Grunts: Inside the American Infantry Combat Experience, World War II Through Iraq
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CHAPTER 2
Peleliu, September 1944: Amphibious Combat Against a Clever, Defensive-Minded Enemy
The Decision
THE DEBACLE DID NOT HAVE to happen. There was nothing inevitable about it, nor anything truly necessary. With a few words, one man could have stopped it, but he could not bring himself to utter those words.
In late July 1944, Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet, met with President Franklin Roosevelt and General Douglas MacArthur at Pearl Harbor. Nimitz and MacArthur functioned as veritable co-commanders of the American effort in the Pacific. But they were more rivals than partners. They constantly competed for resources and influence with Washington power brokers. During the Pearl Harbor meeting, much to Nimitz’s chagrin, MacArthur won the president’s support for an invasion of the Philippines. MacArthur proposed to invade Mindanao in November and Leyte in December. Even though the admiral felt that these invasions were not wise strategic moves, he loyally pledged to protect the flanks of MacArthur’s invasion force. One way to do that was to invade the Palaus, a Japanese-controlled chain of islands a few hundred miles east of Mindanao, the first Philippine island that MacArthur planned to invade in the fall. Because of a first-rate airfield, Peleliu was the most important island in the Palaus. Nimitz promised the president and MacArthur that he would invade Peleliu in mid-September in order to seize the airfield and cut off any Japanese naval or air threat to the general’s Mindanao invasion. Subsequently, planners decided on September 15 for D-day at Peleliu.
A few days before D-day, the Americans discovered that Mindanao was only lightly held and need not be invaded. Aviators from Admiral William “Bull” Halsey’s 3rd Fleet had raided Mindanao against almost no opposition. The aviation commander, Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher, recommended scrubbing the Mindanao invasion and Halsey agreed. Halsey felt that now it made more sense to step up the invasion timetable for Leyte to October. For several weeks, Halsey had actually been skeptical of the need for invading Peleliu. He thought the benefits of taking the heavily defended island did not justify the costs. Now, with no Mindanao invasion, he felt there was no purpose to invading Peleliu. He was right. Peleliu was now a strategic backwater. The Japanese garrison there could not hope to interfere with MacArthur’s operations in the Philippines, especially if he did not invade Mindanao.
In the early morning hours of September 13, Halsey sent a message to MacArthur, Nimitz, and even Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations. “Am firmly convinced Palau not now needed to support occupation of the Philippines.” He asked for permission to cancel the Peleliu invasion. MacArthur could not be reached directly. He was at sea with a fleet that was about to invade Morotai. For security reasons, that fleet was maintaining radio silence. Actually, his authority was limited to operations in the Philippines, not the Peleliu invasion (ominously code-named Operation Stalemate).
So the decision on Peleliu was really Nimitz’s to make since he controlled most of the naval assets upon which the invasion of that island depended. A careful, pensive man, Admiral Nimitz deliberated for several hours before making a decision. “Carry out . . . Stalemate as planned,” he told Halsey. That one fateful sentence consigned thousands to unspeakable misery and horror. Such is the crushing weight of life-or-death responsibility upon the souls of senior commanders. For the rest of his life, Nimitz never explained the reasoning behind his decision. Aptly summarizing the feelings of participants and historians alike, Samuel Eliot Morison, the great naval historian, referred to the Peleliu decision as one of Nimitz’s “rare mistakes.” During the war, the admiral kept a sign over his desk that read: “Is the proposed operation likely to succeed?” In this particular instance, an otherwise sage commander came up with the wrong answer.1
The Japanese
In late July 1944, the Japanese finally decided to change the way they defended against American amphibious invasions. Imperial General Headquarters (IGH) in Tokyo decreed that island garrisons would no longer attempt to defend beaches at the waterline, where they were quite vulnerable to powerful American air strikes and naval gunfire. Nor would the Japanese launch any more wasteful banzai charges. Such suicidal charges simply allowed the Americans to unleash their massive firepower, wasting the lives of brave Japanese soldiers whose valor could be used for much greater strategic purpose. The greatest strength of the Japanese soldier in World War II was his willingness to fight to the death, in the most tenacious fashion, even when cut off, surrounded, and leaderless. This stemmed from the Bushido warrior code, which inextricably linked a soldier’s family honor, duty, patriotism, and his loyalty to the emperor with his willingness to sacrifice himself. In general, this meant that Japanese soldiers were better on defense than offense.
Taking his cue from IGH, Lieutenant General Sadae Inoue, the army’s commander in the Palaus, understood that inland defense was the best way to maximize this strength. “I issued strict orders that the banzai attack was not to be employed because it wasted manpower which could be put to more effective use,” he said after the war. “I ordered that the men [on Peleliu] fight a delaying action from prepared positions, causing as many enemy casualties as possible.” Inoue understood that Japan no longer possessed the naval and air strength to repulse American invasions at the waterline. Banzai attacks were silly and wasteful, contributing more to Japanese vanity than victory. The best hope for victory now was to bleed the Americans dry, until they no longer had the will to win the war. So, at Peleliu, he ordered his 10,500 defenders to dig extensive fortifications within caves that would be impervious to bombing.
