Brutal Combat on Peleliu, with WWII Marine Rifleman Bill Finnegan (Pt. 2)

coil canal was a walk in the park compared to polo [Music] i think we were all in a state of shock because we were breaking the one of the first rules of amphibious landings which is get off the beach we were tied down on that beach for uh an hour or two and they killed hundreds of people on the beach so when we finally got our act together and got off the beach we advanced towards the ridges where they were really holed up and the battle took well my regiment the first was pretty well wiped out the first six days they were relieved after six days and a fifth and seventh regiment stuck around for another month trying to do what they could to clear the island but pelolu was fortified up to the neck i had i had rifle grenades and i could see i could see they were firing at us from a certain cave because it was covered with a cargo net and i could see the net jump when they fired so i fired a couple of rifle grenades in there and quieted the thing down and nobody was moving on the beach so there was one more one more pill box left and i used a rifle grenades in there it was also a trench full on the beach of japanese that nobody saw and knew and all of a sudden the biggest i ever saw jumped out of this trench and he had fixed bayonets and he was looking right at me and i was going to jump up and try to stop him but about i don't know how many people fired over my head and that bay that slid in the sand about four feet from my nose so uh it was an interesting experience on the beach and it didn't get any better from there we advanced towards the ridges it was rocky scrubby terrain and we had so many casualties i kept finding myself alone and most of my squad or fire team was casualties killed or wounded so i found myself alone and all of a sudden boom so this big flash i found myself on my face and i was feeling myself for all the little nicks and scratches and everything i had but i thought i'd better get up and see who was shooting at me looked over and there's our own people standing here on a road by a tank looking over in my direction so i knew it was them so i gave him that and i walked over to him and i call them recruits something like that i i told the japanese were that way up in the ridges and if you shoot at me again i'm gonna shoot back we were breaking as i said every rule of amphibious landing on that beach by staying there could be because they were picking us off from the ridges with everything they had so i had a couple of rifle grenades and i used them on those pill boxes and they worked because every grenade that was thrown in would come back so a rifle grenade goes off on contacts and it worked so that helped get us off the beach we took the bridge the second the second day and the japanese would pop out from here and there it hit it before we knew it and after we took the ridge bloody nose ridge i always settled i settled down with my firemate fire teammate for the night and we couldn't dig holes so we just piled rocks around ourselves we were on what they call the military crest which is down below the top of the ridge because they didn't want us up on the top for what reason i don't know but we couldn't see anybody coming from where we were and we were it was the middle of the night i was dozing and all of a sudden boom boom boom there's hand grenades going off all around us my fire team mate says i'm dead and so i called for a corpsman and the platoon sergeant and we had to go we take the top of the ridge and i told him to get me some hand grenades which she did and we got up a few of us back up to the top of the ridge threw hand grenades over the top ran up shot a few and we had the top of the ridge back which we should never have left in the first place and that was the way it went the first night on bloody ridge japanese and palu were as fanatic as every place else we fought them and they would pop out at night mostly because during the day we could see them and they hid us all over the place at night and [Music] they take so many casualties every time and uh the first night on polo i wound up in a big shell hole or i don't know whatever kind of hole it was but i found some dripping water cool dripping water and i congratulated myself for doing it because i filled up all my canteens and a couple of uh shell casings that held water and i sipped cool water all night because the next day everybody was practically dying of thirst because somebody had goofed and not cleaned out the fuel cans that water was then used in so just another little goof that helps along the way uh we we had to clean out some caves and took a lot of grenades and uh it we never knew if we got anybody in there but uh we'd use explosives and make sure the cave was sealed up [Music] the first night we hadn't gotten to the ridges yet and we could look up and hear what sounded like machinery squeaking in and see if they were closing fortified door metal doors and that was waiting for us because every time they could roll their artillery out on tracks and fire down on us and then roll it back close the door and they're sealed up and they they took a heavy toll on us that first night before we took the ridge because they were looking right down our strokes we got relieved they took us out of action and i didn't have anybody left in my fire team so that's how long the regiment lasted we we were relieved we were taken out of combat well i myself i was evacuated and to a hospital ship and they dumped us at a navy base in manus manus island in the admiralty islands that was another sidebar if you wanted chow you had to get up at six o'clock in the morning and wait i'd go down a line it took about two plus hours to get show the seabees were smart they were seabees were making a good buck selling pornographic literature etc but we went back to pabu from manus in the admiralties they tried to put us on a working party and we had a sit-down strike and the commander said get him the hell out of here so so they took us back to palmu and there we were again on boo-boo but already our time was updated started the [Music] credit system of time overseas and time in combat etc that allowed you the minutes or whatever to get go home and we discovered we were well over that the limit and what do you know one day came the us billy mitchell transport i remember the name because we were so happy to board her and we got on a billy mitchell and about a month and a half later we're pulling it to san diego the port the dolphins look like they were happy to see us we uh pulled into san diego and got processed i had a japanese saber that i taken from a japanese nco on top of bloody nose bridge still have it but uh they took that away from me while i was getting processed at san diego because somebody would have stolen it for sure but it didn't take too long to process out of san diego and we're on our way home first leave i ever had [Music] you

Channel: American Veterans Center

Views: 18,425

Rating: 4.9425588 out of 5

Keywords: AVC, American Veterans Center, veteran, veterans, history, army, navy, air force, marines, coast guard, military, navy seal

Id: 8JCyJX-gg0M

Length: 15min 34sec (934 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021