Ker-plunk.

As we close in on Memorial Day, I want to tell you about a 19 year old U.S. Marine who was fighting for his life on the night of September 15, 1944 on Peleliu, a 3-mile by 6-mile island 500 miles east of the Philippines. That was the first day of the amphibious assault by the First Marine Division so we could wrest the airport on this coral speck from the Japanese and safeguard General MacArthur's right flank as he took back the Philippines. 

 

The issue was in doubt that first night on Peleliu, and the Marine was in a foxhole not far from the beach as rounds passed by overhead, listening to the land crabs who shared the hole with him scuttle about. Suddenly something plunked into the hole from above in the darkness. 

 

Grenade? The Marine clambered about the bottom of the hole frantically, feeling the ground with his hands for the object so he could pitch it back out. 

 

"I was never so afraid in all my life," this strong, brave man said decades later. It turned out to be a coconut, clipped off an overhead tree by passing bullet.

 

That was one of the few stories that Marine ever told about the grim Pacific War. The Marine was my Dad, who passed away at age 61 in 1986.

The way it was

Today is Veteran's Day, formerly known as Armistice Day. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, they finally stopped the bloodshed in World War One, the War To End All Wars. My grandfather fought in that war.

But the fates were just getting warmed up. World War Two, the Big One, came next.

I rode a tank
Held a general's rank
When the blitzkrieg raged
And the bodies stank

My father fought in that war.

At a place called Peleliu. Never heard of it? Then you're obviously not either a former Marine or the descendant of someone who was there. Because no one else knows a thing about it.

On that island in 1944, the First Marine Division, 15,000 strong, locked itself in a struggle with 13,000 Japanese defenders in a fight to the death. Strategically it was insignificant, but the enemy garrison was wiped out entirely while 5,000 Marines went down. You do the math.

The Marines fought for three months amidst razor-sharp coral hills in places with names like Bloody Nose Ridge and the Valley of Death, in temperatures soaring to 118 degrees. It was hell on earth.

As a young boy, I wanted to hear war stories. My Dad was a likely source, because he had seen the elephant. But he only told funny stories. Like the time he wandered down to the river alone on Peleliu to bathe, naked, with only a towel in his hand. Nineteen year-olds obviously don't always make the best choices. He encountered an enemy platoon in full combat gear.

What happened? As my Dad related it, deadpan, they all got away.

Anyway, he had another story he thought was funny. About the time he was crawling along a trench when he encountered two riflemen and a flamethrower hunkered down trying to deal with an enemy machine gun nest some thirty yards away. The flamethrower didn't want to stick his head up and draw fire so he stuck the nozzle of his weapon over the lip of the trench and, moving it around blindly, asked the other two Marines, "Over here? Is that the direction?"

Those Marines assented that he seemed to have the nozzle pointing about right and he discharged his full load without ever looking. Those heavy flamethrowers only had about an eight-second capacity.

My Dad thought this image of a flamethrower firing blindly, one-handed, was funny. This was the end of the story, and it was always told with a twinkle in his eye.

But I was a persistent young boy. One day I insisted on knowing what happened to the machine gun nest.

"Why, we got it."

I wouldn't let it go. "But how do you know, Dad?"

I remember my Dad's voice tightening and his eyes losing their lustre. His look became distant and detached.

"Well, because we got up and charged them, and they were burning so we shot them."

He never told the story again.

You can't imagine how much I miss my Dad. He was a hale and hearty 60 year-old before he fell ill with lung cancer and died the next year, in 1986. I was only thirty-four. I regret that only one of my three children was ever held in his strong hands.

Ken Burns' The War is coming

A couple of posts ago I published a B&W picture of my Uncle Harry in Colorado as he looked during WWII. My life has been a search for heroes, and he is a hero.

