MAN ON RADIO: It's seven o'clock in the morning
and we're steaming along the western coast of Peleliu Island.
In just about an hour and a half, the marines will hit the beaches there.
Before that, the warships of this task force,
which have been pounding the island for three days,
will give it a final, terrific softening up.
WOMAN: Everybody had a radio during the war. No TVs.
And three times a day you got the national news,
and three times a day you did not be far from that radio.
And, of course, my mother had about a four-by-four map.
I really don't know where she got it. It was a map of all of Europe.
And she had a big, long rule stick, and that map hung right there
and it covered that little wall where the, um, buffet is.
And when news time came,
she followed all the battles with the rule stick on the map.
She would have been a great historian.
She would have been.
NARRATOR: Before the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941,
most Americans could not have found Pearl Harbor on a map.
In the two and a half years that followed,
they had had to learn a host of new names
of the places their sons were fighting.
Kasserine Pass and Monte Cassino and Anzio.
Utah Beach and Omaha Beach.
Sainte-Mère-Église and Saint-Lô and the Falaise Gap.
And on the other side of the world, Guam and Bataán and Guadalcanal.
Midway and Saipan and the Philippine Sea.
Before the war could end,
the citizens of Mobile, Alabama and Sacramento, California,
Luverne, Minnesota and Waterbury, Connecticut,
and every other town in America,
would be forced to learn still more names.
Arnhem and Aachen and the Hurtgen Forest.
The Vosges mountains and the Ardennes and Remagen,
Peleliu and Luzon and lwo Jima, and more.
And young men from those towns would learn lessons as old as war itself...
...that generals make plans, plans go wrong, and soldiers die.
MAN: "To the noncombatants and those on the periphery of action,
"the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement.
"But to those who entered the meat grinder itself,
"the war was a netherworld of horror
"from which escape seemed less and less likely
"as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on."
(FLAMES CRACKLE)
"Time had no meaning. Life had no meaning.
"The fierce struggle eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all."
Eugene Sledge.
(EXPLOSION)
The men coined names for the chaos in which they often found themselves
and the ineptitude of some of the officers who sent them there,
employing language they would never have used
in front of their mothers or their wives back home.
'SNAFU' - 'situation normal, all fucked up'.
And 'FUBAR' - 'fucked up beyond all recognition'.
MAN: General Patton is a very wise person,
despite his personal eccentricities.
He said a number of memorable things about war that only real soldiers know.
He said, "All plans last only until the time of the first shot."
Then they're set aside.
Then you just have to go on sheer invention and guts
and not running away and various other things
that are never, never mentioned.
By September of 1944,
the Allies seemed to be moving steadily toward victory in Europe.
On the eastern front,
the Russians had taken parts of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland,
and inflicted 700,000 more casualties on the retreating Germans.
And in the 11 weeks since D-day,
American, British and Canadian forces
had freed most of France and Belgium and parts of Holland
and were arrayed along the 350-mile belt of concrete fortifications
the Germans called the 'Westwall'.
Beyond it lay the heart of Germany itself.
Allied planners had not expected their forces to get that far
for another eight months.
George Patton's Third Army had set the pace,
covering 400 miles in less than 30 days,
though he had outrun his supplies and was desperately short of fuel.
His armoured columns alone required some 600,000 gallons of gasoline
every 50 miles.
On September 11,
an armoured unit of the US First Army crossed the German frontier.
"Militarily", General Dwight Eisenhower's chief of staff told the press,
"this war is over."
Post exchanges were ordered to halt all holiday packages
for the men on the European front.
Nearly everyone was certain the war would be over by Christmas.
There was no room in the supply trucks for winter clothing either.
Besides, the men wouldn't need it.
Meanwhile, the British had taken the important Belgian port of Antwerp,
but no fuel or supplies could be landed there
because the Germans still held the estuary
that lay between the city and the North Sea.
Eisenhower ordered British General Bernard Montgomery to clear them out.
That would have taken weeks,
and Montgomery proposed a daring alternative
designed to speed the Allied advance into Germany -
Operation Market Garden.
First, American and British airborne troops
would be dropped behind German lines
to seize bridges along a 65-mile highway
from Belgium, through Holland, to Arnhem.
Then the British Second Army would race along that highway,
cross the Rhine at Arnhem,
go around the northern end of the Westwall
and drive into the Ruhr Valley,
the centre of German industrial might.
For the risky plan to succeed,
everything had to go perfectly and quickly.
Eisenhower thought the gamble was worth it.
