Why was “bloody nose ridge” on Peleliu such a shitshow? Aside from the...

>MacArthur didn't have the authority to decide US policy
he very clearly did.

Regardless, in 1942 that was the Filipino PERCEPTION of what he said, even if he didn't have the means to actually return for years (if at all at the time). To them, MacArthur saying it was the same as FDR saying it. Maybe even moreso, since MacArthur had been directly helping them for years in Manila.

>Honor
We should've let them get conquered and raped like the Chinese. Everyone forgets how those Filipino fuckers treated us.

This. Additionally, you can see in op's picture that defenses on one side could mutually support the other if they were attacked. With the Old Breed is great, and Brotherhood of Heroes does a good job of tying together accounts of Peleliu.

>he very clearly did.
No he very clearly didn't, as his orders came from Chief of Staff and the Commander in Chief above him.

>Regardless, in 1942 that was the Filipino PERCEPTION of what he said
Literally no one gives a flying fuck about what a bunch of dirty flips think.

aaand /pol/ enters to advocate genocide...

Well, it was a decent one, chaps

Everyone forgets how we treated *them*. We did kinda stab them in the back after promising their freedom if they helped us defeat the Spanish. But even after that, we STILL earned their respect and trust by actually trying to be good colonial masters. Furthermore, we beat the Moros fair and square while genuinely improving their quality of life. It's why Mindanao was peaceful after 1914 and why it was the largest center of resistance to the Japanese occupation.

The US made a bad first impression, but they also made it right.

I have read with the old breed, and i can’t even come close to imagining the hell. That it was. If you watch or listen to mr sledge talk in interviews, there’s a lot he didn’t put in the book for one reason or another. It’s amazing how that guy never once got hit, or seriously injured.

With that said, all it really describes is a kragy mountain. I can’t find any good pictures of anything. All the modern videos from people visiting Peleliu don’t show much up close, and what they do show isn’t much more than trees and foliage, which is understandable after 70 or so years.

I live in New England, so all the mountain around me are a bit different judging by the descriptions.

>No he very clearly didn't
So...who was the guy who pushed for the invasion at Leyte, again? Because everyone else hated the idea. MacArthur was the only senior officer who was for it. If he didn't have significant pull with Washington to the point of being able to draft entire campaigns to fight based entirely on his own pride, they must have just decided to invade Luzon again for the memes, I guess.

>it was the largest center of resistance to the Japanese occupation.
And here we go with the flip delusions. Strongest race in the world, amirite?

>historical fact is delusions
how the fuck is the fact that mindanao had the most guerillas in the philippines a "delusion"? Do you think I'm talking about across the entire co-prosperity sphere or something?

You are out of your fucking mind if you think MacArthur had so much influence that he could overrule literally the entire military and get his way and get 10s of thousands killed for his personal pet projects. The Pacific War is a story of compromises between competing personalities and branches, and there is no reason to think that MacArthur controlled how it was conducted other than having as much influence as his position and experience would afford, which was far less than supreme and absolute.

So which was it, faggot? Was MacArthur speaking for himself or not? If he was, and the only reason the US returned instead of bypassing the Philippines, he clearly had the pull to draft campaigns on his own. If he wasn't, and the choice was made by Washington, then he clearly fucking was speaking for America when he promised a return.

You can't have it both ways.

>Was MacArthur speaking for himself or not
Well the fucker did say "I" will return. If you are literate you should be able to figure out the answer yourself.

Nips weren't committing genocide last I checked.

>/pol/
Fuck off. How is it unreasonable to dislike the fact that a core reason we entered WWII was over an island with a bunch of people who didn't want us there in the first place?

Didn't China have more?

>If he wasn't, and the choice was made by Washington, then he clearly fucking was speaking for America when he promised a return.
Here's a third possibility. MacArthur was blowing off hot air then later on US policy happened to coincide with what he blabbed about earlier.

US didn't enter WW2 to save the Philippines but to protect US interests and nip the Axis countries in the bud before they became a real threat. If the Philippines was located off the coast of Japan, US wouldn't have given two shits if the Nips genocided the entire archipelago.

