Storm Landings

by Joseph H. Alexander

  Unfortunately, the American invasion of Biak coincided with an inspection visit by Lt. Gen. Takazo Numata, chief of staff of the 2d Area Army. Numata assumed command of the garrison, deployed them in natural caves and hastily enlarged extensions along the high ground dominating the airfields, and settled in for an “endurance engagement.” The battle for Biak’s caves took two months and cost three thousand U.S. casualties, plus the relief of the division commander. MacArthur was doubly embarrassed. His promised support to Nimitz failed to materialize, and his press communiqué announcing victory on Biak was several weeks premature. But Biak had been a hell of a fight. Had the Marines and soldiers of the III Amphibious Force studied that battle in the adjoining theater in advance they might not have been as surprised at Peleliu.

  The driving force for Peleliu’s innovative defenses seems to have emanated from the personality of Colonel Nakagawa. We may never know the extent to which he may have benefited from General Numata’s experiences defending Biak or from all the antiamphibious wisdom being collected and disseminated by IGHQ, but Nakagawa had plenty of combat experience in his own right. He had a keen eye for the lay of the land and a respect for the firepower the Americans would bring against his reinforced regiment. He knew their objective would be the airfield. He knew the field lay too close to the obvious landing beaches for him to defend for long. Then he examined the high ground, the ungodly ridges and hills that dominated the island along the northern length. Here he would make his stand.

  Peleliu is barely six miles long by two miles wide and shaped like a lobster claw. The airfields—the main complex in the south and the fighter strip under construction on Ngesebus in the north—lay fully exposed in flat ground. But along the northern edge lay the badlands—a jumble of upthrust coral and limestone ridges, box canyons, natural caves, and sheer cliffs. The natives called this forbidding terrain the Umurbrogal; the Japanese named it Momoji. The Americans would call it Bloody Nose Ridge. But here was a critical intelligence failure. Dense scrub vegetation covered and disguised the Umurbrogal before the bombardment began. Overhead aerial photographs failed to reveal this critical topography to U.S. analysts. That’s why General Geiger was so astonished on D-Day to see such dominant terrain overlooking the airfield and beaches.

  At Nakagawa’s request, General Inoue prevailed on IGHQ to send mining and tunnel engineers to Peleliu to help build the defenses. Within months the forbidding hills and cliffs were honeycombed with more than five hundred caves. Some were five or six stories deep. Some had sliding steel doors to protect heavy weapons. All had alternate exits. All were mutually supporting by observed fire. Here was a classic Fukkaku position defense.

  Roy Geiger’s IIIAC consisted of two divisions, one Army, one Marine. Maj. Gen. Paul Mueller commanded the 81st Division, nicknamed “the Wildcats.” The Wildcats had yet to face combat, but they were enthusiastic, well-trained, ready to fight. Geiger would hold the Wildcats in reserve initially, then unleash them against Angaur and Ulithi. They would also be on call to help out the Marines on Peleliu, if needed. The honor of assaulting Peleliu itself went to the 1st Marine Division, the “Old Breed,” veterans of the earliest pitched battles in the Pacific, Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester. Many of the rank and file of the Old Breed had been deployed in the Pacific for more than twenty months. Said one salty noncom to a greenhorn replacement: “Sonny, I’ve worn out more seabags than you’ve worn out socks!”

  Maj. Gen. William Rupertus commanded the Old Breed. He had seen plenty of fighting in the Solomons and New Britain, but he was impatient, stubborn, and dour. Some contemporaries said he never recovered from the trauma of losing his wife and two children to a scarlet fever epidemic in China a few years earlier. Unlike Geiger, Rupertus held a low opinion of Army forces and viewed Mueller’s Wildcats with suspicion. Rupertus figured his three infantry regimental commanders—Cols. “Chesty” Puller, “Bucky” Harris, and Herman Hanneken—had more combat experience between them than all the officers combined in the Army division.

