I began looking for that cloud of carrier planes to cover the landing. Nothing stirring, but later — a couple of hours after the first landing — one Navy dive-bomber appeared and flew up and down the beach a few times. Of course, it turned out that the Japanese navy was on its way and our warships and carriers had to go out to sea to meet it. The great break for us was that the Japs were asleep at the switch and did not get any of their planes over us in force until 24 hours or more after we were ashore.
[...]
The beach here was ideal for such operations — that was why it was chosen — and we scarcely had to wet our knees going ashore.
[...]
The naval shelling had knocked out the few pillboxes and light weapon emplacements. Quite a few dead Japanese and pieces of Jap were laying around. Did not annoy us, as they were still fresh.
[...]
I had been so worried about keeping my gang together and in control that I had not had time to be scared.
[...]
I relaxed and devoted a few minutes to locating and cutting open green coconuts for drinking purposes. There were enough knocked-down trees to make this easy, and I like coconut milk to drink, as I can get away with it. Most men get a physic effect if they take much of it. The rule was to drink the milk of green coconuts and eat the meat of ripe ones, but my constitution permitted me to make up my own rules.
I had bought a sheath knife from one of the sailors on the way up, and it was to be my constant companion for the rest of my days in the Pacific. A short-bladed affair, of poor steel (I used a file to sharpen it), it had a handle so heavy it was a fair weapon should I ever get that close. Made a wonderful throwing knife. I could throw fairly straight and always used all my strength, in order to be sure of results. I never bothered about it landing point-on — the way I threw, it was effective no matter how it connected. In fact, I preferred it to land butt first in practice, as when I sank the blade three inches or so into a tree it was a lot of work to get it out.
[...]
A couple of the men had trench-knives and two had machetes. All of us were supposed to have these but we did not get them until we later found stocks on the beach and equipped ourselves. Machetes were the most important tool we could get hold of, as with them we could cut bamboo and wood for shelters and shoring up holes. Since none of us had intrenching tools, we had begged 10 or 12 regular full-sized shovels from the armored outfit and the crew of the LSM, for digging-in purposes. Bill Mauldin could undoubtedly have done justice to the picture of some of my characters coming through the water with a rifle in one hand and a full-grown engineer’s shovel in the other. It wasn’t funny then, though, and every guy that came past eyed those tools enviously. We guarded them. Digging tools meant life, more than once.
Nothing interfered with the landing and the main body of the supporting fighting troops began to come in by landing barge from the transports. They would charge off the ramps in the best newsreel manner and find us in front of them, taking life easy on the sand. We would point the right way and tell them the line was over there, three or four minutes’ fast walk, if they wanted to walk fast, and that things were going smooth as silk, etc. My crew envied them and they envied my crew — my gang wanted to get away from the exposed beach and the troopers did not want to move inland against Jap ambushes.
[...]
I was annexed by the beach commander as a messenger, helper and conversationalist.
[...]
I ended up without even a slit trench to park in, so wound a poncho around myself and parked beside a fallen tree. Sure enough, just after dark they started in — weeooweeooweeoo-PLOCK! But the foolish Nips threw everything over the shoreline into the bay, trying to hit the ships anchored there. Duds would have caused casualties on the shore, the way we were piled up. Everything went over, but most of that night I kept waiting for them to shorten the range. Got disgusted about midnight and went to sleep anyway.
I thought I would order one or two copies of Dunlap’s book as gifts. Nope. Hardcover, $150 on Amazon. Snagged myself an $8.95 Kindle version.