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

positions. There were thirty or forty of them, and they were less than a hundred feet off the ground. But they didn’t even slow down or take a second look at us. They were after our ships out in the Sealark Channel.
    We stopped digging in long enough to watch the fireworks. We’d been trained to hit the deck when enemy planes showed up, but I could see hundreds of Marines up and down the beach just standing there gawking at the planes like they were watching a damn ball game. You’d have thought they were in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium, for Pete’s sake. If any of those Jap Zeros had decided to make a few strafing runs along the shoreline, it could’ve been one helluva slaughter.
    Fortunately, the Nip pilots ignored us completely. They didn’t even do much damage to our ships in that first raid. Not a single one of our ships was sunk in that raid, and only one destroyer was damaged. But, of course, from our vantage point we couldn’t see anything that was going on in the channel. All we saw was the Jap planes flying over.
    The biggest problem for us, though, wouldn’t come clear until later. It was that the raid kept a lot of our supplies from getting ashore where we could get to them. Many of the supply ships quitunloading and got under way. They didn’t want to be stationary targets for the Jap bombers, and this interrupted the whole process.
    There were tons of stuff already piled up along the beach, but we didn’t know where it was or what it was or which part was ours. Even if we had, we didn’t have enough manpower to go out and haul it in—not when we needed to work on our defenses at the same time.
    That night, I talked with Lieutenant Adams and a few of the other NCOs about what we were going to do the next day. We still didn’t have any chow, so we exercised our jaws by talking.
    “Where do we go from here?” I asked the lieutenant. “Are we just gonna sit tight and wait for the Nips to come at us or what?”
    He shrugged. “Just set up your line and make sure it’s solid for tonight. Then we’ll talk again in the morning. Captain Patterson’s probably waiting to hear from battalion, and battalion’s waiting to hear from Colonel Hunt at regiment. Nobody expected the Japs to pull a disappearing act like this. We’ll probably send out some patrols tomorrow, but my guess is we won’t do much till after the First Marines take the airfield.”
    The division’s first major objective was to grab the airfield that the Japs had been building—but hadn’t had time to finish—near the north coast of Guadalcanal. We didn’t know it at the time, but that always turned out to be the First Marine Division’s first objective on every Jap-held island we hit.
    Those Jap airfields worried General “Dugout Doug” MacArthur a lot. He couldn’t rest easy at his fancy headquarters in Australia until we converted them to American airfields.
    “So should I plan on taking a patrol out tomorrow?” I asked.
    “Just sit tight, Mac, and tell your guys to stay on their toes,” the lieutenant said. “If I hear anything, I’ll let you know.”
    I want to make it clear right now that Lieutenant Adams was a terrific officer and an all-around good guy. He wasn’t the kind of officer to hide out in a command post forty or fifty yards to the rear. He stayed right up there on the front line with the rest of us and even did some of the digging.
    He’d picked up that “Scoop” nickname—which became his code name, too—because he’d studied journalism in college and wanted to be a newspaper reporter. There was a good reason that all our officers had code names. If the troops had called them by their rank or used the word “sir” in conversation during combat, it would’ve been like pasting a big bull’s-eye on their backs if the Japs overheard.
    Anyway, I’ve never known an officer who was closer to his men than Lieutenant Adams. He was from a small town named Beacon in upstate New York, and he wasn’t