If it did succeed, the war could end in weeks.
"I not only approved of Market Garden," he said later, "I insisted on it."
On Sunday, September 17,
1,481 C-47 transports took off in broad daylight from 24 British airfields
with 20,000 paratroopers on board.
Towed behind the transports were hundreds of CG-4A gliders
carrying men and matériel.
Let's talk about the combat glider - the CG-4A.
An 85-foot wingspan.
It would carry a ton and a half - 3,000 pounds -
plus the two pilots up front.
(DISTANT EXPLOSIONS)
But they were flying coffins. (Laughs)
There was no return.
So, the idea was to get your people down or get your load down,
whatever it is,
and then become an infantryman, which is what we became.
Harry Schmid, of Sacramento,
had been studying accounting when he was drafted in 1942,
and first planned to become a medic.
But then, he said, he didn't want to change bedpans for the whole war,
and volunteered to become a pilot.
When his weak eyes kept him out of a fighter cockpit,
he settled for flying a glider with the 82nd Airborne instead,
and found himself part of Operation Market Garden.
Captain Dwain Luce, of Mobile,
was also on his way to Holland aboard a glider.
The father of two small children,
he had left his family's cannery business
to join the 82nd Airborne when the war started,
and had survived Sicily and Italy
and 33 days of fighting in Normandy.
MAN: I got out over the North Sea there, and that pilot had a parachute on.
I told him, I said, "Look, you might as well take that parachute off
"because you're not leaving here without me."
And I said, "Now, you get your ass shot, who's going to land this thing?"
He says, "You are."
SCHMID: Too fast a speed with a CG-4A will kill you,
because you're talking about a fabric airplane
with nothing but little aluminum struts.
And these guys come in at 90 miles an hour
and crash into something, and, boy, they just disintegrate.
In all my combat missions,
I never came in at more than 50 miles an hour.
I took the chance of getting hit by ground fire and flak,
but I wanted to get my people down and get down on the ground.
MAN ON RADIO: This is Edward R. Murrow.
In just about 30 seconds now,
these 19 men will walk out onto Dutch soil.
There he goes! Do you hear them shout?
Three, four, five, six, seven, eight,
nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen,
fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.
(ENGINE ROARS OVERHEAD)
There they go. Every man out. I can see their chutes going down now.
Every man clear, hanging there very gracefully,
like nothing so much as khaki dolls hanging beneath a green lampshade.
The whole sky is filled with parachutes.
They're all going down so slowly.
It seems as though they should get to the ground much faster...
Things went well at first.
Dutch citizens poured into the streets to greet the Americans.
The 82nd Airborne, including Harry Schmid and Dwain Luce,
seized three bridges near Nijmegen, then dug in
and waited for the British armour to race up from Belgium and relieve them.
The 101 st Airborne took four bridges near Eindhoven,
and when the Germans blew up a fifth, managed to rebuild it overnight.
They too waited to be relieved.
But when the 10,000 men of the British 1 st Airborne
came down seven miles from Arnhem,
the Dutch crowds that turned out to greet them slowed their advance.
Only 500 of the soldiers
managed to reach the all-important bridge across the Rhine.
Meanwhile, word of the Allied plan had fallen into enemy hands,
and by the end of the day,
German panzers had surrounded the outnumbered British at Arnhem.
(GUNFIRE)
Bad weather delayed airborne reinforcements for several days,
and when a parachute brigade of Free Poles was finally dropped in
it was shot to pieces.
The British armour
that was meant to meet up with the paratroopers on the ground
and then spearhead the advance into Germany
soon found itself under attack from enemy artillery.
Smashed tanks and vehicles caused massive traffic jams
that took hours to clear.
SCHMID: The idea of the whole mission, of course, was to control the bridges
while Montgomery came up with his tanks.
Well, they shot him all up, and he didn't get there for seven days. (Chuckles)
So we were in the front lines all that time.
We were not attacking the enemy, but we were defending perimeters.
This was not the way it was supposed to go.
Harry Schmid, Dwain Luce and the men of the 82nd Airborne
found themselves struggling just to hold on,
with no tanks and no heavy weapons.
SCHMID: And they had two ways of going after you.
They'd either do shells that exploded on the ground or they used air bursts.
(EXPLOSIONS)
You worried about those air bursts,
because they would... they would burst about 20 feet above you,
and there was just shrapnel everywhere.
And just a little piece of shrapnel could hit you, you know, and you're gone.
LUCE: They had better weapons, in many cases, than we did.
You're talking about their 88s. They were great weapons.
