The real tragedy of Peleliu occurred during the first week, when General Rupertus and Colonel Puller believed they faced a linear defense along the perimeter of the nearest high ground, the kind of positions they could surely penetrate with just one more offensive push. As a result, for all their undeniable bravery, the 1st Marines sustained appalling casualties and had to be relieved by a regiment of Wildcats (at Geiger’s insistence) six days after the landing. Maj. Ray Davis’s 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, suffered most grievously, losing 70 percent of their number, their line companies reduced to a corporal’s guard.*
Unable at first to dissuade Rupertus from his fixation with frontal assaults, Admirals Wilkinson and Fort and General Geiger made maximum use of their amphibious flexibility to achieve other campaign objectives at less cost. Deciding to bypass Babelthuap and Yap was provident—either could have been worse than Peleliu. On 17 September Wilkinson ordered General Mueller to land two regiments of Wildcats on Angaur. Wilkinson provided a commendable pounding of the small island by naval gunfire and carrier air strikes. Angaur, alone of all the Palaus, had no barrier reef, so Mueller had his pick of landing beaches. The Wildcats fought their way ashore convincingly, then spent three intense days fighting a veteran infantry battalion in heavy swamps and rain forests. Residual fighting would drag on a month, but Mueller shortly had the situation in hand well enough to accept Geiger’s reassignment of one regiment to relieve the 1st Marines along Peleliu’s Bloody Nose Ridge. On 23 September the 321st Regimental Combat Team switched from Angaur to Peleliu to relieve Puller’s remnants.
Two days earlier, Wilkinson and Geiger landed Mueller’s third regiment, RCT 323, at Ulithi Atoll. Here was the greatest strategic dividend of the campaign. While sparse in usable land areas, Ulithi’s lagoon was deep and vast enough to provide a secure anchorage for up to six hundred warships. Ulithi would serve as a final marshaling yard for the great armadas preparing to assault Iwo Jima and Okinawa in the next several months. Ulithi also came at zero cost—the Wildcats lost not a man in this critical seizure.
On Peleliu, despite the bloodbath taking place in the hills and canyons, Admiral Fort stuck to the unglamorous work of improving the beaches, emplacing pontoon causeways, and completing the general offload of all combat cargo. SeaBees had the airfield ready for rough flight operations by D+3. On that day the first “Bird Dogs” of Capt. Wallace J. Slappey’s Marine Observation Squadron Three landed on the airstrip and soon commenced providing air spot for artillery batteries and Navy gunships. Slappey’s squadron would render enormous assistance to the Old Breed here, and again at Okinawa. So effective were the pilots and their observers that Japanese gun crews eventually ceased firing at the first sight of the Bird Dogs overhead, knowing from painful experience that accurate counterbattery fire would be called down on their heads in short order. The Marines loved these doughty little Piper Cubs, calling them “Piperschmidts” or “Messercubs.”
On 26 September the troops in the lines cheered at the sight of gull-winged Marine Corps F4U Corsairs screeching overhead. Maj. Robert F. “Cowboy” Stout’s Marine Fighter Squadron 114 (VMF-114) had arrived ashore, and henceforth both the Old Breed and the Wildcats would be receiving “personalized” close air support. Two days later Col. Caleb T. Bailey’s Marine Air Group Eleven (MAG-11) came ashore and relieved the escort carriers of all further tactical support missions.
On 28 September Geiger and Rupertus put together a little jewel of a shore-to-shore amphibious assault against the islet of Ngesebus by the 5th Marines. The attackers made full use of their major weapons to support the assault: division and corps artillery, naval gunfire, close air support, armored amphibians blazing the way for troop-carrying LVTs. This widely observed assault afforded “Cowboy” Stout’s Corsair pilots an opportunity to show their stuff. They performed spectacularly, roaring in at thirty feet off the deck, just ahead of the advancing LVT-As. A wounded Japanese officer, captured in the ruins of the first line of blockhouses on the island, stated to his interrogator that the air strikes had been the most terrifying combat experience he had ever known—that the Marine riflemen were upon his position before his men could recover from the strafing.
The only disappointment at Ngesebus was the discovery that the island’s soft, sandy soil would not support an airfield, which explained why the Japanese engineers had halted construction of their own fighter strip there. But U.S. engineers carving a new bomber strip out of Angaur’s dense woodlands reported good progress, even while that battle lingered on. Given these reports, Wilkinson and Geiger concluded that they had fulfilled all the strategic objectives of Stalemate II. Ulithi represented a plum; Angaur would prove to be a better bomber field than Peleliu; and the Americans had succeeded in establishing an advance base at Peleliu despite the continuing horrors of the Umurbrogal.
