Storm Landings

by Joseph H. Alexander

  Tinian was a magnificent fight for Marine artillerymen. As one captured Japanese soldier admitted, “You couldn’t drop a stick without bringing down artillery.” Maj. Frederick J. Karch, operations officer for the 14th Marines, recalled an incident where an airburst artillery round cut down an entire Japanese machine-gun crew. “Each man fell in position, carrying his assigned component of the gun, just like a picture out of a training manual.”

  General Schmidt declared the island secured on the afternoon of 1 August. The V Amphibious Corps had seized Tinian in nine days at the cost of 2,355 casualties. Most of the remaining Japanese garrison died defending the southern palisades or in hopelessly outgunned banzai attacks.

  Tinian epitomized the fusion of innovative planning and violent execution, the hallmark of an effective amphibious assault. For its size, there is no finer example of amphibious virtuosity in the Pacific War.

  Tinian became the largest B-29 base in the world and within a year would launch the B-29 Enola Gay with its single atomic bomb destined for Hiroshima. Yet the shock waves of Japan’s sudden loss of the Marianas—forcibly ripped from within their presumably impregnable Absolute National Defense Sphere—produced more immediate results. The Tojo government resigned in disgrace. A senior Japanese official in the emperor’s retinue exclaimed, “Hell is upon us.” Civil defense officials in Japanese cities received orders to begin preparing for American air raids. Garrisons on Peleliu, Iwo Jima, the Philippines, and Okinawa began a frantic race to enhance fortifications.

  Adm. Kishisaburo Nomura admitted to his postwar interrogators that, from Tarawa onward, “everywhere you attacked before the defense was ready. You came more quickly than we expected.” Nomura’s assessment was right on the mark regarding the Gilberts, Marshalls, and Marianas. Beyond that point, however, the Japanese learned to anticipate their enemy more realistically. They would prove fully ready for the storm landings to come. Especially at Peleliu. . . .

  * Admiral Nimitz narrowly missed becoming a casualty himself at West Loch. Seeing the explosions, he ordered his driver to approach the bluff overlooking the disaster, then told him to drive down a dirt road to the water’s edge. Eighteen-year-old Marine corporal Loren F. “Sonny” Paulus, the admiral’s bodyguard, overruled the commander in chief. “Shrapnel was already landing near us on top of the bluff; if we’d gone down that trail we would’ve been hit for sure. I ignored the admiral and ordered the driver the hell out of there.”

  * The amphibians used alternate letters to designate landing dates when campaign planning overlapped. Hence, in the Marianas, it was D-Day at Saipan, W-Day at Guam, and J-Day at Tinian.

  * General Shepherd’s masterful coordination of naval gunfire, field artillery, and close air support of his Orote operation would place him in good stead for assaulting two more peninsulas the following year: Motobu and Oroku on Okinawa.

  * Cates was one of six future Commandants of the Marine Corps who fought in the Marianas. David M. Shoup and Wallace M. Greene Jr. served at Saipan and Tinian; Lemuel C. Shepherd, Robert E. Cushman Jr., and Louis H. Wilson Jr. served at Guam.

  * DUKW is not an acronym but rather an arcane construction code: D = 1942, U = utility, K = all-wheel drive, W = twin rear wheel axles. Troops for forty years called the vehicles “Ducks.”

  Chapter Five

  Sharpening the Amphibious Ax

  The invasion generates into what is purely and simply assault. By assault we mean the last stages of an attack. The operation becomes assault from beginning to end.

  Lt. Gen. Alexander A. Vandegrift, USMC

  Commandant of the Marine Corps,

  August 1944

  The Japanese high command faced an intolerable dilemma in August 1944. Painful to admit, difficult to believe, but the Americans had thoroughly whipped their forces in the Marianas. The U.S. invasion force had crippled the Mobile Fleet and practically annihilated an entire field army. From all reports, the Americans had outfoxed, outfought, and literally steamrollered each Japanese garrison into oblivion. The enemy now held airfields within thirteen hundred miles of Tokyo. And there was no telling where the next storm landing would occur. Both Iwo Jima and Okinawa were now very much at risk.

