[Milsurplus] "A Brutal WWII Pacific Battlefield" Archaeology magazine 7 - 2019

[Hubert Miller]

The river of time relentlessly  rushes on, and it occurs to me I had better post this thing now, before I have it polished, even without additional links
and such I wanted to add, lest it recede into the past along with other uncompleted tasks.

'Archaeology' magazine, cover date 'July - August 2019', has this article 'Place of the Loyal Samurai. On the beaches and in the caves of a small
Micronesian island, archaeologists have identified evocative evidence of one of WWII's most brutal battles.'  An archaeological survey of Peleliu
by a team from the University of Aberdeen ( U.K. )   8 pages, 12 photos. A few of us are interested in this niche topic. Peleliu the most untouched
of Pacific battlefields.

As I was interested in more on this subject which so interests me, I looked up the University's online resources. I had to register; I registered, I think,
as a "student", and now I am getting daily reminders about so-and-so paper published, material of no interest to me. I mention this to say that you
can pursue the subject and access a couple longer articles about Peleliu on the University website, but you have to 'register' and then probably
'unregister' to get off their email list.  The online articles are much more in depth but have not much more in photos.
The 'souveniring' is something I have various feelings about. If it's public land, like the steppes of Russia, I don't have any problem. If it's a small
Pacific island, it kinda seems the islanders own the whole land area, have ownership, and have total say over the detritus of war. Peleliu is kind of
off the map, maybe, while on Guadalcanal, natives have set up 'lemonade stand' type businesses to sell barbed wire and metal junk and also want
to charge you for photos you take. Ludwell Sibley, the author of 'Tube Lore' book, told me the Russian souveniring strikes him as having aspects  of both
"Let us recover the brave soldiers of the Homeland" and on the other hand, "Treasure hunt !"

I don't recall the exact quote from the Aberdeen articles, but there's a line there about "shot up radio equipment" lying about. That interested me.
Would make interesting photos for us, I think.

Below I am quoting a couple particularly poignant paragraphs.

"The most unpleasant spot was generally agreed to be the Japanese Last Command Post at the head of Death Valley, which we have mentioned briefly above. This was the place where the senior officers of the garrison committed suicide two days before the end, and where the last organized defenders made their stand. The site consists of several small caves extending beneath large stone monoliths, that lean together to create an enclosed and hidden space between (Figure 17). Oddly, we never saw birds there, and the absence of their otherwise ubiquitous calls made the jungle uncomfortably silent. Most of the Palauans - and the UXO team who had spent much time there - agreed that it was the worst place on the island, to be avoided if at all possible; several of our local colleagues discreetly found reasons to be elsewhere when we surveyed it. Some visiting British soldiers, combat veterans on leave from Afghanistan, found the physical sense of the place so urgently haunted that they left immediately. It must be admitted that one's skin positively crawled while there, especially when alone. The cave interiors were particularly bad. Again, there are prosaic explanations. At the Last Command Post, as with many of the Peleliu sites, it was not healthy to dwell too long on the emotional state of the men who had fought and died there. Every time we encountered a sealed cave, with contents that we could probably guess at, one felt a lurch in the stomach.

The 'foreignness' of the dead was a consistent theme, the idea that they did not belong in Palau: they were not wanted, nor did they want to be there. In everyday conversation with Palauans we met - taxi drivers, people in shops, and so on - there emerged a feeling that by our presence we were giving the war dead a measure of peace. This was achieved by honouring their memories, and also in a strange way simply by taking the time to think about them, handle their possessions, and do things on their behalf in the places where they died. All this was somehow understood to almost physically defuse the charged and dangerous atmosphere of the battlefield, making it better, and perhaps easing the spirits' departure from the island to their own appropriate places...

....At its worst, this activity is carried out on a major scale and is highly invasive. Sealed caves have been opened with backhoes, and others have been systematically dug through (we encountered several such sites during the survey). Aircraft parts are particularly sought after by individuals who wish to rebuild flying machines from the war. As the Marines took the airfield, it was brought into active service as soon as possible to facilitate American bombing of the Omleblochel. Engineers bulldozed the remains of Japanese planes that had been destroyed on the ground, and these now lie in a number of large heaps alongside the runways (1944 US military documentation records a staggering 61 Zero fighter wrecks and the remains of 63 other aircraft, including large transport planes - see Knecht et al., 2012: part 5). Much of this material has now been removed, including very cumbersome items such as aircraft wings and cockpit canopies. In addition to this, ordnance has been taken away in considerable quantities - a fantastically hazardous undertaking - and the damage done to large armoured vehicles suggests that some of the looters have access to heavy equipment and boats, perhaps even private aircraft.


https://www.academia.edu/10246308/WWII_Battlefield_Survey_of_Peleliu_Island_Peleliu_State_Republic_of_Palau "

So okay, not a great big deal, but one more 'round to-it" that I have gotten to.
-Hue












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