One September evening ten years ago, my wife k and I looked forward to meeting my parents and several of their long-time friends for dinner. Normally gregarious, my father was uncharacteristically quiet and subdued, and during the salad course someone asked him if anything was wrong.
“Today is an important day to me,” he replied.
“Is this the date of your mother’s or father’s death?” his friend asked.
“No,” my father said, looking down at the floor. “Today is September 15, the day the Marines hit the beach at Peleliu. . . .” His words tapered off. He could not continue as tears filled his eyes and brimmed over—the only time I ever recall seeing him cry.
After a short period of time that seemed much longer, my father collected himself. His friends were embarrassed and did not really know how to react. My father and mother excused themselves and went home, where my father continued to mourn the loss of the hundreds of young Marines he had seen die on the beaches of Peleliu more than four decades before.
Few Americans, unless they are Marines or scuba divers, know Peleliu, a small island six miles long and two miles wide located in the Palau island group of the Caroline Islands in the southwest Pacific, about 550 miles due east of the Philippines. About 600 Palauans live on the island today. During World War II, Japanese forces occupied the Palau Islands, and an estimated 13,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors maintained and defended an airfield on Peleliu.
There were two opposing strategies for defeating Japan. Army General Douglas MacArthur wanted to recapture the Philippines, seize Okinawa and Formosa, land on the Chinese mainland, and invade the Japanese home islands from there. Admiral Chester Nimitz favored an “island hopping” strategy, which had as its ultimate objective the invasion of Kyushu, the southernmost Japanese home island.
The invasion of Peleliu was part of both strategies. President Franklin D. Roosevelt chose to support MacArthur’s strategy, and the attack on Peleliu was designed to protect MacArthur’s flank when his forces attacked the Philippines. Not everyone, however, supported the invasion. Admiral William “Bull” Halsey believed that U.S. forces could simply bypass the entire Palau group and go directly to the Philippines. Nimitz overruled Halsey and the prophetically-named “Operation Stalemate” was ordered to proceed as scheduled for 15 September 1944.
In the early morning, Marines embarked from various transport ships and landing craft and moved toward the beaches. The first wave of attacking Marines hit the beach at 0830. Several small Navy ships were positioned as close to the landing beaches as possible, in order to guide and direct the boats carrying the Marines.
My father was serving on board one of these ships— the PC-1230, a 173-foot patrol craft (PC). He recalls distinctly the youth of the Marines, some of whom had lied about their age to enlist and were as young as 16. Many of these boy warriors seemed almost nonchalant about the danger ahead. Dad recalls one young Marine skipping silver dollars across the water as his landing craft headed to the beach.
An official Marine Corps photographer was stationed on the PC-1230 during the invasion, and the photograph that was used as the cover for the official Marine Corps history of the battle was taken from the bow of my father’s ship. My father is positive that this is his ship because the photo shows netting (called snaking) around the lifelines on the bow. Few, if any, PCs had this feature, but my father’s did, because— contrary to Navy regulations—his ship had a dog mascot on board that the crew wanted to keep from falling overboard.
The shallowness of the landing site was one unexpected and costly piece of information that the U.S. forces did not have prior to the invasion. Preinvasion intelligence also indicated that Peleliu was flat. Following the naval bombardment, Rear Admiral Jesse Oldendorf announced that he had “run out of targets.” As the Marines were about to discover, the Japanese defenders had dug more than 500 tunnels in the hard coral hills of the island, providing ideal defenses against naval and aerial bombardment. The Japanese had orders to fight to the last man, and they nearly did so—only 300 Japanese (or their impressed foreign workers) survived the battle. The Marine commander of the invasion, Major General William H. Rupertus, had estimated that it would take three or four days to achieve control of the island. It took closer to 70 days, and cost the Marines 8,769 casualties (killed, wounded, and missing in action.) Some units suffered a higher casualty rate than in any other battle in the history of the Marine Corps. The First Marine Regiment, for example, suffered 56% casualties.
As the invasion began, through his binoculars my father could see amphibious tractors (amtracs) and landing craft getting hung up on the coral reef in the surf at Orange Beach. Once they were caught, they were sitting targets for Japanese gunners. He saw young Marines jumping out of vulnerable landing craft and into the water, where a great many became motionless, floating objects as they were killed or severely wounded. Those images were burned indelibly into my father’s memory, and it was those images that he recalled constantly but rarely talked about.
Observing the prevailing custom of not telling “war stories” concerning World War II, my father did not talk very much about the war in general or Peleliu in particular as I was growing up. But I always knew that he remembered and wanted to return to Peleliu. As a history major in college and later as a naval officer, I talked with my father periodically about visiting the places he had been in World War II, and my friends urged me to go before it was too late. But we never seemed to have the time or the money.
After more than 50 years of practicing law, my father retired. Then my family sold some farm land that it had owned for almost a century. Suddenly, we had both time and money, and so we decided to go.