  With hindsight, and from a purely political viewpoint, this would have been a smart time for Japan to have sued for peace. The savings in lives and property would have been incalculable (although the postwar implications are murky to perceive). But capitulation was not a strategic option to the senior military officers who dominated the Japanese government. Instead, IGHQ reacted to the loss of the Marianas with shame, fury, and controlled desperation. Imperial forces would fight on—and fight smarter.

  Both sides therefore devoted the late summer of 1944 to appraising the new U.S. practice of storm landings. The Americans saw little need for improvement. The Tinian operation in particular generated great pride—a planning and logistical masterpiece, executed with such ferocity by the veteran landing force that the island fell in nine days at a casualty rate of less than 5 percent. In contrast, the Japanese examined their performance in the Marianas and found discouraging evidence of uninspired leadership, interservice squabbling, wasteful banzai charges, and inadequate heavy weapons and fortification material. IGHQ saw clearly that the legendary spiritual supremacy of the individual Japanese warrior could not prevail in the face of overwhelming firepower and mobility that characterized the recent American landings across the Central Pacific. Obviously, their traditional counterlanding doctrine—defend at the water’s edge, counterattack any penetration immediately with all forces—needed urgent, radical revision.

  Japanese leaders believed until the end of the war that the American public would not tolerate a protracted war with high casualties in the Pacific. After the Marianas, IGHQ generally agreed that the best defensive doctrine would be one that bogged down an American campaign indefinitely and inflicted maximum casualties. This was attrition warfare, anathema to the samurai tradition, but the tactics would capitalize on two great strengths of the Japanese troops—their ability to dig and their ability to endure the most god-awful shelling.

  The Japanese received an unexpected grace period in which to refine this new doctrine when the Americans turned away, momentarily, from Iwo Jima and Okinawa to concentrate on the Palaus and the Philippines. IGHQ was elated with the reprieve for its northern outposts. Two extremely gifted lieutenant generals, each bearing the approval of Emperor Hirohito, had just left Japan to begin the defensive enhancements of their respective island citadels: Tadamichi Kuribayashi at Iwo Jima and Mitsuru Ushijima at Okinawa. Within six months both generals would be poised and waiting among some of the most daunting defenses the Americans would face in the war. As they prepared for the coming firestorms, both commanders studied reports of the ways their enemy executed forcible seaborne assaults.

  American amphibious proficiency developed unevenly as the war progressed. Major differences existed between the conduct of amphibious operations in the European and Pacific theaters. Landings in the Mediterranean and in France tended to be larger than those in the Pacific. They usually involved combined operations with Allied forces and often integrated airborne and glider units into the assault plan. Most took place under the protective umbrella of land-based air, and all required a high degree of logistical ingenuity to succeed. Landing forces in Europe rarely encountered reefs and thus remained satisfied with landing boats rather than assault amphibian vehicles. With the major exception of Normandy, most Allied commanders favored night landings, in which the duration and importance of preliminary naval gunfire became secondary to achieving tactical surprise. Allied landings in Italy and France invariably provoked a strong counterattack by German panzer forces. The extended beachhead lines at Anzio and Normandy remained major battlefields for weeks. Some landings were easier. Yet the “amphibious hazard axiom” remained constant: no one in any theater ever landed on a foreign shore without risk—if the enemy didn’t hurt you, the high surf would.

  Night landings w
ere not common in the Pacific. The prevalence of coral reefs dictated precision (daylight) navigation, as well as more attention to the timing of rising tides rather than conditions of light or darkness. Control of the ship-to-shore movement, complex enough in daylight, became dangerously complicated after sunset. Any landing plan that involved preliminary naval bombardment—an inevitable requirement in the Central Pacific (and Normandy, as well)—demanded several hours of daylight for satisfactory observation and execution.

  The celebrated storm landings at Tarawa and Iwo Jima were conducted by Marines; those in the Marianas, Peleliu, and Okinawa by joint landing forces of Army and Marine divisions. Both services also conducted dozens of other landings with only slightly less intensity than those featured in this book. The Army rarely gets sufficient credit for its considerable amphibious role in the Pacific War. As a matter of fact, historian Allan R. Millett has calculated that eighteen Army divisions executed twenty-six amphibious landings in the Pacific, while the six Marine divisions executed fifteen.

