Top Photo: Troops wade ashore from five LCIs, at "Red" Beach, Morotai, on "D-Day", September 15, 1944. Naval History and Heritage Command

In the fall of 1944, US Army and Navy planners in the Pacific theater sought air bases that would facilitate General Douglas MacArthur’s promise of his long-awaited return of American forces to the Philippines. With the campaign up the back of New Guinea wrapping up and the Navy’s destruction of the Japanese carrier force at the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June, the stage appeared set for a landing on the southernmost island of Mindanao, or farther up the chain at Leyte. To help cover these landings, and to relieve the Navy’s carriers of the burden of protecting both the vulnerable transports and the troops once they went ashore, the US Army Air Forces perfected the art of quickly turning liberated areas into functional airfields. This expeditionary airfield capability extended the umbrella of air cover over land and naval forces alike. Looking at the map of potential airfield sites on the route from New Guinea to the Philippines, planners zeroed in on two island chains: the Palaus, including the island of Peleliu, and the Moluccas (Maluku Islands), specifically the northernmost island, Morotai.

Both locations put the Philippines within range of reconnaissance aircraft and long-range bombers that could help cover any invasion force, though Morotai was only half the distance from Mindanao (300 miles compared to 600 for Peleliu). While the Japanese heavily fortified Peleliu, using the island’s porous coral outcroppings to create a dense network of underground bunkers and caves, it left Morotai virtually undefended. The Japanese believed the small island was unsuitable for airfield construction due to the rugged interior with only a single, swampy plain along the southwestern coast. The Peleliu assault was supposed to only take a few days but ended up costing the 1st Marine Division, and later the Army’s 81st Infantry Division, approximately two months and over 10,000 casualties. Morotai was liberated in less than a day, at a cost of one man injured by a falling tree. In less than a week, Army Air Force engineers had a primitive airstrip in operation, eventually constructing two coral-surfaced, 6,000-foot runways capable of handling any aircraft in the Allied inventory. While Peleliu remains a fixture of Pacific war memory, thanks in part to Eugene Sledge’s classic memoir With the Old Breed and the haunting paintings of artist Tom Lea, Morotai is overlooked and virtually forgotten in histories of the Pacific theater.

The 31st Infantry "Dixie Division"

To liberate the Dutch island, Lieutenant General Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army selected the 31st Infantry “Dixie” Division, initially composed of National Guard units from Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The division’s commander was Major General. John C. Persons, a banker from Birmingham who had been decorated for valor in World War I. Despite being mobilized almost a year before the United States entered the war, Persons’s command languished as a training division. The unit underwent three separate “purges,” as it trained men only to transfer them out to other organizations or branches, with newly mobilized selectees and draftees taking their place. The division’s core of senior officers remained largely intact from its National Guard days, and the unit retained its prewar identification and unique culture, despite the Army’s best efforts to “flush” it and bring in new men from across the nation. The division finally deployed overseas in the first few months of 1944, sailing from Norfolk, Virginia—though not to Europe, as the men expected. Instead, their convoy turned south, passed through the Panama Canal, and headed for the tropics of the Southwest Pacific.

Upon arrival in New Guinea, the division went through a period of acclimation before commitment to the defense and development of the Hollandia area. One regiment, the 124th, originally of the Florida National Guard, took part in the Battle of the Driniumor River, near Aitape, where it conducted an audacious counterattack against the Japanese 18th Army. The division’s other two regiments, Alabama’s 167th and Mississippi’s 155th, (Louisiana’s 156th had been split off and sent to North Africa, where its French-speaking soldiers assisted with civil affairs efforts) took over the area at Wewak and gained experience patrolling in the jungle and fighting cut-off Japanese troops escaping from the Hollandia base. Thus, when Krueger needed a fresh but experienced division to conduct the September 15 Morotai assault, the 31st fit the bill.

Members of the 31st Infantry Division (nicknamed the "Dixie Division") coming ashore on Morotai in Indonesia. Alabama Department of Archives and History

The invasion plan called for a three-regiment attack on beaches along the Gila Peninsula, at the island’s southwestern tip, with a quick advance inland to seize the adjacent coastal plain that engineers wanted for the airfield. To prevent tipping their hand, planners decided to forgo any beach reconnaissance, a choice that certainly would have caused the landings to fail if they had been strongly opposed. Instead of a sloping shelf, the area offshore was a mix of sticky, glutinous mud and coral boulders, both of which stopped landing craft far from the beach. When the 31st’s soldiers stepped out into the waist- or chest-deep water, they did not know which of the two obstacles the next step would encounter, resulting in either sliced shins or a plunge into mud that held them fast. Equipment suffered the same fate, as vehicles mired or tumbled into the holes in the pitted shelf. Only amphibious tractors, carrying the lead elements, could traverse the area and reach the stability of the beaches. There, heavier vehicles quickly found a deep layer of mud beneath a thin crust of sand. Many of the Navy’s experienced amphibious sailors described it as the worst beach of any landing in the entire theater.

