• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 878 0

jumpiness, intensified by undisciplined rear-area troops firing weapons for the fun of it. After O. P. Smith investigated one panic, he found that it had been provoked by black stevedores on the shore shooting at an abandoned tractor: “They claimed no one had ever told them they were not to fire their rifles, which was probably correct.” Nor was every alarm unjustified. When the exasperated divisional HQ commandant set off with a shotgun to suppress an outbreak of apparently needless firing near his headquarters, he found two dead Marines beside the corpses of three Japanese who had killed them. Until a well could be sunk, every American was desperately short of water. Emergency supplies were landed in oil drums, which sickened those who sampled them. Temperatures sometimes reached 115 degrees. Scores of men succumbed to heat exhaustion, for which salt tablets proved an essential prophylactic. The jagged coral caused boots to wear out within days. A thousand new pairs and 5,000 sets of socks were flown in from Guam.

The army’s 81st Division landed on neighbouring Angaur on 17 September. After an easy disembarkation, inland the invaders met thick, matted, almost impenetrable rain forest. The beaches were clogged with traffic. The soldiers, fresh to combat, readily panicked in encounters with even small numbers of Japanese. Angaur was only two miles long, and by 20 September it was secure, but the conquerors had not enjoyed their experience. They were still less happy to find themselves loaded back onto ships and transferred to Peleliu. Marines and soldiers were seldom comfortable fighting together. O. P. Smith wrote sceptically: “It is hard to put your finger246 on it, but there is quite a different atmosphere in an army command post as compared to the CP of a Marine outfit. Orders are given like the book says you should give them, but you have the impression they are not carried out.” Rupertus was reluctant to enlist army aid. After a week of fighting and alarming casualties, however, he perceived no choice.

Long-range flamethrowers proved the most effective weapons against Peleliu’s cave mouths, but each assault was painfully slow and costly. In October, gales and torrential rain added to the invaders’ miseries. Marine Corsairs at last began to use the island’s airstrip on 21 October, but organised resistance persisted for weeks more. Lt. Ilo Scatena of the 2/5th Marines kept a platoon roster. Of forty-two men with whom he landed, fourteen were killed and fourteen wounded. In all, the island’s capture cost 1,950 American lives, and gave the invaders one of the most unwelcome surprises of the Pacific war. Almost all the defenders chose to perish rather than quit. A month after Peleliu’s commander, Col. Kunio Nakagawa, committed suicide on 24 November, his surviving soldiers killed a group of souvenir-hunting American soldiers. The last five known Japanese surrendered on 1 February 1945. Statisticians afterwards calculated that it had taken 1,500 rounds of artillery ammunition to kill each member of the garrison. To capture this tiny outpost, Marine and army infantrymen also used 13.32 million .30 calibre rounds, 1.52 million of .45 calibre, 693,657 rounds of .50 calibre, over 150,000 mortar bombs and 118,262 grenades.

As so often in the Pacific, a marginal objective inflicted worse than marginal casualties. It is widely agreed today—as indeed it was in the winter of 1944—that the decision to occupy the Palaus was one of Nimitz’s few bad calls of the war. The Japanese lacked means to exploit their remote island airfields. The defenders of Peleliu could not interfere on Leyte, or anywhere else. Its garrison could have been left to rot. American aircraft could use Morotai’s strips as easily as those on the Palaus. Once the Peleliu operation was launched onto implacably hostile terrain, there was no shortcut by which firepower or technology could overcome resistance. Although the Marines had fought terrible battles on the Pacific islands, at Tarawa and Saipan they attacked before the defenders had completed the construction