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Charles Allen

On the Beaches of Peleliu

An artists rendering of the Peleliu landing

Intro
Nobody in America escaped the effects of World War Two, and my grandfather Charles Allen was no different. He served in the United States Navy from 1944 until the end of the war. His journey carried him to Peleliu, one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific, and ultimately into a position in the planned invasion of Japan.

War in the Pacific
I feel it is important to set the scene before we enter into my grandfather’s story. At the time when my grandfather entered that Navy, the year was 1944. The war in Europe was coming to an end; the Germans would surrender in a year’s time. Most of the fighting was happening in the Pacific Theatre. Since the attack on Pearl Harbor, the allies have been involved in a campaign of island hopping across the Pacific and since the battle of Midway, the allies had been gaining ground in the Pacific. This is where my grandfather enters the story.

The Draft
The year was 1943, and America was engaged in a war in Europe and in the Pacific, and Charles Allen was at Stanford University. At that time, a lottery system was used to draft men to serve in the armed forces. My grandfather received a very high number in the draft and was likely to be taken out of school very soon. Because of this, my grandfather decided to take a V-7 Deferment. The V-7 program was offered to men in college who wanted to be able to finish school before their military obligations began. This meant that he would not have to serve in the military until he had completed his college education.

Training
After his graduation from Stanford in 1944, three years after war had been declared on Japan, my grandfather was ordered to report to the Navy’s Midshipmen School in California for ninety days of training. Upon completing the school, he and his classmates would become known as the "Ninety-Day Wonders." The school began in September and ended in mid-December when my grandfather became a commissioned ensign in the United States Navy. Because he finished high in his class at the training program, he was given a high choice in what position he wanted to take in the Navy. My grandfather was drawn to the destroyer service. He requested to be assigned to a destroyer. A few days later my grandfather received orders to the United States Navy Base located in San Diego. When he arrived he was told that the destroyer he had requested was not in. He was instead assigned to amphibious warfare, a relatively new force that was suffering the most casualties at the time. In San Diego, he was placed in a troop transport and sailed to Esprit Usanto, an island near Australia. After a short stay, he sailed again to the Solomons where he underwent training specific to the mission he was about to embark upon, the invasion of the Palu Island Group.

Island Hopping
The basic strategy in the Pacific theatre was that of "island hopping." The main premise of this strategy was to move from one island to another crossing the Pacific and eventually arriving in Japan. The strength of the strategy came in its flexibility. Unlike when moving across land, when the Americans came across an island that they felt they could not take for whatever reason, they could simply bypass it and move to the next. Both of the different "island hopping" plans that were proposed by General MacArthur and General Nimitz, included the invasion of a tiny island between the Philippines and New Guinea, Peleliu. Peleliu would be the site of one of the bloodiest fights in the Pacific Theatre of Operations.

Bloody Beaches
On September 12, an armada, holding my grandfather who was attached to the first marine division formed up and prepared to move. The 81st Infantry followed close behind them. The main objective on the island was to capture an airfield for United States use in preparing for the invasion of the Japanese mainland. The date of the attack was planned to be September 15. United States Command estimated the battle would last three to four days. Lt. Beachmaster Charles Allen was riding with the 1st marine division under Col. Chesty Puller. The plan for the invasion was to bombard the island with planes and shells from ships to disable any Japanese resistance, then to land on the beach and have the forces swing like an opening door across the island. The hinge of this door was the beach named "White 1" at the base of a system of very steep ridges cliffs and this beach was run by Lt. Allen with the 1st Marines. The United States Navy and Air Force bombarded the island as they had planned but what they didn’t know was that on the island over 10,000 Japanese men were in caves waiting for the bombardment to end. My grandfather recalls "when you looked up at the sky, it looked black, on the horizon, the whole sky was black with our planes coming toward the island." The marines finally landed on the beaches and they where met with a large amount of Japanese fire. Machine guns and artillery that had been protected in the caves pounded the marines that were on the beach. The Americans tried to land amphibious tractors or Am-tracs to assist the

