Hundreds of Marines had already shriveled and passed out from heat exhaustion and their bodies lay all about, “paralyzed in grotesque shapes.”20 The 5th Marines would need water if they hoped to carry out the attack. Just as the men in Sledge’s unit started putting on their gear, a supply detail came up with five-gallon water tanks. “Our hands shook, we were so eager to quench our thirst,” Sledge recalls. But the water looked like “thin brown paint” in his canteen cup, and when he first drank it he had to spit it out. It was full of rust and oil and it gave off a vile smell. A supply officer had transported this water to Peleliu in fifty-five-gallon drums that had previously been filled with diesel oil. The drums had supposedly been steam-cleaned but someone had botched the job. There was nothing anyone could do now; it was drink oily water or die. Some of the men doubled over and retched.
Four infantry battalions were ordered to cross the airfield at a trot, straight into the enemy’s strength. “We moved rapidly in the open, amid craters and coral rubble, through ever increasing enemy fire,” Sledge remembers. “The shells screeched and whistled, exploding all around us.
“I clenched my teeth, squeezed my carbine stock, and recited over and over to myself, ‘The Lord is my shepherd …’
“The ground seemed to sway back and forth under the concussions…. Chunks of blasted coral stung my face and hands while steel fragments spattered down on the hard rock like hail on a city street. Everywhere shells flashed like giant firecrackers.
“Through the haze I saw Marines stumble and pitch forward as they got hit…. I gritted my teeth and braced myself in anticipation of the shock of being struck down at any moment. It seemed impossible that any of us could make it across.”
When Sledge made it to the northeastern side of the field, and found cover in some low bushes, he was “shaking like a leaf. I looked at one of the Guadalcanal veterans and he was shaking as bad as I was.” Sledge almost laughed with relief.
Some men bled to death on the fire-swept airfield; there was no way anybody could get to them in time. The Marines were told to keep moving and not to stop and help the wounded. But an African American Marine in one of the ammunition companies picked up a white Marine from Mississippi and carried him all the way to the aid station.
That night Sledge’s unit moved through the mangrove swamps near the airfield and dug in for the night. It was impossible to get even five consecutive minutes of sleep because of the intensity of the enemy infiltration. “We never used the night,” said Marine Benis Frank. “I can only think of two night operations, one on Iwo Jima and one on Okinawa, that were successful. We owned the daytime for the most part, but the Japanese owned the night.”21
By now it was clear to almost every Marine on the island that the Japanese were not fighting as they had on Saipan and Tarawa, where they had massed their strength on the beachhead and tried to stop the Marines at the waterline. That tactic had failed everywhere. Colonel Nakagawa had contested the landing with one full battalion, inflicting over 1,100 casualties on D-Day, but he had placed most of his troops in caves in the limestone ridges north of the airfield and waited for the Americans to come to him. Beginning with Peleliu, the Japanese would rely on a preplanned defense-in-depth strategy, luring the Americans toward their strong points and unleashing hurricanes of fire from positions that neither naval nor air bombardment could reach. Japan could not win the war this way, but it could hope to make it so hideously costly that the American public would demand an end to the bloodshed without insisting on unconditional surrender.
Peleliu’s ungodly landscape was a perfect laboratory to test the new defense-in-depth tactics. Once the airfield was taken, the Marines had to secure it by going north into the Umurbrogol, a wild terrain that resembled a series of reefs that had reared up from the ocean floor, five parallel, razor-sharp ridges extending for two miles up the island. “The ruggedness of the terrain,” said Sledge, “was almost indescribable…. There were these sheer canyons, the sides at ninety-degree angles, and they would be firing at us from two and three mutually supporting caves. It had a surrealistic appearance because the contours were all at crazy angles, and there was no smooth surface to any ridge.”
