Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  On September 27, while the Fifth began attacking east to seal off the northern tip of Peleliu, the 321st made the maneuver which cut off the Umurbrogal Pocket.

  Captain George Neal of the 2nd Battalion, 321st, formed a task force of seven Sherman tanks, six amtracks, one amtrack flame-thrower and 45 riflemen. He led them up West Road, came to the captured junction and turned down East Road on a southward run that brought his force up behind the enemy. When Task Force Neal came up against Hill 100 and killed 15 Japanese in a brief fight, the Umurbrogal Pocket was contained.

  Above Neal’s force, the Fifth had been caught between two fires.

  On their right, they had come up against the biggest cave on Peleliu. It housed 1,000 men and occupied all of the island’s northernmost ridge. Its seaward tip loomed over the road, here so narrow as to allow only a single tank to pass. Its face was freckled with cavemouths. The moment a tank nosed around its snout, it was struck. The moment infantry sought to crawl along the road they were hit from cavemouths on the right and from Japanese gunners across the 1,000-yard strait on Ngesebus and its adjoining isle of Kongauru to its right or east.

  The Marines called for naval gunfire on Kongauru. They brought land-artillery fire down on Ngesebus, firing smoke-shells every fourth round to disconcert the enemy while nine Sherman tanks rolled into range to fire nothing but smoke. Then they sent five armored amtracks wallowing into the strait. The amtracks sailed 300 yards, wheeled, swiveled their guns around and poured a terrible flat fire into the cavemouths. While they did, Shermans swept along the road and around the snout with infantry following. Following them came an amtrack flame-thrower, which doubled back to burn out the cavemouths.

  That happened on September 27, the day after Major Robert (Cowboy) Stout brought the white-nosed Corsairs of Squadron 114 into Peleliu.

  Now, the Marine fliers would get their first chance to show how well they had developed that tactic of close-up support first used at Hellzapoppin’ Ridge on Bougainville. Cowboy Stout’s low-chargers were to support the Third Battalion, Fifth, during the invasion of Ngesebus on September 28.

  The Marines crossed the strait in amtracks, after an hour of naval gunfire, aerial bombing and shelling by corps and division artillery. Two hundred yards from the beaches, the Corsairs roared over them and began to strafe. They kept it up until the Marines were but 30 yards from the shore, and they struck at levels so low the terrified Japanese were unable to defend the beaches. The landing was made without a single casualty, although 50 Japanese were killed or captured in coastal pillboxes.

  At three o’clock in the afternoon—six hours after the assault began—all but a few hundred yards of Ngesebus had fallen. The rest, with the airfield and adjoining Kongauru Islet, was in Marine hands. There had been 28 men lost.

  The next day Major Stout’s fliers were strafing and bombing up and down the Umurbrogal Pocket, helping the Seventh Marines hammer where the First Marines had left off. Day after day, Corsairs made the fifteen-second run from airfield to Bloody Nose Ridge to drop tanks of napalm on the Japanese, banking and landing to rearm without having bothered to retract landing gear.

  “The enemy plan,” Colonel Nakagawa reported to General Inoue, “seems to be to burn down the central hills post to ashes by dropping gasoline from airplanes.”

  But as the typhoon edged nearer and sullen rains fell on Peleliu, Colonel Nakagawa began to experience less difficulty with napalm and soon had trained his men to keep very low whenever the Corsairs were flying over The Pocket. So the Corsairs began to drop unfused tanks of napalm, leaving it to the attacking Marines to set them alight when they chose by dropping white phosphorous shells on them. When the typhoon’s rains did come they were a blessing to Nakagawa’s remnant. The Japanese had begun to run out of water. Now they trapped enough in underground cisterns to last for months.

