The Marines liked Conolly, had already nicknamed him “Close-In” Conolly for his willingness to steam close ashore in the Marshalls to deliver naval gunfire virtually at “bayonet point.” Command relations between Conolly and his counterpart Roy Geiger exemplified the best characteristics of both men—open, honest, cooperative. No other force in Forager conducted such a systematic work-up for amphibious assault, capped by a detailed rehearsal landing and critique. And at Guam, the landing force would enjoy one of the longest sustained preliminary naval bombardments of the Pacific War—thirteen days, during which “Close-In Conolly” again lived up to his name.
Geiger’s landing force proved to be a diverse but highly competent body of fighters. Maj. Gen. Allen Turnage’s jungle-savvy 3d Marine Division had established the Bougainville beachhead. Brig. Gen. Lemuel C. Shepherd’s 1st Provisional Marine Brigade (soon to become the nucleus of the 6th Marine Division) was new and untested as an entity, but the combination of former Raiders in the 4th Marines plus the Marshalls veterans among the 22d Marines would fight with the equivalent ferocity of a full division. Guam would be the 77th Division’s first fight, but Maj. Gen. Andrew D. Bruce’s soldiers had received superb amphibious and jungle training. Initially slated for reserve duty, the 77th would begin entering the battle for Guam as early as W-Day. The soldiers would acquit themselves well, and after a series of hard-fought subsequent landings in the Philippines and Okinawa would end the war as one of the most adept amphibious divisions in the Pacific.
The Americans had an emotional stake in recapturing Guam, their Pacific possession since 1899. Many “Old Corps” Marines had been stationed there and had developed a special relationship with the native Chamorros. A generation of Marine officers had studied “the Guam Problem” in tactics courses at the Marine Corps Schools in Quantico during the interwar years. Most knew that Guam stood to be more difficult to seize than Saipan. Guam had three times the size, more mountains, more jungle growth, fewer suitable beaches.
The Japanese defended Guam with thirteen thousand army and fifty-five hundred naval troops. General Obata, unable to return to Saipan, had slipped ashore on Guam to reestablish his 31st Army headquarters, but Obata would yield tactical direction of the coming battle to Lt. Gen. Takeshi Takashina, a veteran of action along the Manchurian frontier against the Soviet Union. Takashina believed the Americans would attempt to land at Tumon Bay, the site of the principal Japanese landing in 1941, and developed his main defenses there.
As at Tarawa and Saipan, the Japanese guessed wrong about American landing intentions. Geiger and Conolly decided to forgo Tumon Bay and hit two smaller beaches, five miles apart, the 3d Marine Division in the north, the 1st Provisional Brigade in the south. This was hazardous. Rough terrain just inland from the beaches would slow the link-up of the two forces, leaving both vulnerable to a concentrated counterattack.
Geiger worried needlessly. Thirteen days of preliminary shelling served to disrupt and innervate the Japanese hierarchy. UDT teams performed sparkling work in clearing mines and obstacles from the boat lanes (even having the cheek to leave a sign pointing seaward saying Welcome Marines). Naval aircraft from both the escort carriers and Mitscher’s fast carrier veterans executed a spectacular eighty-plane strike just before H-Hour, strafing and bombing the beaches and the high ground inland. The supporting armada assembled around Guam’s northwest coast included 274 ships, conveying the fifty-four-thousand-man landing force and their weapons and equipment. Here was truly a storm landing in process.
And yet, Japanese defenders, dazed and deafened, somehow emerged from that awful pounding to man their guns and resist the landing. One officer of the 9th Marines reported: “I was particularly impressed to see Japanese soldiers still alive right on the landing beaches after almost . . . incessant bombardment by naval gunfire.” To the south at Gaan Point, a solitary 75-mm gun crew, protected throughout by a camouflaged, concrete blockhouse, opened a disciplined fire against oncoming LVTs at a range of one hundred yards, knocking out nearly two dozen in a row, spilling their troops into the shallows, before Marines from adjacent landing points could overwhelm the position from the rear.
