World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF THE PACIFIC: Toughest Yet

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.

But U.S. 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 war.

A 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.

“The mountainside caves which the Japs defended so doggedly were the incarnate evil of this war. They were built at staggered levels so that it was almost impossible to reach one without being fired at from another. These American kids are incredible. They went in despite their losses, fully conscious of the horror ahead of them, suffering unspeakably from continuous, 24-hour-a-day fighting. But it was even more than-they could take.

“Early reports from the battle were deceptive. They were relayed by radio correspondents broadcasting from a ship in the harbor. On the fourth day one radio man who had not been ashore reported that the top of the ridge had been taken and there was no more mortar fire. Two days later another broadcaster said that Jap mortar fire was very inaccurate and ineffective. Those of us who trudged aboard ship simply told them they ought to go ashore and talk to the 200 who had been killed or wounded the night before by those same ‘ineffective’ mortars.

“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.”