Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  Within a few minutes of the arrival of the Marines on the leftward beaches, every one of the commanders of the four assault battalions had become a casualty. Lieutenant Colonel Raymond Murray of the Second Battalion, Sixth, was so seriously wounded he had to be evacuated. Jim Crowe was also badly hit.

  The big flamboyant redhead, now a lieutenant colonel, became separated from his men as his Second Battalion, Eighth landed by mistake on another battalion’s beach. At half-past nine he moved along the shore with his runner, Corporal William Donitaley. They were fired at by enemy snipers.

  Crowe slumped to the earth struck by a bullet which pierced his left lung below the heart and smashed a rib as it came out. Donitaley fell thrashing in a bush, his left side punctured near the kidney. He thought he was dying.

  “I’m hit pretty bad, sir,” Donitaley gasped. “I guess I’m a goner.”

  “Goddam it,” Crowe spluttered. “Don’t talk like that, boy.” The act of speaking had caused hot air to puff from Crowe’s punctured lung, and he felt blood continuing to gush from his side. Jim Crowe also thought he was a goner.

  “I guess they got me too, boy,” he choked.

  “Goddam it, sir,” said Donitaley. “Don’t talk like that.”

  They lay in the bushes, aware of the grim comedy of their exchange, their wounds multiplying under showers of shrapnel thrown down by Japanese artillery treebursts, until they were found nearly an hour later and brought back to an aid station. A corpsman and Doctor Otto Jantan attempted to fix them up, but Japanese shellfire killed the corpsman and wounded the doctor. Crowe was taken out to a transport, where a young surgeon began to cut away his blood-stained clothing.

  “Before you do anything else, Doc,” Crowe said, “cut off that hanging thumbnail.”

  “Be quiet, Colonel,” the doctor hissed. “You’re a very sick man”.

  “Sick man, hell!” Crowe croaked. “Cut off that thumbnail. It’s damned annoying.”

  The doctor obliged, probably because he wished to humor a man who hadn’t much chance to live. But Crowe did live—and his battalion was re-formed by that soft-voiced Major William Chamberlin who was his very opposite. Chamberlin’s men wheeled to their right to strike south at Afetna Point, blasting away with shotguns issued especially for close-in fighting. They knocked out the antiboat gun and also reduced those batteries which covered the reef channel where the tanks had been held up.

  But by nightfall Afetna Point had not fallen. It was a Japanese pocket almost in the center of the beachhead.

  About 1,200 yards behind it, near Lake Susupe, the “armored pigs” were engaging enemy tanks for the first time.

  Sergeants Ben Livesey and Onel Dickens had halted the amtanks they commanded on the crest of a little, tree-shaded hill. It was ten in the morning and the men were hungry. They jumped out, heated their cans of C-rations, opened them and began to eat.

  They heard firing.

  Below their hill three Japanese tanks were rolling toward a trio of Marine amtracks mired in the muck of Lake Susupe swamp. The Japanese were between the amtankers and the trapped Marines.

  The amtankers jumped back into their armored pigs, buttoned down the turrets and went rocking down the hill and up the road on the Japanese tanks’ tail. The Japanese wheeled. One of them stalled.

  The 75 in Dickens’ tank roared. Flame gushed from the stalled enemy. Then Livesey’s 75 spoke. The middle tank jumped and spun off the road. Side by side, Livesey and Dickens moved up on the remaining tank and shot its treads away. The amtank turrets popped open. The Marines jumped out with rifles in hand, and the surviving Japanese crewmen were put to death.

  With the Marines they had rescued, Livesey and Dickens returned to their hillcrest. For the rest of the day, the Lake Susupe region was left alone.

  Back on the beaches the accuracy of Japanese artillery fire was crowding medical aid stations with casualties. Never before had the Marines encountered such deadly artillery fire, and with about 8,000 men put ashore by nine o’clock in the morning, there was a plenitude of targets for the enemy gunners.

  Within the Fourth Division’s zone, men dug foxholes to shelter the wounded. One man was brought in with his leg almost blown off between hip and knee. A battalion surgeon amputated it without bothering to remove him from his stretcher. Two more stretcher cases came in, one a private, the other an old-time sergeant. The private said he had to relieve himself. A corpsman seized the sergeant’s helmet and handed it to the private. It was the ultimate violation of authority and the sergeant watched in helpless fury, raging:

  “That I should live to see the day when a private should do that in my helmet!”

