USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Wenham > Wenham in World War II : war service of Wenham men and women and civilian services of Wenham people > Part 19
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"Without any question, Iwo was the toughest nut the Marine Corps has ever had to crack. The casualties were unbelievably high, a terrible price to pay. As for our part, we probably will never hit a 'hotter' beach. We were lucky. Some LSMs were not as lucky. Everything we put ashore had to be carried or dragged up over the beach. Every truck of the thousands had to be towed up through that coarse black sand. And you just can't have any con- ception of the amount of stuff that has to be put ashore.
"After the second week we were in very little danger. Occasion- ally we might anchor a little too near shore, and they'd pop at us with machine-guns, but we were generally far enough away so that it would have been just luck if they hit a man.
"At first, of course, all our air cover was by carrier-based planes, as the airfields were badly torn up, and also were under enemy artil- lery fire. The day when we first landed a plane up there provided us with a great thrill, even though they were just tiny observation planes. A few days later transport planes began to land, to take over the work that the seaplanes had been doing. Then it was TBFs.
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Next fighters, then, night fighters. As you know even the biggest planes can land there now. The Seabees work fast.
"The Hospital Ships are wonderful, the way they sit out there in the middle of it all, completely unarmed. Sometimes they get hit. They were certainly overworked on this operation. They do move out of the center of things if night air raids are expected.
"The war dogs were mostly Dobermans and German Shepherds. They did a grand job, smelling out the Japs. There were many casualties among the dogs. One day an officer standing about 50 yds. from me, at Regimental Headquarters, some distance behind the front lines, got nailed by a sniper. Immediately, they sent a man with a dog out to find his hole. The dogs were invaluable.
"I wish I could describe to you the caves and fortifications. Everything was underground, all their life, hospitals, machine shops, etc. A cave which had several hundred Japs in it might have a dozen entrances, none anywhere near each other. When the Marines found one such, and blasted it shut, the Japs would simply come out of another one that night. They could live down there almost in- definitely as long as they had water. I think that this lack of water really hastened their defeat. There were stone and concrete block- houses with no doors or windows, just slits for the guns to shoot out of, and walls so thick that no guns on earth could blast them. The tunnels that led to these would have little cleverly concealed entrances many hundreds of yards away. The terrain was ideal for defense. No flat land. No roads. All rock. Camouflage was easy and they sure made the most of it. Every square foot of the island had to be carefully combed. Fire was no good; there's no vegetation to burn. Pillboxes were built with turns in them so that you could fire right into them and not hit anything. In such places flame-throwers are no good. They won't go around corners. These places just had to be sealed up, one by one. What a job !
"In contrast to other invasions, the Navy was close to the fight- ing the whole time, because the fighting couldn't move inland. When we laid off shore we could see everything that went on, snipers, machine-guns, flame-throwers, tanks, demolition squads, etc. For 10 days, our ships were firing over us all the time. And our planes would come whizzing in over our heads, spitting machine-gun fire, dropping their bombs, or shooting their rockets (there is a really terrifying sound). We saw the whole show. Sometimes it was like watching a movie. The chief handicap the Marines were up against was that they couldn't see the enemy, he was so cleverly concealed,
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and you can't shoot at what you can't see. It was a long operation and we were right in it for 53 weeks. For the Marines, it was a horribly costly operation. My hat is off to them. No one but the Marines could have done it. And the LSMs are proud that they helped make it possible."
ANZIO
On January 22, 1945, the Rome edition of Stars & Stripes took note of the first anniversary of the Anzio invasion by printing a short article about it. This said in part, "Anzio became one of the most hellish campaigns in military history as Field Marshal Albert Von Kesselring pocketed the allies and then poured shellfire into the beachhead for four months." Certainly no one who took part in the invasion would contradict that statement. He might add that the Germans, whose Luftwaffe was a very live ghost indeed, bombed us the clock around, destroyed our ammo, gasoline and ration dumps, inadvertently and, I think, unintentionally bombed our hospitals killing patients, doctors, nurses and Red Cross girls. For 16 miser- able weeks the shelling and bombing went on and there just wasn't anything we could do about it.
