. Marines from 3rd Battalion would stand guard duty on days five and six. All troops would stand inspection daily at ten thirty a.m. A security inspection would be held at ten p.m. At least servings of cold milk and fresh bread followed the regimentation. High seas slowed the loading of their gear and two days of regimented life aboard Sea Runner passed before she finally weighed anchor.³⁹⁵ Scuttlebutt had it that they were headed for Australia.

The crew of Sea Runner kept the ship's clocks accurate as they crossed time zones, which meant waking the marines up an hour earlier on some mornings, a requirement sure to make the troops unhappy. The ship steamed into Pavuvu's Macquitti Bay on November 7. The 3/5 unloaded before noon to find large quantities of mail, beer, Coke, and rotation lists waiting for them.³⁹⁶ Most of the men who had joined up after the attack on Pearl Harbor and who had fought on Guadalcanal found their names on the rotation lists. With a few exceptions, they were going home. The first shipment of replacements had already arrived.³⁹⁷

As Gene disembarked, he saw a Red Cross woman serving the men a cold drink. The sight shocked him. He had seen American women on Pavuvu and at the big base on Guadalcanal. His world of anguish, however, could not admit the beauty and civilization she represented. "She's got no more business here than some damn politician," he thought. A lieutenant saw Sledge hesitate and said, "OK, sonny, move out." Sledge turned to see the untanned skin and crisp uniform of "a brand- spanking new boot-lieutenant."³⁹⁸ The new officer looked into the veteran's eyes and saw nothingness. The sight made the lieutenant uncomfortable and he quickly found something else to do. The moment represented part of what Eugene Sledge had wanted to gain by being a marine: the self-confidence of the combat veteran. As it turned out, though, the blank stare came not from the easy calmness of one who had been tested and knew his own courage. Scenes of naked atrocity clouded his vision, producing an inability to care.

LIEUTENANT MICHEEL ARRIVED BACK IN ALAMEDA, CALIFORNIA, ON NOVEMBER 1, 1944, much as he had in December of 1942. This time, however, he was prepared for the quick sorting job the navy was going to give the veterans of Bombing Two. He made some phone calls: to his girlfriend, Jean Miller, in Philadelphia and to his old skipper, Ray Davis, still flying a desk at a base near Norfolk. On November 2, Lieutenant Micheel was ordered to report to NAS Jacksonville, Florida. Mike was going to be an instructor after he enjoyed a one-month furlough. He asked for and received permission to travel by personal transportation, but he took a train home to Davenport. He saw his parents and he paid another visit to John Lough's parents.

Trading in the '36 Dodge coupe he had stored in a shed for a newer Dodge sedan required only a little cash. Getting gasoline was the trick, since it was still rationed, much to everyone's disgust. The navy had given him some coupons, but not enough to drive to Jacksonville, Florida, by way of Pennsylvania. Waiting for him when he arrived in Davenport, though, was an envelope of gas cards supplied by Jean's father. Jean's enclosed note had a funny story about how her dad had finagled the extra coupons. The cards gave Micheel enough gas to get to Philadelphia, where he spent a long weekend with Jean and her family. He drove to Norfolk to spend a night catching up with Ray, who gave him enough cards for the drive to Jacksonville.

ON NOVEMBER 2, 1944, MAJOR GENERAL WILLIAM RUPERTUS REPORTED ON THE fitness of Lieutenant Colonel Austin Shofner, who was on the division staff. In many ways, Shofner had improved. Most of the categories were now marked "Excellent," including training of troops, handling of men and handling of officers, and he earned a mark of "Outstanding" in loyalty. The provost marshal fell down to "Very Good" in cooperation, in intelligence, judgment, presence of mind, and leadership. For all that he liked about Shofner, Rupertus believed that "as previously reported, his experience as a POW has made this individual highly excitable." While Shofner's incarceration had "not affected his courage or devotion to duty," the general recommended more recuperation for Shofner before he again saw combat. General Rupertus wrote the fitness report on the day he himself was relieved of his command and summarily shipped stateside for his own failure on Peleliu.

Soon after his return to Pavuvu, Shofner also received a letter from the office of the Commandant of the Marine Corps regarding his claim for reimbursement of the personal property he had been forced to abandon in Olongapo on Christmas Day 1941. While his personal clothing, including a number of exotic items, such as a white sharkskin suit, fell within the corps' guidelines, a lot of items did not appear on the "approved schedule of allowances," including the selection of women's lace negligees, the collection of women's handbags, and the elegant household items like the carved ivory elephants. The director of personnel had decided not to factor in the "depreciation" that Shofner had included in his claim, however, and awarded him every last cent of the claim, $2,621.90.

Lieutenant Colonel Shofner had a visit from one of his former sergeants, Hank Boyes of K/3/5. Hank had recovered from his wounds and had come to ask for help. Sergeant Boyes told Shifty a story about D-day, when he had used a tank to clear out some key enemy emplacements. "I got up on the tank," Boyes reported, "and told him [the tank commander] we were K-3rd but I didn't say 5th [regiment] and he was still with us till 2pm and out of ammo before he found out we were not the 7th Marines."³⁹⁹ Put another way, Hank had used a little trickery to keep the tank around to help King in combat. When the tank commander, a Sergeant Meyers, found out the truth, he had raced back toward his assigned regiment, but not before Meyers's superior officer had noticed his absence. Meyers now faced a court-martial. Shifty enjoyed Hank's story and was happy to tell Meyers's CO that his tanker had not been derelict in his duty. The charges against Meyers were thrown out.

PAVUVU DID NOT LOOK SO BAD TO EUGENE SLEDGE NOW. NO INFILTRATORS INTERRUPTED his sleep. In a rather amazing display of devotion, his parents had sent him eighteen packages while he was in combat. He did not reply immediately, however. He slept, munched on snacks, took two to three showers per day, and began reading some of the new magazines and letters. The Mobile Press had Peleliu as a front-page story.⁴⁰⁰ It stressed "the most crushing aerial bombardment" that had preceded the invasion. Gene would have noticed a critical fact that probably escaped most readers: the nine-day preinvasion bombardment had been focused not on Peleliu, but "on Babelthuap, largest of the Palaus." The newspaper assured its readers that the Marine Corps had "coordinated" its offensive against the enemy stronghold "with General MacArthur."

The Mobile newspapers carried a lot of stories about the U.S. Army's march across France, where his older brother Edward served. Among the many letters Eugene opened from his parents, one informed him that Edward had been promoted to captain. A letter from Sidney Phillips described how he had almost been killed by a hurricane at his base in Boca Chica. All of the personnel of the naval air station and all of their airplanes had been evacuated in advance of the powerful storm--all except for the marines, who had been left there to guard whatever survived. Sid wrote his story as if it was a hilarious joke.