Very high velocity.
They were so damn fast that the bullet got there before the sound did.
It was "Zip, bang!" you know? Man, it just...
It was a terrible weapon to... We all dreaded the 88s, I guess.
SCHMID: And when you're in a mission where you're behind enemy lines,
you worry because nobody knows anything.
You don't know whether the Germans are coming or they aren't coming.
And that's probably the thing that mentally bothers you,
is that you don't know what's going on.
As the Americans held their ground near Nijmegen and Eindhoven,
the surrounded British at Arnhem were being slaughtered.
(GUNFIRE)
Finally, after nine long days, Montgomery abandoned his plan,
and ordered the survivors to withdraw by boat.
Market Garden had been the largest Allied airborne operation of the war...
...and the most disastrous.
17,000 Britons and Canadians, Americans and Poles
were killed or wounded or captured
before the operation was abandoned...
...more casualties than the Allies had suffered on D-day.
LUCE: You don't like to see what you see. No.
You don't like to see what you see.
I mean, it's very disquieting to... have your friends... gone
and some of them pretty terribly mauled and things.
And... but that's part of it. War is not a pleasant activity.
And you kind of need to keep your sense of humour a little bit
to get through it.
The Allies had won themselves a narrow 65-mile corridor across Holland,
but the rest of the British and American troops,
including Dwain Luce and Harry Schmid,
had to stay where they were to hold it,
battling the deepening cold as well as the relentless German shelling.
They would be left there for weeks.
LUCE: As a boy, I spent a good time in the woods,
and I think my experiences with that helped me survive,
and I think the little man upstairs had his hand on my shoulder.
And I got hit once, across the helmet.
And it didn't penetrate my helmet,
but it'll make you change your underwear, if you have any.
But that's the only time I got hit.
No, it's... it's kind of like a bad dream, I guess.
Wouldn't want to do it again.
Nope. Couldn't do it again, I don't guess.
It was clear now that the war in Europe would not end before winter.
(DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL FANFARE PLAYS)
MAN: We couldn't wait for the next war film to come out,
because it was filled with heroism and everybody sacrificing for the war,
and everybody who died died for a cause.
The biggest audience response
came, like, from a movie 'Flying Tigers' with John Wayne.
And when he shot down Japanese planes
and the Japanese pilot would hold his hands to his face
and the blood would come out of his fingers,
we would jump up and cheer because the good guys were winning.
(Speaks Japanese)
(BIC YCLE BELL RINGS)
WILSON: The big change that the war brought for me
was I was a businessman at the age of 10.
I was a 'Bee' carrier managing my own money, managing my own route.
And what did I do with my first pay cheque?
I went and bought a cardboard replica of a.30 calibre machine gun
and went home and put it up in a tree in the backyard
and made believe I was mowing down the enemy like that.
That was my contribution to the war effort.
And we all played war to a certain extent,
but it's interesting the way we played war, because nobody ever died.
If you got shot, somebody came to your aid and fixed you up,
and then you could rise up and shoot again.
In Waterbury, Connecticut, just before Pearl Harbor,
Miss Virginia Fleming had married Staff Sergeant John Soden,
who had worked at the US Rubber Company in Naugatuck.
They had a daughter, born while Soden was in training,
and he had been home to see her just once
before leaving for France in the summer of 1944.
On September 10, after volunteering to lead a patrol across the Moselle River,
he was hit in the leg.
(GUNFIRE)
He had his 'million-dollar wound', his ticket home, he told a friend,
and was carried to a barn where he was to receive treatment.
(EXPLOSION)
Then, a German shell hit the barn.
A few days later, Virginia Soden got a telegram
regretting to inform her that John was missing in action.
She wrote to him right away.
WOMAN: "To my dearest husband and daddy.
"I pray to God you will be OK and be back soon,
"as I don't know what I'd ever do.
"But you're coming home, darling.
"And we'll enjoy life like we're supposed to be entitled to.
"Well, sweets, your daughter is OK.
"I still kiss her every night for her daddy.
"But the poor little dear doesn't know what it's all about.
"She's so like you, darling, in every respect.
"The cheque you sent for $40 came.
"Thanks a million, darling.
"Every little bit will help for our future, right?
"Well, John, I can't seem to write any more,
"except I still love you more than ever.
"I pray you'll be safe and home soon.
"Your wife, Virginia."
A month later, a second telegram arrived.
John Soden would not be coming home to Waterbury.
The shell that had exploded in the makeshift hospital had killed him.
