They emerged from a cluster of concrete buildings which formed the Japanese headquarters and barracks area on the northern edge of the airfield. They approached as Japanese artillery on the ridge to their rear began to fire, and when they reached the edge of the airfield, the drivers stepped on the gas and the tanks sped over the crushed-coral surface at 30 miles an hour, leaving the infantry far behind. They charged on a southwest diagonal for the left-center juncture of the First and Fifth Marines.
They went whizzing past the front of the Second Battalion, First, about a baker’s dozen of them, their little wheels spinning within their treads, their guns barking. Snipers rode their engines or were slung to the rear in camouflage nets. They took a terrible flanking fire. Snipers were picked off one by one and the men in the nets shot to death and left lolling like dolls stuffed in Christmas stockings.
One tank butted a Marine amtrack in its rear, but another amtrack butted the Japanese rear. Caught, the Japanese tankers popped out of their turret and were cut down by rifle fire.
Then the Marine tanks arrived, an American rocket-firing plane swooped low over the airfield, and the work of destroying the Japanese tanks was begun.
The Japanese infantry, witnesses to that annihilated charge, withdrew.
The Seventh Marines moved east across the island, and turned to their right to face south and close off Peleliu’s southern tip.
The Fifth Marines drove across the southern edge of the airfield to reach the east coast.
The First was able to keep its right flank tied in with the Fifth’s left, but its own left was splintered into three segments.
Night began to fall on Peleliu, and up on The Point, where K Company was still cut off, Lieutenant Willis whispered to Captain Hunt:
“There’s one thing that can be said for our situation. Well be able to kill some more of the bastards.”
That night they did not kill as many as they thought they would, for the single thrust that the enemy made was quickly repulsed. Hunt thought it was only a sharp probing attack.
In the morning, Hunt found that the probing attack had actually been a skillful infiltration-in-force—and all along the line the Marines could sense that the Japanese on Peleliu seemed a breed vastly different from their brothers of Guadalcanal and New Britain.
Four days?
It looked more like forty.
18
It was the Seventh Marines who were first to test the tenacity of Japan’s new defensive fighter. On the blazing hot morning of September 16, the Seventh’s First and Third Battalions began their drive to clean out southern Peleliu.
They were contested by the elite 3rd Battalion, 15th Infantry, which Colonel Nakagawa had left behind, and all the way they encountered copious supplies of those targets which the bombardment force claimed to have exhausted. Pillboxes, case-mates, bunkers, rifle pits, trenches, and here and there a blockhouse—they were still standing, still spitting death and defiance. If they had not been fixed to fire seaward over the eastern beaches, the ordeal of the Seventh to the south might have rivaled the slaughter impending in the north. But the Marines were able to strike at the Japanese rear and flanks.
All the while the enemy stayed holed-up. Soon the Marines found themselves harassed by the tactic of “passive infiltration” which General Inoue had recommended in his training plan. Swarming along their underground tunnels, the Japanese reoccupied pillboxes which the Marines thought they had knocked out. They attacked the Marines from the rear. They popped up out of unsuspected cavemouths. Where they held high ground, they ran out entrances on one side of their ridge while the Marines pumped explosives or swished flame into it. Then they ran back in again and resumed fighting.
The attack south became a grinding, three-day push, but the Seventh’s two battalions gradually herded the enemy before them into a pair of tiny, pillbox-studded promontories. It was here on the third day that Pfc. Arthur Jackson launched a one-man attack. He charged pillbox after pillbox, spraying automatic fire, hurling white phosphorous grenades and explosives brought up by other Marines, moving from point to point in an astonishing singlehanded foray which wiped out 12 pillboxes and brought death to 50 Japanese—as well as the Medal of Honor and a lieutenant’s commission to Pfc. Jackson. On the afternoon of September 18, the surviving Japanese jumped in the water in hopes of swimming to the islets on the Peleliu lobster-claw’s lower prong. They were picked off by riflemen. Colonel Hanneken reported to General Rupertus:
“The Seventh Marines’ mission on Pelelius is completed.”
In the first light of September 16 Captain Hunt’s men on The Point beat off the Japanese attack launched by the force which had infiltrated during the night. They hung on to their vital height until other Marines reached them and Captain Hunt’s band was firmly tied into the line.
In the meanwhile, the front of the First and Fifth Marines was plugged and straightened everywhere and the two regiments wheeled across the northern edge of the airfield to face the Umurbrogal rising above it.
The Marines crossed the airfield with the temperature at 110 degrees. Heat rose from the surface of the runways in shimmering, visible waves. Bullets hummed among the Marines and struck them down. They went across standing up—for there was no place to hide on this cruel table-top—and they walked or ran, scattered, hundreds of men, but each to himself alone. Men were falling of water poisoning, sickened by water floated ashore in oil drums from which the oil had not been thoroughly cleansed. All along this line steadily straightening from west to east and swinging north there rose the shrill calls of “Corpsman! Corpsman!” and the hoarser cries for blood plasma or water, the lesser calls for salt tablets.
Amtracks answering these calls had to run the gantlet of the reverberating hell which Colonel Nakagawa’s concealed guns were making of the airfield. They had to go careening up Purple Heart Run from the beach to the airport, zigzagging wildly over Silver Star Run from airfield to ridge.
At the end of the day the line was straight. But the Umurbrogal was not yet quite reached, although the Marines had already a hint of the confidence of the men who held it. They had found a Japanese propaganda leaflet, which said:
American brave soldiers!
We think you much pity since landing on this island. In spite of your pitiful battle we are sorry that we can present only fire, not even good water. We soon will attack strongly your Army. You have done bravely your duty.
Now, abandon your guns, and come in Japanese military with white flag (or handkerchief), so we will be glad to see you and welcome you comfortably as we can well.
There were no takers.
“There they are! They’re comin’ in at us!”
It was ten o’clock at night, and the cries of alarm rose all over The Point. They rose as 350 Japanese charged furiously at Captain Hunt’s men, now supported by Marines on the right as well as with mortar and artillery fire and the illumination of naval flares.
“Give ‘em hell!” Hunt bellowed. “Kill every one of the bastards!”
“Klopf! Cut loose! Fire until I tell you to stop.”
“LaCoy, LaCoy—”
“Yes?”
“Let’em have it! Traverse the whole line and keep firing!”