The purpose of the invasion was obvious. Anzio and Nettuno are two little towns on the west coast of Italy between Naples and Rome. Fifth Army was bogged down at Cassino and this was to be an end run, predicated on the assumption that Kesselring would pull some troops away from the Cassino front and relieve the pressure there. We were to cut routes 6 and 7 and shut off his transport and his supplies. Fifth Army was then to advance up the coast and join forces with the beachhead.
In January the water table in the Pontine Marshes is just a few inches below ground level. You couldn't dig fox holes or gun em- placements or latrines or anything else because you immediately struck water. Somebody should have known about that, just as somebody should have known that the Mussolini Canal was too wide and too deep for tanks to cross and that German artillery in the hills around Velletri could prevent us from bridging it.
An officer whose rank and position were such as to put him in very close touch with the top brass, told me semi-officially, that if we took our assigned objectives we would still be within artillery range of the enemy and, in fact, would be subjected to cross fire. It was his opinion that our chances of staying on the beachhead were about one
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in five. Who he was doesn't matter. What does matter is that he was perilously close to correct and that he is one of more than 6000 Americans who lost their lives in this operation.
D-Day dawned clear and chilly. Long before sun-up the Rangers landed and captured the air field with little or no opposition. They were followed by assault troops of the 3rd and 45th Divisions and the British 10th Corps and still there was no opposition worth men- tioning. Jerry bombers paid frequent and unpleasant respects to our LSTs and Liberty ships in the bay. But ashore there was an unwholesome quiet that gave you the creepy feeling that you were walking into a trap. Where was everybody ?
The invasion fleet had been assembling for weeks in Naples harbor. German reconnaissance planes had had many a good look at it. They knew perfectly well that we were setting the stage for an end run. All those transports and cargo ships and all that Navy couldn't mean anything else. Yet we walked ashore almost as if it was a maneuver. Both towns were deserted, not a civilian in sight, no enemy troops, almost no enemy dead; it was uncanny and we didn't like it. We waited apprehensively for something unusually awful to happen. This wasn't like North Africa, Sicily or Salerno and we didn't un- derstand it. Long afterwards we found out that the Germans, who, of course, knew exactly what we were up to, assumed that we would make a thorough job of it and strike much further up the coast. They were waiting for us in strength at Leghorn. Anzio and Nettuno, at the moment of the invasion, were almost undefended.
Everyone knows now that Von Kesselring didn't do what he was supposed to. He brought troops down from North Italy, from south- ern France, from Yugoslavia, from everywhere except the Cassino front. In no time at all he had more troops opposing us than we had on the beachhead. With numerical superiority and every advantage of terrain in enemy hands you don't get very far-and we didn't get anywhere. From the beginning to the end it was a case of put- ting up a defense that would prevent us from being pushed into the sea.
The beachhead never exceeded fourteen miles by seven. That may seem like quite a lot of acreage for some 90,000 men. It might be adequate if the area was hilly and rich in natural cover but the beachhead was completely flat. Every inch of it was within range of well placed German artillery and what was much worse, every inch of it was visible through enemy field glasses. It would have helped our morale no end if we could have seen the Germans, but we
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couldn't. It is hard to describe the feeling that a soldier has when he knows that everything he does, every move he makes, every gun- flash of his own artillery is being watched by a skillful enemy who is playing for keeps.
Every evening at seven, we listened to a renegade American named Sally. She and an individual named George beamed a radio pro- gram straight at Anzio. They tried all the usual tricks. They played good American jazz, told little anecdotes designed to make the men homesick, and Sally sang nostalgic songs. We were amused when she referred to General Mark Clark as General Mark Time and we found it grimly humorous when she would announce that 3rd Division had advanced six feet that day but that a counter attack had pushed them back to their previous position. But when she would tell us that we had received so many reinforcements from such and such divisions-even naming some of the officers-and was 100% correct about it-that got in our hair. Still we listened to it because there wasn't anything else to do. No U.S.O. shows came to Anzio. Even movies were generally forbidden. Assembling a movie audience in one place was considered too great a risk. One springlike day we tried to play a game of baseball. Shells began to fall in the area before the first inning was over. That stopped that! And so the monotony continued-day after day and week after week. If we weren't dodging shellfire, we were dodging our own flak. Even the food was deadly; nothing but K and C rations until we could scarcely swallow the stuff any more. Every day the wounded were carried off to the medicos and every day the dead were taken to the military cemetery at Nettuno until it became one of the largest in Europe. Verily, any man who served on the Anzio beachhead will agree with Stars & Stripes' description of it.
