Grunts (17 page)

At night, some of the Japanese emerged from their caves. Some were looking for water, but most were intent on crawling into the American lines to kill a Marine or a soldier. Many companies strung barbed wire in front of their positions, but that was no guarantee of safety. By the glimpsing half-light of flares, the Americans fought off sleep (not to mention fear), and stared intently into the night, trying to spot them. “Their ability to creep in silently over rough rocks strewn with pulverized vegetation was incredible,” one Marine said. Sergeant Francis Heatley, a machine gunner in the 321st, vividly remembered the rustling sound of rosary beads sliding across the rifle butts of prayerful men around him. The nights seemed endless. “Utter emptiness created a hole in my soul, as though life no longer had any meaning.” His unit shot at anything that moved. The Marines tended to be more disciplined with their fire for fear of giving away their positions or hitting nearby friendly troops. When the Japanese did make it to the American positions, “they rushed in jabbering or babbling incoherent sounds, sometimes throwing a grenade, but always swinging a saber, bayonet, or knife,” Eugene Sledge wrote.

Everything about the Umurbrogol was nightmarish and crude. It was ugly, foul, and wasteful as only war can be. Dante Alighieri or Jonathan Edwards, in their wildest imaginings, could hardly have conceived of anything more hellish. Four-man stretcher teams labored mightily to move wounded men down the steep slopes to the safety of field hospitals. Japanese snipers tried to shoot the bearers and, too often, succeeded. On the slippery ridges, it was easy to drop the wounded man onto the sharp coral, adding to his misery. The heat continued unabated. Grenades and mortar shells had to be kept in the shade lest they explode from the intensity of the sun. The twin stenches of death and rot were draped, like a suffocating, sewage-corrupted blanket, over the entire pocket. “It is difficult to convey to anyone who has not experienced it the ghastly horror of having your sense of smell saturated constantly with the putrid odor of rotting human flesh day after day, night after night,” Sledge wrote. In such tropical heat, decomposition was quick. Dead bodies turned black and swelled up to twice their size. “Added to the awful smell of the dead of both sides was the repulsive odor of human excrement everywhere.” Rotting food, clothing, and vegetation only added to the hellish stink. Like so many others, Sledge felt as though “my lungs would never be cleansed of all those foul vapors.” Some of those foul vapors emanated from the corpses of Marines whom the Japanese had mutilated, severing their decomposed penises and shoving them into fly-filled mouths.

Land crabs came out at night, skittering around, feeding on the dead. Swarms of flies bred with stunning alacrity, converging on the refuse and the decomposing corpses. They gorged themselves on so much blood and flesh that they swelled up to the size of bumblebees and were scarcely able to fly. When they did fly, they made a distinct humming sound. There were millions of them. “When you tried to lift food up to your mouth,” Sergeant Climie explained, “before you got it there, it was covered with these flies. You could not brush them away, you had to snap them off with your fingers. We all got real sick and weak from diarrhea.” The flies were bluish green colored and so aggressive that, in the recollection of one Marine, “if you had food in your mouth and if you opened it very wide, a fly would fly into your mouth. That’s how bad those things were.” The troops joked that the flies even had their own runway at the airfield. Sanitation teams attacked the flies with copious amounts of DDT, but the insecticide only worked on the adults, not the larvae. Still, the DDT helped reduce the fly population to some semblance of manageability.
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The Anticlimactic End

