Battleground Pacific Read online

  “Close to the Flame” Sterling Mace on Peleliu, 1944. (Courtesy Anthony Cioffi.)

  For Freddie Mack Allen

  and

  Dorothy Edna Mace

  CONTENTS

  Frontispiece

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Map of Pavuvu Island

  Map of Peleliu Island

  Map of Okinawa Shima

  Map of K Company’s forward position on Okinawa

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1. Sailing the South Ozone Sea

  2. A Bunch of Cannibals

  3. Hellzapoppin’

  4. Run!

  5. A Blast Furnace in Your Soul

  6. And All the Monkeys Aren’t in the Zoo

  7. The Real Pacific War

  8. The Five Bitches

  9. A Constellation of Ghosts

  10. True Confessions

  11. Hope, Like Death

  12. Whatever Happened to Junior Hudson?

  Epilogue

  Appendix A

  Photographs

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTHING CAN SURVIVE IN A VACUUM. Thanks to the countless individuals who aided us in writing this book—from its inception through the long hours of research to its life online, where hundreds of followers showed great interest and continued with their enthusiastic encouragement—we not only survived; we also thrived.

  Matthew Austin, for proofreading early chapters: Offering suggestions from an outsider’s point of view, you became an insider. Jody E. Powell, my daughter and my computer pro. Skip Mace, my son and golfing buddy. Stephanie, Ethan, and Penny-Lane Allen, for inspiration beyond measure. Jan Snure, Darla Bowen (you know why), Brian Leyden, and his mother, Marie Leyden, for helping us keep the real Billy Leyden’s memory alive, along with the memories of thousands of riflemen who no longer have a voice. The Marietta, Georgia, Support Group. Lois Sellers and her five daughters. Patty Everett, from Leatherneck magazine—finding that photo was pure magic. James Poland—for scannin all our photos. Cheryl Rice and clan. Tommy Colonna. Dorothea Ciofi. Tray Mangum, for making me aware of a certain book (that will remain nameless—but it was valuable, outside of this writing). Harry Raymond Mace, Harriet Mace, and Mickey. Dorothy McCarthy, our missing link to the life of Larry Mahan. Cam Finley, George M. Barrows Sr., and the marvelous Cynthia St. Claire, for all of her time, photos, and care, in giving Peleliu a new life, all these years later. Chuck Bell, for having the confidence that I could actually write something of note. Carlos, Jorge, Randy, and Reese. Alfonso Zepeda. Wally Dees. Hiroki Nakazato, for the Japanese translations (I probably didn’t get it right back then, and I probably didn’t get it right now). Seth Peridon, from the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. Keith Davis, for all your effort. Anthony Ciofi, for the great drawings. David Siltanaki and Nick Villarreal for your support on Facebook. In fact, the whole Facebook crowd: There are too many to name, but you know you’ve been great pals. Also, all the families, friends, spouses, and old marines themselves who were kind enough to let us use their photos for this book. Jerry Waldrop. Harry Bender and the rest of K/3/5 who are still living. Not to mention the guys from my platoon: Your names and what you looked like are forever etched in my mind.

  Then there is Jim Hornfischer, our agent, for always pushing for bigger and better things. We are very fortunate to have you in our corner. Thank you for tapping into what we were putting out.

  Marc Resnick, our editor at St. Martin’s Press: Your confidence in our work was invaluable to the process as a whole. Despite all the hard work, you still managed to make this experience both fun and educating. Your taking a chance on us has been one of the most gratifying experiences of our lives. The rest of the St. Martin’s crew: Sarah Johnson, Katherine Canfield, and India Cooper, our copy editor, for making us look so good in print.

  Last, but not least, Monica, from New Orleans … where are you?

  What we changed

  Was innocence for innocence; we knew not

  The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dreamed

  That any did.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  (The Winter’s Tale, Polixenes at I.ii)

  PROLOGUE

  BEFORE CARL HUBBELL AND MIZ Muggins, before PFC Mahan and Guy Lombardo, before Harry S. dropped a “Little Boy” on 350,000 Japanese, a little girl died in South Ozone Park one day.