Eugene did not feel much like writing. The Marine Corps' birthday on November 10, an anniversary that had merited an effusive letter a year ago, passed without mention. He went to see Sid's friends in H/2/1. He had to find out how Sid's friends had fared. Among the men he said hello to would have been Deacon, who had survived Peleliu and was waiting for a trip home. The 1st Division had never suffered casualties like it had on Peleliu and a lot of marines felt a similar need. All over the island, men were showing up at other companies to check on a buddy. Bill Leyden, one of King Company's riflemen, went around asking after friends. Some were in the hospital on the island of Banika nearby. Others had been wounded so bad they were on a ship bound for the States. Often, though, he asked about a good friend and "his buddies would--in the tent--would tell you how it happened to him and then you'd stare . . . and they'd say, sit down and they'd offer you a beer if they had a beer . . . because they knew just how you felt. And then you'd leave and go back to your outfit." Gene already had heard a fair amount about the fate of the First Marines. Deacon's 2/1 had suffered higher casualties in five days on Peleliu than the 3/5 had in thirty. As a veteran, Deacon had been shocked by the enemy's fortifications that had withstood the relentless pounding. Peleliu, he concluded, had been "Japan's Corregidor."

The first time Sledge put pen to paper would have been to capture some of the specifics of the battles of Peleliu and Ngesebus. ⁴⁰¹ The memories he could not forget, but the details would be lost if not recorded, and E. B. Sledge understood the importance of the details. After a few weeks, he began to write his parents regularly again. The belated birthday wishes from his parents began to arrive in late November and their love moved him. He responded in kind. The seashells he had collected on Peleliu had survived and he had them strung into a necklace for his mother. "I carried them through that operation & Ngesebus," he told her. "I hope because those dainty little seashells came from such a dreadful place that you won't fail to see their beauty and know . . . you were in my mind continually." As he was writing a letter to his parents, the mail call came. As usual, he was handed a package. It contained a Colt .45 automatic pistol--just the thing for nights in combat. While he shared the goodies with his tent mates, the .45 became "the apple of my eye. I care for it like a baby." The pistol represented the deep connection between them and their shared love of hunting. "Pop, I know I'm closer to you than many boys dream of being with their fathers."

November 29 saw another ship full of replacements arrive at the steel dock. A large number of the veterans found themselves turning in their weapons and preparing to ship out. Sergeant St. Elmo Murray Haney shipped out. After only a few days on Peleliu, "Pop" Haney had decided combat "was a young man's game" and taken himself out; no one thought ill of the forty-six-year-old man who had volunteered for combat duty. Haney transferred stateside after being promoted to gunnery sergeant. ⁴⁰² Richard Higgins, Captain Haldane's former runner, also received a ticket home after three battles. King's new skipper, Stumpy Stanley, gave Higgins their late captain's personal effects: a pocketbook, and flag, and a few other mementos. On behalf of the company, Stumpy ordered Higgins to go see Andy Haldane's parents. A lot of King Company gathered at the pier as the veterans of Guadalcanal walked up the gangway. "The Rubber Lipped Division Band did its damnedest," Stumpy noted approvingly, to give them "a proper send off."⁴⁰³ The band played the song they had learned to love in Melbourne, "Waltzing Matilda." It had become their anthem. Like the Old Breed before them, the "Canal Men" sailed for home, entrusting their 1st Division to the next generation.

The draft of replacements meant reorganization. Sergeant Hank Boyes became gunnery sergeant of King Company.⁴⁰⁴ Lieutenant George Loveday, who had served with the 3/5's weapons company on Peleliu, became the company's executive officer. R. V. Burgin was promoted to sergeant and oversaw the mortar section, which expanded from two guns to three. The mortar section lost Duke Ellington to a transfer and gained Lieutenant Robert MacKenzie, fresh from Officer Candidate School (OCS). A number of other new lieutenants joined the company, especially in the rifle platoons. Hank Boyes took the new officers aside one by one and said, "Lieutenant, I'm going to introduce you to your NCOs. They are good, proven men. You can learn a lot by observing and being with them and asking them questions."⁴⁰⁵

Eugene had not been promoted. He had, however, earned what he had long coveted: the reputation, as the saying went, of being "a good man in the field." The respect of his peers meant everything to him. Being a good marine on Peleliu was the bar to which all the replacements would have to measure up, regardless of rank. The new arrivals could not mistake the angry "1,000 yard stare" that some of the vets had, or their ennui.⁴⁰⁶ The replacements would learn who the heroes of K/3/5 were in the same manner in which the Old Breed had once greeted the Canal marines: by telling them they were unlikely to ever measure up. While every veteran of King Company had stories of courage to share, one name stood out.

In early December, the working parties finished carving out a new baseball diamond from the coconut trees on Pavuvu. They hung a large painted plaque on a wooden stand bearing the inscription "Haldane Field."⁴⁰⁷ Thirty marines joined the honor guard and fired a three-volley rifle salute. These thirty marines had been led by Captain Andrew Haldane during the "Battle of Suicide Creek" on Cape Gloucester, and had followed him across the wastelands of Peleliu and Ngesebus. Of all the dear friends they had lost, he was the one they had to honor together. Andrew Haldane had seen himself as a man fulfilling his duty rather than a career officer.⁴⁰⁸ He had joined the Marine Corps reserve while attending Bowdoin College, completing OCS in time to serve on Guadalcanal, where he had proven himself. He had fallen forty-eight hours short of his trip home. At the dedication of the field one of the majors from battalion HQ tried to say what Sergeant Hank Boyes later wrote. "Haldane was a very outstanding leader with calmness, consideration of all possibilities and the courage to carry out his decision. He certainly set the example and had the respect of every man in K Co."⁴⁰⁹ After the ceremony, the guys took off their shirts, put on their shorts, and the regimental officers played a team from the 3/5 on a beautiful sunny afternoon. The home opener at Haldane Field went scoreless until late in the game, when the enlisted men drove in two runs.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL SHOFNER LOOKED AT THE ROTATION LISTS HOPING NOT to see his name. He wanted more than anything to lead again in combat, in part because he was a professional marine and in part because he had to expunge the blotch on his record. Two things worked in his favor. General Rupertus's disappearance was one. The other was the looming possibility that some veterans of Guadalcanal would be required to fight a fourth campaign. It posed, as all senior officers well knew, a "serious morale problem."⁴¹⁰ This problem was averted by a plan to rotate home almost six thousand enlisted men and officers. The plan, begun in early November, would take several months to complete because a man was released only when another arrived to take his place. When the process was completed, the division expected its ranks to be divided roughly into thirds. One-third of the men would be veterans of two battles (Cape Gloucester and Peleliu); one-third of one invasion; and one-third would have no combat experience. An experienced officer who wanted to stay, therefore, might be needed.

