thedrifter
07-27-04, 07:34 AM
World War II: 60 Years Ago
GUAM: "Wake Up and Die, Marine!"
By R. R. Keene
Captain Louis H. Wilson Jr., the 24-year-old "skipper" of Company F, 2d Battalion, Ninth Marine Regiment, would some day become the 26th Commandant of the Marine Corps, but on 26 July 1944, he figured he'd be lucky just to see tomorrow.
He'd been wounded three times the previous day. But Wilson had stubborn tenacity embedded in his soul. There he was on a knoll called Fonte Hill somewhere in the Pacific Ocean with about 20,000 others wresting Guam, a 212-square-mile island in the Marianas chain, from more than 18,500 Japanese soldiers.
Two and a half years earlier on 10 Dec. 1941, Guam had become the first U.S. territory to fall when 5,500 Japanese forced the 337 members of the American garrison and Chamorro Insular Guard, after a brief but spirited fight, to surrender. The time had come to take Guam back.
The task fell to Major General Roy S. Geiger's III Amphibious Corps and, in particular, to the infantry and artillery regiments of the Third Marine Division and the leathernecks of 1st Provisional Marine Brigade. Most of the division Marines were combat veterans of Bougainville.
MajGen Allen H. Turnage, who fought Caco bandits in the jungle hills of Northern Haiti and served in North China just prior to World War II as commanding officer of Marine Forces, now commanded the 3dMarDiv.
Brigadier General Lemuel C. Shepherd Jr., the commander of the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade, had been wounded twice at Belleau Wood in France during WW I. He was a "China Hand" and served in Haiti with the Garde d'Haiti. He also saw action on Cape Gloucester and New Britain. He later became the Corps' 20th Commandant.
BGen Pedro A. del Valle, an unabashed American patriot from Puerto Rico, commanded the corps of artillery. He, too, had sharpened his combative skills in Haiti, Santo Domingo, Nicaragua and Cuba. He was a veteran of Guadalcanal, Tulagi, and the Russell and Florida islands.
Placed strategically in Guam's lush foliage heavy with wild peppers and rugged hillsides was Lieutenant General Takeshi Takashina's 29th Division. The division had been part of the Kwantung Army that had fought the Russians in 1939 at Nomonhan in Manchuria and, later, the Communist and Nationalist Chinese. The Japanese plan was to meet the enemy on the beach and throw them back into the ocean. The Japanese had, since 1941, built some formidable defenses with 8-, 6-, 5- and 3-inch guns. Additionally, they had 75 mm antiaircraft guns, 81 field pieces of artillery, 86 antitank guns and two tank companies.
Operation Stevedore, as the invasion of Guam was dubbed, was postponed while American planners reexamined their options. This time the Navy wanted to get it right. They used every naval gun and aircraft to bomb every suspected target on Guam. Marine historians said the bombardment and shelling went for 13 days on "a scale and length of time never before seen in World War II."
It had an effect. One Japanese wrote, "No matter where one goes, the shells follow."
Navy underwater demolition teams in the last night before the landing cleared 940 separate beach obstacles and left a propped-up sign that read "Welcome, Marines."
Still, it was no cakewalk.
On the morning of 21 July 1944, Marines assembled on the weather decks in full combat equipment. At such times the tension is so palpable that you can feel it in everything, and in this there are those moments where a man, although surrounded by thousands, is alone to think of all that he holds dear.
Someone played "The Marines' Hymn" over the ship's loudspeaker as the leathernecks lumbered over the side, down the cargo nets and into landing vehicles.
The amphibian tractors in two landing groups formed into waves and churned toward shore. Guam was still being pounded with naval gunfire. A thousand yards out there was still no resistance from the Japanese. At 500 yards the island's east coast loomed large before them and still no gunfire. They were 100 yards from the beach when Japanese machine-gun bullets rattled off the metal hulls of the amphibian tractors. Mortar and artillery rounds rained down.
