Part 5

Abreast the northern end of Umurbrogol Pocket, where the sinkhole terrain blended into more regular ridgelines, the 321st captured parts of a key feature, Hill 100. Together with an adjacent hill just east of East Road, and designated Hill B, that position constituted the northern cap of the Umurbrogol Pocket. Seizing Hill B, and consolidating the partial hold on Hill 100 would occupy the 321st for the next three days.

As the regiment probed this eastern path across the north end of Umurbrogol, it also pushed patrols north up the West Road. In the vicinity of the buildings designated “Radio Station,” it reached a promising road junction. It was in fact the junction of West and East Roads. Colonel Robert F. Dark, commanding officer of RCT 321, determined to exploit that route, back south, to add a new direction to his attack upon Hill 100/Hill B. He organized a mobile task force heavy in armor and flamethrowers, designated Task Force Neal, named for Captain George C. Neal. He sent it circling southeast and south to join 2/321’s efforts at the Hill 100/Hill B scene. Below that battle, the 7th Marines continued pressure on the south and east fronts of the Pocket, but still attacking south to north.

As those efforts were underway, the 5th Marines was ordered into the developing campaign for northern Peleliu. Now relieved by the 1st Marines of its passive security mission on the eastern peninsula and its nearby three small islands, the 5th moved over the West Road to side-step the 321st action and seize northern Peleliu. Having received the division order at 1100, the 5th motored, marched, and waded (off the northeastern islets) to and along the West Road. By 1300, its 1st Battalion was passing through the 321st lines at Garekoru, moving to attack the radio station installations discovered by 321st patrols the previous afternoon.

In this area, the 5th Marines found flat ground, some open and some covered with palm trees. The ground was broken by the familiar limestone ridges, but with the critical tactical difference that most of the ridges stood alone. Attackers were not always exposed to flanking fires from mutually supporting defenses in adjacent and/or parallel ridges, as in the Umurbrogol. The Japanese had prepared the northern ridges for defense as thoroughly as they had done in the Umurbrogol, with extensive tunnels and concealed gun positions. However, the positions could be attacked individually with deliberate tank, flamethrower, and demolition tactics. Further, it developed that the defenders were not all trained infantrymen; many were from naval construction units.

On the U.S. side of the fight, a weighty command factor shaped the campaign into northern Peleliu. Colonel Harold D. “Bucky” Harris was determined to develop all available firepower fully before sending his infantry into assault. His aerial reconnaissance earlier had acquainted him with an understanding of the terrain. This knowledge strengthened his resolve to continue using all available firepower and employing deliberate tactics as he pursued his regiment’s assigned missions.

On the afternoon of 25 September, 1/5 seized the Radio Station complex, and the near portion of a hill commanding it. When 3/5 arrived, it was directed to seize the next high ground to the east of 1/5’s position. Then when 2/5 closed, it tied in to the right of 3/5’s position, and extended the regimental line back to the beach. This effectively broke contact with the 321st operations to the south, but fulfilled Colonel Harris’ plans to advance north as rapidly as possible, without over-extending his lines. By suddenly establishing this regimental “beachhead,” the 5th Marines had surprised the defenders with strong forces challenging the cave defenses, and in position to engage them fully on the next day.

The following day, 26 September, as the 321st launched its three-pronged attack against Hill 100/Hill B (northern cap of the Umurbrogol Pocket) and the 5th Marines attacked four hills running east to west across Peleliu, dubbed Hills 1, 2, 3, and Radar Hill in Hill Row. The row was perpendicular to and south of the last northern ridge, Amiangal Mountain. These hills and the ridge were defended by some 1,500 infantry, artillerymen, naval engineers, and the shot-up reinforcing infantry battalion which landed the night of 23 September, in caves and interconnected tunnels within the ridge and the hills. As the fight for Hill Row developed, Colonel Harris had his 2d Battalion side-step west of Hill Row and begin an attack on the Amiangal ridge to the north. Before dark, the 2d Battalion had taken the southern end and crest of the ridge, but was under severe fire from cave positions in the central and northwestern slopes of the ridge.

What was not yet appreciated was that the Marines were confronting the most comprehensive set of caves and tunnels on Peleliu. They were trying to invade the home (and defensive position) of a long-established naval construction unit most of whose members were better miners than infantrymen. As dark fell, the 2d Battalion cut itself loose from the units to its south, and formed a small battalion beachhead for the night.

The next morning, as the 2d Battalion, 5th Marines, tried to move along the route leading to the northern nose of Amiangal Ridge, it ran into a wide and deep antitank ditch which denied the attacking infantry the close tank support they had so successfully used earlier. At this point, the 5th Marines command asked, again, for point-blank artillery.

