The Battle of Peleliu, fought 80 years ago, was going to be “rough but quick,” lasting four days, confidently predicted General William Rupertus, the 1st Marine Division commander.

But the aptly code-named Operation Stalemate ground on for 74 miserable days as the Marines met Japan’s new attritional defense for the first time.

Rupertus’s ebullient forecast caused 30 of the 36 accredited reporters to leave for other battlefields promising better bylines. Peleliu became possibly the most underreported major campaign of World War II.

Those 30 reporters missed a tremendous story of heroism and grit on what was arguably the Pacific War’s worst battleground – a hellscape of coral-limestone hills and gullies sweltering in 110-degree temperatures.

“For sheer brutality and fatigue, I think [Peleliu] surpasses anything yet seen in the Pacific,” wrote Time magazine correspondent Robert “Pepper” Martin, a veteran of several Pacific campaigns.

Unfortunately, the vital fact that Japan had dramatically altered its strategy on Peleliu did not reach the planners of the next Pacific campaign, Iwo Jima, where the lessons had to be re-learned.

 

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Few of the major assumptions about Peleliu proved correct.

Before the 1st Marine Division landed on September 15, 1944, changed plans for the pending Philippines campaign made Operation Stalemate unnecessary.

Peleliu’s airstrip was believed to menace pending US operations against Mindanao, 430 miles away in the Philippines. At the last minute, General Douglas MacArthur moved the target to Leyte, beyond the range of Peleliu’s airstrip. Yet Admiral Chester Nimitz, the commander of Pacific naval operations, chose to let Stalemate proceed because the invasion force was at sea.

What is more, Allied airstrikes that spring had destroyed the airstrip and its Japanese aircraft.

The belief that the Japanese would defend Peleliu as they had previous island strongholds was also mistaken.

After the loss of the Mariana Islands and the Imperial Navy’s defeat in the Battle of the Philippine Sea in the summer of 1944, Japan’s military leaders, conceding that the war was lost, radically altered their defensive strategy to one of attrition. The Japanese intended to inflict such heavy losses that the Allies would drop their demand for unconditional surrender and seek a negotiated peace.

The last-ditch banzai attacks of Tarawa and Saipan were abandoned. Japanese cannons and mortars would rake Peleliu’s landing beaches, and the invaders would be drawn into “endurance engagements” farther inland with the entrenched defenders.

The Americans had no inkling of what lay ahead.

 

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Colonel Kunio Nakagawa’s 11,000 defenders awaited the Marines in 500 natural and man-made coral-limestone caves. A Japanese soldier described Peleliu as “a large unsinkable battleship”; a Marine would call it “a nightmare’s nightmare.”

Japanese mining and tunnel engineers prepared the defensive positions, many of them mutually supporting. Concealed by a dense jungle canopy, aerial photos snapped by carrier planes and long-range Army bombers showed the central island dominated by a long ridge – Americans called it the Umurbrogol – swathed in trees and undergrowth.

Three days of naval bombardment, and the D-Day pre-invasion barrage began to strip away the green mantle and reveal a maze of cliffs, gullies, box canyons, and tunnels, some positions protected by sliding steel doors. The bombardment, however, did not weaken Nakagawa’s defenses.

 

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Rupertus’s expectation of a quick campaign made the Marines almost carefree on D-Day morning. As their amtracs churned toward Peleliu’s five landing beaches, Marines in the first-wave amtracs loudly sang “Give My Regards to Broadway” and “The Beer Barrel Polka.”

As the first wave neared Peleliu’s 500-yard-wide reef, mortar and artillery fire flashed from the Umurbrogol and amtracs erupted in fiery explosions, flinging bodies into the air. The singing stopped.

The 1st Marine Division, unopposed in its previous landings on Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester, faced a contested landing for the first time.

After crossing the reef and a 700-yard lagoon, the Marines splashed ashore at 8:30 a.m. as 26 amtracs burned offshore. Nambu machine guns buzzed from bunkers a few hundred yards inland, stitching Marines, who fell “with bloody splashes into the green water,” wrote Life magazine photographer Tom Lea.

The casualties quickly mounted. Leaping over his amtrac’s gunwale, Private First Class Charles Owen said it was “like falling into hell,” with gunfire exploding around him and the water red with blood. “There were bodies and parts of bodies all around,” he said. 

The adrenalized Marines sprinted across the beach as bullets “hummed and sang” around them, wrote Private First Class Russell Davis.

A 30-feet-high coral ridge known as “The Point” overlooked the landing beaches from the north. There, 500 enemy soldiers manned five pillboxes bristling with machine guns, 20mm cannons, and a 47mm antiboat gun that raked the First Marines on White Beach. The Point had somehow escaped the notice of Stalemate’s planners.

