With the Old Breed_ At Peleliu and Okinawa - E. B. Sledge [35]
The Marine Corps had trained us new men until we were welded with the veterans into a thoroughly disciplined combat division. Now the force of events unleashed on that two-mile by six-mile piece of unfriendly coral rock would carry us forward unrelentingly, each to his individual fate.
Everything my life had been before and has been after pales in the light of that awesome moment when my amtrac started in amid a thunderous bombardment toward the flaming, smoke-shrouded beach for the assault on Peleliu.
Since the end of World War II, historians and military analysts have argued inconclusively about the necessity of the Palau Islands campaign. Many believed after the battle—and still believe today—that the United States didn't need to fight it as a prerequisite to General MacArthur's return to the Philippines.
Adm. William F. (“Bull”) Halsey suggested calling off the Palau operation after high-level planners learned that Japanese air power in the Philippines wasn't as strong as intelligence originally had presumed it to be. But MacArthur believed the operation should proceed, and Adm. Chester W Nimitz said it was too late to cancel the operation, because the convoy was already under way.
Because of important events in Europe at the time and the lack of immediate, apparent benefits from the seizure of Peleliu, the battle remains one of the lesser known or understood of the Pacific war. Nonetheless, for many it ranks as the roughest fight the Marines had in World War II
Maj. Gen. (later Lt. Gen.) Roy S. Geiger, the rugged commander of the III Amphibious Corps, said repeatedly that Peleliu was the toughest battle of the entire Pacific war. A former commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Clifton B. Cates, said Peleliu was one of the most vicious and stubbornly contested battles of the war, and that nowhere was the fighting efficiency of the U.S. Marine demonstrated more convincingly.
Peleliu also was important to the remainder of the Marines'war in the Pacific because of the changes in Japanese tactics encountered there. The Japanese abandoned their conventional all-out effort at defending the beach in favor of a complex defense based upon mutually supporting, fortified positions in caves and pillboxes extending deeply into the interior of the island, particularly in the ridges of Umurbrogol Mountain.
In earlier battles, the Japanese had exhausted their forces in banzai charges against the Marines once the latter had firmly established a beachhead. The Marines slaughtered the wildly charging Japanese by the thousands. Not a single banzai charge had been successful for the Japanese in previous campaigns.
But on Peleliu the Japanese commander, Col. Kunio Naka-gawa, let the Marines come to him and the approximately 10,000 troops of his proud 14th Infantry Division. From mutually supporting positions, the Japanese covered nearly every yard of Peleliu from the beach inland to the center of Nakagawa s command post, deep beneath the coral rock in the center of the ridge system. Some positions were large enough to hold only one man. Some caves held hundreds. Thus the Marines encountered no one main defense line. The Japanese had constructed the perfect defense-in-depth with the whole island as a front line. They fought until the last position was knocked out.
Aided by the incredibly rugged terrain, the new Japanese tactics proved so successful that the 1st Marine Division suffered more than twice as many casualties on Peleliu as the 2d Marine Division had on Tarawa. Proportionately, United States casualties on Peleliu closely approximated those suffered later on Iwo Jima where the Japanese again employed an intricate defense-in-depth, conserved forces, and fought a battle of attrition. On an even greater scale, the skillful, tenacious defense of the southern