No, the classification of entire nations or races as a single entity, and then blaming them to the point that a 6 year old belonging to one group should have his brains blown out because of the sins of another member of his group is inherently "lynch all niggers," /pol/-tier.

In China? Yes. But I was not talking about in general; I mean in the Philippines themselves, and Mindanao demonstratively had the most guerrillas out of all the islands. The US beat the Moros fair and square and then treated them fairly; the Japanese did neither.

Well, then we shouldn't have considered them a major American territory and stationed 30,000 US military personnel there then should we?

Please demonstrate this rather sweeping claim.

The real pointless battle was Okinawa.

Can't, alternate history is kind of odd like that when you start with butterfly effect what-ifs. Which leaves me kind of on a side avenue of how much the Allied high command even knew about the Manhattan Project, as to race towards Okinawa or otherwise bomber range knowing that they could demonstrate that amount of power.

Are you replying to the wrong post? I'm asking for a demonstration of 's assertion that the "sequence and preference of it (Invasion of the Philippines) over other plans was purely a McArthuc ego trip.

That has nothing to do with alt-his.

That was my roundabout way of saying we don't know if they went at Nimitz's plan for Formosa instead of Phillipines. What if Hitler took Moscow instead of going for the Soviet oil centers? What if MacArthur's ballsy insertion into Inchon in Korea went as bad as the ballsy insertion at Market Garden?'

One thing that isn't dispute is that it was heavily influenced by MacArthur's ego. And if we're shitting on him anyway, his inaction when the war broke was also fucktarded.

You, or whoever the fuck wrote made a claim that the preference of the Philippines plan over other plans was due to MacArthur's ego. That is not asking for alternate history. That is asking for evidence of a decision-making process, similar to say, the decision-making process that went into the eventual choice to do Husky and not Roundup.
Alt-history doesn't even enter into the picture, because I'm not asking about what would have worked better, or how the alternatives would have shaped up. I'm asking for proof of a claim that the reason that the Philippnes plan was selected over other plans was due to egotism on old Douglas's part.

>What was it like fighting on the ridges?

Absolute fucking horror

>One Jap charged right into my foxhole
>I stuck my bayonet into his chest as he was leaving his feet
>heaved him right over my shoulder and pulled the trigger, emptying my M1 into him
>he was very dead when he hit the ground-I'll tell you that
>it didn't take but a few second, I just kicked him out of the way and didn't give him another tought
> I just got ready for whatever might come next

I'll post more R.V Burgin stories about Peleliu and the fight on the ridges

>After the first charge, things died down and there was silence
>It was raining slightly. Just enough to make things miserable
>They charged again. And again
>They kept charging and charging that night
>You're not thinking. You just try to get your sights on a man and get him down
>That was all that was going through my mind-Kill that bastard! Don't miss! Make sure you get him!
>I think most of us were wondering
>My God, how many times are we going to need to do this?! For crying out loud, how many of them are out there?

It's hard for people today to fully understand what exactly we were up against in the war in the Pacific
>A sense of duty drives you more than anything else, sure. But anger factors in as well and that anger grows
>As the war progressed, I saw the brutality of what the Japanese soldiers to some of our troops who they captured and it makes a man very very angry
>I saw our men with their testicles and penis cut out and stuffed in their mouth.
>I saw one of our men tied to a tree and used for bayonet practice, he had been stuck through thirty to forty times in the chest alll the way up to his head
>It was obvious that the Japs had not simply killed him but had used his body that way
>I believe I'll hate the Jap Soldiers for as long as I live
>In recent times Ive been to Japan and I don't hold grudges against the Japanese people.
>But the Japanese soldier-I hate him
>My wife talked to me a while back and said "You think you should still be calling them Japs?"
>And I said "I don't care if its proper or not. To me he's a damn Jap then and he's still a damn Jap. I'm talking about the soldier
>And as long as I live I'll hate him"

Umm... Because MacArthur was initially disgraced when he had to leave in defeat of the Philippines with his tail between his legs in disgrace, promising "I will return," and then overruled Nimitz's plan of going via Formosa in lieu of the Philippines?

