First we would like to extend a massive thank you to Carl Wood’s family for being so gracious to allow us to be the caretakers of his wartime belongings. We never cease to be amazed by the incredible artifacts and stories we are trusted to preserve and be the caretakers of.
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Corporal Carl Richard Wood was born in Elkin, North Carolina on March 24th. 1924. He grew up there working in local agriculture when the Marine Corps came to his doorstep in 1941. In Carl’s own words: “In 1941 on a hot July afternoon, I was working in a tobacco field north of Winston-Salem, N.C. on Pine View Drive when a friend named Bill Grubbs walked by wearing a U. S. Marine Corps uniform. He said, “Carl, we are going to have a war with Japan; the Marines are the first to fight; why don’t you go down to the Post Office and sign up in the Marines?”Since I was only seventeen years old, my mother and father had to sign the papers. I knew that Daddy would sign them and I could only hope that he could convince Mama to sign them too. After much persuasion, Mama relented and signed the papers. The U.S.M.C. sent me to Raleigh, N.C. where I took the Oath of Allegiance to uphold the Constitution Of The United States Of America and
the Republic for which it stands on July 28, 1941”.
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Carl then was sent to basic training in Paris Island, SC. “We were then assigned to platoons for Boot Camp training; I was assigned to Platoon 105 under Drill Instructors Brown and Clements. They both immediately began to study the newly formed platoon of raw recruits and teach them how to drill, march and become Marines. Clements walked down the first row of men cursing out a couple of them whose tacky civilian clothes did not meet with his approval; He
ripped up the shirts he did not approve of, and told us that he would make Marines of us; "I promise you!," he said in an ominous demeanor and
tone of voice. He jammed a couple of men's pith helmets down on their heads so forcefully that it tore out the head supports of the helmets. I was in
the second row and was able to watch all of this without being caught up in it. Drill Instructor Clements then stopped and addressed the whole platoon and told us, "You can give your soul to
Jesus but your G__ D___ ass belongs to me." Carl finished basic training just prior to the attacks at Pearl Harbor. He was initially assigned to I Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines but was quickly transferred to A Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines prior to Guadalcanal.
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PFC Wood landed on Guadalcanal on August 7th, 1942 and proceeded inland with A/1/5 where they saw their first combat. “In late August the Japanese launched their first counter attack against out east flank using about 1500 men and several light tanks. That night
I was doing guard duty on an outpost when I heard a shot ring out in the night. In a few seconds another shot rang out, and then many rifles and
machineguns began to fire simultaneously so that no single shots could be distinguished; It became a
solid roar of gunfire, mortar shell explosions, and forty millimeter cannon fire. More than four hundred Japanese were killed and all their tanks
destroyed. By daylight it was over. The crossfire by machine guns and the forty millimeter antitank gun fire along with dozens of rifles and automatic
weapons fire had done a grim job on the Japs. The forty millimeter tank guns also fired canister shells loaded with buckshot which mowed down everything in its path. Canister shells loaded with a thousand buckshot mowed through Japanese bodies
like a knife through butter. It was a most gruesome weapon for the Japs to face; those that escaped will never forget that night. A few Marines were also killed. "A" Company visited and scouted the site the next day and saw a mess of dead Japs and ruined tanks.”
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The next story he shared of note was his own account of the remains his unit discovered from the ill-fated Goettge Patrol. “At the site where the Goettge patrol came ashore was a shallow hole about ten feet in diameter containing about five U.S. Marine bodies with a few shovels of dirt thrown on them. The
hands of all of them had been cut off. Because of the gruesomeness of the scene I chose not to scout around the perimeter; I wanted to look around the
whole Japanese position, but site seeing and souvenir hunting can be dangerous. Several "Jap" bodies were lying on their backs. I noticed that
all of them had white spots of material on their faces, and wondered what it was. Then I saw a Marine spit on one of the Japanese's faces and I realized that the Marines were expressing their
contempt and disgust for the Japs.
