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landing area were not so dramatic. Private Russell Davis, like so many others, was trying to figure out what was going on and what to do. He aimlessly wandered along the beach, looking for a close buddy, dodging near misses, before finally encountering a strong-willed NCO. “I saw a redheaded corporal, flailing his heavy arms and urging the men forward into the smoke at the edge of the beach. The corporal seemed to know what he was doing and I pressed toward him, happy to attach myself to anyone who knew what he was supposed to do.” The corporal was striding around, bellowing at frightened men, even kicking some who refused to move. “Get forward!” he shouted. “There’s a ditch ahead. Get into it. Stop bunching up on that sand like sheep.” Davis and several others responded to him. Later, Davis watched as the corporal persuaded a demolition man to go forward with him and destroy a bunker.
    Generally, this is how the battle went that morning. Frightened men asked corporals, sergeants, or lieutenants what to do and the leaders told them, thus giving them a job to focus on rather than their natural fear. The leaders understood that the situation was horrifying but not all that complicated. Staying on the beach meant death. So the best thing to do was move forward to destroy whatever, or whoever, was in the way. This was how the 1st Marine Division blasted out its bloody lodgment some fifteen yards inland at Peleliu. 9
    Life and Death at the Point
    The worst fighting took place on the extreme left of the American beachhead, just on the northern edge of the 1st Marine Regiment’s White Beach 1. Here a gnarled, thirty-foot-high ridge protruded, like a swollen knuckle, into the sea. Dubbed “the Point” by the Americans, this blunt ridge flanked the entire beachhead, allowing the Japanese to pour enfilading fire on nearly every Marine who was struggling ashore. Colonel Nakagawa understood the defensive advantages of the Point, and he fortified it heavily. According to a 1st Marine Regiment report, Japanese defenses consisted of “five reinforced concrete pillboxes housing a number of heavy machine guns and a 40mm [actually 47-millimeter] automatic weapon. Riflemen and machine gunners in spider traps or coral depressions gave close covering fire for the emplacements.” The automatic weapon was an antiboat gun whose six-pound shells savaged the American DUKWs and amtracs. The pillboxes stood about five feet tall and were reinforced with steel rods and several feet of concrete or coral. The Japanese expertly concealed the pillboxes and their supporting positions within the jagged natural bramble of coral, sand, and foliage that blanketed the Point. Twenty-six-year-old Captain George Hunt, whose K Company drew the mission of capturing the Point, described it as “a rocky mass of sharp pinnacles, deep crevasses, tremendous boulders. Pillboxes, reinforced with steel and concrete, had been dug or blasted in the base of the perpendicular drop to the beach.” Some of the pillboxes had coral and concrete piled as much as six feet high with small holes around them for supporting infantry soldiers. “It surpassed by far anything we had conceived of when we studied the aerial photographs.”
    In fact, the Americans had little idea of how strong the Point really was, because they could not see its defenses. “It was totally overgrown with little shrub trees,” Sergeant George Peto, a mortar forward observer in K Company, recalled. “It was so camouflaged. It just looked like a bunch of brush. You couldn’t really see nothing. It was one of the best fortified places I’ve seen or heard of.” The pre-landing bombardment had not even touched the Point. The Navy had mainly fired at observable targets. They saw nothing to shoot at on the Point, so they left it alone. Only on the ground, then, could the Americans truly understand what they were up against. The Point’s machine guns were raking the landing beaches. Japanese