Virginia's younger brother would always remember
that after she read the telegram his sister let out "an unearthly howl".
MAN: War is mostly boredom, telling lies,
stealing from some other outfit
if they've got something better to eat than you have,
and just making the best of a thousand bad situations.
It's going to rain. You're going to get wet.
It's going to get too hot. It's going to get too cold.
I mean, you're always uncomfortable in the service, it seemed like to me.
By the spring of 1944,
Sid Phillips, of Mobile, had been stationed in the Pacific
for more than two years.
He had survived the fighting on Guadalcanal and at Cape Gloucester
and hoped to be sent to Australia, with its plentiful beer and friendly girls,
until he got his orders to go home.
Instead, his 1 st Marine Division was sent to Pavuvu,
a remote island so small that when the men drilled,
one outfit had to march clockwise and the next counterclockwise
to keep from blocking the only road.
Sitting on his cot one hot afternoon,
Phillips was surprised to see a familiar figure -
his best friend from Mobile, Eugene Sledge.
PHILLIPS: I saw him coming down the company street, looking intense.
I recognised him and ran out, screamed his name.
And we ran and beat on each other and embraced
and rolled around on the ground.
People thought we were fighting and a big crowd gathered.
But then I introduced him around, and it was just a great day.
20-year-old Eugene B. Sledge
was the grandson of Confederate officers.
Bookish and frail as a child,
he had been taught to fish and hunt by his physician father
and was a freshman at the Marion Military Institute,
studying to become an officer,
when he decided to sign on as a private in the Marines instead.
He told his anxious parents that if he waited for graduation,
he might not get a chance at combat.
WOMAN: Eugene Sledge was just an ordinary young man.
He was full of pranks and full of tricks,
and he and my brother Sidney pulled every one of them
that they possibly could.
But they were such great friends
that what one did, the other one followed suit.
He was a very gentle man, as my brother Sidney was,
to be thrown into the middle of a fight like that.
Not long after Sledge got to the Pacific,
he began keeping an unauthorised journal,
slipping tiny sheets of notes between the pages
of the small New Testament he carried
so that no-one else would know what he was doing.
Years later, those uncensored notes would form the basis
of a harrowing memoir of his experiences in the Pacific.
MAN: "The awesome reality that we were training to be cannon fodder
"in a global war that had already snuffed out millions of lives
"never seemed to occur to us.
"The fact that our own lives might end violently
"or that we might be crippled while we were still boys
"didn't seem to register.
"The only thing that we seemed to be truly concerned about
"was that we might be too afraid to do our jobs under fire.
"An apprehension nagged at each of us
"that he might appear to be yellow if he were afraid."
Eugene Sledge.
PHILLIPS: He had come in as a replacement,
and I was being rotated home because I had been overseas over two years.
I certainly did think about what he was facing, because it was all bad.
Every campaign was bad.
Some were a little quicker and a little worse than others,
some were under worse conditions than others,
but they were all bad, and I knew he was going to face some hard times.
In late August of 1944,
Sledge and 16,458 other men of the 1 st Marine Division
left Pavuvu for the Palau Islands, more than 2,000 miles away.
The marines were headed for the tiny island of Peleliu,
where the Japanese had constructed an airfield.
It was only 550 miles east of Mindanao,
which was to be the first stop in General Douglas MacArthur's campaign
to recapture the Philippines.
MacArthur wanted Peleliu put out of action to protect his flank.
But as Eugene Sledge and his fellow marines steamed toward their target,
playing poker and sunbathing on the deck to fill the time,
Allied plans changed.
After the decisive American victory
in the Battle of the Philippine Sea the previous June,
Admiral William Halsey
no longer considered the Japanese air force a serious threat.
The Peleliu airfield had become largely irrelevant.
But no-one cancelled the invasion of the island.
Halsey was sure it would take only four days to secure it.
For three days, the navy bombarded Peleliu.
(EXPLOSIONS)
The foliage that blanketed its jagged coral hills was burned away.
The coral itself was bleached white by phosphorus.
Finally, the officer in charge told his superiors, "We have run out of targets."
It was time to send in the marines.
MAN: "It was hard to sleep that night before the invasion.
"I thought of home, my parents, my friends,
"and whether I would do my duty, be wounded or disabled, or be killed.
"I concluded that it was impossible for me to be killed, because God loved me.
"And then I told myself that God loved us all
"and that many would die
"or be ruined physically or mentally or both
"in the days following.
"My heart pounded, and I broke out in a cold sweat.
"Finally, I called myself a damned coward
"and eventually fell asleep saying the Lord's Prayer to myself."
