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By Al Zdon
When Company K of the Third Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, First Marine Division, known by the parlance of the Corps as K-3-5, stepped ashore at New Britain in 1944, there were
235 men.
When that same company was assigned duty in China at the end of the war, there were 19 Marines from that original group that went ashore.
Jim Anderson of Cameron, Wisconsin, was one of
those 19.
Anderson was born in 1925, and grew up in the rural town of Dallas, Wisconsin. He attended high school at Barron, and in those days if a student was doing well he was allowed to enlist in
the military with the assurance that he would still get his diploma.
And so, at age 17, Jim Anderson joined the Marine Corps on March 9, 1943. Several months later, his diploma was sent to his parents.
Basic training was in San Diego, followed immediately by infantry training at nearby Camp Elliot. In October, he went on board the troop transport Rochambeau and was moved to New Caledonia.
"I
remember that you had to stand in the chow line three fourths of the time aboard ship. And I remember the powdered eggs that stunk. I had to put a lot of ketchup on them to camouflage the smell."
After a brief time at New Caledonia, an Australian ship took them to New Guinea. "Now we were having mutton twice a day."
K Company got to New Guinea after the main action was over. "I never fired a
shot. We went up in the hills looking for the Japanese, but we never found any."
They stayed on New Guinea for a month and then boarded an LST (Landing Ship – Tanks), a means of transportation that
was to become common to the Marines in the following months.
Anderson said he was amazed at how the LSTs could get right up on shore. The large landing ships would drop anchor a half mile out and
then run onto the shore, disgorging their loads of tanks and troops, and then use the anchor rope to pull itself back into deeper water.
Company K arrived at Cape Gloucester, New Britain, about three
or four days after d-day. "It was very, very, heavy, dense jungle. And it would rain every afternoon. Bulldozer tanks would have to cut roads into the jungle."
The company arrived just after Christmas
of 1943. The Marines were trying to take a Japanese airfield so the U.S. forces could use it to bomb the Japanese stronghold at Rabaul on the other side of the large island. New Britain is northwest of
New Guinea and Australia.
The Marines fought their way inland and Anderson's company encountered only the thick jungle the first day. "The first night I dug in with my buddy. Well, you couldn't
actually make a hole in the ground, but we got behind a big tree. One of us would stay awake while the other slept. You always guessed that you were getting the short end of it because nobody had a
watch. It rained so much that watches wouldn't last."
The two could hear noises in the jungle, but they usually were caused by enormous land crabs or wild pigs. The way to solve the problem was by
throwing a hand grenade at it.
The second day, the Marines started to encounter some fire, but Anderson said he never saw the enemy. The company was approaching Suicide Creek, a few miles inland.
"I was the second scout. The first scout was out in front of me. All of a sudden there was a burst of machine gun fire, and down he went. I crawled up to him, but I could see he'd been hit three or four
times, and he was dead. They say you learn more in one week of combat than in a year of training, and if I had more experience I would have known not to stand up, but I did."
Anderson immediately took
a bullet in his left side, ricocheting off his cartridge belt.
"It knocked me over. I managed to drag myself out of there, and I got back a ways. I was practically passed out, I suppose from the
shock. And then the Japs threw a mortar in there and it filled my left leg with shrapnel."
He lay there about 20 minutes before a couple of Marines dragged him out. He was taken on a stretcher back to
the battalion aid station where his wounds were stabilized. "They tied off my leg. That was the worst of my problems at that point."
An amphibious tractor, or amtrac, took him back to the beach where
he was transported on an LST back to New Guinea to an Army hospital.
"It was a very good hospital, built out of tents. What I didn't expect was that there were female nurses. I was all covered with
mud and blood, and she cut all my clothes off me and gave me a bath. I was kind of embarrassed."
Doctors operated on Anderson's leg and took out the larger pieces. They left the wound open, hoping
other pieces of shrapnel would work their way out as time went by. A few days later, they operated on his stomach and took out the bullet that was lodged there.
A month later, Anderson was sent back
to his unit on New Britain. "It was pretty amazing that I was sent back to my company. They often put wounded men in casual companies, and they ended up as replacements here and there."
The wound was
not healing well, and Anderson could hardly leave his cot. One of his comrades would bring his food to his tent each day. The pain was getting worse. Finally they sent him back to the hospital.
"I
think later in the war, they would have just sent me back to the States, but at this time they needed bodies over there."
This time at the hospital, they closed up the leg wound with stitches, and
after a few weeks discharged him again. Actually, they just let him walk out of the door of the hospital.
"I was thinking I could go to Australia for a few months and enjoy myself, but the more I
thought about it, I knew I couldn't leave my buddies."
