With the Old Breed_ At Peleliu and Okinawa - E. B. Sledge [124]
The 5th Marines approached the village of Dakeshi and ran into a strong enemy defensive system in an area known as the Awacha Pocket. Talk was that we were approaching the main Japanese defense line, the Shuri Line. But Awacha and Dakeshi confronted us before we reached the main ridges of the Shuri Line.
When our battalion dug in in front of Awacha, our mortars were emplaced on the slope of a little rise about seventy-five yards behind the front line. The torrents of rain were causing us other problems besides chilly misery. Our tanks couldn't move up to support us. Amtracs had to bring a lot of supplies, because the jeeps and trailers bogged down in the soft soil.
Ammunition, boxes of rations, and five-gallon cans of water were brought up as close to us as possible. But because of the mud along a shallow draw that ran to the rear of the mortar section, all the supplies were piled about fifty yards away in a supply dump on the other side of the draw. Working parties went off to carry the supplies from the dump across the draw to the rifle platoons and the mortar section.
Carrying ammo and rations was something the veterans had done plenty of times before. With the others I had struggled up and down Peleliu's unbelievably rugged rocky terrain in the suffocating heat, carrying ammo, rations, and water. Like carrying stretcher cases, it was exhausting work. But this was my first duty on a working party in deep mud, and it surpassed the drudgery of any working party I had ever experienced.
All ammunition was heavy, of course, but some was easier to handle than others. We praised the manufacturers of hand-grenade and belted machine-gun ammunition boxes. The former were wooden with a nice rope handle on each side; the latter were metal and had a collapsible handle on top. But we cursed the dolts who made the wooden cases our .30 caliber rifle ammo came in. Each box contained 1,000 rounds of ammunition. It was heavy and had only a small notch cut into either end. This allowed only a fingertip grip by the two men usually needed to handle a single crate.
We spent a great deal of time in combat carrying this heavy ammunition on our shoulders to places where it was needed—spots often totally inaccessible to all types of vehicles—and breaking it out of the packages and crates. On Okinawa this was often done under enemy fire, in driving rain, and through knee-deep mud for hours on end. Such activity drove the infantryman, weary from the mental and physical stress of combat, almost to the brink of physical collapse.
A great number of books and films about the war ignored this grueling facet of the infantryman's war. They gave the impression that ammunition was always “up there” when needed. Maybe my outfit just happened to get a particularly bad dose of carrying ammo into position on Peleliu because of the heat and rugged terrain and on Okinawa because of the deep mud. But the work was something none of us would forget. It was exhausting, demoralizing, and seemingly unending.
In this first position before Awacha, those of us detailed to the working parties had made a couple of trips across the shallow draw when a Nambu light machine gun opened up from a position to our left. I was about midway across the draw, in no particular hurry, when the Japanese gunner fired his first bursts down the draw. I took off at a run, slipping and sliding on the mud, to the protected area where the supply dump was placed. Slugs snapped viciously around me. The men with me also were lucky as we dove for the protection of a knoll beside the supplies. The enemy machine gunner was well concealed up the draw to our left and had a clear field of fire anytime anyone crossed where we were. We were bound to lose men to that Nambu if we kept moving back and forth. Yet we had to get the ammo distributed for the coming attack.
We looked