(EXPLOSIONS, GUNFIRE)
The invasion of Peleliu began at dawn on September 15, 1944.
At 6:30 in the morning,
Sledge and his comrades clambered into their amtracs
and started for the island.
"The world was a nightmare of flashes, violent explosions, snapping bullets.
"Up and down the beach, a number of amtracs were burning.
"Japanese machine-gun bursts made long splashes on the water,
"as though flaying it with some giant whip."
Three marine regiments - more than 5,000 men -
went ashore side by side
and quickly discovered that the bombardment had done little damage
to the carefully prepared warren of 500 fortified caves
and concealed gun emplacements,
some equipped with sliding doors of armoured steel,
that honeycombed the coral ridges running up the centre of the island.
The Japanese poured fire down upon Eugene Sledge and his fellow marines.
"I turned my face away and wished that I were imagining it all.
"I had tasted the bitterest essence of war,
"the sight of helpless comrades being slaughtered,
"and it filled me with disgust."
Willie Rushton, also from Mobile, was on the beach too,
now a member of the 11th Depot Company.
And then the first day we went in there,
those people they just... they slaughtered us marines
like we were just a bunch of hogs coming in the slaughter pen.
The Japanese were some tough customers.
They really could fight. They come at you with everything they had.
So, we marines, we were just as tough or tougher than they were,
so we always - well, almost - came out on top.
The Americans lost 1,200 men,
but they clung to the beach and some began fighting their way inland.
Eugene Sledge was a mortarman.
He fired round after round into the enemy
while riflemen advanced ahead of him.
He and his regiment managed to make it all the way across the narrow island,
then dug in for the night.
No-one slept, for fear that Japanese infiltrators would slip into their lines
and slit their throats.
"It was the darkest night I ever saw.
"The overcast sky was as black as the dripping mangroves that walled us in.
"I had the sensation of being in a great black hole
"and reaching out to touch the sides of the gun pit to orient myself.
"Slowly, the reality of it all formed in my mind -
"we were expendable.
"It was difficult to accept.
"We come from a nation and a culture that values life and the individual.
"To find oneself in a situation where your life seems of little value
"is the ultimate in loneliness."
The next morning, the marines were ordered to assault Japanese positions
in the cliffs that overlooked the airfield.
Tanks and artillery would go first,
then the infantry and Sledge would follow,
charging across the exposed gravel airstrip to attack the high ground.
The temperature neared 100 degrees.
There was no shade.
The only water available, hauled up from the beach in 5-gallon cans,
turned out to be fouled by diesel oil.
Scores of men collapsed from heat exhaustion
before the signal was given.
As the marines - four battalions and 1,800 men - moved forward,
the enemy opened up with everything they had.
"I clenched my teeth, squeezed my carbine stock,
"recited over and over to myself, 'The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
"'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
"'I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.'
"The further we went, the worse it got.
"It seemed impossible that any of us would make it across.
"To be shelled by massed artillery and mortars is absolutely terrifying,
"but to be shelled in the open is terror compounded."
Sledge somehow made it across the airstrip safely,
and took what shelter he could beneath a bush.
He was "shaking like a leaf", he wrote,
but took comfort from the fact
that a veteran of the fighting on Guadalcanal, crouching nearby,
was shaking too.
Japanese tactics had changed since the beginning of the war.
Suicidal banzai charges,
like those on Guadalcanal and Tarawa and Saipan,
were largely a thing of the past.
Instead, Peleliu's 10,500 defenders
would contest every inch of the island from their hillside strongholds.
They would have to be blasted or burned out of them, one at a time.
(GUNSHOT)
"Even before the dust had settled,
"I saw a Japanese soldier appear at the blasted opening.
"He drew back his arm to throw a grenade at us.
"My carbine was already up.
"When he appeared, I lined up my sights on his chest
"and began squeezing off shots."
(GUNFIRE)
"As the first bullet hit him, his face contorted in agony.
"His knees buckled.
"The grenade slipped from his grasp.
"I had just killed a man at close range.
"That I had seen clearly the pain on his face when my bullets hit him
"came as a jolt.
"It suddenly made the war a very personal affair."
Willie Rushton was in the thick of it too.
He wasn't supposed to be -
his outfit was assigned to just unload supplies and ammunition.
But when the fighting started,
he and some of his friends volunteered for front-line duty.
RUSHTON: But we were right there
where the fighting was going on, you know.
They was just knocking us off as we came forward.
That's what they were doing - knocking us off.