  Meanwhile, the Seventh Marines had relieved the 321st of their sector in the west, had held there and begun a steady drive from the north and east. They fought against an enemy maintaining an extraordinary discipline. Marines could move through a draw conscious of hundreds of hostile eyes focused on them, and not be fired at. But when they attempted to get a tank through the draw, or tried scaling the ridges—then it fell in fury. At night, the Japanese swarmed from their caves as infiltrators. They caused little trouble to veteran Marines, but they killed many souvenir-hunters. Sailors and service troops who wandered up to The Pocket in search of souvenirs or thrills oftentimes never came out of it alive. Some were even impressed as riflemen by Marine commanders who needed reinforcements and were not fussy about how they were obtained. There were also Marine airmen and service troops who came up to The Pocket for the express purpose of fighting.

  Still Nakagawa held out. As September turned into October, his men had inflicted so many casualties on the gradually advancing Seventh Marines that their ranks were almost as badly depleted as the First’s had been. On October 4, with the two most vital of the eastern ridges in their hands, the Seventh Marines made their last attack. The Third Battalion tried to take Baldy Ridge, hoping thus to drive a deep wedge from the east. To get at Baldy, L Company struck at Ridge 120 to its left or south. From this, they hoped to strike Baldy in the flank and rear. A force of 48 men took Ridge 120 with ease. They turned to drive at Baldy and found they were in a trap.

  The Japanese struck at these exposed Marines from Baldy and a ring of strong-points, hitting them with small arms, machine guns, cannon and mortars. Gunnery Sergeant Ralph Phillips fell dead at the first machine-gun burst. Men were falling everywhere. Big 230-pound Lieutenant James Dunn attempted to lead the men down the ridge’s sheer face. He was hanging on to rocks when machine guns chugged across the draw and dropped him to his death on the boulders below.

  Now the bullets were spanging among the Marines as they crawled wildly for cover. Some of the wounded urged their comrades to leave, others begged them to stay. A corpsman jumped erect.

  “Take it easy!” he called. “Bandage each other. Get out a few at a time.”

  Then he fell dead.

  Down in the draw, Captain James Shanley watched the slaughter of his men in horror. He bellowed to the men of K Company on his left.

  “For God’s sake, smoke up that hill!”

  K Company’s Marines began hurling smoke grenades into the ravine between their own positions and Ridge 120 to their front and right. Wind wafted a billow of phosphorus over the stricken platoon on the ridge crest. Captain Shanley called for a tank. It came up the draw, but was halted by the boulders. It could not strike at the Japanese, but it became a rallying point for the men on the ridge who were even then pulling out under the smoke.

  Some of them jumped and ran to the tank. But there were still six wounded on the ridge, guarded by three Marines and one of the three corpsmen who had not been killed. The wounded urged the able to leave.

  “You’ve done all you can for us,” one of them sobbed. “Get outta here.”

  The unharmed Marines rolled their stricken comrades over the ledge. They fell among the boulders. One man’s foot caught in a vine and he hung there until a comrade kicked it free. Above them, a trio of Marines who had been playing dead jumped to their feet and ran for the ledge. One was killed but the others jumped to safety.

  In the draw, two wounded men stumbled toward the tank. One of them put his arms around his friend and half-carried him forward. They could not make it. They sank to the ground, and Japanese bullets spurted around them.

  Captain Shanley shook off a lieutenant’s restraining hand and ran out to get them. He seized one man in his arms, ran back to the tank with him, laid him down—and ran out again. But a mortar shell exploded behind Captain Shanley and he fell, mortally wounded. Lieutenant Harold Collis ran to rescue Captain Shanley. He fell beside him, dead.

  Now there was more smoke drifting over the ledge. More of the unharmed Marines jumped to safety. They ran across that terrible draw and only a few survived it. Two who did ran back to rescue the woun
ded. They were killed.

  And then dusk began to veil that tableau of tragedy. Of the 48 men who went up Ridge 121, only 11 came back down—and six of these were wounded. The Seventh Marines could also fight no more. Their casualties were 1,497, nearly matching those of the First.

  It was up to the Fifth Marines to crush less than 1,000 Japanese still living in the constricted Umurbrogal Pocket. They relieved the Seventh on October 6. But the valiant arrogant Fifth, the regiment that had been blooded in Belleau Wood, could not do it either. By October 15, they too were exhausted and their casualties of 1,378 were also nearly 50 per cent.

