The Complete History of Peleliu | The Battle That Was Supposed to Take Four Days | WW2 Documentary

The operation to take Peleliu was given four days. It took seventy-three. Six square miles of coral in the Palau Islands, an airfield in the middle of it, and a garrison that had stopped planning to hold the beach and started digging instead — five hundred caves, tunnels and firing positions worked into a ridge that the aerial photographs had shown as a single smooth line of high ground. This is the complete history of that operation, told at the pace it actually happened: loud in the first half, and then slower and quieter for a very long time, because that is what the second half was. Eight hundred yards of reef that could not be crossed any faster. The corner on the left flank held for thirty hours by one company. The airfield crossed in the open at a hundred and five degrees. The ridge the maps had missed. A regiment reduced past the point where its commander would admit it, and the seventy-three-day siege of the pocket that followed — sandbags moved forward, roads built, howitzers hauled up by hand — which was not a battle so much as work that would not end. The argument about whether the island needed to be taken at all is in here too, in its place, without a verdict attached. Narrated slowly and quietly, for sleep. Chapters 0:00 Cold open 2:09 Chapter One — Six Square Miles of Coral 10:40 Chapter Two — Why Anyone Wanted It 19:52 Chapter Three — Three Days, Maybe Four 29:25 Chapter Four — The Island Dug From Inside 39:22 Chapter Five — No Targets Remaining 47:28 Chapter Six — Eight Hundred Yards of Reef 56:59 Chapter Seven — The Point 1:05:53 Chapter Eight — The Airfield and the Heat 1:14:49 Chapter Nine — What the Photographs Missed 1:23:31 Chapter Ten — A Regiment in Name Only 1:31:52 Chapter Eleven — The Road North 1:40:21 Chapter Twelve — The Islands on Either Side 1:49:03 Chapter Thirteen — The Pocket 1:58:47 Chapter Fourteen — The Last Message 2:07:44 Chapter Fifteen — What the Island Kept Sources. Official and primary throughout: Frank Hough, The Assault on Peleliu (Marine Corps Historical Division, 1950); Garand and Strobridge, History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, Volume IV — the Palaus; Robert Ross Smith, The Approach to the Philippines (U.S. Army Center of Military History), for Angaur, the 81st Infantry Division and the pocket; and Gordon Gayle, Bloody Beaches. Where the sources disagree — on the strength of the garrison, on when the pocket was closed, on what the preliminary bombardment achieved — the narration says so rather than choosing the convenient number. Enemy losses are given as what was reported at the time, which is not the same thing as what happened. Images. 348 public-domain and Creative Commons archive photographs, most of them Marine Corps and Navy pictures held by the National Archives and the USMC Archives. Full credits in the pinned comment and its replies. The maps, the chapter cards and the quote cards were drawn for this episode. Nothing graphic is shown, and no famous press photograph of this war appears in it. #WW2 #PacificWar #Peleliu #USMC #MilitaryHistory #HistoryForSleep #SleepDocumentary #WorldWarII