Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  On October 12, the division command declared an end to the “assault phase” of the campaign. The announcement was greeted with scorn by the troops still battling the enemy in the ridges. The Japanese were far from finished; they had plenty of fight left in them, and Americans were still dying. One marine remarked, “Somebody from the Division CP needs to come up here and tell them damned Nips the assault phase is over.”47 But it was true that the remaining Japanese, penned into their shrinking perimeter, posed little threat beyond their lines. The southern plain of Peleliu was functioning as an advanced operating base. USAAF bombers were taking off from the airfield to support the invasion of the Philippines. Cargo ships were running supplies in to the island on a regular schedule. By the second week of October, the pocket had shrunk to an area measuring about 400 by 800 yards, and there were not many more than a thousand unwounded Japanese fighters remaining. Someone suggested, only half-jokingly, that the marines should string barbed wire around the area and call it a prisoner of war enclosure. Planes dropped leaflets around the battlefield and Japanese-language specialists began broadcasting surrender appeals through loudspeakers. There were few takers. Nakagawa’s headquarters must have had a printing press somewhere in the caves, because they responded with a leaflet of their own, addressed to “Poor Reckless Yankee-Doodle.” In the strange music of Japanese-translated English, it told the Americans that they had been sent to Peleliu because FDR needed a Pacific victory to seal his reelection campaign. It accused the Americans of fighting dirty, but pledged that the Japanese would still win in the end. The leaflet is quoted here with original spelling and diction errors:

  The fraud Rousevelt, hanging the president election under his nose and from his policy ambition, worked not only poor Nimmit but also Maccasir like a robot. Like this, what is pity. Must be sacrifice you pay. Thanks for your advice notes of surrender. But we haven’t any reason to surrender to those who are fated to be totally destroyed in a few days later. Add to you, against the manner of your attack paying no heed to humanity, your god shall make Japanese force to add retaliative attack upon you. Saying again, against the attack paying no heed to humanity contrary to the mutual military spirits, you shall get a very stern attack. We mean cruel attack. Japan Military.48

  Marines were gradually pulled off the line and replaced by the army’s 81st Infantry Division (the “Wildcats”). On October 15, when they finally received orders sending them back to Pavuvu, the 5th Marines were the last Marine Corps regiment remaining on Peleliu. They were trucked to the north end of the island, where a new bivouac area had been prepared for them. They burned their old uniforms and boondockers and drew new ones, and enjoyed the small pleasures of showers, sleeping tents, and a proper Quonset mess hall with hot meals. A few days later they filed down to the beach, where they would board landing craft and be ferried out to a waiting transport. Peleliu had knocked three marine regiments out of action; they would have to be rebuilt over time with a large proportion of replacements.

  A few days later, Geiger turned command of all forces remaining on the island to Major General Paul J. Mueller, the Wildcats’ division commander. The 1st Division had suffered casualties of 6,786, of whom more than 1,300 were killed in action. Many survivors would suffer the effects of long-term post-traumatic stress disorder, although the condition was not yet known by that name. Their efforts and sacrifices were recognized in a message from Admiral Halsey: “The sincere admiration of the entire Third Fleet is yours for the hill blasting, cave smashing extermination of 11,000 slant-eyed gophers. It has been a tough job, extremely well done.”49