About a month before we left on our trip, I invited my father to speak to my international relations class about his experiences in World War II. Some of my students’ grandparents had been in the war, but many had never talked with a veteran. My father described the mission and life on board the PC-1230, and spoke about the prevailing attitudes during the war years. When he opened the floor for questions, the students were a little shy, so I broke the ice by asking, “Dad, we’ve talked for many years about visiting Peleliu, but I never asked you why you want to go back?” “Wow, you ask tough questions,” he said. “I hope you aren’t as tough on your students.” He paused, took a deep breath, and sighed. “I saw so many of those young Marines killed that I felt that I owed it to them to come back some day. . . .”
PC-1230
We did not come from a “Navy family.” My paternal grandfather refused to join the military in World War I because he believed, as many did, that it was started and inflamed by munitions makers who were trying to make as much money as possible.
My father was born and raised in the landlocked state of Oklahoma. He entered college in the fall of 1940, eventually joining the Naval Reserve Officers’ Training Corps at Oklahoma University. This class would produce three admirals, and one of the midshipmen who transferred from OU to the Naval Academy was William Crowe, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and U.S. Ambassador to Britain.
By taking up to 21 units a semester, my father was able to complete college and law school and earn his officer’s commission in four years. In March 1944, within a seven- day period, my father graduated, was commissioned as an ensign, admitted to the practice of law, and was married.
The Navy assigned him to a “patrol craft,” more commonly known as a “subchaser,” because the principal mission of the ship was to hunt, detect, and attack enemy submarines. The PC was the smallest steel-hulled vessel designated by the Navy as a “ship.” There were almost 200 of these ships in the Navy during World War II.
After a ten-week training period at the subchaser center in Miami, Florida, my father was ordered to join his ship in the South Pacific. My newly married parents drove from Florida to San Francisco, where my father sailed on a Navy troopship to Pearl Harbor. There he caught a military flight to Noumea, New Caledonia, where he reported to his ship.
The PC-1230 was built by the Leathaem D. Smith Shipyard in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, and commissioned in March 1943. Most of the crew served 30 months in the Pacific without returning to the United States. The average age of the crew was 21, and the “old man” of the ship was 28 years old.
Eventually, my father was named commanding officer of the ship when he was 22. Like seamen centuries before him, my father navigated by the stars, and it was those stars he used to bring the ship home to San Francisco at the end of the war.
Many years after the PC-1230 arrived home from the war, I was in the Navy myself. My dad and I would often drive from his home to San Pedro Harbor. On one of these occasions, we were driving across the Vincent Thomas Bridge when Dad spotted a subchaser in the water below.
“Have you ever been on board one?” he asked.
“Sad to say, but there aren’t any subchasers left in the U.S. Navy. They’ve all been sold for scrap or given to third-world navies,” I replied.
“Let’s go down there and see if we can get on board. I’d like to show you the type of ship I was on.”
The ship was rusting and needed paint badly. An old two- by-ten-inch board served as a gangplank. As we started to board, a big Doberman pinscher came from the bowels of the ship and quickly deterred us from proceeding. The dog was followed by a grizzled old salt with three or four days of beard on his face. “What the hell do you two want?” he demanded.
“I recognized this ship as a subchaser like the one I was on in World War II. My son here is now a naval officer, and he has never been aboard a subchaser. Would there be any chance that we could come aboard and look around a little?” my Dad asked.
The old salt hesitated, and then responded, “I guess since you were on one of these and know your way around, it’ll be OK for you and your son to come aboard.” He pulled the lunging dog away, and Dad and I walked across the makeshift gangplank.
“Do you happen to know the hull number of this ship when she was in commission?” my dad asked the caretaker.
“Oh, yeah,” the old salt replied, “she was PC-1230.”
Very uncharacteristically, my father could not say anything for several minutes. Then he said softly, “This was my ship.”
The old salt seemed to straighten up as if recalling the proper stance for attention from the far recesses of his mind. “That being the case,” he said, “you and your son take as much time as you want. Welcome aboard!”
Dad and I spent the next three hours going from stem to stern, visiting the crew’s quarters, engineering spaces, the wardroom, and the bridge. Although it had been almost 30 years since he had been on board, Dad knew every inch and could recount a story for every space.
As we entered the crew’s quarters, Dad explained that they did not have air conditioning anywhere on the ship. “The only cooling was supplied by air ducts and blowers. After we step into the next compartment, you will see on your right that some of the crew cut holes in the ducts so that their bunks had a little breeze.” Looking at the ducts, we found the illicit holes that had cooled some sailor 40 years before.
On deck, Dad recalled that fresh water was in such short supply that whenever it rained, anyone awake and not on watch would go out on deck naked and soap up for a shower.