That's is so basic, I didn't even think I had to type that out. Every general, pretty much as a part of his job, demands a type A personality and enormous ego, which goes along with being the head honcho of pretty much any huge and powerful organization. It's inherently human.

>The Japs had set up booby traps. You'd hike towards them and they'd ambush you
>They'd get you when you walked into the sights, then they'd retreat and set up further down the road, then you'd have to do the same thing again
>We got smart and went out on patrol with a war dog
>we'd sneak up on those little lean-tos where Jap soldiers were sleeping
>The first time we went out on patrol, we figured we'd be nice and captured 3 of them and took them back to battalion HQ
>We checked on them the next day, and hell, the military had given them all new socks, shoes, underwear, caps and dungarees- the works
>We'd been wearing the same rotting clothes for over a month
>We thought, to hell with this
>After we saw that, we didn't take any more prisoners

I just realized I was posting stories about Burgin's time in Cape Gloucester lol, will start posting actual Peleliu stories

>killing so many Japs that your initial animistic fear turns into general annoyance

This all in a book? Just got done with With the Old Breed, and Sledge alluded to the old salts at Gloucester, but didn't go into any detail as it was a firsthand account.

>Picture an Island completely made out of coral rock. That was Peleliu
>I tell you, all that rock was tough on your skin. It bloodied your knees. Your Elbows. It just shredded your clothes apart
>There was no place to sleep at night. You couldn't make a decent foxhole because you can't dig
>If there was any loose coral around, you'd kind of pile it up around you. That was your foxhole

Its in a book called Voices of the Pacific by Adam Makos, its more recent and its really Burgin's and a lot of other Pacific War Veterans last, uncensored words and stories on the war. I love it, it was that "Listening to grandpa's stories while sitting by the fireplace" feel

At night we'd try to get close enough top were you can reach out and touch the next guy
>One guy would stay awake for an hour, one guy would sleep and then you'd switch off
>I heard a scuffling from down the line one night, I couldn't see what was going on but I knew there was a Jap involved
>And then a long, bloodcurdling scream. The guy told me the story later
>He was sleeping flat on his back when he felt this weight on his chest
>He woke up with fingers around his throat, the Jap had snuck in, sat on the Marine's stomach and started to choke him
>The Marine could feel himself going under, losing consciousness
>He knew he was choking to death
>Like lightning, everything he had ever been taught about self-defense ran through his mind
>He reached behind the Jap's head, grabbed him by the hair and gouged his fingers in the Japs eyes
>the Jap released his chokehold and the Marine broke loose
>He got up, grabbed the Jap by the nape of the neck and seat of his pants and threw him over the cliff
>So the scream I had heard had been from the Jap, screaming all the way down until he hit the ground
>I'd never heard anybody scream like that before and haven't since

We were setting up there on top of one of those ridges, trying to dig in
>The cliff we were on was about sixty feet off the ground, almost straight up and down
>A guy was setting up to my left. From across the valley a Jap shot him right between the eyes
>The names of the ridges on Peleliu all run together anymore
>I didn't put myself in a position back then where I cared to remember their names
>A ridge was just another damn ridge to me, one damn ridge after another

Op here. Thank you for posting these. Holy shit. This is even better than sledge’s stories.

Mfw

>The Japs weren't ON the island, they were IN the island, all over the island were these caves
>The Japs had been on the island since WWI, and they'd brought in hundreds of Korean tunnel diggers in the years that followed
>One cave was big enough to house about 1500 Jap soldiers
>This big cave started on one side of a ridge, went all the way under, and came out the other side
>They had a dispensary set up in there, a hospital. All kinds of stuff
>We had to close three or four entrances to those caves. If you used a charge to close one entrance, you didn't do much damage
>they'd just come out of another entrance and take another shot at you. So we did that, one cave at a time

>not posting Wile E. Coyote as your image
Ya dun goof'd

Also, in contrast and I can't find the copy/paste of the story right now, on the American Jap regiment sent to the Europe an theatre and given high-risk missions; On a covert and surprise-attack mission, there was a man climbing a sheer cliff with all of his fellow soldiers when he started hearing rocks scraping and dull thuds. To his amazement/horror he realized that it was actually his friends who in great determination slipped from their climb but did not cry out, as to not betray their advance to the enemy, only to be shattered upon the rocks below.

