CHAPTER 2

Peleliu, September 1944: Amphibious Combat Against a Clever, Defensive-Minded Enemy

The Decision

THE DEBACLE DID NOT HAVE to happen. There was nothing inevitable about it, nor anything truly necessary. With a few words, one man could have stopped it, but he could not bring himself to utter those words.

In late July 1944, Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet, met with President Franklin Roosevelt and General Douglas MacArthur at Pearl Harbor. Nimitz and MacArthur functioned as veritable co-commanders of the American effort in the Pacific. But they were more rivals than partners. They constantly competed for resources and influence with Washington power brokers. During the Pearl Harbor meeting, much to Nimitz’s chagrin, MacArthur won the president’s support for an invasion of the Philippines. MacArthur proposed to invade Mindanao in November and Leyte in December. Even though the admiral felt that these invasions were not wise strategic moves, he loyally pledged to protect the flanks of MacArthur’s invasion force. One way to do that was to invade the Palaus, a Japanese-controlled chain of islands a few hundred miles east of Mindanao, the first Philippine island that MacArthur planned to invade in the fall. Because of a first-rate airfield, Peleliu was the most important island in the Palaus. Nimitz promised the president and MacArthur that he would invade Peleliu in mid-September in order to seize the airfield and cut off any Japanese naval or air threat to the general’s Mindanao invasion. Subsequently, planners decided on September 15 for D-day at Peleliu.

A few days before D-day, the Americans discovered that Mindanao was only lightly held and need not be invaded. Aviators from Admiral William “Bull” Halsey’s 3rd Fleet had raided Mindanao against almost no opposition. The aviation commander, Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher, recommended scrubbing the Mindanao invasion and Halsey agreed. Halsey felt that now it made more sense to step up the invasion timetable for Leyte to October. For several weeks, Halsey had actually been skeptical of the need for invading Peleliu. He thought the benefits of taking the heavily defended island did not justify the costs. Now, with no Mindanao invasion, he felt there was no purpose to invading Peleliu. He was right. Peleliu was now a strategic backwater. The Japanese garrison there could not hope to interfere with MacArthur’s operations in the Philippines, especially if he did not invade Mindanao.

In the early morning hours of September 13, Halsey sent a message to MacArthur, Nimitz, and even Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations. “Am firmly convinced Palau not now needed to support occupation of the Philippines.” He asked for permission to cancel the Peleliu invasion. MacArthur could not be reached directly. He was at sea with a fleet that was about to invade Morotai. For security reasons, that fleet was maintaining radio silence. Actually, his authority was limited to operations in the Philippines, not the Peleliu invasion (ominously code-named Operation Stalemate).

So the decision on Peleliu was really Nimitz’s to make since he controlled most of the naval assets upon which the invasion of that island depended. A careful, pensive man, Admiral Nimitz deliberated for several hours before making a decision. “Carry out . . . Stalemate as planned,” he told Halsey. That one fateful sentence consigned thousands to unspeakable misery and horror. Such is the crushing weight of life-or-death responsibility upon the souls of senior commanders. For the rest of his life, Nimitz never explained the reasoning behind his decision. Aptly summarizing the feelings of participants and historians alike, Samuel Eliot Morison, the great naval historian, referred to the Peleliu decision as one of Nimitz’s “rare mistakes.” During the war, the admiral kept a sign over his desk that read: “Is the proposed operation likely to succeed?” In this particular instance, an otherwise sage commander came up with the wrong answer.¹

The Japanese

In late July 1944, the Japanese finally decided to change the way they defended against American amphibious invasions. Imperial General Headquarters (IGH) in Tokyo decreed that island garrisons would no longer attempt to defend beaches at the waterline, where they were quite vulnerable to powerful American air strikes and naval gunfire. Nor would the Japanese launch any more wasteful banzai charges. Such suicidal charges simply allowed the Americans to unleash their massive firepower, wasting the lives of brave Japanese soldiers whose valor could be used for much greater strategic purpose. The greatest strength of the Japanese soldier in World War II was his willingness to fight to the death, in the most tenacious fashion, even when cut off, surrounded, and leaderless. This stemmed from the Bushido warrior code, which inextricably linked a soldier’s family honor, duty, patriotism, and his loyalty to the emperor with his willingness to sacrifice himself. In general, this meant that Japanese soldiers were better on defense than offense.

Taking his cue from IGH, Lieutenant General Sadae Inoue, the army’s commander in the Palaus, understood that inland defense was the best way to maximize this strength. “I issued strict orders that the banzai attack was not to be employed because it wasted manpower which could be put to more effective use,” he said after the war. “I ordered that the men [on Peleliu] fight a delaying action from prepared positions, causing as many enemy casualties as possible.” Inoue understood that Japan no longer possessed the naval and air strength to repulse American invasions at the waterline. Banzai attacks were silly and wasteful, contributing more to Japanese vanity than victory. The best hope for victory now was to bleed the Americans dry, until they no longer had the will to win the war. So, at Peleliu, he ordered his 10,500 defenders to dig extensive fortifications within caves that would be impervious to bombing.

Happily enough for the Japanese, a jagged jumble of inland ridges, known as the Umurbrogol, offered the perfect terrain for Inoue’s defense. From the shelter of a dizzying warren of caves, tunnels, and bunkers, the soldiers would fight the Americans to the death, inflicting maximum damage upon them, taking advantage of American impatience, lack of martial spirit, and overreliance on firepower. The defenders would resist the invasion itself, but only with carefully coordinated counterattacks, not suicidal rushes. In this way, the Japanese expected to bring their own firepower to bear efficiently and in the most deadly fashion. “It is certain that if we repay the Americans (who rely solely upon material power) with material power, it will shock them beyond imagination,” Colonel Tokechi Tada, Inoue’s chief of staff, wrote in a prebattle training document.

The 2nd Infantry Regiment formed the critical mass of the Peleliu garrison. The unit had fought in Manchuria, and it traced its proud lineage back to 1884, around the dawn of modern imperial Japan. The soldiers of this unit arrived on Peleliu in late April 1944. They were skilled and physically hardened. They were also totally dedicated to their country. Many of them understood that Peleliu would be a one-way destination. Their commander, Colonel Kunio Nakagawa, was blessed with a keen understanding of how to employ terrain to maximum military advantage. Throughout the summer, he put his soldiers to work building bunkers and pillboxes. They also constructed extensive networks of cave fortifications, especially within the Umurbrogol. “On this small island,” one officer told his men, “we must fortify until it is like a . . . large, unsinkable warship.”

Bitter interservice rivalry was a huge problem for the Japanese, especially among officers. For many years, the Imperial Japanese Navy had comprised the main Japanese presence in the Palaus, including Peleliu. When army soldiers arrived on Peleliu in 1944, they quickly clashed with their naval cousins who had, after all, been there for much longer and thus resented army infringement on their turf. The naval commander, Vice Admiral Itou, deeply begrudged yielding his island to an army colonel. Nor did he see the merits of an inland defense. His navy construction battalions would not cooperate at all with the army. The two services even prepared their own separate cave networks. Most of the navy caves were located on the northern part of the island. They were man-made, with extensive tunnels, and designed mainly to provide shelter in the event of bombardment. The army caves were generally natural, smaller, less comfortable, and designed to defend against attacking ground forces. These interservice issues were such a problem that they threatened Colonel Nakagawa’s battle preparations. To put the army on a more advantageous footing, Lieutenant General Inoue sent one of his key subordinates, Major General Kenijiro Murai, to Peleliu. Murai was senior to Itou. Murai’s presence had the desired effect in keeping the navy in line, but it produced a bizarre Japanese command arrangement that remains something of a mystery to this day. According to all available Japanese sources, Colonel Nakagawa remained in command, but with a two-star general nominally assisting him. Given the rigid hierarchy of imperial Japan, this strains credulity a bit. The whole truth will probably never be known.

Despite their internal problems, the Japanese, by mid-September, had turned Peleliu into a death trap for the American invaders. The landing beaches teemed with mines, tetrahedrons, gun emplacements, antitank ditches, blockhouses, and machine-gun nests. Farther inland the Japanese had constructed a wide range of pillboxes and well-camouflaged gun positions, mainly to foil any American attempt to capture the airfield. The Umurbrogol now basically consisted of little else besides mutually supporting fortified caves, some of which were equipped with steel doors.

Thanks to documents they had captured on Saipan, the Americans knew much about the Japanese order of battle. But they had no clue about the true nature of Peleliu’s imposing terrain, or even much appreciation for the true extent of Japanese defenses. Nor did any American have even an inkling of the new Japanese commitment to inland defense.²

The Brief Bombardment

The Navy’s bombardment of Guam had been, in the estimation of most American officers, the most successful of the Pacific War. In that instance, the Navy had the rare opportunity to soften up Guam for seventeen days prior to the invasion. Even so, the bombardment did not diminish Japanese resistance enough to avoid major fighting once the Marines and soldiers came ashore. Peleliu was smaller than Guam, with fewer enemy soldiers, but it was much more intelligently defended. Carrier-borne planes raided Peleliu several times in the spring and summer of 1944, but the main job of softening up the island went, of course, to the Navy surface ships.

The original invasion plan earmarked only two days for Admiral Jesse Oldendorf’s Western Gunfire Support Group (TG 32.5) to pound Peleliu with the usual array of fire from battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and smaller vessels. Major General Roy Geiger, commander of the III Marine Amphibious Corps, whose 1st Marine Division would assault Peleliu, pleaded with his naval colleagues for one more day and got it. Starting on September 12, Oldendorf’s ships plastered Peleliu. His gunners focused especially on visible structures, such as blockhouses, barracks, hangars, administrative buildings, pillboxes, and gun emplacements. The airfield also absorbed a major drubbing. All hangars and buildings were in shambles. Pieces of dismembered aircraft were scattered all over the place. The bombardment also partially defoliated the island, exposing Peleliu’s formidable coral ridges to American eyes for the first time (aerial reconnaissance photos had not even begun to do justice to the ridges). As Oldendorf’s warships hurled steel at the island, the admiral stood in the combat information center aboard his flagship, the battleship USS Pennsylvania. One by one, as reports of destruction trickled in, he scratched each predetermined target off a checklist. The Japanese, true to their plan, did not even fire one round at the American ships. They huddled in their caves and bunkers, waiting for an invasion they now deemed inevitable. As at Guam, highly trained U.S. Navy Underwater Demolition Teams (UDTs) swam, under cover of the fleet’s mighty bombardment, into the landing beaches to disarm mines, obstacles, and booby traps.

On September 14, Admiral Oldendorf made a stunning pronouncement. He had run out of targets and was ordering his gun crews to cease fire. The crews would resume their shooting the next morning, in support of the lead assault troops, but, for now, they were to stand down. Oldendorf believed he had destroyed every worthy target on Peleliu. To him it made no sense to “blast away at suspected positions and hope for the best.” Better, he thought, to cease fire than waste ammunition. When news of his decision reached senior 1st Marine Division officers aboard their ships, they were shocked. “The dispatch sent by ADM Oldendorf was not only a surprise but was not understood by any of us on the Division Staff,” Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Fields, the 1st Marine Division operations officer, wrote. Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Ramsay, another member of the division staff, described the reaction as one of “incredulity.” Brigadier General Oliver Smith, the assistant division commander, understood that Oldendorf had hit many visible targets but “the cut-up, jungle terrain concealed many targets that the infantry had to overrun at heavy cost.”

By and large, the Marines felt that Oldendorf’s decision was calamitous and inexcusable. Their lives were on the line. They were the ones who would face the Japanese on the ground, in the toughest arena of combat, not the sailors. As such, the Marines expected the Navy to support them as fully as possible. Oldendorf’s termination order, with his ammunition stocks far from depleted, was hardly the way to fulfill those expectations. Another naval commander, Rear Admiral George Fort, described Oldendorf’s decision as “entirely correct.” Fort acknowledged the infantry’s difficult job but, to him, the idea of firing at an island with no visible targets was “an inexcusable waste of ammunition.” Here was a classic difference in thinking between naval and infantry officers. The Navy commanders thought in terms of logistics because so much of their job was dependent upon manipulating cargo, fuel, and time schedules. Successful naval command demanded a strong technical mind and a keen understanding of how to utilize firepower. Marine officers existed in a more simplistic world of operations—closing with the enemy and killing him. All else was subordinated to that mission.

