Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  “Put those goddam lights out!” an MP called to a Marine driving a jeep one night.

  The driver obeyed. But he happened to be a general’s driver, and the general said evenly:

  “Put those goddam lights back on.”

  The driver obeyed.

  “Put those goddam lights out!” the MP shrieked.

  “I can’t,” the Marine yelled back. “I got the goddam general with me!”

  If late August and early September meant a time of lull to the Marines on the ground, it marked the end of the doldrums for the Marines in the air. They would soon get the escort carriers from which they would launch close-up aerial support of their foot-slogging comrades. They would also send 17 squadrons into the Philippines to place this tactic at the service of Army divisions. And the “forgotten war” they had been fighting over the Marshalls would be over.

  Having shown how to knock out a base at Rabaul, the Marine fliers had been assigned a repeat performance over the bypassed atolls of Wotje, Maloelap, Milli and Jaluit. Resistance had been fierce at first. Thirty-six planes had been shot down. But then the fearful accuracy of such dive-bomber pilots as Major Elmer (Iron Man) Glidden—who set the record of 107 combat dives in the Pacific—gradually eliminated the Japanese antiaircraft guns and the Marshalls mission became a boring “milk run.”

  All of the glory, all of the glamour, had moved westward with the invasion timetable. Except for the Marshalls siege and the occasional appearance of squadrons flying by stages to the Marianas, life on Eniwetok, Kwajalein and Majuro could be the perfection of tedium. It was worse at Tarawa, now the backwater of the Pacific War.

  Only the cemetery on Betio served to remind the atoll’s garrison of the savage four-day battle fought there less than a year before. It was a place of shining coral and slender white crosses, surrounded by a neat coconut-log wall which the Seabees had built. Here a lieutenant colonel lay between privates. Here was so often the word “Unknown.” And here, on a white plaque raised above the cemetery gate, was inscribed the sadly beautiful epitaph which Captain Donald Jackson wrote for his comrades.

  I

  To you, who lie within this coral sand,

  We, who remain, pay tribute of a pledge,

  That, dying thou shalt surely not

  Have died in vain.

  That when again bright morning dyes the sky

  And waving fronds above shall touch the rain,

  We give you this—that in those times

  We will remember.

  II

  We lived and fought together, thou and we,

  And sought to keep the flickering torch aglow

  That all our loved ones might forever know

  The blessed warmth exceeding flame,

  The everlasting scourge of bondsman’s chains,

  Liberty and light.

  III

  When we with loving hands laid back the earth

  That was for moments short to couch thy form,

  We did not bid a last and sad farewell

  But only, “Rest ye well.”

  Then with this humble, heartfelt epitaph

  That pays thy many virtues sad acclaim

  We marked this spot, and, murm’ring requiem,

  Moved on to westward.

  Westward they had moved, until, by mid-September, 1944, full 40 degrees of longitude lay between Tarawa and another coral island called Peleliu.

  15

  The Palau Islands, of which Peleliu was one of two chief bastions, were to be held at all costs.

  Imperial General Headquarters had made this clear to Lieutenant General Sadae Inoue when he had taken command there in March. For the Palaus, a series of volcanic islands inside a coral reef 77 miles long and 20 wide, provided the anchorage and air bases no longer available at Truk. They were only about 550 miles east of the Southern Philippines.

  In March, Imperial General Headquarters had wrongly guessed that the Americans would strike the Palaus and not the Marianas. The Japanese had expected General MacArthur’s invasion of the Philippines to take precedence over the Marianas route to Japan. Having used the Palaus to stage their own Philippines invasions of 1941, it seemed to them likely that the Americans would want them for the same reasons in 1944.

  After the surprise at Saipan, after the disaster of the Battle of the Philippine Sea and the agony of the Marianas losses, Headquarters regarded a Palaus invasion as inevitable. So did Inoue. The commander of the “Palau Sector Group,” which also included Yap and Ulithi Atolls, decided to make his defense so tenacious as to gain months of time during which the Empire could recover from the air and fleet losses of the Marianas fighting.