  The 1st Marine Division had fully earned its spurs and its Presidential Unit Citation at Guadalcanal. By 1944 their veterans were likely the best jungle fighters in the world. But the division also had some shortcomings. While their collective fighting spirit would forever sustain them in combat, the Old Breed would need more than jungle fighting skills to prevail in the cave and mountain warfare waiting them at Peleliu. Also, this would be the division’s first major storm landing. For all the subsequent savagery of the fighting for Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester, the Old Breed had never executed a landing against major opposition in prepared defenses, the Florida Islands notwithstanding. Rupertus did little to close the gap. While the rest of Fleet Marine Forces, Pacific leapt at the opportunity after Tarawa to convert their LVTs into tactical assault vehicles, Rupertus demurred. He preferred their original employment as logistic support vehicles. Nor did Rupertus put much stock in naval gunfire planning. Geiger was shocked to discover that the division went into combat at Peleliu without a designated naval gunfire officer on its general staff. Nor was Geiger impressed with the division’s proposed landing plan: three regiments abreast, only one battalion in division reserve, no interest in asking to earmark one of the Wildcat regiments for backup. But Geiger had arrived late in the planning process because of Guam’s prolonged execution, and he had many other problems to overcome in a very short time.

  Roy Geiger found shortcomings in amphibious intelligence, shipping, training, and naval gunfire support planning. Regarding combat intelligence, while the landing force benefited from the discovery on Saipan of the complete Order of Battle for the Peleliu garrison—who they were, how many shooters they had, what weapons—they had little evidence of Nakagawa’s revolutionary intentions. Geiger’s force also had terrible maps, knew nothing about the convoluted high ground to the north, nor why the Japanese had been unable to finish that fighter strip on Ngesebus.

  The prolonged fighting in the Marianas caused serious conflicts in ship scheduling and critical delays in delivery of combat equipment. Only at the absolute last minute did the 1st Marine Division receive new LVT-4s, flamethrowers, and armored amtracs. One provisional armored amphibian battalion could prepare for Peleliu only by studying blueprints of their new vehicles until their arrival just before embarkation. Because the Marines had to split the four available LSDs with the Army, the Old Breed had to leave sixteen of its forty-six Sherman tanks behind. Rupertus, attuned to jungle warfare, didn’t fight very hard for his abridged tanks or tardy flamethrowers, both of which would be so critical in the Umurbrogal.

  Final amphibious training, hurriedly conducted in congested areas, proved costly and frustrating. The 11th Marines had no place to conduct realistic artillery training on tiny Pavuvu. Said regimental operations officer (and future commandant) Lt. Col. Leonard F. Chapman Jr., “training was reduced to the pitiful expedient of firing into the water with the observers out in a boat or DUKW.” Elsewhere, ships collided, landing craft swamped, men were injured. Rupertus broke an ankle dismounting from an LVT. He would go through the battle with a cane and in constant pain, never capable of observing battle conditions firsthand. Then came more bad news. The battleship California was so heavily damaged in a collision she would miss the campaign, a blow to the already sparse naval gunfire support available.

  Inadequate preliminary naval gunfire would become one of the battle’s low points. At Geiger’s insistence, Rear Adm. George Fort extended the bombardment phase from two days to three, but he could do nothing to increase the original quantity of munitions. Peleliu in those three days would receive less weight of metal than Tarawa had received in its three hours. At one point, Rear Adm. Jesse B. Oldendorf, responsible for executing the bombardment, announced he had “run out of profitable targets.” Oldendorf would become one of the landing force’s most trusted bombardment commanders, but these words quickly came back to haunt him. The 1st Marines in particular were incensed to find “the Point” and a major blockhouse just inland
of their left flank beach untouched by the bombardment—and delivering a murderous fire against the assault waves.

  The Japanese also demonstrated a growing proficiency with mines and obstacles in defending Peleliu. UDT frogmen removed hundreds of antiboat obstacles from the approaches to the landing beaches during dangerous daylight operations. But Nakagawa had his own stealth swimmers. These he sent out the night before D-Day to plant rows of horned antiboat mines 150 yards from the beach. This was a stroke of brilliance, but it failed in execution because Nakagawa’s swimmers in their haste neglected to pull the safety pins from most of the mines. Otherwise, the results could have been disastrous for the landing force. Postlanding sweeps found a large number of these powerful mines with their contact horns crushed by American LVTs, intact but harmless.