  Nowhere did the Army gain amphibious proficiency more rapidly than in “MacArthur’s Amphibious Navy”—the Seventh Amphibious Force commanded by the enterprising Rear Adm. Daniel E. Barbey. MacArthur and Barbey executed an unbeatable record of fifty-six amphibious landings in two years, delivering a cumulative total of 1 million men over enemy-held shores. That most of these landings were conducted against light opposition simply reflects MacArthur’s tactical genius and the advantage of attacking along the immense coastlines of New Guinea, Leyte, or Luzon.

  Barbey achieved these series of hopscotching operations with an amphibious fleet literally gathered from the boneyard—castoffs after the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets got first pick. Where amphibious force commanders in other theaters went to sea in battleships, cruisers, or special command ships, Barbey for years flew his flag in an “Able Peter little Charlie,” an APc, a wooden-hulled coastal transport the size of a small tugboat. Barbey modified his “flag-configured ‘apple cart’” to accommodate a few extra bunks, a typewriter, and a mimeograph machine. From his tiny “flag bridge,” Barbey coordinated the movement of his flotilla of flat-bottomed LSTs, LCIs, and LCTs along the dark coasts. Here, speed of execution dominated all other tactical considerations. The beachheads may have been lightly defended, but MacArthur and Barbey knew to expect a major Japanese air strike within the first hours. The soldiers learned to load their ships so adroitly that an acceptable level of critical supplies could be rushed ashore by H-Hour+4—the witching hour—at which the ships would hightail it for safer waters. Barbey therefore preferred to land by the first blush of dawn, sacrificing preliminary naval gunfire (such as was available) to enhance surprise and permit a running start on the offload.

  “Uncle Dan” Barbey conducted all of his New Guinea landings without the luxury of carrier support—with one major exception. In April 1944 an unusually congenial agreement between Nimitz and MacArthur led to the temporary augmentation of Barbey’s ragtag amphibious force by a wealth of carriers, battleships, and transports loaned from the Pacific Fleet for Operation Reckless. This was MacArthur’s bold end run of several hundred miles to strike at the Japanese command and supply center near Hollandia, New Guinea.* Since such a movement would exceed the operating range of land-based tactical aircraft, MacArthur borrowed Marc Mitscher’s Task Force 58 and several escort carriers from Nimitz. Barbey suddenly commanded 217 ships—an embarrassment of riches. He even upgraded his flagship to a destroyer for the occasion.

  Operation Reckless succeeded handsomely. Barbey’s forces landed eighty thousand Army troops in simultaneous assaults at Humboldt Bay, Aitape, and Tanahmerah Bay. Japanese forces in the area, confounded by the sudden landing, fled into the jungles. Thousands of more resolute Imperial troops had been effectively bypassed and neutralized. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall complimented MacArthur, calling the operation “a model of strategic and tactical maneuver.”

  Mary Craddock Hoffman

  Hollandia indeed represented one of the most economical uses of amphibious power in the Pacific War. But here again, heavy congestion of supplies along the exposed beaches continued to represent the Achilles’ heel of amphibious operations. A lone Japanese bomber penetrated the screen at Humboldt Bay during the second night, dropped one stick of bombs amid the crowded stacks of ammunition and fuel along the narrow beachhead, and set fires that exploded and burned for four days—destroying the equivalent of twelve LST loads of critical supplies. The 125 casualties from this incident exceeded the total lost to enemy fire in securing the beachheads on D-Day.

  Amphibious troops and the “Gator Navy” had been wrestling with the problems of delivering combat cargo over the shore for a decade. Tinian’s signal success—the rare beachhead that never became a bottleneck—was more a reflection of an uncommon abundance of LVTs and DUKWs, plus northern Tinian’s open country inland, than any doctrinal breakthrough. As the amphibious war progressed, however, there developed a knowledgeable cadre of Navy beachmasters and landing force shore party professionals who took perverse pride in creating order out of chaos—the essence of amphibious logistics. Iwo Jima would provide their supreme test, but the body of knowledge was now steadily increasing.