Enemy terrain and tactics took their heaviest toll on Chesty Puller’s 1st Marine Regiment. Puller tried to bull his way through nearly impregnable enemy positions on Bloody Nose Ridge, suffering unsustainable casualties. He was a stubborn and fearless fighter, known to take long chances, but there was an almost manic quality to his aggressiveness on Peleliu, perhaps because he had just lost a brother, a fellow Marine, on Guam. He was supported by the equally unbending General Rupertus. When the overall commander of the operation, General Roy Geiger, offered to land an Army regiment being held in reserve to support Puller, Rupertus flatly refused. He distrusted the Army; the Marines would get the job done. To compound the problem, both Rupertus and Puller were hurt. Rupertus had broken an ankle in a training exercise and his injury prevented him from getting to the front to see how badly things were going. Puller aggravated a leg wound he suffered at Guadalcanal and had to be carried around on a stretcher.22
Major Ray Davis’s 1st Battalion lost 71 percent of its number, including all the officers in the rifle companies except one; and that man, Captain Everett Pope, had a hair-raising escape from death that won him a Medal of Honor. “We were finished as a fighting force,” recalls Davis, “and the survivors were numb.” Davis blames Rupertus and Puller, but the entire Peleliu campaign, he says, represented “a total failure of intelligence.”23
After taking the airport, Sledge’s regiment fought for a day or so in the hills next to the 1st Marines and heard their complaints, witnessed their morale sagging. “We had lost too many good men,” George Hunt writes, “how long could it keep up?”24
At this point in the battle, Sledge’s regimental commander, Colonel Harold “Bucky” Harris, flew over the Umurbrogol in a scout plane to see what the Marines were up against. He then went to Puller and Rupertus and told them they could never take the coral mountain by frontal assault because “the contours of the ridges were like Swiss cheese, full of caves, situated in mutually supporting positions.” He recommended that they pull back and move north, where the cave defense system was weaker. Attacking from north to south, using siege tactics, they could root out the Japanese, one position at a time, with artillery, tanks, and newly developed long-range flamethrowers mounted on armored vehicles. When Rupertus came close to accusing Harris of cowardice, saying he was using too much ammunition and not enough men, Harris shot back, “General, I’m lavish with my ammunition and stingy with my men’s lives.” At that moment, the tent flap opened and in came General Geiger, who looked directly at Harris and said, “That’s the most sensible thing I’ve ever heard. You can’t take positions with dead marines.”25
Geiger overruled Rupertus. On the ninth day of the battle a regiment of the Army’s 81st Division, the Wildcats, relieved the shot-up 1st Marines, who had taken more casualties than any Marine regiment in the war up to this point. Trying to force the impossible, and do the job entirely with Marines, Puller and Rupertus nearly destroyed one of the best regiments in the Corps.
“You the 1st Marines?” a correspondent asked as Puller’s leathernecks came off the line. “There ain’t no more 1st Marines,” came the reply from somewhere in the ranks.26
As the exhausted remnants of the 1st Marines walked off to a “safe” area near the sea, George Hunt watched some of his men find beds for themselves on the coral, while others carried their dead comrades to the beach, where “they laid them down respectfully in a straight row. There were no sheets to cover them.”27
INTO THE UMURBROGOL
Twenty days later Sledge’s regiment would be relieved, its ranks almost as decimated as those of the 1st Marines. This was after it went into the Umurbrogol to re inforce the 7th Marines. It was sent there after all the vital positions on the island had been taken: the airfield, the commanding ridge above it, and all of the island sou
th, east, and north of Umurbrogol Mountain, including the neighboring island of Ngesebus. There would be no more frontal assaults from the south. Instead, the Marines and the Wildcats would follow Harris’s more cautious plan. “We moved much faster, took more positions, and killed just scores of Japs because we could flush them out of the caves with direct fire from artillery, tanks, and flamethrowers,” recalls Sledge. Even so, the cave fighting in the Umurbrogol was primeval, a struggle between the hunters and the hunted, the Americans above ground and the Japanese below.
AMERICAN CORSAIR BOMBING JAPANESE POSITIONS IN THE UMURBROGOL, PELELIU, PALAU ISLANDS (USMC).