  Nakagawa, alerted to the American’s intended beaches by the UDT activity, endeavored to further disrupt the assault by stationing suicide teams in the water along the reef prepared to serve as “human bullets” against tanks and armored amphibians. He also tried to pre-position drums of fuel along the reef with which to ignite a wall of “fire along the seawater.” None of these innovations worked, but Nakagawa’s other plans for sacrificing one battalion to “bleed” the landing succeeded. Aircraft bombs planted vertically in the sand with special contact fuses served as awesome mines. His camouflaged positions of “passive defense” maintained their cover until the initial Marines had stormed inland—then emerged to shoot the next echelons in the back. All this—while Nakagawa’s main force lay in deep shelter in the Umurbrogal.

  “Moments are getting tense now that D-Day is near,” admitted 1st Lt. Richard C. Kennard, an artillery forward observer, to his parents. “Will probably be a dirty little boy for a long time, as there is no water on this island, it being as flat as a pancake. The whole operation will be another Tarawa.”

  General Rupertus was more optimistic. “Rough but fast,” he predicted to his subordinates and the handful of combat correspondents gathered on his flagship. “We’ll be through in three days. It might take only two.” Throughout the landing and the battle ashore Rupertus would exert unholy pressure on his regimental commanders for a speedy conquest. He expected a hot fight but assumed a steady offensive would crack the enemy’s resolve, leading shortly to the traditional mass banzai charge and “open season” slaughter. Then it would be a simple matter of mopping up. The Army could do that.

  The division commander’s prediction spread false optimism among the troops. One man stated, “Hell, I can put up with anything for no longer’n that.” A veteran sergeant took the general’s words to heart, telling his troops, “It’s gonna be ‘In-Again, Out-Again Finnegan!’” Said Rupertus: “Somebody bring me the Jap commander’s dress sword.” All this proved wishful thinking shortly after dawn on D-Day.

  The Japanese sought to disrupt American storm landings with a combination of antiboat mines tied to underwater obstacles in the shallows off likely landing beaches. This sketch reflects their use of coral for cairns and a continuing demand for cement and steel for “horned scullies.” (Larry E. Klatt)

  Peleliu was Pvt. Eugene B. Sledge’s first action, and his subsequent book With the Old Breed has been appraised as the definitive enlisted man’s account of World War II action. In a separate reflection on Peleliu’s fiftieth anniversary, Sledge described his experience in the assault waves on D-Day:

  Mary Craddock Hoffman

  Into the jaws of death. This was D-Day at Peleliu, the beginning of a murderous battle in one of the most obscure corners of the war. (U.S. Naval Institute)

  The beach was a sheet of flame backed by a huge wall of black smoke, as though the island was on fire. . . . Every Marine in that amtrac was sickly white with terror. . . . Heavy Jap artillery and mortars were pounding the beach, and Marines were getting hit constantly. We piled out of our amtrac amid blue-white Japanese machine-gun tracers and raced inland. . . . Back on the reef I saw burning amtracs and struggling Marines. . . . A DUKW came in and stopped, to be hit almost immediately by a large shell that exploded dead center, engulfing it in thick black smoke. I didn’t see anyone get out.

  The Old Breed forced their tanks ashore early, less than five minutes after the last assault wave. Nakagawa had drilled discipline into his antitank gunners—remain under cover, ignore the amtracs, wait for the unmistakable Shermans. Now they blazed away. They had the range—but not the velocity. All but one of the eighteen Shermans assigned to support the 1st Marines received direct hits as they trundled over the reef—some took four hits—but the Japanese gunners succeeded in knocking out only three. Within the next eight months the Old Breed would feature the most effective tank-infantry team in the Pacific. The teamwork the division exhibited getting their Shermans ashore at Peleliu—assigned infantry close at hand, LVTs guiding the approach around submerged shell-holes, each component in positive communications with the others—set the foundation for that professional achievement.

  Colonel Nakagawa had his own tank force, a dozen “tankettes” with 37-mm guns, and these he unleashed against the struggling beachhead at midafternoon. A memorable melee followed. The Americans plastered the lightly armored Japanese tanks with everything but the kitchen sink—Sherman tanks, bazookas, mortars, point-blank artillery fire, even a Navy dive-bomber. Two tanks penetrated to the shore, scaring hell out of all hands in the vicinity, but soon they, too, lurched to a halt, burning fiercely. It was a “use ’em or lose ’em” decision for Nakagawa—his tanks had little value in the Umurbrogal defenses—and this vain charge certainly got the Americans’ attention.

