Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu by McEnery Jim

Author:McEnery, Jim [McEnery, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2012-06-05T04:00:00+00:00

THE CRAB AND COCONUT WARS

WHEN WE EMBARKED from Gloucester on May 5, most of us in K/3/5 were pretty sure we were on our way back to Camp Balcombe near Melbourne for another extended stay.

Scuttlebutt to that effect had been circulating for weeks, and we’d convinced ourselves it was the straight scoop. General Rupertus himself had supposedly said so, and a feeling of excitement spread over the ship as New Britain disappeared behind us and we headed into open sea. We were like a bunch of kids on the night before Christmas.

On the deck of the Elmore, some guys gathered around Lieutenant Edward A. “Hillbilly” Jones, the guitar-strumming leader of the company’s machine gun section, and started singing the old Australian folk ballad “Waltzing Matilda.” The tune had been adopted by the First Marine Division as our unofficial theme song when we were stationed at Balcombe back in ’43, and it cheered us up to hear it again.

Lieutenant Jones was from some little burg in Maryland, up near the Pennsylvania state line, and he was one of the best-loved officers in the Corps. He was another one of those so-called Mustangs who worked their way up through the ranks, and the enlisted guys who served with him knew he’d paid his dues on his way to becoming an officer.

Jones had joined the Corps as a private in the mid-1930s and served for six years as a seagoing Marine aboard a Navy ship. He’d won a lieutenant’s commission at Guadalcanal for the fine work he and his gunners did in stopping those Nip banzai charges.

He was especially popular with our southern boys in K/3/5 when he was belting out some twangy country song like “San Antonio Rose” or “Red River Valley.” They were the ones who’d tagged him with the nickname “Hillbilly,” but by now everybody in the company called him that.

Personally, my musical taste ran more to “Sidewalks of New York” or “My Wild Irish Rose,” but I was also a big admirer of Jones. He was a damn good person as well as being a good Marine, and the way he played and sang “Waltzing Matilda” even got me to humming a few bars.

We remembered Melbourne as a peaceful, stable, normal kind of place—one untouched by the gruesome ugliness of war that we lived with every minute at the Cape and the ’Canal. Short of getting back to the States, there was no place else on earth we’d rather go.

If we’re lucky enough to go back to Melbourne, I thought, I may just give Marian Curtis a call when I get there.

I guess I should’ve known I was only kidding myself. We were all destined to be disappointed. Very disappointed.

SOME OF MY SHIPMATES with a keen sense of direction in mid-ocean and no land in sight started to get suspicious after we’d been under way for two or three hours.

“We’re headed almost due east,” one of them said glumly. “We’d have veered south by now if we were going to Melbourne.

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