  To do this he withdrew all troops from Ulithi and began concentrating his 30,000 to 40,000 men in the Palaus, in little Peleliu just inside the southern end of the reef, and on big Babelthuap just within the northern end. Another island, Angaur, was 10 miles south of Peleliu but outside the reef. It got only about 1,400 men.

  Peleliu got between 10,000 and 11,000 men—the 2nd Infantry Regiment, a battalion of the 15th Infantry, a battalion of the 54th Independent Mixed Brigade, a Naval Guard Force and a tank battalion—all commanded by Colonel Kunio Nakagawa. Most of these units were from the 14th Infantry Division, Inoue’s own outfit and the nucleus of his force. It was a proud old division with a service record running back through four years in Manchuria to the Russian War. In General Inoue and his chief of staff, Colonel Tokechi Tada, at Babelthuap, and in Colonel Nakagawa at Peleliu, the 14th Division possessed three of the finest officers in the Japanese Army.

  Such ability was reflected in the “Palau Sector Group Training for Victory” plan issued by Inoue on July 11. It began:

  “Victory depends on the officers and men of the entire army concentrating on our thorough application of recent battle lessons, especially those of Saipan.”

  Less than startling to Western ears, this was unorthodox in Japan. For years the doctrine of defense had been simply and inflexibly “annihilation at the water’s edge.” Hold the beach and you hold all. More, the invading American Marines had not been in the habit of allowing anyone to survive to challenge it. But there had been a few officers who escaped from Saipan, where General Saito’s artillery had punished the Americans. They came to Inoue’s command. They passed along their observations. The result:

  “If the situation becomes bad we will maintain a firm hold on the high ground and prevent the enemy from establishing or using an air base by a daring guerrilla warfare with our artillery .”

  Peleliu was made for such defense.

  It was six miles long south-north and two miles wide at its broadest west-east. It was shaped like a lobster’s claw. It was, in fact, a pair of peninsulas joined on the east coast about one-third up its length. On the east coast were shoals and mangrove swamps and a series of islets extending the lower prong eastward. On the west were narrow beaches of white coral sand, fortified and defended in the accustomed manner. Both coasts were encompassed by the reef surrounding all the Palaus but Angaur. In the south was Peleliu’s excellent airfield, one which had been in use since before the war. Rising above it and running north about two miles was a low wooded ridge which the Japanese called the Momiji Plateau, which the Micronesians called Umurbrogal Mountain and which the American Marines would call Bloody Nose Ridge.

  It was this high ground which made Peleliu so perfectly adaptable to defense-in-depth, for it was neither ridge nor mountain but an undersea coral reef thrown above the surface by a subterranean volcano. Sparse vegetation growing in the thin topsoil atop the bedrock had concealed the Umurbrogal’s crazy contours from the aerial camera’s eye. It was a place that might have been designed by a maniacal artist given to painting mathematical abstractions—all slants, jaggeds, straights, steeps and sheers with no curve to soften or relieve. Its highest elevation was 300 feet in the extreme north overlooking the airfield-islet of Ngesebus 1,000 yards offcoast there. But no height rose more than 50 feet before splitting apart in a
maze of peaks and defiles cluttered with boulders and machicolated with caves. For the Umurbrogal was also a monster swiss cheese of hard coral limestone pocked beyond imagining with caves and crevices. They were to be found at every level, in every size—crevices small enough for a lonely sniper, eerie caverns big enough to station a battalion among its stalactites and stalagmites.

  It was here that Colonel Nunio Nakagawa and his engineers set to work widening, improving and fortifying the caves. When Colonel Nakagawa reported to General Inoue on Babelthuap that Vice Admiral Itou was interfering with his work, Inoue sent Major General Kenjiro Murai down to Peleliu. He was not to take command, he was only, in that friction between the Anchor and the Star, to match rank with Admiral Itou. Beneath the cover of this stalemate, Nakagawa continued his fortifying, and by the end of August he had 500 caves completed.

