Oral History Interview with John Louis Schott, August 28, 2010 Page: 3

                                
relatively [low] as far as casualties were concerned. Probably the lowest amount of casualties of all the
three operations that I was in. And also lower than of course, Guadalcanal, which I did not make. We
fought under terrible conditions there. Nothing but rain and mud and humidity. You couldn't stay dry.
You had a lot of skin problem and dengue fever and malaria and so forth. Mostly they had us fighting
the Japanese. It was just a real terrible place. We had a lot of people who were on the sick list and so
forth. The causalities, I believe the numbers were, now not exact, but I would say it totaled maybe
about 2,000 causalities or something in the whole division through the whole campaign. Now that's
where, you know, Rabaul was on one tip of that island. I guess it would be the western tip of the island.
That was a big Japanese logistics center, training center, and they also had quite an airfield facility there.
I believe they also had some dockings, you know for their ships. But we were able to cut them off. We
didn't have to go in and take Rabaul. So we neutralized them which a real break for us. It made the
operation a lot easier with respect to the fighting aspects. So anyway, I had a rifle platoon and it was a
series of reconnaissance patrols and sometimes they would turn into combat patrols and so forth. It'd
maybe start out as a platoon fight and then we'd wind up in new company fire. And sometimes that's
routine. So that's where I guess you'd say I was brought up. Living on there. I didn't get in but in the
sense, was getting the experience. We went back to a terrible place, the stage for the next operation
was almost an advantage to a burden. That was an island, Pavuvu. I guess it was part of the Solomons.
It was something like about 26 or 27 nautical miles from Guadalcanal. And on this island was nothing
but big coconut plantation, really. We had no place to train. We had to build a camp for ourselves and
we were certainly in no physical condition to do that kind of thing. We were supposed to be there to
train and re-fit and set the stage for our next operation. But anyway, we did it and incidentally that
place, the rats would be running over your sack at night. We had to cut down coconut trees to set up
areas where we could put up pyramidal tents and so forth. So we spent a lot of our time just building
the camp. And then our training areas were quite limited because it was swampy and so it was a very
bad place. We stayed there for the operation on Peleliu. So I was still in B Company, Fifth Marine, so I
still had the same platoon, and I took that platoon to Peleliu. We landed the first day on Peleliu. And
Peleliu was a little island that was in the central Pacific. And it was about two miles wide at its widest
point and maybe about five miles long. It was shaped like a lobster claw. The first marine regiment was
the First Marines. Landed to our left. And the Seventh Marines were on our right. We came at the
center. They had an airfield on Peleliu. It was a garrison of about 10,000 Japanese and this little island
was estimated, maybe ten square miles. It was a solid rock. It had some very rugged terrain. It had the
airfield, and then on the northern part of the island it had some very rugged terrain. The topography
was pretty rugged. It had all these ridges, the draws, running in all kinds of direction. And the Japanese

had built out all these ridges and they had hospital operation in there, they had mess halls, they had
barracks. I mean it was... I remember when we were getting going to the target, we were on the ship,
and I remember getting my platoon up on the weather deck and saying, "From the intelligence we have,
this should be a very short operation. I expect us to take this island in around 72 hours." But I want you
people to know that at that time we had two Browning automatic rifles in every squad. So six BARs. I
sent out that the BAR man can't see them. Well somebody picked up that BAR and I said, well we have
six people left. I need six BARs. I got hit the 11th day at the battle. I had a little more than six, but I
didn't have much more left. I had less than half that platoon left. Out of 44. There was some historian
that said arguably it was the most costly battle of the war in terms of casualties per square foot or

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