  On that date, with the assault phase on Peleliu ended, with about 500 of Nakagawa’s men still holding out in a pocket about 400 yards at its widest east-west, about 600 yards at its longest north-south, command on Peleliu passed to Major General Paul Mueller of the 81st Division. There began then a grim, step-by-step reduction that would last a month and would be fought with bulldozers and explosives and bombs and napalm as much as by foot soldiers with hand guns.

  For now the need for speed no longer existed at Peleliu. Five days after the Army took command, General MacArthur’s soldiers began landing at Leyte in the Philippines. Two days more marked the beginning of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the struggle which was the greatest naval battle in history, bringing death to the Japanese Navy and establishing America as the greatest sea power afloat, while also marking the passing of the battleship and introducing that strange new banzai with wings called kamikaze.

  On October 12, the first of the B-29’s landed on Saipan. On November 24, the first B-29 bombing raid was flown from there to Tokyo. On that same night, when the thunder of the monster American bombers could be heard above the Ginza, Colonel Nakagawa and Major General Murai killed themselves on Peleliu. They had destroyed the colors of their commands and they had no one left to command.

  Kunio Nakagawa and his men had inflicted a total of 6,526 casualties on the First Marine Division, of whom 1,252 were killed. They also killed 208 and wounded 1,185 soldiers of the 81st Division. They had made the oldest and most battle-experienced of all the Marine divisions fight for their lives-fight for each other’s lives. In that recurring and noblest phenomenon of the Marines’ war, Lieutenant Carlton Rouh, Corporal Lewis Bausell, Pfc. Richard Kraus, Pfc. John New, Pfc. Wesley Phelps and Pfc. Charles Roan all threw themselves on enemy grenades to save their comrades. Lieutenant Rouh survived his wounds to receive his Medal of Honor. The others did not.

  Out of this Peleliu which gave General MacArthur his secure right flank, which obtained Admiral Nimitz’ anchorage and air base, came the new phenomenon of the war, the Japanese soldier fighting with head as well as heart. Colonel Kunio Nakagawa had shown the world that in place of the fiction of the Japanese warrior irresistible on offense stood the hard fact of the world’s most tenacious defensive fighter immovable except in death.

  There were many more of them. As one who had been overpowered on Saipan snarled to the conquerors who would not let him kill himself: “You may have this island, but back there is the Empire.”

  Against these new warriors, into the heart of this Empire, the Marines would now go charging.

  IV. And No More

  God and the soldier

  All men adore.

  In time of trouble

  And no more;

  For when war is over

  And all things righted

  God is neglected

  The old soldier slighted.

  —Inscription carved in a Stone sentry box on Gibraltar

  1

  It was early 1945 and the Marines had had their second breather.

  They had fought and won seven major actions in 1944, but apart from two artillery battalions fighting in the Philippines, Marine ground forces had not fired a shot since the Fifth Marines came down from the Umurbrogal in mid-October.

  They needed the respite—for the battered First Division to recuperate from Peleliu, for the new Fifth to shake down in Hawaii, for the Third to fill its ranks and train the newcomers by sweeping Guam of its remaining Japanese soldiers, for the Second and Fourth to renew themselves with replacement drafts from the States, for the Sixth to twist the regimental rivalries of the loner Fourth, Twenty-second and Twenty-ninth Marines into the single strand of divisional pride.

  And now there were six full Marine divisions in the field, two corps, a full army, some 200,000 men; the largest, the most successful, the most experienced body of amphibious assault troops the world has known. Before this force, invincible since Guadalcanal, lay two final targets: Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

  Iwo and Okie—the first a bare eight square miles of desolate crag and volcanic ash lying 760 miles south of Tokyo, the second an irregular island 60 miles at its longest, two at its narrowest and 18 at its broadest, but lying only 375 miles below southernmost Japan.

  Iwo would come first, for Iwo was already urgent.

