Grunts (9 page)

In actual combat, American troops did fire their weapons in large numbers and they did kill the enemy in order to survive. The banzai attack at Guam is a prime example of this. The Americans fought with whatever weapons they had in order to survive. If they had not done so, the beachhead would have been destroyed. In fact, rifles and grenades did most of the killing on the evening of July 25-26, not crew-served weapons. This meant that, contrary to Marshall’s contentions, men killed their enemies at close range, with no unwillingness to shoot. The surviving accounts and records of the battle—and they are extensive—reveal no instance of an American refusing to fire his weapon, choosing his own death rather than be forced to kill the Japanese. This does not necessarily mean it never occurred, as perhaps this happened to some of the dead and they, of course, cannot contribute their perspective. However, one would think that if such reluctance to fight existed, it would feature prominently in survivors’ accounts. Another important point to consider is that the Guam banzai attack was just one of many such similar attacks in the Pacific War, with generally identical results. At Guam and elsewhere, American troops fought to the death and willingly obliged Japanese suicidal tendencies. With sardonic wit—an American cultural tendency—the Marines on Guam even circulated a handbill that described banzai attacks in the familiar terms of a carnival promotion: “Tonight: Banzai Charge. Thrills, Chills, Suspense. See Sake-Crazed Japs Charge at High Port. See Everybody Shoot Everybody. Come Along and Bring a Friend. Don’t Miss the Thrilling Spectacle of the Banzai Charge, Starting at 10 P.M. and Lasting All Night. Admission Free.”
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The failure of Takashina’s Guam gambit destroyed the Japanese position on Guam. He had lost thirty-five hundred of his best soldiers. “The Jap charge had wasted the cream of the enemy troops on the island,” the Marine correspondent Alvin Josephy correctly wrote. “After the failure of the charge, they had nothing more to oppose us with.” They had lost 95 percent of their commanders and thousands of spirited soldiers, not just in the charge but also in resisting so stubbornly near the waterline since W-day. As a result, their offensive power was shattered. All they could do now was to withdraw their dispirited remnants to more defensible positions and wait for the Americans to overwhelm them. “From that day on, the campaign was all ours,” the 3rd Marine Division’s after action report succinctly stated. The Americans secured the island, against noticeably diminished resistance, within the next two weeks.

By giving in to their cultural vanity, the Japanese had played right into the American strengths of firepower and tenacity. Attacking Japanese soldiers were out in the open, calling attention to themselves (to put it mildly), thus making perfect targets. This practically guaranteed them a fatal beating from American firepower. In the close-proximity nighttime fight, personal weaponry did most of the actual damage. Had the attack come in the daylight, artillery, mortars, air strikes, and naval gunnery presumably would have decimated them. So, from an American perspective, the banzai attack was the best thing that could happen. “We well know that these night banzai attacks are the best and least costly way of eradicating the largest number of these fiends,” Lieutenant Lanier explained. “This way they must come out into the open . . . where you have the protection of your own foxhole and organized fire.” Combat infantrymen like Lanier knew that such attacks were terrifying and psychologically damaging, but they were preferable to assaulting strongly fortified Japanese positions full of fanatical enemy who would fight to the death. After Guam, the most thoughtful Japanese commanders understood that banzai assaults were foolish, wasteful, and counterproductive. Instead they now decided to entrench, fight defensively, force the Americans to come to them, and bleed them into nothingness. They would exploit what they saw as American cultural weaknesses—impatience and an unwillingness to suffer large numbers of casualties.
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CHAPTER 2

Peleliu, September 1944: Amphibious Combat Against a Clever, Defensive-Minded Enemy

The Decision

THE DEBACLE DID NOT HAVE to happen. There was nothing inevitable about it, nor anything truly necessary. With a few words, one man could have stopped it, but he could not bring himself to utter those words.

In late July 1944, Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet, met with President Franklin Roosevelt and General Douglas MacArthur at Pearl Harbor. Nimitz and MacArthur functioned as veritable co-commanders of the American effort in the Pacific. But they were more rivals than partners. They constantly competed for resources and influence with Washington power brokers. During the Pearl Harbor meeting, much to Nimitz’s chagrin, MacArthur won the president’s support for an invasion of the Philippines. MacArthur proposed to invade Mindanao in November and Leyte in December. Even though the admiral felt that these invasions were not wise strategic moves, he loyally pledged to protect the flanks of MacArthur’s invasion force. One way to do that was to invade the Palaus, a Japanese-controlled chain of islands a few hundred miles east of Mindanao, the first Philippine island that MacArthur planned to invade in the fall. Because of a first-rate airfield, Peleliu was the most important island in the Palaus. Nimitz promised the president and MacArthur that he would invade Peleliu in mid-September in order to seize the airfield and cut off any Japanese naval or air threat to the general’s Mindanao invasion. Subsequently, planners decided on September 15 for D-day at Peleliu.

A few days before D-day, the Americans discovered that Mindanao was only lightly held and need not be invaded. Aviators from Admiral William “Bull” Halsey’s 3rd Fleet had raided Mindanao against almost no opposition. The aviation commander, Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher, recommended scrubbing the Mindanao invasion and Halsey agreed. Halsey felt that now it made more sense to step up the invasion timetable for Leyte to October. For several weeks, Halsey had actually been skeptical of the need for invading Peleliu. He thought the benefits of taking the heavily defended island did not justify the costs. Now, with no Mindanao invasion, he felt there was no purpose to invading Peleliu. He was right. Peleliu was now a strategic backwater. The Japanese garrison there could not hope to interfere with MacArthur’s operations in the Philippines, especially if he did not invade Mindanao.

