CAPE GLOUCESTER
Puller emerged from the hospital to find that he had lost his troops—through his promotion—but though he was now executive officer of the Seventh Marines, he worked as hard as ever at the training of troops.
When the regiment visited a rifle range at nearby Williamsburg, adjoining an abandoned race track, an Australian major offered the grandstand as shelter. Puller declined: “Thanks, Major, but we’ll bunk in the field. We would like some of your tent floors, but we won’t get under cover. We’ve just taken the boys out of the boondocks. They’ve got more jungle work coming up and it might give ’em pneumonia to sleep in out of the weather.”
Puller’s personality was still a leading asset of the regiment and the troops found him constant, with none of the pomposity so common in officers.
One morning as he approached a company of his men lounging among their tents a newly arrived lieutenant barked an order and the Marines scrambled to their feet, standing at attention.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Puller roared. “Don’t you think I’ve got more sense than to demand that you put on a show every time I come within pistol range? Get back down on your duffs. You ought to know me well enough to realize that I’m no damned bandbox soldier. Take it easy—there’s enough for you to do when we get our next assignment.”
The red-faced lieutenant looked on miserably.
A brand-new chaplain from the States glimpsed Puller in the sergeant major’s office one day, a dazzling sight in his greens, with a great patch of ribbons on his chest. Puller was on his way to a review. The chaplain spluttered praises on the display of decorations. The Colonel dismissed him quietly: “Just the rewards of a misspent youth, Padre. Nothing to it.”
The replacements who had joined the regiment felt Puller’s appeal as much as the veterans and were awed by tales of his career. Junior officers noted hero-worship in the faces of men, especially on parade or inspection. When other officers passed among them the troops were impassive, eyes straight ahead, as if unaware they were being inspected.
Lieutenant David Condon saw what happened when Puller walked the ranks:
“His inspection was always different from that of anyone else. He stopped one morning going down the line and looked at a young BAR man. ‘How well you shoot that thing, old man?’ he asked. The kid said, ‘Expert, sir.’ And Puller growled, That’s the way,’ and walked down the line.
“Then you could see on the faces of the troops what he meant to them. Every eye rolled after him as he walked on and their expressions said better than billboards that he was their kind of an officer. They would have followed him anywhere.”
As the time for a new campaign drew near, Puller drove his staff to complete the last detail in preparation. He warned the regimental supply officer that an Army Quartermaster general was to check their requisitions.
“Notify me at once when he arrives,” Puller said. “I want to explain things in person.”
The Army general arrived when Puller was out, and the lieutenant took the inspector to the supply dump. Puller found them there and overheard their conversation:
“Lieutenant, your requisitions are excessive.”
“I’m sure Colonel Puller would never have signed for more than we need, sir.”
“But he’s asked for ten thousand brass buckshot shells. What the devil does he want with those?”
“To kill Japs with, sir.”
“Doesn’t Colonel Puller know that buckshot is prohibited by the Geneva Convention?”
“Sir, Colonel Puller doesn’t give a damn about the Geneva Convention—any more than the Japs did at Pearl Harbor.”
Awards for heroism during the Guadalcanal campaign finally caught up with the Division in July and Puller led a line of the noncoms on the parade ground before the massed Division. The Congressional Medal of Honor winners, Mitchell Paige and John Basilone, flanked by a row of Navy Cross and Silver Star winners, marched down the field in imitation of the soldierly pace of Lieutenant Colonel Puller. General Vandegrift pinned on the medals, and memories flooded the ranks of veterans as an officer bellowed the citation for Puller’s second star for his Navy Cross.
When it was over Puller complained to his officers that the business of medals was being overdone by American forces: “Take a look at the Australian veterans. Lots of them have fought all the way through this war, including the African campaign, yet most of them rate only one medal. Lots of old-timers have only the Victory Medal of World War I. Yet the merest seventeen-year-old kid from the First Marine Division with not more than a year of service is wearing three medals, and if he’s been decorated for bravery, he’ll wear up to half a dozen. They’re making ’em too cheap.”
Puller embarked with the Division in a convoy for New Guinea on September 23. They landed on October 9, and scattered to staging areas for the forthcoming operation. Japanese planes from Rabaul bombed the camps every night or two, but the nuisance raids hardly interrupted final training.
Puller was made a full Colonel in November, the rank to date from October, 1942, the month of the perimeter stand on Guadalcanal. He attended most staff conferences on New Guinea, one of which confirmed his earlier impression of the Sixth Army commander, General Walter Krueger, whom he had seen in Washington.
Krueger consulted with Marine officers on projected invasion of nearby New Britain:
“What is your plan, gentlemen?”
General Rupertus, who was now the Division commander, explained in general terms; it was clear to Puller that there was no real plan.
“Exactly what is the sequence of your moves?” Krueger asked.
“Well, we will land here on the cape, establish a beachhead and carry on from there. Just as we did at Guadalcanal.”
