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Sponsor The Wrecks of ?????
Old Dispatches War Stories Background on Palau Sights & Sound Weblinks It was like no other battlefield. It was an alien, unearthly, surrealistic nightmare, 
	like the surface of another planet.
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Today it's paradise, one of more than 200 lush islands in a reef-wrapped Pacific chain. .
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But on Sept. 15, 1944, when U.S. Marines landed for an anticipated four-day fight, the tiny atoll had already been bombed into a scorched chunk of scrub-covered coral.
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The desolation was deceptive. Two months and 20,000 casualties later, the islet was unrecognizable: a denuded, 5-square-mile tangle of tree stumps, smoldering tanks, napalmed burrows, rotting corpses and engorged bluebottle flies.
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Then it faded into oblivion -- a military asterisk, unnoticed by journalists and forgotten by history.
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But what happened here -- on one island, in its secret caves and in the air and sea around it -- helped define the course of World War II in the Pacific.
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Throughout December, in a live, day-by-day journey, come dive with us in the clear, warm waters and trek with us through the reborn jungle as we explore what really went on here.

And why.


| Backgrounder - Part 2 |


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