At long last, on May 25 to be specific, a spearhead of the main body of Fifth Army broke through and set free a dog tired, punch drunk, thoroughly disillusioned remnant of an invasion that just didn't jell.
MEDICS ON OKINAWA
In an Infantry Division there are three Regiments, three Bat- talions in the Regiment, and four companies to a Battalion. There are three Medical Aid Men in each Infantry Company whose job it is to bandage the wounded and administer pain deadening drugs on the front line, under fire.
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As soon as a man is wounded, after being given first-aid by the medic, a call goes back to the Battalion Aid Station (generally about 500 ft. behind the front lines) for a team of litter bearers (four) who go up to, and often in front of the lines, get the wounded and return to the Aid Station. At the Aid Station the bandages are checked, wounds redressed if necessary, blood plasma and shock treatment given if needed and the men made as comfortable as possi- ble until they can be transported back to the Collecting Company by their own men. Here again everything is checked and then they are evacuated to a Field Hospital, far enough from the lines so that the only danger is from air raids.
To be an Aid Man with an Infantry Company, one had to be a (so-called) surgical technician and able to bandage skillfully and give morphine correctly as well as duck bullets and anything else that the enemy could throw at you.
The Litter Bearer must know all the preceding skills and should possess a great deal of brawn besides. Quite often Litter Bearers must fix up a wounded man whom the fast moving Aid Man has missed during the heat of battle.
In the Aid Station itself, the Battalion Surgeon and the Assist- ant Battalion Surgeon work tirelessly giving more morphine, blood plasma, and redressing wounds, assisted by medical and surgical technicians.
Being a medical man is no easier or harder than being an Infan- try man, but as for myself, I would much rather help save a life than take a life.
ОМАНА BEACH
I do not have a clear, connected picture in my mind's eye of Omaha Beach. We were all interested enough in the Beach at the time we arrived off shore, for we had spent days and months ima- gining what it would be like, and in the month before the landing we had spent many hours poring over the maps and low altitude photos of the beach and its approaches. So we were very curious and at least a little afraid as we drew close enough to give it our concentrated attention. Perhaps I could compare my personal feel- ings to those of a little boy who moves to a new town and on the first afternoon finds himself plunked square in the middle of the local dancing class. I was curious, I was scared, I was tremendously
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interested in what was there and what was going on, but I tried to keep my curiosity as unobtrusive as possible so that no one might think I hadn't been in this sort of thing before, or suspect that I hadn't the slightest idea of what I should see or how I should act. Laboring under these handicaps, I guess it isn't any wonder that all I remember is little scattered vignettes, sort of snapshots, rather than a complete panoramic picture.
We reached the Normandy coast some two weeks after D-Day. There had been quite a storm during the preceding week and we had been held on our LOT's back in the protected harbors along the English coast until it had cleared enough for us to sail across. My first recollection is of a low coastline, somewhat similar to Plum Island. The first specific item that caught my eye was the flashes of flame which spurted from the guns of the supporting ships which were standing off shore and were giving what-for to Jerry in hot, lethal tons. My first distinct fear that I was able to dissect and analyze was that our little chip of an LCT was going to chug right underneath the muzzles of some of those big guns at the exact moment that the captain thought was the appropriate time to get off a salvo. Apparently our British skipper had some consideration for my feelings, for he took a good healthy detour around the battle- ship which I had considered the main threat.
