With the Old Breed_ At Peleliu and Okinawa - E. B. Sledge [89]
To this private first class, Peleliu was also a vindication of Marine Corps training, particularly of boot camp. I speak only from a personal viewpoint and make no generalizations, but for me, in the final analysis, Peleliu was:
thirty days of severe, unrelenting inhuman emotional and physical stress;
proof that I could trust and depend completely on the Marine on each side of me and on our leadership;
proof that I could use my weapons and equipment efficiently under severe stress; and
proof that the critical factor in combat stress is duration of the combat rather than the severity.
Boot camp taught me that I was expected to excel, or try to, even under stress. My drill instructor was a small man. He didn't have a big mouth. He was neither cruel nor sadistic. He wasn't a bully. But he was a strict disciplinarian, a total realist about our future, and an absolute perfectionist dedicated to excellence. To him more than to my disciplined home life, a year of college ROTC before boot camp, and months of infantry training afterward I attribute my ability to have withstood the stress of Peleliu.
The Japanese were as dedicated to military excellence as U.S. Marines. Consequently, on Peleliu the opposing forces were like two scorpions in a bottle. One was annihilated, the other nearly so. Only Americans who excelled could have defeated them.
Okinawa would be the longest and largest battle of the Pacific war. There my division would suffer about as many casualties as it did on Peleliu. Again the enemy garrison would fight to the death. On Okinawa I would be shelled and shot at more, see more enemy soldiers, and fire at more of them with my mortar and with small arms than on Peleliu. But there was a ferocious, vicious nature to the fighting on Peleliu that made it unique for me. Many of my veteran comrades agreed. Perhaps we can say of Peleliu as the Englishman, Robert Graves, said of World War I, that it:
…gave us infantrymen so convenient a measuring-stick for discomfort, grief, pain, fear, and horror, that nothing since has greatly daunted us. But it also brought new meanings of courage, patience, loyalty, and greatness of spirit; incommunicable, we found to later times.*
As I crawled out of the abyss of combat and over the rail of the Sea Runner, I realized that compassion for the sufferings of others is a burden to those who have it. As Wilfred Owen's poem “Insensibility” puts it so well, those who feel most for others suffer most in war.
* My memory of the remaining events of horror and death and violence amid the Peleliu ridges is as clear and distinct as a long nightmare where specific events are recalled vividly the next day. I remember clearly the details of certain episodes that occurred before or after certain others and can verify these with my notes and the historical references. But time and duration have absolutely no meaning in relation to those events from one date to the next. I was well aware of this sensation then.
*K/⅗ lost eight killed and twenty-two wounded at the Five Sisters.
* At the time of Captain Haldane's death, the bulk of Company K was operating with its parent battalion (⅗) on Hill 140 within the Umurbrogol Pocket. In an attempt to orient himself to the strange terrain his company was occupying, Haldane raised his head and looked over a ridge. A sniper's bullet killed him instantly. First Lt. Thomas J. (“Stumpy”) Stanley succeeded him as commander of K/⅗. Stanley led Company K through the remainder of the Peleliu campaign and on to Okinawa the following spring.
* By 15 October, the Marines had compressed the Umurbrogol Pocket to an area of about 400 to 500 yards. Yet the soldiers