This time, division headquarters responded favorably. During the night of 27 September Major George V. Hanna’s 8th 155mm Gun Battalion moved one of its pieces into position in 2/5’s sector. The gun was about 180 yards from the face of Amiangal Ridge. The sight of that threat at dawn elicited enemy machine-gun fire which inflicted some casualties upon the artillerymen. This fire was quickly suppressed by Marine infantry fire, and then by the 155mm gun itself. Throughout the morning, the heavy 155mm fire played across the face of Amiangal Ridge, destroying or closing all identified caves on the west face, except for one. That latter was a tunnel mouth, down at ground level and on the northwestern base of the hill. It was too close to friendly lines to permit the gun to take it under fire. But by then, tanks had neutralized the tunnel mouth, and a tank bulldozer filled in a portion of the antitank ditch. This allowed 2/5’s tank-infantry teams to close on the tunnel mouth, to blast and bulldoze it closed, and to press on around the northern nose of Amiangal. Simultaneously, Marines swept over the slopes above the tunnel and “seized” the crest of the small mountain.

The term seizure is qualified, for although 2/5 held the outside of the hill, the stubborn Japanese defenders still held the inside. A maze of interconnected tunnels extended throughout the length and breadth of the Amiangal Ridge. From time to time the Japanese inside the mountain would blast open a previously closed cave or tunnel mouth, and sortie to challenge the Marines. Notwithstanding their surprise effect, these counterattacks provided a rare and welcome opportunity for the Marines actually to see their enemy in daylight. Such tactics were inconsistent with the general Japanese strategy for Peleliu, and somewhat shortened the fight for the northern end of the island.

As that fighting progressed, the 5th Marines assembled its 3d Battalion, supporting tanks, amphibian tractors, and the entire panoply of naval gunfire, and air support to launch a shore-to-shore operation to seize Ngesebus and Kongauru, 600 yards north of Peleliu, on 28 September.

There followed an operation which was “made to look easy” but which in fact involved a single, reinforced (but depleted) battalion against some 500 prepared and entrenched Japanese infantry. For some 35 hours, the battalion conducted the most cost-effective single battalion operation of the entire Peleliu campaign.

Much of the credit for such effectiveness was due to supporting aviation. VMF-114, under Major Robert F. “Cowboy” Stout, had landed on Peleliu’s air strip just three days prior to this landing, and immediately undertook its primary service mission: supporting Marine ground operations. The Ngesebus landing was the first in the Pacific War for which the entire air support of a landing was provided by Marine aviation. As the LVTs entered the water from Peleliu’s shore, the naval gunfire prematurely lifted to the alarm of the assault troops. Stout’s pilots immediately recognized the situation, resumed their strafing of Ngesebus until the LVTs were within 30 yards of the beach. They flew so low that the watching Marines “expected some of them to shoot each other down by their ricochets.” This action so kept the Japanese defenders down that the Marines in the leading waves were upon them before they recovered from the shock of the strafing planes.

The 3d Battalion got ashore with no casualties. Thus enabled to knock out all the Japanese in beach defenses immediately, it turned its attention to the cave positions in the ridges and blockhouses. The ridges here, as with those on northern Peleliu, stood individually, not as part of complex ridge systems. This denied their defenders opportunities for a mutual defense between cave positions. The attacking companies of 3/5 could use supporting tanks and concentrate all fire means upon each defensive system, without being taken under fire from their flanks and rear. By nightfall on 28 September, 3/5 had overrun most of the opposition. On 29 September, there was a day of mopping up before Ngesebus was declared secure at 1500. As planned, the island was turned over to 2/321, and 3/5 was moved to division reserve in the Ngardololok area.

Seizure of Ngesebus by one depleted infantry battalion gave a dramatic illustration of an enduring principle of war: the effective concentration of means. To support that battalion, General Rupertus concentrated the bulk of all his available firepower: a battleship; two cruisers; most of the divisional and corps artillery; virtually all of the division’s remaining armor; armored amphibian tractors; all troop-carrying amphibian tractors; and all Marine aviation on Peleliu.

Such concentrated support enabled the heavily depleted 3d Battalion, 5th Marines, to quickly seize Ngesebus, destroying 463 of Colonel Nakagawa’s battle-hardened and well-emplaced warriors in 36 hours, at a cost of 48 American casualties.

Other maneuver elements on Peleliu also were attacking during those 36 hours, but at an intensity adjusted to the limited support consequent upon General Rupertus’ all-out support of the day’s primary objective.

