The American plan for the invasion of Peleliu was worked out in industrial detail on Pavuvu, a small island in the Russells northwest of Guadalcanal, where the First Marine Division loaded its ships according to the exact order in which equipment would be needed on the beach. By August 31, 1944, thirty tank landing ships, seventeen troop and cargo ships, and two dock landing ships had been loaded that way. Far to the northwest, at Koror in the Palau Islands, Lieutenant General Sadae Inoue had already written his own vision of that landing. His instructions of July 11, titled “Palau Sector Group Training for Victory,” told the garrison to survive the naval and air bombardment, hold strong reserves back in prepared positions inland, and then deliver one massive counterattack that would destroy the invaders before their beachhead became secure.
The attacking troops were to advance at a crawl using terrain and shell holes to avoid exhausting their battle strength too quickly. On Peleliu, the counterattack plans were drawn up and rehearsed, and a few infantry companies were reorganized into special counterattack units. Every important order later captured on the island carried the signature of Colonel Kunio Nakagawa of the Second Infantry Regiment. The instructions never spelled out what would make that hour before a secure beachhead the weak one.
The Japanese Army’s own history of amphibious landings suggests what its officers expected to see. That history survives in a document the Americans later filed as Japanese Monograph Number 156, compiled from the notes and recollections of Lieutenant General Sakurai Shō of the shipping section of the Army General Staff. Its translators found that the title was misleading because the text stops at the invasion of Malaya in December 1941, and they said so on the first page. Inside, one landing in China is set down as a lesson.
Troops of the 11th Division went ashore with light equipment fast and without difficulty, while their supplies were held up by air attack and a shortage of landing craft. The men stood on the beach without horses or vehicles, and nothing could be moved forward to them until the unloading point was shifted the next day. Sakurai’s conclusion was that light troops were easy to land and that supplies demanded far more thought. In Malaya, the army went a step further, unloading at night to escape air attack and cutting both the strength of the force going to shore and the quantity of its supplies to make that possible.
So a Japanese staff officer had solid grounds to picture any assault from the sea as something that arrived in layers, men first and weight afterward. No Japanese document found for this account says a word about the layering coming in a strange order. What survives instead is a counterattack plan built on that layered picture, and one afternoon on which the plan met the order the Americans had chosen. The question worth carrying forward is a practical one: at the hour Nakagawa’s reserves went in, where were the American tanks and the heavier guns?
The sequence began at 8:32 on the morning of September 15, 1944. Armored amphibian tractors mounting 75mm howitzers climbed out of the water onto the beaches and started firing at the defenses, and the first wave of riflemen touched the sand behind them, with more waves following at short fixed intervals. The tractors had crawled across 600 to 800 yards of coral to get there. Mortar bursts walked across the reef, and guns hidden in a coral point north of the beaches fired straight down the line of approach, so that burning tractors were already piling up at the waterline while later waves were still out on the coral.
The fourth wave was where the American order parted company with anything in Sakurai’s notes. Landing alongside it were the division’s Sherman tanks, which had made the voyage preloaded in landing craft stowed inside the two dock landing ships, whose crews flooded the decks off Peleliu to float the craft out through the stern gates. At the edge of the reef, the tanks drove off into the water, sealed against it beforehand, and formed six columns, each following an amphibian tractor that crawled along the coral ahead of them. When a guide tractor lifted off the bottom and began to float, the tanks behind it stopped and waited while it searched out a shallower path.
The guide tractors also carried fuel, ammunition, and maintenance stores, so each tank column reached the beach with a small moving dump of its own. The crossing took about ten minutes under heavy fire, and Japanese gunners hit more than half of the thirty tanks between one and four times and knocked three out of action. In the words of the official Marine history, within half an hour of the first landing, the infantry had full tank support. Behind the tanks, the rest of the order kept the same logic.
75mm pack howitzers rolled ashore already assembled off the rear ramps of the newest amphibian tractors, and 105mm howitzers came in on amphibious trucks fitted with a hoisting frame that could lift the whole gun. About sixty sealed amphibious trailers packed back in the Russells with mortar and machine gun ammunition, flamethrower fuel, medical supplies, and signal equipment were towed to the reef by boats and dragged across it by tractors, and the light artillery’s first allowance of shells came ashore inside them. Some ships held back eight small landing craft preloaded with infantry ammunition, flamethrower fuel, and water to wait off the reef until a shore party sent a vehicle out for the precise load it needed. Further out, nine pontoon barges carrying cranes swung nets of cargo from boats into amphibian vehicles about a thousand yards off the coral.
The reason for that order was on a photograph. Just before the division left the Russell Islands, a careful study of aerial photographs had turned up marks north of Peleliu’s airfield that looked very much like tank tracks in ground that offered cover for vehicles forming up. The planners concluded that a tank-supported counterattack from that area was very probable and arranged the landing to meet it. Brigadier General Gordon Gale, who commanded the battalion of the Fifth Marines that day, wrote that the division devised its tank landing scheme in anticipation of the Japanese using their armor at the start.
The planners gave the bulk of the Fifth Marines’ anti-tank weapons and the few tanks available to that regiment to its first battalion, which would be facing the open airfield. The regimental commander, Colonel Harold Harris, ordered both of his assault battalions to bring their 37mm anti-tank guns and heavy machine guns in with the assault waves and set them up forward as soon as the first objective line was taken. The order in which the cargo came ashore was an answer written weeks ahead to a counterattack the Americans had already worked out from a photograph. By afternoon, the first battalion, Fifth Marines, under Lieutenant Colonel Robert Boyd, had reached that first objective line at the edge of the airfield clearing and dug in to wait.
