The Japanese attack failed for two reasons. First, their tanks were small, thinly armored, and lightly gunned. They were no match for American antitank guns, especially the bigger Shermans. “Bazookas helped stop the assault, but it was the General Shermans that did the major portion of the damage,” a Marine combat correspondent wrote. Second, the Japanese attacked over the relatively flat terrain of the airfield into a well-prepared defensive position, making perfect targets of themselves. When the fighting petered out, the shattered hulks of enemy tanks burned in random patterns all around the airfield. Treads and turrets were blown off. Side armor was peppered with holes. Flames consumed metal and flesh alike. Dead, half-burned enemy soldiers—some without legs, arms, or heads—were sprawled around the scorched vehicles, sometimes even wedged underneath their grimy treads. The following day the 5th Marines weathered heavy mortar fire to secure the airfield, the campaign’s major objective. But this hardly seemed to matter. From the coral ridges beyond the airfield, the Japanese poured thick gobs of mortar, artillery, and machine-gun fire onto the vulnerable Americans. The American advance was slow in the face of such ferocious opposition.17
Moreover, the elements were emerging as a real problem. The heat was absolutely brutal. Temperatures reached 105 degrees in the shade, and there was precious little of that to be found anywhere on the beachhead. In the open, the temperatures were at least 115 degrees. It was, in the recollection of one Marine machine gunner, like a “steam room. The sweat slid into one’s mouth to aggravate thirst.” The surviving records most commonly describe the heat as “enervating,” a word that means, according to Webster’s dictionary, “to deprive of vitality.” That certainly held true for many of the Marines. Robert “Pepper” Martin of Time had covered Guam. At Peleliu, he was one of the few civilian correspondents to see the battle firsthand. “Peleliu is a horrible place,” he wrote. “The heat is stifling and rain falls intermittently—the muggy rain that brings no relief, only greater misery. The coral rocks soak up heat during the day and it is only slightly cooler at night. Marines are in the finest possible physical condition, but they wilted on Peleliu. By the fourth day, there were as many casualties from heat prostration as from wounds. Peleliu is incomparably worse than Guam in its bloodiness, terror, climate and the incomprehensible tenacity of the Japs. For sheer brutality and fatigue, I think it surpasses anything yet seen in the Pacific.”
The stress of combat, combined with the unrelenting heat, made for a miserable combination. There was no way to escape the heat. The sun beat down relentlessly, turning the island “into a scorching furnace,” according to one unit after action report. Everyone was sunburned. Jagged coral rocks poked painfully into tender, sun-baked skin. Men sweated profusely. Their fatigues were salt-stained, dripping wet from their smelly perspiration. Salt tablets helped a little bit, but supplies were low. Some Marines collapsed from heat exhaustion. One officer in the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, saw many such men in his outfit “unable to fight, unable to continue. Some were carried out with dry heaves. Others had tongues so swollen as to make it impossible for them to talk or to swallow. Others were unable to close eyelids over their dried, swollen eyeballs. We lost their much needed strength in a critical phase of the operation.”
Dehydrated, frightened, and exhausted, a few broke mentally under the strain of the heat. Private Russell Davis saw a big redheaded Marine, with dried lips and cherry red sunburned skin, completely lose his composure. “I can’t go the heat! I can take the war but not the heat!” he screamed. Davis watched as “he shook his fist up at the blazing sun. Two of his mates pounced on him and rode him down to the earth, but he was big and strong and he thrashed away from them.” Davis never knew the broken man’s ultimate fate.18
To make matters infinitely worse, water was scarce. Each Marine came ashore with two canteens of water, a woefully inadequate ration for Peleliu’s killer heat. Most of the men drank their canteens dry within the first few hours of the invasion. “We had practiced water discipline at great length . . . but the body demands water,” Private Richard Johnston, a machine gunner in the 5th Marines, explained. “No matter how strong your will or how controlled your mind, you either drink what water you have or die in not too long a time.” Medical corpsmen were covered with the blood of wounded men, but now had no water to wash that blood off their hands. With no other choice, they treated their patients with filthy, bloodstained hands. After the chaos of the beach assault abated, and the battle settled into a steady push inland to gain ground, shore parties hauled water ashore, mostly in fifty-five-gallon drums and five-gallon cans. By the second or third day, this water reached the frontline fighters. When a five-gallon can reached Private Sledge’s K Company, 5th Marines, he anxiously held out his canteen cup for a drink. “Our hands shook, we were so eager to quench our thirst. The water looked brown in my aluminum canteen cup. No matter, I took a big gulp—and almost spit it out despite my terrible thirst. It was awful. Full of rust and oil, it stunk. A blue film of oil floated lazily on the surface of the smelly brown liquid. Cramps gripped the pit of my stomach.”
