As usual, men in the ranks had no idea of their destination until they were at sea and underway. Informed that they were bound for Peleliu, they shrugged. No one had heard of it, but that was no wonder—their whole war to date had been a blur of indistinctive look-alike tropical islands, one after another. A foam rubber scale model of the island was distributed to each ship, and platoons were briefed by officers who used pointing sticks to indicate terrain features and landmarks. On Peleliu’s flat southern half were the airfield, two runways and a taxiway making a figure “ 4,” with broad tarmac and parking aprons. The landing beaches were on its southwest coast, designated White Beaches 1 and 2 and Orange Beaches 1, 2, and 3. The northern part of the island was dominated by limestone massifs covered by a thin jungle scrub. The division would establish a beachhead on D-Day, take the airfield and bisect the island on D-Day plus one (D plus 1), and overrun the hilly country to the north on D plus 2 and 3. That was the plan.
The commanding officer of the 1stMarDiv was Major General William H. Rupertus, who had been second-in-command (after Alexander Vandegrift) during the Guadalcanal campaign and had led the detachment on Tulagi, on the northern side of Ironbottom Sound. Rupertus was confident that the Peleliu operation would be bloody but quick, much like past invasions in the central Pacific such as Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands or Roi-Namur in the Marshalls. He expected that a massive preinvasion aerial and naval bombardment would kill many of the Japanese defenders, demolish their fortifications, and perhaps take the fight out of the survivors. If all went as hoped, the enemy infantry would launch reckless banzai charges, allowing the marines to mow them down with rifle and machine-gun fire. Rupertus was full of bravado during the passage to the Palaus, telling his subordinates that he expected one of them to bring him the Japanese commander’s samurai sword.
The army’s 81st Infantry Division (“Wildcats”) was also headed to Peleliu, where it would be held in reserve in transports offshore. The overall Third Amphibious Corps commander for Operation STALEMATE was Major General Roy S. Geiger, who had succeeded Holland Smith in that role a month earlier. Geiger would decide whether to land the reinforcements on Peleliu; if they were not needed, they would be diverted to the smaller island of Anguar, a few miles to the southwest. Rupertus did not want the army on Peleliu and did not think it would be needed. He told war correspondents who sailed on his command ship, “It will be a short operation, a hard fought ‘quickie’ that will last for 4 days, 5 days at the most.”4
On the night of September 14, D-day minus one, the 1st Division marines hit the sack early. Most did not sleep much, however; a good night of sleep was never assured in those cramped, stifling conditions, and many were too nervous and adrenaline-charged even to close their eyes. At 3:00 a.m., sergeants went through the sleeping compartments and rousted the marines from their bunks. They rose and began their D-Day ablutions—a last shave, a sink wash, and (critically) a bowel movement. Men stood in long lines for a turn at the sink or the head. They filled their canteens and drew three days’ field rations. They broke out their battle dress—green dungarees with black Marine Corps emblems on the breast pockets. The ships’ galleys served the traditional “condemned man’s” breakfast of steak and eggs, but many marines had no appetite and did not eat a bite. They stuffed their personal belongings into canvas seabags, folded them into U-shaped bundles, and stowed them forward. Machine guns were test-fired into the ocean. Tins of black and green camouflage skin paint were passed through the ranks, and the men smeared their faces and hands with it.
