Courage: Remember the Stranger (Matthew 25)-A Commemoration, God's Grace
"How many Americans still remember the Battle of Peleliu Island? Not many, I suspect....Overshadowed by events in the European theatre and MacArthur's return to the Philippines, Peleliu, a speck of land only eight miles long and three miles across at its widest, where prodigious blood was shed in a possibly unnecessary battle late in World War II, has never enjoyed an exalted place in the history of Pacific theatre battles. It's details are probably forgotten...That's a pity. The corps commander there called it the "toughest fight of the war." Eugene Sledge, a twenty-one-year-old private in the legendary First Marine Division, fought at Peleliu...He remembered it as a "netherworld of horror," where "time had no meaning; life had no meaning. The fiece struggle made savages of us all."
When the marines of the First Division swarmed the beaches of Peleliu, they were prepared for a tough but very quick fight with the island's Japanese defenders....It would be,...a hellish few days,...but just a few days at the most. As it turned out, the Battle of Peleliu would last more than ten weeks. A garrison of more than ten thousand Japanese soldiers and conscripted laborers, who had been preparing six months for the battle they knew would come, would fight to the death.
D-day was September 15, 1944....The first of three regiments, the First Marines, under the command of Marine Corps legend Colonel Lewis "Chesty" Puller, hit the western beaches of Peleliu at 8:30 that morning. The Fifth and Seventh Marines followed right behind, all three regiments fighting abreast along a two-mile front. There were experienced veterans among the assault forces, but the bulk of the men landing that day were teenagers, straight out of boot camp.
The Japanese had changed their tactics, learning from experience that banzai suicide attacks resulted in quick defeats. On Peleliu they planned a protracted struggle, small unit counterattacks, a war of attrition from hidden defenses, mindful that the Americans would eventually overcome them but determined to exact for as long as they could a very high price for their defeat. The Japanese resisted the landings ferociously; their artillery destroyed dozens of the marines' amphibious tractors (amtracs). Enfilading fire from the high coral ridges above the beaches, particularly one nicknamed "the Point," cut down hundreds of marines in the first hours of the invasion. Counterattacking Japanese soldiers, exploiting holes in the American lines, infiltrated marine companies isolated from the main assault force....
A witness estimated that throughout the first day and night of the invasion, one marine was killed or wounded every two and a half minutes. Chesty Puller's regiment caught the worst of it, facing the fiercest resistence on the assault's left flank and reporting more than five hundred men killed or wounded in the first twenty-four hours. The marines fought all night from their foxholes and the next day resumed their advance, as the Japanese fell back to their final defensive position in hundreds of caves and concrete bunkers hidden amid a series of craggy limestone ridges, a formidable redoubt in the center of the island named the Umurbrogal Mountain.
Temperatures rose to 115 degrees and higher throughout the first week. Drinking water was scarce, and food provisions were depleted. Monsoon rains, while bringing some relief to the sweltering marines, turned battlegrounds into muddy swamps. Hacking their way through thick jungles and mangrove swamps, braving cannon and machine-gun fire to seize one ridge after another (in some instances they were driven from heights they had struggled heroically to take and forced to fight for them all over again), the marines were taking horrific casualties to sustain their advance. The division commander, General Rupertus, still believing that the invasion could be brought to a swift conclusion and determined to prevent the army from reinforcing and claiming a share of the victory, repeatedly ordered his regimental commanders to make frontal assaults on fortified enemy positions until they were exhausted, their ranks so decimated that some battalions were incapable of effective action. By the sixth day, Puller's regiment had suffered more than 1,700 casualties.
The corps commander, Major General Roy Geiger, visited the First Marines and saw for himself their condition. Over the loud objections of the foolhardy Rupertus, Geiger ordered that the regiment be evacuated and the army's 81st Infantry Division and 321st Regimental Combat Team,...replace them. By the time they were relieved, the First Marines had killed almost four thousand of the enemy, nearly a quarter of the garrison, and taken the Point, ten other coral ridges, and nearly two hundred heavily defended caves, Japanese blockhouses, and pillboxes.
