Part 6

Colonel Harris’ aerial reconnaissance during the first week on Peleliu had convinced him that siege tactics would be required to clear the multitude of mutually defended positions within Umurbrogol. As he had earlier expressed himself in the presence of the corps and division commanders visiting his regimental CP, Harris continued with his policy to “be lavish with ammunition and stingy with ... men’s lives.” He was in a strong command position to prepare support thoroughly before ordering advances.

The 2d Battalion, 5th Marines, relieved 3d Battalion, 7th Marines in position on 5 October, but did nothing but reconnoiter positions where heavier firepower could come into play. Engineer dozers were brought up to prepare paths into the north ends of the box canyons, along which LVT flamethrowers and tanks could later operate. A light artillery battery was emplaced along the West Road to fire point-blank into the west-facing cliffs at the north end of the Pocket, as were weapons carriers and tanks later. Troublesome sections of certain cliffs were literally demolished by direct fire, and the rubble dozed into a ramp for tanks to climb toward better firing positions. Light mortars were used extensively to strip vegetation from areas in which firing caves were suspected, and planes loaded with napalm-filled belly tanks were used to bomb suspected targets just south of the key Hill 140, which 2/5 had selected as its key objective.

As 2/5 picked off successive firing positions in the north, 3/5 on 7 October sent a tank sortie into the Horseshoe. This time, the mission was not to seize and hold, but to destroy by fire all identifiable targets on the faces of the Five Sisters, and on the western (lower) face of Hill 100 (Pope Ridge). When all ammunition was expended, the tanks withdrew to rearm then returned, accompanied by LVT flame-throwing tanks and guarded by small infantry fire-teams. Considerably more destruction was effected, a large number of Japanese were killed in caves, and many of the Japanese heavy weapons in those caves were silenced. Previous to this time, some single artillery pieces firing from within the Horseshoe had occasionally harassed the airfield. No such nuisance attacks occurred after the 7 October tank sorties.

For the next six days, the 5th Marines headquarters afforded all available support to small, incremental advances by 2/5 from the north. Light mortars were repeatedly used to clear all vegetation from small objectives and routes of advance. Both tanks and artillery were used at point-blank ranges to fire into all suspected caves or rough coral areas. Aerial bombardment with napalm was used to clear vegetation and, hopefully, drive some defenders further back into their caves. All advances were very limited, aimed simply at seizing new firing positions. Advances were made by squads or small platoons.

The last position seized, Hill 140, just north of the Five Brothers, afforded a firing site to which a 75mm pack howitzer was wrestled in disassembled mode, reassembled, sandbagged, and then effectively fired from its then-commanding position. It could fire into the mouth of a very large cave at the base of the next ridge, from which serious fire had been received for days.

Sandbagging this piece into position posed special problems, since the only available loose sand or dirt had to be carried from the beach, or occasional debris slides. Nevertheless, the use of sandbags in forward infantry positions began to be used increasingly, and the technique was later improved and widely used when 81st Infantry Division soldiers took over further reduction of the Pocket.

By this mode of careful advance, a number of small knobs and ridges at the head of the two murderous box canyons were seized. Direct fire could be laid into the west face of Walt and Boyd Ridges, whose tops were occupied by 1/5, but those cave-filled western slopes were protected by other caves on the opposite, parallel ridge known as Five Brothers.

A week of such siege-like activity pushed the northern boundary of the Pocket another 500 yards south. On 12 October, the 3d Battalion, 5th Marines was called in to relieve 2d Battalion, 5th Marines. The relief was seriously marred, primarily because the forward positions being relieved were so close to the opposing enemy. The incoming troops, including a company commander, were picked off by snipers during this exchange, and a small group of enemy reoccupied a position earlier subdued by frequent interdiction fires. Despite these losses and interruptions, the relief was completed on schedule, and on 13 October, 3/5 continued the slow and deliberate wedging forward.

Directly south of Hill 140, there seemed no feasible axis for advance, so 3/5’s axis was shifted southwest, approximately paralleling the West Road, and into the coral badlands in front of the containing lines manned by the composite groups guarding West Road. While the composite groups held in place, 3/5 operated across their front, north to south. By this means the coral badlands were cleared out for an average (east-west) depth of 75-150 yards, along some 500 yards of the north-south front. This terrain, earlier judged unsuitable for any but the costliest and most difficult advance, was now traversed with the aid of preparatory fire-scouring by napalm bombs. Major “Cowboy” Stout’s VMF-114 pilots’ bombs fell breathtakingly close to both the advancing 3/5 front and to the stationary composite units holding just east of West Road.

