Down on the island’s southern lowlands, the rear-echelon engineering and logistics forces were already hard at work converting Peleliu into an advanced operating base. Three navy construction battalions (“Seabees”) had come ashore on D plus 3. They had improvised an ingenious quarter-mile-long causeway made of pontoon barges, allowing vehicles to drive directly out of the LSTs and over the reefs to Orange Beach. By D plus 4, the airfield and bivouac areas were teeming with trucks and bulldozers. Tent camps were springing up in the palm groves inland of the beaches. The Seabees had orders to extend and grade the main runway to a length of 6,500 feet so that it could accommodate B-24s.31 Bulldozers pushed the wrecked remains of Japanese aircraft to the margins of the airstrips. Trucks carted away debris and brought in crushed coral rock to be turned into concrete. Japanese artillery and mortars on the Urmurbrogal ridges could still hit the northern part of the airfield, so the engineers were obliged to work under fire, and new craters were punched in the runways even as they were filling in the old ones. The air was heavy with dust kicked up by explosions and heavy machinery, and the engineers wore masks to avoid choking on it. “In the north, over Bloody Nose Ridge, I could see the red-orange glare of fire and hear the rumble of war, like continuous thunder,” said Charles S. McCandless, a Seabee lieutenant. “The whole vista was like a scene from The Inferno.”32
A squadron of Marine F4U Corsairs flew into the airfield on September 19 and commenced ground-support operations against Japanese positions on the nearby ridgeline. They dropped 500-pound bombs and napalm, often from very low altitude. These may have been the shortest bombing runs of the entire Pacific War. The Corsairs took off, banked right immediately, and flew low over enemy-held positions in the hills. They dropped their payloads, banked right again, and landed. A typical bombing run lasted less than two minutes; the pilots did not even bother to retract their landing gear.
Ordinary bombs seemed to make little impression against the Japanese subterranean positions, but napalm at least stripped away remaining vegetation, exposing the Japanese firing ports to view. The jellied gasoline incendiary sometimes penetrated into the mouths of the enemy caves, forcing the Japanese to withdraw deeper into their network of underground tunnels.
General Rupertus, failing to grasp the full dimensions of what his division was up against, issued unduly optimistic reports to General Geiger. The Americans now held firm control of the landing beaches, the eastern beaches, the eastern “Lobster’s Claw” peninsula, and the airfield. Elements of the 5th Marines were pushing up the West Road against light and scattered resistance. The 7th Marines had overrun the southern end of the island and were methodically hunting down and killing all Japanese stragglers in that area. Most of the remaining Japanese troops on the island were hemmed in to a shrinking pocket in the Urmurbrogal. One last big offensive push should do it, or so Rupertus and his division staff believed. Constant forward momentum was their governing ideal. Rupertus told Colonel Puller to “hurry up” and break the stalemate. Puller, a famously belligerent warrior who did not need to be cajoled, passed those exhortations down the line to his company commanders, and detached several of his 1st Marines staff personnel for frontline duty. The regiment charged up the Horseshoe again and again, with infantrymen advancing behind tanks and supported by artillery barrages; again and again they were repulsed with heavy casualties. The regiment suffered 1,749 casualties in the first eight days of the battle for Peleliu. Attacking units had suffered 56 percent casualties, including a staggering 71 percent in the 1st Battalion. They had little to show for those awful losses, having made barely any progress into the enemy-held badlands.
When General Geiger first toured Peleliu on September 21, he was alarmed by what he saw. Rupertus and his division command staff showed signs of fatigue and self-doubt, but they were not yet ready to admit that new tactics were needed. At the 1st Marines regimental CP at the base of the Horseshoe Bowl, many of the unit commanders looked to be in a state of physical, emotional, and spiritual exhaustion. They wore gaunt, hunted expressions. Colonel Puller was monosyllabic, virtually catatonic. He and his staff had no ideas other than to bring in reinforcements and attack in greater numbers. Geiger concluded that the 1st Marines were done, that their losses had been too heavy, and that the regiment should be pulled off the line. He decided to bring in part of his corps reserve—a regimental combat team of the army’s 81st Infantry Division. Rupertus objected strenuously, but Geiger had made up his mind. He ordered Puller’s marines to prepare to ship out, and summoned the army RCT to land on Peleliu.