Four 37mm guns sat in defilade in shell craters across its front. Riflemen with grenade launchers and rocket launchers took positions along the line and behind it, and machine guns were placed to stop any breakthrough. Three Shermans of Company B, First Tank Battalion, arrived and were spaced out among the bomb craters with only their turrets showing. Around 4:25 in the afternoon, heavy Japanese artillery and mortar fire began falling on the Marine positions, and every officer on that stretch of the line understood what it meant.
At about 4:50, Japanese infantry of about company strength came out onto the northern edge of the airfield and started across it. They moved dispersed, used every dip and shell hole in the ground, and opened fire as they came into range, which is almost the crawl that Inoue’s July instructions had asked for. Behind the ridges north of the field, an air observer spotted Japanese tanks forming up, and soon they came out onto the open ground in two columns, infantry clinging to the outside of every tank wherever a man could find a handhold. Then the drivers opened their throttles.
They raced ahead and left their own infantry behind, going too fast to support the foot soldiers or to be supported by them. The Marine monograph compares what followed to a 19th century cavalry charge. Swinging across the front of the First Marines, the tanks took fire into their flank, and two of them plunged over a coral embankment into a swamp behind the Marine front, where their crews were killed trying to get out. The rest ran straight into the first battalion.
The 37mm guns fired, the rocket launchers and rifle grenades fired. The three Shermans in their craters fired. And just inside the Marine lines, Battery E of the Second Battalion, 11th Marines, the one artillery unit ready at that hour, fired at its maximum rate. A Navy dive bomber came down low and put a bomb among the tanks.
The men riding on the outside of the tanks were gone. Some tanks broke through the thin line of Company B’s left platoon and ran as far as 150 yards into the Marine rear, and one got within a short distance of the beach. The front held. Two Marines were crushed to death under the treads.
Shermans came out onto the airstrip from the south as well, from the woods where the second battalion, Fifth Marines, was fighting. The first rounds the Shermans fired were armor-piercing, and those went straight through the thin hulls of the Japanese tanks and burst on the ground beyond without doing harm. The gunners switched to high explosive, and after that the fire was devastating. Most of the Shermans supporting the second battalion, First Marines, had gone back to the beach to rearm, and they had to drive about fifty yards out of the brush to get a clear shot.
So that is where the American weight was at the hour Nakagawa chose. It was held down in the Marine line. It was in shell craters with its anti-tank guns loaded. It was a battery of howitzers just behind the riflemen.
And it was a rearming point near enough to the airfield that tanks could leave it and join the fight in fifty yards. Somebody on Pavuvu decided that the tanks belonged with the fourth wave, and by 4:50 that one line of a loading plan was sitting at the edge of an airfield with its guns laid. What the Marines destroyed and with what is not settled and will not be. Most contemporary accounts count thirteen Japanese tanks in the attack.
A later check of the ground by Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Walt, executive officer of the Fifth Marines, suggested there may have been as many as nineteen, and some reports have two escaping, while others list all of them destroyed on the spot. One officer with a head for figures worked out that if every individual Marine claim of a tank knocked out were accepted, the Japanese would have had to send 179 and a half of them. Walt remembered four Shermans charging down from the south and fighting a running battle in the middle of the enemy tanks, while a tank officer, Captain Brandt, wrote to the commandant in 1950 that nobody believed any Marine tanks had fought such a battle at all. The wreckage could not help because many of the tanks had been blown into pieces that nobody could match to a hull.
The man least impressed by the victory commanded the first tank battalion. Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Stewart pointed out afterward that the Japanese machines were light tanks with a quarter to three-eighths of an inch of armor, never meant for a frontal attack against heavy weapons, and that their easy destruction was no grounds for smugness in regard to our anti-tank prowess. Had the Japanese owned modern tanks and attacked in greater numbers, he wrote, the situation would have been critical, and he was right to say it. What happened to the Japanese infantry who had crossed the airfield with such care is another thing nobody knows.
When the dust cleared, there were a few dead where they had been and nothing else. Whether the rest were cut down before they reached the Marines or turned back is not in any account. That night, the Marines beat off more attacks lit by star shells fired from ships offshore. Nakagawa’s headquarters, meanwhile, reported that the American landing had been put to rout and, in the same report, said that his brave counterattack force had thrown the enemy into the sea.
Neither statement was true on any part of the island, and the tanks that proved it were lying burned out on his own airfield. Sending men to ride into a prepared line on the outside of thin steel was an expensive choice. Telling Koror afterward that the enemy had gone into the sea turned that cost into something the command above him could not even see. He used the phrase “put to rout” again a few days later, and on that occasion, the official Marine history calls his report accurate.
General Rupertus, the Marine Division commander, had broken his ankle in a training exercise before the landing and went through the whole operation with his foot in a cast. On the other side, Inoue had warned Nakagawa against wasting his strength in feudal attacks, and in Inoue’s plan, the decisive fight was always meant to happen in the ridges north of the airfield. By the fifth day, most of the surviving garrison was there, and it held those ridges for more than two months. The translators’ forward to Sakurai’s history is dated April 30, 1952, and the monograph went out under the United States Army’s Far East Command, filed at number 156 in a long series of monographs on the Japanese side of the war, running to a little over forty pages of text about how an army should come ashore.
It has one passage about the American way of doing it: that the Americans in their counteroffensives seized an island near the proposed beach and built an airfield there before the landing, at the price of giving away where they meant to land. It never mentions the order of arrival. Nakagawa watched the Marine beachhead from his high ground on the morning of the 16th, a division spread along two miles of beach with the tanks that had wrecked his armor still ashore. He died in his command post before the island fell.
His reports say nothing about it. Whether he ever worked out that those tanks had come in with the fourth wave on purpose, and whether anyone on his staff put it into words before the end, is a question the surviving papers leave without an answer.