Enter the Wildcats
The soldiers of the 81st Infantry Division were known as the Wildcats. Having seen limited action on Angaur, they were fairly new to combat, but not to soldiering. They had trained together for two long years. In contrast to the youthful Marines, the bulk of whom were in their late teens or early twenties, many of the Wildcats were in their late twenties and thirties. These Army infantrymen answered to a range of nicknames: doughboys, doughfeet, and dogfaces being the most common (the next generation would call them grunts, a name that stuck).
On September 23, they entered the front lines at the Umurbrogol. The soldiers immediately noticed the exhaustion in the faces of their 1st Marine Regiment comrades. The Marines were coated with coral grime. Their arms were marred by festering nicks and cuts they had gotten from diving for cover among the sharp rocks. Some had shaggy whiskers. Most had hollow, weary eyes, gazing dully ahead in what infantrymen generally call the thousand-yard stare. Their young faces looked strangely old, with lines caused by the constant facial muscular tension that resulted from abject fear. The Marines were worn down in less than a week by the unimaginable stress of bitter combat that caused “the constriction of the blood vessels in the stomach and the sudden whirling of the brain that occurs when a large shell burst nearby or a friend has his eyes or entrails torn out,” one of the Marines later wrote. To Sergeant Thomas Climie, an older man in the 321st, these brave Marines were “dirty, scared kids. I felt so sorry for them. They were in shock.” Filled with foreboding, he and the other soldiers stared, with anguish, at the Marines.
For their part, the Marines were bemused at how fresh and clean the soldiers looked. Sergeant Peto, who had come frighteningly close to death at both the Point and the Umurbrogol, watched as a burly Army captain led his troops into the line. When the captain saw how few Marines were left, “his face turned pale and he reminded me of a man that was told he was about to be shot and there was a good possibility that that is exactly what happened to him.” A moment later, an awestruck Army tank crewman offered Peto some tomato juice. He drank some juice, but it no sooner hit his stomach than he vomited it up. “That pretty much tells the story of Peleliu.” Amid the solemnity, the Marines kept their sense of humor. In one position, a sergeant, clearly thrilled to see the soldiers, smiled and quipped: “Here comes the Army, with the USO girls in tow.”
The subtle differences between the two ground combat services were evident. Colonel Robert Dark, commander of the 321st, was shocked to find Colonel Puller so close to the front lines. When a confused Dark asked Puller several times for the location of his CP, an exasperated Puller spat and said, with emphasis: “Right here!” Dark ordered his adjutant to place his own CP one thousand yards to the rear. The story spread like wildfire among the Marines, who generally thought of themselves as tougher and truer warriors than soldiers. The soldiers believed Marines were overaggressive, to the point of mindlessness (hence the term “jarhead”). Lieutenant George Pasula, a young platoon leader in G Company, 321st, was stunned to find that the Marine company his unit relieved only had twenty-eight survivors. “Even I, as a young 2LT, began to wonder about the head-on attacks by Puller’s 1st Marines.” Pasula thought it made more sense to envelop the ridges and then use overwhelming firepower against the Japanese. This was the Army way.28
The 321st took its place in the line, on the western side of the Umurbrogol, alongside the 7th Marines. The two regiments repeatedly attacked the enemy-held ridges and caves. Most of the soldiers had already experienced combat on Angaur, but they were shocked by the bloodbath in which they now found themselves immersed. Like their Marine friends, they struggled just to keep their footing. They also got shot to pieces as they tried to assault caves and ridges. Lieutenant Pasula’s platoon was working its way over a coral ridge, trying to push TNT pole charges into a cave opening. As several men were maneuvering the poles over the ridge, edging the charges in the direction of the cave, the lieutenant was talking on the radio with his superior officer. “I heard and felt a commotion, and looking up the ridge, I saw [a] Jap grenade just as it exploded.” The grenade destroyed his rifle and his radio. “Blood was spurting from my right cheek.” He caught fragments in his face, his shoulder, and his arm, but somehow the shrapnel did not break any bones. His radioman helped him across an open area, dodging sniper fire, to an aid station.