After we left, Dad contacted the owner of the ship, who turned out to be an “adult film maker.” Apparently, those involved with vice still can retain some virtue, because the owner offered Dad a memento of the ship. Dad requested and was given the ship’s chart table—the same table he used to bring the PC-1230 home from the South Pacific.
Return to the Past
My 14-year-old son joined my 75-year-old father and me on our journey into the past. We departed in mid-June 1998 and went first to Truk. Dad had a personal interest in Truk, because his ship had been strafed by Japanese aircraft based there. More than 60 Japanese ships and many aircraft lie on the floor of Truk Lagoon today, courtesy of a U.S. Navy raid in 1944- On one of our dives, we saw a Mitsubishi “Model Zero” 30 feet under water. Snorkeling over it, my father shook his fist at it, and I was not sure whether he was serious or clowning around. It’s highly improbable, but this may have been the plane that strafed the PC-1230.
After a brief visit to Guam, we arrived at the Palau islands. I had scheduled one day to visit and tour Peleliu, but Dad wanted to spend more time on the island that was so important to him. He also wanted to really see the island, which he had not been able to do in 1944. After the invasion, the PC-1230 spent four months patrolling around the Palau islands screening for Japanese submarines. During that time, Dad spent only two hours ashore. He was anxious to see up close what he had previously seen mostly through binoculars.
During the invasion, the PC-1230 was positioned off Orange Beach, one of the principal landing sites with some of the heaviest fighting. Prior to the landing of the Marines, the island was pounded by naval and aerial bombardment. Most of the foliage and vegetation was obliterated. Once the Marines landed at 0830, smoke from gunfire and landing craft that had been hit and were on fire transformed Peleliu into a scene from Dante’s lnfemo. My father described it as “the closest thing to hell I ever want to see.”
Today, Orange Beach is a quiet, idyllic, tropical beach, and people of my parents’ generation would expect actress Dorothy Lamour to come out of the lush foliage. Few of any generation would have any clue of the destruction, devastation, and death that occurred here. My father asked us for some time to be alone on the beach. He did not tell me his exact thoughts during his private visit to Orange Beach, but I think he was able to finally tell those young Marines how much he respected their courage, commitment, and sacrifice.
We visited several of the more than 500 caves that the Japanese had dug on the island. Large-bore and antiaircraft guns remained in some of the caves as silent witnesses of the distant battle. We went to the Hills 201 and 210 in the Umurbrogol Mountains, which the Marines quickly dubbed “Bloody Nose Ridge.” In the photos taken during the invasion, this area was stripped of all vegetation and looked like a lunar landscape. Today, the jungle has grown back, and the site of the battle in 1944 would be unrecognizable without the help of a knowledgeable guide.
We saw a very steep hill that was taken by the Marines. Of the 90 Marines who began the assault, only 8 survived. Captain Everett Pope was awarded the Medal of Honor for his leadership in the face of extreme adversity. Seven other Marines and soldiers received the Medal of Honor at Peleliu, and their names are listed at the Memorial to the First Marine Division.
We visited several Japanese memorials to those killed at Peleliu, and Dad expressed his recognition of the devotion of the Japanese soldiers and sailors to their cause. A group of 25 Japanese tourists were on the island at the same time, and I asked my father about his reaction to seeing those Japanese. He remarked that he thought it was good that they were coming to pay tribute to their dead, and that he held no rancor toward them. Reflecting his profession as an attorney, he said, “The statute of limitations runs out on a lot of things, and this is one of those.” I was proud of my father’s capacity for forgiveness and hoped that it was an inherited trait.
At the end of our tour of Peleliu, we returned to the airstrip that was the principal objective of the U.S. invasion in 1944. A lean-to with a thatched roof serves as the “terminal” for passengers arriving and departing on the one commercial air carrier on the island, aptly named Paradise Air.
I learned I great deal from our journey, despite all my previous reading and study of World War II. 1 was first reminded of taking advantage of opportunities. For decades, my father and I had talked about going to Peleliu and could easily have kept talking until it was too late. Once opportunities are experienced, they can never be taken away. My father, son, and I will remember our journey across time, distance, and history for the rest of our lives.
The other lesson I learned at Peleliu is the astonishing capacity for healing of both nature and human beings. Normandy, Peleliu, and countless other battlefields were regions of ashen desolation. Many of the battlefields are now places of beauty that belie their violent, destructive past. With time, nature has a phenomenal capacity for recovery.
Even more amazing is the capacity of humans to recover. I was surprised and proud of my father’s acceptance of the Japanese tourists we encountered on our trip to the places where he had fought their ancestors. If the statute of limitations can run out on the brutalities of Peleliu, then there is hope for the contemporary battlefields of Kosovo, Bosnia, and Northern Ireland.
As we departed Peleliu, I looked back on Orange Beach, where so many young men had lost their lives. There was a rainbow over the beach, a symbol of hope, promise, and peace. The contrast between the man-made destruction and devastation of 1944 and the hope of 1998 could not have been more stark.