Among Heroes
A Marine Corps Rifle Company on Peleliu
First Sergeant Jack R. Ainsworth United States Marine Corps
Edited by Ambassador Laurence Pope (Ret)
ABOUT THE BOOK
Few Americans know of the battle of Peleliu. It never received the iconic recognition of the other amphibious assaults in the Pacific during World War II such as Iwo Jima or Okinawa. At the time of the invasion in 1944, only a handful of journalists even covered the operation because it was expected to be a short action with a quick American victory. It became the bloodiest battle in Marine Corps history given the number of casualties compared to the number of troops involved. It lasted far longer than senior planners had estimated and the tenacious defense by the Japanese took a tremendous toll on the Marines’ headlong assaults on their well-fortified positions.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laurence Everett Pope II was born in New Haven, CT, on 24 September 1945. In his 31 years as a diplomat, Mr. Pope helped shape Iran and Iraq policy at the State Department, was appointed ambassador to Chad by President Bill Clinton and served as political adviser to General Anthony Zinni, head of Central Command, which manages U.S. forces in the Middle East. While going through his father’s papers, Mr. Pope found a firsthand account of the Battle of Peleliu in the Pacific, written by a first sergeant in his father’s Marine company. His father, Everett, had received the Medal of Honor for taking and defending a hill during the battle, and Mr. Pope later edited the notes into a 2011 book, “Among Heroes.” Mr. Pope studied philosophy at Bowdoin College in Maine, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1967 and then served in the Peace Corps, part of a semisuccessful effort to avoid being sent to Vietnam. To his dismay, his first posting in the Foreign Service was as a vice consul in Saigon. Laurence Pope, a veteran diplomat and counterterrorism expert who came out of retirement to serve as the top U.S. envoy to Libya weeks after the 2012 attack that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, died 31 October at his home in Portland, Maine. He was 75.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapters
Peleliu
16 September 1944
17 September 1944
18 September 1944
19 September 1944
20 September 1944
Postscript