As 3/5 was clearing Ngesebus, the rest of the 5th Marines was fighting the Japanese still in northeast Peleliu. After capturing Akarakoro Point beyond Amiangal Mountain, 2/5 turned south. It swept through the defenses east of that mountain with demolitions and flamethrowers, then moved south toward Radar Hill, the eastern stronghold of Hill Row. That feature was under attack from the south and west by 1/5. After two days, the two battalions were in command of the scene, at least on the topside of the hills. Inside there still remained stubborn Japanese defenders who continued to resist the contest for Radar Hill, as did the defenders within Amiangal Mountain’s extensive tunnels. All could be silenced when the cave or tunnel mouths were blasted closed.

As these operations were in progress, the 321st at the north end of Umurbrogol completed seizing Hills 100 and Hill B, then cleared out the ridge (Kamilianlul Mountain) and road north from there to the area of 5th Marines operations. On 30 September the 321st relieved the 1st and 2d Battalions of the 5th Marines in northern Peleliu. That regiment reassembled in the Ngardololok area, before it became once more necessary to commit it to the Umurbrogol Pocket.

_The Umurbrogol Pocket: Peleliu’s Character Distilled_

In a very real sense, the Umurbrogol Pocket typified the worst features of the post D-Day campaign for Peleliu. It provided the scene of some of Peleliu’s worst and most costly fighting, and of some of the campaign’s best and worst tactical judgments. Its terrain was the most difficult and challenging on the island. Prelanding planning did not perceive the Pocket for what it was, a complex cave and ridge fortress suitable to a fanatic and suicidal defense. Plans for the seizure of the area treated the Pocket’s complex terrain as oversimplified, time-phased linear objectives to be seized concurrently with the flat terrain abutting it to the east and west.

The southern slopes (generally called Bloody Nose) dominated the landing beaches and airfield, over which the Pocket had to be approached. After those heights were conquered by the heroic and costly assaults of Puller’s 1st Marines (with Berger’s 2/7 attached), and after the division had set in artillery which was controlled by aerial observers overhead, the situation changed radically. The Pocket’s defenders thereafter retained only the capability to harass and delay the Americans, to annoy them with intermittent attacks by fire and with night-time raids. But after D plus 4, Umurbrogol’s defenders could no longer seriously threaten the division’s mission.

Nevertheless, after the critical enemy observation sites were seized, General Rupertus kept urging “momentum,” as though the seizure of the Pocket were as urgent as had been seizure of the commanding heights guarding it from the south. The stubborn character of the terrain, and its determined defenders, became entwined with the determined character of the general commanding the 1st Marine Division. This admixture was sorted out only by time and by the reluctant intercession of General Geiger. Most of the offensive effort into the Pocket between 21 and 29 September was directed from south to north, into the mouths or up onto the ridges of the twin box canyons which defined the Pocket. Infantry, supported by tanks, air, and flame-throwing LVTs could penetrate the low ground, but generally then found themselves surrounded on three sides. Japanese positions inside the ridges of the canyons, hidden from observation and protected in their caves, were quite capable of making the “captured” low ground untenable. Other attacks, aimed at seizing the heights of the eastern ridges, while initially successful, in that small infantry units could scramble up onto the bare ridge tops, thereafter came under fire from facing parallel ridges and caves. They were subject to strong night counterattacks from Japanese who left their caves under cover of darkness.

During 20 September, D plus 5, the 7th Marines had relieved the 1st Marines along the south and southwest fronts of the Pocket, and on the 21st the 3d and 1st Battalions resumed the attack into the Pocket, from southwest and south. These attacks achieved limited initial successes behind heavy fire support and smoke, but succeeded only in advancing to positions which grew untenable after the supporting fire and smoke was lifted. Assault troops had to be withdrawn under renewed fire support to approximately their jump-off positions. There was little to show for the day’s valiant efforts.

Attacks the next day (22 September) against the west shoulder of the Pocket, from the West Road, up the western box canyon (Wildcat Bowl) and toward Higashiyama (Hill 140), all liberally supported with firepower, again produced early advances, most of which had to be surrendered at day’s end, as all three attacking groups came under increasing fire from the Japanese hidden in mutually supporting cave positions. The 7th Marines had, unbeknown to it, reached within about 100 yards of Colonel Nakagawa’s final command cave position. However, many supporting ridges, and hilltops, would have to be reduced before a direct attack upon that cave could have any hope of success.

The fight for Umurbrogol Pocket had devolved into a siege situation, to be reduced only by siege tactics. But the 1st Marine Division’s commander continued to cling to his belief that there would be a “break-thru” against the enemy’s opposition. He insisted that continued battalion and regimental assaults would bring victory “very shortly.”