The transfer orders that came to him at three thirty p.m. on December 15 could not have been more of a surprise. The new commanding general of the 1st Division, General Pedro del Valle, found Lieutenant Colonel Shofner in the officers' mess and tossed him an envelope, saying, "Read it and weep."⁴¹¹ The orders notified Shofner that he would be transported "to such place as the 14th Army Corps may be located . . . you will report to the Commanding General, Fourteenth Army Corps for temporary duty as an observer or to perform such duties as may be assigned to you by the commanding general of the Corps or other competent authority." Put another way, Shifty Shofner had been assigned as a Marine Corps liaison and advisor on guerrilla affairs to the command of Douglas MacArthur for the invasion of Luzon. Shifty hustled off to get his bags packed. He and MacArthur were returning to the island where their wars had begun.

IN DECEMBER THE PACE OF TRAINING FOR THE 5TH DIVISION ON THE BIG ISLAND of Hawaii slowed. More weekend passes were handed out, although the only destination was the small, rather quiet town of Hilo. Their base on the Parker Ranch had a USO club and a PX, but these did not get a man very far from his routine. The marines played a lot of sports. Of all the games, getting out on the gridiron was the most dangerous. The rigorous training had them in top shape. They knew the pause meant they would ship out soon. It tended to make a man do anything--playing poker, drinking, playing football, or fighting--with abandon. Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone stuck to softball.

The process of packing up their gear had begun when the sergeants of the Twenty-seventh Regiment threw a Christmas party. Few officers were invited.⁴¹² It was the kind of evening when the marines provided some of their own entertainment. Some doggerel written by the 1st Marine Division in Australia had become a favorite.

Bless 'em all, Bless 'em all
The long and the short and the tall
There will be no promotion
This side of the ocean
So cheer up, me lads, bless 'em all.
They sent for MacArthur to come to Tulagi
But General MacArthur said, No.
He gave for the reason it wasn't the season,
And besides, they had no U.S.O.

Taken from an English drinking song, it was the kind of ditty that had new verses added every time it was sung. A few days after Christmas, the Twenty- seventh Regimental Combat Team began departing the camp. Another two weeks and the New Year's Eve celebration, however, passed before John's battalion got on the trucks to ride to the dock. They boarded USS Hansford and steamed around the Hawaiian Islands for a few days, watching while naval officers practiced maneuvering the big fleet.

The days of boredom ended with their ship pulling into Pearl Harbor. After being in Hawaii for six months, the 1st Battalion would at last get its chance to go ashore in the big city. Standing on the ship's deck, they could see that ships of every kind jammed the harbor, including the transports holding about twenty thousand marines of the 4th Division. John had to tell his men that liberty would be granted to only a quarter of his men each day. Hansford and the ships weighed anchor two days later, much to the disgust of half the men. The fleet stood out from Pearl Harbor on January 21, prepared to take on the Japanese.

The next morning, though, found them drilling again, this time as a division. The careful landing plans disintegrated into a snafu.⁴¹³ Ships as big as LCIs missed their marks; smaller boats swamped. The marines raced out of their LVTs and toward their objectives. The soft volcanic ash made movement difficult for men and machines. The ash pooled around their feet; it rose in great clouds of fine dust.⁴¹⁴ They were told that this island closely resembled Island X, their target.⁴¹⁵ After a cold dinner of K rations, they spent an even colder night on the island. Hansford and the rest of the fleet returned the division to Pearl, where half the men could debark each day. Free beer and sporting equipment were made available near the docks. Honolulu was eight miles away and every mode of transportation was strained to capacity. Lots of marines chose to buck the crowds, feeling the need to pull a liberty in the big city.

Gunnery sergeants had a lot easier time having fun in Hawaii than enlisted men. John and his friend Watters managed to look up John's brother George.⁴¹⁶ They passed a few pleasant hours and took another photo for their parents. It was not like John to get serious about what awaited them. As they were leaving, he said, "See you on the beach."⁴¹⁷ Before he shipped out, John wrote his mom to tell her he was okay. He apologized for not writing sooner, "for we were a little busy," and let her know George "sure is looking good mom." He had gotten a letter from Mary and Delores just the other day. "Tell Delores everybody liked her picture she sure came out beautiful in it." He sent "love and kisses to all. Love always, Johnny."⁴¹⁸

SID PHILLIPS SAW A NOTICE FOR THE V-12 PROGRAM ON THE BULLETIN BOARD OF NAS Boca Chica. It offered the chance to become an officer, a prospect for which Sid had no enthusiasm, and the chance to earn college credits, about which he was "extremely anxious." The first stop was his unit's top sergeant, who checked the private first class's folder and exclaimed that he had never seen a higher score on the general aptitude test. Sid had the qualifications. An officer had to sign the application, though, and they both knew their major was a mean and vindictive man who might step in Sid's way. The sergeant said he had a way around the major if Sid could be patient.

At the end of the year, a colonel from Washington, D.C., came to inspect the marine detachment. Colonel Hill wore the 1st Division patch, so Sid knew he was "one of us." The colonel finished his inspection with a short talk to the marines standing before him on the parade ground. He offered them the chance to come see him in the office if they needed something. "As he said this the top sergeant looked right at me and nodded his head ever so slightly."

Sid stowed his gear and raced over to the office. The top sergeant appeared as well, making sure Colonel Hill understood. Hill looked over the application and put it in his briefcase. He turned to Sid "and told me to pack my seabag, that the papers would be on the Commandant's desk Monday morning." Hill asked Sid if he had ever met General Vandegrift. Sid told him a story about bathing in the Lunga River on Guadalcanal with a lot of others. A bar of soap had floated down to him. Sid looked upstream to see his commanding general with his hand out, asking for it back. Hill laughed and promised to remind Vandegrift of it, at which point Sid "saluted and floated out of the office. I wanted to hug the top sergeant."

On Wednesday morning, Sid was told to report to the office. "The top said, 'Here are your papers. You catch the bus at the main gate in one hour.' My cobbers carried my seabag out to the main gate and bid me goodbye." The bus off the Florida Keys and on to Miami had plenty of seats. "It seemed the pattern in the service," he observed, was "to constantly alternate between mountain tops of joy and deep valleys of misery."