  They were taken, both violated and violator, out to the reef and there transferred to landing boats. From there they went to hospital transports already stuffed with wounded and preparing to pull up anchors and sail away. By nightfall the Second Division alone had 238 men killed and 1,022 wounded -and of 355 reported missing few would be found alive. The Fourth Division, though not so badly hit, had already exceeded its casualty rate for the Roi-Namur campaign.

  But by nightfall there were something like 20,000 Marines ashore on Saipan. They held a beachhead about four miles wide from its northern down to its southern flank and a mile at its deepest inland or eastern penetration. Within the perimeter, which had both flanks bent back to the sea, were tanks and artillery, as well as Generals Watson and Schmidt, both of whom came ashore in the afternoon.

  However, neither division had reached its first day’s objective. The Afetna Point pocket still stood between both divisions at the sea, and there was another bulge inland in the unconquered Lake Susupe region.

  Among the men, the veterans had ceased comparing Saipan to other battles and were rating it on its own merits. It was clear that Saipan was going to be a thing of dirt and strain, of heat and thirst, of clouds of flies, of clanging steel and splintering rock. It would be a point-by-point advance against an invisible, dogged, slowly retreating enemy—a foe who had already mystified them by whisking away his dead.

  So they lay down that night in the ruins of the sugar refinery with which the fast battleships had had such aimless sport-failing even to kill its single occupant, that valorous Japanese soldier who hid in its chimney to call down artillery on the enemy Marines-or they lay down in the muck and stench of pigpens and chicken runs, on the hot smoldering earth of the blackened canebrakes, under the guns of Mount Fina Susa, and beneath the bursting, crashing glare of their own star-shells, illumination so brilliant that it seemed to make the bougainvillaea trees things of airy flame.

  Opposite them the enemy was stirring. The counterattack was preparing. The men of Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito were in high spirits. For everyone in the Marianas seemed to know that the Combined Fleet was coming to the rescue. Admiral Nagumo had told General Saito so. As far away as Guam, Lieutenant Rai Imanishi was writing in his diary: “The Combined Fleet is about to engage the enemy in decisive combat…. The enemy has already begun landing on Saipan. Truly, we are on the threshold of momentous occurrences. Now is the time for me to offer my life for the great cause and be a barrier against the enemy advancing in the Pacific Ocean.”

  Although he would have to wait a month or more for his chance on Guam, Lieutenant Imanishi was right. The Combined Fleet was indeed coming. Admiral Soemu Toyoda had bitten hard on the Saipan bait.

  3

  On the morning of June 15 the word of the Saipan invasion was flashed by Nagumo to Admiral Toyoda at his headquarters on Japan’s Inland Sea. At five minutes to nine that morning, Admiral Toyoda sent this message to all his commanders:

  The Combined Fleet will attack the enemy in the Marianas area and annihilate the invasion force.

  Five minutes later, suddenly mindful that it was close to the thirty-ninth anniversary of Admiral Togo’s destruction of the Russian fleet at Tsushima, Toyoda bethought himself of the immortal Togo’s words on that occasion and flashed them to the Combined Fleet:

  The
fate of the Empire rests on this one battle. Every man is expected to do his utmost.

  It was, to the Japanese mind, the tocsin of total battle. It brought the carriers of Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa up from Tawi Tawi to the narrow waters of San Bernardino Strait, bound for their Philippine Sea rendezvous with a battleship force led by Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki. It brought the Japanese fleet out fighting for the first time since Guadalcanal.

  Exhilarated by the great news, the Japanese on Saipan attacked all along the line. From dark until dawn there was hardly a moment when enemy shells were not falling on the Marines or the enemy was not probing for the weak spot against which he would launch his full fury. At about eight o’clock on the night of June 15, the Japanese thought they had found a hole on the front held by the command-riddled Second Battalion, Sixth.

  At that time, the Japanese began moving down the coastal road from Garapan. They came in columns of platoons, riding tanks, trucks, anything that rolled-coming with the customary clamor of a traveling circus. At ten o’clock they were close enough to attack. Flags were unfurled. Samurai sabers flashed and glinted in the moonlight. Someone made a speech. A bugle blared—and the Japanese charged.