As Gene Sledge’s King Company (3rd Battalion, 5th Marines) moved up the West Road on September 21, they passed a column of 1st Marines coming the other way. Sledge saw immediately that the regiment’s numbers had been severely culled. “What once had been companies in the 1st Marines looked like platoons,” he wrote, and “platoons looked like squads.”33 Sterling Mace, marching in column with Sledge, was thinking along the same lines. One glance at the faces of the men in the shattered regiment was enough to tell him that Peleliu had worse to offer than what his unit had encountered so far. Their brothers coming down from the Horseshoe stared back at them with “eyes glazed and distant . . . they looked like hell, with battered dungarees salted white with sweat, unshaven and filthy from powder burns, blood-stained and near emaciated.” Aware that his regiment was likely to be sent up into those same ridges, Mace wondered if they might be catching a glimpse of “our future selves.”34
Tom Lea, the Life combat artist, sketched a portrait of a marine who had just returned to the bivouac area near Orange Beach after frontline combat. The term “combat neurosis” was just then entering into the medical-military lexicon, and the man in Lea’s painting exhibits the symptoms. He appears gaunt, haggard, and hunted; his pupils are dilated, his jaw hanging open, his eyes lifeless. It is a wretched and inconsolable portrait, analogous to Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting The Scream. Lea’s painting, entitled That 2,000-Yard Stare, ran in the June 1945 issue of Life. It remains one of the most famous (or infamous) artworks of the Second World War.
Eight days after D-Day on Peleliu, Operation STALEMATE was threatening to live up to its name. The Japanese had beat back every concerted thrust into their “pocket” in the ridges. With possession of the high ground, they could and did harass the airfield with intermittent mortar and artillery fire. Navy patrols discovered that enemy reinforcements carried by barges and small craft were landing on the northern shore of the island. Division command insisted on securing northern Peleliu, which meant driving up the West Road in force and securing it against artillery and sniper fire. Two regiments, one army and one marine, began probing attacks up the road. In a section designated “Sniper’s Alley,” the rugged cliffs of the Urmurbrogal protruded toward the coast, funneling the American forces into a narrow pass between a mangrove swamp and enemy-held high ground. Snipers fired from the ridges on the right and the swamps to the left, killing or wounding many dozens of soldiers and marines. The road was mined and booby-trapped with tripwires and other devices. These impediments inevitably slowed any progress, but getting control of the West Road was deemed essential, and Rupertus continued to push them hard. Given the bloody stalemate in the Horseshoe Bowl, he hoped to find a more profitable route into the Urmurbrogal pocket from the north.
