The Marines Were Promised Four Days on Peleliu. It Took 74
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Four days, the general promised. It took seventy four.
September 15, 1944. The 1st Marine Division crosses a coral reef seven hundred yards wide onto Peleliu, a six mile island east of the Philippines, to take its airfield. The navy has shelled it for three days and reports it has run out of targets. The division's commander has told his officers the fight will be very tough, but very short.
On the far left, Captain George Hunt's company lands under a coral knob with a 47 millimeter gun built into it. By nightfall he is cut off with thirty men. On the airfield, a dozen Japanese light tanks charge across open ground. And behind the airfield wait the coral ridges of the Umurbrogol, with more than five hundred caves, and ten and a half thousand men who have been ordered not to charge, but to wait.
The four days pass. The 1st Marines lose more than half their regiment. Captain Everett Pope holds a hilltop through the night with fists and chunks of coral. The army is brought in over the general's objections, and the battle meant to protect MacArthur's return to the Philippines is still being fought the day he lands.
Watch to find out how the last defenders of Peleliu sent their final message, why the question of whether this battle was even necessary has never been settled, and what happened when the last of them walked out of the ridges in 1947.
If you want more real WW2 stories like this one, subscribe, it helps more than you'd think. If this one hit different, leave a like. And let me know in the comments, where are you watching from?
Sources: US Marine Corps official histories (Hough, The Assault on Peleliu, 1950; Garand and Strobridge, Western Pacific Operations, 1971; Gayle, Bloody Beaches, 1996), US Army in World War II (Smith, The Approach to the Philippines), Medal of Honor citations. Film and photographs: US National Archives (NARA), US Navy, US Marine Corps, Wikimedia Commons. Maps: terrain from AWS Terrain Tiles (SRTM), coastline and reef © OpenStreetMap contributors, Natural Earth.
#WW2 #WorldWar2 #Peleliu #USMC #PacificWar #MilitaryHistory #History #1stMarineDivision #filedunderfire
The Marines Were Promised Four Days on Peleliu. It Took 74
Filed under fire
533 views
Four days, the general promised. It took seventy four.
September 15, 1944. The 1st Marine Division crosses a coral reef seven hundred yards wide onto Peleliu, a six mile island east of the Philippines, to take its airfield. The navy has shelled it for three days and reports it has run out of targets. The division's commander has told his officers the fight will be very tough, but very short.
On the far left, Captain George Hunt's company lands under a coral knob with a 47 millimeter gun built into it. By nightfall he is cut off with thirty men. On the airfield, a dozen Japanese light tanks charge across open ground. And behind the airfield wait the coral ridges of the Umurbrogol, with more than five hundred caves, and ten and a half thousand men who have been ordered not to charge, but to wait.
The four days pass. The 1st Marines lose more than half their regiment. Captain Everett Pope holds a hilltop through the night with fists and chunks of coral. The army is brought in over the general's objections, and the battle meant to protect MacArthur's return to the Philippines is still being fought the day he lands.
Watch to find out how the last defenders of Peleliu sent their final message, why the question of whether this battle was even necessary has never been settled, and what happened when the last of them walked out of the ridges in 1947.
If you want more real WW2 stories like this one, subscribe, it helps more than you'd think. If this one hit different, leave a like. And let me know in the comments, where are you watching from?
Sources: US Marine Corps official histories (Hough, The Assault on Peleliu, 1950; Garand and Strobridge, Western Pacific Operations, 1971; Gayle, Bloody Beaches, 1996), US Army in World War II (Smith, The Approach to the Philippines), Medal of Honor citations. Film and photographs: US National Archives (NARA), US Navy, US Marine Corps, Wikimedia Commons. Maps: terrain from AWS Terrain Tiles (SRTM), coastline and reef © OpenStreetMap contributors, Natural Earth.
#WW2 #WorldWar2 #Peleliu #USMC #PacificWar #MilitaryHistory #History #1stMarineDivision #filedunderfire