Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  Saipan-Tinian gave Marines first contact with civilian populations. Most of Japanese civilians killed themselves, but native Chamorros welcomed the Marines. Here, Sergeant Federico Claveria gives candy to Chamorran child inside internment stockade.

  Guam in the Marianas—where Third Marine Division and First Marine Brigade landed July 21, 1944—was another backbreaking fight for men such as this machine gunner weighed down with his weapon’s tripod.

  Soap and water can be among the fairest fruits of victory: Marine riflemen on Guam wash island’s grit off their bodies after fighting is over.

  Tiny Peleliu was obscured by smoke and fire of American bombs and shells when First Marine Division assaulted it September 15, 1944.

  Marines were immediately pinned down on hot white coral beaches, for Japanese had merely “gone to ground” during bombardment and returned to their guns after it lifted.

  A Marine gives his wounded buddy a drink from his canteen. Sometimes temperatures on Peleliu were more than 115 degrees and many men fell of heat exhaustion while attacking what was, in effect, a huge coral rock honeycombed with fortified caves.

  America seemed to have everything at Iwo Jima, and these men in new armored amtracks, which could discharge them from the rear, were smiling and confident the morning of February 19, 1945.

  But at Iwo—a mere eight square miles of volcanic ash—Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (inset) had prepared the most formidable position in world history. An hour after Marines began landings on beaches below Mount Suribachi (rear) the Japanese began hurling shells into them and the bloodiest, fiercest fight in Marine Corps history was on.

  A man always fights alone. This Marine was shot in the head by one of Iwo’s numerous and accurate snipers.

  The sight of a man helping his wounded buddy to the rear became common on Iwo Jima. Many lives were saved by transfusions of whole blood within a few hundred yards of the fighting.

  There were two flag-raisings on Mount Suribachi, and this photograph (perhaps never published before) tells their story. A small flag went up first to signal the fall of Suribachi, highest point on Iwo. But it could not be seen, so a second, larger flag went up. The second raising became the most famous photograph of World War Two, and here it appears in the right background while the camera focuses on the lowering of the first flag, left.

  At Okinawa, the largest amphibious assault in history, the Marines had fully developed close air support tactics. This Corsair sends a string of rockets flashing toward a Japanese position.

  Okinawa’s sea wall didn’t have the terrors of Tarawa’s, although these Marines weren’t sure of that as they scrambled over it on D-Day morning of April 1, 1945.

  The Okinawans were in pitiful straits when the Americans landed, and the Marines who found relatively little fighting in their sector-the island’s northern hal f-spent much of their time caring for them.

  Okinawans place their ancestors’ bones in these hillside tombs, but the Japanese turned them into pillboxes—as the Marines learned when they came south to help the Army divisions crack the main line of resistance.

  This Marine is hurling a satchel charge into an enemy cave. Resistance began crumbling after Marines captured Shuri Castle in May.

  The Tenth Army was led by Army Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr. (left), but after he was killed by Japanese artillery, command passed to Marine Lieutenant General Roy Geiger (right). Geiger, who had been at Guadalcanal, had the honor of announcing the fall of Okinawa, the last battle, on June 22, 1945.

  The last Marine landing of World War Two was a peaceful one, as men came ashore to accept the surrender of Japanese forts near Tokyo.

  It was a tactic used at Tarawa, when Julian Smith had placed artillery on Bairiki to support troops advancing on Betio. At Roi-Namur, as well as at Kwajalein Islet, it would be used for that reason and also to force a passage into the lagoon itself. For even the transports were going to go inside the lagoon. Unlike Tarawa, where the Marines were boated outside the reef, the Americans were going to sail inside Kwajalein Atoll already boated in the bowels of LST’s. To enter the lagoon at Roi-Namur—Roi, the air base on the west or left, joined by a causeway to Namur, the supply dump on the right —the Marines must first seize a pair of islets to either side of the lagoon passage below or southwest of Roi.