Emerging on deck in the predawn darkness, they heard the crump crump of naval guns and glimpsed flickering lights on the northern horizon. Baritone reverberations rolled across the sea to a great distance, but out of sync with the distant flashes. As the ships surged onward toward the island, the explosions grew brighter, the thumping louder, and the time lag between them shrank. One sailor was reminded of “a summer storm in the Rockies.”5 As dawn broke in the east, it revealed a clear blue sky, without a cloud in sight—but Peleliu was enshrouded in smoke and haze, and all that could be seen was a vague purple shape, slightly humped at one end. Through and above the layer of smoke was a near-continuous lightshow of orange and pink flashes followed by spurts of yellow smoke. Every now and then came a glimpse of shredded palm trees, or ivory-hued razorback ridges in the island’s central highlands. A gunnery officer on the cruiser Portland, studying the limestone ridges through binoculars, watched as a steel door slid open, a gun fired, and the door slammed shut. He trained his ship’s 8-inch batteries on that door, and fired several projectiles at it, but could not destroy the target. He commented, “You can put all the steel in Pittsburgh on that thing and not get it.”6
Like many amphibious troops before them, the marines were awed by the scene. Even half a mile from the battleships and cruisers, men had to shout to be heard over the thunderclaps made by the great guns. The 1st Marine Division had made two previous amphibious landings—Guadalcanal and New Britain—and neither had been opposed. Would it be three for three? They had heard enough about the landings on Tarawa, Saipan, and Guam to know that appearances could be deceiving, but still they wondered how anyone on Peleliu could survive such a monstrous barrage. About 1,400 tons of naval ordnance were dropped on the island in the hours before the landing. The panorama of destruction certainly improved their mood. One remarked, “It was beyond your imagination how anything could be alive, so we were beginning to feel pretty good.”7 Another wondered whether “the island would still be there by the time we arrived.”8
On an LST (Landing Ship, Tank) that carried elements of the 1st Marine Regiment, a voice on the loudspeaker commanded: “Now all marines lay to your debarkation stations!”9 The men buckled their packs and felt to confirm that their gear was hanging loosely in place. They went down the ladders in single file to the tank deck, a harshly lit enclosed cavity crowded with amtracs. Engines fired to life with an ear-piercing roar, and the air was choked with blue, swirling exhaust fumes. The marines climbed into their assigned vehicles and took their places. They closed their eyes against the fumes, but could not avoid breathing them, and some grew nauseous. “Beads of sweat broke out on our faces, and our jackets were already soggy wet and clinging to us,” recalled Captain George P. Hunt, commanding officer of K Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines. “The exhaust was pouring over us in spite of the great fans which whirred over our heads. The palms of my hands were hot and slippery.”10 Hunt wondered whether his men would be poisoned before they had a chance to fight, but at last the clamshell bow doors separated, the steel ramp slid forward and down, and the first row of amtracs moved forward with a sudden lurch. They clattered down the ramps and into the sea, and the passengers filled their lungs with fresh air.
The LSTs were arrayed in a long row, their bow bays open and their ramps extending into the sea like long steel tongues. The crowded amtracs wallowed on the tide and awaited the signal to start toward the beach. Swells broke over the gunwales and soaked the men. Soon hundreds of amtracs were circling behind the line of departure. With no breeze, the blue exhaust fumes hung thick in the air. Naval patrol craft darted busily among the landing craft, their crews setting out buoys and shouting instructions through bullhorns. The battleships continued to fire on the island, punching temporary craters into the sea beneath their guns’ muzzles. Marines in the boats had to shout to be heard over the relentless salvos. At 8:30 in the morning, right on schedule, came the order to launch the first wave.
The amtrac drivers opened up the throttles, the boats surged and rode higher on the water, and the engines threw up fan-shaped plumes of spray. Marines in other boats shook their fists and shouted encouragement as the first wave left the line of departure, but the roar of the engines and the guns drowned out their voices. The naval barrage ascended to a new pitch: the rockets whooshed overhead, the blasts of the big guns seemed to crack open the heavens, and the naval projectiles roared overhead like freight trains. When the drivers shifted gears,
the transmissions responded with violent thuds that shook the hulls. They hit peak speed of 7 knots, rooster tails flying off the rudders. Men who peered over the bows could see little—Peleliu remained enshrouded in smoke and dust—but they might catch a glimpse of F6F Hellcats flying low over the beach and pouring out orange tracer fire, or carrier dive bombers hurtling down from overhead and planting bombs on unseen targets.
