Strong Men Armed

“Kill! Kill!”

“Artillery falling short!”

“Goddamit, Klopf! Lift the range 200 yards.”

“Short rounds! We’re raising it now!”

“Who’s there, who’s there?”

“It’s LaBerge, LaBerge.”

“Who’s there, I say—I’ll shoot!”

“It’s LaBerge, goddamit, don’t you know me? I’m LaBerge!”

Bang!

“Are you satisfied now, you son of a bitch, you did shoot me?”

“They’re coming around the flank in the water! Bring that gun down to the beach.”

“LaCoy—drop some rounds along the beach 50 yards in front of us.”

“There they are, there they are—let ‘em have it!”

“They’re duckin’ in the niches! Don’t let ‘em get away. Use thermite grenades!”

“Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus, lookit ‘em. Lookit ‘em burn! Even in the water…. Y’hear ‘em?”

After the last ammunition belt had gone off like a string of firecrackers, after the last scream had subsided, there were no more sounds of battle on The Point. Captain Hunt’s Marines had held. Of 235 who had landed on September 15, there were 78 left on the morning of September 17 where K Company was relieved.

19

On the Sunday morning of September 17 the southern third of Peleliu—where the island is broadest and the airfield is located —was in American hands. The Seventh Marines were cleaning out what few enemy remained within this sector, while above them the Fifth Marines began to move up the east coast to the mouth of the lower peninsula or prong and the First Marines struck headlong at the Umurbrogal.

The First attacked across a three-battalion front. On the left the Third Battalion had good going along West Road running like a corridor between sea on the left, Umurbrogal on the right. They had to slow down. They were outdistancing the First Battalion on their right.

One of those enormous blockhouses missed by the bombardment force had halted the First Battalion. It had reinforced concrete walls four feet thick and was supported by 12 surrounding pillboxes and a maze of tunnels. The Marines marked time while old Mississippi steamed in to hurl her 14-inch armor-piercers and high-capacity shells into it. The blockhouse shuddered and began to fly apart. Those Japanese who attempted to escape it were cut down. The Marines of the First Battalion rolled through the remaining pillboxes and fought through a tiny dense jungle. They came to the ridges.

On their right, the Second Battalion was the first to reach the Umurbrogal’s outpost hills. They went up against Hill 200, while the Japanese field pieces ran in and out of cover to strip them of supporting Shermans and amtanks, to knock out the amtracks coming up with supplies, and then to fire point-blank among the climbing riflemen, even then being raked with small-arms fire.

Up, up, up, fighting in an oven of 112 degrees, climbing the cruel slashing coral, clawing over razorbacks, flopping behind boulders to gasp for breath, shinnying up the pinnacles, rolling down steep inclines to escape the bullets and grenades, crawling back up it again to re-form and attack once more, and all around the clanging hell of the enemy artillery and mortars, the cries for water and plasma, and over and over again: “Pass the word for stretcher-bearers, pass the word for stretcher-bearers.”

But they went up, sometimes having to slide back down to retake “fallen” caves which had erupted with killing fire again. They took the first height of the Umurbrogal, and found that to their left above them was another. It was Hill 210, just that much higher than Hill 200, and down from it plunged a terrible rain, while up from the wooded ravine between ridges flashed a matching fire.

The men of the Second Battalion, First, “dug in.” That is, they gathered coral rocks and piled them between themselves and the enemy fire. Then they lay down on the unyielding rock, feeling its intense heat through dungarees slashed and torn by the ordeal of their climb.

But they had driven a deep salient into the enemy’s lines and had covered the Fifth Marines to their right against possible flanking fire. The cost?

“We’re up here,” reported the single company commander who had survived. “But we’re knee-deep in Purple Hearts.”

In the morning, there were more casualties all along the line, for the Second Battalion’s salient in fact had made a shallow W of the entire front from west to east coast. The Japanese took advantage of the W and hammered hard at its joints, counterattacking and shooting the gaps where they found them. Hill 200 shook to constant battle, and Colonel Puller was forced to take G Company from the Second Battalion, Seventh, given him as a reserve, and rush it up to bolster the line. The Marines held, and in the morning of September 18, the attack went forward in an attempt to straighten out the W. It went forward at seven o’clock with the thermometer already rising to 115 degrees, and each man issued a dozen salt tablets and two canteens of water to resist the Umurbrogal’s horrible heat. The guns of both armies had stripped the battleground of all shade. Everything lay open to the sun, which hung in the sky like a burning ball above a jumble of blinding white coral rubble. The Marines were lying out on this like fish gasping on a skillet. The enemy was in his caves, cool and covered.

Marines dropping of heat exhaustion were helped to the rear to be revived with intravenous feedings of normal saline. Then they returned to battle, their camouflage nets pulled out from beneath their helmets and hanging over the back of their necks like the kepis of the French Foreign Legion.

In this heat, Chesty Puller roamed his command post stripped to the waist, his pipe stuck in one corner of his mouth while he issued his orders from the other. Puller had already relieved his badly mauled First Battalion and placed the Second Battalion, Seventh, in the center of his line. He had fed 115 men from the First Pioneer Battalion into the other depleted battalions. His own regiment’s casualties were 1,236, not counting combat fatigue or heat exhaustion, or about one-third—and most of these were among Marines of the line. But Puller was optimistic, as was Major General Rupertus. High ground had been reached the day before, had been held during the night, and now the enemy collapse was imminent.

It had always happened that way. Once the Marines had fought into dominating terrain, Japanese resistance had weakened until it had been utterly broken by a last banzai. Although there had been no banzai as yet, there was no reason not to expect one.

Nor could Puller or anyone else conceive of the depth of the position under attack. There had been a few uneasy reflections on the 35 unmapped caves which the First Battalion had been forced to knock out the day before, but no one dreamed that so many hundreds more awaited them in the higher ridges, as no one doubted the efficacy of the naval gunfire, artillery and air strikes preceding each assault, laying bare more and more of the Umurbrogal’s ugly white pate.

But on this September 18 there were so many more caves, so many more troops and guns in those higher ridges that the attacks of the Second Battalions, Seventh and First, were quickly fragmented center and left. Though the object was to pinch out the Japanese on Hill 210 inside the first V of the W, the Marines were attacking in every direction of the compass, for they were under fire from every direction. It was a bloody scramble of squads or platoons, with here and there a surviving officer rounding up the remnants of a company and leading them on until the Hill 210 bulge was erased. And the Japanese in surrounding ridges retaliated by bringing down such a murderous fire on the Second Battalion, First, and by mounting a series of counterattacks so savage that Lieutenant Colonel Russell Honsowetz reported that he might not be able to hold.

“What d’yuh mean, cain’t hold?” Puller roared. “You’re there, ain’t you, Honsowetz?”

Then, while a smoke barrage was laid down to conceal Honsowetz’ position, Puller ordered B Company out of the First Battalion reserve to a point forward and right of besieged Hill 200. B Company went up it in a rush. But it was only an isolated ridge. It did not relieve much of the pressure on the Second Battalion, First. B Company pushed on. They came to a system of peaks and palisades called The Five Sisters, a complex running transverse to the entire Umurbrogal. They attacked it.