Fertig listened without expression, and then replied flatly, “If I decide not to help you, you will remain in this area as a staff officer without command authority, subject to a letter of instruction that will be furnished to you.”
Rosenquist was taken aback. Ever since the first mention of this proposed mission, back in Washington the previous summer, he had maintained a singular focus on freeing some two thousand systematically beaten, tortured, and starved Americans. After surviving General Whitney’s serial delays, he thought the only remaining obstacle was the enemy.
“I don’t mean to be abrupt,” Fertig continued. “I just want you to understand that I will be the judge of any operations within my area. Now, just what do you intend to do?”
It was a shocking moment for Rosenquist. Armed with orders from General MacArthur’s chief of staff, as well as other weighty documentation from Brisbane’s SWPA Headquarters, Rosenquist had imagined that all he needed to do was direct Fertig to put men under his command, no questions asked. To surrender any classified information to Fertig violated everything this intelligence officer—trained and experienced in top secret missions—held dear.
But Rosenquist realized there was no way out: Fertig would have to know if he was to proceed. Moreover, precious time was slipping away. “We intend to free the American prisoners from Davao Penal Colony before they can be moved,” he said.
“I have no information that they’re about to be moved,” replied Fertig, genuinely startled by Rosenquist’s confident pronouncement. “When are they going, and where are they going?”
Rosenquist answered the question with a question. “Do you think it’s impossible to get them out of there?”
“Certainly not,” Fertig said. “The prison camp is not heavily guarded. Twelve of my men have already escaped from it. They were working on a road gang under one Japanese guard. One day they rushed the guard, beat him with shovels, and walked away.”
Relieved, Rosenquist felt his old enthusiasm return. “How many men do you think I’ll need?” he said eagerly.
“Tell me this,” Fertig said. “Is headquarters going to supply a hospital ship to pick up the prisoners as soon as they’re freed?” The look on Rosenquist’s face supplied the answer.
“I know what’s going on in that camp,” Fertig said. “Some of those men are friends of mine. But can you imagine anything more stupid than releasing two thousand weak and sick men on an overburdened local economy? You’ll attempt no such rescue. Headquarters can call my refusal to cooperate with you any damn thing it likes.”
Rosenquist was stunned. Fertig’s response constituted willful disobedience of a direct order from high command—surely the man knew its potential consequences. Fertig had no trouble reading the disbelief on his face. “You go to Davao and see for yourself,” the colonel said, ending the conversation. “But you are to make no attempt to get those men out of there.”
29
INITIATION AT SAIPAN
IN MARCH 1944, WASHINGTON military planners decided the next amphibious operation would be to seize the primary islands of the Mariana atoll. The trifecta conquest of Saipan, Tinian, and the former American base at Guam would be the Allies’ bold first strike at Japan’s inner defense perimeter. Preparation for a fanatical resistance began immediately.
Operation Forager had two overarching goals: to sever the enemy’s north-south supply and communications route, and to secure mid-Pacific bases for the Superfortress of the air, the B-29 bomber. From the Marianas, B-29s could easily reach Japan’s home islands and begin fire bombing, a tactic designed to shake the country’s resolve and hasten surrender.
The decision to strike the Marianas next was made despite unrelenting pressure from Douglas MacArthur to do something entirely different with the naval forces in the Pacific. He wanted those forces to report to him as soon as possible to support his advance on the Philippines—and sooner rather than later. MacArthur had proposed seizing Rabaul, New Guinea, and then basing the Fifth Fleet there. From that vantage point, the navy could assist him in retaking the Philippines. In a dispatch to General Marshall in Washington, MacArthur wrote:
“I propose that with the completion of the operations in the Marshalls [Kwajalein, et al.], the maximum force from all sources in the Pacific be concentrated [to assist] my drive up to Mindanao.”
