D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  The high point of Sledge’s stay on Pavuvu was a visit by Bob Hope. “While we were preparing for Peleliu, which incidentally we weren’t told about until the day before we shipped out, Bob Hope was over in [the nearby island of] Banika entertaining the troops in the naval hospital. When he heard the 1st Marine Division was on Pavuvu he flew over with his entertainment group in a Piper Cub and put on a wonderful show … That was the last real laugh a lot of my buddies had … in their short lives.”

  The 1st Marine Division shipped out for Peleliu in the last week of August. Company K boarded a large LST, a shallow-draft ship as big as a light cruiser, with a load of LVTs (also known as amtracs or Alligators) in its cavernous belly. It would discharge these Alligators in the waters off Peleliu, twenty men to a vehicle, from its massive bow doors, which opened like a clam. The men in the assault companies—the Marines who would hit the beach first—bunked in the rough-riding, flat-bottomed LSTs with the machines that would carry them ashore. The rest of the division rode in more comfortable troopships.

  The trip to Peleliu—2,100 miles away—took three weeks in the excruciatingly slow LSTs. It was insufferably hot below deck, but the seas were smooth all the way and the men sat on the deck sunning themselves, reading, playing poker, or writing mother. The enlisted men knew nothing about the island with the “nice sounding name, Pel’ e loo” other than that it had a big airfield that Douglas MacArthur wanted knocked out to protect his flank when he returned to the Philippines. The Old Breed’s coldly aloof commander, Major General William Rupertus, told them this would be a “rough but fast” mission, taking only three, maybe four days. Which meant, a skeptical sergeant mused, “we’ll have to kill every little yellow bastard there.”4

  After chow on the evening of the landing, Sledge and a friend leaned on the rail of the slow-rocking ship and talked about what they planned to do after the war, trying their mightiest to appear unconcerned about the next morning. “As the sun disappeared below the horizon and its glare no longer reflected off a glassy sea, I thought of how beautiful the sunsets always were in the Pacific. They were even more beautiful than over Mobile Bay. Suddenly a thought hit me like a thunderbolt. Would I live to see the sunset tomorrow? My knees nearly buckled as panic swept over me. I squeezed the railing and tried to appear interested in our conversation.”

  Sledge excused himself and went below to check his combat pack. Everything was in order. Inside was “a folded poncho, one pair of socks, a couple of boxes of K rations, salt tablets, extra carbine ammo (twenty rounds), two hand grenades, a fountain pen, a small bottle of ink, writing paper in a waterproof wrapper, a toothbrush, a small tube of toothpaste, some photos of my folks along with some letters (in a waterproof wrapper), and a dungaree cap.”

  His other equipment and clothing included a carbine, an entrenching tool, a steel helmet, a green dungaree jacket and pants, ankle-high “boondockers,” light canvas leggings, two canteens, a compass, two clips of ammunition, the regulation Ka-Bar knife in a leather sheath, a larger, meat-cleaver-style knife his father had sent him, and, for good luck, a bronze Marine emblem fastened to one collar.

  When his head hit the pillow that night, he thought of home and wondered if he would die tomorrow. “I concluded that it was impossible for me to be killed, because God loved me.” His heart racing, he fell asleep whispering the Lord’s Prayer.

  THE LANDING

  In the thin light of early morning, he had a breakfast of steak and eggs and headed with his company for the tank deck of the LST. The toilets were so crowded that some men didn’t have the chance to empty their bowels. To boost morale, gung ho Marines were putting on camouflage paint—“war paint,” they called it. “Puts them in the mood,” an officer told K Company’s commander, George P. Hunt, a former newspaperman who would write a riveting account of his part of the upcoming battle, Coral Comes High.

  Hunt was with Chesty Puller’s 1st Regiment, and his company had been given the toughest assignment on D-Day. They were to storm the Point, a Japanese fortification that had been built into the soft coral rock of a small peninsula that jutted out into the sea on the far left of the landing area. If that position was not taken, the enemy would have a free field of fire down the entire length of the beach, and the landing would likely be a massacre.

