An hour before dawn on the sixteenth, the ground was still warm to the touch, and the temperature was 80 degrees Fahrenheit. A low mist rode over the airfield, but when the sun came up it soon dissipated and was replaced by a shimmering heat haze. The temperature that day would reach 105° in the shade, but few marines on Peleliu had the luxury of shade. The air was heavy and still. Sweat ran down their faces and left streaks in their camouflage face paint. Gray coral dust stuck to the sweat and paint and made them look as if they were wearing ivory-colored masks.
Most marines had landed with two canteens of drinking water. By the second day the canteens were empty, or nearly so. A platoon on the edge of the airfield found a pool of milky-looking water at the bottom of a pit. It was full of grit, but the men were too thirsty to care, and drank from it. At a little after seven, carriers brought five-gallon cans of water to the front lines, and the men dipped their tin cups into it. It had a brownish tint and smelled of fuel. A blue film of oil rode on top of the water. R. V. Burgin recalled: “Guys would take a mouthful and spit it out. Those that swallowed it would throw up a few minutes later. Some of them had the dry heaves all morning.”22 They subsequently learned that the freshwater reserves had been loaded onto the transports in fifty-five-gallon fuel drums, and some of these drums had not been properly cleaned and sanitized.
The 5th Marines had been given the job of driving straight across the airfield to Peleliu’s eastern shore. They would bisect the island and cut off the Japanese fighters in the south. As they prepared to advance, they looked up at the sheer rock face directly north of the airfield, the forbidding feature someone had named “Bloody Nose Ridge.” Japanese artillery and mortar fire had been pouring down from that ridge since they had landed the previous day. Some attested that they could “feel” the gaze of unseen enemy soldiers from that soaring vantage point, and it gave them a sensation of powerlessness.
The jump-off signal came a few minutes after ten. The marines rose to their feet and began jogging toward the center of the airfield. They spread out as they had been trained to do, with 8 or 10 feet between them. They moved fast, but kept their heads down. Artillery and mortar shells landed among them, but they did not stop because they knew a stationary target was easier to hit. Blasts gouged chunks of soil out of the ground and flung it up into the sky. A constant shower of shrapnel and coral pebbles fell upon them as they ran. Smoke and dust got in their eyes, noses, and mouths. Corporal Burgin recalled: “Everything was coming at us—mortars, artillery, machine-gun and rifle fire. You heard hiss and zing of shrapnel and bullets all around you. We were as exposed as bugs on the breakfast table. I kept yelling, ‘Keep moving! Keep moving!’ ”23
In his peripheral vision, Sledge saw men fall to his right and left. His field of vision was partly concealed by smoke, and he felt grateful for that. The ground seemed to tilt beneath his feet. His ears rang from the repeated concussions. The big blasts seemed to grow closer and more numerous:
I felt as if I was floating along in the vortex of some unreal thunderstorm. Japanese bullets snapped and cracked, and tracers went by me on both sides at waist height. This deadly small-arms fire seemed almost insignificant amid the erupting shells. Explosions and the hum and the growl of shell fragments shredded the air. Chunks of blasted coral stung my face and hands while steel fragments splattered down on the hard rock like hail on a city street. Everywhere shells flashed like giant firecrackers. . . . The farther we went, the worse it got. The noise and concussion pressed on my ears like a vise. 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.24
The airfield was a burned-out scrapyard, littered with the blackened wrecks of more than one hundred Japanese planes. All the buildings had been bombed out, but heaps of rubble and the remains of concrete walls provided cover for enemy soldiers. Whatever their plans, the marines had to stop and take cover as they approached these positions. As soon as they stopped running, they realized how great a toll the heat was taking. They had sweated entirely through their field uniforms, and their boots were full of sweat. Several men were suffering heat prostration. Their faces were mottled and scarlet-colored, and they shivered as if freezing cold. Sledge lay on his back and lifted his feet, one and then the other: “Water literally poured out of each shoe.”25
After a five-hour firefight on the airfield, the first echelons of the 5th Marines reached the eastern shore at 3:00 p.m. They set up a semicircular perimeter in a mangrove swamp, with their backs to the beach, and prepared for the inevitable long night of shelling, infantry attacks, and infiltration tactics.
