NBA Quiz: 1) Name the five players who scored in double
figures for the 1988-89 champion Detroit Pistons. [Hint: The
squad that beat the Lakers, 4-0.] 2) Name the starting five on the
1998-99 champion San Antonio Spurs. [Hint: Only 3 were in
double figures. Defeated the Knicks, 4-1.] Answers below.
Peleliu, Part II
Continuing our story from last time, the battle for the tiny Pacific
island of Peleliu commenced on September 15, 1944. Shelling
had taken place the prior 3 days, before the invasion by the
famed 1st U.S. Marine Division. But as I noted previously,
Peleliu would prove to be a colossal intelligence failure.
The intensive bombing, both from sea and the air, appeared to
totally destroy any defensive positions that the Japanese may
have had. But the Japs (I don’t mean this to be politically
incorrect) were so well dug in and concealed that the Navy ran
out of targets. It also seemed apparent that as the invasion
commenced on the morning of the 15th, those watching from the
sea, seeing the island aglow and enveloped in smoke, couldn’t
believe that anyone had survived the aerial onslaught.
One Marine, Eugene B. “Sledgehammer” Sledge secretly kept a
diary, which was later turned into the memoir, “With the Old
Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa.” [According to historian Donald
Miller, this is one of the “finest personal accounts of combat ever
written.”]
“We were told diaries were forbidden, because if we were killed
or captured, any diary might give the Japanese information. So I
kept little notes, which I slipped into the pages of my Gideon’s
New Testament,” he said.
Sledge was a new recruit and he relates that the veterans “treated
us replacements like brothers….They were the best teachers in
the world in how to kill Japs because, simply said, that is the
infantryman’s job, to kill the enemy….
“A passionate hatred for the Japanese burned through all the
Marines I knew….because they’re the meanest sonabitches that
ever lived.”
[The following passages are mostly taken from the book “The
Story of World War II,” by Donald L. Miller. From time to time
I like to throw in some good history for “Bar Chat.” This
particular story isn’t intended to be of great detail, but merely to
give you a sense of what it was like in the Pacific Theater. A
number of years ago I had the opportunity to tour the island of
Saipan, which like Peleliu was the scene of amazing heroism,
and carnage. Some of what you are about to read is harsh.]
As some of the Marines approached the beaches of the 6 by 2
mile island of Peleliu, to settle their nerves they began singing
“Give My Regards to Broadway.” “Just before we hit the beach
we were all singing it at the top of our lungs,” one sergeant
said later. “It sure made us feel good.”
The men coming in on the landing ships (LSTs) were told to
keep their heads down. Sledge peeked over the gunwale “and
saw several amtracs get hit dead on by screaming shells and
watched in horror as the bodies of Marines were blown into the
air.” [Miller]
The noise from all the explosions was unbearable. “It wasn’t hot
yet and the sky was blue and the sun was out and I was scared to
death, and so was everybody else,” said Sledge. “The main thing
that concerned me was I was afraid I was going to wet my
pants….
“I looked at the island and all I could see was a sheet of flame
backed by a huge black wall of smoke…as though the island was
on fire. And I thought, my God, none of us will ever get out of
that place.”
Back on the troopships, though, one Marine yelled, “We’ll be off
here by tomorrow.” The general staff had been told by army
intelligence that Peleliu would be a 2 to 3 day affair, max. What
they didn’t understand was that there were 11,000 Japanese
soldiers and sailors on the island, about 6,000 of them veterans
from the brutal Manchurian campaign. Their commander,
Colonel Kunio Nakagawa, brought with him engineers who
tunneled into the coral caves. Sliding steel doors covered the
entrances with the biggest guns, and many of the interlocking
caves had electricity and ventilation systems, as well as
telephone and radio communications. Some of the caves were
five and six stories high. Obviously, none of this was seen from
the air, nor did those first Marines who landed understand what
faced them.
The Japanese waited in the caves until the initial onslaught was
over, then they opened up on the Americans from the cliffs. The
invasion commenced at 5:30 AM and by noon the temperature
was 100 degrees. Over the course of the battle, often it reached
115. Water was in short supply.
Because of the heat, by day two hundreds of Marines had already
passed out from heat exhaustion and their bodies lay all about,
“paralyzed in grotesque shapes.” They desperately needed
water. As Sledge’s unit prepared for renewed fighting, a supply
detail came up with five-gallon water tanks.
“Our hands shook, we were so eager to quench our thirst,” he
recalled. Writes Donald Miller, “But the water looked like ‘thin
brown paint’ in (Sledge’s) canteen cup, and when he first drank
it he had to spit it out. It was full of rust and oil and it gave off a
vile smell. A supply officer had transported this water to Peleliu
in fifty-five gallon drums that had previously been filled with
diesel oil. The drums had supposedly been steam-cleaned but
someone botched the job. There was nothing anyone could do
now. The Marines had to drink the oily water or die. Some of
the men doubled up and retched.”