The drums and cans had originally been used to carry fuel. Before the invasion, work parties had not properly cleaned the containers. Thus, when they were filled with warm water, the fuel residue mixed with the water, and the metal of the containers, producing a noxious, unhealthy, rusted, repulsive brown liquid. “Smelling and tasting of gasoline, it was undrinkable,” Robert Leckie, a machine gunner in the 1st Marines, wrote. Nonetheless, many Marines, like Sledge, were so desperately thirsty that they drank the tainted water. Some vomited. Others were incapacitated with sharp cramps and had to be evacuated.
Word of the tainted water spread quickly. Soon the Marines began looking for other ways to slake their acute thirst. Private First Class George Parker’s unit found two Japanese bathtubs filled with used bathwater. “It tasted a little soapy but we drank it. We had no choice.” Private First Class John Huber, a runner in Sledge’s company, was with a group of men who found a shell crater full of water and trash. “We filled our canteens and put in halzone [sic] tablets to purify it.” Sweaty and thirsty, they chugged down the supposedly purified water. Then someone moved a metal sheet from the crater, revealing a dead Japanese soldier floating facedown in the water. A wave of nausea immediately swept over Huber and the others. “We soon started losing the water . . . and everything else we ate during the day.” One of the men in Private Johnston’s company took a canteen off a dead enemy soldier. Another Marine offered the man two hundred dollars for the canteen. Johnston was struck by how starkly different values in combat were in contrast to life back home. Fresh water was “something that in everyday life most people take for granted.” On Peleliu, it was like gold. The man did not sell the water to his buddy. Instead he gave him a drink for free.
Engineers originally believed that Peleliu offered no sources of fresh water. Within a few days, though, they discovered Japanese freshwater wells. They appropriated those and dug several more of their own. By September 19, the wells were yielding about fifty thousand gallons of water per day, enough to sustain each man with a few gallons each day. In addition, the engineers brought desalination equipment ashore. “All we had to do was run this hose into the ocean,” Private First Class Charlie Burchett, an engineer, recalled. “That thing would pump the water through this unit and it comes out nice, cool, just perfect drinking water.” Within a few days, the water crisis passed. Infantrymen were not exactly awash in water, but they had enough to stave off extreme thirst and dehydration. The heat did not abate, though. Neither did Japanese opposition.19
The Destruction of the 1st Marines
Within three days of the invasion, the 1st Marine Division had already suffered over fourteen hundred casualties, in spite of the fact that the division had not even encountered the most difficult Japanese defenses. In the south, the 7th Marines were clearing out the swampy lowlands of the island. In the center, the 5th Marines were pushing from the airfield across the
midsection of the island, fighting their way through plateaus, jungles, and swamps. In the north, the 1st Marines, having overcome the stoutest enemy beach defenses (including the Point), began attacking the daunting ridges of the Umurbrogol. This was the heart of Colonel Nakagawa’s formidable inland defense.
Because of the limits of preinvasion photographic intelligence and inadequate maps, the Marines had little sense of just how daunting the Umurbrogol was until they were enmeshed in it. Already they were referring to this high ground as Bloody Nose Ridge, but it was more than just one ridge. “Along its center, the rocky spine was heaved up in a contorted mass of decayed coral, strewn with rubble, crags, ridges and gulches . . . thrown together in a confusing maze,” the regimental history explained. “There were no roads, scarcely any trails. The pockmarked surface offered no secure footing even in the few level places. It was impossible to dig in: the best the men could do was pile a little coral or wood debris around their positions. The jagged rock slashed their shoes and clothes, and tore their bodies every time they hit the deck for safety.” Even under ideal circumstances, in peacetime, the ground would have been quite difficult to traverse. “There was crevasses you could fall down through,” Sergeant George Peto recalled. “It was a horrible place. If the devil would have built it, that’s about what he’d have done.”
