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Peleliu
(Time-Life Books - World War 2)

New Guinea had staged through the well-developed naval and air bases in the group. Japan's administrative headquarters for all of the islands it controlled under the League of Nations mandate was located in the Palaus, and after Truk was neutralized by air attacks and the capture of the Marianas, the Combined Fleet moved its headquarters there for a brief period. In April, the crack 14th Division arrived from China. Its commander, Lieut. General Sadae Inoue, set to work building fortifications against a possible attack by Nimitz.

Inoue was aided by a topographical feature of Peleliu: its caves. Before the War the Japanese had mined the island for phosphates, and now they used mining techniques to enlarge the coral caverns that honeycombed Peleliu's ridgeline and to dig vast new ones-more than 500 in all. One of the underground complexes was big enough to hold 1,000 men; others were equipped with steel doors that slid open to allow artillery pieces to fire and then, snapped shut again. Each cave was well stocked with food and ammunition.

Furthermore, the 6,500 Japanese combat troops on the island had been instructed in the new tactical doctrine employed by General Takashina on Saipan: there were to be no more hopeless suicide attacks at the beaches, no more wasteful expenditures of men and materiel in attempts to annihilate the enemy at the waterline. A powerful effort would still be made to knock out the American beachhead before it was consolidated, but if that failed Inoue had ordered his troops to withdraw to carefully prepared defense lines from which mortars and artillery could fire on previously registered targets. Troops who were overrun were to remain hidden, instead of killing themselves in their bunkers, so that at an appropriate moment they might attack the Americans from the rear. Inoue drilled his officers in seven separate counterattack plans, each to be set in motion by a distinctive flare or flag.

Merely dying for the Emperor while giving up the island of Peleliu would not help their cause, Inoue admonished his men. "Victory," he declared, "depends on our thorough application of recent battle lessons, especially those of Saipan. The Americans rely solely upon material power. If we repay them with material power it will shock them beyond imagination."

 Ironically, Inoue himself missed the invasion. When it came, he was on another island overseeing the defenses for the entire Palau group. His subordinates on Peleliu, however, carried out his new defensive doctrine to the letter. It was a radical departure in Japanese military thinking, and the 1st Marine Division was to pay heavily for it.

Before the invasion got under way, bombers from MacArthur's bases in New Guinea and the neighboring islands pounded the Palaus in late August. They were succeeded by planes of fast carriers under Halsey's command. Then the battleships, cruisers and destroyers of the support force, under Rear Admiral Jesse B. Oldendorf, worked Peleliu over for three full days. After flattening what was left of the hangars, buildings and aboveground installations and rearranging the island's scenery, the naval gunners were ordered to let up, and Oldendorf announced that he had run out of targets. The fact is that the Japanese network of underground fortifications had barely been touched.

At least one veteran Marine commander did not share Oldendorf's confidence. As Colonel Lewis B. "Chesty" Puller was getting ready to go over the side of a transport to join his men on D-day, the skipper of the ship hailed him cheerfully.

"Coming back for supper?" he called out. "Everything's done over there. You'll walk in."

"If you think it's that easy," Puller growled, "why don't you come on the beach at five o'clock, have supper with me, and Pick up a few souvenirs?"

The Marines struck from the west at the base of Peleliu's lobster claw, on a mile-long beach alongside the airfield. As they crossed the reef, three regimental combat teams abreast, they saw Urnurbrogol end on, at their left, and it looked deceptively small and innocent. in some of the firstwave  amtracs, Marines were singing. On the extreme left flank, the words of "Give My Regards to Broadway" could be heard coming from Company K of Puller's 1st Marine Regiment as the men rode shoreward.

When the final prelanding barrage moved inland and to the flanks of the Marines, the Japanese came out of their holes. From scores of undamaged mortars, artillery' pieces and machine guns, the defenders of Peleliu dropped a curtain of lead and flying steel upon the reef. An amtrac was hit, and then others came under fire in quick succession. To the right: at the southern end of the beach, obstacles and mines forced the 7th Marine Regiment's amtracs and accompanying tanks into single file, making them easy targets. Many Marines had to wade ashore. On the left the 1st Marine Regiment found itself under fire from Japanese on a little rocky point of land jutting out from the beach. Only in the center, at the airfield itself, did the 5th Marine Regiment land almost intact.

On the heavy cruiser Portland, a gunnery officer watched through binoculars as a heavy steel door opened in the side of a ridge. A gun came out, fired at the beach and disappeared back inside the cave as the door swung shut. The officer directed five separate salvos against the hidden emplacement with the Portland's 8-inch shells. Between salvos, the Japanese weapon emerged unscathed from its cave and pelted the Marine beachhead. The gunnery officer gave up finally in disgust. "You can put all the steel in Pittsburgh onto that thing," he said, "and still not get it."

