The Old Breed

Chapter 3

Solomon Sea

November 3rd, 1943

As it turned out, our destination turned out not to be, in fact, the war. Instead, after a big goodbye to the people of Melbourne, who I'd never even gotten the chance to meet, by a parade down main street to the port, we were loaded onto shabby-looking Liberty ships, which were hastily built cargo ships, made to replace the large losses we had been taking from U-boats in the Atlantic, that had now been turned into transports. On ours, every little thing seemed to creak and groan in despair, from the masts rising high into the sky to the metal floor beneath our feet. The interior of the vessel wasn't any better. Our quarters were located in dark, stuffy, empty cargo holds where rows of metal racks had been hastily built. Everything seemed hastily done. Pathetically. The galleys, we soon found out, were bare wooden structures that were ill equipped for a few hundred hungry Marines. The latrines were located starboard aft in pathetic wooden sheds. The contents of the latrines were piped directly over the side. Even the veterans used to awful conditions on Guadalcanal let out streams of curses at the sights that greeted us on board.

The first night, as we slowly slipped away from Melbourne and Australia, we received a broadcast from Tokyo Rose, a famous Jap female radio host who tried to scare us with Jap propaganda and surprisingly, and scarily, accurate reports on our troop movements. Everyone listened to her though, because between her rants on our forthcoming destruction she played some of the top American musical hits of the last few decades, which was meant to make us lose morale and become homesick, but usually did the opposite, cheering men up. That first night, though, she had bid the 1st Marine Division bon voyage - somehow knowing we were leaving Melbourne that day for wherever the Navy was taking us - and told us that Jap subs were waiting for us. A lot of people had laughed it off then, but throughout the first few days, we'd watch twin-engine Australian anti-submarine Beaufighters - stubby, ugly looking bombers - fly missions off of our convoy. Obviously the threat for submarines had been real. One man on our ship had refused to move from beside one of the life boats, even going so far as laying his bedroll beside it and sleeping there, which the sailors mocked and riddled him for, the Marine stating that the subs really were coming and that we would all be sunk. While I tried to focus on other things, I always tried to make sure I was somewhere easily accessible to the top deck and that there were life jackets near by. By a few days in though, I had given up on this, deciding that if we were going to get hit by a sub, I'd probably die no matter what I did to prevent it.

We did receive quite a scare at one point in the middle of one of the long, hot nights in the hold, when one of the Australian planes dropped a depth charge just out beyond the convoy, close by. Since the cargo holds were under the waterline, the explosion rattled the bulkheads and hull, waking up and scaring the bejesus out of everyone. We thought we'd been torpedoed. Needless to say, I didn't get a very good night's rest after that episode.

Eventually we arrived at our destination, a large island surrounded by clusters of other, smaller ones. Goodenough Island. What a name. The island was large, shaped like a fat porkchop, a mountain, its name to long and confusing to pronounce, rising over two and a half thousand meters above sea level. It dominated the island and ocean around it. It had been our first sign of land. The rest of the island was made up of flat land covered in palm trees and other tropical vegetation before rising into steep, jungle covered ridges which lead up to the summit of the mountain. Smaller islands littered the sea around the big island, small and picturesque, covered by the same tropical vegetation as Goodenough Island, without any of the height. The nature of the smaller islands meant that the ships in the convoy had to line up single file to pass between them. We got lucky being one of the first ships through. One of the Liberty ships behind us ran aground forcing the other ships to stop and help, or just be stuck behind the commotion. The attempts at freeing the ship ended at nightfall when the Navy, afraid of being spotted by Jap planes, turned off the spotlights and instead transported the Marines off of the immobile ship to the island.