What’s more, it was very difficult to find cover, and the nature of the ground multiplied the fragmentation effect of mortar and artillery shells. “Into all this the enemy dug and tunneled like moles; and there they stayed to fight to the death,” an officer in the 1st Marines wrote. To the Americans, the Japanese cave defenses were unbelievably elaborate. According to one Marine report, they were “blasted into the almost perpendicular coral ridges. The caves varied from simple holes large enough to accommodate two men to large tunnels with passageways on either side which were large enough to contain artillery or 150mm mortars and ammunition.” Some of the caves even had steel doors. All of them were well camouflaged, with nearly perfect fields of fire. Naval gunfire, air strikes, and even artillery only had so much effect against these formidable hideouts. Only infantry and tanks could hope to destroy them, and this had to be done at close range, under extremely dangerous circumstances.20
On the day of the invasion, Colonel Puller’s 1st Marines had 3,251 men. By the time the regiment attacked the Umurbrogol, the unit had already lost about 900 men, many of whom had fallen victim to heat exhaustion. Since most of the casualties occurred in the rifle companies, they were well understrength now. This was scarcely a recipe for success, but Marines pride themselves on doing the unlikely, if not the impossible. Between September 17 and 21, Colonel Puller hurled his regiment, plus an attached battalion from the 7th Marines and a few tanks, into frontal attacks to take this high ground.
The true horror of this fighting is almost impossible to describe. The ridges were steep, so much so that some were little more than sheer rock faces, dotted only with fortified caves. The peaks of ridges were often so pointed that men could not stand on them. The rocky, crevassed ground was so unstable that troops could not hope to keep their footing, much less maneuver in any coherent fashion. So the mere act of climbing the ridges, moving around, in suffocating heat, was challenging enough for the men. Under perfect circumstances, it would have been extremely difficult to overpower such a formidable network of caves. Under these conditions, it was a veritable impossibility, even for the gallant Marines. One of Puller’s battalion commanders, Major Ray Davis, who would later earn the Medal of Honor in Korea and command the 3rd Marine Division in Vietnam, referred to the Umurbrogol as “the most difficult assignment I have ever seen.”
As was usually true in any ground attack, the riflemen led the way and faced the greatest dangers. They climbed the hills in small groups, supported at a distance by machine gunners and mortarmen who generally fired from fixed positions. “As they toiled, caves and gulleys [sic] and holes opened up on them,” a Marine, observing from the vantage point of a machine-gun post, recalled. “Japanese dashed out to roll grenades down on them, and sometimes to lock, body to body, in desperate wrestling matches.” Private George Parker, a rifleman, was struggling up one ridge, dodging enemy grenades all the way. “All they had to do was give their grenades a little [heave] and they would go 100 to 125 yards down the hill onto us.” Parker and the others could not hope to throw grenades high enough, or far enough, to do any damage to the enemy. They shot a few rifle grenades in response, but quickly took cover in the face of wicked machine-gun and mortar fire. Parker looked to his left and started to say something to a New Yorker, whose nickname was “Zoot Suit.” As Zoot Suit turned toward Parker, “a bullet went through his nose from the side. The bottom part of his nose fell down onto his upper lip. I’m sure that turning his head to talk to me had saved his life.” Zoot Suit was only too glad to get off the line. Elsewhere, a young private named Gene Burns leaned over to light a cigarette for a buddy. At the exact moment he did so, a Japanese mortar shell exploded in front of him, sending angry shards of shrapnel right where Burns’s torso had been only a second before.21
They were the lucky ones. Many others were ripped apart by machine-gun bullets or fragments. Some died instantly. Others bled to death slowly, while calling vainly for help. Lieutenant Richard Kennard, a forward observer with G Battery, 11th Marine Regiment, was just behind the lead troops, calling in supporting artillery fire, watching so many young infantrymen get hit. “War is terrible, just awful, awful, awful,” he wrote to his family. “You have no idea how it hurts to see American boys all shot up, wounded, suffering from pain and exhaustion, and those that fall down, never to move again.” Many times he himself came close to getting blown to bits by uncannily accurate mortar fire. Unseen enemy snipers nearly blew his head off. Kennard’s battery and several others were pounding the ridges and, by now, carrier-borne aircraft were even bombing suspected enemy positions along the Umurbrogol, but to no avail. The Japanese were too well entrenched in their caves, vulnerable to direct hits, but little else. For the Marines, there was almost no way to avoid the accurate enemy fire. Anyone spending enough time on the ridges got hit sooner or later. Any movement drew fire. One tank platoon leader from the division’s 1st Tank Battalion watched helplessly as his tank’s supporting infantry squad was decimated by mortar fire. Later, with bitter tears streaming down his face, the platoon leader told his battalion commander: “We couldn’t do enough for them. We couldn’t reach the mortars which killed them . . . like flies all around us.” This was why, in the recollection of another tank officer, “the infantry inspired all who witnessed its indomitable heroism . . . to do one’s damnedest.”