Meanwhile, offshore, the burning amtracs and wading men created a scene reminiscent of the Tarawa landing. But there was a crucial difference: here there was no sea wall 20 feet from the water's edge. Moreover, Colonel Kunio Nakagawa, the Peleliu commander, had heeded General Inoue's orders and pulled the greater part of his infantry off the beach for a counterattack. Most of the Marines were thus able to dash inland as soon as they reached shore. Within hours, elements of the 5th Marines had struck completely across the southern edge of the airfield, and by late afternoon the 7th Marines had advanced, on a curve, toward the southern tip of the island. But the enemy fire on the reef had forced some of these units to land on beaches other than those intended; then they had become confused in the dense scrub jungle south of the airfield. Everywhere, the Marines were far behind the ambitious schedule that General Rupertus had set for them.

On the northern end of the beachhead, Colonel Puller's 1st Marines were in serious trouble. Almost all of his radios had been sunk when his command group amtracs were hit on the reef, making it impossible to call for help. A dangerous gap had opened in the lines of Puller's Company K, which had drawn the crucial job of anchoring the extreme northern flank of the division beachhead. Had Colonel Nakagawa spotted the gap, the Japanese could have surged right through it and rolled over the jumble of supplies and wounded and arriving men on the congested beach.

The gap developed because of a natural obstacle that had not shown up on any of the Marines' maps or intelligence reports. It was a steep, jagged coral ridge 30 feet high, 100 yards inland, studded with Japanese gun positions. Crossing the beach and rushing inland through bursting mortar fire, Company K's 2nd Platoon tumbled into a Japanese antitank trench in front of this ridge and stayed pinned down for hours, taking heavy casualties and losing contact with the rest of the company. North of the ridge, Company K's 3rd Platoon hit the beach and wheeled left to attack a rocky point of land jutting 25 yards into the sea from the northern end of the beachhead; in doing so they moved away from the Marines trapped in the trench-thereby widening the gap. But they had no choice. Their first mission was to silence the guns on the rocky point, which were creating havoc by raking the entire beachhead. It turned out to be K's last mission as well.

"The Point was a rocky mass of sharp pinnacles, deep crevasses, tremendous boulders," wrote the company commander, Captain George P. Hunt, afterward. "Pillboxes, reinforced with steel and concrete, had been dug or blasted in the base of the perpendicular drop to the beach. Others, with coral and concrete piled six feet on top, were constructed above, and spider holes were blasted around them for protecting infantry. It surpassed by far anything we had conceived of when we studied the aerial photographs." None of these defenses had even been damaged by the naval bombardment.

The Japanese guns on the point quickly cut the 3rd Platoon to pieces; by the time the unit had covered the 50 yards only a handful of men were fit to fight.

The 1st Platoon, Hunt's reserve, was ordered to follow up the 3rd in the assault on the point. Then Hunt left his shell-hole command post on the beach and headed for the point himself.

"The human wreckage I saw," he recalled later, "was a grim and tragic sight. Wounded and dying littered the edge of the coconut grove from where we had landed to the point. As I ran up the beach I saw them lying nearly shoulder to shoulder. 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. There was Graham, snuffed out a hero, lying with four dead Japs around him; and Windsor, flat on his face, with his head riddled by bullets and his arms pointed toward a pillbox where five Japs slumped over a machine gun."

The carnage marked the path of the 3rd Platoon, which had lost more than half of its men but had wiped out the Japanese covering the point from the beach. On the point itself five concrete pillboxes and a network of trenches were taking a heavy toll as Lieutenant William Willis and his1st Platoon, along with the survivors of the 3rd, stormed the craggy bluff on Hunt's orders. Each pillbox had to be knocked out individually, and the only way to do it was to crawl up close and throw in a grenade.

Hunt arrived to find the point taken, but Company K's ordeal was far from over. Less than two hours had passed since the landing, yet only 30 men remained alive and unwounded out of the 1st and 3rd platoons. This small remnant was completely isolated. Between the point and the helpless 2nd Platoon stuck in the antitank trench-from which Hunt had heard nothing-lay the gap, several hundred yards of craggy jungle into which the Japanese moved unseen and at will. Several times during the day Colonel Puller tried to shift reserve companies into the gap to tie in with Hunt-but at each attempt well-emplaced Japanese machine guns mowed down men moving along the antitank trench.

Gathering together two reserve companies and all the regimental -headquarters troops that could be spared, Puller established a secondary defense line south of the point. That did nothing for Hunt, but it offered some hope that a Japanese counterattack through the gap could be stopped.