A similar effort was then launched from the south by what was left of Lieutenant Colonel John Gormley’s 1/7. Together, these two advances seized and emptied about one-half of the depth of the coral badlands, between West road and the China Wall. This clearing action allowed the composite “infantillery” unit to advance its lines eastward and then hold, as far as the infantry had cleared, toward the back of China Wall.

Overall, the actions of the 5th and 7th Marines in October had reduced the Pocket to an oval some 800 yards, north to south, and 400-500 yards, east to west. According to Colonel Nakagawa’s contemporaneous radio report back to Koror, he still had some 700 defenders within the Pocket, of which only 80 percent were effective. In early October, some wag had suggested that the Pocket situation be clarified by enclosing it with barbed wire and designating it as a prisoner of war enclosure. Spoken in bitter jest, the concept did recognize that the Pocket no longer counted in the strategic balance, nor in completing the effective seizure of Peleliu.

But it still weighed significantly in the mind of Major General Rupertus, who wanted to subdue the Pocket before turning over to Major General Mueller the 81st Division’s previously specified mopping-up task. In point of fact, Rupertus’ successful seizure of Ngesebus and northern Peleliu had terminated the enemy’s capability to reinforce the now-isolated Japanese on Peleliu. Creation of that tactical situation had effectively secured Peleliu.

Without pressing for a declaration that Peleliu had been effectively secured, which would have formalized the completion of the 1st Marine Division’s mission, General Geiger had for some days suggested that in continuing his attacks into the Pocket, Rupertus relieve first the 5th, then the 7th Marines with his largest and freshest infantry regiment, the 321st RCT, still attached to 1st Marine Division. To all such suggestions, General Rupertus replied that his Marines would “very shortly” subdue the Pocket.

Two events now overtook General Rupertus’ confidence. First, the 81st Division was made whole by the return of its 323d RCT, fresh from its critically important seizure of Ulithi. Second, the perception that Peleliu was effectively secured was validated by a message which so stated from Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet/Commander in Chief, Pacific Ocean Areas. Major General Geiger was directed to turn over command to Major General Mueller, whose 81st Division was now directed to relieve the 1st Marine Division, to mop up, and to garrison Peleliu, as long planned. Rear Admiral George E. Fort, Rear Admiral Theodore S. Wilkinson’s successor as commander of operations in the Palaus, was directed to turn over that responsibility to Vice Admiral John H. Hoover, a sub-area commander. When relieved by the 81st Division, the 1st Marine Division would embark for return to Pavuvu.

During the movement and turnover, tactical operations ashore necessarily remained under 1st Marine Division control until the 81st Division could move its command post from Angaur. General Mueller established his CP near Peleliu’s Purple Beach on 20 October. The Wildcat Division thereupon acquired “custody” of the Pocket, and responsibility for final reduction of its determined, able, battered defenders.

Meanwhile, the relief of the 5th Marines by the 321st RCT took place on 15 and 16 October. While that relief was in progress, Lieutenant Colonel Gormley’s 1/7 was still engaged in the earlier-described coral badlands action, to make possible the eastward movement of the containing lines protecting West Road. The relief of 1/7 was accordingly delayed until the next day. On 17 October, a full-strength Company B, 1/323, newly arrived from Ulithi, relieved Gormley’s surviving battalion, approximately man for man.

_Post-assault Operations in the Palaus_

When on 20 October Major General Mueller became responsible for mopping up on Peleliu, he addressed the tactical problem as a siege situation, and directed his troops to proceed accordingly. Over a period of nearly six weeks, his two regiments, the 322d and 323d Infantry, plus 2/321, did just that. They used sandbags as an assault device, carrying sand up from the beaches and inching the filled sandbags forward to press ever nearer to positions from which to attack by fire the Japanese caves and dug-in strong points. They made liberal use of tanks and flamethrowers, even improving upon the vehicle-mounted flamethrower. They thrust a gasoline pipeline forward from a roadbound gasoline truck, thereby enabling them, with booster pumps, to throw napalm hundreds of feet ahead into Japanese defensive areas. Noting the effectiveness of the 75mm pack howitzer which the Marines had wrestled up to Hill 140, they sought and found other sites to which they moved pack howitzers, and from which they fired point-blank into defending caves. To support their growing need for sandbags on ridge-top “foxholes,” their engineers strung highlines to transport sand (and ammo and rations) up to such peaks and ridgetops.

Notwithstanding these deliberate siege tactics, the 81st troops still faced death and maiming as they ground down the bitter and stubborn Japanese defenses. The siege of the Umurbrogol Pocket consumed the full efforts of 81st Division’s 322d RCT and 323d RCT, as well as 2/321, until 27 November 1944 (D plus 73).