After only a few hours, understrength companies of ninety men were down to half that size. Privates were leading platoons. Squads consisted of a few fortunate stalwarts. “As the riflemen climbed higher they grew fewer, until only a handful of men still climbed in the lead squads,” Private Russell Davis, a member of the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines, wrote. “These were the pick of the bunch—the few men who would go forward, no matter what was ahead. They are the bone structure of a fighting outfit.” This was the military version of the old adage that, in any organization, a distinct minority usually does the majority of the work. Even in the World War II Marine Corps—a decidedly combat-oriented organization—small numbers of infantrymen did most of the fighting. These were the natural fighters who would always carry on, come what may. They were the minority, even in the Marines. This is not to say that others would not fight. They would and did. The majority fought hard, but the more intense the combat, the more of them fell by the wayside from wounds, death, and sheer exhaustion. The stalwarts, though, found a way to keep going. “They clawed and clubbed and stabbed their way up,” Davis said. “The rest of us watched.”22
Because of the Golgotha-like terrain, the terrible casualties, and the chaotic confusion of the fighting, many units lost any semblance of organization. They deteriorated into little more than random groups of su
rvivors. “There was no such thing as a continuous attacking line,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Spencer Berger, whose 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, was also being chewed to pieces. “Elements of the same company, even platoon, were attacking in every direction of the compass, with large gaps in between. There were countless little salients and counter salients.” Commanders measured gains in yards. Anything in triple figures was a good day’s work. At night, Japanese infiltrators, sometimes operating in squads, counterattacked the fatigued Americans. The eerie ridges rang with the desperate, animal-like cries of men struggling to kill one another. Veteran Marines expected and hoped that a “ ‘banzai’ charge would come to reduce the opposition,” one of them wrote. “But the Japs were playing a different game this time.”
It was a much smarter game. They stayed in their caves, making the Marines pay dearly for any advance. When the Americans were at their most vulnerable, usually at night, they would hit them with well-planned counterattacks, not mindless suicide charges. The experiences of C Company, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, serve as a perfect example of this and, indeed, a microcosm of what happened to Puller’s regiment at the Umurbrogol. On September 19, the company drew the assignment of taking Hill 100 (later renamed Walt Ridge after a battalion commander in the 5th Marines), at the southwestern edge of the Umurbrogol. Only through herculean effort and immense courage did the ninety survivors of this company climb the hill and finally take it at great cost, after several attempts. Once atop the hill, the commander, Captain Everett Pope, soon discovered that the Japanese were still holding an adjacent ridge from which they could, and did, pour withering machine-gun, mortar, and artillery fire down on the Marines. With night approaching, and having lost so many men to take this hill, Pope elected to stay in place. He and his men scooped out shallow fighting positions in a perimeter the size of a tennis court, and fought back as best they could. They were soon dangerously low on ammunition. “The line is flimsy as hell and it is getting dark,” Pope radioed Major Davis, his battalion commander. “We have no wires and need grenades badly.” Davis had no reinforcements to send, but he promised to get ammo to Pope, and perhaps string wires for phone communication.
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