  At eight o’clock in the morning of January 31, even as Mr. Madison of Majuro was regaling the Recon Boys with palm toddy, Rear Admiral Richard Conolly ordered the bombardment of these tiny specks of coral to commence. After the naval guns came the carrier planes, after them came the rocket boats swooshing their missiles aloft like flights of arrows, and next the wallowing amphibian tanks—the “armored pigs”—striking the seaward side and blasting away with cannon. A few minutes before ten, the Marines of the Division Scout Company and the First Battalion, Twenty-fifth, were churning ashore.

  Most of the few-score Japanese had killed themselves. There were others to be killed during a swift mop-up on both islets, but squalls and a wild surf turned out to be more of an obstacle to the landings than the enemy. Before eleven o’clock Lieutenant Colonel Clarence O’Donnell was able to radio that the islets were secure. An hour later artillery began to come ashore. At the same time minesweepers approached both channels. Moving slowly, almost as though they were butting the mines aside, the stubby little vessels entered the passages while carrier planes swooped over Roi-Namur’s lagoon beaches to lay down a covering smokescreen. Slowly, like the rising thunder of a storm, the fury of fire issuing from three battleships, five cruisers and 19 destroyers grew around Roi-Namur. Fires were leaping from Namur’s lagoon beaches under the pounding of Tennessee and Colorado. To the west Maryland was hurling steel and fire at Roi and its airstrip. But Admiral Conolly wanted Maryland to make sure of Roi’s blockhouses.

  “Move really close in,” he radioed Maryland.

  The Marines were delighted. This was what they had wanted at Tarawa. Mighty old Maryland was less than a mile offshore. Her spotter could see the targets. Admiral Conolly had earned his nickname. Henceforth he would be known to Marines as “Close-in Conolly.”

  The men of the Underwater Demolition Teams were returning to the destroyer Schley, reporting their work successful. More Marines were moving across the lagoon to take a trio of islets just below Namur. They were the Second and Third Battalions, Twenty-fifth, led by Lieutenant Colonels Lewis Hudson and Justice (Jumpin’ Joe) Chambers. They seized the islets. Artillery was brought ashore here too.

  All was in readiness for the next day.

  In the morning four battalions of land-based artillery began firing, the bombardment ships hurled the last of 2,655 tons of steel into two islets not a mile-square apiece and the carrier planes bombed and strafed once more. As one Marine cried out exultantly: “This time we’ve got what it takes! This time we’ve got everything!”

  Everything, as he would soon discover, would have to include the rifle slung over his shoulder.

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  It was a bright pink dawn, but neither Roi nor Namur could be seen in it. Only the narrow white lines of their beaches were visible, with here and there a jagged coconut stump sticking out above the smoke, flames, dust and flying rubble.

  The skies became overcast. There were squalls. The lagoon water was choppy and Marines became nauseous in their amtracks. They cursed the hold-up caused by the novelty of bringing the LST’s into the lagoon. They had been scheduled to attack at ten o’clock, but now they would not make the 4,000-yard run to shore until twelve o’clock.

  They should have been thankful for the delay. By the time they hit the beaches, not a single Japanese officer of consequence was alive to direct the defense of either island. Even as the amtracks formed in line and swept shoreward, a 1000-pound bomb fell on the Namur bomb shelter holding the seven senior officers who had survived the bombardment which killed Admiral Yamada and most of his staff three days ago. It was now every man for himself.

  The Twenty-third Marines
landed on Roi at exactly noon and raced rapidly inland against almost no opposition. Seventeen minutes later Colonel Louis Jones was jubilantly signaling Major General Schmidt: “This is a pip! Give us the word and we’ll take the island.” But Schmidt ordered Jones to halt and reorganize while warships shelled the northern half of Roi.

  At four o’clock, with tanks leading the way, the Twenty-third swept forward again. A hundred separate skirmishes erupted. Dazed and leaderless, the Japanese fought singly or in small groups. They hid in drainage ditches and fired into the rear of the advancing Marines. They made desperate stands in ruined pillboxes. At one of these Pfc. Richard Anderson pulled the pin of his grenade to throw and the missile slipped from his hands. There was no time to retrieve it. It had been his fault and he compensated for the error by smothering the grenade with his body and was killed. The men whose lives he had saved moved forward.