“Ah, yes. You will land, but no beachhead. You will form your division in column and drive for the Japs where you find them, and then destroy them. Plan no beachhead at all. We will not stagnate on New Britain as you did on Guadalcanal.”
Puller’s admiration for Krueger grew, and he said to an intimate: “Wouldn’t you think that Washington would have put him in command in Europe? He’s so obviously the finest soldier we’ve got who’s qualified for the job. But, no, because he was German-born, they wouldn’t trust him to fight his old countrymen, though he’s been an American citizen for about fifty years and most of that in the American Army. Does that make sense to you?”
The Army-Marine controversy over the plan had dragged on for months, and it was not until General Douglas MacArthur, the old “enemy” of the Corps, came to New Guinea in late November that the Krueger plan of landing one Marine regiment and a regiment of Army paratroopers was overruled. In the end, Marine officers had their way: Two regiments of the Division would land together, with the third standing by—but there was no Guadalcanal style beachhead involved.
A regimental chaplain came to Puller’s tent one night in December.
“Colonel, I want you to get out an order for me.”
“I can’t get you an order. See Colonel Frisbie, he’s your man.”
“I’m afraid of him.”
“His bark’s worse than his bite. If you have a reasonable request, he’ll help you. What’s on your mind? Maybe I can give a hand.”
“Well, I want you to prohibit all these good Protestant boys from joining the Catholic Church.”
“Holy smoke, man, we can’t do that! If they’re deserting you, there must be a reason. If you fellows would get down to work like the Catholic chaplains, you’d have no trouble.”
The disgruntled minister went away.
The enemy also had word of the coming assault upon Cape Gloucester. Radio Tokyo blared one afternoon in late December: “The First American Marine Division, assorted cutthroats, degenerates and jailbirds, has been chased out of Melbourne, is now in camp in New Guinea, and will try to invade Cape Gloucester. I am pleased to add that our soldiers are fully prepared to repulse this insolent attempt. The jungles will run red with the blood of the Guadalcanal butchers.”
New Guinea lay just 63 miles across a strait from New Britain, a large, mountainous, overgrown and undeveloped island some 330 miles long and 50 miles wide. An estimated 70,000 Japanese defended it, most of them in the northern area, near Rabaul. At Cape Gloucester on the northwest tip there was a good air base and scouting parties had found it lightly held. That was the target.
Transports gathered in Buna Harbor on Christmas Eve, 1943, and left with an escort of destroyers and cruisers; ahead of them, Marine and Air Force planes from many fields pounded at Rabaul and opened the attack on Cape Gloucester itself. Marines tried singing Christmas songs as the craft pulled out of the harbor but few joined in until one outfit tuned up on “Pistol Packing Mama.” The holds were so hot that the troops spent most of the run on the decks until, on the early morning of December 26, they stood off Cape Gloucester.
Big guns of the fleet rolled for an hour and a half, beginning before dawn, and Marines ate their traditional D-day breakfast of steak and eggs while the salvos shook the hulls beneath them. As the light grew the troops had a look at the tangled green landscape: The two landing beaches, which were split by about 100 yards of jungle growth at the water’s edge, were so narrow as to be almost invisible to the naked eye. To the right, westward, ridges rose to a 6500-foot peak and just beyond, an active volcano trailed a plume of smoke. On the left an imposing hill, some 450 feet high, bulked near the water. This hill was found to be covered with enemy troops, and planes began blasting it. Soon there was a brown smear amid the foliage where bombs had caused a landslide.
The first bombers were in about 7:00 A.M., flying almost out of sight; their bombs walked in gray puffs from the beaches up the hills. A fuel dump exploded near the airfield. Bombers then came in lower—B-25’s followed by A-20’s, which worked very low, strafing. About 7:30 a smoke screen was laid along the beaches and landing craft went in.
Puller had insisted that the assault on the largest visible hill be made at a dead run: “You’ve got to shove ’em in there right under the shells. As soon as the bombardment lifts, make ’em scramble. They’ll get there before the Japs get back into position—because those devils will leave while the big stuff is flying, and count on getting back before we can move.”
The attack went on that schedule. The Third Battalion, Seventh Marines, landed first, followed quickly by Puller’s old battalion, which floundered through a morass behind the beach and pushed up the tall knoll, already known to aviators and ships’ gunners as Target Hill. The slopes were blackened from fire and shrouded with fumes of bombs—and clear of the enemy. Marines occupied the ridge in strength and settled down around the unmanned Jap guns. They beat back a Jap counterattack on the position with ease soon after.
The reserve battalion of the Seventh, the Second, met opposition 1500 yards inland and was pinned into line, settling to fight it out.
An hour after the Seventh was ashore the First Marines came, turned toward the airfield and walked into a well-laid Jap ambush. Tanks came in to clear the enemy from their hidden bunkers and by nightfall the First was well on its way to the airfield.