The Navy answered with precision gunfire. Navy and Marine aircraft flew in low, looking for targets and finding them, unleashing rockets, bombs, napalm and strafing gunfire. At 0833, high tide, the first wave of Marines came across the beach between Adelup and Asan points, called "Devil's horns." It was a gradual rise—almost a natural amphitheater with steep bluffs from which the Japanese could shoot down on the landing force. The Marines pushed about 100 yards and could go no farther.
Third Battalion, Third Marine Regiment had been briefed to take the heights known as Chonito Cliff. Japanese infantrymen worked the bolts of their Arisaka rifles, fed ammunition into their Nambu machine guns and popped off various-sized mortar rounds that wounded and killed large numbers of Marines and stalled the attack.
Mortarman and squad leader Private First Class Luther Skaggs Jr. lost his section leader in a blast of Japanese mortar fire and stepped up to take command. He urged the men forward across 200 yards of fire-swept ground. The idea was to get them into a firing position on the cliffs where they could provide accurate mortar coverage.
They found a position and dug in. The Japanese found them, too, and launched a counterattack at the gun pit. The fight lasted into the night. A hunk of shrapnel from a Japanese grenade tore away part of Skaggs' lower leg. He quickly improvised a tourniquet to stop the bleeding, then propped himself up to where he could return fire with his rifle and lob grenades. Those who witnessed Skaggs' tenacity said he was uncomplaining and calm. This went on for eight hours. Skaggs eventually crawled unassisted to fight more Japanese. President Harry S. Truman would, sometime later, hang the Medal of Honor around Skaggs' neck.
It was the day after the landing that PFC Leonard F. Mason—a Browning Automatic Rifleman—and his platoon from 2/3 found themselves the object of fire from two Japanese machine guns only 15 yards away. They hunkered down in a shallow and narrow gully while Japanese riflemen used bullets to pry them out. Mason, without saying a word, climbed out of the gully. Japanese gunners saw him immediately and concentrated their fire. Bullets tore into his arm and shoulder, but Mason kept going. He was almost on top of them when they stitched him with a burst of machine-gun fire, but he still kept going until, with his BAR, he killed five of the Japanese gunmen and wounded a sixth. He rejoined his platoon, made his report, was evacuated and later died. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
continued............
GUAM: "Wake Up and Die, Marine!"
By R. R. Keene
Captain Louis H. Wilson Jr., the 24-year-old "skipper" of Company F, 2d Battalion, Ninth Marine Regiment, would some day become the 26th Commandant of the Marine Corps, but on 26 July 1944, he figured he'd be lucky just to see tomorrow.
He'd been wounded three times the previous day. But Wilson had stubborn tenacity embedded in his soul. There he was on a knoll called Fonte Hill somewhere in the Pacific Ocean with about 20,000 others wresting Guam, a 212-square-mile island in the Marianas chain, from more than 18,500 Japanese soldiers.
Two and a half years earlier on 10 Dec. 1941, Guam had become the first U.S. territory to fall when 5,500 Japanese forced the 337 members of the American garrison and Chamorro Insular Guard, after a brief but spirited fight, to surrender. The time had come to take Guam back.
The task fell to Major General Roy S. Geiger's III Amphibious Corps and, in particular, to the infantry and artillery regiments of the Third Marine Division and the leathernecks of 1st Provisional Marine Brigade. Most of the division Marines were combat veterans of Bougainville.
MajGen Allen H. Turnage, who fought Caco bandits in the jungle hills of Northern Haiti and served in North China just prior to World War II as commanding officer of Marine Forces, now commanded the 3dMarDiv.
Brigadier General Lemuel C. Shepherd Jr., the commander of the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade, had been wounded twice at Belleau Wood in France during WW I. He was a "China Hand" and served in Haiti with the Garde d'Haiti. He also saw action on Cape Gloucester and New Britain. He later became the Corps' 20th Commandant.
BGen Pedro A. del Valle, an unabashed American patriot from Puerto Rico, commanded the corps of artillery. He, too, had sharpened his combative skills in Haiti, Santo Domingo, Nicaragua and Cuba. He was a veteran of Guadalcanal, Tulagi, and the Russell and Florida islands.
