Peleliu is a coral island about six miles long and two miles wide at the southern end of the Palau Islands, some five hundred miles east of Mindanao in the Philippines. In September 1944 the 1st Marine Division was sent to take it in a few days. The fighting lasted seventy-three days, cost more than nine thousand American casualties and nearly the whole Japanese garrison, and ended with many of the men who fought there wondering why they had been sent. This chapter explains how the invasion was planned and why it went ahead even after the admiral in charge recommended calling it off.

Japan’s islands in the western Pacific

The Palaus had been a German colony until the First World War. Japan occupied them in 1914 and held them afterward under a League of Nations mandate, governing all its South Seas islands from Koror, the town at the center of the group. Japanese settlers, fishermen and phosphate miners followed. On Angaur, the small island just south of Peleliu, the phosphate works the Germans had opened kept shipping fertilizer rock to Japan through the 1930s.

By the time of Pearl Harbor the Palaus were a fleet anchorage and air base on the inner edge of Japan’s defensive perimeter. Peleliu held the best airfield in the group, a pair of crossing runways on the flat southern half of the island. North of the airfield the island rose into a tangle of coral ridges the Japanese called the Umurbrogol mountains. American planners saw a runway. The ridges, hidden under jungle in every aerial photograph, would decide the battle.

In March 1944 the Navy’s fast carriers struck the Palaus for the first time. On 30 and 31 March aircraft from Task Force 58 sank or damaged dozens of ships in the anchorages and mined the passages. Admiral Mineichi Koga, commander of Japan’s Combined Fleet, left Palau by flying boat for Davao during the attacks; his plane disappeared in a storm and he was never found. The Japanese fleet did not use the Palaus as a main base again.

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The carrier strikes on Palau, March 1944

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Angaur before the war: the phosphate mines

Two roads to the Philippines

By the summer of 1944 two American offensives were converging on the Philippines. General Douglas MacArthur’s forces had leapfrogged along the north coast of New Guinea and were preparing to land on Morotai, in the Netherlands East Indies, and then on Mindanao. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz’s Central Pacific forces had taken the Gilberts and Marshalls and, in June and August, Saipan, Tinian and Guam in the Marianas (see the Marianas collection).

The Palaus lay between the two roads. Planners in Washington and Pearl Harbor reasoned that Japanese aircraft there could strike the flank of MacArthur’s advance, and that the islands offered airfields and anchorages the Americans could use themselves. Operation Stalemate, as first drawn up, called for landings on Babelthuap, the largest island in the group. The revised plan, Stalemate II, dropped Babelthuap and its garrison of more than twenty thousand men. It aimed instead at Peleliu and Angaur in the south, then Yap and the atoll of Ulithi to the northeast.

The landings were assigned to Major General Roy S. Geiger’s III Amphibious Corps. Because Geiger and his staff were fighting on Guam until 10 August, much of the planning was done by a temporary headquarters, X-Ray Corps, under Major General Julian C. Smith. The 1st Marine Division would take Peleliu and the small island of Ngesebus off its northern tip. The Army’s 81st Infantry Division, which had never been in combat, would take Angaur, and one of its regiments would be held for Ulithi. Vice Admiral Theodore S. Wilkinson commanded the amphibious force that carried them.

The Old Breed on Pavuvu

The 1st Marine Division, nicknamed the Old Breed, was the most experienced division in the Marine Corps. It had been organized as a division in 1941 and trained at New River, North Carolina, the base that became Camp Lejeune, before it sailed for the South Pacific. It had fought the long campaign on Guadalcanal in 1942 (see the Guadalcanal collection) and the jungle campaign at Cape Gloucester on New Britain from December 1943 to April 1944.

After Cape Gloucester the division was sent to rest on Pavuvu, in the Russell Islands. The men remembered Pavuvu for rotting coconuts, rats and land crabs, and for building their own camp in the mud. Thousands of veterans went home on rotation and replacements took their places. Among them was a nineteen-year-old private from Mobile, Alabama, named Eugene B. Sledge, who joined K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines as a mortarman and later wrote the best-known memoir of the battle. The division rehearsed on Guadalcanal in August and sailed for the Palaus at the end of the month.

The division commander, Major General William H. Rupertus, had broken his ankle in a training exercise and went to Peleliu in a cast. He had been away in Washington during much of the planning. Rupertus expected a hard but short fight. Before the landing he told war correspondents that the island would be taken quickly, in a few days, a forecast that persuaded several reporters not to go ashore at all. Only a handful of correspondents covered the battle, which helps explain why it remains so little known.

Halsey says cancel it

In early September Admiral William F. Halsey’s Third Fleet sent its carriers against the Palaus, Mindanao and the central Philippines to prepare the way. From 9 to 14 September its pilots met surprisingly weak opposition and destroyed hundreds of Japanese aircraft. On 13 September Halsey recommended a sweeping change: cancel the planned landings on the Palaus, Yap and Mindanao, and go straight to Leyte in the central Philippines.

Nimitz accepted most of it. The Yap landing was cancelled and its troops sent toward Leyte, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, meeting with the British at Quebec, moved the invasion of Leyte forward by two months to 20 October 1944. But Nimitz kept the Palau landings. The assault force was already at sea, and he believed the airfields on Peleliu and Angaur and the anchorages at Kossol Passage and Ulithi were needed to support the Philippines. The Army’s official historian later observed that Halsey was the only senior commander who thought the Palaus could be safely bypassed.

On the same morning that the Marines landed on Peleliu, 15 September 1944, MacArthur’s troops landed almost unopposed on Morotai. The two landings were meant to guard the two flanks of the road to Mindanao. A month later, after Halsey’s recommendation, that road ran instead to Leyte, and the story of how the Navy fought there is told in the Leyte Gulf collection.

The plan for Peleliu

The plan was straightforward. The division would land five battalions abreast on the southwest coast, on beaches code-named White 1 and 2 and Orange 1, 2 and 3. Colonel Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller’s 1st Marines would land on the left, on the White beaches, and wheel north toward the high ground. Colonel Harold D. Harris’s 5th Marines would land in the center and drive straight across the airfield to the east coast. Colonel Herman H. Hanneken’s 7th Marines would land on the right and clear the southern end of the island.

Peleliu was ringed by a coral reef that stretched six hundred to eight hundred yards offshore. Landing boats could not cross it, so the assault waves would ride ashore in amphibian tractors, the tracked LVTs that had first been used in quantity at Tarawa in 1943 (see the Tarawa and Kwajalein collection). Tanks would be landed at the reef’s edge and drive in through the shallows. After three days of naval bombardment the division expected to have the airfield on the first day.

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The men and the maps

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