Anderson had to walk down to the dock and make his own arrangements to find a ship back to New Britain. The final humiliation came when he did
arrive back at K-3-5 in an Army uniform and had to endure the ribbing of his friends.
Not long after, the First Marine Division was send to Pavuvu, a rest camp near Guadalcanal. The camp was located
at the site of a coconut plantation. Anderson was assigned to light duty as his leg healed. The men were allowed about six cans of beer a week as part of their ration. Officers got twice that much.
The troops trained and relaxed through June and July. There had been about 100 casualties and replacements had to be worked into the force. In August they climbed back aboard an LST for a new adventure.
"They didn't tell us where we were going until we were on board ship. Then they told us we were going to Peleliu, an island about 600 miles east of the Philippines."
The trip took five weeks on
the slow boat. "I never got seasick. I'd kind of get headaches and nausea for a few days and then I was okay."
The officers tried to keep the men fit by conducting exercises, but with the decks full
of equipment and the necessity to stand in line for chow all day, the exercise regimen was a little lax. Men would pass the rest of their time by reading, usually Reader's Digest or some such fare, or by
playing cards.
When it was time to hit the beach at Peleliu, they told the men that they expected this to be a 72-hour mission. The company was delivered to the beach on an amtrac that drove right up
on the sand.
"We jumped over the side and were immediately hit by machine gun fire. My first thought on the island was I thought I had her here. I didn't see how anybody could live through what was
happening on that beach. It was indescribable. To this day, I can't find words to describe it."
K Company was one of the first units ashore in the 115 degree heat. "They told us on the ship that the
beach was a good place to get killed. We believed that, and we headed inland right away."
Anderson was still gimpy from his leg wound, and so, in the wisdom of the military, they made him a runner.
His job was to stay near the company commander and do his bidding. Radio communication was very poor, and messages often were delivered by runners.
By 11 a.m. that morning, they had crossed the
airport on the lowland near the beachhead. "Infantrymen usually don't have much fun in combat, but that day we had some fun. We formed up in a straight line and started cutting loose at the jungle at the
edge of the strip. We just wanted to keep the Japs pinned down. I burned up 20 or 30 rounds in a hurry."
That night they dug in. "The island was all coral so you couldn't dig a hole. You just piled
rocks around you."
His most memorable moment on Peleliu came in the early fighting. "We had run up against a pill box with a machine gun, and the commander told me to go back and get a couple of tanks
to come up.
"I was going down the path, and I turned a corner and there was a Jap soldier. I had my rifle in my hand, and pulled up and fired without getting it to my shoulder."
The shot went
wild, and the enemy soldier did bring his rifle to his shoulder and fired. "I can still see the flame coming out of the gun barrel. But the shock of me shooting first must have unnerved him because he
missed. He had a bolt action, and I had a semi-automatic. He was working his bolt when I got my rifle up to my shoulder and fired.
"That was the closest call I ever had."
K Company worked its way
down the western part of the island, and then jumped aboard some tanks and roared all the way to the northern tip of Peleliu. From there they boarded a little fleet of amtracs and were transported across
some open water to Ngesebus Island.
They spent two days on the island clearing out a small pocket of Japanese soldiers, and then headed back to Peleliu. The outer portions of the island had been
taken, but the Japanese were holed up in caves and fortifications throughout the central highlands of the island. Names like Bloody Nose Ridge, the Five Brothers and the Five Sisters became geographic
parts of Marine lore.
"At night we would stay in our positions. You knew if you moved, you'd probably get shot at by our own troops. But the Japs would move at night. And they'd bring in replacements
at night. During the day, we had air power and they couldn't move."
Anderson said Peleliu was regarded as the shortest bombing run in the war. The Corsairs and other planes would take off from the
airstrip, circle out to sea, and then bomb the high ground above the airport. The total distance from airstrip to bomb target was sometimes less than a 1,000 yards. The planes wouldn't even retract their
landing gear during the runs.
The Marines would be brought their chow every night along with hand grenades and other ammunition. "The hand grenades came in a little box with tape on it, and we'd take
the tape off to hold down the safety pin so there would be no accidents." The men would carry two or three grenades on their back pack straps, and a few more in the packs.
The constant fighting and
lack of sleep was hard on the Marines. "We were extremely tired. I was as low as I could get. I could hardly put one foot in front of the other. Plus, the place was full of dead Japanese. We couldn't
smell it ourselves by that time, but the pilots told us they could smell it when they were a mile away from the island."