A falling tree in the soggy forest injured one Marine, and otherwise there were only twenty killed and twenty-two wounded on D-day; enemy casualties were estimated at fifty. The Division was on the way to what one historian called the “most nearly perfect amphibious assault of World War II,” but there was trouble to come. The Division staff was puzzled for the next two days by the absence of the enemy as the troops pushed forward through the rough terrain. On the fourth day the Second Battalion of the Seventh stumbled into Japs in bunkers in company strength, and killed almost four hundred of them, against Marine losses of twenty-five dead and seventy-five wounded. After dark that night the Fifth Marines, who had now been brought up from New Guinea, gained the airfield.
On December 30, the First and Fifth secured the field, after hand-to-hand fighting in which they had to call on tanks for help. Rupertus sent a triumphant message to Krueger, offering the field as a New Year’s gift.
Puller was still much in demand. On the fourth day of the assault he was called from his post as exec of the Seventh to repair the ruptured front of the regiment. The First and Second Battalions, under Majors Jack Weber and Tex Conoley were split by a gap of about 1000 yards; casualties were mounting as the stalled units fought blindly in the overgrown terrain. Marines in many foxholes sat with water up to their necks, for the rain still poured in torrents; more trees crashed in the jungle, and about twenty men were killed as artillery fire felled the rotten giants.
Colonel Julian Frisbie sent Puller forward: “Pull the line together so we can hold. They’ll be sending an attack through the gap on us soon.”
Puller hurried off with a runner—and ideas of his own. From the top of Target Hill he saw the problem: “Both battalions were lightly engaged. I could see firing and by using my glasses, though Conoley’s position was mostly in jungle, I could pick out a few of his men from time to time. I got Frisbie on the field phone and told him I was going to Conoley’s position. I hung up before he could stop me, and went across.
“I got over the gap—at least 1000 yards—without running into Japanese. I ordered both Weber and Conoley to extend their lines until the battalions were joined. They soon had them linked up.”
Nothing else was quite so easy as seizure of the airfield. The force now turned to secure its hold on the island by driving into the jumbled, ravine-cut country around Borgen Bay. The toll mounted rapidly.
Brigadier General Lemuel C. Shepherd, Jr., the assistant division commander, directed the assault in semi-independent command of the scattered division. He ordered an unusual scheme of attack, with an unbroken line hinging on the beachhead, swinging to attack southeastward on a front of about 1000 yards. Headquarters seemed unaware of the difficulties of terrain for this drive; trouble developed quickly. A five-man scouting party sent out on December 30 was ambushed and four of its men stabbed or clubbed to death. Three days later the push opened, with the three battalions of the Seventh and the Third Battalion, Fifth Marines, in line.
The skirmishers were stalled at a swift jungle stream, soon known as Suicide Creek, from whose banks automatic weapons fire decimated the first platoons to cross. For all of January 2, two battalions fought their way back and forth across the stream, to be driven off and return. Some men crossed the creek four times. One sergeant remembered a moment from a mortar attack by the enemy: “A kid sitting there in his foxhole. He didn’t have any head. He just had a neck with dogtags on it.” A gray-faced youngster nearby was muttering as he fired his rifle: “It don’t do any good. I got three of ’em, but it don’t do any good.”
Japanese snipers had infiltrated the line, and killed Marines at short range; and one unit which tried to wade the stream was broken, its survivors driven to hide in the weeds at the edge. From mid-stream a boy who failed to make it hung over a log, his body riddled by a score of bullets. For half an hour or more he called to his mates before he died: “Here I am. Here I am.”
The attack had stalled; the line now became U-shaped, with a pocket of the enemy holding back the center. General Rupertus, from Division, relieved the commander of the Third Battalion, Seventh Marines, and sent Puller into action once more, with orders to reorganize and drive forward the unit. Puller retained a memory of the next twenty-four hours:
“Rupertus didn’t ask my advice about relieving that commander—but he did ask me if another senior officer should be relieved. I told him no. The trouble was the same old thing—staff officers don’t know the meaning of terrain, and how it can slow down troops and cost lives.
“I went up to the front about two in the afternoon. I called the company commanders in and told them as briefly as I could what I had in mind:
“‘I’ve been sent to take over. Your commander has been relieved. I don’t intend to be relieved, you can bet on that. We’re going to attack here in the morning!’
“There were protests that the Jap bunkers could not be seen, and that they were cutting up our line. I told ’em I had the medicine for that. I ordered up some of Joe Buckley’s half-tracks, because I knew their guns could deal with the bunkers. The resistance was fairly light—but the staff orders were so foolish that we were just making sitting targets of our people. Buckley did a great job there, as he always did.
“They had orders in these battalions to guide both right and left—an order that can’t be followed well even on parade ground. Any beginner knows that you can guide left, or you can guide right or even center, but you can’t follow two leaders on either side at the same time. The line will buckle and cause gaps. We were frustrating the troops with delays to re-form the line.
“I just said, ‘Now, we’ll go forward and forget all about this guiding business. Just forget there’s anybody on the flanks. We have enough power here to drive, and we’re going to drive. Blow your way through, and think of nothing else.’”