On October 15, after a month of horrible combat, the 1st Marine Division began withdrawing from the Umurbrogol. A few days later, these haunted survivors boarded ships that returned them to Pavuvu. The division had suffered 6,526 casualties, mostly in the rifle companies. The 323rd, another regiment from the 81st Infantry Division, replaced the Marines. Together the soldiers of the 321st and 323rd overran the remnants of Japanese resistance in the Umurbrogol Pocket. In a tactic that was eerily reminiscent of the improvised explosive devices a later generation of American infantry soldiers would face, the Japanese booby-trapped much of the pocket. “In one of the valleys . . . 20 booby traps were found, the instruments ranging in size from the small ‘Kiska Type’ hand grenade to 100 pound aerial bombs,” a 323rd Infantry intelligence summary reported. “Both trip wires and pressure type devices were used, as well as the trips being fired electrically.” In one instance, dogfaces from E Company were moving through a draw when they ran right into a cleverly camouflaged trap. An electrically charged aerial bomb exploded, killing or wounding dozens of men. “Screams of pain and fright filled the air,” the company history recorded. “The evacuation of the torn bodies of our buddies . . . was a hard grim task. Many of our closest friends could not be recognized. Many died in the arms of those who tried to ease their pain.” Concussed men, with wide and hollow eyes, staggered down the ridges, toward the battalion aid station.

Mercilessly, and with careful deliberation, over the course of four weeks, the soldiers eliminated the Japanese defenders of the Umurbrogol. At last, on November 27, they killed off the last defenders. Colonel Nakagawa and General Murai burned the regimental colors and killed themselves. The Americans claimed later to have found their remains. The 81st Division had suffered 3,275 casualties, bringing total U.S. casualties at Peleliu close to 10,000. This was in exchange for the deaths of some 11,000 Japanese defenders, a nearly one-to-one casualty ratio.

Without a doubt, every Marine and soldier who fought at Peleliu was forever haunted, at least in some way, by the experience. Harry Gailey, the author of the best single book on the battle, properly wrote: “In terms of sheer heroism, every man who fought at Peleliu deserved the highest award his country could bestow.” In the view of Gailey and almost every other historian of the battle, it should never have been fought. Possession of the island gained almost no strategic advantages for the Americans. Instead, Peleliu lived on as a cautionary tale of the price combat troops pay when senior leaders make poor decisions, based on faulty intelligence, interservice rivalry, and a lack of flexible response to a thinking, determined enemy.

By assaulting the Umurbrogol so vigorously, the Americans played right into Japanese hands. Colonel Nakagawa could not have planned it any better. The battle unfolded more or less exactly as he envisioned. It is true that the Americans took Peleliu, and thus won a “victory” of sorts. But the Japanese fulfilled their strategic objective of turning the battle into a bloody debacle for the Americans. Even though the Americans enjoyed total air and naval supremacy, the island could only be taken through the extremely valiant actions, on a daily basis, of Marines and soldiers. Even then it was a nightmare of nearly unimaginable proportions.
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CHAPTER 3

Aachen, 1944: Knocking ’Em All Down on a Politically Unrestrained Urban Battlefield

The Setting

TO THE GERMANS, AACHEN WAS a major political symbol of nationhood. To the Americans, it was little more than a collection of buildings. In the fall of 1944, as American troops approached the venerable western German city, Adolf Hitler ordered that it be defended to the last man. To him, and to many other Germans, Aachen was a cultural icon. This was where Charlemagne had once been crowned Holy Roman Emperor, creating what the Nazis later called the First Reich.

Aachen was the first major German city in the path of advancing American armies. Before the war, about 165,000 people had lived there. By the late summer of 1944, Allied bombers had raided the town no less than seventy times, damaging about half of Aachen’s buildings, prompting wide-scale civilian evacuations. By September 1944, there were about 20,000 residents left. At that time, in the wake of a seemingly relentless American advance, German military authorities actually contemplated abandoning the town, partially out of concern for the speed with which the Americans were approaching, and partially because Aachen itself was located on low ground, in a basin, surrounded by imposing hills, making it hard to defend. Moreover, Aachen lay between two strong belts of fortifications to the west and to the east. These were the pillboxes, bunkers, tank traps, and minefields of the Siegfried Line, an imposing network of defensive fortifications that the Nazis had built to impede any invasion of their country from the west. But a combination of logistical problems, worsening weather, Siegfried Line fortifications, and German reinforcements slowed the whole Allied advance to a crawl in late September. Now the Germans settled in for a fight in and around Aachen. Hitler reinforced the Aachen garrison, ordered the remainder of the population evacuated, and told his soldiers to hold on to Charlemagne’s city.