Fortunately for the Americans, Colonel Nakagawa had not foreseen this opportunity. His carefully made counterattack plans called for action elsewhere, and late in the afternoon he set one of them in motion. At approximately five o'clock several hundred Japanese infantrymen emerged from the devastated hangar area north of the airfield and began to advance in a skirmish line toward the Marine positions. This was no screaming banzai charge of bunched-up men providing easy targets. Coolly, the veteran 14th Division troops kept well dispersed, and they sprinted from one chunk of concealing debris to another as they crossed the open ground of the airfield.

Scarcely had the Marines fired their first salvo of mortars when a new peril arose. As a corporal in Puller's 2nd Battalion described it: "From behind a bombed down hangar I saw a cloud of dust with the ugly snout of a Nippon tank at the head of it, then came another, then another from behind a bunker, another from here and one from there. Sure enough they are coming. Jap tanks' pouring out of their hiding places, dodging and swirling crazily about. All of us open fire with machine guns, automatic rifles, small arms, bazookas, or whatever we have. The Japs don't give up, they keep coming and coming fast, very close now."

Spitting fire from machine guns and 37mm cannon, the light tanks-at least 13 of them-whizzed through the advancing Japanese infantry and charged diagonally across the airfield at top speed. Puller's 2nd Battalion took them under flanking fire and two crashed. From the southern end of the field, four of the Marines' Sherman tanks, much heavier and more powerful than the Japanese vehicles, trundled onto the airfield and, with their 75mm guns blazing, charged into the midst of the enemy armored force. Then eight more Shermans joined the fray, and a Navy dive bomber swooped low and dropped a bomb on the Japanese.

The massed firepower was too much for the light Japanese tanks. Their armor was so thin that they were vulnerable to almost every Marine weapon. Nevertheless several of the tanks reached the Marine lines. The 2nd Battalion corporal recalled: "A tank rushed for the machine gun on my right. 'Stoney' stands up in the foxhole and lets go a burst of automatic fire. The tank was not ten feet away when it burst into flame, leaving a trailing fire as it still rolled forward. The lower half of a twisted and burnt Jap body fell not a pace from me. The Marine machine gunners jumped to safety just in time as the tank came crushing over their nest, smashing the weapon to bits. The tank gave a final lunge as it blew up about ten yards behind our lines." One of the Marines rushed up with his flamethrower, but a final spurt of bullets came from the burning tank and caught him in the chest.

Within minutes, Colonel Nakagawa's climactic effort had failed. Nearly all his tanks were destroyed and none of the infantrymen reached the Marines.

At dusk, an amtrac brought supplies to Captain Hunt's isolated men at the point and took away their wounded. Around midnight the Japanese launched a heavy mortar barrage and the Marines fired back blindly with their few machine guns. Their radio batteries had died and they had to endure hours of nerve-racking silence, punctuated by scuffling sounds in front of their lines, sniping and an occasional cry for corpsmen.

At first light the next morning, the Japanese opened up with another grenade and mortar barrage. Without a radio Hunt could not call in mortar or artillery fire, and his men were falling one by one.

The attack mounted in fury until only about 20 Marines were left; then one of Hunt's men knocked out a Japanese mortar with a rifle grenade and the attack faltered. Suddenly the Marines were standing on the rocks firing at the backs of running Japanese. Supplies and reinforcements began to arrive-- troops, mortars, an artillery-observation team, radios and a telephone line. in the afternoon the gap was finally closed.

Hunt counted his men and found that of the 235 in his company who had landed 48 hours earlier, only 78 had not been killed or wounded. Hunt's Company K was relieved and sent into reserve, but for the rest of the division the battle for Peleliu had hardly begun. The airfield, the most important objective, had been taken on the second day, but it could not yet be used because Japanese artillerymen on Urnurbrogol's heights could blast anything that moved on it.

After his tank attack failed and his units in the south were cut off, Colonel Nakagawa withdrew all of his troops into the caves and pillboxes of his Urnurbrogol bastion, there to hold out as long as he could. In the meantime, the 5th Marines, in spite of heavy losses, had managed to traverse the island by way of the exposed airfield and had begun to secure the beaches and sliver-like peninsulas on the eastern side of Peleliu. The 7th Marines were still slogging southward, pressing the Japanese into promontories that jutted out from the lower tip of the island. Thus it fell to Colonel Puller's 1st Marines, who had already suffered the heaviest casualties in the division, to make the first push against Urnurbrogol.