On September 23, the army’s 321st RCT launched a general attack on the ridgeline from a staging point just south of Garekoru Village. With the close support of naval gunfire from warships offshore, the soldiers made good initial progress.35 Under cover of jungle vegetation, they penetrated inland to a distance of about 1,200 yards, cleaning out several caves and pillboxes, killing about thirty enemy soldiers, and seizing much more territory than they had anticipated. The sudden advance took the Japanese by surprise; they had not deployed strong forces to defend that part of their perimeter. Nightfall brought punishing counterattacks, however, and by midday on September 24 the attackers were wondering whether they had bitten off more than they
could chew. The front line having been pushed far up into the ridges, the supply line from the coast was long and precarious, over rocky and uneven ground. Ammunition, fresh water, and rations had to be carried in by hand, over a half-mile route that led up and over steep slopes and down through deep ravines. The Japanese counterattacked vigorously. Artillery and mortar fire continued unabated. The wounded had to be brought out on stretchers, a painstaking effort that caused great pain to the injured men, and many stretcher bearers were struck down by snipers. The Americans dared not leave their wounded behind, knowing that they were liable to be tortured to death.36
As always, the Japanese came at night, either singly or in small parties. In the nocturnal stillness, every sound was dramatically amplified. Captain Hunt wrote of the nearly unbearable strain of those nights on Peleliu: “When one lies in a hole peering intently into die black, listening, smelling, hearing only the sound of one’s breathing, waiting, expecting, the stillness may become appalling, dead objects may rise slowly and live, the motionless may move, sounds of leaves stirred by the breeze may become the sneaking movements of human feet, a friend may be an enemy, an enemy a friend, until, unless controlled by toughness of mind, one’s imagination may become haunted by the unseen and the unheard.”37 Some men went mad, and began shouting in their madness. They were pulled off the line immediately, because a marine who could not stay quiet endangered his comrades. Japanese night-infiltrators wore split-toed canvas tabi shoes that made no sound, and attacked silently with knives, swords, or bayonets. According to Corporal Burgin, a Japanese soldier snuck into a firing nest on a ridgetop one night and began choking a marine in his squad. The man woke up and jammed his fingers into the Japanese soldier’s eye sockets, then threw him from the cliff. “I heard the Jap screaming all the way down, from the second his eyes were gouged until he hit the bottom,” Burgin wrote. “I’ve never heard such a bloodcurdling sound in my life.”38
As on Saipan two months earlier, clouds of bloated metallic greenish-blue flies rose from the rotting, unburied bodies of the dead. They buzzed loudly in the air, though they seemed to prefer to crawl rather than fly. They fed on the remains of discarded food, on excrement, on blood and bodies; they crawled into the men’s canteen cups and lighted down upon their ration cans. They were lazy and seemingly stubborn. Unintimidated by a waved hand, they had to be shaken or plucked away from a spoon or fork. After the experience on other Pacific killing fields, this fly infestation had been anticipated. Experts from the U.S. Department of Agriculture were flown in to run an island-wide extermination campaign. Hundreds of barrels of DDT were stored in the holds of the transport fleet offshore. The chemical was mixed with diesel oil and sprayed throughout the island, especially over corpses. More than three hundred sanitary squads, with tanks of the mixture strapped to their backs, sprayed it over the dead, over pools of standing water, and around “kitchens, messes, and latrines.”39 Truck-mounted sprayers coated much of the area around the beaches. The sanitation teams even found a way to cover the contested ground in the ridges. A TBM Avenger was fitted with gasoline-powered aerial sprayers, and an aircraft refueling pump system was used to pump the solution from belly tanks. The system sprayed about one hundred gallons per minute. By these means the insecticide was spread widely over the Urmurbrogal, settling indiscriminately on both enemy and American positions, coating the living and the dead. These efforts appeared to reduce—but did not eliminate—the fly population.40
By the first week of October, most of the front-line infantrymen were nearing the end of their endurance. Three weeks might as well have been three months or even three years. Sledge remembered Peleliu as “a nether world of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning; life had no meaning. The fierce struggle made savages of us all.”41 Lieutenant McCandless had compared Peleliu, as did many others who served and fought there, to Dante’s vision of hell in The Inferno. But a closer fictional likeness was found in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Like the “black land” of Mordor, the battleground was a foul, evil-smelling wasteland—stripped of its greenery, shrouded in haze, and sealed off by forbidding razorback ridges. An army of cunning troglodytes had burrowed deep into the earth, and could cross beneath mountains through elaborate subterranean networks of tunnels and caverns. To their opponents, these foes seemed every bit as cruel and scarcely more human than Tolkien’s orcs. Even the vile realm’s name, Urmurbrogal, might have been borrowed from a map of Middle Earth—and like Tolkien’s fictional battle for Middle Earth, this was a war to be won by total extermination of the enemy.
