Strong Men Armed
Page 35
But Squires had already blown off the head of the tank’s commander. He followed through by tossing a satchel charge in the open turret, finishing both tank and riders.
A fifth Japanese tank penetrated as far back as Colonel Riseley’s command post. The commander of the Sixth Regiment had been sitting on a tree stump, smoking a cigar while he watched the battle.
The tank rattled closer. Colonel Riseley removed his cigar.
“Son,” he called to his regimental clerk, “get me a bazooka.”
Before the man could obey, a Marine half-track clattered up on the tank and set it aflame with its first shell. Thereafter the half-tracks roved like wolves among the Japanese tanks. Each time they fired, a tank burned—until close to 30 had been knocked out. The others fled, and the last of these was sighted going up a distant hill. Its turret could be seen moving among a cluster of houses. The Marines gave the range to an offshore destroyer.
The destroyer fired 20 salvos and the tank burned for the rest of the day—sending up a cloud of oily smoke to mark the limit of the battleground where General Saito had lost another 700 foot soldiers as well as Colonel Goto and most of the 9th Tank Regiment he commanded.
Tokuzo Matsuya had not been killed. He had survived to fill his diary with another lament: “The remaining tanks in our regiment make a total of 12. Even if there are not tanks, we will fight hand to hand. I have resolved that, if I see the enemy, I will take out my sword and slash, slash, slash at him as long as I last, thus ending my life of twenty-four years.”
It was no boast but a prediction, and by the morning of the third day there were already 3,500 Marine casualties to give it force. June 17 brought more than 500 more casualties in a slow, gouging attack which extended the beachhead north about a thousand yards and up to 2,000 yards east or inland. The inland successes, however, also served to lengthen the Lake Susupe bulge between divisions. The Japanese had hidden in Susupe’s marshes, and the Marines who went in after them with heavy machine guns and mortars sank up to their waists in muck. It would be many days before Lake Susupe was cleared.
On the right or southern front the Fourth Division’s gains were followed by the entry of the 165th Infantry on the Marine right flank. The 165th would attack Aslito Airfield in southern Saipan the following day.
On the extreme edge of the left or northern flank, the Second Marines under Colonel Walter Stuart moved cautiously upcoast in a column of battalions until a point 1,000 yards below Garapan had been reached. They were to sit there until southern Saipan had been cleaned out.
Out on the ocean Kelly Turner was already taking the transports and cargo ships away from Saipan to empty blue seas many, many miles to the south and east. There they joined all the ships and men of the Guam invasion force, circling, circling, circling, to the extreme disgust of the troops, until word arrived of the victory or defeat of Mitscher’s Task Force 58.
And at a point about 500 miles west of the Philippines, the fleets of Admiral Ozawa and Ugaki rendezvoused and refueled, and were now streaking east for Saipan, their scout planes conducting searches many hundreds of miles before and around them, hunting for the American fleet.
Tracking the Japanese for Admiral Spruance was a submarine called Cavalla. She was making her first cruise. She had sighted Ozawa’s carriers astern at dusk. Commander Herman Kossler had quickly turned tail and put 15,000 yards between them and Cavalla. It turned dark, but Kossler could still see the vast silhouette of a monster carrier.
“Christ!” Kossler swore. “It looks like the Empire State Building.”
Then Kossler had been forced to take Cavalla down. She submerged 100 feet and Kossler and his men tried to count the screws of the ships passing overhead in a half-hour-long procession. They counted 15, but Kossler thought that was too low.
Cavalla surfaced and got off her report to Spruance. She went down again for two hours. When she surfaced, shortly before midnight, she had lost contact.
On Saipan in the early morning of June 18 the Japanese had received a message from Premier Hideki Tojo. It said:
Because the fate of the Japanese Empire depends on the result of your operation, you must inspire the spirit of the officers and men and to the very end continue to destroy the enemy gallantly and persistently. Thus alleviate the anxiety of our Emperor.
Back flashed the message of Colonel Takuji Suzuki, the 43rd Division’s chief of staff. It said:
Have received your honorable Imperial words and we are grateful for boundless magnanimity of Imperial favor. By becoming the bulwark of the Pacific with 10,000 deaths we hope to requite the Imperial favor.
At daylight, Lieutenant General Saito began burning his secret documents preparatory to moving his headquarters farther north from the American invaders even then breaking out of their beachhead.
By the night of July 18 the Fourth Marine Division had struck straight across the island to the shores of Magicienne Bay—“Magazine Bay” as it would be forever called—while beneath them the 27th Division’s 165th Infantry had overrun Aslito Airfield.
All was gradually shaping up for the drive to the north planned by Lieutenant General Howlin’ Mad Smith, who had set up headquarters at Charan Kanoa the day before. Smith now had three divisions on Saipan and he hoped to attack to the north on a three-division, cross-island front. He already had seen to the emplacement of his corps artillery—30 155-millimeter “long toms” and howitzers which would fire in support of the assault-but he would not launch the clean-up drive until Mount Tapotchau in the center of the island was seized.
Cavalla was going down again. A night-flying Japanese plane had sighted the American sub and Commander Kossler was submerging. It was three o’clock in the morning of June 19.
At seven o’clock Cavalla was up again-but once more an enemy plane spotted her and drove her down. Something was stirring. Kossler could guess it from the number of enemy planes abroad. At ten o’clock he brought Cavalla up. Again the Japanese planes menaced him.
Cavalla went down. Kossler decided to wait fifteen minutes….
