At 08:30 on 15 September 1944 the first amphibian tractors of the 1st Marine Division crawled up out of the water onto Peleliu. Behind them lay a reef six hundred to eight hundred yards wide, littered with burning tractors. In front of them was a beach swept by fire from guns the bombardment had not touched. By nightfall the division held a shallow beachhead and had lost 1,111 men, 209 of them killed.

Across the reef

The assault waves left their landing ships before dawn and circled until the line of departure. Rocket-firing landing craft and armored amphibian tractors mounting cannon led them in; carrier planes strafed the beaches; the battleships lifted their fire inland. Then the tractors crossed the reef in rows, crawling over coral at a walking pace for the better part of half a mile.

The Japanese held their fire until the tractors were on the reef. Then the guns in the Point to the north and the strongpoints to the south opened along the length of the beaches, joined by mortars and artillery registered on the reef from the ridges. Tractors burned and sank. By one count, sixty LVTs and DUKWs had been knocked out by 09:30. Marines from wrecked tractors waded the rest of the way in chest-deep water. Tanks landed at the reef’s edge drove in behind the tractors in small columns, some guided through the potholes by men walking ahead of them.

The landing order put Puller’s 1st Marines on White 1 and White 2, with the 3rd Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Stephen V. Sabol on the far left and the 2nd under Lieutenant Colonel Russell E. Honsowetz beside it. The 5th Marines landed on Orange 1 and Orange 2 with Lieutenant Colonel Robert W. Boyd’s 1st Battalion and Lieutenant Colonel Austin C. Shofner’s 3rd. The 7th Marines’ 3rd Battalion, under Major Edward H. Hurst, landed on Orange 3, with the 1st Battalion following.

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Going in, 15 September 1944

On the beaches

On the left, Sabol’s 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines ran into the worst of it. The Point, a coral knob about thirty feet high at the north end of White 1, held concrete casemates sited to fire down the length of the beach, and a coral ridge just inland, not shown on the Marines’ maps, held more guns. Puller’s own tractor was hit by a dud shell, and a 47 mm round wrecked his communications section. His regiment’s fight for the Point and the ridges is told in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5.

In the center the 5th Marines did better. Boyd’s battalion pushed inland through scrub to the edge of the airfield. Shofner’s battalion was hit by mortar and artillery fire; its executive officer, Major Robert M. Ash, was killed when his tractor took a direct hit. On the right, Hurst’s battalion of the 7th Marines found that many tractors had landed on the wrong beach, crowding the units together under fire. Rupertus ordered his reserve battalion, the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, to land, but there were not enough tractors left to carry it in before dark.

Two Marines of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines earned the Medal of Honor on the beaches that day. First Lieutenant Carlton R. Rouh, leading a mortar platoon, was shot while clearing a Japanese dugout; as a grenade landed among his men he pushed two of them clear and took the blast himself. He survived. Corporal Lewis K. Bausell was leading his squad against another dugout when a Japanese grenade fell among them. He threw himself on it and was mortally wounded.

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The first hours ashore

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More from the beaches

The Montford Point Marines

Behind the assault battalions came the shore party, and with it two companies of Black Marines, the 11th Marine Depot Company and the 7th Marine Ammunition Company, both part of the 16th Field Depot. The Marine Corps had begun enlisting Black men only in 1942 and trained them separately at Montford Point, a camp within Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Most were assigned to depot and ammunition companies, which unloaded, stacked and moved supplies.

At Peleliu that work was done under fire. The Black Marines carried ammunition forward, unloaded boats on the reef, and, when the casualties mounted, served as stretcher bearers, bringing wounded men down from the line. The Marine Corps’ history of Black Marines in the war records that the 11th Depot Company had seventeen men wounded, the highest casualty rate of any Black Marine company of the war. General Rupertus sent the commanders of both companies identical letters of commendation praising their “whole hearted cooperation and untiring efforts.”

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Black Marines and Seabees on Peleliu

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The shore party and the medics

Dogs and their handlers

Marine war-dog platoons also landed on Peleliu. Their Doberman pinschers and German shepherds stood watch at night, scented Japanese infiltrators and carried messages between handlers when wire and radio failed. The Marine Corps trained its dogs and handlers at Camp Lejeune. One of the photographs taken on D-Day shows Corporal William R. Scott of 913 Gregory Street, Greensboro, North Carolina, with his Doberman, Prince.

The dogs were most valuable at night, when the Japanese came out of their caves to infiltrate the Marine lines. A dog in a foxhole would warn its handler of movement long before a man could hear it.

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