Storm Landings

by Joseph H. Alexander

  Many proven combat leaders found little respite before being tested again on yet another hellacious beach. Five infantry battalion commanders who survived Tarawa went down in the Marianas—Lt. Col. Kenneth McLeod and Maj. John F. Schoettel killed; Lt. Col. Henry P. Crowe, Lt. Col. Lawrence C. Hays, Lt. Col. Raymond L. Murray wounded. A Japanese sniper shot Lt. Col. Evans F. Carlson on Saipan, in effect knocking the controversial former Raider out of the war. Another sniper on Guam killed Lt. Col. Samuel D. Puller, executive officer of the 4th Marines and brother of the legendary Col. Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller.

  These losses were matched by proportional, if less heralded, losses among the key NCO ranks. Survival odds for infantrymen, engineers, and amtrackers were never good; spread over several battles along the seemingly endless road to Japan they seemed prohibitive. A sign post on Tarawa in mid-1944 seemed to reflect this cynicism. One arrow read “To Tokyo, 3130 miles”; another: “To Frisco—what the hell do YOU care? You’re not going there”; and another predicted: “The Golden Gate in ’48; the Bread Line in ‘49.”

  American troops invading the final bastions of the Central Pacific would face larger, more experienced, and more heavily armed Japanese garrisons, each offering an elaborate defense in depth among convoluted terrain. Japanese commanders from this point forward would prove very adept at training and motivating the assortment of veterans and rookies, soldiers and sailors in their ranks. Imperial Army artillery units, absent from the Gilberts and Marshalls, had shown their worth under disorganized conditions at Saipan. Now, increasingly, they would dominate the fighting to come at Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. The Japanese 70-mm howitzers fired by rikusentai troops at Tarawa had proven deadly enough; ahead lay 155-mm field guns, 8-inch naval rockets, 320-mm spigot mortars.

  Also ahead, waiting for the U.S. amphibious forces, would be mines—more numbers and a greater variety than ever used in the Pacific. Among the most common would be the Type 98 hemispherical antiboat mines—“the steel basketball with horns”—which were packed with forty-six pounds of trinitroanisol boosted by picric acid. More lethal improvisation lay ahead: converted depth charges and thousand-pound bombs buried vertically under the sands with contact detonators.

  The Japanese in the coming fights would continue to demonstrate their mastery of the night. “They’ve taken Indian warfare and applied it to the 20th century,” said Merritt A. “Red Mike” Edson, the highly decorated veteran of Tulagi, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and Saipan. But now there would be far fewer of the wasteful banzai charges and much greater emphasis on small-unit infiltration—“prowling wolves,” General Kuribayashi would call them.

  And still to come would be the greatest threat yet to the seemingly unstoppable American amphibious juggernaut—the special attack units, Japan’s last, forlorn, deadly hope—the young kamikaze pilots, suicide boat crews, and “human bullet” antitank squads.

  * Although smaller in scope and less significant strategically, MacArthur’s end-run amphibious strike at Hollandia would approximate his subsequent brilliant strike at Inchon during the Korean War six years later.

  * This was the case at Saipan, Peleliu, and Okinawa, but multiple UDT operations at Guam further confused the Japanese, and the frogmen at Iwo Jima conducted identical sweeps on both coasts.

  Chapter Six

  Bloody Peleliu

  Don’t kid yourself that the end is in sight out here; we’re still nibbling at the edges, and the predominant Japanese Army has not yet really been hurt.

  Vice Adm. Theodore S. Wilkinson, USN

  Commander, III Amphibious Force,

  Summer 1944

  By September 1944 Adm. Chester Nimitz commanded more men and machines of war than all the fabled conquerors of antiquity combined. His joint staff had expanded tenfold since 1941 and now operated at an intensity level best described as “controlled frenzy”—peaking with the mount-out of each new campaign. Such had particularly been the case in getting Operation Stalemate II underway, the prophetically named, frequently altered campaign to seize the Palau Islands in the western Carolines. Stalemate II had seemed snake-bit from the start—delayed and short-changed by the extended Guam campaign, shackled by late-arriving combat equipment and too few ships, marred by costly collisions and other accidents during the training phase. But the diverse components of the task force had sailed on schedule and now, 12 September (Pearl Harbor time), had converged off Peleliu. Indeed, Vice Adm. Theodore S. Wilkinson’s III Amphibious Force had already commenced advanced operations against that small island.

