Word: beaching
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...year-old crewman on the boat had been shot through the head, and had murmured: "I think I'm hit, will you look?" Now he lay on the beach. A Jap ran out of a coconut-log blockhouse into which Marines were tossing dynamite. As he emerged a Marine flamethrower engulfed him. The Jap flared like a piece of celluloid. He died before the bullets in his cartridge belt finished exploding 60 seconds later...
...handsome young Marine walked briskly toward Major Crowe's headquarters, grinning in greeting to a pal. There was a shot. The Marine spun around, fell to the beach dead. He had been shot through the temple. A Jap sniper had waited since early morning for just such a shot at a range of less than ten yards...
...later a voice called: "Major, send somebody to help me! The son-of-a-bitch got me." Two men crawled over the retaining wall, dragged back a Marine shot through the knee. Then a mortar man 75 yards down the beach rose to a kneeling position, tumbled with a sniper's bullet through his back. The wounded man's companion popped up to help, got a bullet through the heart...
...until he finds the mucker that shot him. He's still out there pokin' his rifle in all the holes and shootin' like hell and gettin' shot at a million times a minute." At great risk from shore batteries, destroyers ran close to the beach, opened up on targets as small as one Jap sniper or one pillbox mound. It was precision firing, the shells often landing less than 50 yards from the Marines. If the high explosives did not wreck many of the fortifications, they did strip away most of the islands' palm fronds...
Marines. Not every Corpsman was a natural hero: some quivered and hugged the beach, but most-those who feared and those who disdained death-went forward into the Jap fire...