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  VOICES

  OF THE

  PACIFIC

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group, visit penguin.com.

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  Copyright © 2013 by Adam Makos and Marcus Brotherton

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors’ rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY CALIBER and its logo are registered trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Makos, Adam.

  Voices of the Pacific : untold stories from the Marine heroes of

  World War II / by Adam Makos ; with Marcus Brotherton.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-62219-3

  1. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—Pacific Area. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Personal narratives, American. 3. United States. Marine Corps—History—World War, 1939–1945. 4. Marines—United States—Biography. I. Brotherton, Marcus, author. II. Title.

  D767.9.M35 2013

  940.54’59730922—dc23

  2012046253

  FIRST EDITION: April 2013

  Jacket design and interior maps by Bryan Makos of Valor Studios

  Jacket photos (front): soldiers: USMC; tropical tree background: Bryan Makos; WWII

  Marine uniform: Adam Makos; (back): Eugene Sledge: courtesy of Eugene Sledge;

  Robert Leckie: courtesy of Vera Leckie; John Basilone: courtesy of Richard Greer

  Book design by Tiffany Estreicher

  Title page photo courtesy of the United States Marine Corps

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the author nor the publisher is responsible for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON

  Dedicated to the American and Allied servicemen

  and -women whose voices were forever silenced while

  fighting for freedom in the Pacific.

  CONTENTS

  Faces Behind the Voices

  Introduction

  1. We’re in It Now

  2. Eyeball to Eyeball

  3. The Test of Wills

  4. Rest and Respite

  5. The Green Inferno

  6. Misery

  7. The Hellhole

  8. New Islands, New Blood

  9. Here We Go Again

  10. Black Smoke, White Sand

  11. The Days of Heat and Fury

  12. Assault Across the Bay

  13. Into the Hills of Hell

  14. Back to the World

  15. Island X

  16. The Last Island

  17. The Land of Mud and Death

  18. The Wasteland

  19. The Last Mile

  20. Coming Home

  21. The Lives We Lived

  22. The Last Words

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  Meet the survivors.

  The World War II veterans of this book endured unspeakable horrors, came home to America, and more than sixty-seven years later are still alive today. These men—Marines who fought in the Pacific—are national treasures.

  This book could not be written ten years from now. Not five. Maybe not even two. All the book’s contributors are in their golden years. Some are eighty-eight years old, others ninety. Richard Greer, our oldest contributor, is ninety-five. But the men shared their stories as if World War II happened yesterday.

  In the following pages, these veterans will take you back in time. You’ll experience the shock they felt as boys when Pearl Harbor was bombed. You’ll feel the jolt of boot camp as civility is thrown out the window to turn boys into men. You’ll sail with them to the island of Guadalcanal for their harrowing first battles as Marines as they square off against a seasoned and vicious foe. The journey does not stop there. They’ll take you to Australia for a raucous R&R, then back to the sound of gunfire, to the rain forests of Cape Gloucester, the coral ridges of Peleliu, the black sands of Iwo Jima, and the mud of Okinawa. In the end, they’ll bring you home, as they once returned, triumphant, joyous, yet tormented by the loss of so many friends.

  Today these men are fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers in our communities, our neighbors, the guy at the grocery store, the man in church. Yet what they experienced was so graphic, so horrible, it seems astounding that they are among us. And normal. And so humble.

  Many books exist about the Pacific War. What sets this book apart is its oral-history style. In this type of book, the author presents the “voices,” then steps back into the shadows. This is a conversation between you—the reader—and the men. Imagine for a moment it’s late at night and you’ve walked into the kitchen for a drink and you find your father or grandfather and his old war buddies around the kitchen table. They’re swapping stories. You listen and what you hear you’ll never forget. That is this book.

  After Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and Gary Goetzman produced their award-winning HBO miniseries, Band of Brothers, viewers wanted to know about the battles that took place on the other side of the world. This led to the production of the 2010 miniseries The Pacific.

  The Pacific brought to life the names, places, and battles of the legendary 1st Marine Division. This unit fought in the first American offensives against Japan and was still in the theater of war when the shells stopped flying. The HBO series followed three principal veterans, the quirky Robert Leckie, the sensitive Eugene Sledge, and the larger-than-life John Basilone. These men deserved the spotlight they received. Basilone wore the Medal of Honor for good reason, and after the war, Leckie and Sledge documented their experiences in epic books for the world’s education. Each appears as a character in Voices of the Pacific, but not as “voices,” simply because none of the three are now living.

  The power of this book comes from its freshness. We swing the spotlight over to living heroes who served alongside these icons. The “new voices” in this book are veterans with their own breed of heroics. Some are hometown heroes. Some, like Sid Phillips, R. V. Burgin, and Chuck Tatum are already known by their books or from the silver screen. And many of the men in this book are speaking up for the first time. A reader need not have seen The Pacific to appreciate Voices of the Pacific. The heroism in these pages stands alone.