There was a fresh dug trench about fifty yards long right on, and parallel to, the Matanikau River; About twelve Japs were slumped over dead in the trench. They had died to the last man at their
positions. After we left the area we took a rest break, and we continued talking about the scene we had just witnessed. One Marine said to me, "Did you
see that Marine tied to a tree that they had been using for bayonet practice?" I said," No I didn't. Are you serious?" With a very excited and alarmed
expression on his face he said, "Yes, I saw it. They really did it!" Another Marine spoke up and asked us, "Did you see that Marine's head that they
had cut off and stuck up on a pole by the trail so that everybody walking by could see it?" And again I said, "No. I didn't see that, but I said I saw five men with their hands cut off." But I knew that what they told me was true. I dared not walk out that entire area alone, and even with others it could have been a dangerous recreation. Later, other Marines reported seeing a leg laying over here, an arm over there, and a hand over yonder. It was a bizarre scene of madness, fanaticism and barbarity.
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Wood described his experiences on Guadalcanal with special detail, including his wounding when a 6” shell landed amidst himself and 6 other marines. “On October 27, 1942, when I was assembled with six other marines in reserve. Robert A. from Erwin,
Tennessee, began playing all the latest hit records on his phonograph. He was only sixteen years of age and had not been permitted to make the initial
landing on August 7 because he had come down with mumps, a childhood disease. (Most of the Marines in
the First Marine Division on Guadalcanal were eighteen years of age.) He was sent back to New
Caledonia until he recovered. While there he acquired a wind-up type phonograph with all of the latest records. We seven were assembled around the phonograph enjoying this most welcome diversion. Robert played all of the records while we talked
and enjoyed ourselves. As he finished the last one I said, "Robert, play Tuxedo Junction one more time. That's my favorite record." So he played it
again, and as it ended we began to walk away. The area we were in as a beach defense had not been shelled by the Japs since we had been in that
position. On this day things changed, a six inch shell from Japanese artillery exploded in our midst. It made a dead hit on the phonograph; not a piece of it was ever found. It was the first time they had fired that gun that day, and since the shell was exceeding the speed of sound it arrived before the sound; we did not hear it coming. You do not hear the one that gets you. It blew a hole in
the ground that could hold half a Volkswagen automobile and wounded all seven of us. It killed one of the nicest men in the company. I was standing about ten feet from the
explosion; it blew me end over end a few feet. Then, immediately, in a blur of activity I ended up in a foxhole somebody had previously dug. A Marine named Doyle from Boston, Massachusetts had already
beat me into the hole; he was bleeding from both ears. A small piece of shrapnel hit me in the left
temple, cut an artery, and lodged in my skull behind my ear. Every time my heart beat blood spewed out and quickly drenched my head, chest,
left side, and leg. My wound was spewing blood all over Doyle. Then Al Tresmond of New Jersey fell
into the foxhole on top of me. He had a hole through his thigh the size of a golf ball and was covered with blood. He was bleeding like a "stuck hog" all over me and Doyle. This part only went on
for a few seconds, before I realized that he could not live very long without medical attention. The large artery in his thigh must have been slightly
ruptured. I said, "Tresmond, move over I'm getting out." He asked, "Where are you going?" I said, "I am going for a corpsman." What I did not tell him
was that if he did not get help quickly he was going to die. I was still bleeding, and by this time I was as bloody as a "slaughtered hog." Tresmond was my ideal of a Marine with broad shoulders and narrow hips. When he put on a Marine dress uniform he looked better than the Marines one sees on the billboards outside the recruiting
stations at the Post Office. He was very handsome, much like Tyrone Power. For these reasons I admired him and truly had a brotherly love for him. I did
not want to see this man die. About six weeks later, a mutual friend saw
Tresmond in the Naval Hospital in New Zealand; he was emaciated and had lost a lot of weight but was still alive; I assume he lived, but we did not hear
any further confirmation concerning him.”
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Corporal Wood recovered in time to make the landings at Cape Gloucester which he escaped unscathed despite the wet and dreary conditions. He recalled “We were put on the front line on a heavily wooded hillside for a short period. The day we arrived to take up our position it began raining at
nightfall and rained heavily all night and up to daybreak. That night fourteen inches of rain fell and most of us only had ponchos for cover. My rifle
was buried in mud the next morning. A ravine ran vertically down the hillside and I saw a large kitchen stove lodged six feet above the ground up
in the fork of a tree. One Marine friend of mine said, “When things like this happen it makes me wonder if God is on our side?” One night during this part of the campaign I was on an outpost with another Marine for about four hours. It was pitch black dark with no stars
out and total overhead jungle. I kept hearing jungle noises and wondered if it could be Japs infiltrating our lines. I kept looking in this one direction wondering if I saw anything. Finally, I
seemed to focus on a dark spot and thought that it was a Jap coming right up to me. Then I thought that I could make out his facial features clearly.