Something else was at work here, too. The naval officers, by the nature of their tasks (not to mention their distance from the battlefield), could scarcely conceive of what combat on the ground really meant. They rarely saw the actual results of their firepower. Few of them, even competent commanders like Fort and Oldendorf, truly understood the limitations of their weaponry. They did not fully realize that the Japanese could, and did, find ways to take shelter from the shells. The enemy hunkered down in caves, tunnels, or bunkers and waited for the shooting to stop. At Peleliu, very few Japanese soldiers fell prey to the pre-landing bombardment. The sailors had trouble realizing this. They thought in terms of hitting pinpoint targets, eliminating positions, and overwhelming the enemy with explosions. From the distance of a few miles offshore, it was hard for them to imagine that anyone, or anything, could survive under the avalanche of their shells. This was an inevitable consequence of their point of view. Inexperienced Marines who had never assaulted an enemy-held island often thought the same way. Only after they went ashore did they realize the terrible reality that enemy soldiers could remain alive and well in the wake of such terrible punishment. The bombardments, they came to understand, looked more impressive than they really were, but this realization only set in as a result of experience on the ground. “One must guard against the overenthusiasm of naval gunfire advocates who believe that nothing can survive the heavy preliminary bombardments,” Colonel Walter William Wachtler, Geiger’s operations officer, wrote.

A classic example of this juxtaposition is a conversation that Colonel Lewis “Chesty” Puller, commander of the 1st Marine Regiment, had with the captain of his unit’s troopship on the morning of D-day, as his Marines prepared to go ashore. “Puller, you won’t find anything to stop you over there,” the ship’s captain claimed. “Nothing could have lived through that hammering.” Puller, a commander with years of ground combat experience, demurred. “I doubt if you’ve cleaned it out. I believe they’ll have pillbox stuff, fortifications like we’ve never seen before.” Undeterred, the captain jovially predicted: “We’ll expect you for dinner this evening.” Puller assured the captain that he and his crew would be back in Hawaii well before the Marines were done with Peleliu.³

So, in view of firepower’s limitations, was Oldendorf wrong to cease fire? Probably so. Although three days of bombardment could hardly be expected to neutralize Nakagawa’s formidable defenses, it was still better than two and a half. If Oldendorf’s ships could destroy only a few more enemy gun emplacements, or wound or kill a couple dozen more Japanese soldiers, the job of the ground troops would become just a little bit easier. Perhaps a few more American lives could have been saved. But, of course, no amount of bombardment could completely subdue Japanese resistance. The shooting could only help the Marines, not do the job for them. The Marines did not expect miracles from the Navy, just the absolute maximum level of support that the sea service could provide.

The Assault

The landing beaches stretched for a couple thousand yards along Peleliu’s west coast. Puller’s 1st Marines were to land on the left flank at White Beaches 1 and 2; the 5th Marines, under Colonel Harold “Bucky” Harris, would land in the middle at Orange Beaches 1 and 2; Colonel Herman Hanneken’s 7th Marines would hit the right flank at Orange Beach 3. The airfield was, of course, the main objective. Looking like the numeral 4, it beckoned from just a couple hundred yards inland. Beyond it lay swamps and the dizzying network of jagged ridges, concealed caves, and open valleys that comprised the Umurbrogol.

At 0832, when the first Americans hit the beaches of Peleliu, Japanese opposition was intense. “My surprise and chagrin when concealed batteries opened up on the LVTs [Landing Vehicle Tracked] can be imagined,” Admiral Oldendorf later said. The beaches themselves stretched for only about thirty yards before giving way to scraggly jungle foliage that made it difficult to see inland. Mines, obstacles, barbed wire, and booby traps were embedded all over the beaches. Fortunately, the UDTs and the preinvasion bombardment had disarmed and blown up many of the mines. The Japanese had also failed to arm quite a few of them.

Few enemy soldiers were on the beaches themselves. They were in caves, pillboxes, and concrete blockhouses beyond the foliage, just inland. They had pre-sited the entire landing area, from the beaches all the way to a prominent coral reef a few hundred yards offshore. In no time, an awesome volume of fire swept through the entire landing area, turning it into a ghastly killing ground. Artillery and mortar shells tore into amphibious trucks (DUKWs) and LVTs, setting them afire, burning the crewmen, blowing assault troops into the bullet-swept water. “The ammo which had been aboard them was exploding,” the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, history of events recorded, “and occasionally one of [them] would blow up, scattering burning debris over the beach.” The 7th Marine Regiment’s after action report painted a similarly grim picture of the beach assault: “Direct fire from heavy caliber anti-boat guns took an extremely heavy toll of landing craft. Many of the assault troops were forced to wade ashore without cover from the devastating small arms fire. Beaches . . . were also covered by pre-registered mortar and artillery fires which maintained a steady, unceasing barrage on the landing beaches . . . causing serious disorganization and inflicting heavy casualties.”⁴

In fact, that dreary passage, written as it was by an officer after the battle, did not even begin to convey the full horror of the fighting. Mortar rounds exploded randomly up and down the beach, spraying fragments into the air, into the sand, and into bodies. Nambu machine guns chattered mercilessly, seemingly inundating the beach with bullets, kicking up sand and water, tearing into men. The bullets shattered bones, blew heads off, lacerated kidneys, and tore muscles into mush. Individual Japanese riflemen picked out unlucky Marines and shot them with impunity. Tanks came under immediate fire once they crossed the reef. “Over half of our tanks received from one to four hits during the ten minutes reef crossing, but none were knocked out,” the division after action report related. The tanks were to provide crucial fire support for assaulting infantrymen, and even some measure of cover from enemy small-arms fire.

Ashore, smoke from the friendly bombardment and the burning amtracs wafted overhead in greasy shreds. Most of the Marines had already spent a long morning breathing stale diesel fumes, battling seasickness as their LVTs circled in the water, waiting for the signal to hit the beach. Those who were aboard LVTs that successfully negotiated the reef and made it to shore then jumped over the sides of their amtracs, ran up the beach, sensed the intensity of the fire, and took cover wherever they could. Few could see anyone, or anything, to shoot at. The Americans were caught in a skillfully pre-sited kill zone their enemies had spent many months perfecting. A more desperate situation can scarcely be imagined.⁵

Everywhere, individual Americans struggled to survive and fight back. Corporal Leo Zitko and his fellow Marines had shared a can of boned turkey aboard their landing craft as it roared toward the beach. Now they were pinned down alongside the landing craft, listening to machine-gun bullets clank off the side of the vehicle. “For the first time I began to realize there’s a war going on,” he wrote. He glanced to his right and saw an unexploded mine an inch away from his elbow. Also to his right, he spotted a blockhouse farther down the beach. The muzzle of a machine gun was poking out of the blockhouse. The muzzle flashed as the gunner depressed his weapon as low as he could and squeezed his trigger, spewing bullets along the ground.

This was called grazing fire. The purpose of the fire was to hit anything within two feet of the ground, especially prone men. One bullet smashed into the man next to Zitko with an ugly thud. “From then on . . . it was just a series of ‘close shaves’ and ‘acts of God.’ ” Corporal Henry Andrasovsky’s landing craft struck a mine and then got hit by a mortar shell. He and his squad scrambled over the sides of the LVT and into the water, just moments before another mortar round hit the amtrac and set it on fire. “A machine gun opened up on us in the water. I’d fire eight rounds out of my M1 [Garand] rifle and dive under the water. The water was about . . . chest deep. The machine gun . . . cut down just about everybody that was on the left side of that [amtrac]. I don’t think any of them made it ashore.” He ran into some underwater barbed wire, which tore at his clothes. Finally he and four other men made it to the beach. Their only option was to close with the machine gun and kill its crew, a classic infantry mission. Machine-gun fire from another amtrac forced the enemy gunners to duck their heads. Meanwhile, Corporal Andrasovsky and the others crawled close enough to pitch grenades at the gun. The grenades exploded, shredding the Japanese gunners with fragments. The Americans then leaned in closer and shot them point-blank, with no mercy or reflection. It was the very essence of the infantryman’s decidedly personal war.

Corporal Alexander Costella’s mortar squad landed in a section of the beach that was under intense sniper fire. “Our men were being picked off like flies. I ran up the beach dodging sniper and mortar fire—all the time firing my weapon into the trees hoping to hit some snipers.” Costella dived facedown into a shallow shell hole. Gritty grains of sand irritated his eyes and lips. “One sniper got his sites [sic] on me. He did not miss by much. The bullet hit the sand in front of my face with such impact that it drew blood from my face.” Joe Reid, a friend of Costella’s, plopped down next to him in the hole. Reid was a popular guy, the sort of person who knew how to make everyone else laugh. Costella turned to warn Reid about the snipers. “Before I could finish my words he was hit in the middle of the forehead. The blood seeped out of a small hole. He had a blank stare. I knew he was gone.” Costella felt horrible but he had no time to dwell on his friend’s death. He sprayed the trees with fire from his Thompson submachine gun, got up and ran to another position. Out of his peripheral vision, he could see that the beach was littered with dead Marines. Nearby, Private William Martin was bending under the weight of a full field pack, ammunition, and a drum of communication wire. “A mortar shell exploded about three feet in front of me. It split in half. One piece went to the right of me and the other to the left of me.” He lay stunned for a moment by the impact of the shell. He could hardly believe how close he had just come to having his head blown off. He quickly discarded the drum of wire and got away from that spot. ⁶

In any amphibious invasion, assault troops are often most vulnerable right as they reach an enemy-held shore. At this point, they are disoriented. They are overloaded with equipment. They are probably seasick. They are riding aboard landing craft that make prime, and easily identified, targets for enemy gunners. Once out of the craft, the troops find themselves on open, sandy ground, in a pre-sited kill zone. Thus, Marines were trained to get off the beach as quickly as possible. The quicker they got off the beach, the sooner they could capture objectives and minimize their exposure to Japanese defensive fire. At Peleliu, in those first hours, almost every man—even those who were pinned down—kept thinking to himself: “Get off the beach!” That desperate thought kept flashing through Private Eugene Sledge’s terrified mind as he crawled along the beach, watching the impersonal maelstrom of Japanese firepower destroy men around him. He saw a DUKW roll out of the water, onto the sand, only to be hit by a high-velocity shell. Pieces of the vehicle, and the men within, flew in every direction. He looked seaward and saw a group of Marines out on the reef, trying to exit a burning amtrac. “Their buddies tried to help them as they struggled in the knee-deep water,” Sledge wrote after the war, in one of the most powerful combat memoirs ever published. Sledge saw splashes of water spout up as machine-gun bullets swept through the struggling men. New to combat, he was now filled with anger, revulsion, and abject frustration. “I had tasted the bitterest essence of war, the sight of helpless comrades being slaughtered, and it filled me with disgust.”

Lieutenant Bruce Watkins lost six men from his platoon before the unit had even made it one hundred yards. “Still we hadn’t seen an enemy soldier.” He and most of the platoon made it to an embankment that overlooked the airfield. Waves of accurate, deadly machine-gun fire soon tore into them from the left. Lieutenant Watkins heard one of his privates calling to him: “Lieutenant, help me—I can’t move.” Watkins sprinted through heavy fire to get to him. “He was shot through the thumb and thigh, his leg broken, hugging the ground as best he could.” The lieutenant picked the man up and, aided by the adrenaline that was coursing through his bloodstream, carried him to the embankment. A sergeant was lying there with his abdomen torn open, gushing blood. Watkins “saw them both onto stretchers and ready to be evacuated.” This was humane but it was his job to lead, not care for the wounded.⁷

The problem was that casualties were piling up faster than Navy corpsmen could treat them. No group was busier, or more overtaxed, than the valorous corpsmen, many of whom were attached directly to the Marine infantry companies. “The cry ‘Corpsman’ and ‘Stretcher bearers’ became more nerve racking than the crump of mortar shells and the whine of bullets,” an officer in the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, wrote. Knowing their importance to the Marines’ body and soul, the Japanese delighted in shooting at them. All along the hellish landing area, the corpsmen braved the worst kill zones, administering first aid to the wounded, under the most stressful circumstances. The best they could do for wounded men was to stop their bleeding, bind up their wounds, dull their pain with morphine, or treat the symptoms of shock.