The half-tracks, a bulldozer and tanks were up by dawn, and at 8 o’clock the push began. A bulldozer driver was shot in the mouth as he began work at Suicide Creek, but under sniper fire other volunteers manned the machine until the banks had been cut for the entry of half-tracks and tanks. Puller mounted the vehicle himself several times. The big guns soon located and destroyed Jap bunkers, built of logs just above the surface of the ground, and the way was opened. The vanguard drove several thousand yards before the end of the day. Once more Puller’s leadership had been crucial.
After the infantry had crossed the creek, hanging about the tanks and other vehicles, the whole force moved. With the line straightened, a Jap pocket was wiped out and Marines were ready for the next objective, known to the Japanese as Aogiri Ridge. Heavy fighting raged on the thickly covered slopes and there was danger of another stalemate. Puller took over another battalion on January 8—Third Battalion, Fifth Marines—when its commander, Lieutenant Colonel David McDougal and his successor, Major Joseph Skoczylas, were both wounded. Puller held the scattered troops together for the day until the new exec of the Fifth Regiment, Lew Walt, came up to take over.
Young Walt, now a lieutenant colonel, won further praise from Puller in the next day’s assault as he led his men up a fire-swept hill—dislocating a shoulder as he helped haul a 37 millimeter cannon to the top by hand. By his courageous exposure Walt inspired the troops in the Puller tradition and at nightfall, when opposing lines were only ten yards apart, the injured Walt prepared his men to meet an attack. He held fire until the Japs had charged uphill with shrill shouts. All Marine weapons, including the 37, fired at the final moment, and at dawn, after five assaults had exhausted Walt’s ammunition, he counted more than two hundred Japanese dead in his front.
General Shepherd renamed the hill that morning: Walt’s Ridge.
With the fall of the next ridge, Hill 660, Cape Gloucester was made safe. Puller inserted himself into the final fighting though he had no battalion to command.
Before the guns stopped, a staff officer from Division was spreading a new version of Puller’s magic formula for handling men in battle:
“I went up there in the heaviest of the action, when fire was flying all around us. Puller walked around the outside of the wire at Hill 660, and he stopped at every dugout to talk to some kid. He’d say, ‘How’s things going, old man?’ just as if he’d come from next door to borrow a cup of sugar.
“Those kids thought it was the greatest thing that ever happened. You’d think he had been handling out thousand-dollar bills down the line, and that there was some place here to spend ’em.”
Puller had found one demoralized boy sitting stonily in his hole, looking out with the telltale “thousand-yard stare.” He muttered over and over: “Colonel we got to get the hell out of here.”
“That’s no way to talk, old man.”
Puller led the boy a few paces to the rear and sat with him for ten minutes or so: “Look, old man, I wanta go home, too. I’m not getting any younger. Hell, I’m forty-five years old, you know that? I got a family at home. I know this dump is no good, but neither of us is going home until we lick these bastards. We’ve got to help make our folks safe back home. I’ll try to get you some hot chow up here, old man.”
The boy went back to his hole with a brighter look in his eye.
Private Dick Rowland, who became Puller’s jeep driver on the island, had a similar dose of Puller’s morale-building. The seventeen-year-old Californian, a recent high school football star, was talking with his sergeant major one day when Puller walked past: “That old man can walk you into the ground any time,” the sergeant said.
“Nobody forty-five years old can keep up with me,” Rowland said, but he learned. He later recalled: “In the next two years I found that he could outwalk me and most others. I chased him all over New Guinea and twenty-eight days on the long patrol on Cape Gloucester, and him with all that shrapnel still in his leg!”
Rowland applied for the job of the driver. “You don’t have to take it,” Puller said. “Eight others before you have been killed or wounded. I get around a little bit.”
When Rowland persisted, Puller called a war correspondent, posed for a home-town newspaper picture with the private and asked the reporter to be sure the photograph was sent to California.
Rowland cherished memories of Puller for almost twenty years: “He was a very real and good man, and made quite an impression on me at that age. He was offered dates with nurses and Red Cross women and invited to parties when we were back from the front, but he would never go. He kept a picture of his wife in a little case and looked at it often. He had the respect of every man who got to know him.”
Rowland’s first outing with Puller was a revelation. They walked out in front of the skirmish lines at Cape Gloucester: “A Jap machine gun let go toward us. I hit the deck and looked up to see him looking down at me. He told me never to do that again. He said I could scare half the men on the line, and they were spooky enough without me helping. To this day I can take a loud noise without flinching.
“He could not stand it when Colonel Frisbie would make him stay in the command post, and every chance he had, off we would go, checking the line companies.”
Puller had been puzzled over the number of men with chest and head wounds, as his casualties mounted during the drive against the enemy. Japanese marksmen were not reputed to be expert, yet they had run up a serious total. As captured enemy rifles came in he found the answer.
“No wonder we’re getting hit,” he told his officers. “Look at these rifles. One in three has a telescopic sight, and a damned good one—one devil of a lot better than ours. We’re lucky if we get one to a squad, and they’ve got all they want.”
