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

by Ian W. Toll

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. Even the vile realm’s name, Urmurbrogal, might have been borrowed from a map of Middle Earth—and like Tolkien’s fictional battle for Middle Earth, this was a war to be won by total extermination of the enemy.