  They raced across Roi’s airfield until at six o’clock they had come to the northern beaches on the sea. There they found an enemy trench filled with dead soldiers. The Japanese had placed their rifle muzzles under their chins and kicked the triggers with their big toes. They lay there in precise rows, as though they had been obedient to the last, killing themselves on order.

  Roi had fallen to the Twenty-third Marines, but it had also fallen to the bombs and shells of the invasion fleet, to the howitzers set up on the lower islets. The horrible efficiency of that preinvasion bombardment was nowhere more evident than in the desolation of Roi’s three-strip airfield.

  Hundreds of Japanese lay sprawled around it, their bodies horribly mutilated. They were caught in attitudes of flight as though they had been cut down while running for safety. They lay in huge shellholes and in ruined blockhouses. Sheets of corrugated iron were strewn everywhere. Gaunt, denuded concrete pilings stuck out of the ground in rows and the buildings they had held together were heaped about them in rubble. Japanese aircraft littered the airstrips like broken giant birds. There was nothing left, only a handful of doves cooing in a dovecote atop an unharmed radio station, a few little red chickens dashing noisily about, a pig nosing the ruins, and a big white foolish goose which had escaped the invaders’ shellfire only to land in their cooking pot.

  Roi was the quickest conquest of the Pacific, but across the causeway of Namur there was a real battle going on.

  “Okay, you liberty-hounds,” Sergeant Pappy Meeks had bellowed, “let’s go ashore!”

  Meeks’s platoon had gone charging up Namur’s lagoon beach, along with all the other assault platoons of the Twenty-fourth Marines, and had lost contact with headquarters almost immediately. Major General Schmidt’s staff had to depend for information on a Douglas dive-bomber which roamed the skies about the battlefield with a major named Charles Duchein in its rear-gunner’s seat.

  Shortly before noon, immediately after the bombardment lifted, Major Duchein reported Japanese soldiers crossing the causeway from Roi to Namur. At half-past twelve he reported that the Twenty-fourth Marines had landed successfully on Namur, but were running into opposition from pillboxes and blockhouses that were still standing.

  Shortly before one o’clock Major Duchein peered down at Namur’s eastern shore to see a Marine assault team moving against what seemed to be a giant blockhouse.

  But the building was used as a warehouse, and it was stuffed with torpedo warheads.

  Lieutenant Saul Stein led his men up cautiously to the big blockhouse on Namur. One of his Marines slipped forward and placed a shaped charge against the side of the building. He ran back and ducked.

  The blast tore a hole in the side of the building.

  Out the hole, out exits suddenly flung wide, came streams of Japanese soldiers.

  Lieutenant Stein’s Marines were too surprised to open fire. They were not bewildered. They had heard the Japanese were crazy.

  “Throw in some satchel charges,” Stein ordered.

  They were thrown in.

  “Great God Almighty!” Major Duchein roared.

  He thought he had seen the island disappear, and his plane had shot up into the air like a rocket. He peered into the dense clouds of smoke billowing in all directions below him, and he yelled again to Headquarters: “The whole damn island’s blown upl”

  “Are you hurt?” Headquarters inquired.

  “Wait a minute,” Duchein replied, still trying to see land beneath the smoke. “Stand by a minute.”

  “Is your plane damaged? Where are you?”

  Duchein could hear debris rattling off the bomber’s fuselage, but he breathed with relief for he had seen land beneath the smoke, and he answered the question.

  “I’m about a thousand feet higher than I was. But the island’s still there.”

  It was, but the warehouse that had held tons and tons of torpedo warheads had vanished completely. Its fragmented remains were still falling on those Marines who crouched in shellholes and craters wondering what had caused that unbelievable rocking roar. They crouched in an inky darkness while whole heads of palm trees, chunks of concrete, bomb and torpedo casings fell from the skies. It seemed an endless rain, and then the smoke drifted away and where there had been a warehouse there was now only a great crater filled with water.