No prob

>You get so worn down, so exhausted. We fought them during the days, then at night they'd come out of their rat holes and infiltrate the lines
>You get to the point where you don't give a damn whether you live or die
>We had come off the ridge and were down below the Five Sisters there
>I'd been up and spent two straight nights with the men on the line. Not a wink of sleep
>The 3rd afternoon I found I couldn't focus my eyes anymore, so I called my sergeant, Johnny Marmet, and told him I need to come of the front line
>So John said "Yea come on in"
>We had 2 mortars, each firing harassment rounds
>There was a shellhole in front of one of the guns. They fired those guns every two to three minutes
>I went straight to sleep at eight that night. John woke me up the next morning at 8 AM
>Those guns had fired the whole time I'd been asleep, right over my head
>But I slept all night in that racket, a full 12 hours, and I'd never once heard those guns

>Pretty soon, dead corpses were all around
>There was no dirt to cover the corpses on Peleliu. Just coral
>If there was dirt, we would've covered them. They'd bloat up larger than they really were
>You couldn't bury them. The sour stench of those corpses was everywhere
>You'd often be in a certain place and you'd have to stay there all day and night, 3 days sometimes, and a corpse would be right by you, within stepping distance
>There was no way to get away from the corpses
>The flies were unbelievably thick, big old green blowflies would be everywhere on those corpses
>I've seen flies so thick on a corpse, something would disturb the corpses and they'd form up like a bunch of blackbirds-flies so thick they cast a shadow
>When you were trying to eat, you couldn't shoo the flies off
>You had to knock them off with your thumb
>They'd come up from the body of a dead Jap, fly right out of his mouth or butt and land on your food

>Did the Jap soldier have a sense of surrender? Oh Hell no
>On Peleliu, I believe there was ten or eleven thousand Japs on that island. We captured 19
>and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that some of them were Koreans or Okinawans that they had forced to come into their army
>When it came to the Jap Soldier, you were going to have to kill them all
>They were brainwashed. The head of their gov't, their emperor, was divine in their eyes-literally a god they could pray to
>So fighting became a religious thing for them. They were taught it was an honor to commit suicide for their god
>I've never actually seen a Jap soldier commit hari-kari up close, but I've found plenty of them after they did it
>With a sword stuck in their gut. And I've seen plenty of them after they'd blown themselves up with a grenade
>I always thought, Well more power to them, I wish more of them would have done it
>In their minds, it was an honor to kill themselves for the emperor
>But I always thought the other way around-that it was honor to live for Uncle Sam. I always wanted to live. I never wanted to die

I only know about Peleliu from world at war, so I did a little looking on YouTube after stumbling on this thread, and these ridges don’t really look like anything too scary. I don’t get how it got such a rep.

In world at war you attack a navy gun called “the point” the reading I did describe it as a gun in a cave in a rocky outcrop about 30 feet off the ground. While the game made it look like a huge mountain. I don’t get why they didn’t just have one of the ships shoot it upon approaching the island instead of letting soldiers get chewed up fighting through the jungle to come up behind it.

That doesn't prove your case you idiot. Say, just hypothetically, that MacArthur really and truly believed that going into the Philippines was the best strategic choice available.Then, it's not a question of ego, it's a question of differing strategic priorities, of a different set of calculations about cost, risk, and benefit. Military figures do disagree on purely professional grounds.

This is so incredibly basic, I didn't even think I had to type it out.

They shot the fuck out of it before the troops landed, before they came to the firing line, and the entire time they were there. Think of your picture but with 30 japs hiding in the bushes with rifles aimed right at you, a machine gun in that dark hole where you can't even see it, a mortar position half a mile away dropping fucking bombs on you every 30 seconds, and giant ass artillery pulverizing you and your friends so that your brains form microlesions and combat veterans have to be taken away from the front because they pissed and shat themselves before going otherwise insane. Then at night, they creep out of the caves on rubber-sole shoes and try to slit your fucking throat before pulling a grenade to take you and your foxhole with you.