Happily enough for the Japanese, a jagged jumble of inland ridges, known as the Umurbrogol, offered the perfect terrain for Inoue’s defense. From the shelter of a dizzying warren of caves, tunnels, and bunkers, the soldiers would fight the Americans to the death, inflicting maximum damage upon them, taking advantage of American impatience, lack of martial spirit, and overreliance on firepower. The defenders would resist the invasion itself, but only with carefully coordinated counterattacks, not suicidal rushes. In this way, the Japanese expected to bring their own firepower to bear efficiently and in the most deadly fashion. “It is certain that if we repay the Americans (who rely solely upon material power) with material power, it will shock them beyond imagination,” Colonel Tokechi Tada, Inoue’s chief of staff, wrote in a prebattle training document.
The 2nd Infantry Regiment formed the critical mass of the Peleliu garrison. The unit had fought in Manchuria, and it traced its proud lineage back to 1884, around the dawn of modern imperial Japan. The soldiers of this unit arrived on Peleliu in late April 1944. They were skilled and physically hardened. They were also totally dedicated to their country. Many of them understood that Peleliu would be a one-way destination. Their commander, Colonel Kunio Nakagawa, was blessed with a keen understanding of how to employ terrain to maximum military advantage. Throughout the summer, he put his soldiers to work building bunkers and pillboxes. They also constructed extensive networks of cave fortifications, especially within the Umurbrogol. “On this small island,” one officer told his men, “we must fortify until it is like a . . . large, unsinkable warship.”
Bitter interservice rivalry was a huge problem for the Japanese, especially among officers. For many years, the Imperial Japanese Navy had comprised the main Japanese presence in the Palaus, including Peleliu. When army soldiers arrived on Peleliu in 1944, they quickly clashed with their naval cousins who had, after all, been there for much longer and thus resented army infringement on their turf. The naval commander, Vice Admiral Itou, deeply begrudged yielding his island to an army colonel. Nor did he see the merits of an inland defense. His navy construction battalions would not cooperate at all with the army. The two services even prepared their own separate cave networks. Most of the navy caves were located on the northern part of the island. They were man-made, with extensive tunnels, and designed mainly to provide shelter in the event of bombardment. The army caves were generally natural
, smaller, less comfortable, and designed to defend against attacking ground forces. These interservice issues were such a problem that they threatened Colonel Nakagawa’s battle preparations. To put the army on a more advantageous footing, Lieutenant General Inoue sent one of his key subordinates, Major General Kenijiro Murai, to Peleliu. Murai was senior to Itou. Murai’s presence had the desired effect in keeping the navy in line, but it produced a bizarre Japanese command arrangement that remains something of a mystery to this day. According to all available Japanese sources, Colonel Nakagawa remained in command, but with a two-star general nominally assisting him. Given the rigid hierarchy of imperial Japan, this strains credulity a bit. The whole truth will probably never be known.
Despite their internal problems, the Japanese, by mid-September, had turned Peleliu into a death trap for the American invaders. The landing beaches teemed with mines, tetrahedrons, gun emplacements, antitank ditches, blockhouses, and machine-gun nests. Farther inland the Japanese had constructed a wide range of pillboxes and well-camouflaged gun positions, mainly to foil any American attempt to capture the airfield. The Umurbrogol now basically consisted of little else besides mutually supporting fortified caves, some of which were equipped with steel doors.
Thanks to documents they had captured on Saipan, the Americans knew much about the Japanese order of battle. But they had no clue about the true nature of Peleliu’s imposing terrain, or even much appreciation for the true extent of Japanese defenses. Nor did any American have even an inkling of the new Japanese commitment to inland defense.2
The Brief Bombardment
The Navy’s bombardment of Guam had been, in the estimation of most American officers, the most successful of the Pacific War. In that instance, the Navy had the rare opportunity to soften up Guam for seventeen days prior to the invasion. Even so, the bombardment did not diminish Japanese resistance enough to avoid major fighting once the Marines and soldiers came ashore. Peleliu was smaller than Guam, with fewer enemy soldiers, but it was much more intelligently defended. Carrier-borne planes raided Peleliu several times in the spring and summer of 1944, but the main job of softening up the island went, of course, to the Navy surface ships.
The original invasion plan earmarked only two days for Admiral Jesse Oldendorf’s Western Gunfire Support Group (TG 32.5) to pound Peleliu with the usual array of fire from battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and smaller vessels. Major General Roy Geiger, commander of the III Marine Amphibious Corps, whose 1st Marine Division would assault Peleliu, pleaded with his naval colleagues for one more day and got it. Starting on September 12, Oldendorf’s ships plastered Peleliu. His gunners focused especially on visible structures, such as blockhouses, barracks, hangars, administrative buildings, pillboxes, and gun emplacements. The airfield also absorbed a major drubbing. All hangars and buildings were in shambles. Pieces of dismembered aircraft were scattered all over the place. The bombardment also partially defoliated the island, exposing Peleliu’s formidable coral ridges to American eyes for the first time (aerial reconnaissance photos had not even begun to do justice to the ridges). As Oldendorf’s warships hurled steel at the island, the admiral stood in the combat information center aboard his flagship, the battleship USS Pennsylvania. One by one, as reports of destruction trickled in, he scratched each predetermined target off a checklist. The Japanese, true to their plan, did not even fire one round at the American ships. They huddled in their caves and bunkers, waiting for an invasion they now deemed inevitable. As at Guam, highly trained U.S. Navy Underwater Demolition Teams (UDTs) swam, under cover of the fleet’s mighty bombardment, into the landing beaches to disarm mines, obstacles, and booby traps.