COLONEL SHOFNER MET UP WITH THE U.S. ARMY'S FOURTEENTH CORPS IN PORT Moresby, New Guinea--not a long trip from Pavuvu. Shifty "had no love for the Army and no interest in serving with them. He had heard that all of the men who served with MacArthur were chosen for their loyalty to MacArthur and not for their ability on the battlefield."⁴¹⁹ He reported to the corps headquarters and was assigned to its 37th Division as an observer. Without any official duties, he stepped aboard USS Mount McKinley on December 31 for the trip from New Guinea to Luzon. His ship sailed past Mindanao, still in enemy hands. A week later, as the convoy of ships neared the northern tip of the Philippines, Japanese planes flew out to attack them. These planes did not attempt to drop their bombs on the ships. These planes were bombs. Their pilots attempted to crash themselves into the largest, nearest ship they could find, preferably an aircraft carrier.

Shofner watched the air attacks, which the Japanese government had referred to in the Tokyo newspaper as its Kamikaze Special Attack Force; they had been expected. The enemy suicide planes did not hit McKinley. They struck other ships in the convoy, however, by the dozen. The navy pilots aboard the escort carriers lived on full alert, as did the ships' AA gunners. The numbers of kamikaze involved in this effort and the praise of the special attack force found in the Japanese media betrayed the rapid growth of a serious problem. The eagerness of the enemy to commit mass suicide in order to raise the cost of the U.S. victory came as no surprise to a veteran of Peleliu.

The invasion day bombardment was also something Shofner had seen before, although not to this scale. One thousand ships filled Lingayen Gulf on January 9 as the opening salvos from the battlewagons cleared away all life- forms in the soldiers' paths. The 37th landed that day and so did Shifty at the same location the Japanese had invaded in 1941. He watched the companies and battalion perform. General MacArthur had 131,000 combat troops and another 80,000 in support. Very quickly Shofner became highly critical of the army leadership at the corps level and above. The assault, he felt, took too long to drive inland.^ag His disgust came partly from interservice rivalry; it resulted also from his intense desire to free the Americans locked inside Cabanatuan POW Camp Number One.

His attitude won him few friends on the Fourteenth Corps staff. Shifty also believed that the army commanders "brushed aside" the guerrillas, refusing to use them for anything more than scouts and intelligence. Although he had no direct contact with General MacArthur, Shofner came to believe that the general refused to involve the Filipinos because they had continued to fight the enemy long after he had fled. The attitude, one Shofner considered prevalent among army officers, angered him because he believed the Filipino guerrillas were "heroes" who had "committed their lives and fortunes and their sacred honor to fight the Japanese and care for their people."

The officers of the 37th Division would have questioned the logic of Shofner's insistence that one of the most powerful invasion forces ever assembled should coordinate its advance with the large and well- intentioned, but fractious and ill-equipped, guerrilla movements on Luzon. To the soldiers, the visiting marine colonel's assessment also overlooked the decades of service in the Philippines by General MacArthur and some of his top generals. Moreover, MacArthur's staff had been in constant communication with the guerrillas for years. Shifty had firsthand knowledge of MacArthur's relationship with the guerrillas, however, just as he had with the general's leadership of the battle of Bataan, and it led him to a different conclusion.

In a meeting on January 23 Shifty Shofner insisted that the 37th Division needed to focus on helping the POWs. Thousands of Americans had died slow deaths and had been buried in unmarked graves. To rescue the surviving POWs, the soldiers would need the help of the Filipino guerrillas. The army officers brought in a stenographer to type up his comments.⁴²⁰ Shifty gave a description of Cabanatuan and Camp O'Donnell and Bilibid Prison. Having been a prisoner, though, meant that his geography was a little fuzzy. He believed, however, that this memo was exactly the reason he had been brought to Luzon.⁴²¹ That same day, he found himself detached from further duty and sent to the airport to await transport. On the twenty-seventh he boarded a flight to Guadalcanal and from there winged his way to Pavuvu.

A LOT OF THE MARINES SPENT THEIR IDLE HOURS ON PAVUVU FIGURING OUT WAYS to ferment raisins or anything handy into moonshine known as "raisin jack." The beer bottles issued a few times a month were not enough to wash down the boredom and not all marines were interested in the stacks of books in the recreation hall. After one beer ration was issued, Eugene "sat on my bunk and watched the drunks beat each other. Finally after tearing up their bunks they were quieted by the O.D. [Officer of the Day]. The whole thing was certainly disgusting to me but to them was more fun. So I continue to sell my beer to the suckers and let them show their caveman instincts for bashing each other." At least the poker games--which Eugene noticed tended to end with guys "at each others throats"--were usually held in the tent next door.

Gene liked to hang out at his tent with the men in his squad. Drill or an inspection usually took up the morning, but in the afternoon they had time to shoot the breeze. Aside from an occasional steak or scoop of ice cream, the chow they were served was, like the training, part of the hardship they endured together. They shared the goodies their families sent. No family sent as much as Dr. and Mrs. Sledge, but Snafu got a big can of fried chicken for Christmas, which he shared. Gene smoked one of the pipes his father had sent him and showed off some of the Confederate money from his "good old Rebel country." The marines who had been in Australia told so many stories, the new guys assumed "the Battle of Melbourne may have been the biggest battle the Marine Corps ever fought."⁴²² Snafu might have had something to do with enhancing that reputation, but not R. V. Burgin. His time in Melbourne had been devoted to one Miss Florence Riseley and Burgin had promised to make it back to her. Gene read a bit from one of his mother's recent letters out loud. She declared that "Peleliu was spoken of with awe." His buddy George jumped in with, "Yeah, with aw hell!" The joke got a good laugh. It was just a little moment, one of many that Gene treasured. He belonged.

In the New Year the 1st Division began to train its men in "street fighting," which encouraged the enlisted men to guess about the location of their next assignment. Formosa, mainland China, and Japan itself were mentioned.⁴²³ Gene's mother always wanted to know about what was going on in her son's life. She asked questions. She wondered how his experience compared with his brother's war in Europe. "Ed's outfit," Gene replied, "certainly is good to get so many commendations. I hear we got the Prez citation for Peleliu. I don't know if it's true or not."^ah When Mrs. Sledge began to wonder about his next assignment, he wrote: "Don't try and figure out the things the higher-ups do--I long ago learned its useless figuring. Realize we are in God's hands, and he will unite us all at Georgia Cottage before long."

AUSTIN SHOFNER RETURNED TO PAVUVU AFTER A BITTER BATTLE WITH THE U.S. Army on Luzon. He did not arrive to find a new battalion awaiting his command. The one bright spot for him was that he had "found both a friend and an inspiring leader in General Pedro del Valle," CO of the 1st Division. Del Valle had problems because "the departure of the experienced men was not well timed with the arrival of the new men."⁴²⁴ Since some of his senior officers were not eligible for stateside duty, the general had begun sending them to Australia for a long furlough. It made the training schedule difficult to keep. It was a problem with which Shofner was familiar and he did his best to help his new CO.

