On September 15, 1944, victory for the Allies had become a glowing light on the horizon. The United States, in its inexorable trek across the Pacific toward Japan, continued its drive with the invasion of a tiny island named Peleliu, the second southernmost of the Palau Island group. Securing the island was considered an important requirement as a prelude to the long-awaited invasion of the Philippines.
The main assault on Peleliu was to be made by the First Marine Division under the command of 55-year-old Major General William Rupertus. He had joined the division in March of 1942, and as the Assistant Division Officer (ADO), had fought with the division in the fierce Guadalcanal campaign.
After having studied the upcoming operation and after having been briefed by his staff, Rupertus concluded that this operation would only take three or four days, and that resistance would be initially moderate but brief. He boasted to his officers that, “We’ll be through in three days. It might take two.”
Some six long weeks later, having sustained terrific losses in fierce, nearly continuous combat, the last of his division was finally evacuated from the island. At that point, Phase 2 began, and the Army took over with the task of reducing and eliminating what was left of the hidden Japanese defensive positions. That took another four weeks.
The Marine division would be out of action for six months, its infantry regiments having averaged 50 percent casualties—the highest unit losses ever in Marine Corps history—that occurred in the three rifle assault regiments, the 1st, 5th, and 7th Marines. (Casualties in the division’s other units, such as the 11th Marines (Artillery), the tank battalion, engineers, and medical battalion were not as severe.) While the Marines in the end had been triumphant, their victory was truly what would be called Pyrrhic.
The expression refers to a battlefield success, but one that inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor that having won is little better than having been defeated. The winner’s losses are tremendous, usually almost as heavy as those of their enemy, thus in effect negating a true sense of achievement.
The term is derived from an ancient king of Epirus, a small 3rd-century BC Greek city-state country located in what today is the southern part of Albania and the northwestern part of Greece. Epirus at that time was a powerful Greek state, and King Pyrrhus, a second cousin of Alexander the Great, and was in his own right a formidable general. Thirty-eight-year-old Pyrrhus took his country to war in 280 BC against the Roman Republic to assist an ally, the Greek state of Tarentum in southern Italy. The Romans were trying to subdue all of the Greek states in Italy and Sicily. Tarentum, located in the Italian boot heel, would not be able to survive a direct Roman assault alone.
Pyrrhus put together a coalition army of about 27,000 and some 20 war elephants, loaned to him by his father-in-law, Ptolemy II of Egypt. He crossed the Ionian Sea in 280 BC and landed near Tarentum. The next spring, he invaded Apulia, a region at the tip of the Adriatic Sea, and, marching up Italy’s eastern coast, he met the Roman army at the town of Asculum. After a ferocious, bloody two-day struggle in which the tide of battle turned several times, the Epirotes were finally victorious. Their army though, had been devastated by the battle, their casualties tremendous. Pyrrhus lost over a quarter of his army, and many good commanders, as well as veteran soldiers, had been killed or maimed, many of them irreplaceable. His losses were so great that he could no longer continue the offensive and had to prematurely go into winter quarters to rebuild his army. On the other hand, the losers, the Romans, were able to rapidly replace their losses, so the defeat did little to set them back.
Pyrrhus himself was disheartened by such a costly victory. The Greek essayist Plutarch later wrote that when one of his remaining commanders congratulated the king on his win, he looked at the man sourly and replied, “Yes, and if we are victorious in one more such battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.”
There have been other similar examples in history where the winning side has suffered nearly as much as the enemy, either in casualties or in strategic losses. Napoleon’s marginal victory at Borodino in September, 1812 left him in control of the battlefield, but his losses were some 30,000 men, a critical number for an army far from home; and soon he would face the terrible freezing Russian winter. The British won their battle over the American colonists at Bunker Hill in June, 1775, after three frontal charges up the hill, but they lost two and a half times more men than the colonists. The Americans’ claim of a moral victory substantially furthered their cause for independence. British General Howe later shook his head and bemoaned the fact that his win had been “too dearly bought.”
Lee suffered a similar victory at Chancellorsville, Virginia in May, 1863. In a daring piece of tactical brilliance, he narrowly defeated the twice-as-strong Union forces, losing some 13,000 men to the Union’s 17,000. His losses though, in both men and matériel, would be harder to replace, and casualties were very costly in terms of the experienced fighters lost, including the death of his most trusted and capable general: Stonewall Jackson.
Then there were the bloody battles of World War I on the Western Front—the Somme, Verdun, and Passchendaele, not to mention the lesser campaigns where thousands were killed or maimed to gain a few hundred yards here or there.
Peleliu was no different in this regard. The Marines were eventually victorious over the Japanese that fall of 1944, but the cost to them was tremendous. So many hardened veterans and officers in the famed First Marine Division—the “Old Breed”—became casualties, and the rifle units suffered a higher percentage of losses than ever before (or since) in Marine Corps history. There are a number of reasons for this, including several mistakes that occurred. And the sad part about it is that in the end, taking that island proved unnecessary in winning the war. In fact, many argue that it should not have been undertaken.
This book analyzes why the casualties were so excessive, as well as clearing up a number of confusing issues previously recounted.