Tuesday, September 13, 2005
By JAMES P. PINKERTON
LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY
If you visit the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va., you will see a strange place-name on the front of the monument, just above the words, "Uncommon Valor was a Common Virtue." The place is Peleliu. It's an island in the Pacific -- a sweet-sounding name with a bitter history.
A new book, "Brotherhood of Heroes: The Marines at Peleliu, 1944 -- The Bloodiest Battle of the Pacific War," by veteran journalist Bill Sloan, provides a valuable chronicle of that battle. It also provides an occasion to consider the role of old-fashioned ground combat in the era of high-tech machine war.
Another D-Day
For the 1st Marine Division, Sept. 15, 1944, was yet another "D-Day." The phrase D-Day was not unique to the Normandy invasion a few months earlier; it was the generic term to designate the commencement of combat operations. Yet the other D-Days are unjustly neglected; no U.S. president has convened an international commemoration at Peleliu, where 1,656 Americans were killed in a month of fighting, for the purpose of capturing a 5-square-mile island. For comparison, that's almost as many deaths as the entire U.S. military has suffered in Iraq in 21/2 years.
Sloan ably recounts the deeds of men who went by nicknames such as Ack Ack, Snafu and Hillbilly. But there was nothing unserious about what the Marines did at Peleliu: Eight men earned Medals of Honor -- five of them posthumously.
Yet, at the same time, Sloan raises questions that reverberate all the way to the present. For example, then-Lt. Col. Lewis "Chesty" Puller, one of the legends in Corps history, winner of five Navy Crosses, comes off badly; he is undeniably brave, but he seems careless with the lives of his men.
Strategy questioned
Moreover, Sloan asks whether the invasion was necessary. As the United States pursued its "island-hopping" strategy toward Japan, there was considerable doubt as to whether the 11,000 or so Japanese on Peleliu posed any threat to the Americans as they made their way across the Pacific. That is, U.S. ships and airplanes had already mostly swept the sea and skies of Japanese war machines; as Sloan notes, Peleliu's force-projection capacity had been "obliterated" by American air raids six months before the Marines' amphibious D-Day.
Nevertheless, the author observes, "Yet for an assortment of reasons -- some strategic, some political, some emotional, and some, perhaps, merely vainglorious -- plans for the invasion of Peleliu moved forward inexorably." But, even so, a big part of the plan fell short of completion; three days of naval bombardment before D-Day were unaccountably reduced to two days. Which opens up questions: Why was the military in such a rush? Were officers with names such as Chesty too eager to get onto the ground in search of glory?
As Sloan makes clear, by 1944 the Japanese had no chance of winning the war -- but they kept fighting anyway, out of suicidal doggedness. Indeed, after Peleliu, the next island battles, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, were even more costly in American lives.
Over the years, U.S. thinking has shifted. Wars, according to current doctrine, must become less "labor intensive" and more "technology intensive." In this context, to be sure, dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima was a necessity; the quick Japanese surrender saved hundreds of thousands of American lives.
Techniques are unchanged
But today, in Iraq, the Marines still fight pretty much as they did 60 years ago: on foot, or in vulnerable vehicles. Fighting is still low-tech. That's great for gung-ho heroism, but it's costly in lives and, as the polls show, in public support.
The America blanching at the cost of Iraq today is not the country that sustained Peleliu six decades ago, as well as a hundred other battles like it.
America's politico-military leadership will either have to change the way it fights wars -- by substituting more machines for fewer people -- or else deal with the fact that those wars will have to be brief and cheap.
Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service