A SERIES OF BUSES AND TRAINS TOOK SID PHILLIPS AND HIS SEABAG BACK TO NEW River, North Carolina. He arrived on a cold January day in his dress greens and was given a ride to his barracks. The base he had known as New River had become a sprawling complex of buildings now called Camp Lejeune. He threw his bag on a cot. The others there said hello and someone asked, "What state are you from?"

"Alabama," he replied in a loud voice. A big guy asked, "What city?"

"Mobile."

"Me, too," said the big guy, and just like that Sid had a new cobber. Marion Sims, nicknamed "Bunk," had seen action at Saipan and Tinian. They had time to get to know one another because the V-12 program had not officially started its semester. "We were told the Marine Corps was experimenting with the idea of putting combat veterans into the V-12 program because so many V-12 students had been intentionally flunking out of the program so they could get into a combat unit." Before they attended classes, though, the two hundred or so marines in Sid's class first had to endure several weeks of harsh discipline. Sid found it to be "every bit as bad as Parris Island." The program stripped them of their ranks and also demanded they remain single until they completed it, at which point they would be commissioned as second lieutenants. A number of men disliked the loss in pay suffered from being busted in rank and the attendant abuse. They were allowed to return to their former ranks and stations. Sid "took it gladly" because he "had had enough of the mud and troopships and C rations."

THE 1ST BATTALION OF THE TWENTY-SEVENTH MARINES BOARDED USS HANSFORD and shipped out on January 27. The battalion's commanding officer, Colonel Butler, waited two days before announcing their destination on the ship's public address system.⁴²⁵ He confirmed what some of John Basilone's men had heard already: they were sailing for an island called Iwo Jima. The 5th Marine Division and the 4th Marine Division were going to invade an island closer to Japan than any marine had yet been. Detailed briefings would follow.

All the briefings involved maps. Maps of the Pacific showed Iwo Jima in relation to the airfields on Saipan, from which the air corps' B-29s flew to bomb Japan. Other maps focused solely on the target island, or showed the different sectors into which "Iwo" had been divided. Each navy ship would bombard one sector. A lot of ships meant the sectors were small. Big, 3-D maps made of plaster indicated heights and features. For the next few weeks, the marines spent a part of every day in front of at least one map or aerial photo, being briefed by some officer. Each man was told why Iwo Jima had to be taken in some detail. Each man came to know the terrain and the location of the enemy's emplacements. The men of 1st Battalion were told why the Battle of Iwo Jima would last three days, five at the outside.⁴²⁶

That the Japanese would fight fanatically until death was a given. U.S. intelligence estimated that the Imperial High Command had committed some fourteen thousand troops to hold it.^ai The island's complement of forces was also suspected of including a number of prostitutes.⁴²⁷ To soften up this force, the army's bombers had begun dropping bombs on it every day for three months. Even a cursory look at the aerial photos showed that the buildings that had once dotted the island had disappeared. The navy ships would begin shelling the island three days in advance of the landing. Counting all of the reinforcing units (including the 3rd Marine Division), the "expeditionary force" topped 111,000 men in 500 ships. In less than forty- five minutes, 482 amtracs and an array of other amphibious craft would deliver 9,000 marines from the 5th Division and the 4th Division on Iwo's shore.

John Basilone had never cared much for lectures. Iwo Jima, like Guadalcanal, had an airfield that the Japanese held and the United States needed. The marines had to go ashore and seize it. The strategic logic probably made little impression on John. Certainly he understood the basics. Taking the airfield would make it easier for the B-29s to ignite the paper and wood structures in Tokyo. The bigger the fire, the sooner they all went home.

Briefings concerning his battalion's specific mission captured more of John's interest. The 1st and 2nd Battalions would land in the center of the long invasion beach. Futatsu Rock, the lone rock feature jutting out of the water just off the vast length of beach, divided their landing. John's 1st Battalion would land on the right side of Futatsu at Red Beach Two; Baker Company on the left. The colonel placed Able Company in reserve. John's C/1/27 added to B/1/27 meant about five hundred marines crossing Red Beach Two at H hour. In concert with the companies of 2nd Battalion, they would seize the southern end of the airfield, known as Motoyama Number One, about six hundred yards inland. An advance of another fifteen hundred yards would bring them to the opposite shore. Once on the far side they would swing right and head north and work with the 4th Division to seize the wider part of the island.

At a minimum, the marines were told, they must establish a solid beachhead by day's end because the Japanese were going to mount an all- out banzai attack either the first evening or early the next morning.⁴²⁸ The enemy only had enough fortifications to house four of his nine infantry battalions. The remaining five battalions and their tanks were, according to the intelligence officers, going to charge the marine lines.⁴²⁹ Once this banzai charge had been destroyed, the advance was expected to roll forward quickly.

Charlie Company's first challenge, as photographs of Red Beach Two showed, were the steep gradients in the sand created by the ocean's waves. To assist the scaling of these so-called terraces, the first wave of 1st Battalion would bring scaling ladders. Once across the several terraces on the wide beach, though, Charlie Company would encounter a relatively flat area all the way across the island, intersected by Motoyama's runways and taxiways. Bomb craters were everywhere.

After studying the terrain, the intelligence section rolled clear overlays over the maps. The overlays marked the Japanese pillboxes and bunkers in red. There was a lot of red. Enough enemy positions of various sizes had been marked in red to cause a man's gut to wrench, or even make it seem pointless trying to memorize where they all were.⁴³⁰ Officers explained that the navy's preinvasion bombardment would last three days. On D-day, the battleship New York would handle Charlie Company's landing sector. Once they got off the beach and onto the airfield, they would be in the zone of the heavy cruiser Salt Lake City. The end of the airfield also marked the start of the zone of the battleship Arkansas. The massive batteries on these ships would fire a "rolling barrage," meaning they would not cease firing at H hour, but would continue to fire at targets about four hundred yards ahead of the first wave of marines. If the barrage got too far ahead of John and his men, the stream of explosions would roll backward and hit some areas again. For direct fire support, the 75mm cannons of eight armored amtracs would accompany the two assault companies of the 1/27.

The Japanese had planned for the amtracs, the intelligence officers had to explain. The enemy had buried steel rails in the surf, so some of the LVTs would likely be disabled.⁴³¹ Along with the undersea obstacles, the first troop wave would encounter antitank mines and drums of burning gasoline, as well as "close quarter attack units," or targeted banzai charges.⁴³² To counteract the flames, the first waves would wipe "flash cream" on their faces.