He also found that the enemy scopes were more durable and could be used for weeks without correction, whereas American models were so delicate that they must be zeroed in afresh each day to maintain accuracy.
Lewis wrote to Virginia on January 16, saying that conditions were “very good and steadily improving,” though he had been too busy recently to write. He added:
There is no reason for you to worry, so please do not! In my own mind I have done my duty and I have personally been thanked by Rupt. for my efforts. The men and junior officers have been splendid.…
I regret to say that your Christmas picture has been completely ruined and Virginia Mac’s almost, from continual wetting; I had them on my person and the rainfall has been heavy.…
The Almighty has been good to us and I am indeed thankful.
When the fighting was over at Borgen Bay, Puller tried to boost morale with an order for an immediate movie and band concert, and bulldozers hacked away at a ravine near the command post under Hill 660. One night later Bandmaster Leon Brusiloff led the musicians who had so lately fought as the Headquarters Defense Force. They played the Grand Canyon Suite and Dvorák’s symphony From the New World. Major Henry Heming, the paymaster, saw that though most of the 4000 men were not familiar with the music, hundreds of them wept openly.
Puller stopped by Heming’s tent one night in a rare mood, and talked for hours.
“I’ll tell you, Major. There are three words that I never want used in my presence again—Kike, Wop and Harp.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, the first three good sergeants I lost on Guadalcanal were a Jew, an Italian and an Irishman, and it helped me to realize the secret of our strength—it takes all kinds, and we’ve got ’em.”
He also made an unusual confession: “The only thing we regulars are good for is to keep the guns clean for you reserves, and to lead you in battle. When war comes, there will never be enough professionals to do the job.”
With the clearing of the Cape, General Rupertus planned a patrol far across the island to the village of Gilnit on the southern coast, near the Itni River. The route lay through territory perhaps untrod by white men and required a commander wise in the ways of jungle and Japanese. Rupertus chose Puller and sent him off late in January. The Colonel left the Cape with two enlisted men in a jeep, empowered to pick up all the the men needed. He swept them up by squads, platoons and even companies. In two days he gathered 1300 men.
One of the hundreds he abducted was Corporal W. B. Winterberg, an eighteen-year-old from Ludlow, Kentucky, who belonged to the headquarters company of the First Battalion, Seventh Marines. He was sitting in his company area when the Colonel’s jeep halted.
“Resting.”
“Fall in. Come with me.”
Winterberg found himself in a rear file of the patrol as it moved off toward the interior. None of the strangers near him could explain where they were going, or why, or when they would return to their outfits.
An hour or so after the start Winterberg was astonished to see the Colonel approaching on foot: “He was running, and I don’t mean walking, and he’d come back all down that column, at least a mile and a half, to see if I was still at the rear. Imagine an old bird like that. He ran back to the front, too. We all thought he was a wonderful son of a bitch.”
Farther along the trail Puller spied an overweight officer with an artillery battery: “Hey, old man, where you going?”
“I’m hunting my C.O. I’m in Parish’s company.”
“Where is it?”
“I don’t know, sir, but I’m going back.”
“No, you’re not, Fat. You’ve just joined the Puller patrol.”
The young man was so downcast that Puller made an effort at conciliation: “Fat, it’ll do you good to get away from that jeep. I’m looking out for your own good.”
After a two-day march into the interior it became clear that Puller could not feed all these men; headquarters had been unable to keep its promise to stock him with eight days’ rations at the start. The Colonel ordered supplies brought in behind him by jeep, but some staff officer improved on the suggestion and sent out a heavily loaded ten-ton truck, instead. It bogged in the mire and a bulldozer sent to its rescue also stuck fast.
Puller called for air drops of food but the planes, B-17’s, flew so high that they spewed K-ration cases all over and through the jungle and when they came near the patrol, struck some men. Puller radioed headquarters and asked for Marine Cubs instead, and the small planes fluttered over the jungle party, each dropping three cases of rations per flight—on target.
The first satisfying food came when Major John Mather, an Australian Blackbirder, came through the jungle from Sag Sag at the head of a long column of blacks, and shared his fresh rations.
On its fifth day the patrol reached a deep stream where engineers built a stout, crude bridge, much like those Puller had used in Nicaragua and Haiti, and like those described by Caesar—tripods of poles thrust into the river, lashed together with vines, with logs across them to bear the traffic. The bridge would pass his two jeeps, but the trail beyond was so poor that Puller sent them back. He also cut the force to 389 men.
He reached the village of Agulupella on January 30, where he picked a staff. When he was choosing his intelligence officer, his exec pointed out a major sent up for the purpose by headquarters. Puller scoffed loudly, “Hell, that map hasn’t even got on a weapon. Find me another one.”
From this point he sent forward a small patrol under a brave captain, George Hunt, a newspaperman in civilian life. Hunt was ordered to the banks of the Itni River to scout the neighborhood for Japs and told to return in the evening. The night passed and Hunt did not reappear. Puller took the trail himself and within a few hours found members of the party: “Where’s Captain Hunt?”
