By BILL McKINNEY
Morning News staff reporter
Zig-zagging hundreds of yards through dark waters and over the rough coral shelf at Peleliu, U.S. Marine Cpl. Joe Guth and his buddies plunged headlong toward a beach ""lit with a
million sparks of light.''
They landed just before dawn on Sept. 15, 1944, hoping the cover of darkness would impede Japanese firepower that hadn't been eliminated by three days of naval bombardment.
They didn't
realize how well entrenched the 11,000 Japanese troops had become during their period of occupation and could only grimly accept the coordinated enemy artillery that slashed into the first wave of landing craft.
""I remember the landing craft going around a battlewagon and a bunch of sailors up on deck hollering down at us. One guy yelled, "So long, you stinking Marines. You're going to get it now.
""Our top sergeant turned and gave the guy the finger.''
It made little sense but it was something the survivors could laugh over later, much later. Even in the face of death, the always bubbling
rivalry between Navy and Marines could find a way to surface.
""We got dumped at the end of the shelf, probably 300 or 400 yards from the beach, and had to wade in, first with the water halfway between our
knees and our hips and then gradually through ankle deep water.
""What struck me was that there was no place to hide. You couldn't fall forward without risking drowning. At times it was darker
than anyplace I'd ever been. It was raining. There wasn't any moon. You just had to keep going in.''
Guth, who had been an all-county football player with Union City High School before joining the
Marines, employed a nifty bit of broken-field running in hopes of dodging the deadly enemy fire.
Tracer bullets and flares only seemed to intensify the blackness around him. Mortar explosions vibrated the coral
shelf beneath his feat. He heard enemy rounds slapping the water. But he made it to shore in one piece.
He made it to Beach Orange One, his regiment's first objective.
Three regiments of the First Marine
Division, the principal assault troops, took part in the invasion, all three regiments attacking abreast.
Guth was a scout with the Second Battalion of the 11th Marines, an artillery battalion attached to the Fifth
Marines Regiment in the center. According to later accounts, it was the only regiment to land ""in a form approaching good shape.''
Only the Fifth Marines achieved their first day objective:
overrunning the Japanese airfield directly in front of them on Peleliu. They took up positions on the opposite side of the field as night fell and, before long, all hell broke loose as the Japanese
counter-attacked.
""They tried to push us back into the sea,'' Guth said. ""They came in so close you could hear them talking in Japanese. Our top sergeant called for a flare and when
it went off we could see them in front of us. We jumped them. It was the first and only time I'd ever killed anyone with a bayonet.''
For Guth, the days on Peleliu ran together. He knows he must have
slept sometime between the landing and Oct. 17 when his unit left the island and the mopping up operations to others. He just can't remember shutting his eyes.
He was battle-hardened. He had fought in the
long and bloody struggle for Guadalcanal. He had invaded Cape Gloucester, New Britain. He'd hit the beaches at the Iboki Plantation in New Guinea.
It was at Iboki that he'd seen his unit's only doctor, a
Navy officer, die quickly and horribly.
""We could hear the mortars coming through the trees and I dived into a shallow depression filled with water. The doctor was about 25 yards behind me. I
looked back and the mortar hit between his legs and he just disintegrated.''
Peleliu was a different animal. As bad as the fighting at Guadalcanal had been, Guth said, ""At least you could dig a
foxhole there.'' Peleliu was solid coral and the most a Marine could hope for was a shell hole.
At Guadalcanal, the bulk of the action was defensive, holding what they took against repeated Japanese attacks.
At Peleliu the Marines were always on the attack, against an enemy dug into caves in solid cliffs. Some of the caves had thick metal doors.
""A machine gunner would train on a cave opening to keep
them pinned down and another guy would climb up with a satchel charge, hoping the ricocheting machine gun bullets didn't get him. About the only way you could eliminate the caves were with strong satchel charges.''
For him, Peleliu was, ""the shortest and probably the most gruesome battle of the war.''
Guth served as a scout with a small, five-man artillery observation team. He was the only person on the team
who made it through the war without being killed or wounded.
He doesn't understand it, himself, only that his life was obviously in someone else's hands.
Asked about fear, Guth said fear was always present but it
changed as the fighting and landings continued. By the time he landed at Peleliu, he said, he was still scared but had steeled himself to what was happening around him.
""I got to thinking, "If this is
all there is then why worry about it? Why not go out in a blaze of glory?'
""Sometimes it seemed that death was the only way it was ever going to end, the only way out.''