Leslie Harrold, a nineteen-year-old corpsman with C Company, 5th Marines, was moving up the beach when he saw a man from his unit get shot in the mouth. “The guy’s tongue was cut. He was choking to death on his own tongue and blood flowing down his throat. I got ahold of the guy’s tongue and his bottom lip and I clipped ’em together” with a hemostat. Harrold then jammed several compress bandages into the Marine’s mouth to further staunch the bleeding. “I dug out teeth and bits of gum. I did treat the shock by putting in a liter of blood plasma.” He wrote down what he had done on a tag and pinned it to the wounded man, so that doctors aboard a hospital ship offshore would know his status. Then he flagged down an amtrac to evacuate him. He no sooner finished with this case than a bullet slammed into another Marine “right between the eyes. The bullet [went] in, hit something, turned and went out right in front of his ear. It was like hearing a cantaloupe dropped on the sidewalk.” Harrold attended to him, tagged him, and sent him to an amtrac, all the while under withering fire.

As more men landed, the beach was soon a very crowded place, making it even harder to treat the wounded. Wounded and dying men lay everywhere. Corpsmen scurried around, listening to cries for help, working frantically to save lives. Adrenaline aside, the best way to move wounded men was on stretchers and this was an arduous, labor-intensive job. Generally, it took at least four able-bodied men to move just one wounded man on a stretcher. Some of the stretcher bearers were medics, but most were support troops of one sort or another who were now pressed into service to remove the growing number of wounded men. These litter teams only added to the crowded confusion that reigned on the beach.

Some of the bearers were African-American Marines whose bravery in tending to the wounded earned the universal respect and admiration of everyone on the beach that terrible day. In the opinion of one medical officer, the black Marines were “most proficient in this type of activity. All Unit Commanders praised their efficiency, zeal, and cheerfulness in performing their duties.” Within an hour, the medical people had evacuated the first casualties to hospital ships. As the fighting raged, the evacuations took on a conveyor-belt quality as wounded Marines were treated by corpsmen, placed aboard amtracs, and then shuttled to the ships. According to a remarkably detailed, on-the-spot diary kept by Captain James Flagg, an operations officer in the 5th Marines, this regiment alone suffered 214 wounded during the assault. Among the corpsmen and the riflemen alike, he witnessed countless acts of anonymous heroism, certainly more than even he could ever document. “There were many examples of individual bravery. Some of these actions were never observed [by commanders] and will be forever lost.” Flagg hit upon a great truth of combat. Decorations reflect only what survivors can see, hear, and record within the chaotic myopia of the fighting. Indeed, the same could also be said for battle history.⁸

One thing that is clear about D-day on Peleliu is that leadership was of vital importance. The 1st Marine Division was blessed with a large number of combat-experienced, dedicated small-unit leaders of all ranks. “We had plenty [of] good thinkers on the spot . . . making sense out of nonsense,” one Marine infantryman commented. Throughout the morning, these “good thinkers” led mostly by example. In one typical instance, Private Charles Owen, a sixteen-year-old rifleman in A Company, 7th Marine Regiment, was lying among a clump of Marines, hugging the beach for dear life. The enemy fire was so intense that burrowing into the sand seemed the only way to survive. Every man knew that if he stayed here long enough, he would be killed. In fact, severed arms and legs were lying around them, grisly proof of imminent danger. However, rational calculation gave way to the direct fear of what that wicked fire would do to anyone who dared move a muscle. Beyond this, the inertia stemmed from something very common in combat—sheer confusion. Shells were exploding. Bullets were buzzing. No one could see the enemy. Few Marines had a sense of their location, or what direction to go. Basically, no one really knew what exactly to do next. Owen himself was in the grip of the sort of fear that induces sheer panic. This kind of fear has definite physical symptoms that affect the respiratory system, vision, and even a person’s muscle dexterity. “Never before or since have I experienced such fright,” he said.

He lay still and cursed at himself for lying about his age to join the Corps. He wished he were anywhere but here. Then, above the din of battle, he noticed a booming voice. “Down to my right, and at a point on the beach where the fearful storm of iron and lead was raging most furiously, there was a man coming up the beach toward us. He was the only person on his feet, as far as I could see.” Private Owen could hardly believe that anyone could walk more than a few feet in the face of such terrific fire. The man was carrying a Thompson submachine gun and a Japanese shovel. He was covered with blood and mud, but Owen could see a major’s insignia on his collar. He walked up to Owen’s group and screamed: “Get the hell off this beach or I’ll shoot your ass!” His rank was not necessarily what snapped them out of their fearful paralysis. It was his decisiveness along with his appearance and the determined look in his eye. They were convinced that he really would shoot them if they did not move, so he now became the greater danger. “When I got up and moved,” Owen said, “so did others of my section and company, mortarmen and riflemen—everybody started moving off that beach. It was a complete exodus.” A few minutes later a massive mortar barrage hit right where they had been. “If that major had not been clearing that beach . . . I would have been dead right there at the age of 16.” The major was Arthur Parker, who, as a tank officer, had no direct authority over the infantrymen, but that did not matter in the heat of combat. “They had to be gotten off that beach or they would be killed,” he later explained. “They wouldn’t move so I screamed at them. I used all kinds of profanity.”

Most of the myriad leadership events throughout the landing area were not so dramatic. Private Russell Davis, like so many others, was trying to figure out what was going on and what to do. He aimlessly wandered along the beach, looking for a close buddy, dodging near misses, before finally encountering a strong-willed NCO. “I saw a redheaded corporal, flailing his heavy arms and urging the men forward into the smoke at the edge of the beach. The corporal seemed to know what he was doing and I pressed toward him, happy to attach myself to anyone who knew what he was supposed to do.” The corporal was striding around, bellowing at frightened men, even kicking some who refused to move. “Get forward!” he shouted. “There’s a ditch ahead. Get into it. Stop bunching up on that sand like sheep.” Davis and several others responded to him. Later, Davis watched as the corporal persuaded a demolition man to go forward with him and destroy a bunker.

Generally, this is how the battle went that morning. Frightened men asked corporals, sergeants, or lieutenants what to do and the leaders told them, thus giving them a job to focus on rather than their natural fear. The leaders understood that the situation was horrifying but not all that complicated. Staying on the beach meant death. So the best thing to do was move forward to destroy whatever, or whoever, was in the way. This was how the 1st Marine Division blasted out its bloody lodgment some fifteen yards inland at Peleliu.⁹

Life and Death at the Point

The worst fighting took place on the extreme left of the American beachhead, just on the northern edge of the 1st Marine Regiment’s White Beach 1. Here a gnarled, thirty-foot-high ridge protruded, like a swollen knuckle, into the sea. Dubbed “the Point” by the Americans, this blunt ridge flanked the entire beachhead, allowing the Japanese to pour enfilading fire on nearly every Marine who was struggling ashore. Colonel Nakagawa understood the defensive advantages of the Point, and he fortified it heavily. According to a 1st Marine Regiment report, Japanese defenses consisted of “five reinforced concrete pillboxes housing a number of heavy machine guns and a 40mm [actually 47-millimeter] automatic weapon. Riflemen and machine gunners in spider traps or coral depressions gave close covering fire for the emplacements.” The automatic weapon was an antiboat gun whose six-pound shells savaged the American DUKWs and amtracs. The pillboxes stood about five feet tall and were reinforced with steel rods and several feet of concrete or coral. The Japanese expertly concealed the pillboxes and their supporting positions within the jagged natural bramble of coral, sand, and foliage that blanketed the Point. Twenty-six-year-old Captain George Hunt, whose K Company drew the mission of capturing the Point, described it as “a rocky mass of sharp pinnacles, deep crevasses, tremendous boulders. Pillboxes, reinforced with steel and concrete, had been dug or blasted in the base of the perpendicular drop to the beach.” Some of the pillboxes had coral and concrete piled as much as six feet high with small holes around them for supporting infantry soldiers. “It surpassed by far anything we had conceived of when we studied the aerial photographs.”

In fact, the Americans had little idea of how strong the Point really was, because they could not see its defenses. “It was totally overgrown with little shrub trees,” Sergeant George Peto, a mortar forward observer in K Company, recalled. “It was so camouflaged. It just looked like a bunch of brush. You couldn’t really see nothing. It was one of the best fortified places I’ve seen or heard of.” The pre-landing bombardment had not even touched the Point. The Navy had mainly fired at observable targets. They saw nothing to shoot at on the Point, so they left it alone. Only on the ground, then, could the Americans truly understand what they were up against. The Point’s machine guns were raking the landing beaches. Japanese riflemen and light machine gunners even tied themselves onto the tops of trees. From that vantage point, they could pour accurate, aimed fire at the crowd of Marines all along the beach. “The entire beach was swarming with tractors, men evacuating wounded, and unloading supplies,” one Marine recalled. “The sands were black with milling men.”¹⁰

Basically, K Company had to take the Point or those milling men might well be slaughtered. When Hunt’s outfit hit the beach, it was over-strength, with 235 Marines, plus a couple of radiomen, three Joint Air Sea Communications Operator (JASCO) teams, along with a few stretcher bearers and demolition teams. The captain would literally need every man to accomplish his challenging mission. Most of the company landed one hundred yards too far south. The 2nd Platoon pushed inland about seventy-five yards, right into a diamond-shaped ditch that the Japanese had dug to ensnare American tanks. The trap “was about 10 ft. high and 15 ft. wide and possibly 150 yards in length,” Braswell Deen, a BAR man, wrote. He and the other 2nd Platoon men naturally gravitated to the trap for cover, only to find that it was a killing ground. Caught in the trap, Private Deen saw enemy bullets slam into his platoon leader and several other men. The Japanese small-arms and machine-gun fire was frighteningly accurate. Deen and the others were trying to fire back but they were pinned down “by a devastating cross fire from coral ridges, concrete pillboxes, caves and formidable fighting holes.” Deen’s assistant gunner took a bullet right between the eyes. His lifeless body slid down into the ditch. One by one, others got hit, many of them with mortal wounds. “Everybody was split up and separated,” another private remembered, “and guys with blood on ’em were all over the tank trap. Any time anybody tried to climb out and keep attackin’, they was shot.” The temperature was hovering near one hundred degrees. Water and ammo were already running low. The platoon was combat-ineffective, pinned down, and cut off from the company for the rest of the day. Only with the support of Sherman tanks could the survivors escape that night.¹¹

Minus his 2nd Platoon, Captain Hunt threw the rest of his company at the Point. Initially his men tried a frontal assault along the beach, but Japanese opposition was too intense, so Hunt’s Marines, mainly in small groups, fought their way inland to attack the Point defenders from behind. “For nearly two hours they fought it out in a steady exchange of fire,” the regimental after action report declared. “The protecting [Japanese] troops were killed or driven off first, leaving the pillboxes open to annihilation from their blind spots.” That statement was accurate and straightforward, but it did not even begin to describe what the fighting was like for the infantrymen who had to do it. They fought the Japanese at close range, usually within twenty or thirty yards. It was personal combat. Men saw their quarry, aimed, and shot to kill. The main weapons of decision in this fight were grenades and small arms, not impersonal mortars or artillery pieces.

A few men did most of the grisly work. One such man, Private Fred Fox, noticed a stairway cut into the coral, leading to a dugout. He threw a white phosphorous grenade down the stairs. A couple other men threw fragmentation grenades. After the smoke from the explosions cleared, Fox raised his tommy gun and began edging down the steps. All at once, he saw a wounded Japanese officer at the bottom of the steps. “His left arm was burnt black but he was leaning on his right elbow with a Nambu pistol in his hand aimed at me. I pressed the trigger on the tommy gun firing four or five rounds into him.” The .45-caliber bullets tore holes in the officer and he fell dead. Fox moved past him, into the dugout, where he found several bodies, including another officer who had apparently committed suicide by disemboweling himself.

