Islands of the Damned

Islands of the Damned

Review by Edward M. Coffman

The World War II battlefields in the Pacific were Islands of the Damned for those who fought there. R. V. Burgin, a Marine veteran of Cape Gloucester, Peleliu and Okinawa has aptly entitled his memoir. The terrain and climate and the savagery of an enemy who prepared to fight to the death compounded the sights, sounds, emotions and confusion of war. In this book, the author starkly relates what he saw and felt during those terrible months of battle.

A Texas farm boy, Burgin graduated from high school in 1941 and worked a couple of jobs before he enlisted in the Marine Corps in the fall of 1942. The Marines needed to fill up divisions rapidly so instead of a 12-week boot camp, he endured the hazing and tough training in only six weeks. Without a leave, he went straight to specialized training in mortars then shipped out in March 1943. He joined Company K, Fifth Marines in Australia where the First Division was recuperating from the Guadalcanal campaign.

After seven months of advanced training there and in New Guinea, he experienced his first combat at Cape Gloucester in New Britain. On his third day, he shot and killed a Japanese soldier. Later, during a banzai charge, he bayoneted another. He successfully coped with the difficulties of remaining alert at all times for an enemy who could approach unseen within a few feet in the thick undergrowth. In the four months of this campaign with the tension and horror of jungle combat and the miserable conditions of rain, mud and shortage of food, Burgin lost whatever naïveté he may have had about war.

The division then went to a miserable camp where the veterans and replacements resumed training. One of the replacements in Burgin’s mortar section was Eugene B. Sledge—author of the classic memoir With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, in which he mentions Burgin in his acknowledgment as well as in the text.

In the fall of 1944, the First Division invaded Peleliu. After a month of combat against an enemy in superb defensive positions, heavy casualties, loss of leaders, confusion, friendly fire incidents, food and water shortages in the intense heat and damp, the division suffered 30% casualties and only 85 of the 235 men in Burgin’s company were left.

He considered Peleliu his hardest battle but others gave Okinawa that distinction. During that campaign in the spring of 1945, K Company saw virtually no action for the first month but had to fight viciously to take one well defended ridge after another in the last two months. During three weeks of the bitter fighting, Burgin was in a hospital with a bad flesh wound in his neck and concussion but he got back in time for a bitter two-day fight at Kunishi Ridge where his company suffered 33 casualties.

That was the end of his war which haunts him to this day.

Hardcover: 320 pages

Publisher: New American Library/Div Of Penguin ( March 02, 2010 )

Item #: 33-2688

ISBN: 9780451229908

Product Dimensions: 6.0 x 9.0 x 0.71 inches

Product Weight: 16.0 ounces