Today is the 80th anniversary of the start of the bloodiest battle — based on number of soldiers involved — of World War II in the Pacific. (Tarawa, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa had higher absolute numbers of casualties, but much larger number of troops engaged.)
- Peleliu was targeted was for its airfield. Adm. Bull Halsey advocated bypassing it, but Adm. Chester Nimitz insisted the attack go forward, in order to provide air support for MacArthur’s invasion of the island of Morotai, which began the same day.
- Historians generally agree it was one of Nimitz’s few mistakes during the war, but the most costly one.
- Peleliu ended up being of little strategic value, but cost the First Marine Division almost 1/3 of its strength in killed or wounded over the 2+ months that was required to subdue an island that the Marine commander thought could be taken in four days or less.
- The 81st Army Division, which had sustained significant losses in taking the nearby smaller island of Angaur, also suffered heavily in the battle for Peleliu.
- The brutal struggle and the hellish efforts of the Marines and the Army troops to remove or kill thousands of Japanese troops defending the airfield there and in the hundreds of caves and tunnels they had dug in the lava rock and mountains on the island was grimly recounted in Marine Eugene Sledge’s book With the Old Breed. I actually knew some of Sledge’s relatives, who said he was a great guy, but not surprisingly, was never the same after he returned from the war.
- The battle was also realistically depicted in the great HBO series The Pacific:
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