“He crossed the river, sir.”
“Your orders were to stay on this side. What did he say?”
“He said he was going to get the Medal of Honor or go to China, sir.”
Several officers corroborated the story and Puller sent runners to find Hunt, and tell him that he was under arrest. The aggressive captain had taken off the entire vanguard of the column and in violation of orders, Puller concluded, had deliberately disregarded instructions. When Hunt returned it was at the tail of his column, the men under command of a lieutenant. Captain Hunt remained under arrest only until the return to Cape Gloucester, for Puller recognized his value and preferred no charges against him.
As the column pushed on toward Gilnit, Major Mather assured Puller that the country was free of the enemy, and that he need have no fear.
“How do you know?”
“My native boys. They’ve volunteered to cross the river, and if there was one Jap there, I know damned well they’d never stir.”
Mather took advantage of one pause at a stream to persuade Puller to remove his battle-soiled khakis so that the natives could wash them. Mather marveled at the trousers: “They literally stood up like boards with dried sweat and must have been awfully uncomfortable. It took quite a lot of argument to get them off him; he was determined not to get caught in ambush.”
Puller finally removed the trousers and donned a towel offered by Mather. Two natives washed and dried his clothing.
The patrol left Agulupella on February 6 for the hike to Gilnit; it was only twenty miles by air, but seemed hundreds on the rough trail. Puller kept the pace fast and the men were constantly wet from rain or sweat. The few Japanese they found were diseased and crippled wretches by the trail-side and were bayoneted by Marines, furnishing a grim line for Puller’s later report on the action: “The pig-sticking was fine.”
They reached Gilnit on February 11 and there was not a sign of the enemy—nor of an Army patrol they were to meet there. Puller sent a party to inspect a hill across the Itni known as Attulu and found it unoccupied. He had a puzzling message from the Army patrol: Held up before Attulu Hill. Puller sent another patrol to the hill, found no trace of the Japs, and left in disgust. He left one platoon to remain for twenty-four hours, with the message that he had returned to the Cape.
When he saw that danger was past, Puller slowed the pace and during halts used his Nicaraguan experience to find food. He had men toss grenades into streams and remove hundreds of dead and stunned fish. Within minutes natives had fish broiling on twig racks over fires; the upper racks were covered by heavy green leaves, reflecting heat and hastening the cooking.
Puller thought he had never eaten better food. “It’s a damned wonder,” he said, “that someone at home doesn’t think up something as sensible as this kind of cooking rig and put it on the market.”
Puller had liberated and returned to their villages 1700 natives, after proving that the area was free of Japanese. His report stressed some lessons of the patrols: The newer 610 radio should be used for air-ground communication, since interference by active volcanoes interrupted less powerful radios. Inland patrols needed hob-nailed shoes, and jungle medical kits. The skirmishes of the companies of Captains George Hunt and Nikolai Stevenson showed the need for 60 millimeter mortars on patrol, in addition to BAR’S and light machine guns. He warned that the building of a motor road from Cape Gloucester to Gilnit would be a major undertaking.
Puller judged that the enemy was suffering, since their equipment was inferior to that used on Guadalcanal; Japanese troops now used linoleum as a substitute for leather.
There was a final Puller admonition: “Both officers and men must be taught the absolute necessity of silence on patrol in order to surprise the enemy and not be surprised. There is no excuse for either officers or men speaking above a whisper unless engaged with the enemy.”
The patrol rode the last few miles into the camp at Cape Gloucester. As Puller jumped from a truck he was confronted by an outstretched hand—it was his acquaintance, the Protestant chaplain who had complained of Catholic inroads on New Guinea. Puller was in no mood to befriend him.
“Where’ve you been all this time?”
“Why, I’ve been here doing my best to help out.”
“You weren’t up where the fighting was. I think I’ll prefer charges against you for being absent from your regiment.”
“Colonel, I was with the medical battalion, aiding the wounded. We worked around the clock.”
“They’ve got a chaplain of their own. Your place was with the fighting men—your own battalion. You remember our little talk about Protestant boys joining the Catholics? Well, conduct like yours is one reason for it. They see those priests doing their duty and see you evading it. I can’t work up much sympathy for you.”
Puller told his officers: “In all our fighting I’ve known only a few Protestant chaplains worth their rations.” Years afterward, when he was home from the wars, Puller bearded his Episcopal bishop in Virginia: “I can’t understand why our Church sends such poorly prepared men as chaplains when fighting breaks out—they look to me like men who can’t get churches, for the most part. The Catholics pick the very best, young, virile, active and patriotic. The troops look up to them.”
The Bishop replied that the work of the Church must go on at home in wartime. Puller retorted indignantly: “How can they do that work better than with the troops who are fighting to keep the country safe? What difference does it really make, so far as the survival of America goes, about the people who stay at home, and shirk their duty?”
An exception to this charge against Episcopal chaplains, Puller always added, was Rev. Robert Olton, of All Saints Church in Richmond, a brave man in the war zones, and an exemplary Christian.