Placed strategically in Guam's lush foliage heavy with wild peppers and rugged hillsides was Lieutenant General Takeshi Takashina's 29th Division. The division had been part of the Kwantung Army that had fought the Russians in 1939 at Nomonhan in Manchuria and, later, the Communist and Nationalist Chinese. The Japanese plan was to meet the enemy on the beach and throw them back into the ocean. The Japanese had, since 1941, built some formidable defenses with 8-, 6-, 5- and 3-inch guns. Additionally, they had 75 mm antiaircraft guns, 81 field pieces of artillery, 86 antitank guns and two tank companies.
Operation Stevedore, as the invasion of Guam was dubbed, was postponed while American planners reexamined their options. This time the Navy wanted to get it right. They used every naval gun and aircraft to bomb every suspected target on Guam. Marine historians said the bombardment and shelling went for 13 days on "a scale and length of time never before seen in World War II."
It had an effect. One Japanese wrote, "No matter where one goes, the shells follow."
Navy underwater demolition teams in the last night before the landing cleared 940 separate beach obstacles and left a propped-up sign that read "Welcome, Marines."
Still, it was no cakewalk.
On the morning of 21 July 1944, Marines assembled on the weather decks in full combat equipment. At such times the tension is so palpable that you can feel it in everything, and in this there are those moments where a man, although surrounded by thousands, is alone to think of all that he holds dear.
Someone played "The Marines' Hymn" over the ship's loudspeaker as the leathernecks lumbered over the side, down the cargo nets and into landing vehicles.
The amphibian tractors in two landing groups formed into waves and churned toward shore. Guam was still being pounded with naval gunfire. A thousand yards out there was still no resistance from the Japanese. At 500 yards the island's east coast loomed large before them and still no gunfire. They were 100 yards from the beach when Japanese machine-gun bullets rattled off the metal hulls of the amphibian tractors. Mortar and artillery rounds rained down.
The Navy answered with precision gunfire. Navy and Marine aircraft flew in low, looking for targets and finding them, unleashing rockets, bombs, napalm and strafing gunfire. At 0833, high tide, the first wave of Marines came across the beach between Adelup and Asan points, called "Devil's horns." It was a gradual rise—almost a natural amphitheater with steep bluffs from which the Japanese could shoot down on the landing force. The Marines pushed about 100 yards and could go no farther.
Third Battalion, Third Marine Regiment had been briefed to take the heights known as Chonito Cliff. Japanese infantrymen worked the bolts of their Arisaka rifles, fed ammunition into their Nambu machine guns and popped off various-sized mortar rounds that wounded and killed large numbers of Marines and stalled the attack.
Mortarman and squad leader Private First Class Luther Skaggs Jr. lost his section leader in a blast of Japanese mortar fire and stepped up to take command. He urged the men forward across 200 yards of fire-swept ground. The idea was to get them into a firing position on the cliffs where they could provide accurate mortar coverage.
They found a position and dug in. The Japanese found them, too, and launched a counterattack at the gun pit. The fight lasted into the night. A hunk of shrapnel from a Japanese grenade tore away part of Skaggs' lower leg. He quickly improvised a tourniquet to stop the bleeding, then propped himself up to where he could return fire with his rifle and lob grenades. Those who witnessed Skaggs' tenacity said he was uncomplaining and calm. This went on for eight hours. Skaggs eventually crawled unassisted to fight more Japanese. President Harry S. Truman would, sometime later, hang the Medal of Honor around Skaggs' neck.
It was the day after the landing that PFC Leonard F. Mason—a Browning Automatic Rifleman—and his platoon from 2/3 found themselves the object of fire from two Japanese machine guns only 15 yards away. They hunkered down in a shallow and narrow gully while Japanese riflemen used bullets to pry them out. Mason, without saying a word, climbed out of the gully. Japanese gunners saw him immediately and concentrated their fire. Bullets tore into his arm and shoulder, but Mason kept going. He was almost on top of them when they stitched him with a burst of machine-gun fire, but he still kept going until, with his BAR, he killed five of the Japanese gunmen and wounded a sixth. He rejoined his platoon, made his report, was evacuated and later died. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
continued............