The officers planned each platoon's route across Iwo Jima. The fifty-seven men of Basilone's machine-gun platoon were divided up to support the rifle assault squads.⁴³³

Charlie Company's gunnery sergeant would land in the third infantry wave, which would arrive eight minutes after the armored amtracs.⁴³⁴ Thirty minutes after the first wave, the tanks of Company A of the 5th Tank Battalion would land on Red Beach Two. After explaining the details of C/1/27's assault on Iwo Jima, officers gave instructions on handling POWs, identifying enemy aircraft, and combat first aid. Since the Japanese often yelled "Corpsman!" in order to shoot them, 1st Battalion was told to yell "Tallulah!" if they needed medical attention. Most of the marines would have recognized that the code word with all the ls was the first name of a popular actress, Ms. Tallulah Bankhead.⁴³⁵ Single-dose dispensers of morphine, called a syrette, were also distributed. In between lectures, the seasoned NCOs insisted on the daily cleaning of weapons; not to relieve boredom, but because the salty air corrupted metal at an alarming rate.⁴³⁶

The convoy arrived at Saipan on February 11, where the 3rd Division waited to join the 5th and the 4th divisions. Basilone's Charlie Company disembarked Hansfordand stepped aboard LST 929.⁴³⁷ It was one of the three LSTs carrying the 1/27's assault waves and their amtracs.⁴³⁸ The marines would have considered the discomfort they experienced aboard their "Large Slow Target" as the quintessential experience of being a marine; the swabbies, however, told them these particular ships had just come from launching the army's invasion of Luzon.⁴³⁹ Around them, five hundred ships took their places. The Fifth Amphibious Corps, created for this mission, had been joined.

As always, a few days of inexplicable boredom had to pass. Another full-scale landing exercise on a nearby island had to follow. Basilone ended up spending a lot of time on a ship in Saipan's harbor. On clear days the gleaming silver bodies of giant four-engine B-29 bombers took off from Saipan and Guam and flew north, over his head. John's LST lifted anchor on February 15 and steamed north. The trip to Iwo Jima would last four days.

THE NEWS BROKE ON JANUARY 31 AND IN THE NEXT FEW DAYS BECAME A SENSATION that eventually reached Lieutenant Colonel Austin Shofner on Pavuvu. A unit of General MacArthur's Rangers had gone deep into enemy territory to rescue the Allied prisoners held at a POW camp called Cabanatuan. The story of the daring rescue and of MacArthur's meeting with "ninety friends of Bataan and Corregidor" on February 1 made for newspaper and radio stories powerful enough to stir the heart. Here was redemption--not just for MacArthur, but for America. Shofner did not know what role, if any, his memo had played.^aj He had done what he could. If the world thought the rescue of 531 POWs sounded like a lot, though, to Shifty it must have sounded like the extreme hunger and thirst and punishment inflicted at Cabanatuan had slowly and painfully destroyed a thousand men he had known. Austin was, though, a man who said his prayers and this was a moment to give thanks and praise. The long horrible nightmare was over.

On February 1, he took up his position as the provost marshal again. Later that month, he received a Purple Heart "for injuries received as a result of enemy action at Palau."

EUGENE'S PARENTS HAD COMPLAINED THAT HE DID NOT WRITE AS OFTEN AS HE once had. This had been true in late 1944, but by February 1945 he wrote them more frequently. He usually had something to thank his parents for, like his dad signing him up as a member of the National Rifle Association. Censorship was still strict enough, though, to narrow the range of topics. Complaining about the heat on Pavuvu, which he found to be worse than the heat of Alabama, failed to fill a page. "Jay P. de Leau of Los Angeles is one of my very best friends. We were together on the late campaign, and I might say he is the nearest thing to Sid I've met." Speaking of Sid, Eugene had just received a letter from his friend, who had described all the ways Eugene's parents had been kind to him. Eugene thanked his parents and, in case they had not heard, passed on the news that said Sid "got the first step toward V-12. I hope he isn't headed for an unavoidable mishap like that which befell me. I wrote him today and congratulated him."

Among the many magazines Sledge's mother sent him in February he found a month-old copy of Life. It featured a story on the Battle of Peleliu written and illustrated by a USMC combat artist who had landed on D-day, Tom Lea. Lea offered a vivid and unforgiving look at the brutality. The carrier planes had wiped out "visible targets" three days before the marines arrived, so "the 12,000 Japs on Peleliu" had moved into their bunkers and waited, as Lea observed, "with plugs in their ears and hatred in their hearts."⁴⁴⁰ In a large portrait he entitled "The Last Step," Lea caught a marine in the final seconds of his life, at the moment when he realized he could not move because the last explosion had torn away large parts of his flesh, muscle, and bone. The artist had seen that man in that moment and knew "he never saw a Jap, never fired a shot." Lea quoted Colonel Herman Hanneken, who like Colonel Chesty Puller had fought in many wars in his thirty-one years of duty: "This is the bitterest, fiercest conflict I've ever seen."

At one point in the narrative, the author asked, "How much can a human being endure?" Eugene sent the clipping of Lea's article home to be saved. The question posed by the author was one he was struggling to answer himself.

THE NINETEENTH OF FEBRUARY DAWNED CLEAR AND WARM, TOO BREEZY TO BE hot. John Basilone and his men went through their routine and their amtrac dropped off the tongue of the LST about ten thousand yards from shore. The panorama of violence and power stormed above them, around them, ahead of them, magnificently. They churned slowly to four thousand yards from shore. The island's volcano rose gradually on the left. The shelling stopped at eight a.m. A wave of bombers made a run on the island, followed quickly by dozens and dozens of carrier planes, which swarmed over Iwo Jima for twenty minutes. At eight twenty-five, the planes disappeared and the navy's ship bombardment resumed. Five minutes later, the first wave of amtracs uncoiled from its circle, moved into line abreast, and crossed the line of departure. The second wave followed. Then the third caught John's attention. Then his own wave straightened out and motored toward shore about three hundred yards behind the wave in front.

The amtracs churned through the line of battlewagons, close enough to feel a heat flash each time a salvo crashed forth, the guns firing faster and faster in the final minutes until it stopped just before nine a.m. The carrier planes made another pass, sweeping up from the south past the volcano at 150 knots, flying low and strafing the ground, putting on a show. An amber parachute flare burst over the beach. The first wave had landed. John's amtrac was a few hundred yards from shore, Futatsu Rock just off to his left.

His LVT crawled out of the water at 0912. Coming down the back ramp, he would have noticed that most of the LVT (A)s, the first wave, were milling around near the water's edge; they were supposed to have gone inland to engage targets with their 75mm guns. Empty amtracs were grinding back toward the ships. John felt his feet sinking into the black sand. Carrying his carbine, he slogged to the foot of the black dune, its crest fifteen to twenty feet above his head. There were no ladders in sight. It took both hands digging and both legs pumping furiously to gain the top of the height, as the loose black sand offered little purchase. A fair number of men lay at or near the crest.⁴⁴¹ As his head popped over the edge, he looked across an open swath of beach to another, smaller terrace of black sand. Some marines had crossed to the next terrace; some were making their way between enemy mortar explosions, but about 70 percent had not. The expanse of black beach offered no cover from the enemy mortar shells.

