Marine Combat on 'Bloody Nose Ridge' in the The Pacific's Battle of Peleliu with Frank Pomroy

the japanese officer for a second or two stood there for a minute and tried to get his scabbard out and started rushing towards me and i didn't want to take a chance of missing if i tried to shoot him in the head so i shot two two bullets in his stomach we went out and you went out there and got in the line because you had to have a perfect line and what they would do the first wave would drop us off and then they had to go out and pick up the next wave and those guys were getting off of the transports they're in uh in in in boats or barges and then they'd have to climb from there into the amphibious tracks and then go over the reef and that's how they got the marines down so it was slow getting the second wave and and we were on the beach oh just being pounded pounded uh guys were getting shot up and the the uh the operator of our tank said look there's a machine gun nest just to the right of us he said we're they in this particular tank only had a little room for us we were only several of us because they had a 75 millimeter can on the front and he said i'll try to blast that out of there and uh but we couldn't move because they the whole beach was being covered by all of this i never realized until i went back to see they you could see the whole beach where the first regiment was landing and we were really being pounded and if you didn't stay in that little hole he gave us he said i can give you 30 seconds or a minute to dig your holes and get undercover he said then i gotta back up and i looked and there was the three bodies in the water and i realized that they could from their uniforms and everything one of them was a kid that he we told him to stick with us and we came out of the tank and we immediately jumped off the side you don't go down the ramp that's too much too many steps so we jump off to the side and i think that these fellows not having that went down the ramp the whole distance then made their turn but there were three of them laying dead in the body in the water their bodies and i could see this young kid he was facing uh up facing up and the others were dead but they were killed immediately and so i the tank operator said he was going to back out and i kept doing this and you could with the noise and everything they kind of understand it kept doing this and he looked back there and there were these three bodies in the water so he angled his tank and backed out otherwise he'd have gone over them but uh it you couldn't move hardly a finger or anything finally i uh oh john lacroix went to turn over and his hand up in the air and he got a bullet right through his hand and john said oh bending my hand for me i said well i'm going to try to set up a machine gun i pushed away some of the sand and so i'd have a path to fire and he got a little irritated i mean you're not going to back up my hand i said you can patch up your own i said and i said you know you can still stick here you still got one good hand and he and i had a little argument and and i said well if you want to go aboard a hospital ship the next buy the next tank comes in get aboard it i said you can join us later on but i i was hoping he'd say yeah i'll stick around but so i was left without anybody as assistant gunner so the sergeant says come on we got to get up out of here he said this artillery will kill us all we don't get up out of here so we started grabbed i had to take the whole machine gun it was an air-cooled machine gun i had to take the tri-ball a tripod and the barrel and everything and drag that and i was one of the first ones up and all of a sudden they were rushing ahead of me and then a big barrage hit on this draw several guys were killed yeah just go by him you couldn't stop and we got beyond it up near we got up near the airfield and i had i had no ammunition no belts or anything so i get up there and then bill holman a good friend of mine he said frank you need an assistant gunner i'll uh you know i'll be your assistant i said yeah so i said the first thing bill we got to get some ammunition so bill went running down the beach and not the beach along this airfield where we just stopped and there was a couple of belts there someone that got shot or something and dropped them or too heavy they brought them back so we had two belts of ammunition and we no more got settled in a very short time and uh get we're in a little ridge like this and the airfield sort of ended and then there was a drop and so our bodies were at an angle we could stick our heads up and we set the machine gun up then somebody hauled tanks and we looked out there about dozen tanks running across the airfield hell bent for election and so we were firing it there was one coming right at us and we kept firing and i was trying to knock off a track and uh didn't quite work and then i concentrated on the uh the superstructure thinking there's got to be some opening that the tank drivers and hoping to hit that didn't happen so i kept firing her at the treads while he was coming right at us so bill holman said frank why don't we roll out of the way just before the tank gets within 15 or 20 feet of us and we did we rolled out of the way a tank came right at the machine gun and and crushed it and then it got stuck down in the gully behind us and with opened up the cover of the tank and i guess they were going to try to get out as one marine had dashed up on the side and he tossed in a hand grenade and it sort of killed any occupants or inside we thought it might blow but on the outside there was a barrel tied to it like a 55 gallon drum and there was a in there you could see the the it was dead he'd get fired on and so they wanted some infantry apparently to get to the beach once they got and they were very short distance you know from where we were at the airfield they only had to go several hundred feet maybe a thousand feet and they'd be at the beach and could have raised hell but they stopped all of the tanks and there was a bazooka operator next to us i don't know who he was and he had a loader and the two of them they knocked out two tanks and we were yelling at him to fire at the tank that was coming at us and he fired at it a couple times but he missed it and so that tank got through our lines but he only he gets stuck in his gully about 30 40 feet from us and knocked that out i understand that tank was there for years it's not there now because i went down that area and anyway that calmed