After a short while we were close enough to make out a string of sunken ships which stretched in a broken line parallel to the shore. As we drew nearer we discovered that they were not aban- doned, even though their decks were awash. Many of them were manned by AA crews who had their guns and living quarters on the superstructure which made islands in the choppy sea. Coming in- side this makeshift breakwater we were able to examine the landing beach proper. Two objects caught the eye : hundreds of barrage bal- loons, lining the rise back of the beach; and what appeared to be hundreds of small landing craft, similar to our own, which lay on their keels, or their sides, and even upside down, just above the high water mark. These stranded boats were the only visible evi- dence of the storm which had brought activity to a standstill for five crucial days. Since they had cluttered and barred the original cleared beach approaches, the engineers were busy exploding mines to open up new lanes over which they could get traffic across the beach. There must have been thousands of mines buried in the sand, but the engineers were blowing them at a great rate. Each Teller- mine contains as much explosive as a good sized shell and in conse-
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quence there was just as much noise as we later heard in full-fledged battles.
Our boat had lost its anchor earlier when another ship had tried to climb our stern so our skipper ran in and out among the beached ships trying to find a place to run ashore before his fuel gave out. Each time we pointed the blunt nose of the LCT towards a vacant spot on the shore, the engineers would wave us off. Apparently there were mines in the area or they were saving the place for some gen- eral. Our captain was persistent, as he had to be if he did not want to be washed ashore without power. Our popularity with the en- gineers diminished audibly. They not only slandered the whole foolish Limey Navy, but they had a low opinion of American troops who were foolish stupid enough to sail on a foolish Limey pigsty. ("Foolish" wasn't the word, but it conveys the general idea, after a fashion). Since the engineers were combat veterans according to our lights, we kept our devastating replies to their insults to our- selves and pretended to be amused by the thought that we had chosen this particular LCT to sail on, or, indeed that it had been our choice to come to this God-forsaken country.
Eventually this one-sided debate was terminated when our skipper lost patience and slammed into the shore in spite of the howls and imprecations of the shore brigade. The sailors let down the ramp, and the first vehicle chugged down it and promptly gurgled just about out of sight. It seems that we had grounded on a sand bar in front of a large pot hole. This confirmed the engineers in their original estimate of our combined intelligence, but I will admit that it did not interfere with their efficiency. Tractors, cables and salvage crews appeared in a matter of seconds, the sunken truck was yanked out, the bow of the boat was pulled around, and our tanks and tracks lumbered out onto the dry soil of France. As fast as we hit the shore, the engineers told us to get the blazes off of their beach to make way for better men. We stood not in the order of our going, but lurched and ground as fast as we could across the beach, over the dunes, and on into the fields and hedge rows of Normandy.
OKINAWA
One of the many strategic maneuvers designed by the Pacific High Command to outwit the Japs took place in the form of a full dress feint assault landing on the southern beaches of Okinawa on Easter Sunday morning April 1, 1945, simultaneously with the
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actual landings of two Marine Divisions and three Army Divisions on the western beaches.
I believe that history will show that the Japs expected the actual landings to take place on the southern beaches. Approach to these beaches, which were admirably suited for amphibious landings, lay over open ocean with no natural obstructions or navigational hazards whatever, whereas the approach to the western beaches lay through tortuous reefs and coral heads and necessitated passing close by small islands garrisoned by the enemy.
The USS Lowndes (APA 154), was one of a formidable armada of APA's ( (attack transports), AKA's (attack cargo ships), LST's, LCI's and LCM's. We were escorted by a group of destroyers, de- stroyer escorts and mine sweepers and carried the Second Marine Division and its equipment and supplies which had been loaded at Saipan.
It was our mission to convince the Japs that the actual landings were to take place on the southern beaches and thereby relieve pres- sure on the western shores where the real landings were to be made.
Unlike the Iwo Jima initial assaults on February 19, 1945, where our transport division received relatively little opposition from the air, this Okinawa invasion can well be compared to the results of a healthy kick at a beehive. Here the Japs really put on a show with swarms of Kamikaze or suicide planes, which caused very serious casualties both to our ships and personnel.