The worst thing that happened came right before 3-5-K was to be relieved. "We
had an outstanding commanding officer, Capt. Andrew Haldane. We were out looking over an area for K to move into when the colonel peeked over a rock. He was shot right through the forehead. It was a
terrible, terrible, terrible thing. It really affected our company. Old, tough veterans just broke down and bawled. To go that long, and then finally get killed…"
About two-thirds of K Company was
killed or wounded when it was relieved after 44 days on the front lines. It was transported back to Pavuvu at the end of October 1944 to recuperate and get another infusion of replacements.
In
February, 1945, the company again boarded an LST, and, once at sea, they were told their destination was Okinawa. "We were told it was a Japanese home island. We knew it would be tough, but it was a
bigger island and we didn't think the fighting would be as tough as on the beach."
That turned out to be true. The Marines landed without a shot being fired. It was Anderson's fourth landing where he
never got his feet wet.
The Marines advanced in company formation up the road, and the only bad news was when a grenade fell off somebody's strap and wounded four soldiers. Okinawa was an agricultural
island and the men were able to live off the land, digging up sweet potatoes and onions as they advanced.
The First Marines were assigned the center of the island, and the fighting soon became
intense. "We'd be on one ridge. At 6 a.m., we'd call in the artillery on the next ridge, and after about two hours of shelling, they'd stop and we'd move on to take that ridge. Sometimes we couldn't, and
we'd have to try again."
One day the Marines came up against a pill box with a machine gun in it. "We had an awful gun battle for about a half an hour. They'd shoot out of the hole and we'd shoot into
it. We could hear them talking in there. Finally, Ted Barrow, who was a cousin of Clyde Barrow of Bonnie and Clyde fame, climbed on top of the bunker with his Thompson. We threw hand grenades into the
pill box, and they all came out running. Ted stood upright on top and cut them all down."
Anderson got a bayonet and scabbard for souvenirs from the incident, and he still has them.
At one
point, "Our artillery was coming awfully close to our position one night. We couldn't move back because you just didn't move at night. You'd get shot. The commander came to me and said, 'Andy, do you
think you could get back to that artillery and have them stop?' I said, 'I'll give it whirl, sir.'
"I had a very rough time getting to the rear, getting shot at by our own men and everything else."
When he finally got there, he found the officer in charge of the artillery and told him the situation. The officer told him he was full of baloney.
"I had to use strong language. I told him if he
kept shooting, somebody was going to get killed. It's not easy for a corporal to talk that way to a lieutenant, but I really laced it to him." The officer finally decided to halt the bombardment.
For
this effort, and for other incidents of extraordinary bravery, Anderson was awarded the Bronze Star.
The fighting went on through April, May, June, July and August. The rains came, and the trucks
couldn't get through to bring in supplies. The men would put large plastic sheets out to mark their position. Navy dive bombers would come over and strafe on one side of the sheets and drop food and ammo
on the other side.
The Marines got to the south side of the island just a week before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
"I was in a tent camp on Okinawa when they announced on the loud
speaker that Japan had surrendered. All the guys run out into the street and were shooting their M-1s into the air. There was screaming, hollering, carrying on. It was really something, a wild
celebration. The next day they made us turn in all our ammunition."
Okinawa was also tough on K-3-5. By August, the 220 men had been reduced to about 110. Some of the men had enough points by then to
go home, but Corporal Anderson, who was one of 19 survivors of the company that landed on New Guinea, did not.
After a short rest, the company was again put on LSTs and this time shipped to China
where their duty was to disarm the Japanese soldiers and send them back to their homeland. It was pleasant duty for the Marines after the past year or so. The men received a huge back pay, and prices
were very cheap in China for a time.
In January 1946, Anderson finally built up enough points, and took a train to the coast where he caught a transport to America. He was discharged at Great Lakes,
near Chicago.
He married Beverly in 1948, and the two had three children. Anderson worked as a mechanic for about 20 years and then became the postmaster at Colfax, Wisconsin, for the next 21 years.
Beverly and Jim live on the outskirts of Cameron and volunteer during the summer at the nearby Barron County historical complex.
Anderson's story has a bookend. During the 1990s, he became curious
about a Japanese battle flag he had taken off a dead Japanese soldier on Okinawa. He found somebody who could translate, and he got the name of the soldier who had died. Through the Japanese welfare
agency, he was able to track down the man's son, Isao Kito, who lived in Tokyo.
He wrote Kito a letter about the flag. The son replied and told him he had been conceived while his father was home on
leave, and that he had never known his father. He also wrote, "I most humbly request that you return my father's flag."
"I couldn't think of any reason to keep it, and so I mailed it to him. He wrote
back and said: 'I came home from work and there was a package from America on my kitchen table. I broke down and cried because I knew my father had touched that flag.'"
The Andersons and the Kitos
still exchange Christmas greetings every year.
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