On September 14, Admiral Oldendorf made a stunning pronouncement. He had run out of targets and was ordering his gun crews to cease fire. The crews would resume their shooting the next morning, in support of the lead assault troops, but, for now, they were to stand down. Oldendorf believed he had destroyed every worthy target on Peleliu. To him it made no sense to “blast away at suspected positions and hope for the best.” Better, he thought, to cease fire than waste ammunition. When news of his decision reached senior 1st Marine Division officers aboard their ships, they were shocked. “The dispatch sent by ADM Oldendorf was not only a surprise but was not understood by any of us on the Division Staff,” Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Fields, the 1st Marine Division operations officer, wrote. Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Ramsay, another member of the division staff, described the reaction as one of “incredulity.” Brigadier General Oliver Smith, the assistant division commander, understood that Oldendorf had hit many visible targets but “the cut-up, jungle terrain concealed many targets that the infantry had to overrun at heavy cost.”
By and large, the Marines felt that Oldendorf’s decision was calamitous and inexcusable. Their lives were on the line. They were the ones who would face the Japanese on the ground, in the toughest arena of combat, not the sailors. As such, the Marines expected the Navy to support them as fully as possible. Oldendorf’s termination order, with his ammunition stocks far from depleted, was hardly the way to fulfill those expectations. Another naval commander, Rear Admiral George Fort, described Oldendorf’s decision as “entirely correct.” Fort acknowledged the infantry’s difficult job but, to him, the idea of firing at an island with no visible targets was “an inexcusable waste of ammunition.” Here was a classic difference in thinking between naval and infantry officers. The Navy commanders thought in terms of logistics because so much of their job was dependent upon manipulating cargo, fuel, and time schedules. Successful naval command demanded a strong technical mind and a keen understanding of how to utilize firepower. Marine officers existed in a more simplistic world of operations—closing with the enemy and killing him. All else was subordinated to that mission.
Something else was at work here, too. The naval officers, by the nature of their tasks (not to mention their distance from the battlefield), could scarcely conceive of what combat on the ground really meant. They rarely saw the actual results of their firepower. Few of them, even competent commanders like Fort and Oldendorf, truly understood the limitations of their weaponry. They did not fully realize that the Japanese could, and did, find ways to take shelter from the shells. The enemy hunkered down in caves, tunnels, or bunkers and waited for the shooting to stop. At Peleliu, very few Japanese soldiers fell prey to the pre-landing bombardment. The sailors had trouble realizing this. They thought in terms of hitting pinpoint targets, eliminating positions, and overwhelming the enemy with explosions. From the distance of a few miles offshore, it was hard for them to imagine that anyone, or anything, could survive under the avalanche of their shells. This was an inevitable consequence of their point of view. Inexperienced Marines who had never assaulted an enemy-held island often thought the same way. Only after they went ashore did they realize the terrible reality that enemy soldiers could remain alive and well in the wake of such terrible punishment. The bombardments, they came to understand, looked more impressive than they really were, but this realization only set in as a result of experience on the ground. “One must guard against the overenthusiasm of naval gunfire advocates who believe that nothing can survive the heavy preliminary bombardments,” Colonel Walter William Wachtler, Geiger’s operations officer, wrote.
A classic example of this juxtaposition is a conversation that Colonel Lewis “Chesty” Puller, commander of the 1st Marine Regiment, had with the captain of his unit’s troopship on the morning of D-day, as his Marines prepared to go ashore. “Puller, you won’t find anything to stop you over there,” the ship’s captain claimed. “Nothing could have lived through that hammering.” Puller, a commander with years of ground combat experience, demurred. “I doubt if you’ve cleaned it out. I believe they’ll have pillbox stuff, fortifications like we’ve never seen before.” Undeterred, the captain jovially predicted: “We’ll expect you for dinner this evening.” Puller assured the captain that he and his crew would be back in Hawaii well before the Marines we
re done with Peleliu.3
So, in view of firepower’s limitations, was Oldendorf wrong to cease fire? Probably so. Although three days of bombardment could hardly be expected to neutralize Nakagawa’s formidable defenses, it was still better than two and a half. If Oldendorf’s ships could destroy only a few more enemy gun emplacements, or wound or kill a couple dozen more Japanese soldiers, the job of the ground troops would become just a little bit easier. Perhaps a few more American lives could have been saved. But, of course, no amount of bombardment could completely subdue Japanese resistance. The shooting could only help the Marines, not do the job for them. The Marines did not expect miracles from the Navy, just the absolute maximum level of support that the sea service could provide.