  For many years now I’ve worked closely with the Marines whose stories follow. I met Chuck Tatum a decade ago and edited his book Red Blood, Black Sand for him. I also had the privilege of working with Sid Phillips, on his lighthearted memoir, You’ll Be Sor-ree!. Sid had more stories in him—dark, violent stories he did not put in his own book. I asked him why he was hesitant, and he said he didn’t want his grandkids reading about the raw, rotten, savage side of World War II. So instead he focused on the humor and camaraderie that he found amid the horror.

  There’s a time and place for everything, and this book is about last words from living men. The veterans are not get
ting any younger. None of us are. So in this book, the gloves come off—for Sid Phillips and all our contributors. They agreed to participate because we made them a promise: In this book, you can tell it as it was.

  What follows is not a sanitized version of the war. It’s the last survivors talking to you, digging deep and pulling out painful memories, gut-busting humor, and rousing accounts of American bravery, sacrifice, and old-fashioned goodness. Here they give us one last tale, one last time.

  So where did we find the men who loaned us their voices? Our recruiting efforts were like a snowball. One veteran agreed to participate then told us where to find his buddy, then his buddy told us how to find his buddy. Before we knew it, we had the fifteen heroes whose voices you will hear.

  Time was of the essence, so I enlisted the help of journalist Marcus Brotherton, who had profiled the men of Easy Company for his bestselling oral history project, We Who Are Alive & Remain. Together we did countless hours of interviews, editing, and shuffling the parts of the book together like a jigsaw puzzle.

  We got a little carried away. We interviewed World War II Marine pilots of Wildcat and Corsair fighters who had roamed the skies above the ground-pounders. We talked with Katharine Phillips-Singer, whom you may remember as the Southern lady who stole the show in Ken Burns’s documentary The War. Katharine shared her colorful memories of the World War II home front. But in the end, we ran out of pages. That material is not lost. In fact, it’s available to you on our website, www.valorstudios.com.

  One question puzzled me at the start of this book, but not at the end. How did these men return to the world after what they saw, did, and suffered? How does a man keep his sanity after sleeping in waterlogged foxholes so long his toenails rot away? How does a man tell a joke after having 970 battleship shells dropped around him, each blast sucking the air from his lungs? How does a man keep fighting after seeing his gut-shot buddy be carried away, screaming on a stretcher?

  The answer, we invite you to discover, lies on the pages that follow. I’ll let you come to your own conclusion, but I’ve come to mine: The Marines of this book are an extraordinary breed.

  Adam Makos

  Denver, November 2012

  CHAPTER ONE

  WE’RE IN IT NOW

  Pearl Harbor

  On Sunday, December 7, 1941, the Japanese Navy launched an aerial sneak attack on the American military at Pearl Harbor and across the island of Oahu. On that day, the Japanese killed 2,400 American servicemen and fifty-seven civilians in an act of undeclared war.

  SID PHILLIPS

  December 7, 1941, was a Sunday afternoon, and I didn’t have anything to do. I went by the Albright drugstore in my hometown of Mobile, Alabama, where my friend W. O. Brown was the soda jerk (soda fountain attendant). I was sitting at the counter talking to W.O., and there were about twenty people in the drugstore. This lady burst through the side door and said, “Turn on the radio!” W.O. had a small radio and he turned it on. The news commentator didn’t give any specific information other than we’d been attacked and the casualties were heavy. Evidently he’d been instructed to give only that amount of information and nothing else. We switched from station to station, and they were all talking about the attack on Pearl Harbor. There was no music. Nothing but news. We just sat there and listened, shocked.

  Everyone was puzzled, asking where Pearl Harbor was. I was the only one in the drugstore who knew it was in Hawaii and told everyone this. Pearl Harbor wasn’t a household name then. But my uncle Joe Tucker had been stationed there, and my mother had received letters from him.

  After half an hour, I got on my bicycle and rode on out to my house on Monterrey Place. Everyone had heard about it by then. The news had traveled through the neighborhoods.

  I went to enlist the day after Pearl Harbor. W.O. and I thought we’d be the early birds and get there before a crowd assembled. Our initial plan was to join the Navy. We got to the Federal Building about eight in the morning, and boy—the line for the Navy recruiting office was at least three hundred yards long.

  I had to go to work, and W.O. needed to go to school, so we walked to the head of the line to see what was going on. I was seventeen but had graduated high school and landed a good job down at the U.S. Engineers office in downtown Mobile. My job was to carry maps over to the Federal Building, about two city blocks away, where the maps were duplicated and made into blueprints. It paid $90 a month, which was far more than I ever made in the Marine Corps (when I joined, I made only $21 a month in the Marines).

  A Marine recruiter came up and started talking to me and W.O.