things down and i guess they were i didn't see them but there were a lot of infantry going to follow them started following them from the other side of the airfield and then they retreated back when the tanks were knocked out they're uh there one you might call it a banzai charge they're going to one make one desperate charge behind the tanks when the tanks still got they they pulled back all those those japanese so we stayed there that night and we thought maybe the japanese might come through and they did a few areas that we heard some shooting but it was rather overall quiet first thing in the morning they told us we had to cross the airfield and that we wouldn't be able to run because you wouldn't make it you'd be out of gas if you tried to run the whole distance so we had a sort of a fast walk or a trot and you could see all the marines you know approaching the other side and as we got close then we all did jump into uh because there were a lot of guys being killed because the japanese were firing artillery and everything else as we crossed we finally got to the other side and it sort of cleared up uh i think we were fairly close to the japanese anyway and then i guess oh 15 minutes they said well we've got up that ridge up there and that was bloody nose ridge that we were going to attack so we started through and we were running through a land mine and i could see these little yellow tops of they were like bombs or something and they must have had them so they could walk through but if you were running through you couldn't spot all these and so i was running and i was carrying the barrel of the machine gun and every once in a while i'd take a leap and i'd find myself going through the air probably you're jumping like a 10 or 12 foot jump or something and you had to push what it was that somebody stepped on a mine behind you or somebody and you sort of pushed you along i did see a marine carrying a flamethrower and they used to tell you those things wouldn't burst into flame and all of a sudden this guy went up in a ball of flame something had hit him whether it was a hot artillery shell or something uh anyway he um he went went down and finally we got across this minefield completely across it and we're approaching this bloody nose ridge and by then our ranks had thinned out between the beach and the minefield and crossing the airfield there weren't too many of us left so we tried to go up this one ridge and uh there was so much fire we had to you know back down again a couple of guys fell off because these were like sharp like this very difficult to climb and if you especially if you're carrying a part of a machine gun you're sometimes pulling yourself with one hand and hoping your leg wouldn't slip and so there were a couple of guys you could see they were five you know falling 30 40 feet down into the coral ridge and you know didn't move you'd look down see them not moving so they got killed just falling off maybe they got shot or they slipped and so we couldn't make it and so we went back down again and they decided that they wouldn't do anything until till daylight the next day so the next day we did the same thing but during the night we had guys are assaulting the ridge right the ridge right and that night um we had an attack by i don't know about a dozen japanese or something came into our line and this one uh came at me i uh he had a his uh bayonet on and he started you know moving this and i had my m1 i had picked up an m1 rifle that was beside me and uh because of the machine gun you couldn't get it set up or anything and he they he came at me and i had eight rounds in my uh m1 so i as he came at me i shot him in the stomach and he came forward and hesitated and backed up a little bit he was on a ridge just above me and then he gathered himself together again all this is going on in an instant and took off towards me so then i had another see these people had bolt action rifles and once they fired it they didn't have time to reload and everything so they they loved the bayonets anyway in close quarter anyway i shot him right through the head and as his rifle came down it went through the side of my knee and he fell on top of me because i was below blood pouring out of his head and something got in my mouth and what have you so i immediately pushed him off and i knew he was dead so i just let him lay there and i thought maybe uh might be another job but the others had killed uh the other what is several of them and a couple of we lost a couple of guys and we didn't get another attack that night so the next morning we attacked the ridges again but i went over this dead and i looked and see if he had the papers opened up his wallet there was a picture of his mother and father and a young girl which i presume was his sister and he only looked maybe about 17 or so and anyway i went to got my things together and i put the pictures back in and say well i didn't care for you know and it was did nothing of information he did have a flag in his hat japanese flag but i didn't bother with that because we were going to attack the ridges again and we did get up on top of the ridge and once we had it all of a sudden we were occasionally getting a artillery fire and we could have sworn it was coming from the ocean there might have been some navy um who was directing a destroyer out there their fire and they didn't know the people in this region they probably presume it was japanese so we were getting low in ammunition and they asked for a volunteer to get out and get some ammunition i said i'd go so i took a towel with me to put on my shoulder and went trotting down to the beach and that's when i came across chesty puller's headquarters so i sat down there and chesty puller had his shirt off and uh you know directing his his hands around his hips and a shell came everybody ran and jumped jumped down ducked he he stood up i still looked at him he had his hands like this he said what the hell are you guys doing he said that was a mile away well it was fairly close actually and he was you know he was just doing his thing of being chesty puller and i always remember then picture him no shirt bright sun and standing with his hips like that so we sat there for a little while and i said i gotta get down on the beach and i i a guy come trotting by and he had a case on his shoulder on facing this side and the uniform didn't even look like it it fit him and everybody started looking and wondering and he went a little past us he turned around to look