During the preliminary naval gunfire, much of the vegetation on the peak had been blasted away. To the 1st Marines who reached Urnurbrogol on September 17, the denuded ridges presented a nightmare scene. "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," runs the 1st Marine Division's official history. "There, were no roads, scarcely any trails. The pock-marked 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. Casualties were higher for the simple reason it was impossible to get under the ground away from the Japanese mortar barrages. Each blast hurled chunks of coral in all directions, multiplying many times the fragmentation effect of every shell."

Few of the many ridges and hills were more than 200 feet high, but on each of them, and in the steep ravines between them, were dozens of caves and pillboxes sheltering riflemen, machine gunners, mortars, rockets and field guns. When the Marines approached in the blistering heat, the Japanese would run a gun out of a cave, fire it and then pull it back in before the Marines could spot it.

On the 17th, Puller's 2nd Battalion managed to claw its way up the first of these ridges-only to find that the crest was a perfect target for Japanese gunners on the ridge a couple of hundred yards beyond. Later that day, Puller's 1st Battalion, aided by naval gunfire and tanks and bazookas, had to knock out 35 caves just to start up the forward slope of another ridge; in doing so, the battalion lost so many men that reserves and headquarters troops were hurriedly thrown into the line to hold the gains that night. The next morning, after just one day of fighting on the ridge, the battalion had to be taken out of the line briefly to reorganize and catch its breath.

Evidence of 35 caves on one slope alone and the fact that the 1st Marine Regiment had lost nearly half of its strength in the short space of three days of fighting should have tempered the optimism of the division's officers. But they continued to dispose their forces for a fast sweep up Peleliu's northern peninsula. They did not know, of course, about General Inoue's new tactics or the extent of Colonel Nakagawa's defenses.

The truth emerged on the 18th. A fierce Japanese counterattack forced Puller's 2nd Battalion partially off the ridge it had won the day before. Company B, which had been pulled from the line with the rest of the 1st Battalion only hours before, was ordered back into the fray in an attempt to outflank the Japanese pressing down on the 2nd Battalion. The company took one hill and then  was thrown back before a formidable complex of jagged ridges. From then on Urnurbrogol came to be known in the Marine Corps as Bloody Nose Ridge.

By the sixth day, September 20, the 1st Marine Regiment was finished as a fighting outfit on Peleliu. In its 1st Battalion only 74 men were left out of three companies, and every platoon leader had been hit. The regiment had sustained more than 1,700 casualties. As one of its exhausted men put it: "We aren't a regiment. We're the survivors of a regiment."

As a contingent of the 1st Marines boarded a hospital transport a week later, a close-shaven, starched Navy officer asked the men if they had any souvenirs to trade. One gaunt and battle-weary Marine stood silent for a moment and then reached down and patted his own rear. "I brought my ass outta there, swabbie," he said. "That's my souvenir of Peleliu."

On September 20, the entire 7th Regiment-elements of which had been fed into the weakening lines on Umurbrogol since the third day of fighting was thrown against the impregnable ridges on the island. it made no more headway than the 1st. Clearly the Marines on Umurbrogol needed help.

At that point the Army lent a hand. The 81st Division had just completed a relatively easy campaign on Angaur Island, 10 miles to the south. One of its units, the 321st Regimental Combat Team was available. On September 23, the 321st relieved Puller's remnants.

On September 25, the 5th Marines marched through the Army's newly established lines on the western flank of Urnurbrogol and, bypassing the treacherous ridges, struck northward through the narrow coastal flat to the upper tip of the island. Led by tanks and amtrac-mounted flamethrowers, and calling in naval gunfire with precision, the regiment captured the entire northern section of Peleliu with relative ease and with comparatively few casualties in just five days. Then it doubled back to attack Umurbrogol' s tenacious defenses from the north. Little by little, the 321st combat team and the 5th and 7th Marine regiments tightened a noose around Nakagawa's redoubt. For every inch of tortured coral they bought, the Americans paid dearly.

On October 4 the Japanese allowed the 48 men of Company L, 7th Marines, to scale one 100-foot-high ridge unmolested. When all of the Marines were on the exposed crest, the hidden enemy opened up from three sides with mortars, antitank guns and withering small-arms fire. Three men were killed instantly; the platoon leader, Second Lieutenant James E. Dunn, was one of the first to fall. "Bullets tore him from his grip on the cliffside where he was trying to withdraw his men to safer positions," combat correspondent Jeremiah O'Leary recorded, "and he fell to his death on the ravine floor many feet below."

At the base of the peak, Company K tried desperately to cover the isolated platoon of Company L, but it could only guess at some of the Japanese gun positions.