A couple hundred yards to the right, Captain Pierce Irby’s L Company was trying to scale “a cliff of solid coral rock approximately 40 feet in height. The men had to pick their way very carefully up through the rocks. Often it was necessary for one man to climb to a place where he could get a foot hold and pull other men up to him with his rifle or foot. The progress was measured in inches.” Not only were the rock-climbing soldiers in a terribly vulnerable position; they were really at the mercy of their enemies. Before the soldiers could get their footing, a shower of grenades exploded among them. Everyone hit the ground and tried to find someone, or something, to shoot at. Enemy machine-gun fire swept up and down the ranks of prone Americans. Men could hear the distinctive snapping sound of bullets ricocheting off rocks. Every so often, the bullets struck flesh and bones. It sounded like a baseball bat striking a watermelon. “We just lay flat on the ground, and prayed that we survived the exchange,” one soldier recalled. It was hard to make any headway under such circumstances.29
As the Marines had feared, a few of the soldiers were not up to the formidable task of assaulting the Umurbrogol. In one instance, Captain Thomas B. Jones, the commander of K Company, got orders from his battalion commander to take a key knoll. If the Americans did not take it, then the whole battalion, and the neighboring Marines, would come under suffocating enemy fire, and perhaps find themselves exposed to a Japanese counterattack. Jones’s company had already lost many of its people in a direct assault on a pillbox at Angaur. He was in no mood for another such attack, so he refused the order on the grounds that attacking the knoll would be suicidal. The battalion commander relieved him. Then the only other surviving officer in K Company refused to take command of the company from Jones and carry out the order. He too was relieved.
Captain Irby was forced to transfer his 3rd Platoon leader to command K Company. “Some of the men were nearby and heard the statements made by their company officers,” Irby wrote. “It was apparent that their morale had been greatly affected.” The attack went nowhere. In the recollection of one Marine officer, the soldiers “moved forward along the ridge a few yards until they encountered the first enemy positions, then gave it all up as a bad idea.” Marines from I Company, 7th Marines, ended up taking the knoll, but it cost them sixteen casualties, including the death of their company commander. Understandably, they were deeply angry over the incident, and the story spread quickly among the proud Marines, especially because the 7th was nearing total exhaustion after fighting for so long on the ridges. The problems with K Company seemed to confirm the opinion of so many Marines that the Army just could not fight like the Corps. When word of it reached General Rupertus, he smugly blurted: “There’s the Wildcat Division of pussycats. Now I can tell Geiger ‘I told you so. That’s why I didn’t want the Army involved in this in the first place.’ ” As if the situation would have been better without the presence of fresh reinforcements! Needless to say, Rupertus’s statement revealed much about his pettiness and his myopic view of the battle. There is no record of him ever repeating his “I told you so” tirade to Geiger.
Marine frustration with K Company, 321st, was understandable, but blown out of proportion. The vast majority of the soldiers were fighting hard, doing their best, bleeding and dying alongside their Marine countrymen. As September turned to October, and the battle evolved into little more than a brutal struggle for each and every knobby ridge and fortified cave of the Umurbrogol, a distinct respect grew between the soldiers and Marines who were doing the real fighting, risking their lives in the daily crapshoot of combat.