By the afternoon of September 16, D plus 1, Orange Beach had assumed the appearance of a busy ship-to-shore depot. The beachmasters had taken over, and an abundance of cargo, equipment, and vehicles was coming ashore in a constant relay of pontoon barges.26 Men were pounding signs into the ground to indicate where incoming cargo should be dumped. One part of Orange Beach was so congested with crates and vehicles that it had to be closed to foot traffic. Dead marines were laid out in rows on the beach; presently a burial detail would collect their dog tags and bury them in long trenches. There were also many hundreds of Japanese dead, mostly uncovered. Their pockets and other belongings had been thoroughly rifled, and all valuables or interesting souvenirs claimed. One marine recalled “glossy red tripe boiling from naked bellies. Those arms and legs that are still attached are curiously bent akimbo. . . . The eyeballs are deflated, dehydrated, collapsing in on themselves.”27 Their skin was beginning to turn brown, and flies were buzzing around them. The odor of death soon became overpowering in the heat, and the marines put in an urgent demand for bulldozers so that the dead could be buried as quickly as possible.
General Rupertus had wanted to come ashore on D-Day, but he had been injured in a training accident, his foot was in a cast, and he was walking with a cane. His staff convinced him to wait a day. On D plus 1, he put ashore and took command at the division CP inland of Orange Beach. His mood was upbeat. The 5th Marines had taken possession of the airfield, Peleliu’s only real strategic asset, and had stitched up their lines across the waist of the island. Convinced that the worst of the fight was behind them, Rupertus radioed Geiger (in his command ship offshore) to say that he would not need the reserve force. General Geiger, in turn, released the 81st Infantry Division to land on nearby Anguar. Rupertus’s recommendation and Geiger’s decision would subsequently draw close scrutiny and censure.
On the third day of the battle, assuming that victory was imminent, Rupertus ordered the 1st Marines to take the high terrain north of the airfield, the limestone massif they had nicknamed Bloody Nose Ridge. On old maps of Peleliu, it was designated Urmurbrogal Mountain. The route of attack was a narrow, rocky valley they called the Horseshoe Bowl. From the airfield, the Horseshoe was approached by a serpentine footpath leading through rubble-strewn remains of concrete blockhouses and pillboxes. Marines advanced carefully, flanking and attacking the blasted-out fortifications, where Japanese machine gunners and snipers had taken cover. It was slow, bloody work. The heat and humidity were unremitting, and often the men had to stop and wait for water carriers to haul five-gallon cans up to the lines. Obstacles and debris were cleared to make way for tanks. Lea, who visited the scene, described the path as a “trail littered with Jap pushcarts, smashed ammunition boxes, rusty wire, old clothes, and scattered gear. Booby traps kept us from handling any of it. . . . There were dead Japs on the ground where they had been hit, and in two of the pillboxes I saw some of the bodies were nothing more than red raw meat and blood mixed with the gravely dust of concrete and splintered logs.”28
By the end of the day, advance patrols of the 1st Marines reached the base of the Horseshoe. They did not like the look of it. Every inch of the rock-strewn canyon was swept by mutually supporting Japanese firing ports and embrasures. Some could at least be seen, high in the cliffs, but many others were well concealed behind scru
b brush. How to attack such a fortress? Climbing a rock face to get at one Japanese firing port would only expose the marines to deadly fire from another. And the Horseshoe was only the beginning of a labyrinth of badlands implanted with fiendishly ingenious fortifications. Beyond it lay one razorback ridge after another. The craggy topography had previously been covered by jungle foliage, and aerial reconnaissance photographs had given the impression of gently rounded hills. But the bombing and shelling had exposed a sinister landscape of half-blackened ridges, knobs, pinnacles, canyons, gulches, and sinkholes. The marines named each feature as they drew their maps and devised their plan of campaign. The Horseshoe was overlooked by Walt’s Ridge to the east and the Five Sisters to the west, joined to the Five Brothers to the north. Running parallel to the Horseshoe was another canyon they named the Wildcat Bowl, enclosed by a sheer escarpment they named the China Wall—and on the far side of that, a boulder-strewn corridor they called Death Valley. The contested area was only about a single square mile—but for the men who fought in it, the Urmurbrogal pocket was like a planet unto itself, a seemingly interminable and unconquerable maze of karst.
