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 opening fire of the japanese positions.it was constant fire until our light to go whent green and we deployed we had men puking everywhere then we began to have artillery fire on us. Bombs where dropping left and right one was so close that it made everyone's ears ring so badly we could hear a goddamn thing. Then the boat driver screams “30 seconds, god be with ya”. We didn't know whether the japs bunkers on the beach where even occupied because the air force bombed them for 8 hours straight. So we got ready and the gat on the front of the boat dropped and 5 guys immediately dropped dead from machine gun fire. I jumped out of the side of the boat into the water but I didn't realize that the water was so deep we all swam 15 feet before we could walk. It was even harder with bullets whizzing past and bombs exploding right next to us. We finally made it to the beach my srg said that we needed to get to the treeline.The air force bombed little bunkers in front  for us to hide in so that's where we needed to go. So we did we would wait for the machine guns to reload then we would move. By the time we got to the bunkers we had already lost 40 men. But we got there and the japs had men hiding in there so we decided just to bomb the bunkers and when the smoke makes it hard for the japs beyond the bunkers to see we would charge them and take the second row of bunkers. So they threw the smoke on top of one of the bunkers and the bombers just completely flattened the area and as soon as the smoke came up we charged they had no idea that we were coming. Until we were right on top of them we had our bayonets on and we jumped into the trenches. I was first one in they weren't there, but that's what they wanted us to think they waited till we were in the trenches and they charged. We were outnumbered 15 to 1 and just as they got to us our tankes came. Ripping them to shreds there was 15 of our tanks just putting all they had into the japs. They finally started to retreat and our tanks could not follow them into the jungle. We followed them and shot them down then we followed the last one all the way to the airfield and we had to stop. There was so many japanese soldiers that we weren't even going to try to attack them without support. So we waited