Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (The Pacific War Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian W. Toll

The battle for Peleliu passed mostly unnoticed in the United States. A few brief press accounts appeared in the back pages of newspapers. The news from Europe in those weeks was more stirring and sensational: Allied armies had liberated Paris and were sweeping across France toward Germany. In the Pacific, there was more interest in MacArthur’s march toward the Philippines. The Palau Islands were remote and obscure even by Pacific standards, and it was difficult to convey how this fight differed from a hundred other island battles. Nor was Peleliu a particularly large battle on the scale of the ongoing global carnage. But it was a milestone of a kind, and also a foreshadowing of what was to come in the Pacific, especially in the later and better-known island battles on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. In proportional terms, from the American point of view, Peleliu was the costliest battle of the Pacific campaign. Of the 28,000 marines and soldiers who fought on the island, nearly 40 percent were casualties, including about 1,800 killed and 8,000 wounded.