  A Marine officer picked up a telephone and spoke two words:

  “Illumination requested.”

  It came so swiftly it stunned the Japanese. They had not calculated on the American warships still cruising up and down the west coast. They found themselves outlined from their puttee-taped ankles to the round tops of their mushroom helmets, and they were rapidly cut to pieces in a horizontal hail of bullets, cannister shot, mortar and bazooka shell fragments. They broke and fell back, and then the naval gunfire and Marine artillery burst among them.

  The counterattack downroad from Garapan cost General Saito 700 soldiers. It also cost him Garapan, for in the morning General Watson asked the warships and planes to flatten this enemy staging place.

  General Saito’s plans for driving a wedge into the gap between the Marine divisions was also doomed. Some 200 Japanese who emerged from the gloom of Lake Susupe and struck for the Charan Kanoa pier collided with the men of Lieutenant Colonel John Cosgrove’s Third Battalion, Twenty-third. They were destroyed. So also was a three-tank attack launched down the Garapan road just before daylight. June 16 dawned with the Marines still holding what they had seized the day before and preparing to expand it. That same day Admiral Spruance hauled back on the line holding the Saipan bait.

  Spruance knew that Ozawa had sortied from Tawi Tawi. Throughout the afternoon and night of D-Day he had been receiving submarine reports of the Japanese approach. At half-past four the sub Flying Fish sighted the Japanese carriers debouching from San Bernardino Strait into the Philippine Sea, making dead west for Saipan. An hour later Seahorse spotted Ugaki’s battleships racing north to the rendezvous area.

  On the morning of June 16, Spruance conferred with Admiral Turner and General Holland Smith aboard Turner’s flagship Rocky Mount. He ordered Mitscher’s Task Force 58 to intercept the Japanese, postponed the Guam invasion, promised Smith only two more days of unloading operations, launched prolonged air searches for the enemy, and alerted the old battleships to make nocturnal patrols 25 miles west of Saipan to block any Japanese ships which might elude Mitscher.

  In the meantime the escort carriers would continue to give the Marines on Saipan aerial cover and Smith would commit the 27th Division that very day. The conquest of the island was to be pushed forward as rapidly as possible.

  Satisfied, Spruance prepared to return to his own flagship Indianapolis. Smith stopped him.

  “Do you think the Japs will turn and run?”

  “No,” Spruance said. “Not now. They’re out after big game. If they’d wanted something easy, they’d have gone after MacArthur’s operation at Biak. But the attack on the Marianas is too great a challenge for the Japanese Navy to ignore.”

  That attack was going forward with the Second Battalion, Eighth, and the orphan First Battalion, Twenty-ninth Marines, slugging steadily through the Afetna Point pocket. By noon they had cleared it and secured Charan Kanoa pier.

  On the right, the Fourth Division’s artillery fired shell for shell with the Japanese while General Schmidt marshaled his regiments for a noon attack. With 15 batteries of the Fourteenth Marines ashore, it should have been the pushover that artillery duels with the Japanese had always been. But it was not. Four batteries were knocked out, although the ingenuity of the Division Ordnance Company had them back firing before dusk. One howitzer named Belching Beauty took a direct hit which killed or wounded every member of the crew but one. Belching Beauty was repaired and firing an hour later. Two others were blown to bits, and the ordnance man gathered up the pieces and made a new gun from them.

  Gradually, the Marine artillery asserted its superiority. One by one, the enemy guns were silenced, the last of their rounds killing Lieutenant Colonel Maynard Schultz while he waited at the Twenty-fourth Regiment’s CP to receive instructions for his First Battalion’s attack.

  At half-past twelve the Fourth Division moved out. It slugged ahead slowly. The battalion commanders began calling for tanks. As the Shermans moved up to the front, the Japanese 75’s erupted again.

  The platoon of Shermans led by Gunnery Sergeant Bob McCard ran into the concentrated fire of an entire battery of 75’s. Almost instantly, McCard’s tank was cut off from the others and crippled by the converging shells of four enemy guns. McCard battled back with the tank’s 75 and machine guns. But the Japanese 75’s had the range now. The Sherman was done for.