The fight for Peleliu would go on for more than two months after the first savage week. It is hard to do justice to the suffering there. No man having experienced it would ever forget it. Many of the marines who fought there would fight in other campaigns, notably in the bloody struggle to take Okinawa. None of them believed they ever had it worse than their first days and weeks on Peleliu.
The Japanese fought almost to the last man. The job of digging them out of the caves of Umurbrogal Mountain was mostly the army's. They did it one cave and bunker at a time, with flamethrowers mounted on amtracs and by dynamiting and bulldozing the caves into crypts, sealing the enemy inside to starve to death. Of the estimated 10,900 defenders, only a few dozen, most of them conscripted workers, surrendered in November. Even then a few stragglers continued to fight on....The marines took seven thousand casualties, the army fourteen hundred....Without ships or aircraft, the Japanese presence...had never been a threat to MacArthur's famous promise. But the pointlessness of the sacrifice on Peleliu certainly doesn't diminish the heroism with which it was made.
Should we care that the battle of Peleliu has been, by and large, forgotten by the descendants of the men who fought there, the fortunate beneficiaries of their courage? It seems ungrateful of us, obviously,...
Courage on the scale manifested in Peleliu-hard held, impossibly enduring, selfless, true in all its bloodstained, filthy, aching grandeur, summoned every day for months-will almost surely never be known or needed by us personally....What do we need so much courage for?" "Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life, John McCain with Mark Salter
"To have courage for whatever comes in life-everything lies in that." Mother Teresa
Dear Lord, grant the marines and all soldiers of Peleliu Island grace at the moment of their awful overtaking. Thank you Lord.
"...pray, pray to the merciful Master for help...in their final agonizing moments, since for God time is infinitely malleable, and he will have heard what the poet (and the reader) asks even now, a month or a century on:
the prayer thou hearst me making
Have, at the awful overtaking,
Heard: have heard and granted
Grace that day grace was wanted...The Loss of the Eurydice
It is all one can do. As for those precious souls...only God can be in at the end, only the Father can help there."Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life", Paul Mariani
"How many Americans still remember the Battle of Peleliu Island? Not many, I suspect....Overshadowed by events in the European theatre and MacArthur's return to the Philippines, Peleliu, a speck of land only eight miles long and three miles across at its widest, where prodigious blood was shed in a possibly unnecessary battle late in World War II, has never enjoyed an exalted place in the history of Pacific theatre battles. It's details are probably forgotten...That's a pity. The corps commander there called it the "toughest fight of the war." Eugene Sledge, a twenty-one-year-old private in the legendary First Marine Division, fought at Peleliu...He remembered it as a "netherworld of horror," where "time had no meaning; life had no meaning. The fiece struggle made savages of us all."
When the marines of the First Division swarmed the beaches of Peleliu, they were prepared for a tough but very quick fight with the island's Japanese defenders....It would be,...a hellish few days,...but just a few days at the most. As it turned out, the Battle of Peleliu would last more than ten weeks. A garrison of more than ten thousand Japanese soldiers and conscripted laborers, who had been preparing six months for the battle they knew would come, would fight to the death.
D-day was September 15, 1944....The first of three regiments, the First Marines, under the command of Marine Corps legend Colonel Lewis "Chesty" Puller, hit the western beaches of Peleliu at 8:30 that morning. The Fifth and Seventh Marines followed right behind, all three regiments fighting abreast along a two-mile front. There were experienced veterans among the assault forces, but the bulk of the men landing that day were teenagers, straight out of boot camp.
The Japanese had changed their tactics, learning from experience that banzai suicide attacks resulted in quick defeats. On Peleliu they planned a protracted struggle, small unit counterattacks, a war of attrition from hidden defenses, mindful that the Americans would eventually overcome them but determined to exact for as long as they could a very high price for their defeat. The Japanese resisted the landings ferociously; their artillery destroyed dozens of the marines' amphibious tractors (amtracs). Enfilading fire from the high coral ridges above the beaches, particularly one nicknamed "the Point," cut down hundreds of marines in the first hours of the invasion. Counterattacking Japanese soldiers, exploiting holes in the American lines, infiltrated marine companies isolated from the main assault force....
