Read Online Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu by Bill Sloan, Jim McEnery - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Bill Sloan, Jim McEnery
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our lines.
We had to cook the steer in daylight because there was a strict ban on fires at night, and instead of barbecuing it, we cut it up in chunks and boiled it in some twenty-gallon GI cans. The Marines who’d done the killing, skinning, and butchering were surprisingly generous with the meat. I think everybody in K Company got a chunk or two, and we even let some of the guys in I Company have a taste.
To me, no prime filet mignon in a fancy restaurant ever tasted as good.
W ITH FOOD BEING so scarce, a lot of the guys in the Third Battalion, Fifth, started feasting on rumors—and there were some wild ones going around. One story that made the rounds was about a patrol that came in after half a day in the woods and told an intelligence officer they’d found a batch of cosmetics and toilet articles belonging to women being held by the Japs.
The officer immediately got on the phone to division head quartersand asked for permission to organize a rescue mission to free the women.
“A fat lot of good freeing them would do an old fart like you,” division told him. “Forget it and stay where you are.”
But after what took place on the evening of August 12 (D-plus-5), a Marine would’ve had to be totally crazy to go chasing off into the no-man’s-land to the west to check out a rumor.
What happened on that date to a twenty-five-man Marine patrol led by Lieutenant Colonel Frank Goettge also didn’t leave us much time—or stomach—for thinking about food.
Those invisible Japs we’d been looking for behind every bush for the past five days were about to get all too real.
O N THE AFTERNOON of D-plus-5, word reached our regimental headquarters by way of a captured Jap sailor that a group of enemy soldiers was willing to surrender if the Marines would send out some troops to liberate them and guide them back to our lines.
As I understand it, Colonel Goettge’s patrol included quite a few guys in intelligence, and they’d already been planning a reconnaissance mission into the area west of our Lunga Point perimeter, where most of the Japs on the island were allegedly concentrated.
Since Geottge and his guys were going into the same area where these Japs that claimed they wanted to surrender were, the brass told him to try to make contact with them.
I’ve heard that some of our officers—including Geottge himself—fell for this surrender story hook, line, and sinker. Geottge really believed his men were on some kind of humanitarian mission because the Japs were supposed to be starving and some of thembadly injured. Somebody even claimed to have seen a white flag flying above one of the Jap positions.
Anyway, Goettge took along the assistant First Division surgeon, Lieutenant Commander Malcolm Pratt, to help those that were hurt. He also took one of a handful of language officers in the division to serve as a translator.
The patrol started out just as it was getting dark. This was a silly thing to do in itself because they couldn’t see what they were heading into. It was black as pitch out there. Lots of clouds and no moon. All the guys were packed into a single Higgins boat for the short trip along the coast, which was another dumb move. An enemy machine gun or a couple of well-placed grenades could’ve wiped out the whole lot of them before you could bat your eyes.
I guess because they were so convinced the Nips were going to welcome them with open arms, the only weapons the Marines had were rifles and pistols. There wasn’t a single BAR or machine gun among them. They didn’t even take along any grenades.
The Goettge patrol was nothing but one big, terrible series of mistakes. All of us were naive as hell at that point, but as green as some of our officers were, they should’ve known better.
As time went on, we’d learn the hard way in the Pacific that Japs never surrendered. To them, surrender was the worst thing they could imagine, and they’d a whole lot rather die than disgrace their
We had to cook the steer in daylight because there was a strict ban on fires at night, and instead of barbecuing it, we cut it up in chunks and boiled it in some twenty-gallon GI cans. The Marines who’d done the killing, skinning, and butchering were surprisingly generous with the meat. I think everybody in K Company got a chunk or two, and we even let some of the guys in I Company have a taste.
To me, no prime filet mignon in a fancy restaurant ever tasted as good.
W ITH FOOD BEING so scarce, a lot of the guys in the Third Battalion, Fifth, started feasting on rumors—and there were some wild ones going around. One story that made the rounds was about a patrol that came in after half a day in the woods and told an intelligence officer they’d found a batch of cosmetics and toilet articles belonging to women being held by the Japs.
The officer immediately got on the phone to division head quartersand asked for permission to organize a rescue mission to free the women.
“A fat lot of good freeing them would do an old fart like you,” division told him. “Forget it and stay where you are.”
But after what took place on the evening of August 12 (D-plus-5), a Marine would’ve had to be totally crazy to go chasing off into the no-man’s-land to the west to check out a rumor.
What happened on that date to a twenty-five-man Marine patrol led by Lieutenant Colonel Frank Goettge also didn’t leave us much time—or stomach—for thinking about food.
Those invisible Japs we’d been looking for behind every bush for the past five days were about to get all too real.
O N THE AFTERNOON of D-plus-5, word reached our regimental headquarters by way of a captured Jap sailor that a group of enemy soldiers was willing to surrender if the Marines would send out some troops to liberate them and guide them back to our lines.
As I understand it, Colonel Goettge’s patrol included quite a few guys in intelligence, and they’d already been planning a reconnaissance mission into the area west of our Lunga Point perimeter, where most of the Japs on the island were allegedly concentrated.
Since Geottge and his guys were going into the same area where these Japs that claimed they wanted to surrender were, the brass told him to try to make contact with them.
I’ve heard that some of our officers—including Geottge himself—fell for this surrender story hook, line, and sinker. Geottge really believed his men were on some kind of humanitarian mission because the Japs were supposed to be starving and some of thembadly injured. Somebody even claimed to have seen a white flag flying above one of the Jap positions.
Anyway, Goettge took along the assistant First Division surgeon, Lieutenant Commander Malcolm Pratt, to help those that were hurt. He also took one of a handful of language officers in the division to serve as a translator.
The patrol started out just as it was getting dark. This was a silly thing to do in itself because they couldn’t see what they were heading into. It was black as pitch out there. Lots of clouds and no moon. All the guys were packed into a single Higgins boat for the short trip along the coast, which was another dumb move. An enemy machine gun or a couple of well-placed grenades could’ve wiped out the whole lot of them before you could bat your eyes.
I guess because they were so convinced the Nips were going to welcome them with open arms, the only weapons the Marines had were rifles and pistols. There wasn’t a single BAR or machine gun among them. They didn’t even take along any grenades.
The Goettge patrol was nothing but one big, terrible series of mistakes. All of us were naive as hell at that point, but as green as some of our officers were, they should’ve known better.
As time went on, we’d learn the hard way in the Pacific that Japs never surrendered. To them, surrender was the worst thing they could imagine, and they’d a whole lot rather die than disgrace their
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