But, simultaneously I questioned my ability to see anything in total darkness. So I raised my right hand and passed it back and forth before my eyes about six inches from my face but could not see it. Then I realized that my imagination was deceiving me.”
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Corporal Wood continued on to Peleliu where he would land on Orange Beach with the rest of A Company. Here is a small part of his experience:
“Bullets were cracking all around us. We hit the beach and the first thing that greeted my eyes was bombs planted upside down in the ground with just the detonator showing and many of them were covered with leaves and paper or trash to conceal them from the landing vehicles. Nobody immediately around me was getting shot so I proceed on to where I could see an empty gun emplacement. At the moment
it did not dawn on me that further down in that emplacement were Japs that had not yet come out to start the resistance. But to my left a Marine from
Waco, Texas proceeded into a small clump of bushes and trees without being careful and was gunned down
by a Jap machinegun. The land mines were about five feet apart on the beach but were easy to see and caused us no trouble. The Japs were dropping
one hundred-fifty millimeter mortar shells on us and artillery shells. The air was cracking with bullets from Japs shooting from the coral ridges. They had a four-gun battery of six inch
antiaircraft guns on the other side of the airport which they were using to fire at ground level.”
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Carl made it off the beach with 1/5 and recalled the famed airfield tank attack that slammed into the lines of the 5th Marines: “A Marine Sherman medium tank was parked about thirty feet from me and the crew was out of the tank heating food in a canteen cup. Immediately, they were back in the tank and moving towards the oncoming Jap tanks. The last man was not completely
into the tank and was preparing to close the hatch doors when the Sherman tank fired its first shot. Their first shot hit a Jap tank; the shell
explosion knocked the turret off of the tank and it flew thirty yards up into the air. The Sherman then fired another two or three shots knocking out Jap tanks. Our Sherman tank was still only at our
front line, and was looking around for another target. One Jap tank passed through our line and ran over a Marine machinegun crew which had continued firing on the tank as it ran them down
killing them. (A friend named DeCorsey from Massachusetts. died in this action.) It continued on towards the beach and turned back towards our
position just as I and others were bringing hand grenades back from the beach for the front line for use overnight. When the tank alarm was vocally sounded the ammunition carriers I was with took refuge in a
large bomb crater. We had left our rifles at the front line to carry the ammunition to the front. One of the men with us had a service forty-five caliber automatic pistol with him which he handed
to me because he said, “Can you shoot this thing; I can’t shoot it.“ So I took the pistol in my right hand, and heard another tank coming up from our
rear and said, “This attack is nothing; there is another one of our tanks coming up.” Then, I looked
and it was not one of ours but it was another Jap tank which proceeded on to within five feet of the crater we were in. The tank hatch was opened and a
Jap tank commander looked down at me in the crater; we stared each other in the face, but it did not occur to me to shoot him; neither did he make any hostile intent towards me. We were both so surprised that neither could respond. At that moment I seemed to hear a voice say, “The real danger is behind you.“ Then my mind began to function and I looked toward the front line to see
where our tank was; I knew we were in imminent danger of our tank firing on the Jap tank and it was sitting right beside us. As I was looking, I saw the Sherman tank turret rotating back to the rear of the tank to fire backwards behind it and it needed about another fifteen degrees to line up on
the Jap tank. Immediately, just before he fired, I ducked down as low as possible to avoid the blast and observed that the Jap tank commander had just seen the same thing I saw, but it was too late to react. The seventy-five millimeter gun on the Sherman tank fired. The shell was a high explosive
shell, not armor piercing, and exploded on the Jap tank turret. The explosion ignited the gas in the tank and a blue flame shot out of the turret top
going up twenty feet. The Jap was suspended in the blue flame with his elbows resting on the turret
top. The blue flame was exactly like a well adjusted Bunsen burner one uses in the chemistry lab. The flame burned on for more than an hour. The Jap was burned carbon black. The other two Japs in the tank were also burned to a crisp. Several of our Bazooka men also got in on the action and knocked out tanks. The Bazookas worked. Later I
learned that the Sherman tank was the only one we had ashore at the time. It was at the best location to repulse an attack”.