Elsewhere, one of Hunt’s platoon leaders, Lieutenant William Willis, led a group of Marines in assaulting the pillboxes that made the Point so formidable. One of his men, Private King, attacked one pillbox by himself. As he was hurling grenades at the pillbox’s embrasure, a bullet tore through his helmet but, by some miracle, it did not hit his head. Another bullet caromed off his cartridge belt. Instead of fleeing, King stayed put and threw another grenade at the embrasure, killing most of the Japanese in the pillbox. The rest tried to flee. “My boys lined up as though they were in a shooting gallery at Coney Island and proceeded to pick them off with ease!” Lieutenant Willis later testified. “I remember one Jap who left a trail of smoke behind him, his pack evidently on fire. He was screaming like a frightened monkey. Then he fell down, still burning up, and didn’t move.” The monkey reference was no accident. Willis and the other Marines thought of the Japanese as animals, thus dehumanizing them. This stoked their own hatred and willingness to kill. Another one of Willis’s men launched a perfect rifle grenade shot, right through the embrasure of the pillbox, scoring a direct hit on the 47-millimeter gun. The lieutenant watched in delight as the pillbox imploded. “After a big explosion, the pillbox burst into flame, and black smoke poured out of the embrasure and the exit. I heard the Japs screaming and their ammunition spitting and snapping as the heat exploded it.” Three screaming Japanese “raced from the exit, waving their arms and letting out yells of pain. The squad I had placed there finished them off.”¹²

As of 1015, the Americans controlled the Point. By Captain Hunt’s estimate, he had lost about two-thirds of his company. His Marines had killed 110 Japanese soldiers. Already the steamy air was filled with the putrefying stench of the dead. Wounded men and dead bodies were strewn all over the shaggy, jagged coral of the Point. “The human wreckage I saw was a grim and tragic sight,” the captain commented. “I saw a ghastly mixture of bandages; bloody and mutilated skin; men gritting their teeth, resigned to their wounds; men groaning and writhing in their agonies; men outstretched or twisted or grotesquely transfixed in the attitudes of death; men with their entrails exposed or whole chunks of body ripped out of them.” The mere act of taking this position was a triumph of near epic proportions, and a testament to the potency of well-trained, well-led infantrymen who were determined to fight hard and work together as a team. With the equivalent of only a couple hard-pressed platoons, armed with only light infantry weapons, Hunt’s men had taken five concrete pillboxes, numerous dugouts, and had killed over one hundred enemy soldiers, in less than an hour’s fighting. They had done this with no fire support at all, not even mortars.¹³

K Company’s ordeal was far from over, though. The men were exhausted and on the verge of dehydration from the intense heat of the tropical sun. Their uniforms were filthy, torn, and salt-encrusted. “Damn, it was hot and we were thirsty,” one of the Marines later wrote. Some resorted to crawling into no-man’s-land and stripping canteens from the maggot-infested bodies of their enemies. The Marines were also low on ammo and had little food. Hunt had so few able-bodied men left (thirty-eight, according to the records) that his fighting positions were spread quite thin, over the course of about eighty or ninety yards. Although K Company’s possession of the Point had eliminated the deadly fire that had been saturating the landing beaches, the company was cut off. The men were under constant Japanese mortar and sniper fire. The mortars were especially effective. As the shells hit and exploded, they sent shards of rock and steel flying in all directions. At one point, a Japanese artillery piece lobbed heavier shells against the Point, wounding several men. Air and naval fire subsequently destroyed the gun. It was difficult to dig into the gnarled coral ridge, so the Marines stacked rocks and logs around their hasty fighting positions. Hunt was in radio communication with his battalion commander, but his radio batteries were running out of juice.

Fortunately for K Company, a supply LVT, crewed by four black Marines, made it into the Point just before evening. They dropped their ramp and unloaded boxes of ammunition, hand grenades, barbed wire, a flamethrower, and several surviving members of the 2nd Platoon. The LVT crew also brought a fifty-five-gallon drum of water, but this did not do much good. “The drum had not been cleaned,” Private Fred Fox wrote, “and the water tasted awful, sickening. It was oil and water and no way could we drink it.” For now, Fox and the others had to make do with captured Japanese canteens. K Company loaded several of their most seriously wounded comrades aboard the LVT, and it left.¹⁴

The resupply came just in time, because the Japanese fully understood the Point’s significance and were determined to retake it. They had launched a few jabs during the day, but a sharper attack began at midnight with a ferocious mortar barrage, followed by a company-sized probe. Instead of hurling themselves forward with a wasteful banzai attack, the Japanese used the darkness to edge in close to the American lines. Their mortars forced the Americans to crouch low, behind their rocks, “like they were our mother’s arms,” in the words of one veteran, hoping the shells would hit somewhere far away. The shrapnel from the mortar shells showered the Point’s scraggly trees and tinkled off the jagged rocks. The fragments also scored several hits on men and the air was filled with plaintive cries for corpsmen.

The Marines were very well disciplined. They did not give away their positions with wild, searching fire. Instead, they waited until the Japanese were within hand grenade range and then opened up. “We did a lot of shooting, a lot of grenade throwing,” Private Fox recalled. “There was screaming and a lot of explosions.” Sergeant Peto was on the extreme right of the company position, crouched behind a .30-caliber machine gun that he had taken from a disabled Sherman tank on the beach. Because the 81-millimeter mortars were not operational, he had become an impromptu machine gunner. By the light of flares, he fired at anything that moved beyond the rocks. “Whenever anybody heard a noise or there was some movement, everybody would open up. They were all around us. They were within . . . fifteen or twenty feet of us.” At this stage, the American fire was too much for the Japanese. “The attack subsided to occasional harassing mortar fire,” Captain Hunt wrote, “and by 0300 there was quiet.”

As the sun rose, the fighting once again intensified. The Japanese showered the American lines with mortar shells. Most of the enemy infantrymen were in a defiladed area within hand grenade range. Private Fox was manning a captured Japanese machine gun. Just to his right, a small group of Marines were hurling grenades at the enemy soldiers, who were about fifty yards away. “There was a big coral rock in front where our guys could stand up and get a nice throw at the Japs. The Japanese would throw back with their grenades hitting the rock, which would roll off to one side or the other.” Captain Hunt was near the center of the company position, barking orders, radioing for help, managing the battle. “Our machine guns raked across the draw riddling any Jap that stuck up his head. I saw a hand rise to throw a grenade. Our bullets reduced it to a bloody stump. The fight became a vicious melee of countless explosions, whining bullets, shrapnel whirring overhead or clinking off the rocks, hoarse shouts, shrill-screaming Japanese.” More and more Americans went down with wounds. Captain Hunt saw them walking, or being carried by stretcher teams, down to the beach, blood dripping from arms, torsos, and heads. Both sides continued to pour huge quantities of fire at each other. “I smelled the powder vapor, acrid, choking, could see it swirling white—sweat in my eyes, stinging—jacket was wet on my back—rock chips spattering at my feet.”¹⁵

The fighting finally died down around 0730. The rest of the day was comparatively quiet. This gave Colonel Lewis “Chesty” Puller the precious time he needed to send help to Hunt’s hard-pressed company. In the course of the day, the colonel sent more resupply amtracs, with reinforcements as well. Also, B Company of the 1st Marines attacked north and linked up with Hunt’s K Company late in the afternoon on September 16. By then, Hunt had 60-millimeter mortars in his own position and 81-millimeters a couple hundred yards down the beach, at his disposal, plus some artillery, too. In that sense, his company was stronger than before but his men were now in the throes of total exhaustion. Knowing the Point’s defenders were still vulnerable, Colonel Nakagawa amassed 350 infantry soldiers and launched a night attack. This was a well-planned assault to capture a key objective, not an immature banzai attack. Even so, the Americans, aided by the half-light of flares, mowed them down in droves. “Howls of pain which rose in front of our positions, dimly heard through the roar of our weapons, told us that we were hitting the mark,” Captain Hunt wrote. The captain knew this was a fight to the finish. “Give them hell!” he screamed at his men. “Kill every one of the bastards!”

The Japanese colonel had committed another 47-millimeter gun to support his carefully conceived attack, but American artillery destroyed the gun and its crew. “The bodies were stacked 4-deep over the gun,” Sergeant Peto wrote. Farther down the beach, the 81-millimeter mortar crews were firing at the absolute minimum range. “We were firing only 200 to 250 yards,” Corporal Albert Mikel, a member of a mortar crew, said. “Our mortars were pointing almost straight up. In fear that the mortars might fall backwards, we placed sandbags on the barrels of the mortars.” In spite of this blanket of firepower, some of the Japanese closed to within bayonet range. Several of them fell upon Private Fox, stabbing him repeatedly. He nearly bled to death but somehow held out in a delirium until another Marine rescued him.

By the early morning hours of September 17, the fighting petered out. The Japanese attack was a deadly failure. In a day and a half of fighting, some four hundred Imperial soldiers had been killed. Their torn, rotting corpses were draped all over the Point. They lay in mute testimony to the waste, vulgarity, and valor inherent in war. “They sprawled in ghastly attitudes with their faces frozen and their lips curled into apish grins,” Hunt recalled. “Their eyes were slimy with the green film of death. Many of them were huddled with their arms around each other as though they had futilely protected themselves from our fire. They were horribly mutilated; riddled by bullets and torn by shrapnel until their entrails popped out; legs and arms and torsos littered the rocks and in some places were lodged grotesquely in the treetops. Their yellow skin was beginning to turn brown, and their fly-ridden corpses still free of maggots were already cracked and bloated like rotten melons.” Such were the troubling realities of life and death at the Point. In securing it, the Americans had secured their beachhead on Peleliu.

Years later, Russell Honsowetz, a battalion commander in another 1st Marine Regiment unit that did not fight at the Point, smugly claimed that many Marines and historians “made a lot of ballyhoo” about K Company’s desperate battle at the Point. Yet the company, he claimed, “was never in danger.” This would have been news to the men who fought so desperately, and bled and struggled, and watched their buddies die in that awful place. Of the 235 members of the company who went into the Point, only 78 came out unscathed (at least in the physical sense). Hunt lost 32 men killed and another 125 wounded. “Imagine if an officer less brave than George Hunt had the job of securing the Point,” Major Nikolai Stevenson, the 3rd Battalion executive officer, once said in tribute to the captain and his Marines. Knowing that K Company was fought out, Colonel Puller immediately placed the unit in regimental reserve. He knew full well that Captain Hunt’s men had performed brilliantly. He and most other Marines rightly thought of the Point battle as one of the great small-unit infantry accomplishments in World War II.¹⁶

Sheer Misery

In the meantime, Peleliu was turning into a bloody slugging match of pure attrition, exactly the sort of battle the Japanese wanted to fight. The Americans were paying dearly for every substantial gain they made. On D-day alone, the 1st Marine Division suffered nearly thirteen hundred casualties. Late in the day, the Japanese launched a tank-infantry counterattack designed to push the Americans back from a shaky perimeter they had carved out at the airfield. This was a carefully planned albeit ill-advised assault, not a banzai attack. The Americans slaughtered their enemies in droves. “Here they come,” Marines yelled to one another, even as they opened up with every weapon at their disposal. A combination of fire from Sherman tanks, antitank guns, bazookas, machine guns, and rifle grenades destroyed the enemy soldiers, and at least thirteen of their tanks, at close range.

The Japanese attack failed for two reasons. First, their tanks were small, thinly armored, and lightly gunned. They were no match for American antitank guns, especially the bigger Shermans. “Bazookas helped stop the assault, but it was the General Shermans that did the major portion of the damage,” a Marine combat correspondent wrote. Second, the Japanese attacked over the relatively flat terrain of the airfield into a well-prepared defensive position, making perfect targets of themselves. When the fighting petered out, the shattered hulks of enemy tanks burned in random patterns all around the airfield. Treads and turrets were blown off. Side armor was peppered with holes. Flames consumed metal and flesh alike. Dead, half-burned enemy soldiers—some without legs, arms, or heads—were sprawled around the scorched vehicles, sometimes even wedged underneath their grimy treads. The following day the 5th Marines weathered heavy mortar fire to secure the airfield, the campaign’s major objective. But this hardly seemed to matter. From the coral ridges beyond the airfield, the Japanese poured thick gobs of mortar, artillery, and machine-gun fire onto the vulnerable Americans. The American advance was slow in the face of such ferocious opposition.¹⁷

Moreover, the elements were emerging as a real problem. The heat was absolutely brutal. Temperatures reached 105 degrees in the shade, and there was precious little of that to be found anywhere on the beachhead. In the open, the temperatures were at least 115 degrees. It was, in the recollection of one Marine machine gunner, like a “steam room. The sweat slid into one’s mouth to aggravate thirst.” The surviving records most commonly describe the heat as “enervating,” a word that means, according to Webster’s dictionary, “to deprive of vitality.” That certainly held true for many of the Marines. Robert “Pepper” Martin of Time had covered Guam. At Peleliu, he was one of the few civilian correspondents to see the battle firsthand. “Peleliu is a horrible place,” he wrote. “The heat is stifling and rain falls intermittently—the muggy rain that brings no relief, only greater misery. The coral rocks soak up heat during the day and it is only slightly cooler at night. Marines are in the finest possible physical condition, but they wilted on Peleliu. By the fourth day, there were as many casualties from heat prostration as from wounds. Peleliu is incomparably worse than Guam in its bloodiness, terror, climate and the incomprehensible tenacity of the Japs. For sheer brutality and fatigue, I think it surpasses anything yet seen in the Pacific.”