  On many Pacific battlefields—most infamously on Saipan—the differing tactical concepts of the army and the marines had caused serious friction between the services. Geiger and Rupertus had wanted to snuff out Japanese resistance before turning the island over to the army, and they regretted their failure to do it. But it would take seven more weeks of hard fighting to dig the enemy out of their caves. In this final stage of the battle for the Urmurbrogal badlands, the Wildcats showcased the advantages of go-slow siege tactics. They needed a wide, well-graded road up the Horseshoe Bowl in order to get tanks, trucks, armored bulldozers, and heavy artillery to the front lines, so they built one. They kept the Japanese perimeter under constant heavy artillery fire and airstrikes, dropping tons of napalm each day. They erected enormous sandbag embankments to provide cover for infantry. The sandbags were filled at the beach and transported to the front lines in amtracs or other armored vehicles. Eventually, the army engineers even built an aerial tramway, similar in appearance and function to a primitive ski lift, which moved sandbags directly from the beaches up into the hills. These walls of sandbags were pushed inward, closer and closer to the Japanese firing positions; in some cases, soldiers crawled forward while using poles to push sandbags ahead of them. Cave openings and firing ports were sealed off. The Japanese responded with their customary skill, shrewdness, and determination. Even when the Wildcats held peaks and ridgelines above their heads, the Japanese might yet hold the interiors of the hills. The Americans sometimes heard Japanese voices in the rock beneath them, or smelled Japanese cooking rising through hidden air vents. Cave openings sealed by artillery might later be blasted open from within, and a party of Japanese fighters sneak out to attack from unexpected directions. Small-unit attacks were most frequent at night, so the army engineers set up floodlights to keep the battlefield brightly illuminated. The sandbags marched inexorably toward the heart of the pocket. A pipeline was constructed, and diesel fuel was pumped up from the coast to be poured into the cave entrances. “With the aid of a booster pump and nozzle at the end of the pipeline, the effect of a garden hose was obtained. White phosphorus grenades were used to ignite the fuel which settled in crags and crevices in the area covered.”50

  On November 24, 1944, Colonel Nakagawa radioed his final report to the division headquarters on Koror. He burned the regimental colors. He had fewer than one hundred men remaining; they would form small infiltration squads and launch one last round of night attacks. Nakagawa apparently committed ritual suicide, but no one who witnessed it survived to tell the tale. Nor did the Americans notice any final assault—indeed, small numbers of Japanese went on fighting for months, and many dozens of stragglers continued to live in the caves until the end of the war and beyond. In March 1947, a full eighteen months after V-J Day, a group of thirty-three Japanese stragglers under the command of a lieutenant were discovered and persuaded to surrender.

  The battle for Peleliu passed mostly unnoticed in the United States. A few brief press accounts appeared in the back pages of newspapers. The news from Europe in those weeks was more stirring and sensational: Allied armies had liberated Paris and were sweeping across France toward Germany. In the Pacific, there was more interest in MacArthur’s march toward the Philippines. The Palau Islands were remote and obscure even by Pacific standards, and it was difficult to convey how this fight differed from a hundred other island battles. Nor was Peleliu a particularly large battle on the scale of the ongoing global carnage. But it was a milestone of a kind, and also a foreshadowing of what was to come in the Pacific, especially in the later and better-known island battles on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. In proportional terms, from the American point of view, Peleliu was the costliest battle of the Pacific campaign. Of the 28,000 marines and soldiers who fought on the island, nearly 40 percent were casualties, including about 1,800 killed and 8,000 wounded. Nearly the entire Japanese garrison of 11,000 perished. Even accounting for the disparity in the numbers killed—inevitable given the customary Japanese refusal to surrender—those results gave a casualty ratio of nearly one to one.

  Nakagawa had effectively used his underground network to vitiate American advantages in offshore firepower and command of the air. His forces had mostly eschewed the tactically futile banzai charge. They had made shrewd use of the terrain, fighting on ground of their own choosing. Those tactics would be repeated on a larger scale on islands nearer Japan in the b
attles to come in 1945.

  U.S. infantrymen had come to regard their enemy as a vicious and sadistic creature, barely human, who had to be rooted out of the ground and exterminated. All the same, they could not help but admire the enemy, even while hating him from the bottom of their hearts, for his tenacity, his cunning, his stamina, and his implacable courage in the face of certain defeat and death.

  THE THIRD OBJECTIVE OF OPERATION STALEMATE (after Peleliu and Anguar) was Ulithi Atoll, 345 miles northeast of Peleliu. This oblong loop of palm-crowned sandspits would serve as a new fleet anchorage, almost exactly midway between Guam and the Palaus. With a lagoon measuring 209 square miles, Ulithi was large enough to shelter the entire Third Fleet and its supporting mobile logistics forces. Eniwetok, which had served a similar function for the prior six months, would be reduced to the status of a way station linking Pearl Harbor to the Marianas.

