Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu Read Free

first objective was a low ridge that rose up about a hundredyards inland. We had to hack our way to it through the bushes, but once we got there, it gave us a natural line of defense with a good view of the beach.
    We started digging foxholes as fast as we could while some of the guys took cover in the trees and brush and kept their eyes on the jungle and their rifles at the ready. Other guys hacked at the under-growth with bayonets and machetes, but it took a lot of hacking to make even a small dent in the stuff. I borrowed a shovel from one of the guys keeping watch. We saw nothing, and the only sounds we heard were our own grunts and heavy breathing from all that digging.
    We knew from our maps that Guadalcanal was a pretty damn big island—roughly ninety miles long from east to west and thirty miles wide from north to south. It lies near the southwest end of the Solomon Islands chain, and it had been a British possession until the Japs decided to invade it in the spring of 1942. As it turned out, that was one of the worst mistakes they made in the war. But when we decided to go in and take it back, that came awful close to being just as big a mistake.
    According to our intelligence, which wasn’t exactly famous for its accuracy, the only fortified or inhabited areas of Guadalcanal were along a strip of the north-central coastline. That was where the unfinished Jap airfield that was our first main objective was located.
    There were some small native settlements scattered over the rest of the island, but it was mostly an uninhabited wilderness of impenetrable jungles and rugged mountains. As far as we knew, the nearest enemy troops could be anywhere on it. They might be a two-day hike away, or they might be hiding just a few yards into the undergrowth. It didn’t make you feel very secure to think about it.
    We paused now and then to look at each other, shake our heads, and ask a question that none of us could answer:
    “Where the hell are the Japs?”
    W E DIDN’T GET a bite to eat that first day on Guadalcanal. That was the bad news. If the Japs had been close enough, they could’ve heard guys’ stomachs growling like banshees up and down the line. By late afternoon, we were even running low on water because of the heat.
    We’d been served the traditional “warrior’s meal” of steak and eggs for breakfast that morning aboard ship. But that had been the middle of the night—about 2 AM—and by sundown that evening it was nothing but a distant memory.
    The only casualty in the Fifth Marines that day was when some hungry private tried to stab a hole in a coconut with his bayonet to get at the meat and milk inside and cut his hand.
    I guess that was the good news.
    There was a really bad shortage of food on Guadalcanal, and for reasons I’ll explain later, it lasted long after that first day. We didn’t know it then, but K/3/5 would be fighting on Guadalcanal for over four months, and we stayed hungry most of the time.
    A well-known author named Eric Hammel wrote a book about the Guadalcanal campaign more than forty years after the battle. He called it Guadalcanal: Starvation Island . As far as I’m concerned, he hit the nail right on the head.
    Except for millions of coconuts on thousands of coconut trees, the only edible things I ever saw growing on the island were some stunted pineapples and a tree full of limes. Once in a while I saw aMarine with a stalk of bananas, but I never knew where they came from, and I never actually saw any bananas growing on trees.
    We never got lunch the whole time we were there, and our breakfasts were mostly black coffee and nothing else. Our only real meal was at night, and we wouldn’t have had that during those first few weeks if we hadn’t found several tons of rice the Japs had stored near the airfield and left behind.
    About 12:30 PM that first day—right in the middle of our “lunchless hour”—we saw our first Jap air raid. Their planes flew right over our