The rusting hulks of tanks and field artillery are a common sight in the jungles of Peleliu, but the fighting that scarred the Pacific island in World War II also left a more dangerous legacy — unexploded bombs.
A Japanese airfield made the 10km long island a prized asset during the conflict, with the US determined to seize it at any cost.
The island — about an hour’s boat ride from the Palau capital, Koror — underwent months of bombardment before US Marines launched an invasion in September 1944 that was expected to take just three days.
Photo: AFP
Instead, the assault dragged on for almost three months and became one of the bloodiest in the Allied “island-hopping” campaign, claiming about 13,000 Japanese and 3,000 US lives.
On the island today, reminders of the war are everywhere. Down the road from the main jetty is the “1,000-man cave,” a maze of tunnels that served as an underground Japanese field hospital — one of 608 fortifications carved out of the rugged limestone terrain in a bid to repel the US military.
Steve Ballinger, cofounder of British-registered charity Cleared Ground Demining, says 600 pieces of ordnance were removed from that cave for it to be declared safe.
Tourists had visited the cave virtually daily, unaware that they were sightseeing amid live landmines, hand grenades and mortars, not to mention human remains, which were repatriated to Japan.
“It’s crazy really, the scale of contamination,” Ballinger said, adding that World War II-era ordnance had a 30 percent failure rate and the live shells and mines in Peleliu were simply left in place until the cleanup began.
There were also weapons stockpiles in the honeycomb of Japanese-made caves. After the battle, the US simply dumped enemy bodies and ordnance into 30m deep sinkholes that pit the jungle floor.
Cleared Ground started the cleanup in 2009 and has since removed 32,000 items of live ordnance in Peleliu.
Fellow cofounder Cassandra McKeown said they did a survey of all houses on the island when the work began and found that 26 percent of properties were contaminated with live ordnance.
“They had them in the backyard; they had live grenades in the school as part of a history project,” she said. “They were using them as doorstops, old ladies were using them to hammer nuts on, not realizing they were dangerous. This one lady had one right next to a barbecue.”
Cleared Ground has trained a team of 25 Palauans to help dispose of the dangerous items and boasts a 100 percent safety record, with no unplanned detonations during its de-mining work.
However, Ballinger said practically everyone in Palau knew someone who had been killed by World War II ordnance, although accidents had become rarer since the late 1970s, when the government outlawed dynamite fishing, which could set off nearby ordnance.
Andy Johns, who like Ballinger is a former bomb-disposal expert with the British military, said the only place he had seen a greater concentration of ordnance was in Kuwait after the first Gulf War.
“There’s no jungle in Kuwait, though; it’s nice and sandy, not like this,” he said.
Peleliu’s jungle is so thick and the Japanese-made cave network so extensive that Japanese soldiers went into hiding after the battle and staged guerrilla attacks until finally surrendering in April 1947.
Ballinger said Palau was not unique and there were high levels of ordnance in other Pacific nations that saw intense fighting during World War II, including Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.
“It’s the exact same problem in Tarawa [Kiribati]; there’s ordnance all over the reef,” he said.
“We went to the Marshalls last year and there’s people with bombs in their houses that they found 20 years ago and there was no ability to deal with it,” he added.
McKeown said Cleared Ground was eager to extend its work across the region, but that doing so was dependent on finding funding from donor nations for an issue she said had been largely forgotten abroad.
“Before we started, they’d been waiting for 70 years here for the Americans and Japanese to come back and help clean up,” she said.
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