i guess he thought he was amazed that he got biased or something and everybody hauled a and all these guys fired their rifles or whatever he must have been hit 50 times and i saw fuller still standing there with his hands like this looking the guys all rushing over to look at this dead chap and i i said well i just thought i'd get down to the beach and i got a a case of ammunition and started back and when i got there they said now we need water so i didn't feel like volunteering just after that so they told us ma manhattan get out and get some water so he went down to the beach and he came back with an empty can and we said what where's the water he said water's no good they get fuel in it and you can't drink it he said i took a taste he says like a gasoline taste and they were pouring from 55 gallon drums and you could take one of these five gallon can well he put a couple of quarts in it i guess just to prove that there was and you couldn't drink the stuff so i said marv and i said we're being hit by uh some artillery and they normally fire about three shells i said so after that first one hits and we know it's here i said get flat on your stomach because they're you know firing right on top of us so a shell landed another one and marvin didn't get flat on his stomach he was on his hands and knees and he got this shell right into his side so he yeah you could hear him yell and he rolled over and the side of i could just barely see blood and it was getting dark at that time so i said to these guys give me your bandages i said he's got a serious wound and so i took my own and i went was going to wrap him by put my hand by then i was getting dark right in my hand went right into his side and i stuffed it all and then i took his unwrapped i pushed that in there and then seven or eight other bandage i put around them and then it was pitch dark so we dragged marvin up to a bomb crater and had him below ground and then went it formed our line and oh for about an hour marvin was screaming back there and yelling he was in tremendous pain so i told these guys i said look i'm going back to uh to get marv and drag him down beside me and uh he he needed help and the only thing he could do was console him or something we had and i often thought they should have given people some kind of a medicine or even to give a another marine a shot or something i suppose they were probably afraid to let this stuff out i i don't know what they used to give them needles to you know morphine or something i suppose and uh and so i said don't anybody fire now because i'm going to go over and get them so i grabbed them by the collar and dragged them down 30 feet that i was awake and i had a little depression i was in so i put his body in and i was on top of the ground and all night long he was almost in a coma and making a lot of noise so one of the guys and i won't tell you his name but he said you know shut him up he said i'm going to come over and shoot him i said if you come over to shoot him i'm going to kill you so during the night i was holding marvin's hand all of a sudden i felt his hand relax and i put my hand up by his face and i didn't know what it was a strange feeling and i couldn't make out what it was and i shut my eyes and slept for by about an hour or so it was daylight and the first thing i did is jump up where marvin was and his face was all these shells all over his face these little things like this all chewing and it's flesh i pulled one off you could see that you'd pull the skin off and everything so i cut one of his dog tags and opened his mouth up just a little and shut it real tight because i didn't want to you know so they could identify him and lo and behold his he was missing in action and i don't know why they wouldn't have found with the one on his neck and the other one in his mouth i was alone by myself that morning and that afternoon and a plane went over an american plane and i thought gosh these guys have got carrying bombs or napalm and so i had enough strength to go out and i put in i cleared all and i made big figures about a foot wide of semper fi on the ground because i figured the japanese were on the rigid looking down wouldn't even know what that meant so next time this plane came over i saw him dip his wings and when he got over the other side he dropped some nape on whether there were japs on the other side or some target and he flew over a couple of times and it was getting dark and i had picked this spot because i had a big piece of coral that i could hide behind and i laid out i had 13 hand grenades i laid 12 of them on the rocks one on my belt left and i had a 30 caliber m1 and i had a carbine and i had a 45 pistol i i had ditched my machine gun because i couldn't carry the ammunition and a machine gun and i thought those are better weapons and it just got daylight and i could hear some chattering or talking and i woke up i was in a little bit of a sleep i guess and i could tell it was japanese that i couldn't even see them yet and they came around this big sort of piece of coral or a pathway i thought it was a dried up river or something one was pulling a machine gun car with supplies on it and the other one was either an officer or a non-commissioned officer with a samari sword dragging between his legs and looked a little comical but so i took my m1 rifle and waited to get real close and i shot the jab pulling the machine gun cart because he had a rifle on his shoulder i figured i'd better kill him first because i didn't want to get in a fire fight and i shot him in the head and he dropped dead and then the japanese officer for a second or two stood there for a minute and trying to get his scabbard out and started rushing towards me and i didn't want to take a chance of missing if i tried to shoot him in the head so i shot two two bullets in his stomach and he fell down and he's in after yelling and screaming in japanese i saw his hand he kept going like this but he couldn't raise his arm up i realized he had a hand grenade in his hand so i had no water and i had no food but i had plenty of ammunition so i thought well after he dies i'll uh i'll go out and get the the canteen off the fellow shot in the head because i didn't want to bother him because he had a hand grenade so he died within an hour or so and stopped screaming [Music]

Channel: American Veterans Center

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Id: ciN4j1RUFkw

Length: 25min 0sec (1500 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 21 2021