  On the tank deck, the Alligators’ engines were rumbling, filling the hold with stomach-turning diesel exhaust, despite the huge fans whirling overhead. When the signal was given, the big bow doors separated and Sledge’s amphibious tractor, following others, rumbled down the sloping ramp and settled into the sea “like a big duck.” Just ahead, in the rolling blue-green water, was the Alligator carrying George Hunt. A veteran of Guadalcanal and New Britain, Hunt was scared because he knew what to expect. A greenhorn. Sledge was scared because he didn’t know what to expect.

  As the Marines passed the patrol boats and rocket ships, the sailors shook their fists and yelled, “Go get ’em, you Marines!” To settle their nerves, the men in one of Hunt’s landing boats began singing “Give My Regards to Broadway.” “Just before we hit the beach we were all singing it at the top of our lungs,” a Marine Sergeant said later. “It sure made us feel good.”5

  The men had been ordered to keep their heads down, but Sledge peeked over the high gunwale “and saw several amtracs get hit dead on by screaming shells and watched in horror as the bodies of Marines were blown into the air.” Those men that were still alive began walking in to shore arid were cut down by machine gun fire. “The noise from the battleships and the Corsairs [Navy fighters] and the divebombers was so incredible it was indescribable. You couldn’t even yell to the man right next to you and have him hear you. As we moved into position we could see and feel the power of the sixteen inch salvos fired from the battlewagons right over our heads. Every time they exploded, trees and debris were hurled high into the air. It wasn’t hot yet and the sky was blue and the sun was out and I was scared to death, and so was everybody else. The main thing that concerned me was I was afraid I was going to wet my pants.

  “I looked at the island and all I could see was a sheet of flame backed by a huge black wall of smoke … as though the island was on fire. And I thought, my God, none of us will ever get out of that place.”

  Back on the troopships, the men lined the rails and shouted, “Burn! Burn!” as tiny Peleliu, only six miles long and two miles wide, vanished in flame and smoke and monstrous clouds of coral dust. “We’ll be off here by tomorrow,” one Marine yelled.6

  It was the same reaction as at Tarawa. Hardly a Marine could believe there was an enemy soldier alive after such a shelling. But the Japanese were dug in better than they had been at either Tarawa or Saipan. In a cave built deep in one of the island’s coral ridges, a Japanese defender wrote in his diary, “We will defend Peleliu! We are imbued with the firm conviction that even though we may die, we will never let the airfield fall into enemy hands. Our morale is sky high.”7 But so was the Marines’. “Over the gunwale of a craft abreast of us I saw a marine, his face painted for the jungle, his eyes set for the beach, his mouth set for murder, his big hands quiet now in the last moments before the tough tendons drew up to kill,” wrote Tom Lea, Life’s leading war artist in the Pacific.8

  For more than two months, Lea had lived aboard the carrier Hornet, chronicling that ship’s role in operations in the South Pacific. This was his first battle experience with the Marines. In their combat packs, he and two other correspondents each had a can of beer. They agreed to have their own little celebration on the beach if they made it there.

  There were 10,500 Japanese soldiers and sailors on the island, about 6,000 of them members of the Kwantung Army, veterans of brutal fighting in Manchuria. Their commander, Colonel Kunio Nakagawa, had brought in mining and tunneling engineers to militarize the natural coral caves of Peleliu, which were built into a central spine of hills that ran up the northern half of the island. Sliding steel doors covered the entrances to the caves with the biggest guns, and many of
the interlocking caves had electricity, ventilation systems, telephone and radio communications, and hidden exits. The largest of them held a thousand men and a number of the caves were five and six stories deep. The caves were ideally located for defense, in a 300-foot-high mountain of jagged coral, with sheer cliffs, overlooking the flat area at the center of the island, just off the beach, where the airfield was located. It was “a series of crags,” Private Russell Davis described it, “ripped bare of all standing vegetation, peeled down to the rotted coral, rolling in smoke, crackling with heat and … stained and black, like bad teeth.”9 The natives called this menacing coral mass the Umurbrogol. The Americans would call it Bloody Nose Ridge. Taking it, would cost more American lives than were lost in the assault on Omaha Beach.*

  Aerial intelligence had failed to sight this high ground, for it was covered at the time with dense tropical growth. But the tremendous naval fire had blasted off the vegetation, exposing the coral ridges that began just north of the airport. There in the caves, “with plugs in their ears and hate in their hearts, they waited,” Lea wrote. “Through terrifying bombing and shelling they waited for the marines to start across the 675-yard reef to the beach…. Then they opened up.”10

  As Sledge’s landing craft approached the beach, it hit a coral shelf and the engine stalled. Shells fell all around it, creating towering water geysers, and machine gun bullets pelted the steel sides of the Alligator. “When the first shell came over, I knew my place was back home with mother.”

