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 himsel
f: “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.”
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