The stress of combat, combined with the unrelenting heat, made for a miserable combination. There was no way to escape the heat. The sun beat down relentlessly, turning the island “into a scorching furnace,” according to one unit after action report. Everyone was sunburned. Jagged coral rocks poked painfully into tender, sun-baked skin. Men sweated profusely. Their fatigues were salt-stained, dripping wet from their smelly perspiration. Salt tablets helped a little bit, but supplies were low. Some Marines collapsed from heat exhaustion. One officer in the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, saw many such men in his outfit “unable to fight, unable to continue. Some were carried out with dry heaves. Others had tongues so swollen as to make it impossible for them to talk or to swallow. Others were unable to close eyelids over their dried, swollen eyeballs. We lost their much needed strength in a critical phase of the operation.”

Dehydrated, frightened, and exhausted, a few broke mentally under the strain of the heat. Private Russell Davis saw a big redheaded Marine, with dried lips and cherry red sunburned skin, completely lose his composure. “I can’t go the heat! I can take the war but not the heat!” he screamed. Davis watched as “he shook his fist up at the blazing sun. Two of his mates pounced on him and rode him down to the earth, but he was big and strong and he thrashed away from them.” Davis never knew the broken man’s ultimate fate.¹⁸

To make matters infinitely worse, water was scarce. Each Marine came ashore with two canteens of water, a woefully inadequate ration for Peleliu’s killer heat. Most of the men drank their canteens dry within the first few hours of the invasion. “We had practiced water discipline at great length . . . but the body demands water,” Private Richard Johnston, a machine gunner in the 5th Marines, explained. “No matter how strong your will or how controlled your mind, you either drink what water you have or die in not too long a time.” Medical corpsmen were covered with the blood of wounded men, but now had no water to wash that blood off their hands. With no other choice, they treated their patients with filthy, bloodstained hands. After the chaos of the beach assault abated, and the battle settled into a steady push inland to gain ground, shore parties hauled water ashore, mostly in fifty-five-gallon drums and five-gallon cans. By the second or third day, this water reached the frontline fighters. When a five-gallon can reached Private Sledge’s K Company, 5th Marines, he anxiously held out his canteen cup for a drink. “Our hands shook, we were so eager to quench our thirst. The water looked brown in my aluminum canteen cup. No matter, I took a big gulp—and almost spit it out despite my terrible thirst. It was awful. Full of rust and oil, it stunk. A blue film of oil floated lazily on the surface of the smelly brown liquid. Cramps gripped the pit of my stomach.”

The drums and cans had originally been used to carry fuel. Before the invasion, work parties had not properly cleaned the containers. Thus, when they were filled with warm water, the fuel residue mixed with the water, and the metal of the containers, producing a noxious, unhealthy, rusted, repulsive brown liquid. “Smelling and tasting of gasoline, it was undrinkable,” Robert Leckie, a machine gunner in the 1st Marines, wrote. Nonetheless, many Marines, like Sledge, were so desperately thirsty that they drank the tainted water. Some vomited. Others were incapacitated with sharp cramps and had to be evacuated.

Word of the tainted water spread quickly. Soon the Marines began looking for other ways to slake their acute thirst. Private First Class George Parker’s unit found two Japanese bathtubs filled with used bathwater. “It tasted a little soapy but we drank it. We had no choice.” Private First Class John Huber, a runner in Sledge’s company, was with a group of men who found a shell crater full of water and trash. “We filled our canteens and put in halzone [sic] tablets to purify it.” Sweaty and thirsty, they chugged down the supposedly purified water. Then someone moved a metal sheet from the crater, revealing a dead Japanese soldier floating facedown in the water. A wave of nausea immediately swept over Huber and the others. “We soon started losing the water . . . and everything else we ate during the day.” One of the men in Private Johnston’s company took a canteen off a dead enemy soldier. Another Marine offered the man two hundred dollars for the canteen. Johnston was struck by how starkly different values in combat were in contrast to life back home. Fresh water was “something that in everyday life most people take for granted.” On Peleliu, it was like gold. The man did not sell the water to his buddy. Instead he gave him a drink for free.

Engineers originally believed that Peleliu offered no sources of fresh water. Within a few days, though, they discovered Japanese freshwater wells. They appropriated those and dug several more of their own. By September 19, the wells were yielding about fifty thousand gallons of water per day, enough to sustain each man with a few gallons each day. In addition, the engineers brought desalination equipment ashore. “All we had to do was run this hose into the ocean,” Private First Class Charlie Burchett, an engineer, recalled. “That thing would pump the water through this unit and it comes out nice, cool, just perfect drinking water.” Within a few days, the water crisis passed. Infantrymen were not exactly awash in water, but they had enough to stave off extreme thirst and dehydration. The heat did not abate, though. Neither did Japanese opposition.¹⁹

The Destruction of the 1st Marines

Within three days of the invasion, the 1st Marine Division had already suffered over fourteen hundred casualties, in spite of the fact that the division had not even encountered the most difficult Japanese defenses. In the south, the 7th Marines were clearing out the swampy lowlands of the island. In the center, the 5th Marines were pushing from the airfield across the midsection of the island, fighting their way through plateaus, jungles, and swamps. In the north, the 1st Marines, having overcome the stoutest enemy beach defenses (including the Point), began attacking the daunting ridges of the Umurbrogol. This was the heart of Colonel Nakagawa’s formidable inland defense.

Because of the limits of preinvasion photographic intelligence and inadequate maps, the Marines had little sense of just how daunting the Umurbrogol was until they were enmeshed in it. Already they were referring to this high ground as Bloody Nose Ridge, but it was more than just one ridge. “Along its center, the rocky spine was heaved up in a contorted mass of decayed coral, strewn with rubble, crags, ridges and gulches . . . thrown together in a confusing maze,” the regimental history explained. “There were no roads, scarcely any trails. The pockmarked surface offered no secure footing even in the few level places. It was impossible to dig in: the best the men could do was pile a little coral or wood debris around their positions. The jagged rock slashed their shoes and clothes, and tore their bodies every time they hit the deck for safety.” Even under ideal circumstances, in peacetime, the ground would have been quite difficult to traverse. “There was crevasses you could fall down through,” Sergeant George Peto recalled. “It was a horrible place. If the devil would have built it, that’s about what he’d have done.”

What’s more, it was very difficult to find cover, and the nature of the ground multiplied the fragmentation effect of mortar and artillery shells. “Into all this the enemy dug and tunneled like moles; and there they stayed to fight to the death,” an officer in the 1st Marines wrote. To the Americans, the Japanese cave defenses were unbelievably elaborate. According to one Marine report, they were “blasted into the almost perpendicular coral ridges. The caves varied from simple holes large enough to accommodate two men to large tunnels with passageways on either side which were large enough to contain artillery or 150mm mortars and ammunition.” Some of the caves even had steel doors. All of them were well camouflaged, with nearly perfect fields of fire. Naval gunfire, air strikes, and even artillery only had so much effect against these formidable hideouts. Only infantry and tanks could hope to destroy them, and this had to be done at close range, under extremely dangerous circumstances.²⁰

On the day of the invasion, Colonel Puller’s 1st Marines had 3,251 men. By the time the regiment attacked the Umurbrogol, the unit had already lost about 900 men, many of whom had fallen victim to heat exhaustion. Since most of the casualties occurred in the rifle companies, they were well understrength now. This was scarcely a recipe for success, but Marines pride themselves on doing the unlikely, if not the impossible. Between September 17 and 21, Colonel Puller hurled his regiment, plus an attached battalion from the 7th Marines and a few tanks, into frontal attacks to take this high ground.

The true horror of this fighting is almost impossible to describe. The ridges were steep, so much so that some were little more than sheer rock faces, dotted only with fortified caves. The peaks of ridges were often so pointed that men could not stand on them. The rocky, crevassed ground was so unstable that troops could not hope to keep their footing, much less maneuver in any coherent fashion. So the mere act of climbing the ridges, moving around, in suffocating heat, was challenging enough for the men. Under perfect circumstances, it would have been extremely difficult to overpower such a formidable network of caves. Under these conditions, it was a veritable impossibility, even for the gallant Marines. One of Puller’s battalion commanders, Major Ray Davis, who would later earn the Medal of Honor in Korea and command the 3rd Marine Division in Vietnam, referred to the Umurbrogol as “the most difficult assignment I have ever seen.”

As was usually true in any ground attack, the riflemen led the way and faced the greatest dangers. They climbed the hills in small groups, supported at a distance by machine gunners and mortarmen who generally fired from fixed positions. “As they toiled, caves and gulleys [sic] and holes opened up on them,” a Marine, observing from the vantage point of a machine-gun post, recalled. “Japanese dashed out to roll grenades down on them, and sometimes to lock, body to body, in desperate wrestling matches.” Private George Parker, a rifleman, was struggling up one ridge, dodging enemy grenades all the way. “All they had to do was give their grenades a little [heave] and they would go 100 to 125 yards down the hill onto us.” Parker and the others could not hope to throw grenades high enough, or far enough, to do any damage to the enemy. They shot a few rifle grenades in response, but quickly took cover in the face of wicked machine-gun and mortar fire. Parker looked to his left and started to say something to a New Yorker, whose nickname was “Zoot Suit.” As Zoot Suit turned toward Parker, “a bullet went through his nose from the side. The bottom part of his nose fell down onto his upper lip. I’m sure that turning his head to talk to me had saved his life.” Zoot Suit was only too glad to get off the line. Elsewhere, a young private named Gene Burns leaned over to light a cigarette for a buddy. At the exact moment he did so, a Japanese mortar shell exploded in front of him, sending angry shards of shrapnel right where Burns’s torso had been only a second before.²¹

They were the lucky ones. Many others were ripped apart by machine-gun bullets or fragments. Some died instantly. Others bled to death slowly, while calling vainly for help. Lieutenant Richard Kennard, a forward observer with G Battery, 11th Marine Regiment, was just behind the lead troops, calling in supporting artillery fire, watching so many young infantrymen get hit. “War is terrible, just awful, awful, awful,” he wrote to his family. “You have no idea how it hurts to see American boys all shot up, wounded, suffering from pain and exhaustion, and those that fall down, never to move again.” Many times he himself came close to getting blown to bits by uncannily accurate mortar fire. Unseen enemy snipers nearly blew his head off. Kennard’s battery and several others were pounding the ridges and, by now, carrier-borne aircraft were even bombing suspected enemy positions along the Umurbrogol, but to no avail. The Japanese were too well entrenched in their caves, vulnerable to direct hits, but little else. For the Marines, there was almost no way to avoid the accurate enemy fire. Anyone spending enough time on the ridges got hit sooner or later. Any movement drew fire. One tank platoon leader from the division’s 1st Tank Battalion watched helplessly as his tank’s supporting infantry squad was decimated by mortar fire. Later, with bitter tears streaming down his face, the platoon leader told his battalion commander: “We couldn’t do enough for them. We couldn’t reach the mortars which killed them . . . like flies all around us.” This was why, in the recollection of another tank officer, “the infantry inspired all who witnessed its indomitable heroism . . . to do one’s damnedest.”

After only a few hours, understrength companies of ninety men were down to half that size. Privates were leading platoons. Squads consisted of a few fortunate stalwarts. “As the riflemen climbed higher they grew fewer, until only a handful of men still climbed in the lead squads,” Private Russell Davis, a member of the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines, wrote. “These were the pick of the bunch—the few men who would go forward, no matter what was ahead. They are the bone structure of a fighting outfit.” This was the military version of the old adage that, in any organization, a distinct minority usually does the majority of the work. Even in the World War II Marine Corps—a decidedly combat-oriented organization—small numbers of infantrymen did most of the fighting. These were the natural fighters who would always carry on, come what may. They were the minority, even in the Marines. This is not to say that others would not fight. They would and did. The majority fought hard, but the more intense the combat, the more of them fell by the wayside from wounds, death, and sheer exhaustion. The stalwarts, though, found a way to keep going. “They clawed and clubbed and stabbed their way up,” Davis said. “The rest of us watched.”²²

Because of the Golgotha-like terrain, the terrible casualties, and the chaotic confusion of the fighting, many units lost any semblance of organization. They deteriorated into little more than random groups of survivors. “There was no such thing as a continuous attacking line,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Spencer Berger, whose 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, was also being chewed to pieces. “Elements of the same company, even platoon, were attacking in every direction of the compass, with large gaps in between. There were countless little salients and counter salients.” Commanders measured gains in yards. Anything in triple figures was a good day’s work. At night, Japanese infiltrators, sometimes operating in squads, counterattacked the fatigued Americans. The eerie ridges rang with the desperate, animal-like cries of men struggling to kill one another. Veteran Marines expected and hoped that a “ ‘banzai’ charge would come to reduce the opposition,” one of them wrote. “But the Japs were playing a different game this time.”