By now, the 5th Marines had taken Ngesebus, a nearby
island, and had secured the northern part of Peleliu. Battered though they were, they relieved the decimated 7th Marines and went into the line with the 321st at the Umurbrogol. All that remained in Japanese hands was the isolated inner ring of the Umurbrogol, a nine-hundred-yard-long, four-hundred-yard-wide pocket of ridges and caves. “We had everything . . . that was ever used by anybody,” General Smith later said. “We had the beaches, we had the airfield, we were using everything that we ever wanted to use. All we didn’t have was this darned pocket.” With the airfield and the beaches secure from Japanese fire, and some of the high ground in American hands, there probably was not much point in trying to take the rest of the pocket. Better to let the isolated Japanese starve or die of thirst in their caves. But in World War II, American commanders generally liked to destroy all enemy pockets of resistance, especially in the Pacific, where the Japanese normally fought to the death rather than surrender. Wise or not—and it probably was not all that smart—this was the mind-set.30
So the bitter struggle for this strategically worthless coral mush continued, just as Colonel Nakagawa had foreseen. Day after day, groups of ragged American infantrymen attacked. To them, every jagged ridge and every looming cave looked alike, but they had nonetheless coined nicknames for some of the more prominent terrain features—the China Wall, the Five Sisters, the Five Brothers, Old Baldy, Hill 140, the Wildcat Bowl, and, of course, Walt Ridge. The 321st initiated an extensive sandbag-filling operation for their frontline soldiers. Carrying parties hauled the bags up to the Umurbrogol and plopped them down in rifle company areas on the front lines. Infantry soldiers then attacked by crawling forward, pushing the bags in front of themselves, affording some level of cover from the withering enemy fire.
The Americans also had plenty of fire support. Artillery constantly pounded the pocket. Sometimes bulldozers sealed caves, entombing the Japanese within. Marine F-4U Corsair fighter planes, operating from the airstrip, flew the shortest close air support missions of the war. They would take off, climb a few hundred feet, drop their bombs or napalm on suspected Japanese positions, turn around, land, and then do it again. Each flight lasted about two minutes. Some pilots did not even bother to raise their landing gear after they took off. In order to avoid friendly fire problems, “every member of the squadron was briefed in every detail of the terrain and friendly troop locations,” one officer later wrote. “When the bombing run began, the frontline infantry units set off colored hand grenades to mark their lines.” In many cases, infantry and air commanders flew joint reconnaissance missions together over the pocket.
Excellent and well coordinated though the air support clearly was, it could not destroy the Japanese caves. The only way to do that was through head-on assaults with direct fire support. Artillerymen from the 11th Marines, through superhuman effort, hauled their pieces to the high ground, within sight of the enemy. Sometimes they had to break their guns down into pieces, put them on pulleys, hoist them up the hills, and then reassemble them. They did this with 75-, 105-, and 155-millimeter guns. “To be effective it was often necessary to place the pieces within sniper range of the enemy,” General Smith wrote. One battery set up three 105-millimeter guns and fired armor-piercing shells and white phosphorous rounds into caves at a range of only five hundred yards. The job of hauling ammunition up to the guns was arduous. “A 75 round isn’t too heavy,” Corporal William Burnett wrote, “but after you climb 300’ [feet] with them and then have to run across 25’ of open space with snipers you are pooped out.” Because the infantry ranks were so depleted, many of the artillerymen stayed on the front lines, serving as de facto infantry.31
The most effective support came from tanks (both Marine and Army) and specially modified flamethrowing LVTs. Although the rough terrain limited the mobility of these vehicles, they worked closely with the infantry wherever possible. The LVTs crawled along, protected by the infantrymen. When the LVT crew, or a rifleman, spotted a target, the LVT belched a jet of flame in that direction. They were ideal for shooting flames into cave mouths and crevasses. “It is something to see,” one soldier recalled. “They give it a squirt and the trees and brush disappear. And one sight I still can’t get rid of is when a Jap appeared and the flamethrower hit him and you would see this big orange flame running and screaming and then no noise but still burning. It’s terrible!”
The tanks would maneuver in front of the caves and blast them point-blank, sometimes even within a few yards of the cave openings. “Theirs was the mission of providing direct fire . . . to be used as close artillery,” a tanker later wrote. One Marine recalled seeing a tank as it “rolled up to the mouth of a cave. The snout of its artillery piece swung into the hole. The piece fired shot after shot,” dismembering the Japanese defenders inside. “Three . . . or four . . . rounds of HE [high explosive] bursting inside—topped off by a round or two of WP [white phosphorous] was standard tank treatment—and most effective indeed,” a tank commander wrote.