  Getting ashore on D-Day was never rougher than on the extreme left flank, where Capt. George P. Hunt led King Company, 3d Battalion, 1st Marines, against a fortified promontory of coral and boulders, known ever after as “the Point.” Here Nakagawa had constructed five separate pillboxes, four housing 20-mm machine cannons, the fifth a 47-mm anti-boat gun—which took a heavy toll of LVTs by sustained enfilade fire along the beachfront. Hunt found the promontory unassailable from the sea; at best his Marines clutched at the rocky flanks, trying to root out the Japanese literally face-to-face. Nor could the rest of Chesty Puller’s 1st Marines lend a hand. They were fully embattled, and Hunt fought his desperate saga for thirty hours in virtual isolation. At one point during the night, Hunt’s 230-man company was down to 18 Marines, desperately holding on to their small enclave with a captured machine gun and an epic will to win. Those reinforcements who finally fought through to the Point the next afternoon stared in horror. The shot-up bodies of both sides scattered among the rocks resembled the graphic photographs of Devil’s Den at Gettysburg from the previous century.*

  Maj. Jonas M. Platt, operations officer for 3d Battalion, 1st Marines, was frustrated by his inability to relieve Hunt’s isolated company any sooner. “It was a very, very hot beach,” he recalled. Trying to direct naval gunfire against Japanese positions in the highlands, Platt kept getting interrupted by the destroyer skipper asking, “Can you observe? Can you observe?” “Hell, no,” replied Platt, “we’re taking grazing fire right over our hole.”

  No elements of the 1st Marine Division came ashore with impunity on D-Day. The 7th Marines on the right flank encountered an armed promontory of their own (Ngarmoked Island) and experienced great difficulty pushing across the southern end of Peleliu. Correspondent-artist Tom Lea landed with the 7th Marines and looked back at the beach: “Turning my head seaward I saw a direct center hit on an amtrac—pieces of iron and men seemed to sail slow-motion through the air.”

  The 5th Marines in the center escaped the worst of the enfilade fire going in, but then faced the open expanse of the airfield, swept by fire from the high ground, and took the brunt of the Japanese tank attack in the afternoon. Brig. Gen. Oliver P. Smith, assistant division commander, came ashore at noon, but by day’s end there were insufficient LVTs left operational to land the reserves or General Rupertus and his full command group. Smith kept a calm hand on the throttle, accommodated G
eneral Geiger’s surprise visit with aplomb, and succeeded late in the day in establishing communications with Puller, whose 1st Marines had suffered the most on D-Day. The Old Breed occupied a rather disappointing beachhead about three thousand yards long by five hundred yards at its deepest—plus George Hunt’s isolated pocket to the north. Smith had eight infantry battalions ashore, plenty of tanks, and several batteries of 105-mm and 75-mm pack howitzers. All this came at the cost of eleven hundred casualties, including two hundred dead. The grim accounting measured worse than Guam and Tinian, but slightly better than Tarawa or Saipan—to this point.

  Meanwhile, several hundred miles to the southeast, General MacArthur watched with great interest as his 31st Division landed unopposed at Morotai, maintaining the promised “one-two punch” against the threat to his seaward flank. In scattered fighting ashore, the soldiers sustained a hundred casualties while killing or capturing an equal number of Japanese. Combat correspondents described MacArthur ashore looking over the horizon to the Philippines and remarking, “They are waiting for me there—it has been a long time.”

  The Americans on Peleliu would sustain the bulk of their casualties after D-Day in the northern highlands, beginning with the 1st Marines’ assault on Bloody Nose Ridge on D+1 and continuing through the commitment of each Marine and Army regiment during the ensuing ten weeks. This savage fighting raged throughout a forbidding landscape—what one survivor described as “abominable terrain, a submerged reef suddenly thrust upward . . . with ridges as steep as the roof of a house.” Shortly, each contested jumble earned troop nicknames: “the Five Sisters,” “Dead Man’s Curve,” “the China Wall.”