Combat· World War II
Hill 100 (Peleliu)
Hill 100 was a coral ridge at the eastern edge of the Umurbrogol Pocket, bordering the Horseshoe Valley, that the Marines were ordered to seize on 19 September 1944.
The task fell to Captain Everett P. Pope's company of the 1st Marines, attached to Lieutenant Colonel Honsowetz's 2d Battalion. The company had landed days earlier with 242 men and was down to about 90 by the time it crossed a fire-swept causeway and climbed the hill, losing its tank support when two Shermans slipped off the approach. Reaching the crest near twilight, Pope's Marines found that the ground they had taken was overlooked by still-higher Japanese positions on the ridge's northeast extension and by caves in the parallel ridge to the west, leaving them exposed on a knob barely large enough to hold. Through the night they beat back repeated counterattacks, fighting with rifles, grenades, knives, and finally rocks and fists as ammunition ran low, supported by the battalion's mortars. By dawn on 20 September the position was untenable and the survivors, only a handful still unwounded, were ordered to withdraw; the dead could not be recovered until the ridge was finally taken for good in early October. Pope received the Medal of Honor for the action. The fight became one of the most cited illustrations of the Umurbrogol's mutually supporting cave defenses, where a hill could be reached but not held.
Podcast episodes on World War II
Record no. 576