Peleliu was supposed to take four days. It took seventy-three, and cost the 1st Marine Division more than a third of its strength. The airfield it was fought for played almost no part in the campaign that followed. That is why, more than eighty years later, Peleliu is still the most argued-over battle of the Pacific war, and why the men who fought there wrote some of the best books to come out of it.

The reckoning

The Army’s official history gives the most widely used totals. The 1st Marine Division lost about 1,250 men killed, including about 115 missing, and 5,275 wounded, roughly 6,525 in all. The 81st Infantry Division lost 542 killed and 2,736 wounded or injured on Peleliu and Angaur. Navy losses added hundreds more. On the other side, about 13,600 Japanese died in the Palau operation, more than 11,000 of them on Peleliu, and only about 400 were taken prisoner, most of them Korean and Okinawan laborers rather than soldiers.

Measured against the number of men who landed, the 1st Marine Division’s losses were among the heaviest of any American amphibious assault of the war. The 1st Marines lost 1,749 men in six days, and the 7th Marines close to half their strength.

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Patrick Klein

Was it worth it?

The Army’s historian, writing in 1953, concluded that the Palaus proved less valuable than expected and were not used as planned. Peleliu’s airfield came too late to support the Leyte landings and played no key part in later operations. Angaur’s field was finished the day after the landings on Leyte and sent its first bombers against the Philippines on 17 November; it later served the campaign on Luzon. Kossol Passage was used as an emergency anchorage. Ulithi, taken without a fight, was enormously valuable as the Pacific Fleet’s forward base for the rest of the war.

Admiral Halsey had argued before the landing that the Palaus could be bypassed, and he was the only senior commander who thought so. Defenders of the decision point out that no one knew in September 1944 how quickly the Philippine campaign would move, and that a Japanese garrison with an airfield beside the road to the Philippines was a real threat. Critics answer that more than ten thousand American casualties were a high price for an airfield that was not needed. Both arguments are still made.

What Peleliu taught

Peleliu was the first battle against the Japanese defense in depth, and the lessons were hard. Naval gunfire could not destroy positions it could not see. Infantry attacks on cave systems produced terrible losses. What worked was patient, combined work: tanks and flame tractors brought close to the caves, demolitions, bulldozers, artillery fired directly into openings, and aircraft working within a few hundred yards of the front.

Five months later the Marines met the same system on a larger scale at Iwo Jima, and in April 1945 the 1st Marine Division, rebuilt on Pavuvu, landed on Okinawa, where the 81st Division’s methods were used again. See the Iwo Jima collection and the Okinawa collection.

The men who wrote about it

Some of the most lasting American writing about the war came out of Peleliu. Eugene B. Sledge, the mortarman from Mobile who joined K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines on Pavuvu, kept notes in a New Testament he carried and later turned them into With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, published in 1981. Military historians and veterans alike regard it as one of the finest infantry memoirs ever written. Robert Leckie of the 1st Marines wrote Helmet for My Pillow in 1957. Captain George Hunt of the Point wrote Coral Comes High. In 2010 the HBO series The Pacific brought Sledge’s and Leckie’s stories to television.

Tom Lea, an artist-correspondent for Life, landed with the Marines on D-Day and spent the first days ashore sketching. His painting of a Marine with blank, exhausted eyes, That 2,000 Yard Stare, became one of the most famous images of the war. It belongs to the Army Art Collection.

Gordon D. Gayle, who commanded the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines and retired as a brigadier general, wrote the Marine Corps’ fiftieth-anniversary history of the battle, Bloody Beaches, published in 1996. It is one of the main sources for this collection and is free to read online.

The Montford Point Marines, remembered

The Black Marines of the 11th Marine Depot Company and the 7th Marine Ammunition Company, who carried ammunition and stretchers on Peleliu under fire, had trained at Montford Point, at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. For decades their service was barely mentioned in histories of the battle. In 2012 the Montford Point Marines, the roughly twenty thousand Black men who trained there between 1942 and 1949, were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Montford Point is now Camp Gilbert H. Johnson, named for one of its first drill instructors.

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Montford Point

Peleliu today

Peleliu is now a state of the Republic of Palau, with a few hundred residents. The island is a battlefield museum. Rusting amphibian tractors and tanks lie where they stopped, the caves still hold their dead and their ammunition, and Australian-funded teams are still clearing unexploded ordnance. The Peleliu Battlefield was designated a United States National Historic Landmark in 1985. There are American, Army and Marine memorials, and Japanese memorials, including one built by the Japanese government for the war dead of the western Pacific.

In April 2015 Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko of Japan visited Peleliu and paid respects at both the Japanese and American memorials. Every September, on the anniversary of the landing, Palauan, American, Japanese and Australian officials gather at the Peace Memorial Park. At the seventieth anniversary in 2014, Kiyokazu Tsuchida, a Japanese veteran of the battle, and William Darling, a Marine veteran, shook hands there.

September 19442001

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Remembrance

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Peleliu today

People, places and pages in this chapter

Sources and further reading

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