Islands of the Damned: A Marine's Pacific War Memoir

Introduction to Burgin's Service

Islands of the Damned: A Marine at War in the Pacific is a memoir by Romus Valton Burgin from Texas, who volunteered for the Marine Corps at age twenty and trained to become a 60mm mortar man. Burgin was subsequently shipped overseas to Melbourne to join the First Marine Division. During his time at Camp Balcombe, he met Guadalcanal veterans and gained firsthand knowledge about the Japanese and the war. Beyond military preparation, Burgin experienced Australian hospitality, including visits to landmarks such as the Young & Jackson Hotel on Flinders Street Station. His time in Australia also brought a significant personal connection: he met and dated Florence Riseley, an Australian woman, whom he would marry after the war ended. This interweaving of personal romance with military service establishes a recurring theme in the memoir—the way individual human connections persist even amid the chaos and horror of global conflict.

Burgin served with K/3/5 before being deployed to Milne Bay, where he engaged in armed combat in January 1944 at Cape Gloucester. His first combat experience proved significant: he killed one Japanese soldier using his .45-caliber pistol, though he noted no remorse at the time. The battle conditions were brutal, marked by torrential rains and difficult jungle terrain navigated while under fire. Burgin participated in the unit's eastward advance toward Talasea before being reassigned to Pavuvu for recuperation.

Early Combat and Training Operations

The respite at Pavuvu included morale-boosting events, such as a Bob Hope USO show, which Burgin recalled fondly. During this period, he learned of upcoming landing operations and attended a briefing by General Rupertus, who predicted that the assault on Peleliu would be "rough and short"—a forecast that would prove both accurate and tragic for the men under his command. These training and recovery phases punctuated Burgin's combat service, creating a rhythm of intense fighting followed by periods of relative safety and reflection.

The assault on Peleliu stands as a pivotal moment in Burgin's memoir and in the broader narrative of Pacific island warfare. Burgin's mortar crew, alongside other Marines including Eugene Sledge, landed in a tense and uncomfortable atmosphere. The fighting at Peleliu lasted far longer than General Rupertus had predicted, and Burgin's account offers unique perspectives that parallel—and sometimes diverge from—those in Sledge's acclaimed memoir.

The Peleliu Campaign

One particularly vivid moment illustrates the intimate horror of combat: Burgin landed on nearby Ngesebus Island while Sledge and Snafu took cover at a Japanese bunker believed to have been neutralized. As the mortar crew set up, Sledge heard voices emanating from inside. Burgin bent forward to peer into an embrasure and locked eyes with a Japanese soldier looking back. Before the enemy could react, Burgin fired three rounds through the firing slit from his M1 rifle. Such moments—compressed, immediate, and decisive—reveal the stark reality of individual combat decisions in island warfare.

Throughout the memoir, Burgin emphasizes that the Pacific War has been overshadowed in popular consciousness by the more celebrated liberation of European cities. The Pacific theater, as he presents it, consisted of prolonged, savage combat across distant and harsh terrain—a war fought with less public acknowledgment of its brutality. His personal encounters reflect the fundamental savagery of Pacific island warfare and the suffering endured by Marines and supporting personnel.

Themes of Trauma, Resilience, and Personal Life

The memoir's structure—moving from childhood through wartime experience and into current life as a Texan—allows Burgin to offer reflective distance on his wartime experiences. The book's language is deliberately simple and direct, avoiding artificial drama; this spare prose style makes his testimony more powerful precisely because it does not embellish. Burgin's account addresses themes central to all combat memoirs: the bonds formed between soldiers, the moral and psychological weight of killing, and the contrast between the training-induced readiness to kill and the human cost of exercising that readiness.

Burgin's courtship with and marriage to Florence Riseley provides an unconventional dimension to his memoir. The two-year separation, dependent entirely upon his survival at Okinawa and Peleliu, frames the war not merely as a military campaign but as a threat to personal happiness and future. This civilian perspective—the way one woman's life hung in the balance of combat outcomes—humanizes the broader statistical tragedy of the Pacific War. Notably, Burgin does not dwell on trauma or long-term psychological damage; instead, he suggests that individuals process horrible events in different ways. His own resilience and early recognition that military training had fundamentally altered his capacity to kill inform his mature perspective on the war's meaning.

The memoir also documents the material hardships of combat service: inadequate clothing, insufficient food, and poor logistical support. These details ground the account in the unglamorous, often-overlooked reality of frontline life. Burgin's willingness to acknowledge both his actions and their moral ambiguity—his lack of remorse at his first kill, yet his sobering recognition that combat confusion led to the deaths of fellow Marines and American soldiers—demonstrates a mature honesty about the war's psychological complexity.