  “Take off!” McCard roared at his crew. “Out the escape hatch!”

  One by one, the crewmen lowered themselves through the hatch in the tank’s floor, scuttling to safety while McCard hurled grenades from the opened turret. Machine-gun fire raked the tank, wounding McCard. The Japanese charged. McCard seized a machine gun and faced them a second time alone. He shot 16 of them before they killed him.

  The other Marine tanks returned. The stand which won McCard the Medal of Honor had also won the time to coordinate the attack. It went forward, slowly, but by dusk the Marines’ lines were firm all along the beachhead. The Fourth Division had a penetration of 2,000 yards across its 4,000-yard front. The Second Division had contented itself with cleaning out the Afetna Point gap, with patrolling, and with consolidating its own left flank facing north toward Garapan. It was well. At dusk, while the 27th Division’s 165th Infantry began to come ashore, Lieutenant General Saito ordered the first night tank attack of the Pacific War.

  It would strike the left flank sector held by the Jones boy named Bill.

  “He may be only twenty-seven, but he’s the best damn battalion commander in this division-or any other division.”

  That was what Colonel Jim Riseley of the Sixth Marines thought of the commander of his First Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Jones, the Marine Corps’ youngest field commander and one so at home in battle he could tell his men, “I’d rather command a battalion in combat than sleep with Hedy Lamarr.” Jones was the brother of Captain Jim Jones, whose Recon Boys were then assigned the unglorious mission of guarding the Corps CP in the rear, and he delighted in warning his officers that they must stand at all costs, “because if my brother gets hurt, Mother will never forgive me.” This night of June 16-17 they would have to stand against the full brunt of Colonel Hideki Goto’s 9th Tank Regiment.

  Up in the blackened rubble that was once the city of Garapan, Colonel Goto unbuttoned the turret of his regiment’s leading tank. He stood erect. He raised his saber and flourished it over his head. The turrets of the following tanks came open. The commanders, among them that Tokuzo Matsuya who had written so fiercely in his diary two days before, stood erect. They flourished their sabers.

  Colonel Goto struck the side of his tank a resounding clank. His junior officers spurred their metal-mounts forward with similar saber-slaps. The turrets were closed.

  The 9th Tank Regiment swept forward.

  “Colone
l,” said Captain Claude Rollen, “it sounds like a tank attack coming. Request illumination.”

  “Right,” said Lieutenant Colonel Jones, and passed the request for illumination back to Colonel Riseley. Then he notified a medium tank company to stand by and got bazookamen from A Company moving over to Captain Rollen’s sector.

  That was at half-past three.

  Fifteen minutes later the squeaking, rattling Japanese mediums—the “kitchen sinks” as the Marines called them-burst into Rollen’s sector in two waves.

  The first wave carried riflemen or light machine-gunners sprawled on the long trunk of the engine compartment or hanging on to the guide rails like firemen. Crewmen led the tanks forward on foot, although here and there a commander stood erect in an open turret, shouting orders and flashing his saber in the crashing glare of the star-shells. Behind the second wave of tanks the bulk of Colonel Ogawa’s 136th Infantry Regiment came trotting forward.

  The tanks drove into a roaring cauldron of explosions and flashing light. As they were hit and set afire they illuminated other tanks farther back. Sometimes the tanks to the rear stopped. An officer jumped out, waved his saber, made a speech, and climbed back in again. A bugle blared. The tanks came on and the Marine bazookamen tore them apart. Sharp-shooters such as Pfc. Herbert Hodges had seven rockets for his bazooka, enough for him to knock out seven tanks. Private Bob Reed got four with four shots, and then, running out of ammunition, he got a fifth by jumping aboard it and dropping in a grenade.

  Some of the enemy tanks got in. Two of them rolled over a pair of 60-millimeter mortar positions. Another came up on Captain Rollen, and a rifleman-rider fired just as Rollen attached a grenade to his carbine. The bullet detonated the grenade-and Rollen fell, pinked with shrapnel, his eardrums shattered.

  Captain Thomas came up to take his place, the same Norman Thomas who had held off the Jap banzai on Tarawa. A fourth tank raced up. Its riders shot Thomas dead. They turned to take Sergeant Dean Squires under fire.