Like Saipan, Guam’s coral reef would prevent all boats from landing on the beach, so LVTs would have to maintain the assault momentum by conducting transfer line operations with the boats along the beach. Loss of so many LVTs in the assault put a premium on their use to land ammunition and other critical supplies. That situation precluded the use of LVTs to land the reserve force, the 77th Division, whose introduction to amphibious combat in the Pacific War thus consisted of having to wade ashore from the reef under intermittent enemy fire.
Mary Craddock Hoffman
A paradox developed in the nature of the Japanese defense. Takashina and his lieutenants fought with a singular lack of imagination, squandering their sizable forces in suicidal counterattacks. On their own, however, the Japanese junior officers and NCOs fought with great elan and daring, prolonging the inland battle, and selling themselves dearly. Some of the roughest fighting the Marines would experience in the Pacific occurred well after W-Day on Guam, including the protracted battle for Bundschu Ridge by the 3d Marine Division and the “minicampaign” to seize Orote Peninsula by the 1st Provisional Brigade.*
The spirited if uncoordinated resistance by the Japanese garrison combined with Guam’s rugged terrain to slow the efforts of the two landing forces to merge and drive northward. The reef proved to be the weak point in the massive logistic effort needed to sustain the campaign ashore. General Shepherd found this to be the case as early as W-Day when he came ashore to establish his brigade command post. “Supplies not coming ashore with sufficient rapidity,” he signaled the control ship offshore. “Believe delay at transfer line at edge of reef. Expedite movement with preference to all types ammunition.” Hours later he reported the situation unchanged: “Our casualties about 350. . . . Critical shortages fuel and ammunition.”
Navy beachmasters and shore party Marines provided a dozen or so floating cranes along the reef to speed the exchange of cargo between boats and LVTs, but this produced only marginal improvements. Logistics problems intensified as frontline units deployed further from the beachheads. The paucity of tracked and wheeled prime movers slowed artillery displacements, medical evacuation, and critical resupply efforts throughout the campaign. Guam, in fact, proved to be one of the most labor-intensive logistic efforts of the Central Pacific drive. At one point, nearly ten thousand troops from all three divisions—virtually one-fifth of IIIAC—could be found wrestling with combat cargo in ships’ holds, along the reef, or among inland supply dumps.
On 29 July, W-Day+8, the 22d Marines raised the American flag above the ruins of the former Marine barracks on Orote Peninsula. The next day, tactical aircraft of all three services began using the two-thousand-foot airstrip on the captured peninsula. On 4 August Marine Air Group 21 began flight operations from Orote Field, soon providing twelve squadrons of attack and fighter aircraft in support of the campaign.
Guam “fell” on 10 August, the official end of organized resistance. Nearly 11,000 Japanese died in the defense, including both Obata and Takashina. Incredibly, as many as 10,000 more Japanese troops simply vanished—went to ground in Guam’s subtropical jungles. American forces would continue to flush them out for the duration of the war (and for decades thereafter). If the fighting spirit of the Japanese troops on Guam had been matched with the same kind of resourceful leadership exhibited by Imperial commanders at Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, or Okinawa, the campaign might well have followed a more dramatic and extended course. As it was, Guam proved costly enough. General Geiger’s IIIAC suffered 8,000 casualties (Marines and soldiers) in the twenty-day fighting, including 1,796 killed.
A Marine wounded in the battle for Guam is carried aboard a waiting landing craft for the run out to a hospital ship. (U.S. Naval Institute)
Where Saipan had been clouded by interservice acrimony, Guam served as a model of how smoothly a
joint-service campaign could function. The harmonious relations between Admiral Conolly and General Geiger extended downward and outward. The salty Marines, innately suspicious of the unproven soldiers of the 77th Division, soon marveled at that unit’s courage and proficiency. Indeed the Guam Leathernecks would ever after refer to their Army teammates as the “77th Marine Division.” General Bruce recognized the compliment. Naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison was equally complimentary of those who won victory by storming Guam. Citing Julian Corbett’s axiom that amphibious landings are only successful when both naval officers and troops “are schooled for it, hand in hand, by constant and well-ordered practice,” Morison concluded that “Dick Conolly’s and Roy Geiger’s units were superbly schooled.”
At dawn on 24 July 1944, while the battle of Guam raged at full intensity, two U.S. amphibious task forces approached the west coast of Tinian. One seemed vast and powerful—battleships and heavy cruisers surrounding attack transports. The second force, an unimpressive scattering of LSTs and smaller craft, loitered behind, near Tinian’s northwest tip, as if merely a follow-on echelon.