The philippines was US territory with a noteworthy population of US citizens living in semi-prisoner status, and had historically been a crucial asset for American.

By 1941, the americans weren't terribly unpopular in the Philippines. Consider that Quezon and the nationalist party in general won a landslide victory in the 1935 election, while Aguinaldo's anti-american party got less than 20% of the vote.

I mean, credit where credit is due, the Americans really did help build the economy, quickly developed self-rule, and facilitated the transition towards independence. Not a lot of folks in places that mattered (ok, "place") still cared for the years of revolution.

*asset for american access to asian markets.

>When we got on that boat and left Peleliu, really, we hadn't slept for a month.
>I was wiped out after thirty days of constant fighting
>Exhausted. Mentally and physically. We all were
>Some were barely able to climb the rope ladder to get aboard the ship to leave
>I don't remember changing clothes for the whole damn time we were on Peleliu
>The coral and sweat from the heat mixed together. Everyones clothes were raggedy, frayed, torn
>Everybody stunk. Nobody was changing his socks. Many men are sick
>There was a lot of diarrhea going on
>We were a bunch of raggedy-ass Marines

Thats all I got for now, might post some of Burgin's Okinawa stories tomorrow

Perhaps google something like "MacArthur Philippines necessary argument against," for further reading of more fleshed out points because basic abstract concepts seem to evade you, you contrarian autist.

I don't know where else we could even go with this discussion, you disagree and sweep aside any dissenting opinion even as widely held as this one from multiple WWII historians, including pedestrian accounts from things like like The World at War and WWII in Color from when I turn on the Military Channel for background noise. There's not much else to be said or to go from here.

You usually don't get replies from pasting walls of text, so I'm probably one of many who want to say thanks. Make a new thread even, loving these accounts.

The book has more than just Burgin's account of Peleliu but its a lot to type down and its getting late for me and I'm actually pretty beat.

Plus I have a soft spot for old Burgy, I got to meet the old saltdog when I was still in the Muhreens, the man is a humble gentleman and Marine

Nah MacArthur was pretty clear that the reasons were entirely moral.

Do / did marines really look down on army guys? Or is that all a meme?

Think of it as sibling rivalry, although we all come together to punk on our faggot step-brother (the Air Force)

Check this out.
You have to get to the ridges first. So you need to bang your head against the perimeter they have outside the ridges in the jungle.

Now your at the ridges. Good job. You made it this far. Now you’re getting shot from above and the sides of adjacent ridges, and from any guys in the jungle you might have missed.

Now you have to climb the ridge(s) Once you’re on top of the ridge, you’ll be shot at from any and all nearby ridges, and whoever is on top in a bunker, hole, camouflaged or simply doing a suicide charge with a grenade.

You’re still alive? Excellent. You can rest now. But only for a few minutes at a time if you’re lucky. Because the flashbacks, ptsd, and general anxiety will probably have you on edge until you simply pass out from exhaustion. You’ll have to do this all over again for the next 30 days.... if you make it that far.

it was like an ant hill. You close up one hole, they pop out in one on the other side and shoot you in the back. THere were hundreds, if not thousands of manmade and natural caves there to fight from. It was a shitshow in the worst way possible. Keep in mind, it’s also 100f+ so you’re also dealing with trying not to die from heat stroke. With minimal sleep.

youtu.be/BKlOFwtyOT0

Damn, were any other countries during the war this forthcoming with the reality of the fighting overseas?

I’d say the English. Because they did some pretty rough fighting in Burma, and on some of those islands as well.

Is it a general rule. That fighting on hills and ridges always sucks? Pic related. Edison’s ridge on Guadalcanal. All those Japanese cadavers.

Here are few scans from A Tomb Called Iwo Jima, a book that focuses on the Japanese perspective of that battle and its survivors

...

...

>overruled Nimitz's plan of going via Formosa
MacArthur was not higher in rank, he literally could not have overruled anything.

>I mean, credit where credit is due, the Americans really did help build the economy, quickly developed self-rule, and facilitated the transition towards independence
>the one time the colonial master actually did the things they said they were doing

By large, yes. Fighting uphill always sucks