Yet Colonel Nakagawa continued to rule the highlands, bloodying each American advance by day, deploying disciplined patrols of infiltrators to terrorize the enemy each night. He still had plenty of guns and ammo, including the lethal 150-mm heavy mortar, the biggest mortar the Marines had yet faced, an ideal weapon among the cliffs and crags of the Umurbrogals. The Japanese public followed reports of Nakagawa’s extended resistance on Peleliu with patriotic intensity. Emperor Hirohito bestowed nine separate “decrees of praise” on the garrison during this time, an unprecedented expression of divine interest.
The pace of relentless close combat exacted a heavy toll among the Americans as well. “It was a young man’s war,” said Capt. John McLaughlin, a rifle company commander in the 5th Marines. “Only a young man could fight all night, then attack all day.” Here was another forecast of the fighting to come on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Two opposing armies; one aboveground, vulnerable, frustrated; the other almost entirely underground, living in relative comfort and safety, only briefly exposed while covering designated fields of fire. More than one U.S. commander exalted over finally winning a bitterly contested ridgetop—only to roar in anger at the smell of the Japanese cooking dinner in safe warrens hundreds of feet beneath the high ground.
Both sides resorted to ingenuity in the battle for the caves. U.S. troops often dangled a satchel charge at the end of a long rope down a cliff face, trying to swing the explosive pack into a cave mouth. Sometimes a Japanese soldier in a spider hole above the cave would lean out with a knife—sawing the rope in two just before the charge exploded.
General Geiger made sure that MAG-11 provided the kind of “flying artillery” that amphibious planners had envisioned before the war. This was close air support at its finest. Marine Corsairs would take off from Peleliu’s airstrip and not even raise their landing wheels. In fifteen seconds they would be over the target, dropping their belly ordnance, then circling to land and rearm. Indeed, the first bomb delivered sprayed steel shrapnel onto the airfield, a mere thousand yards behind the point of impact.
Marine pilots used napalm bombs effectively at Peleliu, but the crazy-quilt front lines demanded special care in dropping these area weapons. In close quarters the pilots would drop the napalm tanks without detonators and merely dip their wings on pull-out to signal delivery. Nearby troops would then open fire with tracer rounds, igniting the napalm by “remote control.” Reported the Japanese: “The enemy plan seems to be to burn down the central hills to ashes by dropping gasoline from airplanes.”
By the end of September, Rupertus had suffered more than five thousand battle casualties in his division. The 1st Marines were so shot to pieces that Geiger ordered them evacuated to their base in the Russell Islands. Ironically, the survivors of this proud regiment had great difficulty leaving the grisly island to reembark their transports. Heavy seas swamped three DUKWs, spilling the troops in the water and requiring massive rescue efforts. Heartless Peleliu just wouldn’t let go.
The protracted bloodbath on Peleliu received very little coverage in the States. The nation instead focused on war news from Europe—the dramatic Operation Market Garden in the Netherlands, American penetratio
ns of the Siegfried Line, Russian thrusts into the Baltic. Time magazine barely mentioned Peleliu until five weeks after the assault began.
On 12 October Geiger declared the island secured and conducted a ceremonial flag-raising. Frontline troops snorted derisively at the news, but in truth the announcement merely signaled the end of the amphibious assault phase and the beginning of what the Army would call “Siege Warfare.” Three days later the 81st Division relieved the Old Breed Marines and continued the battle another six weeks. On 20 October MacArthur indeed “returned” to the Philippines, landing in great strength on Leyte. On the next day, engineers completed Angaur’s low-lying airfield. Yet another glitch materialized. The assigned Seventh Air Force bomber squadron had not completed its training qualifications. The first B-24 medium bombers did not take off on combat missions from the new field until 17 November, too late to contribute to the Leyte landing or subsequent beachhead breakout.
During the night of 24-25 November, Colonel Nakagawa sent his final message to Tokyo: “Our sword is broken and we have run out of spears.” With that, he burned the regimental colors and shot himself. Imperial Headquarters posthumously promoted the gifted colonel two grades to lieutenant general. One can only wonder why they waited, but the point is moot. Seventy-two days after D-Day, the long battle for Peleliu had ended.