In the early morning hours of September 13, Halsey sent a message to MacArthur, Nimitz, and even Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations. “Am firmly convinced Palau not now needed to support occupation of the Philippines.” He asked for permission to cancel the Peleliu invasion. MacArthur could not be reached directly. He was at sea with a fleet that was about to invade Morotai. For security reasons, that fleet was maintaining radio silence. Actually, his authority was limited to operations in the Philippines, not the Peleliu invasion (ominously code-named Operation Stalemate).

So the decision on Peleliu was really Nimitz’s to make since he controlled most of the naval assets upon which the invasion of that island depended. A careful, pensive man, Admiral Nimitz deliberated for several hours before making a decision. “Carry out . . . Stalemate as planned,” he told Halsey. That one fateful sentence consigned thousands to unspeakable misery and horror. Such is the crushing weight of life-or-death responsibility upon the souls of senior commanders. For the rest of his life, Nimitz never explained the reasoning behind his decision. Aptly summarizing the feelings of participants and historians alike, Samuel Eliot Morison, the great naval historian, referred to the Peleliu decision as one of Nimitz’s “rare mistakes.” During the war, the admiral kept a sign over his desk that read: “Is the proposed operation likely to succeed?” In this particular instance, an otherwise sage commander came up with the wrong answer.
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The Japanese

In late July 1944, the Japanese finally decided to change the way they defended against American amphibious invasions. Imperial General Headquarters (IGH) in Tokyo decreed that island garrisons would no longer attempt to defend beaches at the waterline, where they were quite vulnerable to powerful American air strikes and naval gunfire. Nor would the Japanese launch any more wasteful banzai charges. Such suicidal charges simply allowed the Americans to unleash their massive firepower, wasting the lives of brave Japanese soldiers whose valor could be used for much greater strategic purpose. The greatest strength of the Japanese soldier in World War II was his willingness to fight to the death, in the most tenacious fashion, even when cut off, surrounded, and leaderless. This stemmed from the Bushido warrior code, which inextricably linked a soldier’s family honor, duty, patriotism, and his loyalty to the emperor with his willingness to sacrifice himself. In general, this meant that Japanese soldiers were better on defense than offense.

Taking his cue from IGH, Lieutenant General Sadae Inoue, the army’s commander in the Palaus, understood that inland defense was the best way to maximize this strength. “I issued strict orders that the banzai attack was not to be employed because it wasted manpower which could be put to more effective use,” he said after the war. “I ordered that the men [on Peleliu] fight a delaying action from prepared positions, causing as many enemy casualties as possible.” Inoue understood that Japan no longer possessed the naval and air strength to repulse American invasions at the waterline. Banzai attacks were silly and wasteful, contributing more to Japanese vanity than victory. The best hope for victory now was to bleed the Americans dry, until they no longer had the will to win the war. So, at Peleliu, he ordered his 10,500 defenders to dig extensive fortifications within caves that would be impervious to bombing.

Happily enough for the Japanese, a jagged jumble of inland ridges, known as the Umurbrogol, offered the perfect terrain for Inoue’s defense. From the shelter of a dizzying warren of caves, tunnels, and bunkers, the soldiers would fight the Americans to the death, inflicting maximum damage upon them, taking advantage of American impatience, lack of martial spirit, and overreliance on firepower. The defenders would resist the invasion itself, but only with carefully coordinated counterattacks, not suicidal rushes. In this way, the Japanese expected to bring their own firepower to bear efficiently and in the most deadly fashion. “It is certain that if we repay the Americans (who rely solely upon material power) with material power, it will shock them beyond imagination,” Colonel Tokechi Tada, Inoue’s chief of staff, wrote in a prebattle training document.

The 2nd Infantry Regiment formed the critical mass of the Peleliu garrison. The unit had fought in Manchuria, and it traced its proud lineage back to 1884, around the dawn of modern imperial Japan. The soldiers of this unit arrived on Peleliu in late April 1944. They were skilled and physically hardened. They were also totally dedicated to their country. Many of them understood that Peleliu would be a one-way destination. Their commander, Colonel Kunio Nakagawa, was blessed with a keen understanding of how to employ terrain to maximum military advantage. Throughout the summer, he put his soldiers to work building bunkers and pillboxes. They also constructed extensive networks of cave fortifications, especially within the Umurbrogol. “On this small island,” one officer told his men, “we must fortify until it is like a . . . large, unsinkable warship.”

Bitter interservice rivalry was a huge problem for the Japanese, especially among officers. For many years, the Imperial Japanese Navy had comprised the main Japanese presence in the Palaus, including Peleliu. When army soldiers arrived on Peleliu in 1944, they quickly clashed with their naval cousins who had, after all, been there for much longer and thus resented army infringement on their turf. The naval commander, Vice Admiral Itou, deeply begrudged yielding his island to an army colonel. Nor did he see the merits of an inland defense. His navy construction battalions would not cooperate at all with the army. The two services even prepared their own separate cave networks. Most of the navy caves were located on the northern part of the island. They were man-made, with extensive tunnels, and designed mainly to provide shelter in the event of bombardment. The army caves were generally natural, smaller, less comfortable, and designed to defend against attacking ground forces. These interservice issues were such a problem that they threatened Colonel Nakagawa’s battle preparations. To put the army on a more advantageous footing, Lieutenant General Inoue sent one of his key subordinates, Major General Kenijiro Murai, to Peleliu. Murai was senior to Itou. Murai’s presence had the desired effect in keeping the navy in line, but it produced a bizarre Japanese command arrangement that remains something of a mystery to this day. According to all available Japanese sources, Colonel Nakagawa remained in command, but with a two-star general nominally assisting him. Given the rigid hierarchy of imperial Japan, this strains credulity a bit. The whole truth will probably never be known.