Private First Class Robert Leckie described White Beach as “a litter of burning, blackened amphibious tractors, of dead and wounded, a mortal garden of exploding mortar shells.”

With grenades and automatic weapons, Captain George P. Hunt’s K Company methodically neutralized The Point – but at a terrible cost; just 18 effectives remained of the 102 men who began the attack.

The Fifth Marines, landing to the south, wiped out pillboxes immediately inland and reached the edge of the airfield, Stalemate’s ostensible objective.

At 4:50 p.m., Japanese artillery and mortar fire from the Umurbrogol suddenly rained down on the Fifth, and a dust cloud arose on the airfield’s northern perimeter. From it emerged more than a dozen small, lightly armed tanks and hundreds of enemy infantrymen. A tornado of Marine gunfire tore through the attackers, and they melted away; just two tanks survived the onslaught.

After the airfield was secured, and as the Seventh Marines struggled for control of southern Peleliu, the First Marines began the daunting task of assaulting the Umurbrogol’s jumble of hills, ridges, and deep ravines – defended by enemy troops in fortified caves, bunkers, and hidden tunnels.

Subduing each stronghold required grenades, satchel charges, flamethrowers – and Marine blood. The Umurbrogol became known as “Bloody Nose Ridge.”

After Navy Seabees repaired the landing strip on Peleliu, Marine Corsairs regularly bombed and napalmed the Umurbrogol, a mere 15-second flight away.

Puller’s First Marines led the daily ground assaults in the broiling heat against its topographical landmarks, nicknamed “the Horseshoe,” “Five Brothers,” “Five Sisters,” “China Wall,” and “Death Valley.”

The attacks were frontal; there was no finesse about them. Rupertus and Puller believed that the Japanese would crack if they just kept up the pressure. But when the Marines captured a hill, they often could not hold it against the swarming Japanese counterattacks.

The battle environment was toxic. Besides the blazing heat, the air reeked of decomposing Japanese corpses and unburied excrement. It was impossible to dig foxholes in the coral-limestone rock, so the Marines heaped rocks around their positions. Hundreds of Marines collapsed from heat exhaustion.

Lieutenant Colonel Harold “Bucky” Harris, the Fifth Marines commander, surveyed the Umurbrogol from an observation plane, and afterward urged Rupertus and Puller to flank and attack it from the less heavily defended north side, rather than the south. They did not take Harris’s advice.

The attacks’ bloody toll caused Puller and Rupertus to despair. “This thing has just about got me beat,” Rupertus tearfully told an aide. Yet he resisted summoning his reserve, the Army’s 81st Division, fighting on nearby Angaur against 1,400 defenders; Rupertus wanted only Marines to triumph on Peleliu.

Puller, limping from shrapnel that he still carried from Guadalcanal in his left leg, confessed to Lieutenant Colonel Lew Walt that he was “absolutely sick” over his losses. “He thought we were getting them killed for nothing,” said Walt.

Marine General Roy Geiger, Stalemate’s overall commander, intervened. Over the objections of Rupertus and Puller, Geiger ordered the First Marines relieved by the 81st Division’s 321st Regimental Combat Team (RCT) from Angaur.

Gaunt and filthy, sleepless and underfed, wearing torn, stained uniforms, the First Marines shuffled out of the highlands. In just six days, Puller’s regiment sustained 1,749 casualties of the 3,252 men who had landed on September 15, while killing 3,942 Japanese soldiers.

“What once had been companies in the First Marines looked like platoons; platoons looked like squads. I saw few officers,” wrote Private First Class E.B. Sledge of the Fifth Marines.

On September 23, the 81st’s 321st RCT and the Fifth Marines began to flank the Umurbrogol from the island’s west road. Attacking the Umurbrogol from the north, they utilized heavy weapons to minimize casualties – painstakingly slow work nonetheless.

The rest of the 81st Division relieved the 1st Marine Division in mid-October. By then, the division had killed more than 10,000 Japanese soldiers, while using up the Fifth and Seventh Marines.

The 81st began siege operations against the last 500 defenders trapped in the Umurbrogol.

The battle ended on November 27, when soldiers stormed Colonel Kunio Nakagawa’s last redoubt at China Wall and found that he and co-commander General Kenijiro Murai had committed suicide.

Of the 28,000 Marines and soldiers who fought on Peleliu and Angaur, 10,786 became casualties; 14,330 enemy soldiers and laborers died.

Japan’s strategy of attrition indeed showed promise, yet the Battle of Peleliu did nothing to change the Pacific War’s trajectory.

 

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Joseph Wheelan is the author of Bitter Peleliu: The Forgotten Struggle on the Pacific War’s Worst Battlefield, and two other Pacific War books: Midnight in the Pacific: Guadalcanal, the World War II Battle That Turned the Tide of War, and Bloody Okinawa: The Last Great Battle of World War II.