In nearly every instance, the infantry stayed close to the tanks to protect them from assaults by extraordinarily brave Japanese soldiers wielding mines, torpedoes, and grenades. Private First Class John Huber of K Company, 5th Marine Regiment, was covering a tank when a Japanese machine gun opened up. He took cover next to the tank. “When the tanker spotted the Jap gun, it fired the 75 gun at it, and I took the muzzle blast of four rounds.” It took him a few hours to get his hearing back, but the tank meanwhile had blown the enemy machine gunners into jagged pieces. The only trouble with the LVTs and tanks was that there were not enough of them. Because of maintenance issues, and the forbidding terrain, only a couple dozen were in operation at any given time, and that was always during the daytime.
So usually the attacks were carried out by dwindling groups of frightened, desperately weary infantrymen, carrying rifles, submachine guns, flamethrowers, and satchel demolition charges. Often, intense enemy fire killed and wounded many Americans, pinning assault elements down before they could get near the caves. Other times, the infantry was able to edge up against the openings. “We went from cave to cave, with small arms fire and grenades, to cover the men with the flamethrowers and satchel charges that would seal the caves,” Private First Class Huber recalled. In an attempt to escape the flames and TNT, some of the Japanese ran from the caves, straight into riflemen like Huber, who shot them at close range. “As the Japs came running out on fire, we would have a field day finishing them off.”
Sometimes, as the Americans cautiously advanced, they could hear the hidden Japanese talking or even smell their cooking. Private First Class Charlie Burchett and a group of Marines came upon one such cave and then “took a whole case of TNT and dropped it down with a rope. It quieted them down.” After blasting another cave, Burchett and his buddies counted seventy-five dead Japanese. Like many of the caves, this one was part of an elaborate tunnel system that the Japanese had burrowed beneath the sharp rocks of the Umurbrogol. In the tunnels they stored food, ammunition, sake, and clothing.32
At night, some of the Japanese emerged from their caves. Some were looking for water, but most were intent on crawling into the American lines to kill a Marine or a soldier. Many companies strung barbed wire in front of their positions, but that was no guarantee of safety. By the glimpsing half-light of flares, the Americans fought off sleep (not to mention fear), and stared intently into the night, trying to spot them. “Their ability to creep in silently over rough rocks strewn with pulverized vegetation was incredible,” one Marine said. Sergeant Francis Heatley, a machine gunner in the 321st, vividly remembered the rustling sound of rosary beads sliding across the rifle butts of prayerful men around him. The nights seemed endless. “Utter emptiness created a hole in my soul, as though life no longer had any meaning.” His unit shot at anything that moved. The Marines tended to be more disciplined with their fire for fear of giving away their positions or hitting nearby friendly troops. When the Japanese did make it to the American positions, “they rushed in jabbering or babbling incoheren
t sounds, sometimes throwing a grenade, but always swinging a saber, bayonet, or knife,” Eugene Sledge wrote.
Everything about the Umurbrogol was nightmarish and crude. It was ugly, foul, and wasteful as only war can be. Dante Alighieri or Jonathan Edwards, in their wildest imaginings, could hardly have conceived of anything more hellish. Four-man stretcher teams labored mightily to move wounded men down the steep slopes to the safety of field hospitals. Japanese snipers tried to shoot the bearers and, too often, succeeded. On the slippery ridges, it was easy to drop the wounded man onto the sharp coral, adding to his misery. The heat continued unabated. Grenades and mortar shells had to be kept in the shade lest they explode from the intensity of the sun. The twin stenches of death and rot were draped, like a suffocating, sewage-corrupted blanket, over the entire pocket. “It is difficult to convey to anyone who has not experienced it the ghastly horror of having your sense of smell saturated constantly with the putrid odor of rotting human flesh day after day, night after night,” Sledge wrote. In such tropical heat, decomposition was quick. Dead bodies turned black and swelled up to twice their size. “Added to the awful smell of the dead of both sides was the repulsive odor of human excrement everywhere.” Rotting food, clothing, and vegetation only added to the hellish stink. Like so many others, Sledge felt as though “my lungs would never be cleansed of all those foul vapors.” Some of those foul vapors emanated from the corpses of Marines whom the Japanese had mutilated, severing their decomposed penises and shoving them into fly-filled mouths.
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