  Nimitz, who had learned the ways of the sea from his mariner grandfather, knew he had done his best to prepare his lieutenants for the assault. Now came the hard part: waiting for the battle reports. Few commanders handled this nail-biting pressure better than Nimitz. Those who knew him best, however, discerned a pattern to his activities during these periods of tense anticipation. When he was upbeat and confident, Nimitz passed the time by pitching horseshoes. When he was concerned, the admiral sought to steady his nerves by firing his target pistol on the small range adjacent to his Pearl Harbor headquarters. Nimitz fired thousands of rounds while waiting for news of the storm landing at Peleliu.*

  Nimitz had promised Douglas MacArthur in the presence of President Roosevelt the previous summer that he would support his adjoining theater commander’s long-anticipated return to the Philippines. MacArthur worried about the threat to his right flank in advancing from New Guinea to Mindanao posed by Japanese airfields on Peleliu in the Palaus and on Morotai in the Moluccas. The two commanders agreed to attack both islands on 15 September, MacArthur against Morotai, Nimitz against Peleliu.

  Nimitz knew he had gotten the short end of the stick. Less than two hundred Japanese defended Morotai. He already knew from documents captured on Saipan that more than ten thousand veterans from the Kwantung Army defended Peleliu and neighboring Angaur. He also knew the Japanese had expected his forces to strike the Palaus immediately after the Marshalls. He had outfoxed them by attacking the Marianas instead, but now came the payback—the Peleliu defenders would surely have taken every advantage of the three-month grace period to enhance their fortifications. Both “Bull” Halsey and “Howlin’ Mad” Smith had dourly predicted in advance that Peleliu could be “another Tarawa.” While neither Nimitz nor his staff shared that pessimism, no one expected a cakewalk. Nimitz also realized he did not have his “first team”—Spruance, Turner, Hill, Smith—assigned to this campaign, but that fact didn’t bother him. Nimitz’s great strength lay in his ability to appraise and select commanders. He had plenty of confidence in the newly formed Third Fleet team of Halsey, Wilkinson, Rear Adm. George H. Fort, and Marine major general Roy S. Geiger. Still, Nimitz fired his target pistol, magazine after magazine, waiting.

  Abruptly, at this eleventh hour, came a thunderbolt from Halsey. In a flash precedence, top secret message to Nimitz, intended for the Joint Chiefs, Halsey recommended major revisions to the conduct of the Pacific War. While rampaging through the Philippines with his fast carrier task forces, Halsey had found surprisingly light opposition. In his view, the door to the central Philippines lay open (“this was the vulnerable underbelly of the Imperial Dragon”). His message suggested mind-boggling changes: cancel the invasion of Mindanao altogether; strike instead at Leyte, and do so two months early; cancel the entire Palaus operation; redeploy the Army’s XXIV Corps (scheduled to seize Yap and Ulithi) to MacArthur for Leyte.

  Nimitz never kept a diary nor wrote a “tell-all” book after the war. We can only surmise that Halsey’s breathless message caused him great irritation. For one thing, there was very little time to decide. Operation Stalemate II had already begun; D-Day at Peleliu was less than three days off. Second, the timing couldn’t be worse. These decisions would affect the entire Pacific War, but MacArthur was under way with the Morotai assault force under radio silence and Adm. Ernie King out of town at the Combined Chiefs’ “Octagon” Conference in Quebec. There was probably another, more subtle factor a
t work. While Nimitz and his staff admired the tactical bravery of “Bull” Halsey, they had less regard for his strategical acumen. Then, too, the CINCPAC staff had worked hard to get the Stalemate II forces under way; reversing that momentum would be costly to do and bad on morale.

  Against this background, Nimitz and his valued planner Forrest Sherman reviewed the bidding. Nothing Halsey said really changed the obligation of CINCPAC to protect MacArthur’s return to the Philippines by forcibly eliminating the Japanese threat at Peleliu. Yes, they could forgo Yap and loan MacArthur the temporary use of the XXIV Corps. Bypassing Mindanao, advancing Leyte? MacArthur’s call. But Peleliu would go as planned.