It was at Peleliu that the Japanese adopted their defense-in-depth
strategy, “luring the Americans toward their strong points and
inflicting horrible casualties from positions that neither naval or
air bombardment could reach. Japan could not win the war in
this way, but it could hope to make it so hideously costly that the
American public would demand an end to the bloodshed short of
unconditional surrender.” [Miller]
The Marines were cut to pieces, and two officers deserve a large
share of the blame; General William Rupertus and the legendary
Lieutenant General Lewis B. Puller, better known as “Chesty.”
It isn’t the point of this brief piece to delve into the details of
why these two are often singled out, but Rupertus was an
arrogant SOB, unloved by his men, while Chesty, the most
decorated Marine in history, did not come up with his finest
effort at Peleliu. While his bravery can’t be discounted (he was
injured in a previous battle and led mostly from a stretcher, on
the front lines), many of the survivors labeled Chesty a “butcher.”
Puller was a Marine’s Marine, but this often meant he failed to
accept help of any kind. Wrote one Marine correspondent on
Peleliu, George McMillan, “In the minds of many Marine
officers….Puller crossed the line that separates courage and
wasteful expenditure of lives.” [Source: “Chesty,” by Lt. Col.
Jon T. Hoffman]
By the ninth day of battle, the 1st Marine Division and its
attached units had lost 1,400 dead or missing and 5,700
wounded, casualty rates as high as any in the war. [By the
time the battle was over, months later, the death toll was over
2,000 with about 7,500 wounded, including the Army infantry
that later took over most of the fighting.]
Sledge’s unit, however, had to fight on. The entire landscape
had been blasted free of vegetation and scarred white by
thousands of phosphorus shells. The soldiers became a living
part of the terrain. Sledge recalls they stank as bad as they
looked. Miller writes:
“The heat and the fear made them sweat, and the smell of their
bodies was nauseating even to themselves. Worse, it blended
with the odor of their dead.”
Sledge:
“In the tropics, when men were killed in the morning they would
begin to bloat and stink pretty badly by night.
“We would cover our dead with ponchos, from head to toe, and
put them on stretchers behind the company area. But the dead
Japs were lying all over the place in the ridges. There was no
place to bury them in that coral. So they just bloated and rotted.
Maggots tumbled out of their mouths and eyes, and big blowflies
swarmed around the bodies….
“There was another problem. Typically, when a man who was
under fire had to defecate he used a grenade canister or ration
can and threw it out of his foxhole, covering it up with dirt the
next day….But there was no soil in the limestone hills of Peleliu,
so there was this terrible odor from feces….You felt you would
never get the stench of dead and rot and filth out of your nostrils.
And at night the land crabs would come out and swarm over the
dead Japs. Then shells would come in and blow big chunks of
the rotting corpses all over the place.”
Fatigue also set in. The men weakened mentally. They also
realized they had been sent into a death trap. In one of the worst
mistakes of the war, only 9,000 Marines were fighting the 11,000
Japanese. Normally, the Marines outnumbered the enemy by
three to one.
Everyone was thrown into the fight, including the cooks, drivers,
and supply men. “Because of the heat and terrain, it took four
people to carry a man on a stretcher,” Sledge recalled. “It was
dangerous work. The Japs absolutely opened up on stretcher-
bearers with everything they had. You cannot imagine the cold
hatred we had of people who shot at us as we were taking out our
wounded and were unable to fire back. Historians say we hated
the Japs because we were racists. Racism had nothing to do with
it. It was the way they fought.”
Sledge certainly respected the Japanese soldiers for their loyalty
to country and their unbelievable physical courage, but he
believes they had been brutalized in their training and
indoctrination, and that’s what made them fight “with savagery
beyond necessity.” To be fair, Sledge also saw how the Japs’
actions reduced some of his fellow Marines to an equal level. He
adds:
“Time had no meaning; life had no meaning. The fierce struggle
for survival in the abyss of Peleliu eroded the veneer of
civilization and made savages of us all. We lived in an
environment totally incomprehensible to the men behind the
lines – service troops and civilians.”
After about three months of fighting, Colonel Nakagawa, having
carried out his mission to “bleed the Americans,” burned his
colors and killed himself. Only a handful of his 11,000 men
were still alive, melting into the landscape. Some weren’t found
until about 18 months after the war.
