Word: peleliu
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Pepper" Martin-taking the hard way back to his old post in Chungking -faced the mortar fire at Peleliu with the first landing wave, found himself pinned on the sands between two quizzical Marines ("I wonder where we are." "It sure ain't Staten Island...
...When we hit Peleliu's sandy beaches we wondered if another Tarawa was developing," Martin cabled. "The Japs knew we were coming and threw everything in the book at us in a desperate effort to stave off annihilation. Two Jap shells made near misses on our amphtrack, pelted its sides with shrapnel. When we reached the beach another mortar a few yards distant spouted bloodily against the smoky island background, killed one Marine, wounded two others. We had to dig for cover in a ditch because our front lines were only 25 yards inland...
After nearly four weeks the Japs still held out on Peleliu's Bloody Nose Ridge, and in a small pocket on nearby Angaur Island. Already on Peleliu 11,083 Japs had been killed, 214 captured; on Angaur 1,150 were dead and eleven were prisoners...
...casualties kept climbing, too. Since some of its units landed last fortnight on two-by-six-mile Peleliu to aid the hard-pressed marines, the 81st Infantry Division's casualties had approximately doubled, to 251 killed, 1,465 wounded. The 1st Marine Division's three-week total (1,038 killed or missing, 4,650 wounded) was already the heaviest for a single division in the Pacific...
...southern slope of a hill on furnace-hot Peleliu, two hospital corpsmen came upon a badly wounded marine, a young Southerner. They lifted him on a stretcher and started toward the beach through the machine-gun fire that corpsmen often brave to rescue fallen comrades...