It was a much smarter game. They stayed in their caves, making the Marines pay dearly for any advance. When the Americans were at their most vulnerable, usually at night, they would hit them with well-planned counterattacks, not mindless suicide charges. The experiences of C Company, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, serve as a perfect example of this and, indeed, a microcosm of what happened to Puller’s regiment at the Umurbrogol. On September 19, the company drew the assignment of taking Hill 100 (later renamed Walt Ridge after a battalion commander in the 5th Marines), at the southwestern edge of the Umurbrogol. Only through herculean effort and immense courage did the ninety survivors of this company climb the hill and finally take it at great cost, after several attempts. Once atop the hill, the commander, Captain Everett Pope, soon discovered that the Japanese were still holding an adjacent ridge from which they could, and did, pour withering machine-gun, mortar, and artillery fire down on the Marines. With night approaching, and having lost so many men to take this hill, Pope elected to stay in place. He and his men scooped out shallow fighting positions in a perimeter the size of a tennis court, and fought back as best they could. They were soon dangerously low on ammunition. “The line is flimsy as hell and it is getting dark,” Pope radioed Major Davis, his battalion commander. “We have no wires and need grenades badly.” Davis had no reinforcements to send, but he promised to get ammo to Pope, and perhaps string wires for phone communication.

After the sun set, the Japanese came for them. “A Marine unit can fight for a day or two with no food, an hour or two with no water,” Pope later said, “but it’s tough to fight with no ammo.” With few bullets and only a smattering of grenades, the Marines were forced to fight hand to hand with the Japanese, kicking, stabbing, biting, scratching, struggling like animals to stay alive. The fighting was personal, primitive even. In some instances, the Marines used rocks against their enemies, and not just to beat them to death. They often threw the rocks in hopes of fooling the Japanese into thinking that they were grenades. Other times they literally threw their smaller attackers over the precipice of the hill. “The whole night was mixed up,” Pope later said.

The gruesome sounds of C Company’s bloody drama could be heard, quite distinctly, by other Marines below Hill 100. Private William Martin, a wireman in the battalion communication section, was approaching the hill, in the dark, with the intention of stringing wire for C Company. He could hear screams coming from the looming high ground. “All of a sudden a Jap stood up, took his rifle and directed it toward my helmet. He hit my helmet, lost his balance and landed on me. I swung my roll of combat wire and apparently hit him somewhere that made him roll off of me. I then picked him up and threw him down the path which I had just come from.” Seeing this, a nearby American machine gunner opened up and killed the Japanese soldier. Not far away, in a captured Japanese bunker, Private Davis could hear the macabre voices, both foreign and domestic, in the tropical night. “We could hear them screaming for illumination or for corpsmen, as the Japs came at them from caves which were all around them. We could hear them crying and pleading for help, but nobody could help them.”

By sunrise, Pope only had fifteen men left. Colonel Puller initially wanted him to keep attacking but, learning that C Company was basically destroyed, he rescinded the order. The captain and his survivors fought their way off the hill, leaving behind many of their decomposing dead, who could not be recovered for many days to come. Pope earned the Medal of Honor for his actions at Hill 100. The hill remained in Japanese hands. “It just seems impossible to get the Japs out of those coral caves,” Lieutenant Kennard wrote his family, “and I don’t know how the problem is going to be solved.” By September 21, the 1st Marines had taken only a few hundred dearly won yards of the Umurbrogol. The regiment had suffered nearly two thousand casualties. Companies were down to ten men. Few platoon leaders or company commanders were still standing. Most of the sergeants were dead or wounded as well. Puller had culled out his rear areas of cooks, bakers, signalmen, litter bearers, and engineers to refurbish his line companies, but the Umurbrogol had consumed them, too. The 1st Marine Regiment was destroyed.²³

Puller, Rupertus, and the Fatal Weakness of Strong Men

Chesty Puller was a legend in the Marine Corps. Even to this day, he looms as a larger-than-life figure, a fire-breathing, inspirational combat leader who exemplified everything a Marine officer should be. He had come up through the ranks, serving all over the globe with the Old Corps of the pre-World War II era. He saw as much ground combat as any twentieth-century American. Basically, he was to the Marine Corps what George Patton was to the Army—a colorful, unforgettable household name who embodied the aggressiveness of total victory. As with Patton, Puller believed in leading from the front. He was a warrior in the truest sense of that word (his detractors saw him as a “warmonger”).

Diminutive and almost gnomelike, Puller always seemed to be wherever the action was thickest, talking to men, joking with them, inspiring them. His command post was usually close to the front lines, especially at Peleliu, where it was probably too near the fighting since many of his staff officers spent as much time taking cover as doing their jobs. To him, leading troops in combat was the highest calling.

He had a special connection with enlisted men, like Sergeant George Peto. At one point during the terrible fighting that followed D-day on Peleliu, Peto was feeling downcast, exhausted, and generally dispirited. Then he saw the colonel, who greeted him amiably: “Hi, son.” Peto instantly felt better. “That encounter did more for my well-being than a good drink of cool water, which I was in bad need of. I would have followed that man to hell and that’s exactly what we did at Peleliu.” Pharmacist Mate 3rd Class Oliver Butler, a young Navy corpsman in E Company, 1st Marines, had been struggling for days to save more badly wounded men than he could ever count. As the sun set one night, he saw the colonel strolling the front lines as if out for an evening walk. Puller stopped at Butler’s position and actually seemed to know him: “How are you doing, Butler?” Stunned and flattered, Butler replied: “I’m doing fine, Chesty, but we’ve sure lost a lot of men and I hope we get some replacements up here tomorrow.” Puller seemed to understand completely. “I know, son, but hang in there and keep your eyes open and your ass down.” He moved on, talking to other men as he walked the line. Butler later wrote: “Among the reasons Chesty Puller’s troops liked him and admired him was the fact that he was a leader who actually and personally led and the fact that his personal courage was never in doubt.” Puller often said that “no officer’s life, regardless of rank, is of such great value to his country that he should seek safety in the rear.”²⁴

Inspirational though he certainly was, Puller’s leadership at Peleliu left something to be desired. He was still carrying shrapnel in his leg from a wound suffered at Guadalcanal. The wound was infected, swelling his thigh to twice its normal size. He walked with the help of a rifle, a cane, or helping hands. His brother had recently been killed in another Pacific battle, and he burned with hatred for the Japanese, an enmity that perhaps took away some of his focus. He believed that the best way to win was through the pressure created by constant, unrelenting attacks. “He believed in momentum,” General Oliver Smith, the assistant division commander, once commented. “He believed in coming ashore and hitting and just keep on hitting and trying to keep up the momentum until he’d overrun the whole thing [island]. No finesse.”

In Puller’s mind, the Japanese were no match for his Marines. He would defeat the enemy by overwhelming them. Although this aggressiveness was generally laudable, at the Umurbrogol it did not serve him well. By and large, he simply hurled his regiment into frontal attacks, with few adjustments and little maneuvering, “like a wave that expends its force on a rocky shore,” in the estimation of one of Puller’s officers. Chesty did this with utter, sustained ruthlessness, and not much in the way of fire support. To be fair, he did not have much of the latter to call upon, especially artillery. He might possibly have sidestepped the Umurbrogol, working his way up the west coast of Peleliu to encircle the Japanese in their caves, but that would have left the beachhead vulnerable to Japanese counterattacks. Still, with all that taken into consideration, he seemed to have little grasp of the utter impossibility of what he was telling his men to do. Day after day, he cajoled, threatened, and coaxed his commanders into launching more, and ever costlier, attacks. When Puller ordered his 2nd Battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Russell Honsowetz, to take a hill one day at all costs, Honsowetz complained that he no longer had enough men. “Well, you’re there, ain’t you, Honsowetz? You get all those men together and take that hill.” Puller clearly wanted quick results regardless of the consequences. Amid the bloodbath, he simply would not admit to himself, or anyone else, that his regiment could not achieve the impossible.

Honsowetz was a great admirer of Puller, but others in the 1st Marines never forgave him for the losses the regiment suffered at the Umurbrogol. “Chesty Puller should never have passed the rank of second lieutenant,” Private First Class Paul Lewis later said of his colonel. In Lewis’s opinion, Puller wanted to earn the Medal of Honor and he did not care how many of his men died for him to get it, “just so long as he was still there at the end.” Sergeant Richard Fisher thought of him as a tragic caricature of his own aggressive image. “All battles are ‘training exercises’ for men like Puller, and it was just another rung up his ladder. Puller was a man who could not live long without war.” Captain Pope was anything but a fan of Puller, whom he thought of as a mindless butcher. “I don’t think [he] was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I had no use for Puller. He didn’t know what was going on, and why he wanted me and my men dead on top of that hill [Hill 100], I don’t know.” Pope especially resented Puller’s enduring legendary status. “The adulation paid to him these days sickens me.” General Robert Cushman, who served as commandant of the Marine Corps, believed that Puller was a great combat leader who nonetheless could not understand anything except constant attacks, regardless of circumstances. “He was beyond his element in commanding anything larger than a company—maybe a battalion—where he could keep his hands on everything and be right in the middle of it.”

So, was Puller really at fault for the destruction of the 1st Marines at the Umurbrogol? To some extent he was. He demonstrated little imagination in maneuvering his units. He pushed his battered combat formations way too hard. He himself seemed to have little appreciation for the challenging terrain. He even turned down an opportunity to fly over it for a better look, saying he had plenty of maps. Nor did he truly understand the disquieting strength of the Japanese defenses. Sometimes positive characteristics can actually become a weakness. In this case, Puller represented aggressiveness, valor, and inspirational leadership, all ingredients that make the Marine Corps great. But he also demonstrated the tendency of Marine officers to over-rely on these strengths to the exclusion of all else. The repeated, mindless frontal attacks were the American version of banzai. They were almost as costly, and every bit as fruitless.²⁵

It must be clearly understood, though, that at the Umurbrogol, Puller was only following the orders of Major General William Rupertus, his division commander. “The cold fact,” one officer wrote, “is that Rupertus ordered Puller to assault impossible enemy positions . . . daily till the First was decimated.” Puller might well have protested or demurred, but Rupertus probably would have relieved him. “It was more or less of a massacre,” Puller later admitted. “There was no way to cut down losses and follow orders.” Unlike Puller, the general had few good characteristics as a commander. A thirty-year veteran of the Corps, the fifty-four-year-old Rupertus had once been a champion marksman (he later penned “The Rifleman’s Creed”). In the 1930s, while stationed in China, he had lost his wife and two of his children to a scarlet fever epidemic. By most accounts, he was never the same after that tragedy. He grew more reticent, more withdrawn, and more dour. Earlier in World War II, he had served as assistant division commander of the 1st Marine Division until being promoted to the top job in late 1943. He was aloof from his men and frosty with his staff, especially the able General Smith, his second in command, whom he treated like an unwanted disease. Cold and testy, Rupertus did not communicate well with his subordinate commanders. He was a poor judge of terrain and tactics. He was rightfully proud of the Marine Corps, but allowed that pride to morph negatively into fierce contempt for the Army and the supposed incompetence of soldiers. At Peleliu, his men paid dearly for his interservice chauvinism. In short, he was completely out of his depth as a division commander.

Before the invasion, he had made the colossal mistake of telling his division that the fight for Peleliu would only take three days. Once the invasion began, he seemed entirely preoccupied with making this foolish and unfounded prediction come true. When the battle shaped up as a long slog, he at first denied the obvious, and then responded with ever more orders to attack, particularly in the Umurbrogol. Because he had broken his ankle in a pre-landing exercise, thus limiting his mobility, he was generally confined to his command post (CP). Like some sort of latter-day château general, he spent much of his time on the phone, snarling at his subordinates to “hurry up” and capture the island. As the casualty numbers piled up, he seemed divorced from reality. One day, during the height of the 1st Marine Regiment’s struggle for the Umurbrogol, a newspaper correspondent came back from the front lines and told the general how many dead Marines he had just seen. At first, Rupertus tried to deny this, but realizing that the reporter knew what he was talking about, the general commented: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking the eggs.”

