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carried by stretcher teams, down to the beach, blood dripping from arms, torsos, and heads. Both sides continued to pour huge quantities of fire at each other. “I smelled the powder vapor, acrid, choking, could see it swirling white—sweat in my eyes, stinging—jacket was wet on my back—rock chips spattering at my feet.” 15
    The fighting finally died down around 0730. The rest of the day was comparatively quiet. This gave Colonel Lewis “Chesty” Puller the precious time he needed to send help to Hunt’s hard-pressed company. In the course of the day, the colonel sent more resupply amtracs, with reinforcements as well. Also, B Company of the 1st Marines attacked north and linked up with Hunt’s K Company late in the afternoon on September 16. By then, Hunt had 60-millimeter mortars in his own position and 81-millimeters a couple hundred yards down the beach, at his disposal, plus some artillery, too. In that sense, his company was stronger than before but his men were now in the throes of total exhaustion. Knowing the Point’s defenders were still vulnerable, Colonel Nakagawa amassed 350 infantry soldiers and launched a night attack. This was a well-planned assault to capture a key objective, not an immature banzai attack. Even so, the Americans, aided by the half-light of flares, mowed them down in droves. “Howls of pain which rose in front of our positions, dimly heard through the roar of our weapons, told us that we were hitting the mark,” Captain Hunt wrote. The captain knew this was a fight to the finish. “Give them hell!” he screamed at his men. “Kill every one of the bastards!”
    The Japanese colonel had committed another 47-millimeter gun to support his carefully conceived attack, but American artillery destroyed the gun and its crew. “The bodies were stacked 4-deep over the gun,” Sergeant Peto wrote. Farther down the beach, the 81-millimeter mortar crews were firing at the absolute minimum range. “We were firing only 200 to 250 yards,” Corporal Albert Mikel, a member of a mortar crew, said. “Our mortars were pointing almost straight up. In fear that the mortars might fall backwards, we placed sandbags on the barrels of the mortars.” In spite of this blanket of firepower, some of the Japanese closed to within bayonet range. Several of them fell upon Private Fox, stabbing him repeatedly. He nearly bled to death but somehow held out in a delirium until another Marine rescued him.
    By the early morning hours of September 17, the fighting petered out. The Japanese attack was a deadly failure. In a day and a half of fighting, some four hundred Imperial soldiers had been killed. Their torn, rotting corpses were draped all over the Point. They lay in mute testimony to the waste, vulgarity, and valor inherent in war. “They sprawled in ghastly attitudes with their faces frozen and their lips curled into apish grins,” Hunt recalled. “Their eyes were slimy with the green film of death. Many of them were huddled with their arms around each other as though they had futilely protected themselves from our fire. They were horribly mutilated; riddled by bullets and torn by shrapnel until their entrails popped out; legs and arms and torsos littered the rocks and in some places were lodged grotesquely in the treetops. Their yellow skin was beginning to turn brown, and their fly-ridden corpses still free of maggots were already cracked and bloated like rotten melons.” Such were the troubling realities of life and death at the Point. In securing it, the Americans had secured their beachhead on Peleliu.
    Years later, Russell Honsowetz, a battalion commander in another 1st Marine Regiment unit that did not fight at the Point, smugly claimed that many Marines and historians “made a lot of ballyhoo” about K Company’s desperate battle at the Point. Yet the company, he claimed, “was never in danger.” This would have been news to the men who fought so desperately, and bled and struggled, and