The landscape had been blasted free of vegetation and scarred white by a steady storm of phosphorus shells, the explosions covering the Americans with coral dust. “When it would rain the dust, being lime, would harden, and we would move our arms and the pieces of coral would crack and fall off our dust-hardened dungarees.” says Sledge. They became a living part of that war-ruined terrain and stank almost as badly as it did. The heat and the fear made them sweat, and the smell of their bodies was nauseating even to themselves. Worse, it blended with the odor of their dead. “In the tropics, when men were killed in the morning they would begin to bloat and stink pretty badly by night,” Sledge recalled in a conversation long after the war.
WE WOULD COVER OUR DEAD WITH ponchos, from head to toe, and put them on stretchers behind the company area. But the dead Japs were lying all over the place in the ridges. There was no place to bury them in that coral. So they just bloated and rotted. Maggots tumbled out of their mouths and eyes, and big blowflies swarmed around the bodies. The flies would also get after our food and nothing scared them away…. You had to pick them off your K rations. Often we had to eat within two or three feet of a dead Jap, and he’d be pretty rotten. And the flies that were on the dead Jap would land on our canteen cups and sometimes fall into the coffee. We didn’t have a lot of coffee, so we just pulled the flies out and drank it.
There was another problem. Typically, when a man who was under fire had to defecate he used a grenade canister or ration can and threw it out of his foxhole, covering it up with dirt the next day. If you were not under fire you could go back a little way off the line and dig a small hole. But there was no soil in the limestone hills of Peleliu, so there was this terrible odor from feces. Most of us got severe diarrhea and that added to our sanitary problems. The odor was absolutely vile. You felt you would never get the stench of dead and rot and filth out of your nostrils. And at night the land crabs would come out and swarm over the dead Japs. Then shells would come in and blow big chunks of the rotting corpses all over the place.
Worse than the filth was the fatigue. “The fatigue a combat infantryman is exposed to is absolutely beyond description…. [After a couple of weeks], we were liter ally shuffling around like zombies.”
They began to weaken mentally as well. The entire time Sledge was on Peleliu he did not recall a single second when there was not a gun firing. There was no front line; the entire island was the front. That wore men down and made them feel helpless and vulnerable. “When buddies were killed or wounded, many of us just simply cried.”
The men soon realized they had been sent into a death trap. In most Storm Landings—with the prominent exception of Tarawa—the Marines usually outnumbered the enemy by about three to one. But on Peleliu there were 9,000 Marines fighting nearly 11,000 Japanese. As casualties mounted, cooks, bakers, drivers, engineers, and supply men, including some African-Americans from the ammunition and supply companies, were given rifles and thrown into the fight. And every man in a rifle company, even the company commander, had to serve as a stretcher-bearer at one time or another. This was dangerous duty. “The Japs,” says Sledge, “absolutely opened up on stretcher-bearers with everything they had. You cannot imagine the cold hatred we had of people who shot at us as we were taking out our wounded and were unable to fire back. Historians say we hated the Japs because we were racists. Racism had nothing to do with it. It was the way they fought.”
1ST MARINES IN THE UMURBROGOL, PELELIU (USMC).
Every day, soldiers and Marines witnessed signs of the unyielding ferocity of the enemy. Late in the fight, Sledge spotted the bodies of three dead Marines in a shell hole. They were hadly decomposed, but this was to be expected in the tropics. As he looked closer, however, he was stricken with horror and revulsion—and rage such as he had never felt before. One man was decapitated. His head and severed hands rested on his chest and his penis had been stuffed into his mouth. The second man had been gruesomely mutilated in the same way. The third Marine looked like he had been chopped up like a steer in the Chicago stockyards.
This was “savagery beyond necessity,” Sledge wrote later, and it changed the way he fought. He began killing without regret or remorse, routinely shooting dead and wounded enemy soldiers after seizing a position “to make sure they were dead. Survival was hard enough in the infantry without taking chances being humane to men who fought so savagely.”