The larger task force steamed directly for Tinian Town, site of the island’s best beaches and consequently the heart of the Japanese defenses. Gunships commenced a fierce bombardment. Transports lowered landing craft, formed them into waves, dispatched them shoreward in formation. Japanese naval gunners opened fire from camouflaged coast-defense batteries. The boat waves hesitated four hundred yards from the beach, then retired at full speed to the transports. The exultant Japanese commander wired Tokyo: “We have repelled an American landing with one hundred barges!”
But something strange was happening with that sleepy group of LSTs up north, an area where no real landing beaches existed. To the shock of the Japanese garrison, hundreds of troop-laden LVTs appeared in the water, streaming in parallel columns toward two narrow patches of rock and sand. The demonstration against Tinian Town had been an artful ruse. Here was the main assault. Seasoned troops of the 4th Marine Division swarmed quickly ashore. Similar to the Allied invasion of Normandy, the American seizure of Tinian would depend heavily on tactical deception, favorable weather—and audacity.
No island seized by the Fifth Fleet in the Central Pacific produced greater strategic dividends at less cost. Tinian, in fact, was a model of amphibious ingenuity. Where each previous storm landing had been characterized by a costly loss of momentum at the beachhead, Tinian was just the opposite—a waterborne blitzkrieg; indeed, an early forerunner of “maneuver warfare from the sea.”
Tinian would reflect the emergence of a new breed of amphibians. Gen. Holland Smith’s long span of influence in the Pacific War waned sharply after Saipan. Although Spruance and Turner would recall him from the sidelines to help with Iwo Jima, Smith would never again exercise direct tactical command of troops in an amphibious assault. Chester Nimitz, striving mightily to preserve a spirit of interservice harmony among his often fractious command, would never forgive Holland Smith, a Marine, for his heavy-handed relief of Gen. Ralph Smith, an Army commander, for ineptitude. Nimitz ordered Holland Smith back to Pearl Harbor to assume command of the newly established Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, an important but administrative—and backwater—billet. Maj. Gen. Harry Schmidt assumed command of VAC. Maj. Gen. Clifford B. Cates relieved Schmidt in command of the 4th Marine Division.* The two younger generals would work well together at Tinian and again half a year later at Iwo Jima—and in both cases in harmony with the amphibious force commander, Adm. “Handsome Harry” Hill, who replaced Turner.
Compared to Saipan’s mountains and Guam’s jungled ridges, Tinian was relatively flat, its northern two-thirds covered by a checkerboard of open canefields and small farms. Operation Forager sought air bases for the new B-29 Super-fortresses, and Tinian’s canefields offered a bonanza. Three decent airfields already existed. Engineers figured they could enlarge these, then build three more from scratch, eventually giving the U.S. Army Air Forces six bomber strips with the necessary eighty-five-hundred-foot runways.
Nearly nine thousand Japanese troops—half Army, half Navy—stood ready to defend Tinian against the inevitable American invasion. Col. Keishi Ogata held nominal command over all forces on the island, including his own 50th Infantry Regiment, veterans of the Kwantung Army. Like his counterparts on Saipan and Guam, Ogata proved brave but uninspired.
Tinian’s shortage of suitable landing beaches presented the biggest challenge to Marine planners. Forcing a landing at Tinian Town would be foolhardy (“another Tarawa” warned Holland Smith, sourly, before he departed). The island did offer two tiny beaches on the northwest coast, near Ushi Airfield, but they were rocky and narrow, more like trails leading onto the plateau. The more the planners studied the aerial photographs, however, the more they liked the idea of deviating radically from established doctrine by landing two entire divisions over these improbable entry points. Tactically, it made sense: a surprise strike with plenty of mobility; early seizure of the best airfields; maneuver room for both divisions to shoulder into line and swing south. The big risk came in the arena of logistic support. Could Hill and Schmidt really support two divisions through those tiny bottlenecks in the escarpment? Weather became a concern. The monsoon season loomed.