The beaches at Peleliu, H-hour. My grandfather is in the cluster of ships towards the top of the photo.

marines. My grandfather said "[the tractors] where useless, they would get stuck in the coral, and then hit with artillery." After a long fight, the Americans established a beachhead, but they where still taking fire from Japanese soldiers probing their positions. The orders were to hold on the beach while the 5th and 7th Marines swung across the island. "We had to dig foxholes to keep ourselves safe from the fire," my grandfather recalls "The only problem was because we were on the beach, if we dug to deep [the foxholes] just filled up with water." He told me about the way he dealt with this problem "You could dig about two feet down and then curl up and hold your helmet facing the direction the fire was coming from." The allies finally established a beachhead and the fighting moved inland, but when there is combat going on on and island of that size, you are never really too far from the action.

The Horrors on Peleliu
My grandfather, who remained on the beach, began the onerous task of evacuating the wounded and bringing supplies to the marines. He ran this operation from his position on the beach. The task was very complicated. For starters, the Japanese still controlled the highest point on the island which was knows as "Bloody-Nose Ridge." It was from this position that the Japanese wreaked havoc upon the American landing craft. No ship could stop on the beach to unload supplies or pick up the wounded without being shelled almost immediately. "The scene on the beach was a disaster," my grandfather said "there were medics running all around the dead and wounded that covered the beach. And we couldn’t get our ships anywhere near them" However the inability to evacuate wounded was only the start of the problems. On warships all the supplies are in stages. Things are packed on the ship in the order they would be needed. The invasion was planned to last only four days. So as you can imagine the types of things coming off the supply ships on days eight and nine began to have less practical use. My grandfather recalls one such incident. "A marine Sargeant ran up to me on the beach and said told me his men needed more 50-cal machine gun barrels quickly." However at that time the only thing that was coming off the ships were Ping-Pong balls in order to entertain the troops after the battle (which was supposed to end four days earlier) was over. The machine barrels would not be available for days. And even when they did arrive there was a good chance they would be lost to the artillery upon landing. It became clear to the Americans that not much would happen while the Japanese controlled "Bloody-Nose" Ridge.

A stratigic map of the island. Charlie landed at White-1

Heros on the Rest of the Island
There were three divisions of marines on Peleliu, my grandfather was only with one of them. I feel it is important to fill in what is happening on the rest of the island. The 5th and 7th marines were the other marines on Peleliu. The 5th Marines objective was to secure the airfield on the eastern end of the island, while the seventh marines were simply responsible for taking ground and eliminating resistance. The fifth Marines captured the airfield with little difficulty and the seventh marines made great gains up the center of the island and split the Japanese forces in two. The 7th Marines were then able to give one battalion (the 2nd) to assist in the capture of "Bloody-Nose Ridge." The 321st Regimental Combat Team and 81st Infantry Division from nearby Angaur joined the 2nd in this effort of supporting the 1st Marines. The fifth marines, after capturing the airfield, moved northwest to try to encircle the last remaining Japanese resistance, knowing that they would fight to the very last. The last problem that the United States faced was Japanese reinforcements coming from the nearby island of Ngesebus. A 600-yard channel separated these islands form Peleliu. Marines crossed this channel and supported by planes from the newly captured airstrip at Peleliu, quickly eliminated the 500-man Japanese garrison on the island. All that was left to do was finish off the Japanese in the Umurbrogol Pocket, which was the name given to the region around "Bloody-Nose Ridge." The marines would encircle the region and hold their positions for eight weeks, with the battle quickly turning into a siege. Marines used mortars to wear down the resistance and then made an assault on the ridge. The attack was again turned back, but it did make a small gain. My grandfather described the assault on "Bloody-Nose Ridge" as "the greatest act of bravery I had ever seen." Marines led by Col. Puller made twenty-three unsuccessful attempts at the ridge. Many times they reached the top and were forced to withdraw because of intense fire coming from other