They were also confused. Baker Company had landed on Charlie's beach. Officers and NCOs of both companies were shouting and struggling mightily to get their platoons organized while huge navy shells shrieked overhead. Japanese mortars exploded on the open ground. There were wounded men. On the next terrace above him, he would have just discerned the impatient staccato of machine guns firing.

As gunnery sergeant of Charlie Company, John's job was to make sure his men got organized properly into squads and fire teams at their rendezvous area. The riflemen needed supporting arms. Machine gunners needed ammo carriers. They all expected to fight next to men they knew and trusted. John needed to help get the fire teams organized and moving forward. He would have tried.

The intensity of the enemy mortars exploding on Red Beach Two dramatically increased at nine thirty-five a.m.⁴⁴² Every marine started digging a hole. With every handful of ash scooped out, another slid back in. There was no other cover. The noise made it impossible to hear a shout from a few feet away. The officers of Charlie Company, like John, could see that a crisis had come.⁴⁴³ John shouted, "Come on, you guys, we gotta get these guns off the beach!"⁴⁴⁴ He stood up, signaled the men near him to "follow me" and started his legs churning forward.⁴⁴⁵ A few marines followed. Picking his way through the men lying in the black sand, he crossed to the next terrace. Another stretch of open black sand lay ahead. The marines there were ducking under enemy machine-gun fire. John could tell he had joined the men of the first wave because they wore a heavy white cream on their faces to prevent being burned by gasoline fires. The flash cream gave them a ghoulish appearance. The fury of mortars made yelling at the men pointless. John got up and ran across the terrace to the next lip. A machine-gun team lay there.

Basilone thumped the gunner's helmet to get his attention, then pointed at the aperture of a blockhouse.⁴⁴⁶ The marine turned to him. It was Chuck Tatum, the young man from Baker Company he had met a year ago on his first day back. Tatum was unsure. John had him look right down his arm and that did it. The snout of a large-caliber cannon emerged from a large concrete blockhouse in the face of a small ridge. The cannon was firing at the beach to their right. Into his ear, John yelled, "Get into action on that target!" Tatum slapped down the tripod and his assistant put the pintle into the slot. They loaded it; Tatum cocked it and pulled the trigger. Nothing. Opening the breach, the young marine saw it was clogged with black sand. Tatum rolled a bit and left his assistant to get the cleaning gear from his pack. He began cleaning the firing mechanism with a toothbrush. Basilone waited. Tatum snapped the cover shut, pulled the bolt and started firing. John took one look at where the tracers were hitting and realized the angle was bad. The firing port faced to their right. He signaled Tatum to shift to his right. Tatum and his buddy picked up the gun and moved about thirty yards along the terrace.

When they opened fire, their bursts found the mark. Pinned down, the Japanese inside quit firing. John had already spied the next move. He sent Pegg, a demolitions expert, forward. Moving alongside Tatum's bullets, Pegg got near the pillbox. Basilone ran over and whacked Tatum's helmet. The machine gun stopped firing. Pegg threw the satchel full of C-2 explosives into the aperture and ran like hell. Everybody ducked. After it exploded, it was the flamethrower's turn. Tatum fired a few rounds to cover his approach. The flamethrower stuck the barrel into the mouth of the pillbox and gave it a couple of long squirts.

John handed Tatum his carbine, unlocked the Browning from its tripod, grabbed the bail with his left hand and the handle over the trigger with his right, and sprang forward. Gaining the ridge, he fired at the soldiers who were escaping out the back of the burning pillbox. Holding the machine gun at his hip, he fired full trigger at eight or nine Japanese, most of whom were covered in burning napalm. It was a textbook approach. Tatum, his assistant gunner, and other riflemen joined him. They fired at the bodies. Basilone exchanged the machine gun for his carbine and waved them to follow.⁴⁴⁷

They left the black ash behind and moved into a nightmarish landscape. The stunted trees and bushes had been burnt into blackened stumps. The coarse grass and twisted limbs still burned with napalm. The bombs had cratered the earth and demolished the network of low rock walls that had once divided the area. They paused frequently, looking for pillboxes and timing explosions. John led them through the few hundred yards from the last terrace to the edge of the airfield, Motoyama Number One. A steep embankment off to their right revealed where the main runway ended, its grade well above their heads. They ran around the southern end of the runway. They clambered up the embankment as explosions went off near them, so they jumped into holes. Basilone landed in one with Tatum, the assistant gunner, and two riflemen. They caught their breath. In one direction lay the wrecked planes and equipment with the shell-pocked airstrip just beyond. The volcano, about fifteen hundred yards away in the opposite direction, towered over them. Looking back, they saw the way they had come. No one was there. Tatum looked at his watch. "It's 10:33. We landed at 0900. We have been on Iwo for one hour and thirty minutes."⁴⁴⁸ The barrage grew intense. It sounded like some of it was coming from Suribachi, above them, and some from the other side of the airfield. Then the navy started shelling them--the rolling barrage was rolling back. It was like sitting in the bull's-eye. Two marines began moving back to the beach.

John stopped them. "We took this ground and now it's up to us to hold it! Dig in! I am going back for more men! Stay here come hell or high water!"⁴⁴⁹ With that, he ran back for the beach. Racing down two terraces, John found three tanks struggling to get out of the terraces and minefields. Tanks drew fire like magnets. He had been trained to get behind the tanks and get on the phone and direct them. Instead, he stood up in front of the lead tank, so they could see him. Exposing himself gained the trust of the skittish tankers, who had already lost four of their comrades. John was calm as he walked them to solid ground.⁴⁵⁰ With the tanks headed into the brush, John ran for the beach. Hundreds of marines watched him from the safety of shell holes, aghast.

The enemy barrage on Red Beach Two had become a torrent.⁴⁵¹ Large-caliber artillery shells exploded at regular intervals moving in one direction parallel with the beach. At a certain point, the explosions shifted a hundred feet toward the beach or away from it, and came walking back. Heavy mortars also came swishing down in great numbers. The violence of it all overwhelmed the senses. Every marine knew he had to run forward. The knowledge made his heart pound. Yet to run forward without expecting to get hit was like expecting to run in a rainstorm without getting wet. The soft black sand, which made walking difficult, also sucked their bodies into ground level, and that felt wonderful. The amtracs, now aided by Higgins boats and LCMs, had succeeded in getting the regiment ashore.⁴⁵² The entire regiment was pinned down.^ak The enemy's guns had turned enough landing craft into geysers of water, wood, and metal that landing operations had been shut down. The numbers of wounded and dead were climbing fast.

