With the Old Breed_ At Peleliu and Okinawa - E. B. Sledge [103]
“Hey, you guys, the blowers [electric ventilating fans] are off. By God, we'll smother in this damn place!” yelled one man. I was next to the hatch, and several of us started yelling at the sailors outside, telling them we needed air. They yelled back from the other side of the steel door that it couldn't be helped, because the electricity was needed to operate the gun mounts. “Then, by God, let us out on deck!”
“Sorry, we've got orders to keep this hatch dogged down.”
We all started cursing the sailors, but they were following orders, and I'm sure they didn't want to keep us locked in that stuffy compartment. “Let's get the hell outa here,” a buddy said. We all agreed it would be better to get strafed on deck than to suffocate in the compartment. Grasping the levers and moving them to the unlock position, we tried to open the hatch. As fast as we turned each lever, the sailors outside turned it back and kept it dogged down. Other desperate Marines joined us in trying to unclamp the hatch. There were only two sailors outside, so with our combined efforts, we finally got all the clamps open, shoved open the hatch, and burst out into the cool, fresh air.
About that time other Company K men poured out of a hatch on the other side of the compartment. One of the sailors got pushed over and rolled across the deck. In an instant we were all outside breathing in the fresh air.
“All right, you men, return to your quarters. No troops topside. That's an order!” came a voice from a platform slightly aft and above us. We looked up and saw a navy officer, an ensign, standing against the rail glaring at us. He wore khakis, an officer's cap, and insignia bars on his collar, in stark contrast to us dressed in green dungarees, tan canvas leggings, and camouflaged helmet covers, and loaded with battle equipment, weapons, and gear. He wore a web pistol belt with a .45 automatic in the holster.
None of our officers was in the area, so the navy ensign had it all to himself. He swaggered back and forth, ordering us into the foul air of the troop compartment. If he had been a Marine officer, we would have obeyed his order with mutterings and mumblings, but he was so unimposing that we just milled around. Finally, he began threatening us all with courts-martial if we didn't obey him.
A friend of mine spoke up, “Sir, we're goin’ to hit that beach in a little while and a lot of us might not be alive an hour from now. We'd rather take a chance on gettin’ hit by a Jap plane out here than go back in there and smother to death.”
The officer spun around and headed for the bridge—to get help, we assumed. Shortly some of our own officers came up and told us to stand by to go down the nets to the waiting boats. As far as I know, our breakout of the troop compartment for fresh air was never mentioned.
We picked up our gear and moved to assigned areas along the bulwarks of the ship. The weather was mostly clear and incredibly cool (about 75 degrees) after the heat of the South Pacific. The bombardment rumbled and thundered toward the island. Everything from battleships down to rocket and mortar boats were plastering the beaches along with our dive bombers. Japanese planes, their engines droning and whining, came in over the huge convoy, and many ships’ antiaircraft fire began bursting in the air. I saw two enemy planes get hit some distance from our ship.
We were all tense, particularly with the intelligence estimate that we could expect 80-85 percent casualties on