But the vote taken by the Combined Allied Chiefs of Staff at Cairo, Egypt (Sextant conference) the previous December, concurred with the US Joint Chiefs’ recommendation: that whenever there was a conflict over resources, the US Navy’s crucial thrust across the Central Pacific would take priority over MacArthur’s objectives. Undeterred, MacArthur continued to lobby for a strategy shift in his favor. This was the reason he had dispatched General Sutherland to Pearl Harbor in January 1944: to negotiate this revision with Admiral Nimitz. When that effort failed, Sutherland pushed on to Washington to make the case.
Admiral King had one word for the proposal to divert the bulk of the Pacific Fleet to MacArthur’s command—absurd. King’s negative opinion of MacArthur had been formed early in the war by Admiral Hart’s highly charged eyewitness account of the general’s role in the disastrous fall of the Philippines. But King’s mistrust of MacArthur wasn’t the only reason for his opposition. He was convinced that the Central Pacific thrust—which included seizure of the Marianas and additional islands to their west—was the key to dominion over Japan because of their B-29 base potential. Not surprisingly, King had the full backing of Army Air Forces Chief General Hap Arnold.
Furious that the “navy cabal” had won again, MacArthur reacted bitterly to what he viewed as a barely concealed plot to prevent him from taking overall command of the Pacific War. “The navy fails to understand the strategy in the Pacific,” MacArthur scolded. But the Joint Chiefs held firm. MacArthur’s Mindanao landings would be allowed to proceed only after the Central Pacific forward areas were secured.
THANKS TO A COMBINATION of factors, the war in the Pacific was finally getting its share of resources. Admiral King’s relentless push for a stepped-up Pacific offensive was key, but so also was home front outrage over the widely publicized accounts of Japanese atrocities against American prisoners. All that was needed now were the right men to lead the effort.
Admirals Nimitz and King had easily agreed that Raymond Spruance, now a vice admiral, should be placed in overall command of the Central Pacific sweep. King, Nimitz, and Spruance had also been unanimous in their choice of Kelly Turner as the Central Pacific’s amphibious assault commander. He was bold and brilliant, if exceedingly profane—even by US Navy standards. But in their view, Turner alone had the unique combination of talents and skills to seize the target assets and lead the navy’s vast armada of ships and troops all the way to Japan’s doorstep.
The amphibians had their work cut out for them. Operation Forager would be their biggest operation so far, by orders of magnitude. Saipan was sacred ground to the Japanese, and a full-blooded samurai defense was expected. Nor was it a tiny islet bluff measurable in yardage. Saipan’s seventy-two-acre terrain was a hellish montage of coral-aproned beaches, high plateaus, rolling hills, jagged ridges, blind ravines, sheer cliffs, and an extinct volcano—plus a new logistical nightmare for amphibian planners: a vast network of caves.
Saipan’s human defenses were also formidable. In addition to a Bushido-stout army, it was home port to Pearl Harbor villain Admiral Chuichi Nagumo and his fleet. It was also home to tens of thousands of Japanese civilians. The stakes were sky-high for both sides, just as they had been at Guadalcanal, but in that action, the navy had snuck into Japan’s side yard. At Saipan, they would be breaking into their house. Forager would be an assault of unprecedented scale, and Bill Mott wasted no time immersing himself in the planning.
If he was going to keep this job, he needed to learn quickly, perform optimally, and make Admiral Turner happy. Many of his predecessors had succeeded at the first two but failed at the third. But Bill was optimistic. Hard work had always
propelled him toward his goals, and this would be no exception. In this case, he had two aspirations. One was career advancement—stellar performance in this job would ensure his dream of transferring from the naval reserves to the regular navy. The other was to advance toward the Philippines and Barton. Some days he wasn’t sure which was the greater motivator.
The planning process itself was byzantine. Fine-tuned sequencing of every land, sea, and air offensive was essential, and a daunting mobile logistics force had to be assembled. Avoiding the sorts of horrific and costly errors that had unfolded at Tarawa was always uppermost in his mind.
