Six miles south of Peleliu, the Army’s 81st Infantry Division, the Wildcats, went into combat for the first time on the small phosphate island of Angaur. They took most of it in four days and then spent a month digging the last defenders out of a bowl of quarries and cliffs. Another of the division’s regiments sailed northeast and took the atoll of Ulithi without firing a shot, giving the Pacific Fleet the anchorage it would use for the rest of the war.

The Wildcats on Angaur

Angaur is a small, roughly triangular island at the southern end of the Palaus, flat in the south and east and rising to ridges and old phosphate diggings in the northwest. Its phosphate had been mined since German times and a narrow-gauge railroad ran to the works. The Japanese garrison, about 1,400 men under Major Ushio Gotō, was built around a battalion of the 59th Infantry Regiment.

The 81st Infantry Division, commanded by Major General Paul J. Mueller, had trained in the United States and Hawaii and rehearsed on Guadalcanal. Its landing was held back until the Marines on Peleliu seemed secure; Julian Smith had argued against the timing, but Admiral Wilkinson ordered it for 17 September. That morning, after a bombardment by the battleship Tennessee and other ships, the 322nd Infantry landed on Red Beach on the northeast coast and the 321st on Blue Beach on the east coast, while the 323rd made a feint toward the west.

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The landing on Angaur, 17 September 1944

The landings went well. The Japanese had expected an attack from the west, and resistance on the beaches was moderate. In three days the two regiments cut across the island, took the town and phosphate works the Japanese called Saipan Town, and drove the defenders into the rough ground of the northwest. On 20 September General Mueller reported that organized resistance had ceased. That proved premature. Gotō had pulled his survivors into a natural fortress around Lake Salome, a bowl of phosphate pits, cliffs and caves, and he had orders from Inoue not to waste them in a final charge.

The Lake Salome bowl

With the 321st Infantry sent to Peleliu on 23 September, the 322nd Infantry was left alone with Gotō’s men. The fighting in the bowl went on for a month. The soldiers worked forward along the railroad cut, which they called Bloody Gulch, and up the ridges around the lake, sealing caves one at a time with flamethrowers, demolitions and bulldozers. Prisoners told interrogators that three or four hundred men were still in the bowl at the start of October; the division’s intelligence officers thought fewer.

On 21 October the 322nd overran the last organized defenses. The Army’s official history counts about 1,300 Japanese killed and 45 captured on Angaur. The 81st Division lost 264 men killed and 1,355 wounded or injured from 17 September to 21 October, almost all of them in the 322nd Infantry; another 244 men were treated for combat fatigue and nearly 700 for sickness.

The Japanese survivors of Angaur were few. One of them, Hiroshi Funasaka, a sergeant who was badly wounded and taken prisoner, wrote about the fight after the war, one of the very few Japanese accounts of the southern Palaus.

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Angaur remembers

Angaur’s airfield

Angaur was taken for its airfield, and the engineers started on it while the fighting was still going on. The 1884th and 1887th Engineer Aviation Battalions began work on 20 September. A C-47 made the first landing on 15 October, and by 19 October two 6,000-foot strips were finished. The field came too late to help the landings on Leyte, which began on 20 October, but from 17 November bombers flew from the Palaus against the Philippines, and Angaur became a useful heavy-bomber base for the campaign on Luzon.

Ulithi: the anchorage taken without a shot

The third regiment of the division, the 323rd Infantry, sailed northeast after its feint at Angaur. Its target was Ulithi, a ring of small islands about four hundred miles northeast of Peleliu enclosing one of the largest lagoons in the western Pacific. The Japanese had left. The 323rd occupied the atoll without opposition from 22 to 24 September 1944.

Within weeks Ulithi became the forward base of the Pacific Fleet. Hundreds of warships, tankers, ammunition ships and repair ships could anchor in the lagoon at once, and the fast carriers came back there between strikes on the Philippines, Formosa, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Sailors went ashore on the small island of Mogmog for a few hours of beer and baseball. The Japanese struck back on 20 November 1944, when a kaiten human torpedo sank the fleet oiler Mississinewa in the anchorage. Of everything won in the Palau operation, Ulithi was by most accounts the most valuable.

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Ulithi, the fleet’s anchorage

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Ulithi: the fleet’s Pacific base

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