George Hunt put this differently. “If it hadn’t been for [the Japanese] we would never have been on this goddam island in the middle of no place with all these rocks, the blasted heat and no water or chow…. We hated them, and we would kill them and keep killing them or we would be killed.”28
In the Umurbrogol, there was probably more Japanese infiltration than anywhere else in the Pacific. The enemy slept in the caves all day and slipped out at night, singly or in twos and threes. The Americans, waiting in their shallow foxholes, had a password, one the Japanese could not pronounce clearly. If a garbled reply came back, the fight was on. The infiltrators would toss grenades and charge, screaming and swinging a saber or a freshly sharpened bayonet. “The sounds of the fights in the foxholes were ungodly,” Sledge recalls. “Grunts and curses and screams. The fighting was savage, Neanderthal … Its purpose was to inflict casualties and to wear us down, which it did.” As Benis Frank remarked: “It was good so many of us were so young. Only a young man could fight all day and all night.”29
Sometimes the Japanese infiltrated in order to kill Americans wounded by shellfire earlier in the day. Sledge lost friends in these raids, which he considered yet another loathsome form of warfare, one that provoked an equal savagery in some of his comrades. Marines and Army infantry stripped Japanese corpses, looking for souvenirs—sabers, pistols, flags, hara-kiri knives, even gold teeth, which they cut out with their knives, sometimes before the wounded victim was dead. “Time had no meaning; life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all,” Sledge wrote in his memoirs. “We lived in an environment totally incomprehensible to the men behind the lines—service troops and civilians.”
In a break in the fighting, Sledge saw a dead Japanese soldier squatting on the ground in front of his machine gun. The top of his head had been blown off, cleanly severed as if a power saw had done the job. “I noticed this buddy of mine just flippin’ chunks of coral into the skull…. It rained all that night and the rain collected inside his skull…. Each time [my buddy’s] pitch was true, I heard a little splash of rainwater in the ghastly receptacle…. There was nothing malicious in his action. This was just a mild-mannered kid who was now a twentieth century savage….
“We all had become hardened. We were out there, human beings, the most highly developed form of life on earth, fighting like wild animals.”
The fighting stopped for Sledge on October 30, 1944, when his broken regiment was sent back to Pavuvu after suffering 64 percent casualties. The Army’s Wildcats were left to finish the job, and it would take them another six hard weeks. On the night of November 24, Colonel Nakagawa, having carried out his instructions to bleed the Americans-killing or wounding 9,615 soldiers and Marines—burned his colors and shot himself in a cave in the shell-blasted Umurbrogol. Only a handful of his men were still alive. They melted into the coral ridges and did not surface and surrender until a year and
a half after the war. To take Peleliu and two nearby islands, Angaur and Ngesebus, cost one American casualty and 1,589 rounds of ammunition for each Japanese defender killed.
The image that best captures the agony of Peleliu is Tom Lea’s Two-Thousand-Yard Stare. It is the portrait of a young Marine that Lea saw in a sick bay he passed by on his way off the island. “I noticed a tattered marine standing quietly by a corps-man, staring stiffly at nothing. His mind had crumbled in battle, his jaw hung, and his eyes were like two black empty holes in his head.”30 When Lea painted him, he put him against the background of Bloody Nose Ridge. Lea’s notes tell the man’s story: “Last evening he came down out of the hills. Told to get some sleep, he found a shell crater and slumped into it. He’s awake now. First light has given his gray face eerie color. He left the States 31 months ago. He was wounded in his first campaign. He has had tropical diseases. There is no food or water in the hills, except what you carry. He half-sleeps at night and gouges Japs out of holes all day. Two thirds of his company has been killed or wounded but he is still standing. So he will return to attack this morning. How much can a human being endure?”31
The Japanese defense of Peleliu did nothing to halt the American advance on the home islands, nothing to weaken American resolve to fight to the finish. Neither did taking Peleliu put America closer to winning the war. Peleliu received almost no news coverage while it was being fought and today it is a forgotten battle. All attention was on MacArthur’s invasion of the Philippines and Eisenhower’s drive from the tangled country of Normandy, where the Allied armies broke through tremendous German resistance in midsummer, to the borders of Germany, where they stalled that autumn in front of the Siegfried Line, the menacing belt of fortifications at the western gates of the Nazi fatherland. But Peleliu, as Sledge says, must not be forgotten. One of the most murderously fought battles in all of history, it is a lasting reminder of the debasing consequences of unrestrained war, fighting without letup or conscience.
D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC Page 21