Dawn was breaking as we approached the transport area. In the semi-darkness, a Jap plane skimming over the water streaked across our bows and smashed the transport on our port side amid- ships, causing a great explosion of flame and smoke. An LST to starboard, loaded with high octane gas, was spouting flame a hun- dred feet in the air. The Japs were busy that morning. One dropped out of a low cloud and skimmed our funnel so close we could see the "meat ball" insignia. We opened up on him with everything we had. Probably the curtain of tracers confused him and per- suaded him to seek other quarry.
Meanwhile, we were approaching the island whose still dark out- line was etched in flame. From my position on the bridge, I was a spectator at one of the most awesome shows ever put on by man. Tons of high explosives were bursting in a red glare over the island, and little orange flashes as far as the eye could see showed that the vast array of battleships, cruisers and rocket ships were really pour- ing it on.
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At a prearranged signal, hundreds of empty LCVP's and LCM's (personnel and tank landing craft) were launched from the trans- ports on the providentially calm waters, and were soon speeding in orderly formation like waterbugs toward the beach. The hideous bombardment seemed to slacken momentarily and our aircraft laid a thick white smoke screen over the beaches, under which cover our little landing craft turned about when three hundred yards from the beach and scurried back to the waiting ships.
Our feint completed, we hoisted aboard our boats and headed for sea. After several days in a designated waiting area, about one hundred miles east of Okinawa, uneventful except for an occasional submarine alert, we received a dispatch-"USS Lowndes with a destroyer escort will proceed alone to the main western invasion beaches to await further orders." We knew this meant plenty of action. But that is another story.
JAPANESE PARACHUTE ATTACK LEYTE, DECEMBER 6, 1944
On the night of November 26, 1945 the American Command got their first intimation that the Jap had one more trick up his frayed sleeve.
The island of Leyte in the Philippines was already considered secure when this last threat struck.
Several enemy transport planes crash-landed in the surf near XXIV Corps Headquarters. Two landed safely, and about thirty of their passengers escaped our troops and headed inland. Most of them were killed during the next few days, but documents taken from their bodies indicated that a major airborne attack against our airfields was in the making.
There wasn't a great deal to do except tighten up the defenses and wait. Enemy plans were for a co-ordinated attack in which remnants of Jap ground troops from the hills would join their air- borne brethren. On December 4 the enemy began infiltrating American lines in large numbers from the mountains and on the night of the 6th, the Japs struck.
Just before dusk a force of 38 transport planes roared in from the sea. About 30 planes were shot down, but the Japs were able to land about 250 men at one end of San Pablo airfield. Meanwhile 400-500 Japanese ground troops had penetrated through to nearby Busi airfield, and a few parachutists had landed there. Both fields
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were in the zone of the XI Airborne Division, but in anticipation of just such an attack, the First Battalion of the 382nd Infantry, 96th Division had been attached to the XI Airborne and ordered into positions in the airfield area. The First Battalion's Company "B" killed some of the paratroopers before they reached the ground, and a number more were shot during the night. In the morning they killed more of the Japs who were coming out of the hills.
The same morning, (December 7) "A" Company moved into position with a company of the XI Airborne and attempted to re- take San Pablo airfield. It was a day of confusion, for the Japs were wearing American uniforms taken from Air Forces' personnel, and the action was more of a brawl than an organized battle. Casu- alties were very heavy on both sides.
On December 9 the First Battalion gathered most of its units together inside one perimeter. At dusk the rifle companies set off in various directions to intercept separated Jap patrols. That left the battalion headquarters personnel, a few mortarmen and some bat- talion medics to defend the perimeter. By then the Jap menace was thought to be mainly eliminated, and the men had set up a few liv- ing tents. The Japs were not gone, however, and at midnight they launched a wild drunken Banzai charge of about 150 men, a group about equal to our own. The clerks, medics and supply personnel proved up to the task, and threw rifle and machine-gun fire at the enemy, stopping their charge before it could penetrate the line. They killed 50 Japs at a cost of seven casualties.
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