Victory at Peleliu cost 9,600 American casualties—3,100 soldiers, 6,500 Marines. Nearly 1,200 died. Probably 16,000 Japanese died defending both Peleliu and Angaur. Logisticians calculated that the Americans fired an average of 1,589 rounds of all kinds of ammunition and ordnance to kill each enemy soldier.
Peleliu indeed left “a bad taste” with most survivors. As Eugene B. Sledge stated unequivocally on the battle’s fiftieth anniversary: “I shall always harbor a deep sense of bitterness and grief over the suffering and loss of so many fine Marines on Peleliu for no good reason.” Not every survivor agrees. Peleliu veteran Fred K. Fox reminds us that the 1st Marine Division once valued its alternate nickname as “MacArthur’s Marines” and felt obligated to help the legendary general’s return to the Philippines. In retrospect, the survivors among the Old Breed and the Wildcats have plenty of reason to view their combat performance at Peleliu with pride. Lacking the preponderance of numbers customarily required for amphibious assault, shortchanged by inadequate preliminary bombardment, the III Amphibious Force stormed ashore and prevailed against an enemy force that, man-for-man, represented the best fighters in the Japanese Empire. Peleliu’s protracted, bloody, and frustrating battle became a convincing American victory.
Yet the perception of Peleliu as a wasteful campaign persists to some degree today. Historian Nathan Miller flatly states that Peleliu was “Nimitz’s major mistake of the war.” Advocates of fast carrier warfare have always asserted that Task Force 58 (or 38) could have neutralized Peleliu without having to invade the place. The argument certainly holds true in other bypassed islands like Truk, Marcus, and Wake. But there were major exceptions to airpower alone neutralizing a Japanese airfield. American medium and heavy bombers pulverized tiny Iwo Jima for one hundred straight days prior to that battle—yet every night the dump trucks loaded with “Keystone Kops” would come rumbling out of the caves to resurface the airstrips for flight operations. Sometimes these islands simply had to be subdued at bayonet point.
Star-crossed Operation Stalemate II produced certain strategic benefits. The former Japanese bastion in the western Carolines was now a center for U.S. long-range bombers and maritime patrol aircraft. The great natural anchorage of Ulithi would be of tremendous value in the campaigns to come. And the proud Japanese 14th Infantry Division, one of the empire’s best, had been eliminated—killed at Peleliu and Angaur, or bottled-up and out of the war on Babelthuap and Yap. Taking Peleliu off the board also slammed the remaining door on the quarter of a million Imperial troops still at large in the Carolines.
Bad as it was, Peleliu provided the 1st Marine Division invaluable tactical experience for the near future. Of the six U.S. divisions engaged in the battle for Okinawa, none would surpass the Old Breed in their proficiency in tank-infantry coordination, use of close air support, and overall field savvy in cave warfare.
Regrettably—and almost inexplicably—the most useful lessons of Peleliu would not find their way in time to the troops who would need them most critically—the three divisions of Marines then preparing for the assault on Iwo Jima. Here again is evidence of an administrative oversight—or intracorps hubris—that should have been forcibly corrected by Holland Smith as commanding general of the Fleet Marine Forces, Pacific. Strange as it may seem, the Japanese were proving superior to their enemy in distributing tactical lessons learned from the epic amphibious battles of 1944. As a consequence, General Kuribayashi on Iwo Jima knew far more about the recent “antiamphibious struggles” at Biak and Peleliu than did his forthcoming enemy counterparts, Generals Holland Smith and Harry Schmidt.
* The author is indebted to H. Arthur “Hal” Lamar, flag lieutenant to Nimitz, and Loren F. “Sonny” Paulus, the admiral’s bodyguard, for these personal insights.
* The instructors at Marine Corps Schools in Quantico, Virginia, constructed an exact replica of the Japanese defensive complex at “the Point” on a similar promontory in Lunga Reservoir, and for the next decade all second lieutenants undergoing Basic School had to formulate a tactical assault plan in field exercises.
* In keeping with his aggressive nature, Colonel Puller maintained his regimental command post well forward; in fact, just behind his lead battalion. But Puller was slowed in this campaign by complications from his earlier wound at Guadalcanal. As Major Davis recalled: “I was always convinced that Lewie Puller would not have survived had he not been crippled. They were carrying him around on a stretcher. I was convinced if he had been able to walk around the way he was prone to do he was going to be killed.”
