Word: peleliu
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...another period of recuperation (on a nightmarish island called Pavuvu, which had been picked as a "rest area" in one of the war's major snafus), then tackled its next assignment-Peleliu. It was the division's first strongly opposed landing and its bloodiest, hardest battle of the war. The Navy and air preparation had knocked out only a small part of the cleverly protected Jap installations. On the beach the marines were caught in a tremendous torrent of fire. The division took Peleliu at a cost of 6,000 casualties out of 23,000 men (of whom...
...Buzzard. It was a desk job and Douglas stood it as long as he could. But he kept pestering the brass for a chance to get into the fighting. His chance came when the ist Division charged ashore at Peleliu. On the second savage day, the adjutant of the 5th Marines was wounded; back to the ships went the message: "If that old white-haired buzzard wants to get in some fighting, let him come ashore." Douglas stayed with the 5th through some of the bloodiest days of the Pacific campaign, won a Bronze Star for carrying ammunition...
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...