They didn't make no... whether you was black or white or whatever -
they didn't care when you got into combat.
15 members of Rushton's depot company were hit.
He was one of them, wounded in the leg by shrapnel.
He was carried to a hospital ship offshore,
the only wounded black man aboard.
After his wounds were treated he asked if he could have a haircut.
The ship's barber refused.
When I got up there, he told me, he said, "I can't cut your hair."
And so then a couple of white marines asked him, "Why can't you cut his hair?"
Said, "You don't have to give him no style, just cut his hair off.
"All he wants is some of that hair off his head."
So he said, "No, I can't. I can't cut his hair."
Then the captain intervened.
The captain of the Red Cross ship came down there and told that barber,
"I'm telling you for the first and the last time -
"I don't care who comes on this ship, if he's an American soldier,
"whether he's black or white or whatever,
"I want you to cut his hair, you know, just cut his hair.
"Don't ever make a remark like that anymore."
Private Rushton got his haircut.
For Eugene Sledge and the other marines still fighting on Peleliu,
one day, one firefight, one terror-filled night
now seemed just like the next.
"During a lull, the men stripped the packs and pockets of the enemy dead
"for souvenirs.
"The men gloated over, compared, and often swapped their prizes.
"It was a brutal, ghastly ritual
"the likes of which have occurred since ancient times
"on battlefields where the antagonists have possessed
"a profound mutual hatred.
"It was uncivilised, as is all war, and was carried out with savagery.
"It wasn't simply souvenir hunting or looting the enemy dead -
"it was more like Indian warriors taking scalps.
"While I was removing a bayonet and scabbard from a dead Japanese,
"I noticed a marine dragging what I assumed to be a corpse.
"But the Japanese wasn't dead.
"He had been wounded severely in the back and couldn't move his arms.
"The Japanese's mouth glowed with huge, gold-crowned teeth,
"and his captor wanted them.
"He put the point of his KA-BAR knife on the base of a tooth
"and hit the handle with the palm of his hand.
"Because the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about,
"the knifepoint glanced off the tooth and sank deeply into the victim's mouth.
"The marine cursed him, and with a slash, cut his cheeks open ear to ear.
"I shouted, 'Put that man out of his misery.'
"All I got for an answer was a cussing out.
"Another marine ran up and put a bullet in the enemy soldier's brain
"and ended his agony.
"The scavenger grumbled and continued extracting his prizes undisturbed."
"There were certain areas we moved into and out of several times
"as the campaign dragged along its weary, bloody course.
"I became quite familiar with the sight of some particular enemy corpse,
"as if it were a landmark.
"It was gruesome to see the stages of decay proceed
"from just killed, to bloated,
"to maggot-infested rotting, to partially exposed bones,
"like some biological clock marking the inexorable passage of time.
"On each occasion my company passed such a landmark,
"we were fewer in number."
"The opposing forces on Peleliu were like two scorpions in a bottle,"
Eugene Sledge wrote.
"One was annihilated, the other nearly so."
After six weeks of combat,
Sledge and the rest of the 1 st Marine Division
were finally taken off the island.
It would be another month
before the Japanese commander finally radioed his superiors
that "All is over on Peleliu" and then committed suicide.
A handful of Japanese would go on fighting there until February of 1945.
Securing Peleliu was supposed to take four days.
It took more than two months.
10,000 Japanese were killed - nearly every man who had defended the island.
More than 1,200 Americans perished,
including Private John D. New,
who had grown up in Mobile just across town from Eugene Sledge.
He hurled himself onto a Japanese grenade,
saving the lives of two friends but losing his own.
For his heroism, he received a posthumous Medal of Honor.
5,274 more Americans were maimed or missing.
Out of the 235 men in Eugene Sledge's company,
only 85 left the island without physical wounds.
And in the end, there had been no tactical need for the little airfield
for which so many of Sledge's friends had died.
"As I struggled upward onto the boat with my load of equipment,
"I felt like a weary insect climbing a vine.
"But at last I was crawling up out of the abyss of Peleliu.
"I stowed my gear on my rack and went topside.
"The salt air was delicious to breathe.
"What a luxury to inhale long, deep breaths of fresh, clean air.
"But something in me died at Peleliu.
"Perhaps it was a childish innocence that accepted as faith
"the claim that man is basically good.
"Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places,
"who do not have to endure war's savagery,
"will ever stop blundering and sending others to endure it."
Eugene Sledge.
Over the coming weeks,
on both sides of the world,
Allied force would continue to be undercut by Allied folly.