  The Japanese had abandoned Ulithi some months earlier, so no blood was shed in the capture of the great atoll. On September 21, minesweepers swept and buoyed the main entrances into the lagoon, and a small reconnaissance force of army Wildcats went ashore on one of the larger outlying islets. They were greeted by timid Polynesian natives who turned friendly the moment they understood that the strangers were enemies of the Japanese. The advance units spread through the atoll, hopping from one islet to the next in rubber boats. They found some abandoned Japanese equipment, but no enemy troops. According to the 81st Division report, they found only “ 2 Japanese, both dead.”51 Ulithi was declared secure at sundown on September 23.

  The native Ulithians were led by a kindly, paralytic chieftain called “King Ueg.” Like the big American chief in Washington, Ueg had been crippled by polio. His subjects carried him around in a sedan chair constructed of palm logs and hand-woven fiber. The Ulithians lived in simple native villages spread across six or seven different islets, in graceful platform huts built of split palm logs and platform floors carpeted with soft fibers, and they were topped with soaring, steeply canted roofs thatched with pandanus fronds. Men and boys wore loincloths; women and girls wore grass skirts; all wore flowers in their hair and smeared their bodies with oil. Portuguese and Spanish explorers had made first contact with the Ulithians more than four hundred years earlier, and Jesuit missionaries had visited in the early eighteenth century. Since that time, the natives had practiced an exotic form of Christianity in isolation, with the doctrines and practices brought by the Jesuits gradually merging into their own ancient myths and religious traditions. In 1944, they lived much as their ancestors had lived for millennia, fishing in the lagoon and tending small plots of taro. They traveled and fished in hand-carved outrigger canoes—paddling through the surf, raising triangular sails of woven fiber, and speeding away “like a flock of gulls skimming the incredibly blue floor of the lagoon.”52

  A navy civil affairs officer persuaded King Ueg to relocate all of his subjects to a single island in the southern part of the atoll. In return, the occupiers would provide food, medical care, and other desired goods for the duration of the war. After initial hesitation, Ueg agreed. Straggler lines were set up to guard the island and prevent U.S. personnel from approaching it without authorization: “These steps proved effective in eliminating molestation of natives by our troops.”53

  The press of time was heavy. The Third Fleet would need to shelter in this anchorage before the end of the month; it did not have time to return to Eniwetok, given the new October timetable for the Leyte operation. The first echelon of the 51st Seabee Battalion disembarked and began working around the clock in twelve-hour shifts. Beachmasters set up landing areas and depots. Piers were erected quickly by filling pontoons with sand and coral rock, which were then sunk and anchored into the bottom. In three days, the engineers unloaded more than 3,000 tons of supplies, including water, rations, fuel, medical supplies, and ammunition, and about three hundred vehicles, including trucks, bulldozers, and half-tracks. They cut down palm trees with gasoline-powered saws. Stumps and roots were blasted out with demolition charges, and the debris was winched out to the cleared areas alongside the airstrip and the roads. Trucks hauled crushed coral rock to be fed into cement mixers. A fleet of exhaust-belching diesel bulldozers began working over the existing Japanese airstrip on Falalop Island, which would be lengthened, widened, and resurfaced. A prefabricated steel fuel tank farm was linked to a fueling dock by five pipelines; a beach was suddenly displaced by a concrete seaplane ramp; an air traffic control tower shot up amongst the palms; and coral taxiways, aprons, and hardstands extended out from the edges of the airfield. One island, Mog Mog, was set aside as a fleet recreation area; in time it would support a network of baseball diamonds, basketball courts, barbeque pits, outdoor amphitheaters, and mess halls. The service and logistics fleet would have to sail on its own steam from Eniwetok, a voyage of more than 1,500 miles. It would be a long and hazardous journey, because the service vessels could not make more than 12 or 14 knots at sea, and the barges and drydocks had to be towed at 6 knots.