This prolonged siege operation was carried on within 25 miles of a much larger force of some 25,000 Japanese soldiers in the northern Palaus. Minor infiltrations aside, those Japanese were isolated by U.S. Navy patrols, and by regular bombing from Marine Aircraft Group 11, operating from Peleliu.

Difficult and costly as the American advances were, the Japanese defenders in their underground positions had a similarly demanding and even more discouraging situation. Water was low. Sanitation was crude to nonexistent. Rations were short, and ammunition was even scarcer. As time wore on, some of the Japanese, when afforded opportunity, chose to leave their defenses and undertake futile, usually suicidal night attacks. A very few succeeded in being captured.

Toward late November, even Major General Murai apparently came to this point of view. Still not in command, he nevertheless proposed, in a radio message to Lieutenant General Inoue on Koror, a _banzai_ finale for their prolonged defense. But General Inoue turned down the proposal. By this time, Nakagawa’s only exterior communications were by radio to Koror. As he had anticipated, all local wire communications had been destroyed. He had issued mission orders to carry his units through the final phase of defense.

As the tanks and infantry carefully pressed their relentless advances, the 81st Division’s engineers pressed forward and improved the roads and ramps leading into or toward the heart of the Japanese final position. This facilitated the tank and flamethrower attacks to systematically reduce each cave and position as the infantry pushed its sandbag “foxholes” forward.

On 24 November, Colonel Nakagawa sent his final message to his superior on Koror. He advised that he had burned the colors of the _2d Infantry Regiment_. He said that the final 56 men had been split into 17 infiltration parties, to slip through the American positions and to “attack the enemy everywhere.” During the night of 24-25 November, 25 Japanese, including two officers, were killed. Another soldier was captured the following morning. His interrogation, together with postwar records and interviews, led to his conclusion that Colonel Nakagawa and Major General Murai died in the CP, in ritual suicide.

The final two-day advance of the 81st Division’s soldiers was truly and literally a mopping-up operation. It was carefully conducted to search out any holed-up opposition. By midday on 27 November, the north-moving units, guarded on the east by other Army units, met face-to-face with the battalion moving south, near the Japanese CP later located. The 323d’s commander, Colonel Arthur P. Watson, reported to General Mueller that the operation was over.

Not quite. Marine air on Peleliu continued to attack the Japanese positions in Koror and Babelthuap, joining the patrolling Navy units in destroying or bottling up any remaining Japanese forces in the northern Palaus. A late casualty in that action was the indomitable Major Robert F. “Cowboy” Stout, whose VMF-114 had delivered so much effective air support to the ground combat on Peleliu.

The stubborn determination of the Japanese to carry out their emperor’s war aims was starkly symbolized by the last 33 prisoners captured on Peleliu. In March 1947, a small Marine guard attached to a small naval garrison on the island encountered unmistakable signs of a Japanese military presence in a cave in the Umurbrogol. Patrolling and ambushes produced a straggler, a Japanese seaman who told of 33 remaining Japanese under the military command of Lieutenant Tadamichi Yamaguchi. Although the straggler reported some dissension within the ranks of that varied group, it seemed that a final _banzai_ attack was under consideration.

The Navy garrison commander moved all Navy personnel, and some 35 dependents, to a secure area and sent to Guam for reinforcements and a Japanese war crimes witness, Rear Admiral Michio Sumikawa. The admiral flew in and travelled by jeep along the roads near the suspected cave positions. Through a loudspeaker he recited the then-existing situation. No response. Finally, the Japanese seaman who had originally surrendered went back to the cave armed with letters from Japanese families and former officers from the Palaus, advising the hold-outs of the end of the war. On 21 April 1947, the holdouts formally surrendered. Lieutenant Yamaguchi led 26 soldiers to a position in front of 80 battle-dressed Marines. He bowed and handed his sword to the American naval commander on the scene.

_Was the Seizure of Peleliu Necessary? Costs vs. Benefits_

What advantages to the United States’ war effort grew from the conquest of Peleliu? It assured absolute domination of all of the Palaus, thereby adding, marginally, to the security of MacArthur’s right flank as he continued westward, then northward from New Guinea into his Philippines campaign. Within the Palaus group, it destroyed facilities which survived Admiral Marc A. Mitscher’s devastating strike of March 1944. It insured total denial of support to the enemy from Koror’s submarine basing facilities, incrementally decreasing the already waning Japanese submarine capability east of the Philippines. The United States position on Peleliu completed the neutralization of the some 25,000 Japanese troops in northern Palau. The landing on Peleliu did not contribute to the Regimental Landing Team (RLT) 323 unopposed seizure of Ulithi. Admiral William F. Halsey had earlier believed that his forces could seize Ulithi without first seizing Peleliu.

