With the Old Breed_ At Peleliu and Okinawa - E. B. Sledge [42]
“Hey,” I said to a veteran next to me, “what are those am-tracs doing all the way across the airfield toward the Jap lines?”
“Them ain't amtracs; they're Nip tanks!” he said.
Shell bursts appeared among the enemy tanks. Some of our Sherman tanks had arrived at the edge of the airfield on our left and opened fire. Because of the clouds of dust and the shellfire, I couldn't see much and didn't see any enemy infantry, but the firing on our left was heavy.
Word came for us to deploy on the double. The riflemen formed a line at the edge of the scrub along a trail and lay prone, trying to take what cover they could. From the beginning to the end on Peleliu, it was all but impossible to dig into the hard coral rock, so the men piled rocks around themselves or got behind logs and debris.
Snafu and I set up our 60mm mortar a few yards behind them, across the trail in a shallow crater. Everyone got edgy as the order came, “Stand by to repel counterattack. Counterattack hitting I Company's front.”
I didn't know where Company I was, but I thought it was on our left—somewhere. Although I had great confidence in our officers and NCOs, it seemed to me that we were alone and confused in the middle of a rumbling chaos with snipers everywhere and with no contact with any other units. I thought all of us would be lost.
“They needta get some more damned troops up here,” growled Snafu, his standard remark in a tight spot.
Snafu set up the gun, and I removed an HE (high explosive) shell from a canister in my ammo bag. At last we could return fire!
Snafu yelled, “Fire!”
Just then a Marine tank to our rear mistook us for enemy troops. As soon as my hand went up to drop the round down the tube, a machine gun cut loose. It sounded like one of ours—and from the rear of all places! As I peeped over the edge of the crater through the dust and smoke and saw a Sherman tank in a clearing behind us, the tank fired its 75mm gun off to our right rear. The shell exploded nearby, around a bend in the same trail we were on. I then heard the report of a Japanese field gun located there as it returned fire on the tank. Again I tried to fire, but the machine gun opened up as before.
“Sledgehammer, don't let him hit that shell. We'll all be blown to hell,” said a worried ammo carrier crouched in the crater near me.
“Don't worry, that's my hand he just about hit,” I snapped.
Our tank and the Japanese field gun kept up their duel.
“By god, when that tank knocks out that Nip gun he'll swing his 75 over thisaway, and it'll be our ass. He thinks we're Nips,” said a veteran in the crater.
“Oh, Jesus!” someone moaned.
A surge of panic rose within me. In a brief moment our tank had reduced me from a well-trained, determined assistant mortar gunner to a quivering mass of terror. It was not just that I was being fired at by a machine gun that unnerved me so terribly, but that it was one of ours. To be killed by the enemy was bad enough; that was a real possibility I had prepared myself for. But to be killed by mistake by my own comrades was something I found hard to accept. It was just too much.
An authoritative voice across the trail yelled, “Secure the mortar.”
A volunteer crawled off to the left, and soon the tank ceased firing on us. We learned later that our tankers were firing on us because we had moved too far ahead. They thought we were enemy support for the field gun. This also explained why the enemy shelling was passing over and exploding behind us. Tragically, the marine who saved us by identifying us to the tanker was shot off the tank and killed by a sniper.
The heavy firing on our left had about subsided, so the Japanese counterattack had been broken. Regrettably, I hadn't helped at all, because we were pinned down by one of our own tanks.
Some of us went along the trail and looked