  I didn’t know much about that little girl. I knew she was my sister. Dorothy was her name. She had white skin and blond hair and a great stillness hung around her as she lay in her casket at our home in Queens. I was too young to know a whole lot more. After all, I was only four years old.

  It was September 9, 1928.

  My dad was there, I’m sure. Mom, too. Neighbors would arrive at the house to pay their respects to our family—and to view the little dead girl, who would never again be troubled by arms and legs, which she found unusable in her thirteen years of life. Dorothy no longer had to eat with spoons that had been bent inward at the handle, creating a ladle-like instrument, so that tiny paralytic hands could manage the utensils more easily. Those spoons would always remain in my memory, assuredly because I was viewing them at a time when my young mind was making the connection between the normal spoons I was just beginning to master and the ones my parents had to fashion for my sister out of necessity.

  It was infantile paralysis that killed Mom’s firstborn child. Polio to some. The same affliction that later killed a certain wheelchair-bound president—the man who stood up boldly for a grieving and angry nation, one day in late 1941, and with a “righteous might” declared that sneak attacks by little yellow bastards would not go unpunished by the United States of America.

  Crippled presidents, it seems, make big decisions regarding life and death.

  Crippled little girls do not.

  Nobody, neither my mom nor my dad, took me by the hand and led me to see Dorothy for the final time. I led myself; and the truth is, my last look at Dorothy is a thought that also serves as my very first memory of the girl. My first memory of anything at all, in fact … and it was a memory of death.

  So, on September 15, 1944, almost sixteen years to the day after Dorothy passed away, about two dozen other marines and I, packed like matchsticks in our amphibious tractor, found ourselves skimming the Pacific Ocean toward the beach of Peleliu Island, with the rest of the 1st Marine Division—all of us immortal young men, about to become severely mortal, courtesy of the Empire of Japan.

  As we were heading in, for some reason that I will never know, my little Dorothy came to mind—just a flicker like a muzzle flash, a trace memory of something inexplicable—and I said to myself …

  I said to myself something that I’ve told very few people in my life, save for my mom, upon my return from the war …

  You see, it was my mom who explained to my middle sister, Mickey, and me that Dorothy was an angel. Mom called Dorothy an angel, and that was something she really ingrained into the minds of her living children.

  Every weekend Mom would take Mickey and me to Evergreens Cemetery, in Brooklyn, to visit Dorothy’s grave. We would catch the bus to Metropolitan Avenue and then take the trolley car to Bushwick Avenue. Then we’d walk the rest of the way to the cemetery, where we viewed the mound that marked Dorothy’s final resting place. Every weekend, for a long, long time, we did this.

  Now, as a Marine Corps rifleman, I was taking a very different journey, yet toward a place with striking similarities to the boneyard of Dorothy’s eternal youth. Peleliu: The bitterest battle that the Marine Corps faced in World War II became the charnel house for many more youths, many years later.

 
; That singular moment in time, before we hit the beach on Peleliu, ticks off the echoes of my personal past, present, and future into an amalgamation of everything that became life as I know it. It was a defining moment that transcends all the clichéd stories of old men who sit around dreaming of the days when they were young and at peril.

  Understand this: The spearhead of any attack is the rifleman and his rifle.

  My name is Sterling Mace. I was that rifleman.

  1

  SAILING THE SOUTH OZONE SEA

  AT 7:13 A.M. ON THE MORNING of February 2, 1924, Punxsutawney Phil, “Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators, and Weather Prophet Extraordinary,” burrowed out of his dirty little rodent hole and saw his dirty little rodent shadow, signifying that another six weeks of winter was on its way. Later that evening, I came into this world, as my mom gave birth to me in the back of Jake Cohen’s hardware store, at the corner of 135th Place and Rockaway Boulevard, Queens Borough, New York, amid the lead piping, kerosene jars, penny nails, and post hole diggers.