THE JAPANESE GARRISON, 11,000 MEN STRONG, was drawn from the crack Fourteenth Division of the Kwantung Army. The commanding officer was Colonel Kunio Nakagawa, a heavily decorated “star” officer who had commanded the division’s Second Regiment. The force had shipped in from Manchuria after the sudden loss of the Marshall Islands earlier that year. Tokyo did not expect the Peleliu garrison to survive, and had made no plans to evacuate survivors. These seasoned veterans were expected to sell the island as dearly as possible, and then die to the last man.
Since their arrival in May, the Japanese had worked tirelessly to improve and extend Peleliu’s underground fortifications. Colonel Nakagawa was a leading champion of defensive fukkaku (“honeycomb”) tactics, which relied on burrowing under the ground into bunkers and tunnels. Foreseeing that the enemy would win absolute naval and air supremacy and would reduce all above-ground positions to rubble, the colonel kept most of his troops in reserve in caves deep in the massifs. He intended to make the Americans come to him, in the high terrain of the island’s interior. This “defense-in-depth” concept would allow the Japanese to hold out over a longer period of time and exact a higher price from the attackers.
Peleliu was better suited to those tactics than any other Pacific War battlefield. The ridges in the heart of the island, and the great honeycomb of caves that lay beneath them, were products of millions of years of geological processes. A thin topsoil clung to the ivory-colored rock, enough to support a sparse green scrub that concealed cave entrances and firing embrasures—but the rocky ground was impervious to picks and shovels, which meant that the attackers could not easily dig themselves into foxholes. The Japanese had expanded and improved nature’s handicraft. In September 1944, on the eve of the American landing, the greater part of Nakagawa’s garrison force inhabited a great subterranean labyrinth connecting more than five hundred natural and manmade caves. Some of the entrances were fitted with steel doors built flush into the slopes, well hidden by camouflage netting or vegetation. Some were so small that men could enter only by crawling on their hands and knees, but one great underground cavern was large enough to accommodate a thousand men at once. The system had been fitted with wooden stairways, electric lights, telephone lines, storerooms, ventilation shafts, interior decks, mess cooking facilities, hospitals, command posts, and built-in bunks. Freshwater had collected in cisterns, enough to sustain a long siege. The tunnel network went on for miles. Nakagawa could move reinforcements from one part of the hills to another, even over a distance of half a mile, without exposing them to enemy fire. Deep in the rock, the temperature was cool and comfortable, giving the defenders respite from the furnace-like heat outside.
The garrison was well armed and amply supplied. Nakagawa had 75mm artillery pieces, 81mm mortars, 141mm heavy mortars, .50-caliber machine guns, dual purpose antiaircraft guns, rocket launchers, and plenty of ammunition of all types stored deep in the caves. In many instances, cave entrances doubled as high-ground firing ports. The larger guns were mounted on rails and could be moved through subterranean passages from one position to another. An ingenious system of hoists and small railcars moved ammunition up from the magazines. At the mouth of the larger cave entrances, Japanese engineers had blasted deep bays into the sides of the tunnels; troops could take cover here when the mouth of the cave came under artillery fire. Hidden passageways and firing ports were left in place, so that even if a cave was breached by the enemy, it might still remain a threat.
In early September, Peleliu came under heavy and repeated aerial attacks by Third Fleet carrier planes and Army Air Forces B-24 bombers. The attackers flattened virtually every structure above ground, including all of the buildings adjacent to the airfield. During a September 6 fighter sweep, the aviators found “no airborne aircraft or shipping and meager AA. Few operational aircraft seen on ground.”29 Dozens of Japanese planes were destroyed, including many on the ground. Repeated carrier strikes hit the airfield and beach fortifications with bombs, rockets, and napalm. On September 12, the American battleships and cruisers had appeared in the offing and began raining high-explosive projectiles down on the island. The bombardment destroyed most remaining structures and blockhouses above the landing beaches and especially around the airfield. The cumulative onslaught began to burn and strip away the jungle foliage in the central hills, revealing the unexpectedly steep and rocky terrain, crowned with soaring palisades of coral spires and columns that might have been considered beautiful in a different context. A few Japanese guns fired back, but not many.
