Read this story at BenarNews
PELELIU, Palau — Palauan Sharla Paules surveys the contaminated ground of her lush tropical home island of Peleliu, still littered with WWII munitions 80 years after its liberation from the Japanese.
She recalls as a child her grandmother warning the land was poisoned by unexploded bombs, disrupting almost every aspect of traditional life on the island.
“They said after the war the soil was so contaminated they couldn’t even plant food,” said Paules, 49, who is part of a team clearing the island for the mine action group Norwegian People’s Aid.
“They couldn’t plant bananas, taro, tapioca or soursop. You still can’t plant tapioca and eat it here, it’s really bad.”
The United States fired more than 2,800 tons of munitions from the air and naval vessels on the Japanese-occupied island before making an amphibious assault in 1944.
Nearly 2,000 Americans, 10,000 Japanese and an unknown number of Palauans died in the ensuing battle.
Today, much of Peleliu’s southern edge is still littered with unexploded munitions, rusting tanks and soldiers’ skeletal remains. It’s a stark reminder of a Pacific-wide problem: the lingering legacy of unexploded and abandoned ordnance, also known as UXO/AXO.
Paules’ colleague Roger Hess picks up a rusting Japanese grenade from the floor of the jungle while taking BenarNews on a tour of clearance work on the island.
“We’ll come back and recover it. It’s technically still live,” said the 65-year-old American army veteran, brushing off the dirt and marking it with white spray paint for later removal.
Hess is the Palau operations manager for Norwegian People’s Aid and is preparing a clearance operation in the upper reaches of Umurbrogal Mountain, a series of jagged, jungle-covered coral ridges that was one of the main battlegrounds on Peleliu.
The Type 91 grenade held by Hess is not an unusual find in Palau.
“The fuse may not function, but if you put it in a fire it will blow,” he said.
MORE STORIES FROM PALAU
Teenagers fight US militarization of Palau with UN complaint over rights violations
Patriot missile plan stirs debate in Palau
‘Respect our sovereignty’: Palau tells China
The Micronesian nation is one of nine Pacific island countries contaminated by an unknown quantity of explosive weapons left behind by Japanese and Allied forces after WWII.
Although international awareness about the issue in the Pacific is lower than in landmine and cluster munitions hotspots like Cambodia or Africa’s Sahel region, experts say potentially lethal munitions are scattered across the region’s lagoons, beaches and jungles.
These explosive remnants of war threaten not just human life, but can pollute water sources, hinder infrastructure development and leave land too dangerous to farm.
“Palau has not had an accident in decades, but that doesn’t mean there is no potential for it,” said Hess.
“Just look at the amount of munitions we’re pulling out; any of those mishandled can kill people.”
A deadly menace
Palau may not have seen a casualty for some time, but other parts of the Pacific have not been so lucky.
In the Solomon Islands, which witnessed heavy combat between Japanese and Allied forces on the main island of Guadalcanal, two young men died in 2021 when an American 105 mm shell exploded in a residential area of the capital Honiara.
At the time of their deaths, Raziv Hilly and Charles Noda were part of a group cooking over a backyard fire pit without realising the WWII-era projectile was buried beneath the ground.
While media reports occasionally highlight the deadly threat, there are no formal systems in place to track accidents or gather comprehensive data on the extent of contamination in Pacific island nations, according to nongovernmental organizations.
In 2012, the Pacific Island Forum, PIF, endorsed a regional UXO strategy that aimed to mobilize and coordinate efforts to tackle the problem.
But according to people familiar with the plan, after an initial burst of energy, including two regional conferences in Palau and the Australian city of Brisbane, little progress has been made in recent years.
The PIF did not immediately respond to BenarNews requests for an update on the strategy.
Experts say that poor data collection and coordination is preventing Pacific island governments from combating the deadly menace, including accessing international assistance.
“There’s a lack of knowledge that this is important information that can help get funding to deal with the problem long term,” said Mette Eliseussen, national coordinator at Australian nonprofit SafeGround, which has done extensive surveys and clearance across the Pacific.
Historically, Pacific states have also been disadvantaged because international funding for ERW action is driven by two international treaties that cover landmines and cluster munitions, neither of which were used widely in the Pacific in WWII.
“Because they have UXO, [donors] have sort of said, ‘Oh, you don’t have a landmine problem, so we will discriminate against you.’ That’s been the attitude until just recently,” Eliseussen told BenarNews.
In 2023, the Pacific region saw an increase in funding for clearance of ERW. The U.S., Australia and Japan raised financial support for Solomon Islands and Palau, and made new investments in Kiribati and the Marshall Islands, according to the 2024 report produced by the Landmine and Cluster Munitions Monitor.
Eliseussen said geopolitical “tension with China” partly explained the renewed attention and additional resources for the problem in the Pacific.
Last year on Peleliu, U.S. Marines completed a $400 million rehabilitation of a WWII-era Japanese airfield, including removing UXOs at the site. It will allow fixed-wing aircraft to operate to enhance the U.S. military’s strategic capabilities in response to China’s ambitions in the South China Sea and Pacific region.
Between 2021 and 23, the U.S. Department of State provided Solomon Islands with $4.5 million for clearance, $1.5 million for Palau and smaller amounts for Marshall Islands, Fiji and Papua New Guinea.
John Rodsted, a researcher at SafeGround, said international donors like the U.S., Australia and Japan needed to step up assistance to rid the Pacific of UXOs and take a long-term approach to funding.
He added that the Japanese in particular “should put their hands in their pockets and actually help clear this stuff up.”
Contaminated soil
Since NPA began survey and clearance in Palau in 2016, it has found 10,844 ERW scattered across the country, according to its records.
Hess could not say if Peleliu – with a population of about 500 people – would ever be free of ERW, but based on the ferocity of fighting there were “probably still around 100 suspected hazardous areas.”
On a recent survey of Umurbrogal Mountain, the detritus of war was obvious to see – mortars, rockets and shells dotted the ground.
Weeks earlier, NPA staff found the remnants of a suspected landmine outside a cave while accompanying Japanese personnel searching for soldiers’ remains, Hess said.
“The biggest threat to public safety are white phosphorus munitions that were fired from 81 mm mortars,” he said, referring to the incendiary weapons that ignite on contact with oxygen.
Not everything discovered is hazardous, but such items are marked with yellow-tipped stakes and white spray paint and their GPS coordinates recorded for retrieval later that day.
After the munitions are collected, they are moved to a makeshift storage facility near the Peleliu’s trash heap, then transported to a disposal site on the nearby state of Koror, where they are cut open and burned out.
The work is slow going – and decades late – but according to locals like Paules, it’s starting to make a difference.
“When I was little, we saw a lot of [munitions] on the side of the street. Nowadays we don’t see so much,” she said.
BenarNews is an online news outlet affiliated with Radio Free Asia.