  Before dawn on October 1, two carrier task groups filed into the lagoon and dropped their hooks in the north anchorage: Admiral Bogan’s Group 38.2 (which included Halsey’s flagship New Jersey) and Admiral Sherman’s Group 38.3. That amounted to about half of Task Force 38, an armada of sixty steel ships with blue-gray camouflage patterns and soaring masts. They seemed to dwarf the adjoining islets. Lieutenant McCandless of the Seabees woke up that morning and walked down to the beach: “As I emerged from the palm trees and looked across the lagoon, I could hardly believe my eyes. It was full of warships—all sizes and types. Aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, tankers, destroyers, ten or twelve submarines, etc., all riding peacefully at anchor. They had slipped in during the night. I have no idea how they could have done it so silently, and I realized then why we were on Ulithi. It was a great protected hiding place into which the big powerful American task forces could rendezvous.”54

  The fleet had counted on a few days of rest and replenishment at anchor, but it was not to be. On October 2, its second day in Ulithi, seas were rough even in the protected waters of the lagoon, and loading was difficult. The barometer was sinking, and fleet meteorologists warned of an approaching typhoon. As in other mid-Pacific atolls, the low-lying islands did not provide much protection against storm winds. Reluctantly, Admiral Halsey led the fleet back out to sea to ride out the typhoon. On October 3, the two task groups were buffeted by high seas and 50-knot winds. Reentering the atoll by Mugai Channel on the morning of October 4, they learned that the storm had thrown sixty-five Higgins boats and fourteen LCMs onto the beach. Most were deemed unsalvageable. But there was no time to pause; the fleet had to get back to sea for another round of carrier strikes in support of the impending invasion of Leyte. The Third Fleet had many promises to keep.55

  The two task groups were at sea again on the afternoon of October 6, forging north in the tail of the typhoon. They would rendezvous with the rest of Task Force 38 at sea, then proceed to the Ryukyuan archipelago between Japan and Formosa, where they would hit targets on Okinawa and adjacent islands. The seventeen-carrier force, totaling one hundred ships with nearly 100,000 seamen, would approach closer to Japan than any other Allied warship (except submarines) had since the Doolittle Raid in April 1942.

  The 1,300-mile voyage was rough and tumble, with gale-force winds and seas breaking over the decks.56 At flag plot on the New Jersey, Carney and the staff designated the typhoon “Task Force Zero.” Since it was moving north, ahead of the task force, it performed the useful service of suppressing Japanese air activity and keeping the enemy’s long-range patrol planes at bay. The four groups of Task Force 38 rendezvoused at sea on October 7, about 375 miles west of Saipan, and began a long, frustrating day of refueling. The ships lurched and rolled in sickening fashion, with green water breaking over decks, and even many of the old hands fell seasick. The Third Fleet Diary noted that the “seamanship of the fleet was given a severe test. Fueling was terminated at 1915, and
was completed except for a few of the large units which had not received full quota of fuel.”57

  At noon on October 9, the fleet rang up flank speed for the all-night run to Okinawa. The ships roared through the night, but no patrol planes appeared on radar; the Japanese did not expect them. Carney remarked that “we caught the boys on Okinawa utterly unprepared, because I suppose they figured nobody in his right mind would be at sea during anything of this sort. We arrived unheralded and in full force.”58 Arriving at its planned launch point northeast of Okinawa at dawn on October 10, the fleet turned into the wind and began launching planes. The initial fighter sweep found few enemy planes airborne, but plenty parked on the ground. At Yontan Airfield, the largest on Okinawa, the attackers strafed parked planes, leaving about a dozen ablaze. Then followed four waves of bombers, escorted by additional fighters armed with bombs and rockets; they targeted airfields, barracks, ammunition dumps, fuel tanks, and defensive installations all up and down the Ryukyus. In the last of the day’s strikes, they worked over targets still burning fiercely from the earlier raids. Fires engulfed the ancient central district of Naha, Okinawa’s prefectural capital, killing about six hundred civilians and leaving four-fifths of the town in ashes. The fire destroyed much of the art, architecture, and cultural patrimony of the old Ryukyuan kingdom. Even now, older Okinawans remember the disaster by the date it occurred: 10/10.