  Nearly all were connected by interior tunnels. Most had entrances on more than one level and all had entrances on both sides of the mountain. Log-and-sandbag barricades protected the entrances, and their tunnels ran only a few feet inside the mountain before turning sharply to escape both direct gunfire and the terrible American flame-throwers. Some of the caverns were five and six stories deep. They contained barracks and kitchens. If the top of the Umurbrogal were to be lifted off, some of these tunnel networks would appear like monster H’s or series of E’s laid back to back. And this would be repeated for five and six levels down.

  Within these caves Colonel Nakagawa placed all of his artillery except his coastal guns, all of his mortars and also the new 200-millimeter rocket-launchers just received from Japan. The guns fired from cave mouths equipped with sliding doors of armored steel. They could hit the beaches, the airfield to the south and Ngesebus to the north. They were protected by squads of riflemen and machine-gunners firing through the slits of natural crevices. All of these strong-points were covered by interlocking fire. For the Americans to attack one of them would be to bring down the fire of two or three others on them, to say nothing of those which would remain silent until the Americans advanced under the delusion that they had knocked out the entire system. Then, as Hercules had found with Hydra, they would find the beheaded stump sprouting two fresh heads to bite at them.

  The Umurbrogal was the Pacific’s masterpiece of defensive engineering, and it was going to be manned by a new Japanese warrior. For Lieutenant General Inoue’s training plan instructions had also killed the banzai. Inoue had agreed that “We are ready to die honorably,” but he had also gone on to suggest, in that imprecise language which was as great a military drawback as the banzai itself, that mere dying was not enough. It had to have that exotic Western thing: purpose. Otherwise: “We must preserve personnel and ordnance.” Nor was “spiritual power” any longer vaunted over material power.

  “It is certain that if we repay the Americans (who rely solely upon material power) with material power it will shock them beyond imagination….”

  Unlike the crimson imagery with which commanders such as Haruyoshi Hyakutate urged the Japanese soldier to eat three of the American devils with each morning’s bowl of rice, this remark had the quality of reality. A bursting shell, as Saipan had shown, did have more effect than a banzai scream. Clearly, General Inoue agreed with Napoleon’s cynical dictum that “God is on the side of the heavy artillery.” In a Japanese paraphrase, he said:

  “Heavenly aid on the road to victory falls only to those commanders who have a thorough control of command….”

  Nor did Inoue fear naval gunfire. He told his men:

  “Without concerning ourselves with the great explosive bursts or the strong local effect of naval firing, the destructive power wrought upon personnel is not very great…. Aerial bombardment is almost identical…. By observing very carefully the activity of enemy planes and the bombs while they are falling, avoiding thereby instantaneous explosions, and by taking advantage of gaps in bombardment in order to advance, it can cause no great damage.”

  In proof, Inoue ordered his men to practice crawling through the bombs dropped during the light American raids of the spring and summer. But he ordered them to the antiaircraft guns when Admiral Halsey’s warbirds struck at the Palaus from Task Force 59 carrier decks on September 6 through September 8. When the bombardment force of battleships and cruisers showed up under Rear Admiral Jesse Oldendorf in the pale moonlight of early morning, September 12, all Palau troops got under cover.

  At Peleliu, Colonel Nakagawa left about a battalion south of the airfield, perhaps another battalion along the western beaches, while withdrawing the rest of his men and tanks into the Umurbrogal.

  Up at Babelthuap, General Inoue prepared to receive the main American attack.

  It was his only mistake.

  16

  The American plan in the waning summer of 1944 was to commence the invasion of the Philippines by stages.

  The first stage was to open the gates: Morotai on New Guinea in the west, Peleliu-Angaur in the Palaus on the west. This would be followed by invasion of Yap on October 5, and after that, the seizure of Ulithi.

  Then, in mid-November, General MacArthur would land on Mindanao in the Southern Philippines. Victory here would lead to December invasion of Leyte in the Central Philippines.

