_Members of the Japanese garrison on Saipan pose for a photograph
during a more peaceful time before the Marine landing._]
As the Marine artillery also landed in the late afternoon of D-Day and
began firing in support of the infantry, it received deadly accurate
counter-battery fire from the Japanese. The commander of the 4th
Division, Major General Harry Schmidt, came ashore at 1930 and later
recalled, “Needless to say, the command post during that time did not
function very well. It was the hottest spot I was in during the war....”
Major James A. Donovan, executive officer of the 1st Battalion, 6th
Marines, endured a mortar barrage that had uncanny timing and precision:
We entered a little village called Charan-Kanoa. We paused there
to get some water. We had been pinched out of our zone of action.
We were washing up and resting when all of a sudden mortar shells
started to fall on us. We didn’t know it at the time, but in a tall
smokestack nearby was a Japanese forward observer. He was directing
the fire, looking right down on us. It didn’t occur to us that
somebody could be up in that smokestack after all the preparatory
naval gunfire and everything that had been fired into the area,
but he was up there all right. He really caused a great number of
casualties in G Company.
He caught us without foxholes. We had that false sense of security
from having been pinched out of the line. We thought we had a
chance to relax. We didn’t. So all had to dig holes in a hurry,
and it’s hard to dig a hole when you’re lying on your stomach
digging with your chin, your elbows, your knees, and your toes. It
is possible to dig a hole that way, I found, but we lost far more
Marines than we should have before someone finally located that
observer up in the smokestack. I don’t know how tall the smokestack
was, but I would say probably the equivalent of two or three
stories high. From up there he could see the entire picture, and he
really gave it to us.
The night of D-Day saw continuous Japanese probing of the Marine
positions, fire from by-passed enemy soldiers, and an enemy attack
in the 4th Division zone screened by a front of civilians. The main
counterattack, however, fell on the 6th Marines on the far left of the
Marine lines. About 2,000 Japanese started moving south from Garapan,
and by 2200 they were ready to attack. Led by tanks the charge was met
by a wall of fire from .30-caliber machine guns, 37mm antitank guns,
and M-1 rifles. It was too much and they fell back in disarray. In
addition to 700 enemy dead, they left one tank. The body of the bugler
who blew the charge was slumped over the open hatch. A bullet had gone
straight up his bugle!
One of the crucial assets for the Marine defense that night (and on
many subsequent nights) was the illumination provided by star shells
fired from Navy ships. Japanese records recovered later from their
_Thirty-first Army_ message file revealed, “... as soon as the night
attack units go forward, the enemy points out targets by using the
large star shells which practically turn night into day. Thus the
maneuvering of units is extremely difficult.”
As the weary Marines finally tried to get some sleep, all along their
irregular line of foxholes, two things were very clear to them: they
had forced a precarious beachhead in the teeth of bitter enemy fire,
and a long, tough battle obviously lay ahead.
While the thoughts of the riflemen focused on survival and the
immediate ground in front of them, the senior command echelons saw the
initial success of the landings as a culmination of months of planning,
training, and organization for a strategic strike on a crucial Japanese
stronghold. The opportunity for this sprang from earlier Central
Pacific victories.
The Marine conquest of Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands in November 1943,
followed by the joint Marine-Army capture of Kwajalein and Eniwetok
atolls in the Marshall Islands in January-February 1944, had broken
the outer ring of Japanese defenses and set the stage for succeeding
operations.
These earlier victories had moved up the entire American operational
timetable for the Central Pacific by three valuable months. After
discussions of various alternatives (such as an attack on the vast
Japanese base at Truk), the Joint Chiefs of Staff had settled on the
next objective: the Mariana Islands. There were to be three principal
targets: Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. It was a daring decision, for Saipan
was 1,344 miles from the Marshalls and 3,226 miles from Hawaii, but
only 1,250 miles from Japan. Furthermore, the islands were linchpins in
the revised inner defense line which the Japanese felt they absolutely
had to hold after their previous losses in the Central and Southwest
Pacific.
Saipan represented a whole new kind of prickly problem for an American
assault. Instead of a small, flat coral islet in an atoll, it was a
large island target of some 72 square miles, with terrain varying from
flat cane fields to swamps to precipitous cliffs to the commanding
1,554-foot-high Mount Tapotchau. Moreover, the Japanese considered it
“their own territory,” in spite of the fact that it was legally only a
mandate provided by the terms of the Versailles Treaty following World
War I. The fact that Japan held the islands led it to install a policy
of exclusion of all outsiders and the start of military construction,
forbidden by the treaty, as early as 1934.
