Westward they had moved, until, by mid-September, 1944, full 40 degrees of longitude lay between Tarawa and another coral island called Peleliu.
15
The Palau Islands, of which Peleliu was one of two chief bastions, were to be held at all costs.
Imperial General Headquarters had made this clear to Lieutenant General Sadae Inoue when he had taken command there in March. For the Palaus, a series of volcanic islands inside a coral reef 77 miles long and 20 wide, provided the anchorage and air bases no longer available at Truk. They were only about 550 miles east of the Southern Philippines.
In March, Imperial General Headquarters had wrongly guessed that the Americans would strike the Palaus and not the Marianas. The Japanese had expected General MacArthur’s invasion of the Philippines to take precedence over the Marianas route to Japan. Having used the Palaus to stage their own Philippines invasions of 1941, it seemed to them likely that the Americans would want them for the same reasons in 1944.
After the surprise at Saipan, after the disaster of the Battle of the Philippine Sea and the agony of the Marianas losses, Headquarters regarded a Palaus invasion as inevitable. So did Inoue. The commander of the “Palau Sector Group,” which also included Yap and Ulithi Atolls, decided to make his defense so tenacious as to gain months of time during which the Empire could recover from the air and fleet losses of the Marianas fighting.
To do this he withdrew all troops from Ulithi and began concentrating his 30,000 to 40,000 men in the Palaus, in little Peleliu just inside the southern end of the reef, and on big Babelthuap just within the northern end. Another island, Angaur, was 10 miles south of Peleliu but outside the reef. It got only about 1,400 men.
Peleliu got between 10,000 and 11,000 men—the 2nd Infantry Regiment, a battalion of the 15th Infantry, a battalion of the 54th Independent Mixed Brigade, a Naval Guard Force and a tank battalion—all commanded by Colonel Kunio Nakagawa. Most of these units were from the 14th Infantry Division, Inoue’s own outfit and the nucleus of his force. It was a proud old division with a service record running back through four years in Manchuria to the Russian War. In General Inoue and his chief of staff, Colonel Tokechi Tada, at Babelthuap, and in Colonel Nakagawa at Peleliu, the 14th Division possessed three of the finest officers in the Japanese Army.
Such ability was reflected in the “Palau Sector Group Training for Victory” plan issued by Inoue on July 11. It began:
“Victory depends on the officers and men of the entire army concentrating on our thorough application of recent battle lessons, especially those of Saipan.”
Less than startling to Western ears, this was unorthodox in Japan. For years the doctrine of defense had been simply and inflexibly “annihilation at the water’s edge.” Hold the beach and you hold all. More, the invading American Marines had not been in the habit of allowing anyone to survive to challenge it. But there had been a few officers who escaped from Saipan, where General Saito’s artillery had punished the Americans. They came to Inoue’s command. They passed along their observations. The result:
“If the situation becomes bad we will maintain a firm hold on the high ground and prevent the enemy from establishing or using an air base by a daring guerrilla warfare with our artillery .”
Peleliu was made for such defense.
It was six miles long south-north and two miles wide at its broadest west-east. It was shaped like a lobster’s claw. It was, in fact, a pair of peninsulas joined on the east coast about one-third up its length. On the east coast were shoals and mangrove swamps and a series of islets extending the lower prong eastward. On the west were narrow beaches of white coral sand, fortified and defended in the accustomed manner. Both coasts were encompassed by the reef surrounding all the Palaus but Angaur. In the south was Peleliu’s excellent airfield, one which had been in use since before the war. Rising above it and running north about two miles was a low wooded ridge which the Japanese called the Momiji Plateau, which the Micronesians called Umurbrogal Mountain and which the American Marines would call Bloody Nose Ridge.
It was this high ground which made Peleliu so perfectly adaptable to defense-in-depth, for it was neither ridge nor mountain but an undersea coral reef thrown above the surface by a subterranean volcano. Sparse vegetation growing in the thin topsoil atop the bedrock had concealed the Umurbrogal’s crazy contours from the aerial camera’s eye. It was a place that might have been designed by a maniacal artist given to painting mathematical abstractions—all slants, jaggeds, straights, steeps and sheers with no curve to soften or relieve. Its highest elevation was 300 feet in the extreme north overlooking the airfield-islet of Ngesebus 1,000 yards offcoast there. But no height rose more than 50 feet before splitting apart in a maze of peaks and defiles cluttered with boulders and machicolated with caves. For the Umurbrogal was also a monster swiss cheese of hard coral limestone pocked beyond imagining with caves and crevices. They were to be found at every level, in every size— crevices small enough for a lonely sniper, eerie caverns big enough to station a battalion among its stalactites and stalagmites.
It was here that Colonel Nunio Nakagawa and his engineers set to work widening, improving and fortifying the caves. When Colonel Nakagawa reported to General Inoue on Babelthuap that Vice Admiral Itou was interfering with his work, Inoue sent Major General Kenjiro Murai down to Peleliu. He was not to take command, he was only, in that friction between the Anchor and the Star, to match rank with Admiral Itou. Beneath the cover of this stalemate, Nakagawa continued his fortifying, and by the end of August he had 500 caves completed.
Nearly all were connected by interior tunnels. Most had entrances on more than one level and all had entrances on both sides of the mountain. Log-and-sandbag barricades protected the entrances, and their tunnels ran only a few feet inside the mountain before turning sharply to escape both direct gunfire and the terrible American flame-throwers. Some of the caverns were five and six stories deep. They contained barracks and kitchens. If the top of the Umurbrogal were to be lifted off, some of these tunnel networks would appear like monster H’s or series of E’s laid back to back. And this would be repeated for five and six levels down.
Within these caves Colonel Nakagawa placed all of his artillery except his coastal guns, all of his mortars and also the new 200-millimeter rocket-launchers just received from Japan. The guns fired from cave mouths equipped with sliding doors of armored steel. They could hit the beaches, the airfield to the south and Ngesebus to the north.