"The wounded crawled behind rocks or just lay motionless, bullets hitting them again and again," O'Leary wrote.
"Others cried pitifully for help and begged their comrades not to leave them there." Medical corpsmen on the crest of the ridge worked feverishly to drag the wounded out of the storm of fire. One stood up and shouted: "Take it easy! Bandage each other. Get a few out at a time." Then he, too, was killed.

Throwing away their weapons, the frantic Marines clawed their way back down the cliff. Some were hit and fell off the peak; others slipped in their haste and tumbled down, ripping their flesh on the jagged coral. The horrified commander of Company L, Captain James V. Shanley, watched them falling. "For God's sake," he screamed to Company K, "smoke up that hill!"

Under the cover of billowing phosphorus from smoke grenades, some of the men let themselves drop, taking their chances on the fall. The wounded on the ledge urged their buddies to jump. "You've done all you can for us," one shouted. "Get outta here." Realizing that the wounded would never survive if they were left behind, several Marines rolled their injured buddies off the ledge. One man, his foot caught in a vine, hung head down and helpless until another Marine kicked him loose.

On the ravine floor, two wounded Marines tried to help each other across an exposed draw to the safety of a tank Captain Shanley had called in. Arm in arm, they hobbled slowly across the draw, but they were too weak to make it. They fell together, and the Japanese opened fire on them. it was more than Shanley could take. Fighting off a lieutenant who tried to hold him back, he sprinted into the draw, picked up one of the men, carried him through Japanese fire and laid him gently in the lee of the tank. As he raced to get the other man, a mortar shell exploded behind him and he crumpled to the ground, fatally wounded. Seeing Shanley fall, his executive officer, a second lieutenant, rushed to his aid. He was hit by an antitank shell, and fell dead beside the captain,

Some of the men high on the ledge tried to climb down. A few descended without getting hit and made it across the ravine to the tank. Two quickly volunteered to return with stretchers to the base of the cliff to carry out the wounded. Both were killed. The debacle at Ridge 120 lasted about three hours and 15 minutes. When it was over, only 11 of the original 48 Marines had survived.

In the words of the 1st Division report, the combat had now become "a battle of attrition-a slow slugging yard by yard struggle to blast the enemy from his last remaining stronghold in the high ground." Long-range flamethrowers mounted on tanks charred hundreds of caves and pillboxes, but many tanks poking into the ravines were knocked out of action before they could fire. Hills were captured and lost and captured again. Cave mouths were sealed with explosives-but the Japanese often escaped through tunnels. Once the ridges overlooking the airfield were cleared of Japanese, Marines Corsair fighter planes could fly close support missions for the troops-but their bombs and bullets had little effect on the Japanese underground. At one point a Marine battalion commander established a command post directly above a Japanese cave. From beneath his feet the aroma of cooking drifted upward. Provoked, he ordered his men to lower a TNT charge on a rope to the cave mouth. The charge exploded and collapsed the shelter.

By the end of October more Army troops replaced the 5th and 7th Marines, both of which had lost about half their strength. But of Colonel Nakagawa's force of 6,500 only 700 remained. The 81st infantry Division, whose 323rd Regiment had earlier captured Ulithi, an atoll to the north in the Caroline chain, took over the Peleliu operation.

Major General Paul J. Mueller, the 81st's commander, resolved to proceed slowly and methodically, without risking a man unnecessarily. Every advance was preceded by artillery, mortar and napalm attacks. Armored bulldozers cleared routes for tanks. Soldiers inched forward on their bellies, pushing sandbags ahead of them for protection. To get into one troublesome area, the Army's engineers laboriously rigged a fuel pipeline 300 yards long with a nozzle that enabled an operator to squirt flame on a Japanese position like water from a hose. Finally, after more than a month of this grinding action, soldiers of the 323rd Infantry Regiment attacked a Japanese-held ridge from three sides and cleaned it out. Three days earlier, in his underground command post, Colonel Nakagawa had burned his regimental colors and shot himself. It was all over.

The battle for Peleliu claimed the lives of 1,252 Marines and 277 soldiers; another 5,274 Marines and 1,008 soldiers were wounded in the fighting. Ten thousand Japanese soldiers and civilians perished. So well protected had been the Japanese by their caves and tunnels that it took an average of 1,589 rounds of heavy and light ammunition to kill each of Nakagawa's men.

"It seemed to us," one Marine officer said later, "that somebody forgot to give the order to call off Peleliu. That's one place nobody wants to remember." And the battle went largely unnoticed back in the States. While Marines and soldiers were still locked in a tragic struggle with the enemy, another event in the Pacific had drawn the world's attention. MacArthur, with attendant fanfare, had returned to the Philippines.