  After I was born, my dad, the tall and dapper Harry Raymond Mace, lost everything in the stock market crash of 1929. Bigwigs were jumping out of Wall Street buildings on “Black Tuesday,” and a fat banker leaped from the top of the Stock Exchange and landed right on my dad’s pushcart, destroying everything we owned.

  Of course, that’s a little joke, but even in the biggest lies there are still the smallest grains of truth.

  In this case, the standing truths are twofold: In those days, unless you were living in the White House, to some extent or another, nobody in America remained unaffected by the Great Depression of the 1930s. Secondly, the real Pacific war did not begin on the beaches of Tarawa, Peleliu, and Iwo Jima—nor did it start with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The real Pacific war began with the dreams and realities, the episodes and ambitions, that beat within the hearts of the young men who would later experience it.

  We youths of the era collectively and individually were molded by the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal ideals, thus finding ourselves well equipped to kill the sons of Nippon and lay low their yellow nation. We didn’t know it then, but the kids of the Great Depression, a deprived generation, were preparing for war—and we were becoming damned good at it, even before we laid hands on a weapon.

  For me, the New York of my time was the New York of all time.

  It is a lost New York. Lost to the years, now, but very much a product of its own time, as farmsteads and subway lines spit in the palms of their hands and shook on it as if it still meant something. Wiseguys could be seen standing on the street corners on Saturday afternoons, ogling the girls and shootin’ the shit—and then later that afternoon the same bunch would hitch a truck out to the potato farms, in Suffolk County and Montauk Point, and then back again, each time seeing how far they could make it out.

  So when my family moved out to Queens, before I was born, all of our relatives from Brooklyn laughed and said we were moving out to the country. Yet my dad probably took the electric train to get there!

  We were the overflow of Queens during the Great Depression.

  From our home on 123rd Street, down the back of 128th Street, was “Little Italy,” where the Italians (we called them guineas back then) would throw all sorts of exotic and colorful festivities. They’d have a feast, with food stalls dotting the sidewalks, selling greasy sausages and fat cannolis. Confetti littered the streets. There were loud voices everywhere, and chirping children ran between the legs of their padri and madri.

  Then me and my pals, when we got old enough, we’d swagger through the crowd, browsing for those cute little Italian girls, trying to romance them amid the spinning wheels, bright lights, and games of chance (which I swear were rigged, because those “games” would clean you out quicker than those Italian girls could heist your heart).

  When I returned home for the night, empty-handed and empty-hearted, I would lie in bed, hands propped behind my head, listening to the caterwauling of the Italian opera singers as they cut loose for the last time before they closed down the show. Then the fireworks would go off.

  I could hear the pops, bangs, and whizzes of the pyrotechnics as the reds, yellows, and oranges smeared lightscapes across my bedroom window.

  Even after the war, I lay there, watching the sounds and listening to the sights, as they held another feast, while consciously I tried to equate those sensations to the things I had experienced in the Pacific.

  The fireworks wouldn’t shake me up or anything. I wouldn’t become frightened. Although they were pretty close.

  I was pretty close.

  It was simply a unique time for all of us in Queens, from the skunk cabbage farms in South Ozone to the Aqueduct Racetrack on Rockaway to places people today never heard of, like Cornell Park and Richmond Hill Circle. Queens was popping with civilization, as one million immigrants and natives shared a commonality that not many people do today. Yet as America wore the face of tragedy in the reflection of the stock market crash of 1929, my Queens, too, was no exception. Beneath the tough lessons of meager meals and Home Relief, there was a flipside to our disposition—the mask of comedy, which diametrically opposed the Depression that assailed us: the double-sided Greek mask of classic theater. We had to keep ourselves in clover, despite knowing better. Despite ourselves.

  Then a miracle happened, when I was eleven years old—Christmas morning 1935.

  It didn’t change anything, yet to me it changed everything.

  Mickey and I flew down the stairs that Christmas morning, screeching to a halt in front of the tree out on the porch. The sparkle in our eyes surely eclipsed the glamour of promises that lay beneath the traditional tree.