On D-Day, Sledge had been taken aback to witness a veteran of his company “field-stripping” a dead Japanese soldier for valuables and souvenirs. But he and the other fresh “boots” of the 1st Marine Division were soon inured to far more ghastly scenes. On much of the battlefield it was impossible to dig graves in the rocky ground. Bodies rotted in the heat for weeks. They bloated, darkened, and broke open like rotten fruit. Sledge’s unit found their way around the terrain by using familiar corpses as landmarks. “It was gruesome to see the stages of decay proceed from just killed, to bloated, to maggot-infested rotting, to partially exposed bones—like some biological clock marking the inexorable passage of time.”42 Sledge watched a young marine pass the time by tossing rocks into the rain-filled broken skull of a dead Japanese, “as casually as a boy casting pebbles into a puddle on some road back home; there was nothing malicious in his action.”43
The Americans would take deadly risks to remove their own dead from the battleground, to be buried near the beach. But it was not always possible to do so immediately. Mutilation of enemy dead was an offense committed on both sides. Sledge recalls finding the remains of dead marines whose corpses had been hideously dismembered: heads and hands cut off and penises severed and stuffed into their mouths. “My emotions solidified into rage and a hatred for the Japanese beyond anything I ever had experienced,” he wrote. “From that moment on I never felt the least pity or compassion for them no matter what the circumstances.”44 Japanese dental practices of that era used gold to fill cavities, so many of the enemy soldiers had gold-crowned teeth. Some Americans made a practice of “harvesting” those prizes from the enemy dead. In a scene witnessed by Sledge, a marine attempted to extract a gold tooth from the mouth of a wounded enemy soldier by cutting it out with his kabar knife:
Because the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about, the knife point glanced off the tooth and sank deeply into the victim’s mouth. The Marine cursed him and with a slash cut his cheeks open to each ear. He put his foot on the sufferer’s lower jaw and tried again. Blood poured out of the soldier’s mouth. He made a gurgling noise and thrashed wildly. I shouted, “Put the man out of his misery.” All I got for an answer was a cussing out. Another Marine ran up, put a bullet in the enemy soldier’s brain, and ended his agony. The scavenger grumbled and continued extracting his prizes undisturbed.45
Trophy-taking and mutilation of enemy dead were prohibited by standing orders. But in that disordered environment, amidst such unremitting brutality, it seemed beside the point to object directly on moral grounds. The infantryman who wanted to dissuade a comrade from engaging in such practices offered practical objections. He appealed to field sanitation standards, for example, or the risk of being caught and punished, or a desire to keep the stench of decaying flesh at bay. Taking teeth from Japanese corpses, he warned, might expose the taker to dangerous germs. As a last resort, he might point out that the people back home would never understand. Another marine in Sledge’s platoon carried a Japanese hand with him for a time. He wrapped it in wax paper and kept it in his pack, intending to take it home with him when they left the island. Sledge and several others objected. The officers would bring him up on charges, they told him. The hand would stink up the ship. It gave them the creeps. Finally, and reluctantly, the man threw his souvenir away. “The war had gotten to my friend,
” Sledge reflected. “He was a twentieth-century savage now, mild mannered though he still was. I shuddered to think that I might do the same thing if the war went on and on.”46
Belatedly Rupertus recognized that his hoped-for quick hard fight was not to be. The Urmurbrogal pocket was a sophisticated fortress, shrewdly embedded in the terrain, and designed to inflict maximum casualties on attackers. The enemy’s elaborate cave-and-tunnel system had been constructed over many years with the aid of miners and mining engineers. Patience and new tactics were required. The last phase of the battle would be a painstaking battle of attrition. Progress against the defenders came slowly, in fits and starts. Territory was to be taken yard by yard. Armored vehicles advanced into the ridgelines and fired back at Japanese positions. Their main objective was to discover the location of all Japanese guns and firing ports, and to strip away all remaining vegetation. The Americans mapped the entire battlefield, down to minute detail, including the position of every known enemy firing port. A day’s progress might be measured by five or ten yards. Perhaps the marines might lift a heavy artillery piece to some new promontory, using steel cables run through a block and tackle rig. The newly placed gun might then manage to land direct hits on troublesome cave entrances or embrasures higher up the ridge. The 155mm howitzer was large enough to take the ridges down, chunk by chunk—and with the use of these weapons they began destroying and blasting out cave entrances.
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