What happened at Peleliu?
At the Battle of Peleliu, from 15 September to 27 November 1944, US Marines and Army troops captured the island from its Japanese garrison after more than two months of savage fighting. Promised as a battle of a few days, it became a nightmare of cave warfare on the coral ridges the Marines called Bloody Nose Ridge. The garrison was nearly wiped out, American losses were heavy, and the island's strategic value has been debated ever since.4
The division commander expected Peleliu to be short and rough, secured in about four days. Instead the Marines found a honeycomb of caves and a new Japanese way of fighting, and the battle ground on for over two months on a ridge they would never forget.5
Part of The greatest battles of the Pacific War · Before: The Battle of Tarawa · Next: The Battle of Leyte Gulf
The road to the Palaus
As American forces drove toward the Philippines in 1944, Peleliu and its airfield were targeted to protect the flank of the coming invasion. A heavy bombardment was expected to make the landing quick, and the Marine commander William Rupertus predicted the island would fall in a few days.6
The operation, code-named Stalemate II, was meant to seize the southern Palaus: the 1st Marine Division would take Peleliu while the Army's 81st Infantry Division took the neighboring island of Angaur, both under Major General Roy Geiger's III Amphibious Corps. On 13 September 1944, two days before the landing, Admiral William Halsey recommended canceling it and sending the troops straight to the Philippines, because his carrier strikes there had met unexpectedly weak opposition. Chester Nimitz replied that the commitments were already made and the Palau landings must go ahead.7
Halsey's message still changed the wider war. According to the 1950 Marine Corps monograph by Frank O. Hough, it started the exchange that moved the invasion of Leyte forward by two months, to 20 October 1944, the landing that brought on the Battle of Leyte Gulf.8
A new kind of defense
The Japanese commander, Kunio Nakagawa, had abandoned the old tactic of trying to destroy the invaders at the water's edge. He still mined and fortified the beaches, but he put his main effort into the rugged interior, with hundreds of interconnected caves and bunkers, planning to make the Americans pay dearly for every yard, a defense in depth that would be repeated on later islands.9
How many troops fought at Peleliu?
Roughly 10,000 to 11,000 Japanese defended Peleliu, built around Colonel Nakagawa's 2nd Infantry Regiment of 6,500 to 7,000 men. Against them the 1st Marine Division landed three infantry regiments, nine battalions in all, and the Army's 81st Infantry Division, which first took Angaur, later sent its regiments to Peleliu to finish the battle.10
Nakagawa's men were veterans of the war in China, armed with 24 75mm guns, a dozen or more light tanks and heavy mortars, and joined by naval troops and laborers already on the island. Gayle, the Marine Corps historian, judged the American plan badly unbalanced: nine Marine battalions were sent against more than 10,000 defenders on Peleliu, while six Army battalions faced about 1,500 on Angaur.11
Bloody Nose Ridge
The Marines landed on 15 September 1944 on the western beaches, code-named White and Orange, crossing the reef in amphibian tractors under fire from guns the bombardment had missed. By nightfall the division had lost about 1,100 men, more than 200 of them killed. Late that afternoon Nakagawa sent tanks and infantry across the airfield in a counterattack, and Marine fire of every caliber destroyed it.12
Once ashore, the Marines ran into the coral spine of the island, the Umurbrogol, which they came to call Bloody Nose Ridge. Its caves and sheer rock had survived the bombardment untouched, and attacking them in the fierce heat cost appalling casualties for tiny gains.13
The heat was a second enemy. On the second day the temperature reached 105 degrees Fahrenheit (about 41°C) in the shade, later readings went as high as 115 degrees, and water brought ashore in badly cleaned oil drums made men sick. Puller's 1st Marines, attacking the southern ridges, had lost about 1,500 men by 19 September and reported 1,749 casualties when Geiger pulled it out of the line on 21 September; the regiment's story is told in our profile of Chesty Puller.14
Cave by cave