  That was the substance of the CINCPAC endorsement on Halsey’s message. King and the other Joint Chiefs, with subsequent input from MacArthur’s staff, bought the recommendations as modified by Nimitz. Peleliu’s storm landing would stand.

  Nimitz made decisions every day of the war that sealed the fate of men under his command. This decision had terribly fateful consequences. Yet it is difficult to fault the man based on what he thought he knew at the time. Peleliu’s unsavory aftertaste would be more a product of unexpected tactics by the Japanese garrison and unimaginative division-level leadership on the part of the landing force than the strategic rationale for the campaign. More than anything else, Peleliu would represent the dynamic relationship between American’s growing amphibious virtuosity vis-à-vis the Japanese search for effective countermeasures the final year of the war.

  Maj. Gen. Roy S. Geiger, the gregarious Marine aviator commanding III Amphibious Corps at Peleliu, became the first senior American officer to sense the changes in Japanese “antiamphibious doctrine.” Eight weeks earlier he had commanded IIIAC against stiff but predictable Japanese defenses at Guam. But this D-Day—15 September 1944—seemed different. Status reports reaching Geiger on the flagship Mount McKinley from assault elements ashore were garbled and incomplete. He could neither grasp the situation nor understand why the assault momentum seemed so badly stalled.

  His staff knew Geiger to be a commander who liked to see things firsthand. In earlier campaigns (and again at Okinawa) the Old Man was prone to disappear from headquarters, “borrow” an aircraft, and fly over the battlefield to assess the situation directly. On D-Day at Peleliu, frustrated by conflicting reports, Geiger simply walked down the ship’s accommodation ladder, hailed a passing landing craft with all the nonchalance of a man flagging a taxi, and took off for the beach.

  As he approached the reef, Geiger immediately recognized two facts. First, the truncated naval gunfire bombardment had failed to take out several cleverly hidden antiboat guns on both flanks of the beaches. At least twenty-four LVTs and countless DUKWs now burned in the shallows from direct hits at short range. Second, judging from the recurring booms of heavy artillery firing from a forbidding ridgeline dominating the island—and where the hell did that ridge come from?—the Japanese had adopted a defense-in-depth for Peleliu. Gaining the beach with considerable difficulty, Geiger worked his way forward and stuck his head up over the berm to appraise the airfield. At that instant, a major-caliber Japanese round nearly tore his head off. The Corps commander slithered quickly down to cover, visibly shaken. Guam had been rough. But Peleliu looked absolutely lethal. Now they were facing a pro team.

  The forcible seaborne assault of Peleliu and its subsequent battle ashore would prove Geiger right. This was a strange, transitional, costly campaign. The landing was bad enough. There followed a desperate, prolonged battle under unimaginable conditions of hellish heat and twisted terrain—vicious, point-blank fighting that would last ten weeks and cost nearly ten thousand American casualties. “Everything about Peleliu left a bad taste in your mouth,” said one survivor. Indeed, the battle became one of the most controversial—and obscure—conflicts in the entire war. Yet for all its waste and sacrifice, the fighting on Peleliu yielded useful operational benefits. While no one knew it at the time, it would be Peleliu—not Saipan or Guam—that would reflect the future of storm landings to come at Iwo Jima and Okinawa and, potentially, Kyūshū. Whatever could be learned here, at whatever cost, would help prepare for the even bigger bloodbaths ahead.

  The Palaus anchor the western edge of the Carolines, the most extensive island chain in the world, spanning thirty-three degrees of longitude just north of the equator. The Palaus themselves are an unremarkable string of islands ranging about one hundred miles from Ulithi in the north to Peleliu and Angaur in the south. Babelthuap, by far the largest, almost as large as Guam, lies just south of center. Adjacent to Babelthuap, the Japanese maintained an administrative center in Koror, the long-time capital of their mandated possessions in the Pacific. The strategic value of the Palaus stems from pure geography: they lie nearly equidistance from New Guinea, the Marianas, and Mindanao. The Japanese called the Palaus “the spigot of the oil barrel,” the gateway to their petroleum resources in the East Indies.