  By March of 1945 the American forces in the Pacific would combine to secure either Luzon in the Northern Philippines, or to capture Formosa and ports on the China Coast. On either of these land masses the necessary large bodies of troops could be staged for the final assault on Japan.

  Then the tides of war began shifting and the plan changed.

  The Japanese in China launched their inevitable attacks on American air bases there and the Fourteenth Air Force had to retire from its forward fields. Soon the Japanese would make the China coast difficult to invade. For these reasons, and because no more American troops could be spared from Europe, the Formosa-China route to Japan was about to be canceled out.

  And then, on September 13, Admiral Bull Halsey made his electrifying discovery that Japanese air power in the Philippines was on its last leg. On September 12, the carriers of Task Force 58 stood within sight of the mountains of Samar in the Central Philippines. They flew off 2,400 sorties. They destroyed 200 enemy planes. They sank ships. They bombed installations. They roved with such impunity that Halsey suggested to Admiral Nimitz, and thence to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that all the Palau, Yap, Morotai and Mindanao landings be called off in favor of an immediate bold thrust into Leyte in the Central Philippines.

  But General MacArthur was already headed for Morotai aboard the cruiser Nashville—and the ship was maintaining radio silence. Two days of messages shooting back and forth among Nimitz in Hawaii, the Combined Joint Chiefs of Staff attending the Octagon Conference in Quebec, and Lieutenant General R. K. Sutherland speaking for MacArthur in New Guinea produced these changes:

  Instead of landing on Mindanao in November and then on Leyte in December, MacArthur would go directly to Leyte in October.

  The Yap landing would be called off, and the Twenty-fourth Corps would be used at Leyte instead.

  The Morotai landing by the 31st Infantry Division would go forward as planned, as would the landings on Angaur, Ulithi and Peleliu. The last three, considered necessary to obtain the air bases and anchorage which Admiral Nimitz wanted to support the Philippine landings, were to be made by troops of the Third Corps under Major General Geiger; the 81st Infantry (Wildcat) Division to hit Angaur and after that Ulithi, the First Marine Division to take Peleliu.

  Peleliu, it had been known for months, was going to be a tough nut. The Marines had asked for heavy preinvasion bombardment there. And yet, off Peleliu on September 14, Admiral Oldendorf got off this message from his bombardment force:

  “We have run out of targets!”

  That same day, correspondents and unit commanders aboard the transports broke open sealed envelopes given them by Major General Rupertus, still commanding the First Marine Division. They read that Peleliu would be tough, like Taraw
a, but also just as short.

  It would take, said General Rupertus, something like four days.

  17

  On the morning of September 15 the First Marine Division struck at Peleliu’s western beaches three regiments abreast.

  On the left or north was the First Marines, using the code word Spitfire; in the center opposite the airfield was the Fifth or Lonewolf; on the right moving against the southern tip was the Seventh or Mustang.

  The Marines were almost gay going in, for General Rupertus’ prediction of four days had made them cocky, but once their amtracks had bumped over the fringing reef, once Colonel Nakagawa’s thousand-eyed mountain stuffed with men and guns had begun to flash, they stopped calling to one another, stopped throwing kisses, stopped wagging four confident fingers. They ducked beneath the gunwales and began to pray.

  “Playmate, this is Spider. The First Waves are on the beach. Repeat: The first waves are on the beach. Over.”

  “Spider, this is Playmate. What resistance do they seem. to be meeting? Over.”

  “Playmate, this is Spider. Hard to tell much through this smoke. Over.”

  All that could be seen to shoreward was a great pall of twisted, drifting smoke, sometimes suffused with a pinkish glare by the shivering of flames beneath or within it. It was a fiery Moloch of a cloud, created by the thundering of the great naval shells exploding beneath it, the clash-crashing of thousands of rockets and the whuffling thump of the bombs which screaming dive-bombers dropped through it. It was so impressive that the skipper of Colonel Chesty Puller’s transport rushed up to the veteran Marine commander as he began to go over the side to join his men.