With the Old Breed_ At Peleliu and Okinawa - E. B. Sledge [143]
The board “floor” kept us out of the water and mud, provided we worked diligently enough at the bailing detail. Necessity being the mother of invention, we had “reinvented” the equivalent of duckboards commonly used in flooded World War I trenches. The duckboards pictured and described in 1914-18 in Flanders were, of course, often prefabricated in long sections and then placed in the trenches by infantrymen. But the small board floor we placed in our foxhole served the same function.
Continued firing finally caused my mortar's base plate to drive the pieces of wood supporting it deep into the mud in the bottom of the gun pit. We couldn't sight the gun properly. We tugged and pulled the gun up out of the mud, then it was a choice of emplacing it either on some firmer base in the gun pit or on the surface outside. The latter prospect would have meant sure death from the enemy shelling, so we had to come up with something better in a hurry.
Somebody got the bright idea of building a “footing” on which to rest the base plate. So in the bottom of the gun pit, we dug out a deep square hole larger than the base plate and lined it with boards. We next placed several helmets full of coral gravel we found in the side of the railroad bed into the footing. We set the mortar's base plate on the firm coral footing, resighted the gun, and had no more trouble with recoil driving the base plate into the mud. I suppose the other two squads in our mortar section fixed their guns’ base plates in the same manner.
The Japanese infantry kept up their activity to our front and tried to infiltrate our lines every night, sometimes with success. Snafu made good about then on the threat he had made to the CP on Peleliu about any enemy headed toward the Company K CP. On Peleliu one night after we came off the lines Snafu shot two Japanese with his Thompson. He had killed one and fatally wounded the other. A sergeant made Snafu bury the dead soldier. Snafu objected strenuously because he said, and rightly so, if he hadn't shot the Japanese they would have kept on going right into the company CP. Sarge said maybe so, but the corpse had to be buried, and since Snafu had shot it, he must bury it. Snafu promised he would never shoot another enemy soldier headed for the CP.
One day as dawn broke with a thin fog and a pelting rain, Snafu woke me out of the nearest thing to sleep that could be attained in that miserable place with, “Halt who goes there? What's the password?”
Jolted out of my fatigue stupor, I saw Snafu's face silhouetted against the gray sky. Rain poured off his helmet, and drops of moisture on the end of each whisker of the thick stubbly beard on his jutting square jaw caught the dim light like glass beads. I snatched the Tommy up off my lap as he raised his .45 pistol and aimed it toward two dim figures striding along about twenty yards away. Visibility was so poor in the dim light, mist, and rain that I could tell little about the shadowy figures other than they wore U.S. helmets. At the sound of Snafu's challenge, the two men speeded up instead of halting and identifying themselves.
“Halt or I'll fire!” he yelled.
The two took off for the railroad bed as fast as they could on the slippery ground. Snafu fired several shots with his .45 but missed. Shortly we heard a couple of American grenades explode in the railroad bed. Then a buddy yelled that the Japanese had been killed by his grenades. Daylight came rapidly, so we went over to the railroad embankment to ask what had happened.
When Snafu and I got to the foxhole by the railroad embankment, we found two Marine snipers grinning and laughing. The grenade explosions had scared awake the Marines in the dryness under the tarpaulin in the company CP and had chased them out into the rain. They were drifting back to the shelter as we arrived. We waved, but got only glares in return.
We took a look at the dead enemy before returning to our foxhole. They had been wearing Marine helmets but otherwise were dressed in