  The Alligator began running again, and as the Marines came up on the sand, the lieutenant pulled out a bottle of whiskey and shouted, “This is it boys.”

  “Just like they do in the movies! It seemed unreal.”

  Racing ashore a few yards, Sledge sought cover with members of his company. The Marines landed three regiments abreast, the 1st, 5th, and 7th Marines. Most of Puller’s 1st Marines, on the left flank, attacked the lower hills of Bloody Nose Ridge and were stopped cold, with heavy casualties. Hunt’s K Company, meanwhile, went straight for the Point and took it after a vicious firefight. But holding it would be a lot harder than taking it. Sledge’s 5th Marines landed in the center and headed inland through low scrub vegetation toward the airport. The 7th Marines landed on the far right. After knocking out entrenched enemy positions on the southern end of the island, they were to loop north and reinforce Puller.

  Tom Lea, with the 7th Marines, found it impossible to do any drawing or sketching on the beach. “My work there consisted of trying to keep from getting killed and trying to memorize what I saw and felt under fire. On the evening of D-plus-one I returned to a naval vessel offshore where I could record in my sketch book the burden of this memory.” At his home in El Paso, Texas, Lea transformed his hastily executed pencil sketches into searing color portraits of men at war, which were reproduced in the pages of Life.

  AFRICAN-AMERICAN SUPPLY COMPANY PINNED DOWN ON THE REACH AT PELELIU (USMC).

  Lea came across the reef on a Higgins boat. The reef was “barricaded with concrete posts and railroad-track ties, all heavily entwined with barbed wire. There were necklaces of underwater mines around every possible landing point.” And the Japanese had “planted inverted 500-lb, aerial bombs and naval torpedoes with special fuses as mines and booby traps. Minefields stretched from the water to 50 yards inland in a pattern which insured explosives every 20 feet.”11 When his boat ground to a stop on the rugged coral, Lea splashed through the shallow surf and fell flat on his face, lying there wet and terrified as he watched a mortar tear a Marine to pieces, his head and one leg sailing into the air.12

  Lea fell into a shell hole as another mortar came rocketing down on him. “Lying there … I saw a wounded man near me, staggering in the direction of LVTs. His face was half bloody pulp and the mangled shreds of what was left of an arm hung down like a stick, as he bent over in his stumbling, shock-crazy walk. The half of his face that was still human had the most terrifying look of abject patience I have ever seen. He fell behind me, in a red puddle on the white sand.”13 That shattered Marine became the subject of Lea’s famous painting The Price. It was different from anything Lea had done before. Most of his work up to Peleliu had a sharp documentary quality, with almost no tension or bloodshed. The Price is so gory, so brutally grotesque, it makes you want to turn away. Peleliu changed Tom Lea. The Price “is a monument,” wrote the novelist James Jones, “to the blood and death that all of us, even those who have been there, prefer not to see or think about when we are away from it.”14

  Lea followed the 7th Marines into the burned and mangled jungle just inland from the beach, where he found cover with other Marines in a long trench. There, he and his two friends punched holes with their knives in their three beer cans and drank a toast to the Marines on Peleliu. “The beer was hot, foamy and wonderful.”

  It was just before noon and the sun had burned through the overcast of the early morning. Throughout the battle, temperatures would hover around 100 degrees, reaching 115 degrees on some days, and water was in short supply in the early part of the invasion. “Sweat ran in streams from under our helmets which, without cloth covers, were burning to the touch. Our dungarees, wet with sweat, stuck to our legs and backs. The sand under our clothes scratched like sandpaper,” Lea wrote.15

  Just behind the trench, in a large bomb crater surrounded by splintered trees, an improvised aid station had been set up. No hospital tent had been erected. That would have invited enemy fire. In the center of the crater a doctor was performing surgery, while corpsmen administered to the walking wounded. “The padre stood by with two canteens and a Bible, helping…. He looked very lonely,” Lea wrote, “very close to God, as he bent over the shattered men so far from home. Corpsmen put a poncho, a shirt, a rag, anything handy, over the grey faces of the dead and carried them to a line on the beach, under a tarpaulin, to await the digging of graves.”

