Word: peleliu
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...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...
...picture of the task on the U.S.'s newest and hardest-won Pacific island came last week from TIME Correspondent Robert Martin: "Peleliu is a horrible place. The heat is stifling and rain falls intermittently -the muggy rain that brings no relief, only greater misery. The coral rocks soak up heat during the day and it is only slightly cooler at night. Marines are in the finest possible physical condition, but they wilted on Peleliu. By the fourth day there were as many casualties from heat prostration as from wounds...
...Peleliu is incomparably worse than Guam in its bloodiness, terror, climate and the incomprehensible tenacity of the Japs. For sheer brutality and fatigue, I think it surpasses anything yet seen in the Pacific, certainly from the standpoint of numbers of troops involved and the time taken to make the island secure...