The battle became a slow, grinding reduction of the ridge, cave by cave, with flamethrowers, demolitions and tanks. Army troops joined the exhausted Marines, and the main body of Japanese defenders held out into late November, most of them fighting to the death.15
The 81st Infantry Division had landed on Angaur on 17 September and declared it secure on 20 September. Its 321st Infantry then came to Peleliu and pushed up the west coast road, opening the way for the 5th Marines to clear the north of the island. On 28 September a single Marine battalion crossed in amphibian tractors to the islet of Ngesebus and took it in about 36 hours, killing 463 defenders for 48 American casualties.16
What remained was the Umurbrogol Pocket, a maze of ridges that by October measured only a few hundred yards across. On 20 October the 81st Division's commander, Major General Paul Mueller, took over the battle, and his soldiers treated it as a siege, inching forward behind sandbags for about six more weeks. On 24 November Nakagawa radioed that he had burned his regiment's colors; he and Major General Kenjiro Murai then died by ritual suicide in their command post. Organized resistance ended on 27 November.17
Even that was not quite the end. A last band of Japanese soldiers and sailors under Lieutenant Tadamichi Yamaguchi hid in the caves until 21 April 1947, when they formally surrendered to the small American garrison, more than a year and a half after Japan itself had surrendered.18
How many Americans died at Peleliu?
About 1,600 to 1,656 Americans were killed on Peleliu and the neighboring islands of Angaur and Ngesebus, out of roughly 9,600 American casualties. The National WWII Museum gives some 9,600 casualties with 1,600 killed in action. The Marine Corps history by Gayle counts 6,526 Marine casualties, 1,252 of them killed, and 3,089 in the 81st Infantry Division, 404 of them killed in action: 9,615 casualties in all, with 1,656 dead.19
Japanese losses were close to total, an estimated 10,900 dead. Gayle counts only 202 prisoners, just 19 of them Japanese servicemen and the rest mostly Korean laborers, while the National WWII Museum gives just over 300 captured. Gayle also calculated that the battle cost one American casualty and 1,589 rounds of ammunition for every Japanese defender killed or driven from his position. Eight Marines received the Medal of Honor for Peleliu, five of them posthumously.20
Why Peleliu mattered
Peleliu was an American victory, but at a terrible cost, and many historians argue the island could have been bypassed, as others were. Its real significance was grim foreknowledge: Nakagawa's defense in depth was the shape of the fighting to come on Iwo Jima and Okinawa.21
Was the Battle of Peleliu necessary?
Probably not, in the judgment of many historians, though it was not useless. Halsey wanted it canceled, and the Marine Corps' own 1996 history calls the island's main benefit, an air link across the western Pacific, a convenience rather than a necessity. In its favor, the capture also removed a Japanese base on the flank of the Philippines campaign.22
Hough's 1950 monograph argued that no one could say for certain what would have happened without it, and that Peleliu and the airfields later built on Angaur proved useful in supporting the long Philippines campaign. The clearest single benefit came by chance: in August 1945 a patrol plane flying from Peleliu spotted the survivors of the cruiser USS Indianapolis, four days after she was torpedoed, and 316 men were saved.23
How is Peleliu remembered today?
Peleliu is now a state of the Republic of Palau, and the whole island was designated a US National Historic Landmark, the Peleliu Battlefield, on 4 February 1985. The landmark takes in the invasion beaches, the airfield and the Umurbrogol Pocket, where caves, gun positions, pillboxes and a Japanese blockhouse remain among the jungle.24
The 1984 nomination by National Park Service historian Erwin N. Thompson recorded two Japanese memorials on the south of the island, one of them at the site of the former American military cemetery, and noted that the jungle had grown back over ground the battle had stripped bare. The battle also lives on in Eugene Sledge's memoir With the Old Breed and in the paintings of LIFE artist Tom Lea, among them The Two-Thousand Yard Stare, which shows a Marine with a haunted gaze coming away from Bloody Nose Ridge.25
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