Fortunately, as the first waves of troops reached the shore, a hasty reconnaissance revealed better landing beaches on the opposite side of the peninsula. However, these beaches were not as well protected and were exposed to the direct swell of the Pacific. But adaptation and improvisation overcame the obstacles, and by nightfall the invasion forces were on their objectives with follow-on forces already crowding the new beaches. The few remaining Japanese defenders, largely withdrawn in the months before the attack to bolster the garrison on nearby Halmahera, quickly faded into the jungle. Those that remained launched nightly harassing attacks against the perimeter. More troublesome was the response from Japanese aircraft based on Halmahera or sneaking in from Mindanao. Despite preinvasion bombardments of their airfields and raids by Navy carrier aircraft, every night a few bombers slipped through the defensive screen to make life miserable for the troops ashore and the construction crews trying to rush the airfield to completion. But the Japanese planes were too few to seriously hinder American efforts, and by the end of September, engineers rehabilitated a disused Japanese airstrip for night fighters and reconnaissance aircraft. Army Air Force engineers also began work on the longer runways used by bomber and transport aircraft.

The capture of Morotai, including follow-on operations to expand the perimeter and push Japanese forces infiltrating back onto the island from Halmahera away from the new airfields, occupied the 31st Division for the next several months. Life generally settled into a routine involving patrols and hot meals and movies within the expanding base area. However, the troops soon objected to the steady diet of South Pacific “sarong films” that overly glamorized life in the tropics. While other Sixth Army divisions stormed ashore at Leyte in October and began a brutal, months-long campaign to liberate that island, troops on Morotai settled into a monotonous and occasionally dangerous existence, broken only by frequent air raids. One raid on Christmas Eve inflicted heavy damage on the NIPA (Netherlands Indies Provisional Authority) barracks housing Indonesian workers; dozens were killed. The division engaged in minor operations to liberate surrounding islands and tamp down resistance in the island’s interior but was never able to completely pacify the island. As a result, some Japanese troops did not emerge from the interior until decades after the war had ended. When alerted for follow-on operations on Mindanao in March 1945, the division turned over operation of the base area to the all-Black 93rd Infantry Division, including the 369th Infantry Regiment, known as the “Harlem Hellfighters.” This unit earned accolades serving with a French division in World War I and still wore a blue Adrian helmet patch as their divisional insignia on their sleeve.  Not surprisingly, members of the 31st, drawn from the strictly segregated Deep South, and the 93rd clashed frequently, providing an ugly reminder of the still significant domestic struggles within a nation fighting race-based imperialism abroad. Later, when both divisions were stationed together on Mindanao after the end of hostilities, soldiers again clashed, often while competing for the attention of recently liberated Filipinas.

Inspect the invasion beaches at Morotai Island, Netherlands East Indies, on the first day of landings there, 15 September 1944. Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives.

Overall, the 31st Division’s capture and development of Morotai proved a valuable addition to the Allied Southwest Pacific Campaign. Though they played only a limited role in the Leyte landings, aircraft from the new base facilitated the liberation of Indonesia and follow-on Australian operations in Borneo. The cost paled in comparison to the steep price for Peleliu, which proved to be only a precursor to even bloodier battles on Iwo Jima and Okinawa in early 1945. Throughout his campaign in New Guinea and in his return to the Philippines, MacArthur revealed a strong preference for bypassing fortified strong points and seizing lightly defended areas that outflanked strong Japanese positions. These tactics undoubtedly saved the lives of many American servicemembers, including the soldiers of the 31st, who finished the war with one of the lowest loss rates in the entire Army. Marines often did not have this luxury, and circumstances forced them to directly assault heavily defended beaches and elaborate defensive positions, which raised the cost of victory significantly. Together, both branches proved instrumental in the eventual Allied victory, though the contrast in style has had a significant effect on postwar memory. While Peleliu is well known, thanks in part to miniseries such as The Pacific, the Army’s experiences are only now receiving the scholarly attention they deserve.