Attacking a formidable objective such as Saipan called for complex
planning and much greater force than had previously been needed in the
Central Pacific. An elaborate organization was therefore assembled.
Admiral Raymond A. Spruance was in overall command of the force
detailed to invade the Marianas as well as the naval units needed to
protect them. Admiral Turner was in command over the amphibious task
force, while Marine Lieutenant General Holland M. Smith was to direct
the landing forces on Saipan and then on the neighboring island of
Tinian. (A similar command structure, but with different combat units,
was set up for the attack on Guam to the south.)
The operation plan for Saipan, code-named Forager, called for an
assault on the western side of the island, with the 2d Marine Division
on the left and the 4th Marine Division on the right. The Army’s 27th
Infantry Division was in reserve, ready to be fed into the battle if
needed. While each of the two Marine divisions had previously fought as
a complete unit, the 27th had experienced only two minor landings (at
Makin and Eniwetok islets) for some of its regiments and battalions.
The intensive training for these three divisions took place in the
Hawaiian Islands with Major General Harry Schmidt’s 4th Marine Division
on Maui, Major General Thomas E. Watson’s 2d Marine Division on the
“Big Island” of Hawaii, and Army Major General Ralph C. Smith’s 27th
Infantry Division on Oahu. As Lieutenant Chapin described it:
(These) months were busy, hard-working ones. The replacements
that arrived to fill the gaps left by Namur’s casualties (in
the Kwajalein battle) had to be trained in all the complexities
of field work. Most of these replacements were boys fresh from
boot camp, and they were ignorant of everything but the barest
essentials. Week after week was filled with long marches, field
combat problems, live firing, obstacle courses, street fighting,
judo, calisthenics, night and day attacks and defenses, etc. There
were also lectures on the errors we’d made at Namur. Added emphasis
was placed on attacking fortified positions. We worked with
demolition charges of dynamite, TNT, and C-2 [plastic explosive],
and with flame throwers till everyone knew them forward and
backward.
The month of May 1944 brought final maneuvers and practice landings for
all three divisions. The operation plan looked neatly and efficiently
organized on paper. In practice it looked different to that lieutenant:
To us in the lower echelons it was just the same old stuff that
we’d been doing for a solid year: filing up from compartments below
decks to your assigned boat station, going over the side, hurrying
down the net to beat the stopwatch, into the heaving LCVP (Landing
Craft, Vehicle, Personnel), and away. Then the interminable hours
of circling, meanwhile getting wet, hungry and bored. The K rations
(in a waxed box) tasted like sawdust; the weather got rougher and
rougher. Some of the men got seasick, and all of us were soaking
wet and cold.
Finally we headed back to our transport and clambered up the cargo
net with a sigh of relief. The next day it was the same thing all
over again, except that this time we went ashore. This, too, had
an awfully familiar feeling: wading through the surf, getting
your only pair of shoes and socks wringing wet, and then onto the
beach where all the sand migrated inside your shoes. A series of
conflicting and confusing orders flowed down through the chain of
command: halt and move on, halt and move on, go here, go there.
The vast attack force now gathered at Pearl Harbor. Although there were
unfortunate accidents to some of the landing craft, over 800 ships
set out in the naval component, some for direct fire support of the
troops, some for transport, and some (the fast carrier task force) to
make advance air strikes and then to deal with the attack which the
landing probably would incite from the Japanese Navy. Holland Smith’s V
Amphibious Corps, totalling 71,034 Marine and Army troops, sailed with
some slow elements starting on 25 May. The specialized craft for the
ground forces ran the gamut of acronym varieties. After staging through
the Marshalls, the armada headed for the target: Saipan.
At sea the troops got their final briefings: maps of the island (based
on recent American aerial and submarine photographs of a hitherto
“secret island”), estimates of 15,000 enemy troops (which turned out in
the end to be 30,000 under the command of Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu
Saito and Vice Admiral Chiuchi Nagumo), and detailed attack plans for
two Marine divisions.
Simultaneously, the American fast carriers’ planes began, on 11
June, their softening-up bombing, combined with attacks on Japanese
land-based air. Two days later, the main enemy fleet headed for the
Marianas for a decisive battle. Then, on 14 June, the “old battleships”
of the U.S. Navy, reborn from the Pearl Harbor disaster, moved in close
to Saipan to pound the Japanese defenses with their heavy guns. That
night underwater demolition teams made their dangerous swim in close
to the assault beaches to check on reefs, channels, mines, and beach
defenses. All was now in readiness for the landings.
The bloody business of D-Day was, as the troops well realized, only a
beginning, for the long, gruelling fight which began the next morning.
[Sidebar (page 4):
[Illustration: