Word: peleliu
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Stern as the battle proved to be, Gloucester was not as bad as the next "rest camp," Pavuvu, and neither-in some ways-was Peleliu, where the division again caught the full fury of war in the Pacific. Pavuvu is a stinking, rat-infested little island in the Solomons, fit neither for marine nor Gook. Some men went "Asiatic" (regular Marine lingo for rock-happy). A sentry walked his muddy post for four hours, stopped at the last tent as his relief reported, put his rifle to his mouth and blew the top of his head off. This seemed...
Novelist Tom Lea's father was mayor of El Paso, Tex., and he grew up among ranchers. Lea, however, became no cattle-raising Texan; he became an artist. As such, on commission for LIFE, he landed on Peleliu in September 1944, with an assault wave of U.S. marines and lived through one of the bloodiest island battles of the Pacific war. Since his return he has been hanging around Mexican bull rings with a new ear for the heartbeats of men in danger...
...Brave Bulls, Lea's first novel, is a war book of a kind that most critics forgot to expect. The Brave Bulls has nothing, ostensibly, to do with the war, but the sand of the bull ring in this book is also the sand of the Peleliu beaches; the black and powerful truth that fills the book is the truth of death that marines learned on Peleliu's Bloody Nose Ridge...
...clock the ist Marine Division on Peleliu had made only 200 yards. The Japanese lieutenant had noted in his diary that although the bombardment had altered the island's scenery, only one man in his company was hurt. Snug in their caves, the Japanese waited until the first wave hit the beach, then, "the guns on point and island opened, many of those back in the ridge, and a mortar barrage so heavy that those who lived through it said it was the worst they had ever seen." By nightfall there were 1,298 dead & wounded Marines, the beachhead...
...Shock of Battle. According to Fletcher Pratt, Peleliu was the Marines' hardest battle. None of them was easy, though he calls the assault on Tinian "perfection." Pratt, one of the best of the civilian war analysts, wrote The Marines' War at the Marine Corps' request, but on three conditions, all granted: that he have full access to official Marine files and captured Japanese records; permission to interview eyewitnesses; complete freedom of opinion. The result is a fine service history written with clarity and intelligence, one that many Marines will welcome as an authoritative corrective to their...