A witness estimated that throughout the first day and night of the invasion, one marine was killed or wounded every two and a half minutes. Chesty Puller's regiment caught the worst of it, facing the fiercest resistence on the assault's left flank and reporting more than five hundred men killed or wounded in the first twenty-four hours. The marines fought all night from their foxholes and the next day resumed their advance, as the Japanese fell back to their final defensive position in hundreds of caves and concrete bunkers hidden amid a series of craggy limestone ridges, a formidable redoubt in the center of the island named the Umurbrogal Mountain.
Temperatures rose to 115 degrees and higher throughout the first week. Drinking water was scarce, and food provisions were depleted. Monsoon rains, while bringing some relief to the sweltering marines, turned battlegrounds into muddy swamps. Hacking their way through thick jungles and mangrove swamps, braving cannon and machine-gun fire to seize one ridge after another (in some instances they were driven from heights they had struggled heroically to take and forced to fight for them all over again), the marines were taking horrific casualties to sustain their advance. The division commander, General Rupertus, still believing that the invasion could be brought to a swift conclusion and determined to prevent the army from reinforcing and claiming a share of the victory, repeatedly ordered his regimental commanders to make frontal assaults on fortified enemy positions until they were exhausted, their ranks so decimated that some battalions were incapable of effective action. By the sixth day, Puller's regiment had suffered more than 1,700 casualties.
The corps commander, Major General Roy Geiger, visited the First Marines and saw for himself their condition. Over the loud objections of the foolhardy Rupertus, Geiger ordered that the regiment be evacuated and the army's 81st Infantry Division and 321st Regimental Combat Team,...replace them. By the time they were relieved, the First Marines had killed almost four thousand of the enemy, nearly a quarter of the garrison, and taken the Point, ten other coral ridges, and nearly two hundred heavily defended caves, Japanese blockhouses, and pillboxes.
The fight for Peleliu would go on for more than two months after the first savage week. It is hard to do justice to the suffering there. No man having experienced it would ever forget it. Many of the marines who fought there would fight in other campaigns, notably in the bloody struggle to take Okinawa. None of them believed they ever had it worse than their first days and weeks on Peleliu.
The Japanese fought almost to the last man. The job of digging them out of the caves of Umurbrogal Mountain was mostly the army's. They did it one cave and bunker at a time, with flamethrowers mounted on amtracs and by dynamiting and bulldozing the caves into crypts, sealing the enemy inside to starve to death. Of the estimated 10,900 defenders, only a few dozen, most of them conscripted workers, surrendered in November. Even then a few stragglers continued to fight on....The marines took seven thousand casualties, the army fourteen hundred....Without ships or aircraft, the Japanese presence...had never been a threat to MacArthur's famous promise. But the pointlessness of the sacrifice on Peleliu certainly doesn't diminish the heroism with which it was made.
Should we care that the battle of Peleliu has been, by and large, forgotten by the descendants of the men who fought there, the fortunate beneficiaries of their courage? It seems ungrateful of us, obviously,...
Courage on the scale manifested in Peleliu-hard held, impossibly enduring, selfless, true in all its bloodstained, filthy, aching grandeur, summoned every day for months-will almost surely never be known or needed by us personally....What do we need so much courage for?" "Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life, John McCain with Mark Salter
"To have courage for whatever comes in life-everything lies in that." Mother Teresa
Dear Lord, grant the marines and all soldiers of Peleliu Island grace at the moment of their awful overtaking. Thank you Lord.
"...pray, pray to the merciful Master for help...in their final agonizing moments, since for God time is infinitely malleable, and he will have heard what the poet (and the reader) asks even now, a month or a century on:
the prayer thou hearst me making
Have, at the awful overtaking,
Heard: have heard and granted
Grace that day grace was wanted...The Loss of the Eurydice
It is all one can do. As for those precious souls...only God can be in at the end, only the Father can help there."Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life", Paul Mariani
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