In February, 1944, Puller had a physical examination in the camp at Cape Gloucester and aside from a notation of a recent attack of malaria was found in perfect condition. On the same day, upon hearing a rumor that one-third of the veterans of Guadalcanal were to be rotated back to the States, Puller wrote General Holcomb, the Commandant, in terms which would have been appreciated by a Caesar or a Napoleon:
It is respectfully requested that my present assignment to a combat unit be extended until the downfall of the Japanese Empire.
He enclosed a copy of his physical examination report; General Rupertus scrawled his approval on the document.
In April, when the Division was nearing the end of its stay on New Britain, another decoration came through for Puller—a gold star in lieu of his fourth Navy Cross.
The Division moved back to a rest camp on Pavuvu in the Russell Islands in April, to prepare for still another invasion. The new island was a hellhole in the first weeks. Tents were pitched in bogs and the bottomless roads had to be filled by Marines in coolie brigades who hauled coral in buckets.
Hank Adams stalked into General Oliver Smith’s tent at headquarters and shouted: “Great God! Who picked this dump? More like a hog lot than a rest camp.”
Puller indicated half a dozen officers. One of them grinned: “It didn’t look quite like this from the air. We thought it was a paradise.”
The Division recouped and drew replacements here; the first of the new weapons began to appear in quantities. The Springfields had almost disappeared now, to Puller’s sorrow. He was interested in the first of a new-style flamethrower when an officer brought one by. The youngster proudly explained the work of the deadly torch and looked to Puller for approval.
“Where’s the bayonet fit on?” Puller asked.
Puller’s men rigged for him the only shower in their section of the island, a crude arrangement fed by a barrel mounted over a canvas shed. Men climbed the hill to wash up after hours of working in the black muck, and because of the long uphill carry limited themselves to a bucket or two of water. Puller kept a close watch on the shower. One afternoon as he played cribbage with Henry Heming a freshly arrived lieutenant swaggered up the hill with a towel and stiffly starched khakis over his arm. The boy officer kept the shower running far beyond the limit; when he reappeared Puller beckoned:
“Lieutenant, you enjoyed your shower?”
“Yes, sir, Colonel. Great!”
“That’s grand. Lieutenant, how do you suppose that water gets up there into that barrel?”
“I never thought of that, sir.”
“This is your chance, Lieutenant. Every drop of water passes up this hill on the backs of enlisted men. Now you grab those two cans over there and see what you can do about it, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And don’t let me see you stop for one minute until that barrel is full.”
Puller and Heming played cribbage far into the night, but the paymaster’s mind was not on the game: “That poor, silly kid labored up and down that hill all night, so far as I know. He was still going when we gave up on cribbage.”
Puller’s men had a hard routine of setting-up exercises; Henry Heming thought the Colonel worked at them harder than anyone else. But when Puller once caught the overweight banker in the rows of puffing men he shouted: “Cut it out, Heming! Get back to your tent and don’t let me catch you here again. Can’t afford to lose the paymaster, above all others.”
The veteran sergeant, Red O’Neill, remembered for years Puller’s early-morning instruction when he halted an exercise period: “Now, when this regiment goes into action, there will be platoon leaders in front of the platoons. And company commanders in front of the companies. The battalion commanders will be in front of the battalion—and your regimental commander will be in front of all.” It was not idle talk.
Puller had only lately got the promotion he wanted most—as a commander of troops. He was given a regiment, the First Marines; he began training them with characteristic thoroughness.
Oliver Smith, the assistant division commander, who came to observe Puller’s work, arrived when Lewis was off on a command post exercise, simulating an assault landing. Puller, taking only his staff and communications troops of the regiment, had crossed a bay near their camp to land on the far shore. Smith followed in search of Puller; he went in from the beach on foot and soon found the command post of the two assault battalions, where their officers awaited developments. Puller was not to be seen. “He’s up ahead,” an officer said. Smith trudged inland. When he overtook Chesty, Smith laughed: “Lewis, don’t you know that by the book you’ve got to have the regimental CP behind the battalion posts?”
“That’s not the way I operate,” Puller said. “If I’m not up here, my people will say, ‘Where the hell’s Puller?’”
When Smith had gone, Puller spoke to his staff: “I know you’ll hear ’em say I’m a damned fool for exposing myself, and running along the front lines, and that I’m just a platoon leader at heart. I go up there because that’s the only way a field commander can handle a force in combat. It was the reason Lee and Jackson exposed themselves so often in the War Between the States. I recommend it to you. It has nothing to do with bravery. I can feel fear as much as the next man. I just try to keep my mind on doing my duty.”
A young officer spoke up: “But Colonel, you expose yourself like a private, and you’re the most valuable man in the outfit.”
“No officer’s life is worth more than that of any man in his ranks,” Puller said. “He may have more effect on the fighting, but if he does his duty, so far as I can see, he must be up front to see what is actually going on with his troops. They’d find a replacement for me soon enough if I got hit. I’ve never yet seen a Marine outfit fall apart for lack of any one man.