As the days passed and the casualty numbers grew, the general himself was on the verge of nervous exhaustion. In one instance, Rupertus sat, head in his hands, on the sleeping bunk he kept in his command post. “This thing has just about got me beat,” he told Lieutenant Colonel Harold Deakin, his personnel (G1) officer. Deakin put his arm around the general and consoled him. “Now, General, everything is going to work out.” Another time, later in the campaign, Rupertus summoned Colonel Bucky Harris, commander of the 5th Marines, to the division CP. Harris found Rupertus in there all alone, with tears streaming down his cheeks. “Harris, I’m at the end of my rope,” he said. Rupertus told Colonel Harris that he was thinking of turning over command to him, but he later calmed down and nothing ever came of this.²⁶

The general’s main problem was stubborn, narrow-minded, self-defeating pride. The 1st Marine Division was part of the III Marine Amphibious Corps, under Major General Roy Geiger. The other major unit under Geiger’s command was the Army’s 81st Infantry Division. Even as the 1st Marine Division invaded Peleliu, elements of the 81st had secured nearby Angaur. By September 19, the division’s 321st Infantry Regiment was available to reinforce the Marines at Peleliu. Rupertus was lucid and intelligent enough to understand how badly his division needed the Army’s help at the Umurbrogol. Yet, for days he refused to even consider this option. He was absolutely determined that his division would take Peleliu alone. He was contemptuous of the Army and would not even think of asking for help from mere soldiers. He clung to his miserably wrong prediction of a quick campaign, each day expecting, and pushing mightily for, a battle-winning breakthrough. In other words, he was willing to squander the lives of his men in order to feed his own pride and prejudice. “This reluctance to use Army troops . . . was very noticeable to the Corps staff,” Colonel Walter Wachtler, Geiger’s operations officer, later wrote. “It is probable that he [Rupertus] felt, like most Marines, that he and his troops could and would handle any task assigned to them without asking for outside help.” One Marine junior officer, writing to his family, put it even more succinctly. The brass, he said, “would never call in the Army like this, for it would hurt the name of the Marine Corps, I suppose, to let the world know that ‘doggie’ reinforcements had to be called in so early!!” This mind-set has, at times, plagued Marine officers. The Corps inculcates the notion—crucial to the Marine identity—that Marines are tougher and simply better than soldiers. Marines can achieve most anything without much outside help, so the thinking goes. This is indeed what makes Marines so special, but in some instances, like Peleliu, it can also lead to a collective isolation in outlook, as if no one else is worthy to fight alongside Marines. Rupertus is the classic example of this insular mode of thought.

Geiger, however, was different. From D-day onward, he was ashore at Peleliu. Brave and energetic, he roamed the battlefield, constantly gathering information on what was happening. He had a low opinion of Rupertus, and had never gotten along particularly well with him. For several days, he watched as the situation at Umurbrogol grew worse. He considered relieving Rupertus, but did not like the idea of firing a Marine division commander in the middle of a fight. Instead, on September 21, he decided to take matters into his own hands. Geiger and his staff visited Puller’s command post. Shirt-less, with a corncob pipe in his mouth, Chesty limped around on his swollen leg while briefing the corps commander. Drenched in sweat, Puller’s hair was plastered to his head. Colonel William Coleman, a member of the corps staff, had the impression that Chesty was completely exhausted. “He was unable to give a very clear picture of what his situation was.” Geiger asked him if he needed reinforcements and Chesty “stated that he was doing alright with what he had.” This was a crucial moment when Puller could have asked for the help he so badly needed but, like Rupertus, he could not bring himself to do so.

Puller’s condition, and his tenuous grasp of reality, was the final straw for Geiger. The corps commander believed that Puller should have flanked and enveloped the Umurbrogol, rather than attacking it head-on. General Geiger proceeded immediately to Rupertus’s command post and told Rupertus that the 1st Marines were finished as a fighting unit. The regiment had suffered 56 percent casualties. Davis’s 1st Battalion alone had lost 71 percent of its Marines. Geiger told Rupertus that the regiment needed to be removed, not just from the line but from the battle altogether, and sent back to Pavuvu, where the unit could be rebuilt for future campaigns. He told Rupertus he intended to replace them with the Army’s 321st Infantry. “At this, General Rupertus became greatly alarmed and requested that no such action be taken,” Coleman wrote, “stating that he was sure he could secure the island in another day or two.” Geiger overruled him. The battle was over for the 1st Marines, and the Army would replace them. The Marines of the 1st Regiment had literally given everything they could give at the Umurbrogol. They had fought, sweat, bled, and cried. They had performed with a gallantry that was nearly superhuman. Indeed, General Smith later wondered how they were able to capture as much ground as they did. Now, at last, thanks to General Geiger’s intercession, their hell on earth was finally over. As they left the line, one of them said: “We’re not a regiment. We’re the survivors of a regiment.” Another one later added: “We were no longer even human beings.”²⁷

Enter the Wildcats

The soldiers of the 81st Infantry Division were known as the Wildcats. Having seen limited action on Angaur, they were fairly new to combat, but not to soldiering. They had trained together for two long years. In contrast to the youthful Marines, the bulk of whom were in their late teens or early twenties, many of the Wildcats were in their late twenties and thirties. These Army infantrymen answered to a range of nicknames: doughboys, doughfeet, and dogfaces being the most common (the next generation would call them grunts, a name that stuck).

On September 23, they entered the front lines at the Umurbrogol. The soldiers immediately noticed the exhaustion in the faces of their 1st Marine Regiment comrades. The Marines were coated with coral grime. Their arms were marred by festering nicks and cuts they had gotten from diving for cover among the sharp rocks. Some had shaggy whiskers. Most had hollow, weary eyes, gazing dully ahead in what infantrymen generally call the thousand-yard stare. Their young faces looked strangely old, with lines caused by the constant facial muscular tension that resulted from abject fear. The Marines were worn down in less than a week by the unimaginable stress of bitter combat that caused “the constriction of the blood vessels in the stomach and the sudden whirling of the brain that occurs when a large shell burst nearby or a friend has his eyes or entrails torn out,” one of the Marines later wrote. To Sergeant Thomas Climie, an older man in the 321st, these brave Marines were “dirty, scared kids. I felt so sorry for them. They were in shock.” Filled with foreboding, he and the other soldiers stared, with anguish, at the Marines.

For their part, the Marines were bemused at how fresh and clean the soldiers looked. Sergeant Peto, who had come frighteningly close to death at both the Point and the Umurbrogol, watched as a burly Army captain led his troops into the line. When the captain saw how few Marines were left, “his face turned pale and he reminded me of a man that was told he was about to be shot and there was a good possibility that that is exactly what happened to him.” A moment later, an awestruck Army tank crewman offered Peto some tomato juice. He drank some juice, but it no sooner hit his stomach than he vomited it up. “That pretty much tells the story of Peleliu.” Amid the solemnity, the Marines kept their sense of humor. In one position, a sergeant, clearly thrilled to see the soldiers, smiled and quipped: “Here comes the Army, with the USO girls in tow.”

The subtle differences between the two ground combat services were evident. Colonel Robert Dark, commander of the 321st, was shocked to find Colonel Puller so close to the front lines. When a confused Dark asked Puller several times for the location of his CP, an exasperated Puller spat and said, with emphasis: “Right here!” Dark ordered his adjutant to place his own CP one thousand yards to the rear. The story spread like wildfire among the Marines, who generally thought of themselves as tougher and truer warriors than soldiers. The soldiers believed Marines were overaggressive, to the point of mindlessness (hence the term “jarhead”). Lieutenant George Pasula, a young platoon leader in G Company, 321st, was stunned to find that the Marine company his unit relieved only had twenty-eight survivors. “Even I, as a young 2LT, began to wonder about the head-on attacks by Puller’s 1st Marines.” Pasula thought it made more sense to envelop the ridges and then use overwhelming firepower against the Japanese. This was the Army way.²⁸

The 321st took its place in the line, on the western side of the Umurbrogol, alongside the 7th Marines. The two regiments repeatedly attacked the enemy-held ridges and caves. Most of the soldiers had already experienced combat on Angaur, but they were shocked by the bloodbath in which they now found themselves immersed. Like their Marine friends, they struggled just to keep their footing. They also got shot to pieces as they tried to assault caves and ridges. Lieutenant Pasula’s platoon was working its way over a coral ridge, trying to push TNT pole charges into a cave opening. As several men were maneuvering the poles over the ridge, edging the charges in the direction of the cave, the lieutenant was talking on the radio with his superior officer. “I heard and felt a commotion, and looking up the ridge, I saw [a] Jap grenade just as it exploded.” The grenade destroyed his rifle and his radio. “Blood was spurting from my right cheek.” He caught fragments in his face, his shoulder, and his arm, but somehow the shrapnel did not break any bones. His radioman helped him across an open area, dodging sniper fire, to an aid station.

A couple hundred yards to the right, Captain Pierce Irby’s L Company was trying to scale “a cliff of solid coral rock approximately 40 feet in height. The men had to pick their way very carefully up through the rocks. Often it was necessary for one man to climb to a place where he could get a foot hold and pull other men up to him with his rifle or foot. The progress was measured in inches.” Not only were the rock-climbing soldiers in a terribly vulnerable position; they were really at the mercy of their enemies. Before the soldiers could get their footing, a shower of grenades exploded among them. Everyone hit the ground and tried to find someone, or something, to shoot at. Enemy machine-gun fire swept up and down the ranks of prone Americans. Men could hear the distinctive snapping sound of bullets ricocheting off rocks. Every so often, the bullets struck flesh and bones. It sounded like a baseball bat striking a watermelon. “We just lay flat on the ground, and prayed that we survived the exchange,” one soldier recalled. It was hard to make any headway under such circumstances.²⁹

As the Marines had feared, a few of the soldiers were not up to the formidable task of assaulting the Umurbrogol. In one instance, Captain Thomas B. Jones, the commander of K Company, got orders from his battalion commander to take a key knoll. If the Americans did not take it, then the whole battalion, and the neighboring Marines, would come under suffocating enemy fire, and perhaps find themselves exposed to a Japanese counterattack. Jones’s company had already lost many of its people in a direct assault on a pillbox at Angaur. He was in no mood for another such attack, so he refused the order on the grounds that attacking the knoll would be suicidal. The battalion commander relieved him. Then the only other surviving officer in K Company refused to take command of the company from Jones and carry out the order. He too was relieved.

Captain Irby was forced to transfer his 3rd Platoon leader to command K Company. “Some of the men were nearby and heard the statements made by their company officers,” Irby wrote. “It was apparent that their morale had been greatly affected.” The attack went nowhere. In the recollection of one Marine officer, the soldiers “moved forward along the ridge a few yards until they encountered the first enemy positions, then gave it all up as a bad idea.” Marines from I Company, 7th Marines, ended up taking the knoll, but it cost them sixteen casualties, including the death of their company commander. Understandably, they were deeply angry over the incident, and the story spread quickly among the proud Marines, especially because the 7th was nearing total exhaustion after fighting for so long on the ridges. The problems with K Company seemed to confirm the opinion of so many Marines that the Army just could not fight like the Corps. When word of it reached General Rupertus, he smugly blurted: “There’s the Wildcat Division of pussycats. Now I can tell Geiger ‘I told you so. That’s why I didn’t want the Army involved in this in the first place.’ ” As if the situation would have been better without the presence of fresh reinforcements! Needless to say, Rupertus’s statement revealed much about his pettiness and his myopic view of the battle. There is no record of him ever repeating his “I told you so” tirade to Geiger.

Marine frustration with K Company, 321st, was understandable, but blown out of proportion. The vast majority of the soldiers were fighting hard, doing their best, bleeding and dying alongside their Marine countrymen. As September turned to October, and the battle evolved into little more than a brutal struggle for each and every knobby ridge and fortified cave of the Umurbrogol, a distinct respect grew between the soldiers and Marines who were doing the real fighting, risking their lives in the daily crapshoot of combat.