  Admiral Koga’s precipitous abandonment of Truk with his Combined Fleet during the Marshalls campaign left all of the Carolines vulnerable to American amphibious assault, including the lightly fortified Palaus. The degree to which IGHQ took this vulnerability seriously can be measured by their decision to withdraw the 14th Division from the Kwantung Army for deployment to the Palaus as early as April 1944. The 14th Division had a proud combat record dating back to the Sino-Japanese War of the last century. Many of the current troops had fought the Russians or the Chinese. This was a well-trained, cohesive, heavily armed unit, proud to be “Manchukuoan” veterans and boastful of their new motto, Breakwater of the Pacific.

  Maj. Gen. Sadae Inoue deployed most of his division—some twenty-five thousand troops—on Babelthuap, expecting the main American attack there. He also assigned a large garrison to defend Yap. To Peleliu he dispatched a reinforced regiment; to Angaur a reinforced battalion. While Babelthuap had a military airfield, the one on Peleliu was better, a two-strip, hard-surfaced facility for medium bombers and fighters. Japanese engineers also had an auxiliary strip under construction on the small island of Ngesebus, joined to Peleliu by a causeway.

  Col. Kunio Nakagawa commanded the 2d Infantry Regiment (with two battalions of the 15th) on Peleliu. Altogether, Army and Navy combined, the Japanese force on the island would number well over ten thousand. When early Army-Navy squabbling threatened to interfere with defensive preparations, Inoue sent down his trusted assistant Maj. Gen. Kenjiro Murai, who served unobtrusively as Nakagawa’s “tactical assistant” and kept the Navy admiral in line.

  Peleliu’s unique and remarkable defenses may have had several architects. Inoue and his talented chief of staff, Col. Tokechi Tada, certainly contributed; Murai and Nakagawa contributed the most; the faceless IGHQ provided top-level doctrinal impetus.

  IGHQ took exceptional measures following the fall of the Marianas to devise more practical countermeasures against American storm landings. Indeed the Imperial Army, increasingly taking on the lion’s share of defense responsibilities within the Absolute National Defense Sphere, formed antiamphibious research teams to analyze lessons learned from each battle. Among the lessons learned from Saipan, for example, emerged these blunt recommendations:

  • “Prepare for the worst on the assumption of defending without control of either the air or the sea.”

  • “Enemy preparation fires for a beach assault are beyond imagination, which is ten to twenty thousand tons. The enemy will continue to increase preparatory bombardment in order to minimize his casualties.”

  • “The enemy is expected to choose landing sites where he can land at relative ease, disembark rapidly, and have easy access to airfields.”

  Japanese forces on Guam had little time to inculcate lessons learned at Saipan into their own defense plans, but they did experiment successfully with employing a few major weapons forward along the beach in heavily fortified and camouflaged positions. The final reports from the Guam garrison, like those at Saipan, suggested the futility of trying to defend the s
horeline. “Although there is a need for beach positions to disrupt the enemy landing,” said one staff officer, “it is dangerous to depend on them too much. There is need for preparation of strongpoints from which to launch counterattacks, and for deep resistance zones adjacent to waterfront positions.”

  Imperial General Headquarters in August 1944 published “Defense Guidance on Islands,” which reflected the bitter lessons of the Marianas, recommended defense in depth, and advised against “reflex, rash counterattacks.” Army field commanders noted the transition from seeking the elusive “decisive engagement”—ludicrous in the absence of air or naval superiority—to a much more realistic policy of “endurance engagement.” Policy statements began to include the phrase “Fukkaku positions,” defined as underground, honeycombed defensive positions.

  The Americans had first encountered primitive Fukkaku positions as early as Gavutu-Tanambogo in 1942. By May 1944, when the 41st Division landed on Biak in the Schouten Islands as part of MacArthur’s New Guinea campaign, the Japanese had developed Fukkaku positions to a disturbingly systematic level. MacArthur had promised Nimitz he would provide shore-based, long-range bomber and reconnaissance support from captured Japanese airfields on Biak in time for the Saipan invasion. Two weeks, planners figured, should be enough time to overcome the forty-four-hundred-man garrison and get the fields operational. When the 41st Division’s vigorous landings on Z-Day met only sporadic resistance, it seemed the planners had been right.