Operation Stalemate II

Chesty Puller and First Marines at Peleilu as seen though BunnyVision© propaganda.  Peleilu was a complete waste of men and materiel, it had no value and could have been ignored.  Puller was relieved of duty as he was off his head with pain and exhaustion and sent home for the duration of the war.  The First Marine Division suffered 1,252 dead and 5,274 wounded for an unnecessary battle their worthless general declared would be over in 3 days.  'First Marines' means the 1st Marine Regiment, the division is referred to as 1st Marine Division.  The Japanese outdid themselves as warriors and made our boys pay very heavily for every inch of ground gained in that awful place.  The U. S. Army 81st Division totalled 3,089 casualties, of whom 404 were killed in action.  19 Japanese soldiers and sailors were captured out of 10,000 combatants.  This is the kind of thing that ensured the use of the atomic bombs, the invasion of the home islands would have been a slaughterhouse.

'One of the heroes of the Pacific war turned out to be then Col. Chesty Puller, one of the regimental commanders of Rupertus’s division. Yet even here his heroic actions were wasted. General Rupertus gave him orders that were subsequently described as suicidal. “The cold fact,” one officer was to was to later write, “is that Rupertus ordered Puller to assault impossible enemy positions daily till the [regiment] was decimated.”  “It was more or less of a massacre,” Col. Puller later confessed. “There was no way to cut down losses and follow orders.  One historian claimed that the general’s main problem was that of pride. “Rupertus knew how badly his division needed the Army’s help,” he wrote, yet “for days he refused to even consider this option. He was absolutely determined that his division would take Peleliu alone.” The Marines eventually defeated the Japanese on Peleliu, but at extraordinary cost. The assault proved to be the costliest attack in Marine Corps history. One battalion from Rupertus’s division had only seventy-four men remaining; the rest of the approximately seven hundred had been killed or wounded.
The above sentence is wrong.  The worst casualties in Marine history were racked up at Iwo, 6000 dead and 26,000 wounded.

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