  Ironically, the Marines saw their own original mission change significantly as the war progressed. After forty years of developing the capability of seizing advance fleet bases in support of a naval campaign, the Marines increasingly found themselves storming ashore to establish airfields in support of the strategic bombing campaign against Imperial Japan. The Marianas and Iwo Jima exemplified this new thrust. Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, thus became keenly interested in Marine amphibious expertise in the Pacific. By late November the first B-29s of the Twentieth Air Force would take off for Japan from the new airfields in the Marianas.

  The distinguishing characteristic of amphibious operations executed in the Central Pacific would remain the convergence of strategic and tactical offensives—General Vandegrift’s aptly described “assault from start to finish.” Such an emphasis on unrelenting assault meant heavy demands on shipping, intricate organizations, concentrated detailed planning, and complex tactical execution.

  These demands revealed a fundamental split between the tactics of the Army and the Marines once they crossed the high-water mark on the beaches. Army divisions, in general, made maximum use of supporting arms, preferring to pulverize Japanese strongholds with integrated firepower before ordering an infantry attack. Army commanders also proved methodical in sweeping their entire frontage as they advanced, leaving no pockets of resistance in their rear. The Marines, less endowed with organic supporting arms and more attuned to the spirit of momentum by their amphibious nature, preferred to charge ahead, accepting casualties and bypassing pockets, hustling for the far shore. The Army approach undeniably saved casualties. The Marine way saved time.

  The Navy favored any tactics that would expedite the assault, hasten the general unloading of landing force supplies, and permit an early departure from constricted waters of the task force. The Navy’s sense of desperate vulnerability during an amphibious assault—the apt metaphor of “one foot ashore, the other still in the water”—did not diminish throughout the course of the Pacific War. Indeed the Navy’s heaviest losses and closest encounters with disasters after Pearl Harbor occurred in and around amphibious beachheads: Savo Island in 1942; loss of the escort carrier Liscome Bay in 1943; Leyte in 1944; the kamikazes off Okinawa in 1945.

  The Japanese fleet submarine I-175 torpedoed the merchant-hulled escort carrier Liscome Bay off Makin Atoll during Operation Galvanic. The torpedoes caught the ship at sunrise, just as her aircraft began to spool-up for launch, all fully armed and fueled. The resulting explosions were terrific—Admiral Hill saw the smoke plume from Tarawa, ninety-five miles away—and the ship sank like a stone, taking 644 of her 959 officers and men to their deaths.

  Kelly Turner and Holland Smith held Maj. Gen. Ralph Smith and his 27th Di
vision partly responsible for this disaster. The Army National Guard outfit, engaged in their first combat, had taken nearly four days to subjugate the small Japanese garrison on Butaritari Island, thereby extending the requirement for the Liscome Bay and the other support ships to loiter in harm’s way. This resentment clearly influenced the Smith vs. Smith controversy at Saipan months later, but the criticism is a bit unfair. Losses to Japanese submarines in the Gilberts could well have been greater and in fact could have occurred days earlier. Admiral Koga dispatched nine long-range submarines to the Gilberts from the Carolines on 18 November, two days before D-Day at Tarawa and Makin. Every ship in Spruance’s fleet had been in jeopardy throughout the landings. In the eyes of the Navy, however, the loss of the Liscome Bay illustrated the imperative for unrelenting, aggressive tactics by the landing force—the Marine way, not the Army way. Nor did these adjectives always follow service lines; the Navy admired the rambunctious spirit displayed by the Army’s 77th Division at Guam, Leyte, and the offshore islands at Okinawa.

  For its part, the Navy now demonstrated an increased willingness to support amphibious assaults from dangerously close range. This had not been the case in the narrow waters of the Solomons. When Admiral Nimitz visited Guadalcanal at the height of the campaign in late September 1942, General Vandegrift complained about the tactical conservatism of the warships intended to support his Marines ashore: “Out here too many commanders have been far too leery about risking their ships.” Nimitz, who had survived the blemish of a court-martial as an ensign for running his destroyer aground in the Philippines, agreed that the preservation of a fleet-in-being would be meaningless if the United States lacked the naval power to win the protracted battle for Guadalcanal. He then placed “Bull” Halsey in command of the South Pacific Theater, and Vandegrift quickly had the support of a warrior who would risk every ship in his arsenal to support the troops ashore.