Chapter Seven
Iwo Jima
Storming Sulfur Island
It was an operation of one phase and one tactic. From the time the engagement was joined until the mission was completed it was a matter of frontal assault maintained with relentless pressure.
Lt. Gen. Holland M. Smith, USMC
Commander, Expeditionary Troops, Iwo Jima
Task Force 56 Action Report,
March 1945
Iwo Jima was the most heavily fortified island the Americans would assault in World War II. The strategic benefits of acquiring airfields within fighter range of Tokyo would be significant—the risks in attacking that steep, volcanic fortress, “the Doorstep to Japan,”would be enormous. No U.S. amphibious force could have tackled this mission any earlier in the war. Seizing Iwo Jima would require full command of the air and sea, overwhelming firepower, imaginative naval campaign planning, seasoned shock troops, and violent, sustained amphibious execution.
Iwo Jima was a latecomer as a potential objective for U.S. amphibious forces. Many planners figured that the campaigns in the Philippines and Palaus would be followed by a combined operation against Formosa. Others, including Fifth Fleet Commander Raymond Spruance, believed the wiser choice would be to strike north-by-northwest against the Volcano and Ryukyu Islands. Seize Iwo Jima, he suggested, then Okinawa, in preparation for the final invasions of Kyūshū and Honshū.
Iwo Jima represented a major obstacle to the strategic bombing of mainland Japan by B-29s based in the Marianas. The island, lying about halfway between Saipan and Tokyo, contained an early warning radar system that provided Tokyo with an invaluable two-hour alert of each approaching B-29 raid. Further, Iwo-based fighters launched to intercept the incoming bombers, forcing them to fly a circuitous route, requiring more fuel and diminishing their payloads. Fighters on Honshū, alerted by Iwo Jima’s radar, would be waiting for the American bombers, forcing them to fly at higher altitudes, further sacrificing bombing accuracy. After each mission, Iwo fighters sallied forth again to swarm around crippled U.S. Super-fortresses struggling to return to the Marianas. And Japanese
medium bombers staged through Iwo for damaging raids on the U.S. airfields on Saipan and Tinian, destroying more B-29s on the ground than Gen. Curtis E. LeMay’s crews lost during their strike missions. The vaunted strategic bombing campaign had proven a bust so far. Iwo Jima had to go.
On 3 October 1944 the Joint Chiefs of Staff directed Nimitz to capture the ten-square-mile island. With Halsey still mired in the “tar pit” of Peleliu, Nimitz gave the newest tasking to Spruance. Reduced to its nub, the Fifth Fleet’s mission was twofold: enhance the strategic bombing campaign; facilitate the ultimate invasion of the Japanese homeland. Nimitz emphasized speed of execution, as he had before Tarawa, saying: “It is a cardinal principle of amphibious operations that shipping be localized and exposed at the objective for the minimum possible time.” This guidance would prove increasingly difficult to honor: seizing Iwo would take five full weeks; Okinawa, twice as long.
Operation Detachment, the campaign to seize Iwo Jima, became of necessity a stepchild wedged between the larger campaigns of Luzon and Okinawa. This narrow window of time dominated the planning for Detachment. Even as late as 1944-45 America lacked the resources to conduct two, simultaneous, full-scale amphibious operations in the Pacific. The JCS twice postponed D-Day for Iwo because slow progress in Luzon delayed the turnover of naval gunfire support ships and landing craft from MacArthur’s forces to the Fifth Fleet. Nor was there any slack at the other end of the schedule. Spruance had to complete the seizure of Iwo Jima and reposition his amphibious forces to support the Okinawa campaign well before 1 April. That was the latest date Okinawa could be invaded without incurring undue risk from the summer typhoon season.
These time constraints did not unduly bother Spruance. He knew each of his principal task force commanders to be a veteran of urgent planning and hard campaigning in the Central Pacific. He led a seasoned, proven team. Marc Mitscher would again command the Fast Carrier Task Force (TF 58); Kelly “Terrible” Turner, the Joint Expeditionary Force; “Handsome Harry” Hill, the Attack Force. Rear Adm. W.H.P. “Spike” Blandy, highly regarded for his cool-headed handling of an amphibious group at Saipan and Tinian, would take command of the massive Amphibious Support Force (in effect, the “advance force commander”).
Storm Landings Page 15