  Toward evening, the men near the trench started to dig in for the night. Their entrenching tools were useless against the bone-hard coral. All they could do was find a hole or a slight depression and pile up stories and debris around it for cover. As they worked, they could be heard muttering. “It’s the ferking night time I don’t like, when them little ferkers come sneakin’ into your lap.”16 When they finished, they cleaned their rifles and sharpened their bayonets.

  Up the beach, to the left, Sledge’s 5th Marines had moved in close to the airstrip, where they repelled a tank attack with bazookas, mortars, and their own hard-punching Sherman tanks, annihilating thirteen small, thin-skinned tanks and a company of infantry that moved across the airfield behind them. This was a carefully coordinated counterattack, not a banzai charge, the first indication the Marines had that the enemy might fight differently on Peleliu than they had at Tarawa or Saipan.

  Still further up the beach, on the extreme left of the line, part of George Hunt’s decimated K Company was holding the fortresslike Point in primeval, hand-to-hand fighting, cut off from the rest of the Marines on Peleliu and encircled by the best of Nakagawa’s Manchuria veterans. They would be isolated and under incessant attack until they were relieved thirty hours later. Puller and the rest of the 1st Marines could not get to them. They were pinned down by shots of fire from the caves of the Umurbrogol, just to the north of them. (After the war, the Marine Corps built an exact model of the Point at its Quantiro training facility to teach new officers how to assault a “doomsday” defense.)

  That evening, as he fell into a “restless doze,” brushing aside the land crabs that had crawled on his face, George Hunt wondered, “Could I still find my way around New York?—almost unbelievable to see Fifth Avenue again, to buy a newspaper at Whelan’s, ride the Eighth Avenue subway and the Staten Island Ferry … and feel the stampeding, pulsating, brawling, uproarious spirit of the city—then I must have slept.”17

  Along the beach, as the sun went down, men ate candy bars, drank warm water from canteens, and had their last cigarette before the “smoking lamp” was extingui
shed. Then the island blackness closed in on them. Most expected it to cool off, but it didn’t; and they sat and fried in puddles of their own sweat. Waiting. When the counterattack came in Lea’s section of the beachhead, it began with a flurry of small arms fire and the high-pitched screams of enemy soldiers. Then came the mortar shells, smashing down all around them, the Marine howitzers answering every few seconds.18 Star shells lit up the sky and the whole beachhead came alive. But again, there was no suicidal assault, just unrelenting, nerve-rattling mortar fire.

  “To me, artillery was an invention of hell,” Sledge recalled. “After each shell I was wrung out, limp and exhausted.” As the fight for Peleliu wore on, and the shelling intensified, there were a number of times when Sledge thought he was going to go out of his mind.

  BLOODY NOSE RIDGE

  Toward first light, after the shelling stopped, Marines climbed out of their primitive shelters with big grins on their smoke-smeared faces, feeling they had beaten the odds, at least for a night. “We wiped the slime off our front teeth and lighted cigarettes,” wrote Lea. As they prepared themselves for battle, Lea and the Marines saw what the enemy had done that night. The nearest dead Japanese were about thirty yards in front of the trench. They had infiltrated the Marines’ lines, wearing the helmets of dead Marines, and sneaked into foxholes and “cut throats. They had been slashed or shot by Marines in hand to hand fighting in the darkness and there were bodies now in the morning light.”19

  At 8:00 A.M. Sledge’s 5th Marines prepared for an assault on the crushed gravel airfield. The Marines already held two sides of the field, but the Japanese had their heavy guns concentrated on the coral mound overlooking the north side of the field, just west of where Chesty Puller was trying to break through. Planes, tanks, and howitzers would spearhead the advance, followed by the foot soldiers; and the assault would be made under the full force of that other enemy on Peleliu—the blistering sun, heat waves, visible to the eye, rising up from the furnacelike coral.