  Lieutenant Stein and most of his men were dead, though one man who had been blown 150 feet out into the lagoon was found unhurt. There were 40 Marines killed by the explosion and another 60 wounded. A half-hour later there were more casualties when the Japanese blew up two other blockhouses.

  At four o’clock the Twenty-fourth Marines were attacking again, and the Japanese were fighting back.

  On the left flank a pillbox pinned down a platoon of Marines led by Lieutenant John Power. The men tried to work up to it to lob in grenades but were driven back. Power charged and was hit in the belly. Covering the wound with his left hand, firing his carbine with the right, receiving two more wounds, he completed his charge. He routed the enemy and fell to his knees, dying. With Pfc. Anderson, Lieutenant Power would receive a posthumous Medal of Honor.

  Now the Marines were moving through terrain which made Namur so much more difficult than Roi. The tanks were stalled by fallen trees and logs, and were laid open to the attacks of Japanese who jumped on them to drop grenades through the visual ports. Captain James Denig and his gunner were killed that way, although a BARman named Howard Smith shot down five of Denig’s assailants and risked flaming gasoline and exploding shells in an attempt to save him. The Marine attack slowed down with the approach of night and the order came to dig in.

  “Stand by for a counterattack,” came the word.

  It came in a clear pale moonlit night and the Marines fought individually to contain it. Sergeant Frank Tucker lay behind a tree and shot 38 Japanese dead, firing ammunition brought to him by Pfc. Stephen Hopkins. Tucker received bullets through his helmet, his canteen, his field glasses, while Hopkins received the rifle shot that killed him. Corpsman James Kirby lay in a shellhole between the lines to care for a dozen wounded Marines, saving the life of Pfc. Richard Sorenson, who had fallen on a grenade to save his buddies and would now live to receive a Medal of Honor. Nineteen-year-old Pfc. Jack Brown was killed while his father, Corporal Earl Brown, survived. And then the medium tanks Jezebel, Jenny Lee, Joker and Juarez rolled up to the front at half-past five in the morning with machine guns and 75’s flashing flame and the Japanese attack was broken.

  With the full light of day, these four tanks led a counterattack. This was the final lunge which brought death and a posthumous Medal of Honor to Lieutenant Colonel Aquilla Dyess as he put himself at the front of his battalion. The drive ended on Namur’s northern shores at some time before noon of February 2 as the tanks rolled up to the edge of a bomb crater filled with Japanese. Corporal Michael Giba looked through Jenny Lee’s periscope and saw an inflamed Japanese eye. The enemy soldier had jumped on Jenny Lee, draped himself over its turret and now he was contemplating Corporal Giba. The Japanese did not seem to know what to do. Corporal Giba reached for a wea
pon, and the Japanese produced a grenade, pulled its pin, tapped it against the turret to arm it—and then lay down on it.

  Jenny Lee jumped. Giba heard bullets clattering against Jenny Lee’s sides. The other tanks were shooting the Japs off his turret. Then all four of them lumbered down into the crater.

  It was all over on Roi-Namur. In two more days it was all over at Kwajalein Islet to the south. Eleven days later the Fourth Marine Division sailed east to its new base of Maui in Hawaii, a veteran outfit. The Fourth had secured its objective in twenty-four hours, had lost 190 dead and 547 wounded—and had buried 3,472 enemy troops while taking 264 prisoners.

  The camp at Maui was not far from Camp Tarawa, where the Second Marine Division was renewing itself for combat, a battle which the Fourth would join and find more fierce than this. For Admiral Nimitz had his desired bases in the Central Marshalls and American air and sea power were truly neutralizing the other atolls of the chain. Soon the vast and various American panoply would strike west beyond the Marshalls.

  But not before the seizure of Eniwetok—“The Land between East and West.”

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  Eniwetok was truly a dividing land. The Micronesians had found it so in their long canoe journeys to and from the Carolines in the west and the Gilberts-Marshalls in the east. It had been a stopping place, what the logistics of modern war call a staging area.