In his command post under one of those ridgelines, Colonel Nakagawa remained in radio contact with the Japanese headquarters on Koror, another island to the north. His post was comfortable, efficient, and well constructed. The cavern was equipped with an elaborate array of decks and stairways, a refrigerated storeroom, and comfortable quarters partitioned by bulkheads for Nakagawa and other senior officers. The CP was furnished with desks, conference tables, file cabinets, wall maps, and communications equipment. From deep in their underground lair, the concussions of the big naval shells seemed distant and muffled. They had suffered only negligible casualties in the bombing and shelling, and had conserved the better part of their strength to meet the enemy on the ground of their choosing—the high ground.
FOUR BATTALIONS OF THE 1ST MARINES mounted the first attack up the Horseshoe Bowl. The terrain funneled them into a sector approximately 1,000 yards wide, enclosed on both sides by ridges and enfiladed by high firing positions. Marines moving up the rock-strewn corridor had to climb and crawl. They were constantly under fire from different directions, by weapons of various types and calibers—rifles, machine guns, grenades, rockets, mortars, and field artillery. Their entrenching tools made no impression on the rocky ground, so they could not dig for cover. The unseen enemy fired from one slot, withdrew into the subterranean network as the marines returned fire, and then fired from another. A rain of mortars blasted coral dust and pebbles from the ground, augmenting the shrapnel effect of each shell. Tanks and other armored vehicles were stopped by boulders and rock piles.
Colonel Lewis Burwell “Chesty” Puller, the regimental commander, intended to take high ground, one ridge at a time, and he was willing to suffer heavy losses to do it. But gaining possession of a ridge would avail the marines nothing if they could not hold it. On September 20, a company (B-Company, 1st Battalion) led by Captain Everett P. Pope seized the summit of Hill 154 at the edge of Horseshoe Valley, only to find itself exposed to overpowering crossfire from Japanese positions on even higher ground. Lying flat, the unit held on until nightfall, but darkness brought waves of ferocious infantry counterattacks. The company defended its position not only with rifles, machine guns, and grenades, but also with bayonets, knives, rocks, and their bare hands. Their numbers diminishing, their wounded accumulating, they ran low on ammunition. At dawn they
still held the ridge, but only eight men were healthy enough to fight. They had no option but to withdraw, and received permission to do so. But the company had to evacuate their wounded, no easy task; they lowered them down the ridge with ropes. The dead were left where they lay, and the bodies would bake in the tropical heat for another two weeks until they could be removed and buried in a cemetery near the beach. The ordeal of Pope’s marines was a bitter foretaste of the fighting to come as the Americans pushed farther into the pocket.
Marines who had fought on multiple Pacific island battlefields agreed that Peleliu was the worst. The pitiless equatorial sun beat down on a lifeless moonscape of ivory-colored coral rock, and temperatures routinely surpassed 110 degrees. After three days on the line, the men looked like wraiths: lips blistered, hair matted, coral dust caked on unshaven faces. Sweat ran into their eyes, which already ached from the glare of the sun. The acrid smell and biting taste of cordite stung their noses and throats. Their hands were raw and abraded from crawling on the rocks. No one could escape the all-pervading stench of putrefying bodies, rotting rations, and their own excrement. Clouds of large greenish-blue flies fed off the unburied dead and tormented the living. Sudden torrential rainstorms came in the late afternoon, and sometimes at night. There was no escape from the relentless artillery and mortar barrages. Even among those who were not directly injured by the blasts, the accumulating concussions sapped their strength and spirit. At times the roar and thud of artillery continued from dusk to dawn, making it difficult to get a wink of sleep—but a man who was exhausted enough could sleep even under the muzzles of a 155mm howitzer, which made a sound, said Sterling Mace, another man in Sledge’s platoon, “commensurate to having a subway tunnel running between your ears.”30 When the guns paused, the marines could hear wounded and dying Japanese crying out in the night. Often they cried out for their mothers, as did dying men of all races.
Twilight of the Gods Page 19