Summary:

William Edwards journal

When I joined the marines I had no idea that it was going to be this difficult. By the time we got off the bus we were already getting yelled at. But after the first two weeks it started to get easier, The running slowed down along with the yelling now we mostly just shoot and practice survival. We asked why we need these skills and are drill sergeant told us that we would be going into the jungles of the islands in the pacific. He said that those island’s
Have hundreds of ways to get killed like poisonous plants, dangerous animals the weather and the bugs. So we trained for 14 weeks and finally we go deployed. The told us we would be heading into a terrible island in the middle of nowhere. To take a small airfield, we were never told it was going to be bad. They just told us that it would only take a day to push through the small island. But for some reason I thought they were lying, and I was right.
They woke us up told us we would be sending the boats forward to scout and that we would need to be ready by 0700. Then the alarm went off the japs sent bombers and kamikaze pilots to try and take us out. But they had no idea that we had air support on the aircraft carrier 2 clicks behind us. The ship captain sent a alert to the carrier and they sent 13 planes right away. They mad all of us come up and watch the japs get ambushed as they came at us. The 13 planes demolished the 20 jap bombers and all of the kamikazes retreated back to the airstrip. We are told that we would be attacking now so we began to arm up i had my rifle until my srg came by telling me that i'm now the squads radio man. That means that now i'm calling in bombing runs from the planes then artillery from the ships. So we got ready to load up on the higgins boats. Aka landing boats, we began to load up when our ships just started