After the sun set, the Japanese came for them. “A Marine unit can fight for a day or two with no food, an hour or two with no water,” Pope later said, “but it’s tough to fight with no ammo.” With few bullets and only a smattering of grenades, the Marines were forced to fight hand to hand with the Japanese, kicking, stabbing, biting, scratching, struggling like animals to stay alive. The fighting was personal, primitive even. In some instances, the Marines used rocks against their enemies, and not just to beat them to death. They often threw the rocks in hopes of fooling the Japanese into thinking that they were grenades. Other times they literally threw their smaller attackers over the precipice of the hill. “The whole night was mixed up,” Pope later said.
The gruesome sounds of C Company’s bloody drama could be heard, quite distinctly, by other Marines below Hill 100. Private William Martin, a wireman in the battalion communication section, was approaching the hill, in the dark, with the intention of stringing wire for C Company. He could hear screams coming from the looming high ground. “All of a sudden a Jap stood up, took his rifle and directed it toward my helmet. He hit my helmet, lost his balance and landed on me. I swung my roll of combat wire and apparently hit him somewhere that made him roll off of me. I then picked him up and threw him down the path which I had just come from.” Seeing this, a nearby American machine gunner opened up and killed the Japanese soldier. Not far away, in a captured Japanese bunker, Private Davis could hear the macabre voices, both foreign and domestic, in the tropical night. “We could hear them screaming for illumination or for corpsmen, as the Japs came at them from caves which were all around them. We could hear them crying and pleading for help, but nobody could help them.”
By sunrise, Pope only had fifteen men left. Colonel Puller initially wanted him to keep attacking but, learning that C Company was basically destroyed, he rescinded the order. The captain and his survivors fought their way off the hill, leaving behind many of their decomposing dead, who could not be recovered for many days to come. Pope earned the Medal of Honor for his actions at Hill 100. The hill remained in Japanese hands. “It just seems impossible to get the Japs out of those coral caves,” Lieutenant Kennard wrote his family, “and I don’t know how the problem is going to be solved.” By September 21, the 1st Marines had taken only a few hundred dearly won yards of the Umurbrogol. The regiment had suffered nearly two thousand casualties. Companies were down to ten men. Few platoon leaders or company commanders were still standing. Most of the sergeants were dead or wounded as well. Puller had culled out his rear areas of cooks, bakers, signalmen, litter bearers, and engineers to refurbish his line companies, but the Umurbrogol had consumed them, too. The 1st Marine Regiment was destroyed.23
Puller, Rupertus, and the Fatal Weakness of Strong Men
Chesty Puller was a legend in the Marine Corps. Even to this day, he looms as a larger-than-life figure, a fire-breathing, inspirational combat leader who exemplified everything a Marine officer should be. He had come up through the ranks, serving all over the globe with the Old Corps of the pre-World War II era. He saw as much ground combat as any twentieth-century American. Basically, he was to the Marine Corps what George Patton was to the Army—a colorful, unforgettable household name who embodied the aggressiveness of total victory. As with Patton, Puller believed in leading from the front. He was a warrior in the truest sense of that word (his detractors saw him as a “warmonger”).
Diminutive and almost gnomelike, Puller always seemed to be wherever the action was thickest, talking to men, joking with them, inspiring them. His command post was usually close to the front lines, especially at Peleliu, where it was probably too near the fighting since many of his staff officers spent as much time taking cover as doing their jobs. To him, leading troops in combat was the highest calling.
