Capture of Peleliu Bravery on the Beach

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An unknown major motivated a terrified 16-year-old to get out of thekilling zone at Peleliu.

By Charles H. Owen

On the early morning of September 15, 1944, I was a 16-year-old private in A Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines (A/1/7), 1st Marine Division. The 1st Marine Division had made the initial land offensive effort in the Pacific theater at Guadalcanal and, subsequently, had fought in the Cape Gloucester/New Britain campaign. Now it was embarked on its third campaign, my first. The mission: to take Peleliu, in the Western Carolines, thus protecting the eastern flank of General Douglas MacArthur’s drive into the Philippines. It was an effort that many believe should not have been made.

One of the chief opponents of the landing was U.S. Third Fleet Commander Admiral William F. Halsey. However, Halsey’s pleas to have the landing on Peleliu called off fell on deaf ears. Hence the 1st Marine Division and all of its supporting units prepared to take a heavily defended island, the first wave positioning itself to move toward the landing beaches. Leading the assault was the 3rd Armored Amphibian Battalion (Provisional), composed of 75 armored amphibious tanks. The executive officer of that outfit was leading the way in his command tank.

My company was to land on Orange Beach 3, which was on the far right flank of the 7th Marines sector, but somewhat to the left, or north, of a large segment of the assaulting tanks. To say that I was scared as our amtrac made its way beachward would be putting it mildly. The defending Japanese forces were unleashing a galling fire on the assaulting Marine elements–fire that seemed to increase in intensity as our amtrac ground to a halt on the edge of the beach. After vaulting over the side, with the amtrac already backing up and getting out of there, I ran up onto the beach, where I found myself among others of my company and mortar section, all of us prone on that beach and hugging its sand. The noise of the incoming fire made voice contact almost impossible. Japanese artillery and small-arms fire were dealing death wholesale upon the assaulting Marines and particularly those who chose to remain on that beach.

My fellow A/1/7 comrades and I had been instructed repeatedly in our training exercises that the beach was the last place we would want to be. The Japanese would have it “zeroed in.” After debarking from our landing craft, getting off the beach immediately was a must. Despite such instructions, in the face of the fire from our front and both flanks, we remained frozen to that beach with fear.

Never before or since have I experienced such fright. Yet neither I nor any of the people around me took any steps to avoid what was bound to happen. If we remained in that position, we would almost certainly have been killed. Actually, I do not know how long I remained there. It could not have been for more than a few minutes, but it seemed an eternity. I was terrified, and the first thing I saw that had an effect on my mind was either a detached arm or a leg that landed beside me.

As I hugged that beach, many thoughts raced through my mind. Why had I joined the Marine Corps two years earlier, at age 14, falsifying my date of birth on my enlistment papers? Why had I asked for combat duty when, after finishing boot camp and attending sea school, I had been assigned to a nice berth on a training ship tied up in the Norfolk Navy Yard?

Then, in my state of complete fear, something shook me back to reality. I heard a voice, a very loud voice. I would describe it as a booming voice, one that could be heard over all of the accompanying noises of battle, one I would never forget. I looked around me. There was nobody moving in our immediate area. I looked again, down to my right, and at a point on the beach where the fearful storm of iron and lead was raging most furiously, there was a man coming up the beach toward us. He was the only person on his feet, as far as I could see.

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