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

by Ian W. Toll

By the first week of October, most of the front-line infantrymen were nearing the end of their endurance. Three weeks might as well have been three months or even three years. Sledge remembered Peleliu as “a nether world of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning; life had no meaning. The fierce struggle made savages of us all.”41 Lieutenant McCandless had compared Peleliu, as did many others who served and fought there, to Dante’s vision of hell in The Inferno. But a closer fictional likeness was found in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Like the “black land” of Mordor, the battleground was a foul, evil-smelling wasteland—stripped of its greenery, shrouded in haze, and sealed off by forbidding razorback ridges. An army of cunning troglodytes had burrowed deep into the earth, and could cross beneath mountains through elaborate subterranean networks of tunnels and caverns. To their opponents, these foes seemed every bit as cruel and scarcely more human than Tolkien’s orcs.