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The following day, Wood watched from a vantage point as A company crossed the airfield:
“on the second day “A” (Able) Company and others were given orders to cross the airport and take up positions near the ridges. Since I was not crossing with the company I took up a position of
visual advantage in the lines they were vacating to watch the airport crossing. Over two hundred men were dashing as fast as they could run across the
open airport. The Japs immediately opened up with machine guns, rifle fire, and mortars. Mortar shells were exploding in their midst but the Japs also began firing the six inch antiaircraft guns at them
point blank. The guns were firing parallel to the ground and the shells were not going off but were
scooting through them without exploding. The six inch shells were getting down on the bare coral
rock ground and digging a furrow making a deafening screeching roar for a hundred yards or two as they passed through the Marines without hitting anybody and then rising back up into the air and tumbling end over end at the speed of sound making a loud
rumbling noise as they flipped on out of hearing. Many six inch shells passed right through those men without hitting anybody. Either the shells did not
explode because the detonators never did hit the ground because they went through them as a sled, or the Japs did not put detonators in them hoping to
hit somebody with a direct hit because they saw so many men at once that they thought they could not
miss. It is also possible that they never armed those shells until they were ready to fire them for safety reasons and they did not have time to screw
a detonator in on such short notice.
Captain Dusenbury did not cross the airport with “A” Company. But we crossed it later in the day. One Marine told me that he saw Captain Dusenbury in the bottom of a large bomb crater
while crossing the airport; he had his pack open and was looking at a Confederate flag. Later, I crossed the airport under mortar, machinegun, and heavy rifle fire with bullets cracking all around us. Others were crossing at the
same time. I stopped and rested in two or three bomb craters and was constantly sprayed by rifle fire even while resting in the crater. (Jap rifle
and machinegun fire from the coral ridges was very heavy over all of our positions and the airport, but it was not possible to pinpoint any of their
positions from which the fire was coming; it must have been coming from small holes in the ridges that even our fighter pilots were unable to see.)
It was dangerous even to look out, so after resting, I again emerged and proceeded to the other side and took up a position near the captain.
Unable to dig a foxhole in such hard coral rock and earth I took refuge with other Marines in a Jap shelter built of coral stone near enough to hear
the captain if needed. The enemy fire was continuous and deadly. The next day we moved to a ninety yard long causeway across a section of swamp. The causeway was about eight feet wide, and provided means for men to run across it to climb the nearest coral ridge. But the causeway was under
enemy fire and some men were wounded in the crossing. A few dead Marines and Japs were strewn along the side of the causeway. One Marine in
particular had a bullet through one lung and was suddenly having to breath on only one lung. He was in much pain and anguish. We had a hospital ship
off shore and maybe he was taken to the ship early enough for him to survive; I hope that was the case with him.
On the other side of the causeway we climbed the coral ridge by means of ropes and with our feet to the vertical wall for maybe twenty feet. Near
the top I found a three feet wide ledge on which I could sit, lay down, and sleep while keeping a surveillance on the ridge top and adjacent ridge about fifty yards away. I could sit up without
being seen by the Japs. But in arms reach over my head was two dead Japs that had been dead several days in this 110 degree Fahrenheit temperature and
were very decayed with soupy midsections. Large green flies were all around us and as we ate our rations they had to be beaten away with our spoons to get food to our mouths. Large flies tried to go into my ears and had to be pulled out with my fingers. The odor was terrible until one acclimated to it”.
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Wood fought across Peleliu with A/1/5 and survived unscathed.
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He returned home, was discharged, returning to civilian life “Upon arriving back at the Base at Parris Island
they were discharging everybody that had completed their enlistment and had been staying in the Corps at the Convenience of the Government. After two Atomic bombs which destroyed two cities and more than two hundred thousand people, Japan had
unconditionally surrendered. My enlistment had been up for a couple of months so I was eligible for discharge. As I was being tested in medical I could
not even hear the bells they were ringing to test my hearing for discharge. The corpsman said that I should come back on Monday for a complete hearing
test, but I told the corpsman that was testing me to forget it, that I wanted out. He dropped the issue and I left for home on that Friday. On the following Monday September 16, 1945 I enrolled in High Point College at High Point, NC.
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Carl Wood graduated from NC State in 1950. He eventually married and had 5 children. Carl’s wartime experiences unfortunately followed him for the rest of his life causing he and his family some problems. He remained in contact with some of his friends who served with him on Guadalcanal and eventually passed away in Pensacola, Florida in 2007 at the age of 83. Thank you to the family of Carl Wood for entrusting us with his artifacts and memoirs.
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