  For traditionally, under the tree, there might be the same wooden canoe I received the year before, but this year Dad had painted it a different color, so that it looked great again. Or I had a metal dirigible, which got the same treatment a couple of times—painted up, or polished nice to give it a new shine. Rounding out our Christmas bounty, Mom and Dad put an orange, maybe an apple, and a few walnuts in the stockings that hung in front of our false-front fireplace. It didn’t matter what I got for Christmas, though. It didn’t matter if it was something new or a little bit of the old stuff. The happiness my family shared on Christmas had a lot to do with just being together—and also knowing that there were some children, like the kids who lived in the shantytown of Cornell Park, with their dirt roads and swamps, who were probably getting whippings on Christmas morning, just to set their minds right for the coming New Year.

  Besides, we had a good roof over our heads. Our home on Panama (123rd) Street was small but comfortable. Dad had paid $2,300 for it, so that made it ours. It was a three-bedroom bungalow, with my room fairly cramped, being situated on the top floor where the roof pitched down at a slant. Mickey was upstairs also, but her bedroom was larger than mine; she got first dibs because of her age. Mom and Dad took the downstairs bedroom, coming off of the living room; then there was a small dining room and a kitchen. That was it.

  We could have been a lot worse off.

  Dad even had a car, a 1927 Essex, which was great, but we couldn’t afford the antifreeze for it when the winter bit deep enough, so Dad would have to pour water into the radiator as a coolant. Water worked fine, until you parked the car for about three seconds. A case in point: One winter, Dad took a WPA job, building Jacob Riis Park; as he got ready to leave for the day, he went out to the Essex and tried to turn the motor over, only to find the car wouldn’t start because the engine was a solid block of ice. Being the logical guy that Dad was, he built a fire under the motor with some old wood, so that after a while the water thawed and he was able to ride home again.

  Even our clothes, growing up, were strictly the cheap stuff.

  Mickey and I got our clothes from a handout store on 119th Street, where the uniform of the day was always brown corduroy knickers, black shoes, and black stockings. It seemed that everybody w
ore nothing but black in those days. And those shoes? Everyone was given a pair of size D shoes, even if they had size EEE feet. For three years I walked around with sores on my heels, trying to get into those damned lace-ups.

  It was later, when I was in the Marine Corps, that I remembered those shoes, when I saw how happy the rednecks in our platoon were when they received their U.S.-issue boondockers—which, as it turned out, were the first shoes they’d ever owned in their lives.

  It was funny, and we New Yorkers would crack wise at the Rebels; nevertheless, it brought back a certain thankfulness for how lucky some of us were, compared to those who had grown up in the Dust Bowl days of the Great Depression. Yet which one of us could claim we were unaffected by the hard knocks of our era? There wasn’t a single marine who didn’t have at least one drum to beat over the want and worry of the 1930s.

  Even in 1943, as we marines took the train from Camp Lejeune to California, crossing into Georgia, the call of the Depression still knew every one of us by name. The train made frequent stops, and little black children ran up to our open windows and began dancing, performing, for any change that we’d throw out to them. They didn’t know any different; they still smiled and danced, kicking up puffs of dust around their ankles. They were maybe seven or eight years old, dirty from head to toe, and living in dry wooden shacks. I even recall one such “home” being constructed out of the back end of a rusted automobile.

  Those poor children probably didn’t even know what a Christmas morning was.

  Eight years earlier, however—before I had any notion of the Marine Corps, or of death from Japan—happiness abounded in a little corner of New York, when I saw the miracle behind our Christmas tree.

  It was the greatest gift a boy could ask for.

  Somehow (gasp!), some way (it’s the most beautifulest thing I’ve seen in my whole entire life!) … there was a Junior Racer Flexible Flyer behind the tree—a brand-new sled! No, not just any sled, but the Cadillac of sleds! The Flexible Flyer was a work of art that might as well have been crafted by da Vinci, or God, for that matter, as far as I was concerned. The high-polished gleam-sheen of the wooden board was so glossy I could make out the shiny reflection of my huge grin, mirroring off its golden-hued surface. The fiery red runners, at the sides of the board, held their own dimensions of beauty—long and sleek, almost knifelike in their finely tooled curvature.