As they approached the reef line, it became apparent that the Japanese were firing back. Artillery and mortar rounds began falling among the boats, sending up impressively large columns of spray that caught the morning light and momentarily split into a rainbow of colors. The enemy could not see them; they were firing blindly through the smokescreen. Few boats were hit, but the barrage confirmed that the enemy was alive and full of fight. The beach remained hidden behind a curtain of flame and smoke. “It seemed as though a huge volcano had erupted from the sea,” recalled Eugene B. Sledge, a twenty-year-old private, “and rather than heading for an island, we were being drawn into the vortex of a flaming abyss.”11
The LVTs slowed as they approached the reef line. They bumped; the treads bit into the coral; the bow tilted sharply upward, and they began lurching and trundling across the top of the reef. Marines were thrown from their feet. They could not sit in the boats without fracturing their tail bones, so they crouched and held on to one another for support: “We grabbed and lurched and swore.”12 Many of the LVTs had been fitted with 75mm pack howitzers, and these fired back at the beach, also blindly. Inside of the reef, the sea was shallow and green, the sandy bottom visible from the gunwales. A line of broken, blasted palm trees loomed out of the white murk. The sun overhead was dimmed in the overcast, appearing as a silver disk, but its heat beat down relentlessly.
The earthshaking explosions made by the naval shells moved inland as the first boats scraped ashore on Orange Beach. The treads of the amphibious tractors bit into the sand; the engines raced; they trundled some distance up the beach, then jerked to a stop. Rear tailgates fell open with a slam, and sergeants shouted, “Let’s go!” The marines rushed out the back, made a quick U-turn, and dashed up the beach. Chattering machine-gun and rifle fire came from unseen positions beyond the tree line. Rifle shots snapped and whined around their ears. The enemy was firing bigger weapons, too—antiboat guns and field artillery. Many marines in that first wave died on the open beach. Others sprinted into the palm groves and looked for the first opportunity to take cover—behind a tree, into a shell crater, or flat on the ground. Blackened and splintered palm trees soared over their heads. Their eyes and mouths were choked with dust; their nostrils filled with the acrid scent of cordite. The terrain had been blasted into a wild jumble of craters and fallen palm logs and tilting slabs of earth. The ruined landscape provided cover for advancing marines, but also for Japanese snipers.
The officers and sergeants kept shouting to push forward; they had to clear the beach for the succeeding waves of landing craft. They cut through barbwire entanglements. They moved forward from one covered position to another. Many fell to sniper fire. On the far side of the palm groves were machine-gun nests, log firing walls, and a long antitank ditch. The marines took them by frontal assault, at full sprint, “hollering like a bunch of Indians”—the leatherneck version of the banzai charge.13
Hunt’s company landed at the northern end of White Beach, where a rocky headland jutted about 200 yards out into the sea. Strong pillboxes and cunningly hidden firing embrasures were built into the southern face of that rock. A 47mm antitank gun in an unapproachable firing position knocked out several amphibious vehicles before they reached the beach. K Company marines found themselves under a hailstorm of enfilade fire, without any good options for cover. They tried to dig in as best they could, but the ground was hard coral rock. The heat built up by mid-morning and became awful; everyone was soaked through with sweat. As Japanese mortar fire found the range, the marines’ wounded multiplied. They were strewn across the beach, seemingly too many to evacuate. Constantly came the cry: “Corpsman!” Stretcher-bearers were cut down by enemy sniper fire. Captain Hunt registered “a ghastly mixture of bandages, bloody and mutilated skin; men gritting their teeth, resigned to their wounds; men groaning and writhing in their agonies; men outstretched or twisted or grotesquely transfixed in the attitudes of death; men with their entrails exposed or whole chunks of body ripped out of them.”
Smoke grenades provided a respite from the murderous fire. Lobbing several to the base of the rock face, Hunt’s marines blinded the Japanese gunners, who were reduced to firing randomly through the haze. A squad was sent around to cover the rear exit of the pillbox. A marine armed with a shoulder-mounted rocket grenade launcher managed a lucky shot; the grenade glanced off the muzzle of a 47mm antitank gun and entered the firing casement. Black smoke poured out of the embrasure. Japanese voices were heard from inside the rock, screaming in pain as they burned; three enemy soldiers ran from the back exit and were put out of their misery by the squad placed to cover it.
