The Ultimate Battle by Bill Sloan

Author:Bill Sloan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster

PROBABLY NO RIFLE COMPANY in the First Marine Division had been led by a more admired set of commissioned officers during the savage battle for Peleliu than K Company, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines, and no group of enlisted men ever held its officers in higher esteem.

But Peleliu exacted an even heavier toll on K/3/5’s leadership than on its rank-and-file troops. Less than 100 hours before the Marines were withdrawn from combat, First Lieutenant Ed “Hillbilly” Jones, commander of the Third Platoon, had been gunned down by a sniper. Captain Andy “Ack-Ack” Haldane, the company’s beloved CO, had been shot through the head on the next-to-last day of the fighting. Both Jones and Haldane had been with the company since Guadalcanal, and both were Silver Star recipients.

When K/3/5 was pulled off the line at Peleliu after thirty straight days of battle, only two of its commissioned officers remained alive and unwounded—First Lieutenant Thomas “Stumpy” Stanley, the company exec, and Second Lieutenant Charles “Duke” Ellington, commander of the mortar section.

Eight months later, in mid-May 1945, the entire cast of Peleliu officers was gone from K/3/5, except for Stanley, who was nursing a severe case of malaria and only a few days from being evacuated to a hospital.

“We’d lost more lieutenants than I could count, much less remember, during the first six weeks at Okinawa,” said mortar section leader Sergeant R. V. Burgin, “and without badmouthing any of our replacement officers, I’d have to say that their levels of experience and leadership were a cut or two below what we’d had at Peleliu.”

Replacing Ellington in command of the mortar section was Robert “Scotty” McKenzie, a “boot” second lieutenant fresh from an Ivy League school and a total stranger to combat. On the rest-camp island of Pavuvu, as K/3/5 prepared for Okinawa, McKenzie’s loud pronouncements about the havoc he planned to wreak on the Japanese when he met them in battle made Peleliu and Cape Gloucester veterans either cringe with embarrassment for the young shave-tail or laugh in his face.

“The first time one of our guys gets hit, I’m gonna take my Ka-Bar in my teeth and my .45 in my hand and charge those damned Japs!” McKenzie would rail while the veterans smirked and rolled their eyes.

“I was embarrassed for Mac,” said Gene Sledge, “because it was so obvious that he conceived combat as a mixture of football and a Boy Scout campout.”

In early May, McKenzie had learned the truth about combat in one painful lesson, and his reaction had borne no resemblance to his earlier illusions. When he saw his first man killed in action and came under massive artillery fire for the first time, he dug the deepest foxhole that anyone in the company could remember seeing. Long after all his men had finished their own digging, McKenzie was still at it, burrowing like a groundhog as enlisted men threw barb after barb at their lieutenant.

“Ain’t it about time you took your Ka-Bar and .45 and charged them Nips, Mac?” jibed Corporal Snafu Shelton.

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