John gathered up some more men and set off for the airfield, running from shell hole to shell hole.⁴⁵³ Clearing the last terrace, he happened upon Clinton Watters and some of his squad. John jumped in a shell hole with his buddy. Watters had lost a lot of men just crossing the beach. Some had been hit; others were still endeavoring to heft their machine guns up the terraces. The area in front of them, so quiet on John's first trip, had come alive with small-arms fire.

Watters had been stopped by a couple of Japanese throwing grenades from a trench system ahead. John yelled, "Let's you and I go in. You go that way and I'll go this way. We'll go in."⁴⁵⁴ An explosion caused Watters to duck. John did not wait. By the time Watters caught up to him, John had jumped into the enemy's trench and was shooting them with his carbine. Once they killed the soldiers, Watters heard John yell something about "let's do this . . ." and set off. For the next twenty minutes, every rock seemed to have become a pillbox. Before Watters understood either the target or the plan, John surged forward to go do it. Not every gunnery sergeant would have chosen to lead the attack rather than direct it, but Basilone did not even look back to see if they were following him. Watters chased Basilone. The rest of the squad followed.

As they crossed the plateau of burnt scrub brush and shell holes on the way to the airfield, the artillery fire grew intense. The Japanese were plastering the area to halt the advance. The navy guns were preparing the airfield for the advance of the marines. Carrier planes roared overhead, dropping canisters of napalm. Small-arms fire was coming from every direction. Watters and Basilone and their rump squad got separated.

John still had four NCOs behind him as he approached the end of the runway. They jumped into some foxholes. A mortar round exploded in the hole with the four NCOs. Charlie Company lost more of its leadership.⁴⁵⁵ John stood up to run. Bullets hit him in the right groin, the neck, and just about blew off his left arm completely.⁴⁵⁶ John Basilone died a painful death in the dirt near Motoyama Airfield Number One. In the rain of fire the men nearby could not reach him, nor was it their job to do so. The dead were left for the graves registration unit. The word went out, though. "John got it."⁴⁵⁷ Watters heard those words when he reached the hospital ship a bit later. The sailor who said them did not know Clint or his relationship with Basilone. Everybody knew John.

ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE INTERNATIONAL DATE LINE, LENA BASILONE happened to see a newspaper headline on February 19 as she was cooking in the mess hall. It announced that ten thousand marines had landed on Iwo Jima. Though she had never heard of the island, it startled her and she spilled the pan of hot grease she was holding. The grease burned her badly on her lower leg and foot. She was taken to sick bay.

"I HAVE A LOT OF SYMPATHY FOR THE BOYS ON IWO," EUGENE WROTE HIS PARENTS on February 24, "for I have a pretty clear idea of what they are facing." He did not elaborate. Gene as always did his best to avoid writing anything that might add to their concern, without pretending that he was entirely safe. His difficulty was that the battle of Peleliu had changed him in ways that he was only beginning to understand. The expectation of going into another battle before too long, and the laws of censorship, prevented him from exploring the dominating aspect of his consciousness with the two people he trusted most. On bits of paper that he kept with his pocket Bible, he set down the basic facts of his experience--small markers to help define the wild demons of horror loose within him.

He had seen on Peleliu the bodies of marines carved into grotesque figures by enemy knives. The sight had engendered within him a consuming hatred. He became a marine with pity only for his own kind. "My comrades would fieldstrip their packs . . . and take their gold teeth," E.B. wrote, "but I never saw a Marine commit the kind of barbaric mutilation the Japanese committed if they had access to our dead."⁴⁵⁸ For now, though, his attempts to define morality in combat had to stay inside him.

Sledge's parents, careful readers, would have discerned some of their son's turmoil. A mention of having finally gained back the weight he had lost must have made them wonder what had caused him to drop it. When he wrote of the fun he had playing volleyball, which was all the rage on Pavuvu, he added, "It certainly was fun to get out and play like a bunch of kids again." When his mother told him one of his chums at home was preparing to enlist, Gene cautioned: "Tell Billy, I always thought a lot of him and that he had plenty of sense and if he has [good sense], not to join this outfit." Although some marines got easy jobs stateside, Gene predicted that "it would be just Billy's luck to get into some bulldog outfit like this." His mother must have wondered at his reply, which came even as he requested her to have seven copies printed of a photo of him with Snafu, Burgin, and the other men of the #2 gun squad.

By the middle of February 1945, the signs of an imminent departure for another battle were all there. The new men had had a few months with which to train. Gene found peace in worship. He found meaning in poetry, particularly the wrenching nihilism of the English poets who had survived the trenches of World War I. He found joy in classical music, although there was very little of it on Pavuvu and for good reason. Professional musicians had come to Pavuvu a few weeks after the division's return from Peleliu and attempted to put on a concert down at the steel pier. The marines had booed the musicians off the stage.⁴⁵⁹ A USO show came to Pavuvu soon after and wowed a packed house with pop songs and bawdy humor. Eugene Sledge knew he was different from the average "Leatherneck." When he needed to get away, he read his Muzzleloader magazines and admired the photos of his family, his home, and his pets.

A letter from Sid Phillips could always cheer Eugene up. In late February, Sid wrote to share good news. He had gotten through the first part of the course, at Lejeune. Eugene let his parents know that Sid "is going to get a furlough and then going to the U. of North Carolina. I sure hope he makes out alright. He will be out to the house when he gets his furlough. I really appreciate the swell way you and pop treated him on his other furlough." Gene's conversation with his parents about his future plans led him to write the polytechnic institute in northern Alabama, for a list of its course offerings, and to ask his parents what they thought of a major in forestry as a start to his career.

WITH ORDERS TO REPORT TO THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL Hill in his pocket, Sid Phillips went home to Mobile for ten days feeling like he was the king of the world. He borrowed Dr. Sledge's extra car again and drove directly to the Merchant's Bank, downtown, "to see if that gorgeous teller was still there and not married. She was there with no ring on her finger," so he came up with a pretense to go speak with her. He introduced himself. "Oh yes," she said, "I remember." They spoke for a bit and made a date. Sid came back to the bank a few minutes before closing "and spent the time talking to the old bank guard in his fancy uniform at the door telling him war stories, some of which might have been true. Then out the door came Mary Victoria Houston, dressed in a navy blue polka dot dress and high heels with her brown curly hair bouncing." The sight of her made his head spin. They walked across the street and up the block before he realized he had no idea where he had parked the car. Panic set in. Sid mumbled his way through a fib about having moved it so many times that day and needing to look for it. Mary "cooed not to worry, that she knew where I would park and we went to the parking lot by the old jail and there the car was. When I asked her how she knew, she replied that her family always parked there when they came to town." The rest of his furlough passed quickly.