By ten o’clock that morning, three infantry regiments had landed on a 2,500-yard-long chain of beaches. Tom Lea, an artist and war correspondent for Life magazine, landed with the second wave on Orange Beach. The Japanese mortar and artillery barrage remained as intense as it had been an hour earlier, when the first wave had come in. The beach and shallows were littered with burning and disabled amphibious vehicles, and marines lay face down on the beach, “huddled like wet rats.” Lea took cover in a shell crater and kept his head down as mortar blasts tore up the beach. Looking back out to sea, he watched as marines waded in through the surf, rifles held above their heads, pillars of whitewater erupting around them. He saw several killed: “One figure seemed to fly to pieces. With terrible clarity I saw the head and one leg sail into the air.”14
Lea had not brought his sketchpad to the island, but he took mental photographs and stored the images to be retrieved from memory. Later he drew or painted several scenes for Life, including a provocatively graphic painting entitled “The Price,” which depicted a mortally wounded marine staggering up the beach in the moment before he fell dead. The left side of the man’s face was completely gone, “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.”15 After publishing the image months later, Life received a flood of complaints and subscription cancellations. Some accused Lea of embellishing the scene, a charge he angrily denied. He had painted exactly what he had seen, he said, no less and no more.
In a palm grove inland of the beach, Lea found a large shell crater that had been commandeered for a temporary field hospital. Corpsmen, four to a stretcher, were arriving continuously and setting the stretchers down in rows. Plasma bottles hung from a broken tree stump. Corpsmen gave morphine shots and applied tourniquets. A chaplain held a canteen in one hand and a bible in the other. “He was deeply and visibly moved by the patients’ suffering and death,” Lea wrote. “He looked very lonely, very close to God, and he bent over the shattered men so far from home. Corpsmen put a poncho, a shirt, a rag, anything handy, over the gray faces of the dead and carried them to a line on the beach, under a tarpaulin, to await the digging of graves.”16
The Americans now held a two-mile-long beachhead, with an average depth of about 500 yards, encompassing the southwestern shore of the island. Mine disposal squads were digging up Japanese artillery shells that had failed to detonate. Men carried spools of telephone wire and were draping it haphazardly across the plowed-up ground and charred underbrush behind the beach. Scattered everywhere was the debris of battle, a jumble of discarded packs, helmets, rifles, boxes, clothing, and rubber life belts. A long antitank ditch that had been dug by the Japanese had been commandeered as the 1st Division command post. Nearby were regimental and battalion CPs for the 5th Marines. These areas remained
under heavy mortar fire throughout D-Day. One battalion CP (3/5) took a direct hit that injured the regimental commander and several of his staff.
The division command was still struggling to form an accurate picture of what was happening on the island. Radiomen could not establish contact with forward units. The relentless artillery fire chewed up the field telephone systems. Message runners were forced to rush across exposed positions, and many were wounded or killed. General Rupertus committed his reserve battalions, and then told his staff that he had “shot his bolt.” As reports came in, his staff tallied D-Day casualties of 1,111, including at least 209 killed.17
That evening, as darkness fell, the naval vessels offshore fired parachute flares and star shells to keep the contested ground illuminated. The spectral orange and yellow light gave the blasted-out landscape an eerie, otherworldly appearance. Shadows veered and danced. The gnarled stumps of blasted trees reached up from the earth. A sailor offshore was reminded of a “moonscape,” or “the photos I had seen of no-man’s land during the trench warfare of World War I.”18 Japanese artillery and mortars fired periodically, and infiltrators and small unit attacks continued intermittently until dawn. Company K, holding the rocky point at the northern flank of the beachhead, kept their fingers on their triggers while listening for any sound that might portend a new attack—“a shout, a rustling, a jabbering, a scraping of feet on the rocks.”19 The marines threw hand grenades blindly at those sounds. The Japanese fighters on Peleliu did not rush forward pell-mell in the style of a banzai charge, but crossed from one covered position to another. They fought shrewdly, attacking in much the same manner as the marines would attack if the circumstances were reversed. “Japs were bobbing in and out of the rocks,” Hunt recalled. “I could see their flat, brown helmets. At times it was hard to distinguish them from my men, so quick were the movements.”20 Unseen snipers fired from the tops of high palm trees, hitting marines who were keeping their heads down and had assumed they were out of the line of fire. There was no rest or respite for the men of Company K; the enemy kept coming, all night long, from three directions. “The fight became a vicious melee of countless explosions, whining bullets, shrapnel whirring overhead or clinking off the rocks, hoarse shouts, shrill-screaming Japanese.”21
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