By now, the 5th Marines had taken Ngesebus, a nearby island, and had secured the northern part of Peleliu. Battered though they were, they relieved the decimated 7th Marines and went into the line with the 321st at the Umurbrogol. All that remained in Japanese hands was the isolated inner ring of the Umurbrogol, a nine-hundred-yard-long, four-hundred-yard-wide pocket of ridges and caves. “We had everything . . . that was ever used by anybody,” General Smith later said. “We had the beaches, we had the airfield, we were using everything that we ever wanted to use. All we didn’t have was this darned pocket.” With the airfield and the beaches secure from Japanese fire, and some of the high ground in American hands, there probably was not much point in trying to take the rest of the pocket. Better to let the isolated Japanese starve or die of thirst in their caves. But in World War II, American commanders generally liked to destroy all enemy pockets of resistance, especially in the Pacific, where the Japanese normally fought to the death rather than surrender. Wise or not—and it probably was not all that smart—this was the mind-set.³⁰

So the bitter struggle for this strategically worthless coral mush continued, just as Colonel Nakagawa had foreseen. Day after day, groups of ragged American infantrymen attacked. To them, every jagged ridge and every looming cave looked alike, but they had nonetheless coined nicknames for some of the more prominent terrain features—the China Wall, the Five Sisters, the Five Brothers, Old Baldy, Hill 140, the Wildcat Bowl, and, of course, Walt Ridge. The 321st initiated an extensive sandbag-filling operation for their frontline soldiers. Carrying parties hauled the bags up to the Umurbrogol and plopped them down in rifle company areas on the front lines. Infantry soldiers then attacked by crawling forward, pushing the bags in front of themselves, affording some level of cover from the withering enemy fire.

The Americans also had plenty of fire support. Artillery constantly pounded the pocket. Sometimes bulldozers sealed caves, entombing the Japanese within. Marine F-4U Corsair fighter planes, operating from the airstrip, flew the shortest close air support missions of the war. They would take off, climb a few hundred feet, drop their bombs or napalm on suspected Japanese positions, turn around, land, and then do it again. Each flight lasted about two minutes. Some pilots did not even bother to raise their landing gear after they took off. In order to avoid friendly fire problems, “every member of the squadron was briefed in every detail of the terrain and friendly troop locations,” one officer later wrote. “When the bombing run began, the frontline infantry units set off colored hand grenades to mark their lines.” In many cases, infantry and air commanders flew joint reconnaissance missions together over the pocket.

Excellent and well coordinated though the air support clearly was, it could not destroy the Japanese caves. The only way to do that was through head-on assaults with direct fire support. Artillerymen from the 11th Marines, through superhuman effort, hauled their pieces to the high ground, within sight of the enemy. Sometimes they had to break their guns down into pieces, put them on pulleys, hoist them up the hills, and then reassemble them. They did this with 75-, 105-, and 155-millimeter guns. “To be effective it was often necessary to place the pieces within sniper range of the enemy,” General Smith wrote. One battery set up three 105-millimeter guns and fired armor-piercing shells and white phosphorous rounds into caves at a range of only five hundred yards. The job of hauling ammunition up to the guns was arduous. “A 75 round isn’t too heavy,” Corporal William Burnett wrote, “but after you climb 300’ [feet] with them and then have to run across 25’ of open space with snipers you are pooped out.” Because the infantry ranks were so depleted, many of the artillerymen stayed on the front lines, serving as de facto infantry.³¹

The most effective support came from tanks (both Marine and Army) and specially modified flamethrowing LVTs. Although the rough terrain limited the mobility of these vehicles, they worked closely with the infantry wherever possible. The LVTs crawled along, protected by the infantrymen. When the LVT crew, or a rifleman, spotted a target, the LVT belched a jet of flame in that direction. They were ideal for shooting flames into cave mouths and crevasses. “It is something to see,” one soldier recalled. “They give it a squirt and the trees and brush disappear. And one sight I still can’t get rid of is when a Jap appeared and the flamethrower hit him and you would see this big orange flame running and screaming and then no noise but still burning. It’s terrible!”

The tanks would maneuver in front of the caves and blast them point-blank, sometimes even within a few yards of the cave openings. “Theirs was the mission of providing direct fire . . . to be used as close artillery,” a tanker later wrote. One Marine recalled seeing a tank as it “rolled up to the mouth of a cave. The snout of its artillery piece swung into the hole. The piece fired shot after shot,” dismembering the Japanese defenders inside. “Three . . . or four . . . rounds of HE [high explosive] bursting inside—topped off by a round or two of WP [white phosphorous] was standard tank treatment—and most effective indeed,” a tank commander wrote.

In nearly every instance, the infantry stayed close to the tanks to protect them from assaults by extraordinarily brave Japanese soldiers wielding mines, torpedoes, and grenades. Private First Class John Huber of K Company, 5th Marine Regiment, was covering a tank when a Japanese machine gun opened up. He took cover next to the tank. “When the tanker spotted the Jap gun, it fired the 75 gun at it, and I took the muzzle blast of four rounds.” It took him a few hours to get his hearing back, but the tank meanwhile had blown the enemy machine gunners into jagged pieces. The only trouble with the LVTs and tanks was that there were not enough of them. Because of maintenance issues, and the forbidding terrain, only a couple dozen were in operation at any given time, and that was always during the daytime.

So usually the attacks were carried out by dwindling groups of frightened, desperately weary infantrymen, carrying rifles, submachine guns, flamethrowers, and satchel demolition charges. Often, intense enemy fire killed and wounded many Americans, pinning assault elements down before they could get near the caves. Other times, the infantry was able to edge up against the openings. “We went from cave to cave, with small arms fire and grenades, to cover the men with the flamethrowers and satchel charges that would seal the caves,” Private First Class Huber recalled. In an attempt to escape the flames and TNT, some of the Japanese ran from the caves, straight into riflemen like Huber, who shot them at close range. “As the Japs came running out on fire, we would have a field day finishing them off.”

Sometimes, as the Americans cautiously advanced, they could hear the hidden Japanese talking or even smell their cooking. Private First Class Charlie Burchett and a group of Marines came upon one such cave and then “took a whole case of TNT and dropped it down with a rope. It quieted them down.” After blasting another cave, Burchett and his buddies counted seventy-five dead Japanese. Like many of the caves, this one was part of an elaborate tunnel system that the Japanese had burrowed beneath the sharp rocks of the Umurbrogol. In the tunnels they stored food, ammunition, sake, and clothing.³²

At night, some of the Japanese emerged from their caves. Some were looking for water, but most were intent on crawling into the American lines to kill a Marine or a soldier. Many companies strung barbed wire in front of their positions, but that was no guarantee of safety. By the glimpsing half-light of flares, the Americans fought off sleep (not to mention fear), and stared intently into the night, trying to spot them. “Their ability to creep in silently over rough rocks strewn with pulverized vegetation was incredible,” one Marine said. Sergeant Francis Heatley, a machine gunner in the 321st, vividly remembered the rustling sound of rosary beads sliding across the rifle butts of prayerful men around him. The nights seemed endless. “Utter emptiness created a hole in my soul, as though life no longer had any meaning.” His unit shot at anything that moved. The Marines tended to be more disciplined with their fire for fear of giving away their positions or hitting nearby friendly troops. When the Japanese did make it to the American positions, “they rushed in jabbering or babbling incoherent sounds, sometimes throwing a grenade, but always swinging a saber, bayonet, or knife,” Eugene Sledge wrote.

Everything about the Umurbrogol was nightmarish and crude. It was ugly, foul, and wasteful as only war can be. Dante Alighieri or Jonathan Edwards, in their wildest imaginings, could hardly have conceived of anything more hellish. Four-man stretcher teams labored mightily to move wounded men down the steep slopes to the safety of field hospitals. Japanese snipers tried to shoot the bearers and, too often, succeeded. On the slippery ridges, it was easy to drop the wounded man onto the sharp coral, adding to his misery. The heat continued unabated. Grenades and mortar shells had to be kept in the shade lest they explode from the intensity of the sun. The twin stenches of death and rot were draped, like a suffocating, sewage-corrupted blanket, over the entire pocket. “It is difficult to convey to anyone who has not experienced it the ghastly horror of having your sense of smell saturated constantly with the putrid odor of rotting human flesh day after day, night after night,” Sledge wrote. In such tropical heat, decomposition was quick. Dead bodies turned black and swelled up to twice their size. “Added to the awful smell of the dead of both sides was the repulsive odor of human excrement everywhere.” Rotting food, clothing, and vegetation only added to the hellish stink. Like so many others, Sledge felt as though “my lungs would never be cleansed of all those foul vapors.” Some of those foul vapors emanated from the corpses of Marines whom the Japanese had mutilated, severing their decomposed penises and shoving them into fly-filled mouths.

Land crabs came out at night, skittering around, feeding on the dead. Swarms of flies bred with stunning alacrity, converging on the refuse and the decomposing corpses. They gorged themselves on so much blood and flesh that they swelled up to the size of bumblebees and were scarcely able to fly. When they did fly, they made a distinct humming sound. There were millions of them. “When you tried to lift food up to your mouth,” Sergeant Climie explained, “before you got it there, it was covered with these flies. You could not brush them away, you had to snap them off with your fingers. We all got real sick and weak from diarrhea.” The flies were bluish green colored and so aggressive that, in the recollection of one Marine, “if you had food in your mouth and if you opened it very wide, a fly would fly into your mouth. That’s how bad those things were.” The troops joked that the flies even had their own runway at the airfield. Sanitation teams attacked the flies with copious amounts of DDT, but the insecticide only worked on the adults, not the larvae. Still, the DDT helped reduce the fly population to some semblance of manageability.³³

The Anticlimactic End

On October 15, after a month of horrible combat, the 1st Marine Division began withdrawing from the Umurbrogol. A few days later, these haunted survivors boarded ships that returned them to Pavuvu. The division had suffered 6,526 casualties, mostly in the rifle companies. The 323rd, another regiment from the 81st Infantry Division, replaced the Marines. Together the soldiers of the 321st and 323rd overran the remnants of Japanese resistance in the Umurbrogol Pocket. In a tactic that was eerily reminiscent of the improvised explosive devices a later generation of American infantry soldiers would face, the Japanese booby-trapped much of the pocket. “In one of the valleys . . . 20 booby traps were found, the instruments ranging in size from the small ‘Kiska Type’ hand grenade to 100 pound aerial bombs,” a 323rd Infantry intelligence summary reported. “Both trip wires and pressure type devices were used, as well as the trips being fired electrically.” In one instance, dogfaces from E Company were moving through a draw when they ran right into a cleverly camouflaged trap. An electrically charged aerial bomb exploded, killing or wounding dozens of men. “Screams of pain and fright filled the air,” the company history recorded. “The evacuation of the torn bodies of our buddies . . . was a hard grim task. Many of our closest friends could not be recognized. Many died in the arms of those who tried to ease their pain.” Concussed men, with wide and hollow eyes, staggered down the ridges, toward the battalion aid station.

Mercilessly, and with careful deliberation, over the course of four weeks, the soldiers eliminated the Japanese defenders of the Umurbrogol. At last, on November 27, they killed off the last defenders. Colonel Nakagawa and General Murai burned the regimental colors and killed themselves. The Americans claimed later to have found their remains. The 81st Division had suffered 3,275 casualties, bringing total U.S. casualties at Peleliu close to 10,000. This was in exchange for the deaths of some 11,000 Japanese defenders, a nearly one-to-one casualty ratio.

Without a doubt, every Marine and soldier who fought at Peleliu was forever haunted, at least in some way, by the experience. Harry Gailey, the author of the best single book on the battle, properly wrote: “In terms of sheer heroism, every man who fought at Peleliu deserved the highest award his country could bestow.” In the view of Gailey and almost every other historian of the battle, it should never have been fought. Possession of the island gained almost no strategic advantages for the Americans. Instead, Peleliu lived on as a cautionary tale of the price combat troops pay when senior leaders make poor decisions, based on faulty intelligence, interservice rivalry, and a lack of flexible response to a thinking, determined enemy.

By assaulting the Umurbrogol so vigorously, the Americans played right into Japanese hands. Colonel Nakagawa could not have planned it any better. The battle unfolded more or less exactly as he envisioned. It is true that the Americans took Peleliu, and thus won a “victory” of sorts. But the Japanese fulfilled their strategic objective of turning the battle into a bloody debacle for the Americans. Even though the Americans enjoyed total air and naval supremacy, the island could only be taken through the extremely valiant actions, on a daily basis, of Marines and soldiers. Even then it was a nightmare of nearly unimaginable proportions.³⁴