He rose well before dawn each morning to analyze documents, maps, memos, manifests, intelligence estimates, and massive to-do lists—and then create his own. He marshaled every scintilla of his accumulated knowledge of complex communications and radio transmission codes and distribution networks among and between the services, in order to build a largely unprecedented mastery of multiservice amphibious assault operations. It was the toughest task he’d ever undertaken, and his new boss was a living, fire-breathing homing device for the slightest human error. President Roosevelt himself had been easier to please.
Battle plans were drafted and redrafted with continuous input from a vast orchestra of individuals from all the services, from Generals Marshall and Arnold to Admirals King and Nimitz. Updated intelligence was layered in daily, requiring more drafting and redrafting. Operation Forager planning was then put to the test, repeatedly, with rigorous landing rehearsals at Maui. After each multiday rehearsal, plans were revised and more rehearsals were conducted.
At Turner’s behest, Bill marshaled the preparation of inventories, indexes, and execution orders. The logistics of long-distance provisioning alone seemed infinite. With Saipan 3,500 miles from Pearl Harbor, the closest full supply depot, 120 days’ worth of everything was needed for more than three hundred ships’ companies. All combatant and auxiliary ships required capacity stores of ammunition, fuel, lubricants, fresh provisions, dry goods, clothing, and medical supplies. An additional 60-day supply was required for the landing forces—some one hundred thousand men in all.
Compounding these dizzying logistics were the complications of fueling hundreds of vessels at sea, with each class of vessel having different protocols. There were also the details of aircraft replacement, repair facilities, salvage operations, and coordination of the four hospital ships to move wounded from the beaches to the ships—with the added consideration that all the above would likely take place in the heat of air and sea battle and in the vicinity of torpedo-bristling enemy submarines.
Coordinating the multiple services’ contributions to this quadrille of an assault plan—designed to put eight thousand men ashore every twenty minutes—was another herculean undertaking, alone requiring thousands of man-hours. And, of course, there had to be contingency plans for each one of these carefully laid plans, because battles rarely go according to plan. As samurai warrior Sun Tsu had observed centuries earlier, “Many calculations lead to victory and few calculations to defeat.”
Successful amphibious operations also required reliable intelligence estimates of the number and types of enemy forces and the location of fixed artillery and other equipment, as well as anything else that might improve assessment of enemy potential. After collecting such intelligence, the estimates then needed to be scrutinized, questioned, and revised over and over and over again. Admiral Turner—in a style that overwhelmed and terrorized nearly everyone around him—demanded it all at his fingertips, funneled to and from him through his fledgling aide and flag secretary.
In addition to these duties, Bill was also the ship’s legal and personnel officer, in which capacity he was responsible for issues ranging from promotion and decoration recommendations, to dereliction of duty, drunkenness, and assault. He was also the ship’s media censor: he had to read and approve all copy written by the dozens of war correspondents aboard before it could be transmitted from Rocky Mount’s communications center. Despite the other demands on his time, Bill attached no small importance to this task. He had witnessed firsthand how one errant news report had the potential to derail the war effort.
Lastly, he was to see that a discreet group of Navajo Indians aboard—whose assignment was the synchronous transmission of radio messages between the flagship and landed parties in their little-known Native American tongue—coordinated properly with their multiple constituents in the amphibious force’s complex communications chain. The Navajo code system was valued for its unique ability to transmit real-time battle-status updates to and among units onshore and to and from the fleet without time-consuming enciphering and deciphering.
All this planning was for a landing nearly the size and complexity of the impending Normandy invasion (deferred from May to June, 1944, due to weather)—but which had to be assembled in a fraction of the time. It was the busiest Bill Mott had been in his life. Admiral Turner arose each morning at 0430, and by 0700, the admiral’s orderly would have made several trips to Bill’s quarters with instructions relating to the full range of matters listed above. So many notes from Turner’s personalized notepad would arrive before breakfast each day that Bill came to refer to them as “snowflakes.” Like his own boss, Admiral Spruance, Turner famously believed in delegating authority. Bill felt the full brunt of this management style early on.