When the 321st’s probes eastward near the northern end of the Pocket brought them within grasp of sealing off that Pocket from the north, they deployed two battalions (2d and 3d) facing eastward to complete the encirclement.

This attack against Hill B, the stopper at the northern end of the Pocket absorbed the 321st Infantry’s full attention through 26 September, as the 5th Marines was fighting in northern Peleliu. The 7th Marines continued pressuring the Pocket from the south, and guarding it on the west. With the 321st victory on the 26th, that unit’s mission was expanded to press into the Pocket from the north. This it did, while simultaneously clearing out the sporadically defended Kamilianlul Ridge to its north. Its attack south from Hill B and adjacent ridges made very limited progress, but permitted some consolidation of the American hold along the north side of the Pocket, now 400 yards wide in that zone. On 29 September, the 7th Marines was ordered to relieve the Army unit in that northern sector.

To relieve 2/7 and 3/7 of their now largely static guard positions along the west and southwest sectors of the Pocket, the division stripped hundreds of non-infantry from combat support units (artillery, engineer, pioneer), and formed them into two composite “infantillery” units. Under 11th Marines’ Lieutenant Colonel Richard B. Evans and 5th Marines’ Major Harold T. A. Richmond, they were assigned to maintain the static hold in the sectors earlier held by 2/7 and 3/7. They faced the karst plateau between the West Road and the Pocket.

The 7th Marines’ flexibility restored by this relief, its 1st and 3d Battalions relieved the 321st units on 29 September, along the north edge of the Pocket. Then on the 30th, they pushed south, securing improved control of Boyd Ridge and its southern extension, variously called Hill 100, Pope’s Ridge, or Walt Ridge. The latter dominated the East Road, but Japanese defenders remained in caves on the west side. The 7th Marines’ partial hold on Pope Ridge gave limited control of East Road, and thereby stabilized the east side of the Pocket. But the U.S. hold over the area needed improvement.

On 3 October, reinforced by the attached 3/5 (back from Ngesebus), the 7th Regiment organized a four-battalion attack. The plan called for 1/7 and 3/7 to attack from the north, against Boyd Ridge and the smaller ridges to its west, while 2/7 would attack Pope (Walt) Ridge from the south. The attached 3/5 was ordered to make a diversionary attack from the south into the Horseshoe canyon and its guardian Five Sisters on its west. This regimental attack against the Pocket committed four infantry “battalions,” all now closer to company than battalion strength, against the heights near the southern end of the Pocket (Five Sisters), and the ridges at the eastern shoulder of the Pocket (Pope and Boyd Ridges). After heavy casualties, the attack succeeded, but the Five Sisters (four of which 3/5 scaled) were untenable, and had to be abandoned after their seizure.

The next day, 4 October, the 7th Marines with 3/5 still attached made one more general attack--in the south, again to seize, then give up, positions on the Five Sisters; in the north, to try to advance and consolidate the positions there earlier seized.

In that 4 October action, the 3d Battalion, 7th Marines’ push led to an unexpectedly rapid advance which it pressed to get up onto Hill 120. It was hoped that this would provide a good jump-off for the next day’s operation against the next ridge to the west. However, Hill 120, as with so many others in the Umurbrogol, was then under enemy crossfire which made it completely untenable. The attacking company was withdrawn with heavy casualties. Among these casualties was Captain James V. “Jamo” Shanley, commanding Company L. His company was attacking Ridge/Hill 120 when several of his men fell, wounded. Shanley dashed forward under heavy fire, rescued two of the men and brought them to safety behind a tank. He then rushed back to help a third, when a mortar round landed immediately behind him, mortally wounding him. His executive officer, Lieutenant Harold J. Collins ran out to rescue him, only to fall by his side instantly killed by a Japanese antitank round.

For his heroism Captain Shanley was awarded a Gold Star (second) for the Navy Cross he had earned at Cape Gloucester, New Britain. There, his company was in the lead in seizing Hill 660, a key terrain feature in the Borgen Bay area.

The 7th Marines had now been in the terrible Umurbrogol struggle for two weeks. General Rupertus decided to relieve it, a course General Geiger also suggested. Still determined to secure the Pocket with Marines, General Rupertus turned to his only remaining Marine regiment, the 5th.

Colonel Harris brought two firm concepts to this final effort for his 5th Marines. First, the attack would be from the north, an approach which offered the greatest opportunity to chip off one terrain compartment or one ridge at a time. His 1st Battalion positions along the east side of the Pocket would be held statically, perhaps incrementally adjusted or improved. No attacks would be launched from the south, where the 3d Battalion was positioned in reserve.