“I don’t want you to go up under the guns just for show. It’s only the idiots and the green kids who think they’re bullet-proof. But if you don’t show some courage, your officers won’t show it either, and the kids will hang back. It’s that kind of an outfit that always has trouble.”
There were several award ceremonies on Pavuvu and Puller, decorating some of his men for valor on Cape Gloucester, left a memory with Sergeant Carl Fulgenzi of his regiment. The Colonel growled to every man as he handed out the medals: “You stick with me, old man, and you’ll get plenty of these things.”
On one of these days there was a Bronze Star for Puller, given for the action on Guadalcanal in which he was wounded. He told officers in the privacy of his tent: “They recommended me for a Silver Star for that action, and back in Corps Headquarters at Noumea some jerk reduced it to a Bronze Star. What right have those people got to put their cotton-picking hands into things like that? They didn’t see the action, and have no way on earth to judge. Wouldn’t you think they could see what it does to morale? I can stand it. I’ve got enough damned medals. But what it does to the young kids is inexcusable.”
In the same ceremony Frank Sheppard, now a first lieutenant, pinned on Puller a Purple Heart for the seven wounds of Guadalcanal.
In several of his daily letters to his wife Lewis wrote of his happiness at having direct word of her and Virginia Mac—from Colonel Taylor Selden, who had just come out from the States to be chief of staff to Rupertus in the next landing operation.
… He said that you and our daughter were lovely and the most attractive ladies that he had ever met. He did not have to tell me that about you, Dear.…
He wrote her of an offer by Rupertus to send him home by Christmas:
The time will pass and then we will be completely happy. We will have a lovely home wherever I am stationed. You and Virginia Mac will make it so.…
The war news is fine, and I pray that the good God will give us victory and lasting peace in the very near future.… Please do not worry about my health or safety, as there is absolutely no need to. I am fine with the single exception of my longing for you.
He heard from his old friend of boot camp days, Tom Pullen, their first exchange in almost a generation, and wrote in reply:
… I have served on foreign stations over eighteen years and am near to being a foreigner. When this war is finally won, I will be more than satisfied to retire and sit on the front porch of our home in Middlesex County, Virginia. I trust that our leaders will be able to arrange a lasting peace.… There is a great deal of hard work ahead of us here.
In the late summer there was a letter from his younger brother Sam, whom he had not seen for years. Sam was on Guadalcanal, the executive officer of the Fourth Marines and a lieutenant colonel; his outfit was training for the retaking of Guam.
Puller questioned an aviation sergeant who flew a Cub and when he found that the over-water distance to Guadalcanal was only fifty miles got three days’ leave and had the sergeant fly him to the big island.
Sam and Lewis had three days together—their last. Most of the time was spent in searching for the sites of the battles Lewis had fought there in ’42, for already the jungle had retaken so many of the clearings as to make the spots almost beyond recognition. The old line of his battalion on the perimeter was easiest to find, for there were still curling strands of rusting wire and the brothers stepped on many Japanese skeletons.
The silence stunned Lewis. “I can’t realize that this is the spot,” he said. “I’ve never thought of those times without hearing again all that noise, that seemed as if it would never end. It’s so quiet now that it’s all unreal.”
They talked late at night in Sam’s tent, ranging over the days of their boyhood, their hunting and fishing, and fights with village boys, to the actions of the war, and the invasions both of them faced. In his last glimpse of Sam, Lewis thought: “Lord, he’s almost white-haired. We’re getting old.”
Puller returned to Pavuvu to find a new stir in the camps. The Allied landings in France were expanding; the new B-29’s had begun to bomb Tokyo; Saipan had fallen. Whole fleets of cargo ships had brought the First Division new equipment to Pavuvu and there was word of an independent role for the Marines in a new operation. General MacArthur would follow his own southern course in island-hopping, but the Corps would stab into the Central Pacific. Puller could hardly conceive of the scope of the new Marine Corps, which he had known as a force of a mere 19,000 in his prewar days: There were now five divisions and a brigade in the Pacific and another division training In California—well over 100,000 men.
In late July, on the same day Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman were nominated for the coming elections back home, Marines landed on Guam. A few days afterward Lewis got the news: Lieutenant Colonel Sam Puller had been killed, shot through the heart by a machine gunner’s bullet. His intimates noticed a new reserve in the Colonel in these days, but it was not long before still another false report was added to the growing Puller legend: Marines whispered that Lewis, when he got word of Sam’s death, had said grimly: “Those who live by the sword must die by the sword.”
The loss of Sam had in fact touched Lewis deeply; he covered it with silence and a hurried turning to other topics when officers spoke of his brother’s death.
On Pavuvu the Division intensified its work and sweated at war games on the beaches and in the palm groves. There was a new watchword: Peleliu, the next target.
One evening General Rupertus stopped by Puller’s tent for a quiet talk, and when it was over the division commander said: “Lewie, you should make general on Peleliu. It’s tailored for you. Your performance of duty should bring you another Navy Cross, and a brigadier’s star, too.”