The most visible benefit of a subdued Peleliu lay in its use as a link in the flight path and line of communications from Hawaii, and from the Marianas, to the Philippines. The holding was a convenience, but not a necessity.

Such judgment could be disputed, however, by the survivors of the _Indianapolis’_ 29 July 1945 sinking. Having delivered atomic bomb parts to Tinian shortly before, the ship was headed for the Philippines, when it was suddenly torpedoed at night. The ship went down in 12 minutes, and no report of the contact or the sinking was received. The fourth day after the sinking, its 316 survivors (from a crew of 1,196) were sighted by a Navy patrol bomber working out of Peleliu. The sighting led directly to their rescue, and most certainly would not have occurred, but for American occupation of Peleliu.

What did the seizure of Peleliu cost? Marine casualties numbered 6,526, including Navy corpsmen and doctors, of whom 1,252 were killed. The 81st Division totalled 3,089 casualties, of whom 404 were killed in action. Total U.S. troop casualties was 9,615 for Peleliu, Angaur and Ngesebus, with 1,656 dead.

By inflicting that many casualties, the Japanese were successful in implementing their longstanding “delay and bleed” strategy. The actions cost them an estimated 10,900 casualties, all but a tiny fraction killed. Just 202 prisoners of war were captured, only 19 of whom were Japanese military (seven Army, 12 Navy). The others were laborers, largely Korean. Among the Japanese military defenders, less than two per thousand were captured.

The costs at Peleliu held warnings aplenty for the remaining Allied operations to be conducted across the Pacific to Japan. Even with total local air and naval superiority, with lavish naval gunfire and bombs, with the dreaded napalm weaponry, and with a 4:1 troop superiority, the seizure of Peleliu consumed one American casualty and 1,589 rounds of heavy and light troop ammunition for each single Japanese defender killed or driven from his prepared position. A few months later, the attacks on Iwo Jima and Okinawa would confirm this grim calculus of war against determined Japanese defenders, ably led, in prepared defenses.

The question of whether the Peleliu operation was necessary remains moot, even today, some 52 years after the 1 September 1944 landing. The heroism and exemplary conduct of the 1st Marine Division, its Marines and Navy corpsmen, and the soldiers of the 81st Infantry Division on that miserable island is written in the record. But there is an enduring question of whether the capture of Peleliu was essential, especially in view of Admiral William F. Halsey’s recommendation through Admiral Nimitz to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 13 September 1944, two days before D-Day, that the landing be cancelled. By that time, it was too late. And Peleliu was added to the long list of battles in which Marines fought and suffered, and prevailed.

[Sidebar (page 46): Tom Lea’s Paintings

Tom Lea, the artist of the paintings which illustrate this pamphlet, wrote of his experiences on Peleliu in _Battle Stations_, published in 1988 by Still Point Press in Dallas. Some of the sketches from this book were reproduced with commentary in Volume 14, Number 2 of _Discovery_, a journal published by the University of Texas at Austin. In this issue, James Jones, author of _From Here to Eternity_, wrote: “Lea was one of the artists put in the field by _Life_.... Various of his works appeared in the magazine, and up until the time he went into Peleliu, most of them could be pretty well classified as excellently done but high-grade propaganda. There was very little American blood, very little tension, very little horror. Mostly, it was what could be called the _Bravo America!_ and _This is Your Boy_ type of war art. His almost photographic style easily lent itself to that type of work....

“But something apparently happened to Lea after going into Peleliu. The pictures painted out of his Peleliu experience show a new approach. There is the tension of terror in the bodies here, the distorted facial expressions of the men under fire show it, too....

“One of the most famous, of course, is the _Two-Thousand-Yard Stare_ portrait of a young marine who has had all, or more than, he can take. The staring eyes, the slack lips, the sleepwalker’s stance. I’ve seen men with that look on their faces. I’ve had it on my own face. It feels stiff, and the muscles don’t want to work right when you try to smile, or show expression, or talk. Mercifully, you’re out of it for a while; unmercifully, down in the center of that numbness, though, you know you will have to come back eventually.”

Reprinted by permission of _Discovery_, the University of Texas at Austin. Tom Lea’s artwork in this pamphlet is reproduced with the permission of the artist. The captions under each of the Lea paintings are the artist’s own words.

Benis M. Frank