The Americans originally intended to bypass Aachen. “We had to weigh the value of the city of Aachen against getting a breakthrough of the Siegfried Line,” Major General J. Lawton Collins said. Throughout September and early October, Collins’s VII Corps slowly breached the Siegfried Line pillboxes to the north and south of Aachen. Two of his infantry divisions, the 30th and the 1st, were gradually enveloping the town—the 30th from the north and the 1st from the south. Collins’s plan was for them to link up, be-siege it, and force it to surrender. He and his division commanders initially agreed “not to get involved in the streets of Aachen.” The key terrain, they thought, was the high ground outside of Aachen, especially the hills a few miles to the northeast of town, near Verlautenheide. The city of Aachen itself, they felt, was indefensible and next to meaningless. They were absolutely correct about the importance of the hills to the northeast, but mistaken in their assumption that Aachen itself had little meaning.

By early October, both divisions were involved in ferocious fighting for the hills. In the meantime, the Germans were hitting them with powerful counterattacks and had reinforced the city. In Aachen, the enemy now had five thousand soldiers, mostly from the 246th Volksgrenadier Division plus a few SS troops, entrenched in cellars and stone buildings. These men were supported by two platoons of 120-millimeter mortars, five Mark IV tanks, and over thirty artillery pieces. With the hill fights still raging, no siege yet under way, and such a powerful enemy force ensconced in the town, the Americans could no longer afford to ignore them. “These enemy forces . . . were a potential threat to our rear,” one American officer later explained. Major General Collins and his immediate superior, Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges, commander of the U.S. First Army, reluctantly decided that Aachen must be taken.

This nasty job went to troops from the 1st Infantry Division, one of the most distinguished units in the Army. The 1st Division had been fighting since North Africa. The unit had assaulted Sicily and had led the way at Omaha Beach in Normandy. Along the way, the division had suffered heavy casualties. Nonetheless, most of the commanders and staff officers were highly experienced. Their chronically understrength rifle companies were comprised of a mixture of veterans (most of whom had been wounded at least once) and replacements. Two of the division’s regiments, the 16th and the 18th, were tied up in the fighting for the hills around Verlautenheide. To take the town, Major General Clarence Huebner, the division commander, only had two battalions, plus attachments, available from his remaining infantry regiment, the 26th, known as the Blue Spaders. This amounted to about two thousand soldiers against an enemy force over twice that size.
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COPYRIGHT © 2010 RICK BRITTON

Fortunately for the Americans, these battalions were led by two of the finest field-grade commanders in the entire U.S. Army. Thirty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Derrill Daniel, commander of the 2nd Battalion, had a doctorate in entomology from Cornell University. Before the war, he had worked as an insect control expert for the state of New York. He was also a reserve infantry officer who had been called to active duty in 1940, eventually ending up in battalion command. Nicknamed “Uncle Dan” (or sometimes “Colonel Dan”) by his admiring men, he led the 2nd Battalion through the invasions of North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy, logging nearly two years of command time. He had proven himself to be an insightful, brave, and valorous commander. He already had four Silver Stars for bravery to his credit. His colleague, Lieutenant Colonel John Corley, commander of the 3rd Battalion, was every bit as distinguished. This Brooklyn-born son of Irish immigrants had graduated from West Point in 1938 and had been with his battalion since North Africa. Just thirty years old, he was infused with a youthful vigor and sheer force of personality that had become legendary in the battalion. He held his subordinate commanders to the highest standards, demanding excellence in combat leadership from them and showing them how to succeed. “I don’t remember him smiling and I don’t remember him shaking my hand,” one junior officer later said. More than anything, he led by example. He had the rare gift of maintaining a commander’s perspective while frequently fighting on the front lines like any everyday soldier. His bravery bordered on the maniacal. Between the North Africa and Sicily battles alone, he had been decorated no less than six times for valor, including the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest decoration.
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