  “Do you boys want to kill Japs?” he said.*

  “Yeah, that’s the idea,” we said. “But we’re going to join the Navy.”

  “Nah,” he said, “you don’t want to do that. You can’t get into the Navy if your parents are married. And anyway, all you’ll do in the Navy is swab decks. But I guarantee that if you join the Marine Corps, we’ll put you eyeball to eyeball with the Japs.”

  There wasn’t any line at his office. So that’s the big reason why we joined the Marines—because the damn line for the Navy was too long. We were so stupid. We didn’t know anything about the Marine Corps other than what was on the recruiter’s posters. Years later, W.O. and I compared notes and we figured that just about everything that Marine recruiter told us was a lie—except meeting the Japs eyeball to eyeball.

  What was our predominant motivation for enlisting? It was anger. Even more than duty, I’d say. The only information we had was that it was a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. No warning at all. So the American people were really angry. It’s something that almost can’t be put into words—how infuriated we were as a country.

  JIM YOUNG

  On Monday morning, December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked, I was at work at the shoe factory in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania. I was twenty years old. I shut down my machine. The boss said, “What the hell are you doing?” and I said, “I’m sorry, but I’m leaving to join up.” It was then that I heard other machines being shut down and guys saying, “We’re going, too.”

  I hitchhiked to Philadelphia and arrived at 1 P.M. at the recruiting offices. The sidewalks were lined up for blocks with guys wanting to enlist. I had decided to go in the Navy. After waiting in line for hours I finally got in the naval office, only to be turned down because some of my teeth needed to be filled. I had some cavities. When the war broke out, the military outfits had certain codes; you had to be in this and that shape. The war was so new they hadn’t had time to lower their standards.

  Across from the naval office was the U.S. Marines office. As I started to walk away, some guy in the Marine line said, “Hey, Mac, what’s the matter?” I told him the Navy had turned me down. “Why don’t you try the Marines?” he said. I told him the office would be closed by the time I went out and got in the Marine line. He told me to just keep talking to him and keep moving with the line and that no one would even notice. Then when we got to the door we would just pop in. Well, it worked, and I became a U.S. Marine! They never even said anything about my teeth. I was told I could leave the next day or wait until after Christmas. I chose the latter so I could say my good-byes to my mother and friends.

  My mother was sad to see me go. She was my role model. I worked for her in her little mom-and-pop store—groceries, fruit, and produce. I peddled the fruit to other towns for her. My stepfather was a state policeman and he wasn’t a good guy. He was very mean to my brother Phillip and me. I was kinda glad to be leaving.

  ROY GERLACH

  My parents were both Mennonites, pacifists, and didn’t approve of war. We lived on a farm in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and I had the choice of staying out of the service two ways, either by being a conscientious objector because of my parents’ religion, or by getting an agricultural deferment for working on a farm. But I didn’t quite agree with my folks about being pacifists. I can’t say I was right or not about it. I was twenty-one years old and it was my decisi
on.

  I went from work to Lancaster, and there was a big long line to join the Army. I didn’t have time for that. I found another long line, and that was to join the Navy. I didn’t have time for that neither. So I went down the hall and found the Marine Corps office. I went in there.

  “What do I have to do to become a Marine?” I asked.

  “Can you hear, talk, and see?” the sergeant said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Okay, you’re in.”

  So I became a Marine because they had the shortest line.

  They had a group leaving the 29th of December. So I thought, “Good, that will give me Christmas at home.” I didn’t tell my parents I had signed up until I was set to go.

  Parris Island Boot Camp, December 31, 1941

  SID PHILLIPS

  We were so stupid, we’d never heard of Parris Island. I think that recruiting sergeant told us we’d have a short training program at a beautiful resort on the beach in South Carolina. When we arrived at the Marine Corps Recruiting Station at Parris Island, we soon realized it wasn’t even an island. There’s a causeway that connects it to the mainland. It’s just a name—Parris Island. That boot camp was rugged. Before Pearl Harbor, it lasted twelve weeks. But after Pearl Harbor they shortened it to just six weeks. Everything was intensified and sped up. It was wintertime when we arrived, December 31, 1941. And it was cold.

  As you arrived, there with civilian clothes and long hair, all the guys who were already there would holler, “You’ll be sorry!” We were rapidly sorry within the first few hours that we were there. They had that pegged just right.

  JIM YOUNG

  A big Marine sergeant started yelling at us to line up so he could take roll call. When he finally called “James F. Young!” no one said a word, not even me. One of the guys I’d met said, “Didn’t you tell me that was your name?” I finally yelled, “Here, Sir!” The sergeant said, “Boy, we got us a real dumb ass here! Don’t even know his own name.” I was very embarrassed. My stepfather had always made me use his last name, which was Wolfe. No one had ever called me anything different, so my mind went blank when the sergeant called “James Young.” Anyway, it was my first goof in the Marines and I hoped it was the last.