Star on his high school football team, shipboard Marine during WWII in charge of AA fire onboard his light cruiser protecting the flattops, bronze star recipient, Princeton grad, farmer and geologist, father of three lovely daughters and a son, devoted husband, I was very grateful to be afforded the chance to see him again earlier this month in Durango, Colorado. He fought at the first and second Battle of the Philippine Sea (the first one being the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, the second one being the Battle of Leyte Gulf, where the Japanese very nearly pulled off a stunning surprise), the China Sea raids, the Iwo Jima landing, and the First Carrier Air Strikes at Tokyo.

His ship was off Peleliu when my father, who was also a WWII Marine, was fighting in that bloody island battle. Many shipboard Marines were sent ashore as replacements for the heavy casualties incurred onshore, and I have read my uncle's journal entry where he expresses relief upon learning from lightly wounded Marines transferred to his ship from the raging battle that they knew my father and he was unhurt so far.

Jim is alive! is the notation my uncle made about his brother. Those were the days when boys barely out of their teens had such concerns, eh? (My father was nineteen when he served his time in the hell called Peleliu.)

Here is a picture of my father during WWII. You could see these pictures in the Navy Log at the Navy Memorial in DC on Pennsylvania Avenue across from the Archives at Seventh Street. He also fought on Okinawa, and was posted to China immediately after the war to confront the Communists in an attempt to bolster our fatally corrupt ally Chiang Kai-shek.

Ken Burns has produced a film on World War II which singles out the Battle of Peleliu as prime examples of a sanguinary battle that was strategically worthless, the brutality of the war, and how little Americans actually know about World War II. (Peleliu bled the First Marine Division white. It also was the Marines' introduction to the new Japanese strategy of eschewing wasteful banzai charges and making the Americans root them out from their fortified entrenchments one by one, which proved hideously costly at Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.)

If you want to know the ordeal that young Americans went through at Peleliu, read The Devil's Anvil by James Hallas. Your next twenty-miler won't seem so bad.

And yes, I thought my father, who died in 1986 at age 61, was a hero too. Did a family member of yours serve during WWII? Look his or her service record up.

Peleliu. You should know this.

My youngest child graduated from a boarding school in the Northeast on Saturday. I am proud of him for doing so because he has had a rough time. It apparently got a little rocky for him at the end up there at the school but he made it through. Congratulations to him.

Here's an artist's rendering of him done a few years ago. Don't you think he probably is now a handsome young man? (That's my boyhood photo next to his portrait. I always thought we had similar looking eyes and mouths.)

For his graduation, I sent him a card, some money, a few photos of what I have been up to, an old card of a Jet football player (when I was growing up on Staten Island, my parents had season tickets for the Joe Namath-led New York Jets at Shea, hence my affinity for Jets players), a first-day issue stamp of the1st Marine Division and a book by Bill D. Ross called Peleliu: Tragic Triumph.

The book is about the 1st Marine Division's 1944 battle against the Japanese on the island of Peleliu in the Palaus, a chain of islands about 550 miles east of the Philippines. The Army's 81st Division saw combat there as well.

Mostly it was a Marine fight. My Dad was a 19-year old corporal in K35 when he fought the Japanese there. It was awful, fighting in 110 degree heat on sharp coral with the stench of rotting bodies everywhere. The Marines took over 5,000 casualties in a division of around 15,000 men. They annihilated the Japanese garrison of 13,000 troops pretty much to the last man because no mercy was shown by either side in the war in the Pacific. The Japanese refused to surrender and didn't take prisoners themselves as a rule.

Peleliu was the first place where the Japanese eschewed the wasteful tactic of banzai charges and made the Marines come root them out of their fortified caves, one by one. These tactics were later famously applied on Iwo Jima and Okinawa (where my Dad also fought), but they started on Peleliu.

Ross' book's title is based on the fact that the savage fight was unnecessary to the nearly simultaneous reconquest of the Philippines. Bloody Peleliu easily could have been bypassed and left to wither on the vine. I bet you never heard of Peleliu. It was quite a fight.

I was always proud of my Dad. My youngest son never met him because my Dad died three years before my youngest child was born. I hope the book teaches him a little about what kind of special men those World War II combat Marines were.

I haven't seen my youngest son nor spoken with him for quite awhile but I wish him luck. I love you son.