nearby ridges. Meanwhile my grandfather, not fifteen yards from the base of the ridge, was struggling with the hundreds dead and countless wounded men from these assaults. A horrible example of this attack can be seen in the C Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines. They went up "Bloody-Nose Ridge" with 242 men, and returned with eight. The Japanese weere now thirsty, starving and in desperate need of medical supplies, completely cut off from all assistance by the marine lines. At this point the battle was declared won by the Americans and Army divisions relieved all the marines. Two and half months after the battle had begun the chief Japanese commander on the island, Colonel Nakagawa, and his general, General Murai, both committed ritualistic suicide leaving 60 Japanese soldiers to finish the fight. Three days later the last of the Japanese were defeated.

The docks built at Peleliu.

Charlie at Peleliu
Even with this entire ordeal going on, there were things that needed to be done. After just a few days on the island, with the marines still very much engaged in the Umurbrogol Pocket, my grandfather with his men set to work dredging a harbor out of the coral, and building a dock. After seventy days of work with tractors, the harbor and dock were completed. At this time Charlie left Peleliu Island and sailed to the Leyte Gulf.

After Peleliu
After the invasion of Peleliu my grandfather sailed to the Leyte Gulf where he landed without resistance after MacArthur’s men had secured the island and served a strategic role similar to his experiences at Peleliu with the construction of an operational harbor. After this work was complete he returned to Peleliu and was attached to the 3rd marines and combat-loaded for the invasion of the Japanese mainland. He told me that the beach he was supposed to land on in Japan had about 20 feet of beach, and then a 40-foot cliff. He and his men would be required to grapple up the cliff and then fight a dug in Japanese force. He is convinced that if he had to fight this battle he would not have survived the war. However it was at this time when America dropped atomic bombs or Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese surrendered and so the invasion was not necessary.

After the War
My grandfather served in the Navy well after the combat was over. After he returned from the Pacific, he was assigned to the Navy’s Press Department. There he worked there for a while and then was assigned to the Chief of Naval Operations Office and was a member of the board that evaluated the Pacific campaign. When it came time to evaluate Peleliu, he tells me, the board decided that the attack had been "unnecessary," and that the island "should have been avoided." His last job for the Navy was to assist in the writing of the Navy’s Official Book on amphibious combat. "Because I was considered an expert, at the time there hadn’t been too many invasions like I had seen." He joked.

In Conclusion
Charles Allen fought on beaches with some of America’s bravest marines. Also his role as a Naval Officer with the marines was an important one as he controlled the flow of supplies and men to and from the island. In the end the battle was deemed unimportant and my grandfather moved on to other things. But that will never change the bravery that everyone on that island experienced, and it will never make us forget the 1,252 American and 10,000 Japanese men who lost their lives on that island.

Ever the sailor: Charles Allen cruising through Boston Harbor.

Bibliography
Primary Sources

Allen, Charles. Personal Interview. 11.24.03.

Secondary Sources

Gayle , Gordon D. . Bloody Beaches: The Marines at Peleliu. US Marine Corps Headquarters: History and Museums Division, 1996.

"Island Hopping in the Pacific." 17 Dec. 2003 http://library.thinkquest.org/18106/hopping.html?tqskip1=1
Keir . "PELELIU." 23 Nov. 2003

Morison, Samual Eliot. History of United States Naval Operations: Vol. 8. 2001.

Moran , Jim, and Gordon Rottman. Peleliu 1944: The Forgotten Corner of Hell. New York: Osprey Pub Co., 2002.

Prize, Scott. "The Battle for Peleliu." 25 Nov. 2003.

"Selective Service System: History and Records." United States Selective Service System. 16 Dec. 2003.

Sulzberger, C.L. The American Heritage Picture History of World War Two : Outlet, 1987.

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I would like to thank Charles Allen for his co-operation with this interview, Mr. Brooke for editing my content, The Needham High Library staff and Needham Public Library staff for their help with research.