The only way to become an accepted member of Kelly Turner’s rarified inner circle was to be able to interpret and respond to his orders intelligently and on the double, as well as to have the physical capacity to remain alert and quick on the uptake at all hours. One also had to accept the occasional “spit in the eye,” by way of the admiral’s famously foul mouth, bad temper, and general dearth of charm. His transport commanders were said to fear Kelly Turner more than they did the Japanese.
But Bill got on well with his new boss. In fact, a bond formed between the two men, just as had been the case with virtually all of Bill’s previous mentors and bosses—sequential father figures so lacking in his early childhood. After Bill’s relatively mild trial by fire at Eniwetok (at the end of the Marshall Islands campaign), Admiral Turner made clear he was impressed with his new charge. For one thing, Bill never seemed to fall behind on the formidable list of tasks assigned him. For another, the irascible Turner observed, Bill was “unfailingly courteous.” Even the admiral understood this challenge.
FOLLOWING ONE LAST DRESS rehearsal in late May 1944, Admiral Turner approved the plan for Operation Forager. The volume dwarfed all previous Pacific assault directives. Including the 163-page executive order issued by CINCPAC Admiral Spruance, Turner’s master plan ran 800 pages; it had been assembled and tested to the teeth in an impressive three months. Saipan would be invaded on June 15, followed quickly by Guam on June 19, and Tinian last.
Between May 29 and June 6, 1944, the various contingents of the huge invasion fleet sortied from multiple ports for convergence off Saipan. As the world’s eyes fastened on events unfolding on the beaches of northwest France, the largest naval convoy ever assembled in the Pacific set sail in 550 ships, auxiliary vessels, and landing crafts; 128,000 troops with 75,000 tons of supplies were in tow. Fanned out ahead of them were dozens of armed, prowling submarines, primed for the kill.
On the long voyage to Saipan, Bill began to feel ill. Initially, he wrote it off as seasickness, but in time, he knew it was something more serious. He wondered if departing for the Pacific the previous January before fully recovering from double pneumonia was the cause. But these were different symptoms. He could barely keep down food, and coffee, critical sustenance for months of long days and short nights, burned into his stomach and intestines like battery acid. Bill returned to his cabin each night doubled over in pain.
When the ship’s doctor, Captain Gillette, suggested he take to Sick Bay, Bill declined. After years of scheming and countless setbacks, he was finally at sea on the eve of battle; surely he could make it through Operation Forager. Instead, he requested a hefty suppl
y of magnesium hydroxide for its antacid properties, and aspirin. The latter, it turned out, would only make matters worse.
One night, during a break in the earsplitting pre-invasion shore bombardment of Saipan, Bill mixed a rounded spoonful of magnesium hydroxide in a metal cup of water and swallowed it with two gulps and a wince; this usually kept the symptoms at bay for a few hours. He then left his cabin for the deck. At the forecastle rail, he beheld a sight as spectacular as the one that spread out before him on the sea. The star Sirius—the brightest in the night sky and crucial to nautical navigation—was the centerpiece of a celestial light show of shooting stars and crystal-clear constellations. These jewels of the night backlit a dark and quiet Saipan.
The vast waters surrounding Rocky Mount were studded, too: hundreds of ships reached beyond the horizon in every direction. The prodigious fruits of America’s war industries were arrayed before him like a feast. In fact, the exponentially expanded United States Navy of mid-1944 was about to surpass the size of all the navies in history combined.
Bill allowed a measure of relief to mingle with his physical discomfort. So far he had delivered fully on each task required of him. He’d grown confident in this daunting new role. Despite the initial—and steep—nautical learning curve, his sea legs now stood firm. Battle would be quite another thing; he would find that out soon enough. This moment, he knew, was a rare snatch of tranquility.
Enterprise was visible in the middle distance. With Benny now in Washington, Bill was grateful that perpetual worry over his safety, if not his happiness, was behind him. He also indulged in a deep sense of optimism about reaching Barton. He had measured in centimeters the shrinking distance on the map more than once over the past few weeks. In Washington, he had been some 14,000 miles away; now Mindanao lay less than 1,500 miles to the west.
The Jersey Brothers Page 29