He had a special connection with enlisted men, like Sergeant George Peto. At one point during the terrible fighting that followed D-day on Peleliu, Peto was feeling downcast, exhausted, and generally dispirited. Then he saw the colonel, who greeted him amiably: “Hi, son.” Peto instantly felt better. “That encounter did more for my well-being than a good drink of cool water, which I was in bad need of. I would have followed that man to hell and that’s exactly what we did at Peleliu.” Pharmacist Mate 3rd Class Oliver Butler, a young Navy corpsman in E Company, 1st Marines, had been struggling for days to save more badly wounded men than he could ever count. As the sun set one night, he saw the colonel strolling the front lines as if out for an evening walk. Puller stopped at Butler’s position and actually seemed to know him: “How are you doing, Butler?” Stunned and flattered, Butler replied: “I’m doing fine, Chesty, but we’ve sure lost a lot of men and I hope we get some replacements up here tomorrow.” Puller seemed to understand completely. “I know, son, but hang in there and keep your eyes open and your ass down.” He moved on, talking to other men as he walked the line. Butler later wrote: “Among the reasons Chesty Puller’s troops liked him and admired him was the fact that he was a leader who actually and personally led and the fact that his personal courage was never in doubt.” Puller often said that “no officer’s life, regardless of rank, is of such great value to his country that he should seek safety in the rear.”24
Inspirational though he certainly was, Puller’s leadership at Peleliu left something to be desired. He was still carrying shrapnel in his leg from a wound suffered at Guadalcanal. The wound was infected, swelling his thigh to twice its normal size. He walked with the help of a rifle, a cane, or helping hands. His brother had recently been killed in another Pacific battle, and he burned with hatred for the Japanese, an enmity that perhaps took away some of his focus. He believed that the best way to win was through the pressure created by constant, unrelenting attacks. “He believed in momentum,” General Oliver Smith, the assistant division commander, once commented. “He believed in coming ashore and hitting and just keep on hitting and trying to keep up the momentum until he’d overrun the whole thing [island]. No finesse.”
In Puller’s mind, the Japanese were no match for his Marines. He would defeat the enemy by overwhelming them. Although this aggressiveness was generally laudable, at the Umurbrogol it did not serve him well. By and large, he simply hurled his regiment into frontal attacks, with few adjustments and little maneuvering, “like a wave that expends its force on a rocky shore,” in the estimation of one of Puller’s officers. Chesty did this with utter, sustained ruthlessness, and not much in the way of fire support. To be fair, he did not have much of the latter to call upon, especially artillery. He might possibly have sidestepped the Umurbrogol, working his way up the west coast of Peleliu to encircle the Japanese in their caves, but that would have left the beachhead vulnerable to Japanese counterattacks. Still, with all that taken into consideration, he seemed to have little grasp of the utter impossibility of what he was telling his men to do. Day after day, he cajoled, threatened, and coaxed his commanders into launching more, and ever costlier, attacks. When Puller ordered his 2nd Battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Russell Honsowetz, to take a hill one day at all costs, Honsowetz complained that he no longer had enough men. “Well, you’re there, ain’t you, Honsowetz? You get all those men together and take that hill.” Puller clearly wanted quick results regardless of the consequences. Amid the bloodbath, he simply would not admit to himself, or anyone else, that his regiment could not achieve the impossible.
Honsowetz was a great admirer of Puller, but others in the 1st Marines never forgave him for the losses the regiment suffered at the Umurbrogol. “Chesty Puller should never have passed the rank of second lieutenant,” Private First Class Paul Lewis later said of his colonel. In Lewis’s opinion, Puller wanted to earn the Medal of Honor and he did not care how many of his men died for him to get it, “just so long as he was still there at the end.” Sergeant Richard Fisher thought of him as a tragic caricature of his own aggressive image. “All battles are ‘training exercises’ for men like Puller, and it was just another rung up his ladder. Pulle
r was a man who could not live long without war.” Captain Pope was anything but a fan of Puller, whom he thought of as a mindless butcher. “I don’t think [he] was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I had no use for Puller. He didn’t know what was going on, and why he wanted me and my men dead on top of that hill [Hill 100], I don’t know.” Pope especially resented Puller’s enduring legendary status. “The adulation paid to him these days sickens me.” General Robert Cushman, who served as commandant of the Marine Corps, believed that Puller was a great combat leader who nonetheless could not understand anything except constant attacks, regardless of circumstances. “He was beyond his element in commanding anything larger than a company—maybe a battalion—where he could keep his hands on everything and be right in the middle of it.”
So, was Puller really at fault for the destruction of the 1st Marines at the Umurbrogol? To some extent he was. He demonstrated little imagination in maneuvering his units. He pushed his battered combat formations way too hard. He himself seemed to have little appreciation for the challenging terrain. He even turned down an opportunity to fly over it for a better look, saying he had plenty of maps. Nor did he truly understand the disquieting strength of the Japanese defenses. Sometimes positive characteristics can actually become a weakness. In this case, Puller represented aggressiveness, valor, and inspirational leadership, all ingredients that make the Marine Corps great. But he also demonstrated the tendency of Marine officers to over-rely on these strengths to the exclusion of all else. The repeated, mindless frontal attacks were the American version of banzai. They were almost as costly, and every bit as fruitless.25
It must be clearly understood, though, that at the Umurbrogol, Puller was only following the orders of Major General William Rupertus, his division commander. “The cold fact,” one officer wrote, “is that Rupertus ordered Puller to assault impossible enemy positions . . . daily till the First was decimated.” Puller might well have protested or demurred, but Rupertus probably would have relieved him. “It was more or less of a massacre,” Puller later admitted. “There was no way to cut down losses and follow orders.” Unlike Puller, the general had few good characteristics as a commander. A thirty-year veteran of the Corps, the fifty-four-year-old Rupertus had once been a champion marksman (he later penned “The Rifleman’s Creed”). In the 1930s, while stationed in China, he had lost his wife and two of his children to a scarlet fever epidemic. By most accounts, he was never the same after that tragedy. He grew more reticent, more withdrawn, and more dour. Earlier in World War II, he had served as assistant division commander of the 1st Marine Division until being promoted to the top job in late 1943. He was aloof from his men and frosty with his staff, especially the able General Smith, his second in command, whom he treated like an unwanted disease. Cold and testy, Rupertus did not communicate well with his subordinate commanders. He was a poor judge of terrain and tactics. He was rightfully proud of the Marine Corps, but allowed that pride to morph negatively into fierce contempt for the Army and the supposed incompetence of soldiers. At Peleliu, his men paid dearly for his interservice chauvinism. In short, he was completely out of his depth as a division commander.
Before the invasion, he had made the colossal mistake of telling his division that the fight for Peleliu would only take three days. Once the invasion began, he seemed entirely preoccupied with making this foolish and unfounded prediction come true. When the battle shaped up as a long slog, he at first denied the obvious, and then responded with ever more orders to attack, particularly in the Umurbrogol. Because he had broken his ankle in a pre-landing exercise, thus limiting his mobility, he was generally confined to his command post (CP). Like some sort of latter-day château general, he spent much of his time on the phone, snarling at his subordinates to “hurry up” and capture the island. As the casualty numbers piled up, he seemed divorced from reality. One day, during the height of the 1st Marine Regiment’s struggle for the Umurbrogol, a newspaper correspondent came back from the front lines and told the general how many dead Marines he had just seen. At first, Rupertus tried to deny this, but realizing that the reporter knew what he was talking about, the general commented: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking the eggs.”
