The Marines hit the beaches at 0832. There were no Japanese in their immediate vicinity. Within minutes, however, the invaders found themselves under heavy shellfire, which wrecked dozens of amphibious vehicles, and made the men reluctant to forsake cover and advance beyond the beach. Medical corpsman Bill Jenkins’s unit suffered its first casualty seconds after disembarking. It was ‘Pop’ Lujack, the oldest man in the company, ‘a guy I thought a lot of, and it hurt me badly when I saw he was hit. I didn’t know any better but he was hit in the head and practically the whole back of his head was shot off, and I was laying down there trying to fix him up. One of the guys came up and said, “Doc, get out of there, he’s dead.”’
More than 10,000 Japanese were defending the island. Rather than attempt to hold the coast under American bombardment, Col. Kunio Nakagawa had deployed his men inland, on a series of coral ridges which offered commanding views of the shore. The beach at Peleliu, flailed by enemy fire, became one of the Marines’ most shocking memories of the Pacific war, and cost them over two hundred dead on the first day. Though the beach had been reconnoitred, Rupertus and his staff knew nothing of the terrain inland, which was ideally suited to defence. Peleliu had been a mining site. Each ridge was honeycombed with tunnels, in which the Japanese had installed electricity and living quarters, impervious to shells and bombs. Marine communications proved so poor that commanders were left struggling to discover their own men’s whereabouts, and were thus hesitant about calling in close artillery support. Of the eighteen tanks landed with 1st Marines, three were knocked out before they reached the beach, and all but one were hit by shells thereafter. In the chaos, a senior officer landed to investigate why so many vehicles were blazing. He could discover little. Most of 1st Marines’ headquarters had been wiped out, and 5th Marines’ HQ was also badly depleted. A shell blast concussed a Louisiana-born staff officer so badly that he began to murmur in the French of his childhood.
A Japanese counterattack in the afternoon, supported by light tanks, was easily repulsed, the enemy shot to pieces. When feeble little Japanese ‘tankettes’ surrounded an American medium tank, it destroyed eleven in a circle, ‘like Indians round a wagon train’, as O.P. Smith put it. Here was a pattern which would become familiar in all the late Pacific battles: when the Japanese moved, they were slaughtered; when they held their ground, however, they were extraordinarily hard to kill. Smith was sitting at his forward command post when a mortar bomb landed just short of its protecting bank. A Marine fell back onto the general, a small fragment lodged in the back of his head. Smith’s aide bandaged him: ‘The boy was not badly hurt and was talkative. He was married and had been out of the States for two years. To him, the wound was a ticket home.’ American guns were getting ashore only slowly, because so many amphibious vehicles had been destroyed. Snipers provoked wild retaliatory fusillades, as dangerous to Americans as to Japanese. When Smith wanted to visit regimental command posts, he could find them only by tracking phone wires.
Nightfall brought no respite. There were 12,000 Americans onshore, crowded into a beachhead which granted each man a few square feet of coral, sand and insects. The Marines held no clearly defined perimeter, merely scrapes and holes between four and seven hundred yards inland, along more than a mile of coast. Most of the men were utterly bemused, conscious only of incoming fire. Japanese infiltrators crept into American forward positions, grenading and testing nerves. A man who found himself under friendly fire even after shouting the password resorted to singing a verse of the Marine Corps hymn. Some 7th Marines landed amid the shambles, and found themselves unable to locate their objectives. After being harried from place to place, out of radio contact with higher command, under heavy mortaring their amphibious tractors returned to the assault ship, Leedstown. Alongside in darkness, the navy refused to let the men board, supposing that they had run away. Their colonel was reluctantly permitted to climb the side alone, to radio divisional headquarters for new orders. Eventually his men were grudgingly authorised to re-embark, but many boats’ occupants spent the whole night lost at sea.
It took 1st Marine Division a week and 3,946 casualties to secure the key airfield sites, mocking Rupertus’s four-day estimate. Even then the Japanese overlooked them from the Umurbrogol Ridge, and could sustain observed fire. After the Japanese shot down medics recovering wounded, heavy mortars laid smokescreens to protect stretcher-bearers. The whole island occupied only seven square miles. In O.P. Smith’s words, ‘For the first few days, real estate was at a premium.’ The beach area was crowded with makeshift bivouacs. There was little scope for outflanking enemy strongpoints. These could only be assaulted headlong, each yard of progress costing blood. ‘The thousands of rounds of artillery shells, the mortar barrages, the napalm strikes and the bombs poured in…[These] undoubtedly killed many Japanese in exposed positions, but those in caves were untouched and there were always new relays of snipers and machine-gunners to replace those who had fallen on the peaks…For the concentrated fury of the fighting it was only exceeded by Tarawa and Iwo Jima,’ wrote a senior Marine. Reinforced concrete blast walls protected each tunnel mouth. When the Americans finally secured the largest cave system on 27 September, it proved to have housed a thousand defenders.
No place on the island was safe. Bill Atkinson watched a BAR gunner take up position behind a tank and start firing. To Atkinson’s horror, the Sherman suddenly lurched backwards, crushing the man to pulp. 5th Marine Virgle Nelson, hit in the buttock, hollered with glee: ‘Oh my God, I guess I get to go back now!’ Bill Jenkins, a medical corpsman from Canton, Missouri, was awed by a tough machine-gunner named Wayley, who was hit four times. Told that he was to be evacuated, Wayley said: ‘No way.’ Jenkins asked his buddy Jack Henry to get a litter. The moment Henry moved, machine-gun fire caught his arms, and he came running back into the tank trap where they lay. ‘One arm [was] 99.9 per cent off and the other almost as bad. I could have taken a scissors and clipped both arms off and buried them. I wasn’t trained to try and set the cut-up, broken-up arms…all I did was just kind of put them together, both of them, and I wrapped them up the best I could with T-shirts and used tourniquets. I put his arms over his head to keep him from bleeding to death.’ Against the odds, Henry survived.
Another man begged Jenkins for medicinal brandy. The corpsman said sheepishly: ‘Gosh, I had some, but I got so damn scared I drank it myself.’ Seventeen-year-old Tom Evans landed as a replacement rifleman, but was immediately detailed as a litter-bearer. ‘I am carrying this guy on the stretcher and he’s been dead maybe a day and a half but already his body is kind of oily and covered with flies and maggots. I slipped and fell as I was going downhill and naturally he comes sliding down and straddled my neck, and I had maggots on me—Ohh.’ Marines learned to race clouds of accursed blowflies to every meal, sliding a hand across a can top the instant it was opened. Men’s lips and ear tops blistered in the sun. Commanders dispatched from the ships offshore fresh bread—‘a great morale-builder’—and occasionally ice cream in milk cans. ‘Chesty’ Puller asked his Marines if there was anything he could get them. Predictably, they asked for a drink stronger than water. Puller issued medicinal alcohol mixed with powdered lemonade. Others found a cache of Japanese sake