Mary Craddock Hoffman
Schmidt and Hill launched an exceptional preliminary bombardment of Tinian. For once, the Americans in the Central Pacific were close enough to their next objective to pound it with their own field guns from a fire support base. As early as 20 June, while the fighting for Saipan still boiled, U.S. Army 155-mm “Long Toms” began bombarding northern Tinian. The number of artillery pieces firing on Tinian grew as the battle of Saipan waned. Soon Schmidt had thirteen batteries of the XIV Corps artillery firing day and night, using a greater number of cannon than Union general Meade employed in defense of Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg. Hill’s veteran gunships worked over the rest of the island, while carrier air and Army P-47s flying from Saipan’s Aslito Airfield contributed to the pounding.
This integrated bombardment reached a crescendo on the morning of J-Day. Hill’s decoy landing effectively froze the main body of Ogata’s forces in place in the south for several critical hours. Members of the 2d Marine Division, watching the feint from the relative safety of their transports, quickly saw the wisdom of avoiding a real landing at Tinian Town. The popular old battleship Colorado closed to within thirty-one hundred yards off shore when a battery of Japanese 6-inch guns opened up from a hidden cave above the harbor. In fifteen minutes these guns scored twenty-eight hits on the battleship and her escort destroyer, inflicting 285 casualties.
The 4th Marine Division took full advantage of this distraction to hustle its assault elements ashore, using more than 500 LVTs and 130 DUKWs (amphibious trucks) to cross the reef and penetrate Japanese defenses at White Beach.* Enemy mines and machine guns slowed the advance initially, but the Marines soon had the mass and mobility in place to roll inland. Cates well knew that everything depended on maintaining the momentum of the assault. Conventional shore party operations would not do the job. There must be no stopping on the beach for any reason. Everything coming ashore—bullets, beans, bandages—had to travel on tracks or wheels, prepared to move directly to supply points well past the escarpment.
Assault troops of the 4th Marine Division race toward Tinian’s northwestern beaches during the decoy landing farther south. (U.S. Naval Institute)
An enterprising SeaBee officer devised a portable vehicle ramp that could be emplaced by LVTs, thus offering more beach exits. Before long the Navy warped two floating pontoons into place, invaluable facilities captured from the Japanese at Saipan. The tempo of offloading never slowed. Before nightfall, Cates had 15,000 Marines ashore. The cost had been astonishingly light: 15 killed, 225 wounded.
Cates had fought the Japanese at Guadalcanal and knew what the night would bring. He brought his tanks, half-tracks, and light artillery ashore well before dark. Cates also landed enough barbed wire t
o secure the extended perimeter, and he coordinated night defensive fires with the cruisers and destroyers assigned in support.
As expected, Colonel Ogata, chagrined at misjudging the main thrust of the American landing, sought to reverse the situation that night by marshaling several thousand of his troops and half a dozen tanks around the American perimeter. Ogata’s veterans, adept at night fighting, launched a well-coordinated tank-infantry attack on the heels of a stinging artillery barrage. In essence, this close, violent combat between two experienced forces became THE Battle of Tinian. Here General Cates’s forethought paid dividends. Star shells fired from offshore destroyers helped backlight the attackers. Marine tanks, half-tracks, and machine guns took a heavy toll of Japanese infantry caught up in barbed wire. The Marines’ versatile M3A1 37-mm antitank guns proved particularly well-suited for this kind of close-range fighting, firing canister rounds like some super-caliber, semiautomatic shotgun. The whole affair was as vicious a little battle as would be seen in the Pacific War. And one of the most one-sided. The Marines held. At daybreak they counted fifteen hundred dead Japanese in and around their perimeter. “We’ve broken their backs,” said Cates grimly.
With the dawn also came the 2d Marine Division, landing in trace over White Beach, maintaining the high mobility of the previous day. The two divisions moved out together, reached the east coast, then wheeled southward. Scattered Japanese units fought bitterly, but most of Ogata’s surviving forces melted away toward the south. The terrain opened up, becoming ideal tank country. For several days after the landing, the Marines enjoyed the rarest of combat experiences in the island warfare of the Pacific, riding on tanks and half-tracks pell-mell down farm roads in pursuit of a retreating enemy. The troops soon outran the range of the artillery support on Saipan and began relying more heavily on Army aircraft, Navy gun ships, and their own 105-mm artillery battalions, now ashore.
Storm Landings Page 10