As the days passed and the casualty numbers grew, the general himself was on the verge of nervous exhaustion. In one instance, Rupertus sat, head in his hands, on the sleeping bunk he kept in his command post. “This thing has just about got me beat,” he told Lieutenant Colonel Harold Deakin, his personnel (G1) officer. Deakin put his arm around the general and consoled him. “Now, General, everything is going to work out.” Another time, later in the campaign, Rupertus summoned Colonel Bucky Harris, commander of the 5th Marines, to the division CP. Harris found Rupertus in there all alone, with tears streaming down his cheeks. “Harris, I’m at the end of my rope,” he said. Rupertus told Colonel Harris that he was thinking of turning over command to him, but he later calmed down and nothing ever came of this.26
The general’s main problem was stubborn, narrow-minded, self-defeating pride. The 1st Marine Division was part of the III Marine Amphibious Corps, under Major General Roy Geiger. The other major unit under Geiger’s command was the Army’s 81st Infantry Division. Even as the 1st Marine Division invaded Peleliu, elements of the 81st had secured nearby Angaur. By September 19, the division’s 321st Infantry Regiment was available to reinforce the Marines at Peleliu. Rupertus was lucid and intelligent enough to understand how badly his division needed the Army’s help at the Umurbrogol. Yet, for days he refused to even consider this option. He was absolutely determined that his division would take Peleliu alone. He was contemptuous of the Army and would not even think of asking for help from mere soldiers. He clung to his miserably wrong prediction of a quick campaign, each day expecting, and pushing mightily for, a battle-winning breakthrough. In other words, he was willing to squander the lives of his men in order to feed his own pride and prejudice. “This reluctance to use Army troops . . . was very noticeable to the Corps staff,” Colonel Walter Wachtler, Geiger’s operations officer, later wrote. “It is probable that he [Rupertus] felt, like most Marines, that he and his troops could and would handle any task assigned to them without asking for outside help.” One Marine junior officer, writing to his family, put it even more succinctly. The brass, he said, “would never call in the Army like this, for it would hurt the name of the Marine Corps, I suppose, to let the world know that ‘doggie’ reinforcements had to be called in so early!!” This mind-set has, at times, plagued Marine officers. The Corps inculcates the notion—crucial to the Marine identity—that Marines are tougher and simply better than soldiers. Marines can achieve most anything without much outside help, so the thinking goes. This is indeed what makes Marines so special, but in some instances, like Peleliu, it can also lead to a collective isolation in outlook, as if no one else is worthy to fight alongside Marines. Rupertus is the classic example of this insular mode of thought.
Geiger, however, was different. From D-day onward, he was ashore at Peleliu. Brave and energetic, he roamed the battlefield, constantly gathering information on what was happening. He had a low opinion of Rupertus, and had never gotten along particularly well with him. For several days, he watched as the situation at Umurbrogol grew worse. He considered relieving Rupertus, but did not like the idea of firing a Marine division commander in the middle of a fight. Instead, on September 21, he decided to take matters into his own hands. Geiger and his staff visited Puller’s command post. Shirt-less, with a corncob pipe in his mouth, Chesty limped around on his swollen leg while briefing the corps commander. Drenched in sweat, Puller’s hair was plastered to his head. Colonel William Coleman, a member of the corps staff, had the impression that Chesty was completely exhausted. “He was unable to give a very clear picture of what his situation was.” Geiger asked him if he needed reinforcements and Chesty “stated that he was doing alright with what he had.” This was a crucial moment when Puller could have asked for the help he so badly ne
eded but, like Rupertus, he could not bring himself to do so.
Puller’s condition, and his tenuous grasp of reality, was the final straw for Geiger. The corps commander believed that Puller should have flanked and enveloped the Umurbrogol, rather than attacking it head-on. General Geiger proceeded immediately to Rupertus’s command post and told Rupertus that the 1st Marines were finished as a fighting unit. The regiment had suffered 56 percent casualties. Davis’s 1st Battalion alone had lost 71 percent of its Marines. Geiger told Rupertus that the regiment needed to be removed, not just from the line but from the battle altogether, and sent back to Pavuvu, where the unit could be rebuilt for future campaigns. He told Rupertus he intended to replace them with the Army’s 321st Infantry. “At this, General Rupertus became greatly alarmed and requested that no such action be taken,” Coleman wrote, “stating that he was sure he could secure the island in another day or two.” Geiger overruled him. The battle was over for the 1st Marines, and the Army would replace them. The Marines of the 1st Regiment had literally given everything they could give at the Umurbrogol. They had fought, sweat, bled, and cried. They had performed with a gallantry that was nearly superhuman. Indeed, General Smith later wondered how they were able to capture as much ground as they did. Now, at last, thanks to General Geiger’s intercession, their hell on earth was finally over. As they left the line, one of them said: “We’re not a regiment. We’re the survivors of a regiment.” Another one later added: “We were no longer even human beings.”27
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