Donald Miller concludes:
“Peleliu received almost no news coverage while it was being
fought and today it is a forgotten battle. All attention was on
MacArthur’s invasion of the Philippines and Eisenhower’s drive
to the Siegfried Line. But Peleliu, as Sledge says, must not be
forgotten. One of the most murderously fought battles in all of
history, it is a frightening reminder of the debasing consequences
of unrestrained war, war fought without let up or conscience.”
The battle never should have been waged in the first place.
General Rupertus was told days before to shelve the plans.
MacArthur didn’t need Peleliu’s airstrip to successfully invade
the Philippines after all. It’s also a telling reminder that as our
last World War II vets die, you shouldn’t be surprised that some
of them prefer to forget their experiences. God bless them.
—
Stuff
–On Saturday, two of your editor’s favorites had birthdays.
Clint Eastwood, 73, and Joe Namath, 60.
–Howard “Sandman” Sims passed away. The famous tap dancer
was also the “executioner” at the Apollo Theater in Harlem,
where he yanked awful performers off the stage on amateur
nights.
–Sports Illustrated reports that former 49ers wide receiver Gene
Washington has occasionally been escorting Condoleezza Rice,
including to the last White House state dinner. Washington is
now director of football operations for the NFL. Rice wants to
be commissioner some day. Hmmmmm. Who’s using whom?
–You know, it’s been a big year for the PGA Tour. Add
Kenny Perry to the list of great champions for winning the last
two events. Awesome play, super guy.
–Allen Barra has a piece in the Sunday Times where he says the
Yankees’ Bernie Williams should one day be elected into the
Hall of Fame. No way, man.
–For the record, the Mets’ David Cone retired with a super 194-
126 career mark and 5 World Series rings. Little did I know that
when I went to a Mets game back in April, I was witnessing his
last major league start. Meanwhile, in Mets land, John Franco is
making a pretty spectacular comeback from Tommy John
surgery at age 42.
–What’s this deal with Greg Maddux quitting after 80 pitches
these days? It’s bogus, I tell ya. And I’m beginning to wonder if
he’ll reach 300 wins after all. Doesn’t look like Roger Clemens
will. Ahem.
–Wake Forest finished 4th in the men’s NCAA golf
championship, my fellow Demon Deacon alums. Unfortunately,
Clemson won it, but this was Wake’s best finish in 6 years.
–Speaking of the ACC, if you want to apply to be Duke
University’s next president, write:
Robert K. Steel, Chair
Presidential Search Committee
Duke University
Box 90871
Durham, NC 27708-0871
Hell, you get free hoops tickets and you’re near the babes at
Chapel Hill.
–Changing the subject…quickly…Mickie Most died, one of the
top record producers of the 1960s. It was Most who discovered a
raw R&B group out of Newcastle, England…the Animals. Most
had an ear for hits and recommended the Animals record “The
House of the Rising Sun,” which, of course, went to #1 in both
the States and the UK. He also discovered Peter Noone and
Herman’s Hermits, along with Lulu and Donovan.
–We acknowledge the retirement of the great goalie Patrick Roy,
who holds NHL records for most games won, both regular
season and playoffs, along with capturing 3 Stanley Cup playoff
MVP awards to go with his 4 titles.
–And now for your “wild bull” news:
Yemen’s newly elected parliament was meeting on Saturday and
there were some protesters outside. The owners of a bull
planned on slaughtering the animal to vent their frustration that
they have to live in Yemen, when all of a sudden, the bull broke
free and charged into the legislative chambers, injuring three.
No word on the fate of the bull. [Actually, I accidentally threw
out the second half of the story.]
–If you’re in the vicinity of Texas A&M University on June 6-7,
you may want to check out the “Gamebird Conference.”
According to High Plains Journal, topics include “Bird, Land,
European Hunts and Cash Flow.” Personally, I’d like to see a
lecture titled “The Truth About Elephants and Rice Beer.”
Top 3 songs for the week of 6/1/68: #1 “Mrs. Robinson” (Simon
& Garfunkel) #2 “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly” (Hugo
Montenegro….title song from the movie, which is receiving a lot
of local press these days due to the reissue of the classic in a
restored format) #3 “A Beautiful Morning” (The Rascals)
NBA Quiz Answers: 1) ’88-’89 Pistons: Isiah Thomas, 18.2
ppg; Joe Dumars, 17.2; Mark Aquirre, 15.5 (as Piston…he had
been acquired earlier in the year for Adrian Dantley); Vinnie
Johnson, 13.8 (off the bench); Bill Laimbeer, 13.7. [Others on
the team were Dennis Rodman, James Edwards, Rick Mahorn
and John Salley.] 2) ’98-’99 Spurs: Tim Duncan, 21.7 ppg;
David Robinson, 15.8; Sean Elliott, 11.2; Avery Johnson, 9.7;
Mario Elie, 9.7.
Next Bar Chat, Thursday.
