Some of them jumped and ran to the tank. But there were still six wounded on the ridge, guarded by three Marines and one of the three corpsmen who had not been killed. The wounded urged the able to leave.
“You’ve done all you can for us,” one of them sobbed. “Get outta here.”
The unharmed Marines rolled their stricken comrades over the ledge. They fell among the boulders. One man’s foot caught in a vine and he hung there until a comrade kicked it free. Above them, a trio of Marines who had been playing dead jumped to their feet and ran for the ledge. One was killed but the others jumped to safety.
In the draw, two wounded men stumbled toward the tank. One of them put his arms around his friend and half-carried him forward. They could not make it. They sank to the ground, and Japanese bullets spurted around them.
Captain Shanley shook off a lieutenant’s restraining hand and ran out to get them. He seized one man in his arms, ran back to the tank with him, laid him down—and ran out again. But a mortar shell exploded behind Captain Shanley and he fell, mortally wounded. Lieutenant Harold Collis ran to rescue Captain Shanley. He fell beside him, dead.
Now there was more smoke drifting over the ledge. More of the unharmed Marines jumped to safety. They ran across that terrible draw and only a few survived it. Two who did ran back to rescue the wounded. They were killed.
And then dusk began to veil that tableau of tragedy. Of the 48 men who went up Ridge 121, only 11 came back down—and six of these were wounded. The Seventh Marines could also fight no more. Their casualties were 1,497, nearly matching those of the First.
It was up to the Fifth Marines to crush less than 1,000 Japanese still living in the constricted Umurbrogal Pocket. They relieved the Seventh on October 6. But the valiant arrogant Fifth, the regiment that had been blooded in Belleau Wood, could not do it either. By October 15, they too were exhausted and their casualties of 1,378 were also nearly 50 per cent.
On that date, with the assault phase on Peleliu ended, with about 500 of Nakagawa’s men still holding out in a pocket about 400 yards at its widest east-west, about 600 yards at its longest north-south, command on Peleliu passed to Major General Paul Mueller of the 81st Division. There began then a grim, step-by-step reduction that would last a month and would be fought with bulldozers and explosives and bombs and napalm as much as by foot soldiers with hand guns.
For now the need for speed no longer existed at Peleliu. Five days after the Army took command, General MacArthur’s soldiers began landing at Leyte in the Philippines. Two days more marked the beginning of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the struggle which was the greatest naval battle in history, bringing death to the Japanese Navy and establishing America as the greatest sea power afloat, while also marking the passing of the battleship and introducing that strange new
On October 12, the first of the B-29’s landed on Saipan. On November 24, the first B-29 bombing raid was flown from there to Tokyo. On that same night, when the thunder of the monster American bombers could be heard above the Ginza, Colonel Nakagawa and Major General Murai killed themselves on Peleliu. They had destroyed the colors of their commands and they had no one left to command.
Kunio Nakagawa and his men had inflicted a total of 6,526 casualties on the First Marine Division, of whom 1,252 were killed. They also killed 208 and wounded 1,185 soldiers of the 81st Division. They had made the oldest and most battle-experienced of all the Marine divisions fight for their lives-fight for each other’s lives. In that recurring and noblest phenomenon of the Marines’ war, Lieutenant Carlton Rouh, Corporal Lewis Bausell, Pfc. Richard Kraus, Pfc. John New, Pfc. Wesley Phelps and Pfc. Charles Roan all threw themselves on enemy grenades to save their comrades. Lieutenant Rouh survived his wounds to receive his Medal of Honor. The others did not.
Out of this Peleliu which gave General MacArthur his secure right flank, which obtained Admiral Nimitz’ anchorage and air base, came the new phenomenon of the war, the Japanese soldier fighting with head as well as heart. Colonel Kunio Nakagawa had shown the world that in place of the fiction of the Japanese warrior irresistible on offense stood the hard fact of the world’s most tenacious defensive fighter immovable except in death.
There were many more of them. As one who had been overpowered on Saipan snarled to the conquerors who would not let him kill himself: “You may have this island, but back there is the Empire.”
Against these new warriors, into the heart of this Empire, the Marines would now go charging.
IV. And No More
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It was early 1945 and the Marines had had their second breather.
They had fought and won seven major actions in 1944, but apart from two artillery battalions fighting in the Philippines, Marine ground forces had not fired a shot since the Fifth Marines came down from the Umurbrogal in mid-October.
They needed the respite—for the battered First Division to recuperate from Peleliu, for the new Fifth to shake down in Hawaii, for the Third to fill its ranks and train the newcomers by sweeping Guam of its remaining Japanese soldiers, for the Second and Fourth to renew themselves with replacement drafts from the States, for the Sixth to twist the regimental rivalries of the loner Fourth, Twenty-second and Twenty-ninth Marines into the single strand of divisional pride.
And now there were six full Marine divisions in the field, two corps, a full army, some 200,000 men; the largest, the most successful, the most experienced body of amphibious assault troops the world has known. Before this force, invincible since Guadalcanal, lay two final targets: Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Iwo and Okie—the first a bare eight square miles of desolate crag and volcanic ash lying 760 miles south of Tokyo, the second an irregular island 60 miles at its longest, two at its narrowest and 18 at its broadest, but lying only 375 miles below southernmost Japan.
Iwo would come first, for Iwo was already urgent.
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