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Moore, Charles_WAPA-246_WAPA 4170_OralHist_Video.mp4

Charles George Moore was born September 30th, 1924 in Knoxville, Tennessee. He grew up on the north side of Chattanooga, in what they call the Harrison Bay area. Charles had two brothers and four sisters. One of his brothers was sent to 77th Army Division on Guam. He got to see his brother twice while there. His brother had contacted some kind of a jungle virus and it affected his respiratory system. He died due to complications at age 44. Charles’ dad worked at a paper box company. Charles quit high school before graduating to work when he was 16 and was at work when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. When he was 18, in1943, he enlisted in the Marine Corps. Charles went to a boot camp in San Diego, California. His drill instructor’s name was Sergeant Todd. Charles remembers on the first day getting to the receiving barracks, a big sergeant challenged any of the new men fight him and a guy from Texas, “Tex” gave him a good fight. After boot camp, Charles was sent to an advanced training period at Camp Elliot, right out of San Diego. And then they loaded aboard ship, headed for the Pacific. They went straight to New Caledonia. New Caledonia was kind of a distribution center for men and supplies at that time. Charles was in what they called a replacement battalion, to be split up and sent to any division that needed them. Bougainville is where he got into the 3rd Division and had his first combat experience. While there, the biggest thing he was involved in was combat patrols. At that time, he was carrying an M1. When they left Bougainville, they went back to Guadalcanal. The 3rd Division had a base camp there. They stayed on Guadalcanal for a while and then they gave Charles a BAR. Charles goes into detail about the BAR. Charles’s battalion had trained for Kavieng and the Japanese evacuated that island so they called that off. Then they had another training period which consisted of a little bit of training in house to house fighting. Coming to Guam, they landed on the extreme left flank of Red Beach One, just on the other side of Adelup Point. They were under fire before they got to the island. While coming in on the amphibian tractor, Charles saw a Jap in a coconut tree getting ready to fire. He threw his BAR up and started firing. He knocked him right out of the tree. They pulled in there a few feet from the water’s edge and each tractor had a case of 30 caliber ammunition, a few mortar rounds, a five gallon can or two of water and a case or two of C rations. Charles’s platoon leader was Martin O’Brien. Captain Moore was the company commander. The company moved on up to higher ground, but their first objective was to turn left and go down to Adelup Point and take it over. They had so much resistance that they didn’t have a chance to try to move. When daylight came, they had an attack right at daylight with machine gun fire. Charles’s platoon had mortars and the heavy and light mortars as well as artillery. But on that ridge, they didn’t really have all of the artillery support that they should have had, because there were too many machine guns on that ridge to take it with just rifle fire. Captain Moore called Charles over for the fire power of another BAR because he had one BAR man right there with him, Willy Steel from South Carolina. Before Charles got to him, Captain Moore and Willy Steel got hit with machine gun fire. On the third day they made it to the top of the ridge and snuck behind the Japs and finished them off. On the fifth day they moved out from behind that ridge and moved down Fonte Ridge. Before they got to the Mt. Tenjo Road, his company commander had been wounded. Moving down Mt. Tenjo Road, they came to a curve in the road and there was gap in there and a drop between two ridges. Part of Charles’s platoon set up in this drop - there were steep ridges on either side. This is where they were the night of the bonzai attack. Charles recalls the attack in vivid detail. To survive the attack, he ended up having to play dead. Come daylight, Charles went down the line, checking people and got some stretchers up there. The head count that Charles heard that died in that attack that night, of the Japanese, was 5,000 soldiers. When this was all over, they took all of their riflemen that were left in company, put those together and made a squad of 17 or 18 men out of them. They moved on down the ridge and stopped just short of the cross island road. At that time there was only one road across the island, it started in Agana and went across the island. Charles tells the story of seeing Japanese soldiers line up civilians and shot them all while Charles’s platoon looked on helplessly. The only prisoners that any of Charles’s company took on Guam was a woman and her baby. The woman was a Japanese major’s wife. They saved them from some Japanese soldiers who tried to use her to shield them from the company’s shots. Charles recalls another battle while they were continuing along a trail into a banana grove and Japanese soldiers came after them in tanks. Once the American tanks got involved, that tank battle didn’t last – it was very short. And actually that was end of the action for them and against the organized resistance. They stayed in Guam, the 3rd Division made their base camp here and stayed here and went through the mopping up operation, getting all the scattered Japs.

U.S. National Park Service, War in the Pacific National Historical Park

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War in the Pacific National Historical Park, Code: WAPA

Guam , Guam
War in the Pacific National Historical Park, Guam , Guam
Latitude: 13.3905000686646, Longitude: 144.654006958008

ICMS (Interior Collection Managment System) : WAPA-00246
NPS Museum Number Catalog : WAPA 4170

War in the Pacific Oral Histories

2025/03/07

T. Stell Newman Visitor Center, Collections room, Safe and Shelf SLF D-01

Public Can View

Rose Manibusan, Jennifer Craig

Organization: American Memorial Park
Role: Chief Interpretation
Address: Micro Beach Road, Garapan, Mp 96950
Email: wapa_interpretation@nps.gov

Saturday, April 5, 2025 12:03:46 AM

Saturday, April 5, 2025 12:03:46 AM

Moore, Charles_WAPA-246_WAPA 4170_OralHist_Video.mp4

mp4

2334.1 MB

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