  2

  The B-29 Superforts which had been flying from Saipan to Tokyo since November 24 had been suffering severe losses. Japanese antiaircraft fire was savage. There were many fighter planes left to defend the Japanese home islands, and some would ram a Superfort if they could not shoot it down. And there was no chance of surprise because Iwo-based radar warned the homeland in time to fly off fighter protection.

  Worst of all was the long 1,500-mile flight home. Crippled Superforts unable to fly more than a few hundred miles from Tokyo fell into the sea and were lost with their crews. Those which fell between Iwo and Saipan might be reached by Dumbo rescue planes, but if the crews were saved, the enormously expensive B-29’s were surely lost.

  With Iwo Jima in American hands, the Superforts could fly much closer to Tokyo undetected, they could be escorted over the Japanese capital by Iwo-based fighters, and men shot down off the very shores of Japan might even hope for the arrival of Iwo-based rescue planes. Most important, any Superfort capable of flying halfway home could be saved by an emergency landing at Iwo. With the eventual use of Iwo Jima as a regular stop-off on return flights, smaller gasoline-loads would make possible bigger bomb-loads. Iwo’s own raids on the Marianas would cease, bringing about the release of Marianas-based fighters for use elsewhere, and possession of the island would nail down the right or eastern flank of the Okinawa operation.

  Such was the importance and urgency of Iwo Jima in early 1945. Rarely before had an objective been so clearly necessary. Perhaps never before had so much counted on the seizure of such a no-count place.

  It was only 4½ miles long, 2½ miles wide, this Iwo Jima or Sulphur Island. It was a loathsome little cinder clog, a place black and charred and shaped like a lopsided pork chop. To Major Yokasuka Horie, who had come to it in late 1944, the place was an abomination. It was “only an island of sulphur, no water, no sparrow and no swallow….” Major Horie’s detestation of Iwo was evident in what may stand as one of the world’s most original defense plans, the one he submitted to his superior, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi.

  “Now we have no fleet and no air forces,” Major Horie’s plan stated. “If American forces will assault this island it will fall into their hands in one month. Therefore it is absolutely necessary not to let the enemy use this island. The best plan is to sink this island into the sea or cut the island in half. At least we must endeavor to sink the first airfield.”

  General Kuribayashi rejected the plan. After a few more disagreements with his staff officer, he transferred Major Horie to Chichi Jima, 160 miles to the north. Tadamichi Kuribayashi was like that: curt, stern, cold—one of those moon-faced, pudgy men who are all ruthless energy and driving determination. The troops did not like him. They had no girls of the “comfort troops,” no saki, only duty. They called him a martinet. But Tadamichi Kuribayashi was something more than that: he was a perfectionist.

  He had begun his career in the cavalry, the elite service of the Japanese Army. In 1938 and 1939 he was a colonel commanding the 7th Cavalry Regiment during action in Manchuri
a. In 1940 he was promoted to major general and given the 1st Cavalry Brigade. Two years later he was transferred to Canton and made chief of staff of the 23rd Army. He was called to Tokyo in 1943 on the ineffable assignment of reorganizing the Guards Brigade into the 1st Imperial Guards Division. And Tadamichi Kuribayashi had met the Emperor. Not many Japanese below cabinet rank are so favored, but Tadamichi Kuribayashi was going out to command at Iwo Jima, and Iwo Jima was in the very Prefecture of Tokyo.

  He reached his unlovely black pork chop in June, 1944, taking over the usual mixture of Army and Navy troops which would eventually reach 21,000 men and of which his own 109th Infantry Division formed the nucleus. He sent the civilians back to Japan and grimly told his troops that it looked like a fight to the death. For comfort, he issued the Iwo Jima Courageous Battle Vow. It said:

  Above all else we shall dedicate ourselves and our entire strength to the defense of this island.

  We shall grasp bombs, charge the enemy tanks and destroy them.

  We shall infiltrate into the midst of the enemy and annihilate them.

  With every salvo we will, without fail, kill the enemy.

  Each man will make it his duty to kill 10 of the enemy before dying.

  Until we are destroyed to the last man, we shall harass the enemy by guerrilla tactics.