Albacore was cruising at periscope depth and Commander J. W. Blanchard was peering into the glass.
He started. There was a big carrier, a cruiser and the tops of other ships about seven miles away—and that carrier was big! It was Taiho, the carrier Commander Kossler had first sighted and the biggest flattop that Japan was able to float. She was 33,000 tons, brand-new, and she flew the eight-rayed, single-banded flag of Admiral Ozawa. She was launching planes, for Ozawa’s attack on the Americans was already begun.
Commander Blanchard retracted his periscope and made plans to attack. He calculated the range and ordered a spread of six torpedoes prepared. Then something went wrong with the torpedo data computer. The “Correct Solution” light refused to flash—and Taiho was fast moving out of range.
Blanchard upped periscope and fired by sight.
Then he sent Albacore plunging down deep and awaited the arrival of both the enemy destroyers and the sound of a torpedo explosion.
They came swiftly-three destroyers and one great explosion.
Blanchard was disappointed. He could never hope to sink the biggest enemy carrier he had ever seen with a single torpedo.
The quarter-hour had passed and Cavalla was up to periscope depth.
There were four planes on the starboard bow. But they did not molest Cavalla. Kossler watched. He saw the mast of a destroyer over the horizon. He moved to his right. He saw the mast of a carrier. She was taking on planes. She was not as big as the monster he had seen last night, but she would still rate around the 22,000-ton Shokaku class. Wanting to be sure she was Japanese, Kossler came in closer.
“Goddam!” he exploded when the ship’s flag came into view. “It’s the Rising Sun-big as hell!”
Cavalla began firing torpedoes. She got four off in rapid succession and another pair as she began to submerge.
Going down, Kossler heard three of his fish hit. And then he heard and felt the wrath of the Japa
nese depth-charges. For two hours the enemy worked Cavalla over, while above the surface mighty Shokaku was a holocaust of burning gasoline and exploding bombs.
At about three o’clock in the afternoon Cavalla’s sound gear picked up monstrous water noises. Kossler and his crewmen heard great concussions.
“That damn thing is sinking,” Kossler said.
He was right. One of Shokaku’s bomb magazines had exploded and the big ship fell apart and sank.
A single torpedo hit did not alarm Admiral Ozawa, nor should it have. Taiho was much too big, much too modern, to be so easily knocked out.
But aboard her was a damage-control officer who was not very experienced, and after Albacore’s fish had ruptured one of Taiho’s gasoline tanks, the damage-control officer ordered all ventilating ducts turned on full blast while the ship tore ahead at 26 knots. He hoped to blow the fumes away, but he only succeeded in distributing them. He filled Taiho with gasoline fumes, and also the vapors of the crude petroleum then being used for fuel, and he turned her into an enormous floating gas-bomb. All that was needed was friction.
It came at half-past three. Taiho’s flight deck blew up, her hangar sides blew out and her bottom blew down. She rolled over on her left side and sank by the stern, taking with her many airplanes and all but 500 of her 2,150 officers and men. Among those who survived were Admiral Ozawa and his staff.
Carrying the admiral’s flag and a framed portrait of the Emperor, Ozawa and his staff were ferried by lifeboat to the destroyer Wakatsuki. From there Ozawa moved to Zuikaku, and it was aboard this carrier that he received the first of those terrible reports that bore upon his head like hammer blows.
Not only was Taiho lost and Shokaku sunk, but his airplanes and aviators were being torn to bits in the battles which the Americans would derisively name “The Marianas Turkey Shoot.” That day alone Ozawa lost 330 planes, against 30 American craft destroyed—the most resounding single day’s defeat in the history of aerial warfare. Next day he lost a third carrier, Hiyo, plus two tankers, and seven more of his ships were damaged. The airfields on Guam were turned into rubble by the American bombers. He himself was forced to flee toward Okinawa, with Admiral Ugaki following.
There was no rescue at Saipan. In the log of the commander who opened battle June 19 with 430 aircraft on his decks, there was this ominous entry on the night of June 20:
“Surviving carrier air power: 35 aircraft operational.”
The disaster had been even greater. With scout planes and land-based air losses added in, Japan’s defeat in the Battle of the Philippine Sea totaled 476 airplanes destroyed and 445 aviators killed. American losses were three ships damaged and 130 planes lost—80 of these during night landings at the conclusion of the pursuit of the Japanese-and 76 airmen dead.
No nation had ever been so badly beaten in the skies. But Tokyo was already telling the world of the customary magnificent victory, just as Lieutenant General Saito had been telling Tokyo of the splendid successes being scored in the hot, shell-blasted hills south of Mount Tapotchau.
4
During the first four days of the fighting on Saipan it was a rare Marine who had not felt himself slammed to earth by concussion or had not heard the whine of flying steel and rock or the nasty peening of the bullets, for the Japanese holding the foothills masking Mount Tapotchau in central Saipan were fighting with tenacity and skill.
In those first four days the First Battalion, Sixth, lost all but two of its captains and Lieutenant Colonel Bill Jones concealed his grief in the grim joke that to save these two, “I guess I’d better bust ‘em down to second looey.”
In the Fourth Marine Division’s sector, the eastern half of the island, a battered rifleman also made a sardonic estimate of the first ninety-six hours.
“Three times in the past four days,” he said, “my wife has been almost a rich woman. I could see them counting out my insurance money ten dollars at a time and the wife riding downtown in a new Packard roadster with a spotlight on each side.”
The following four days were equally harrowing, especially for the Third Battalion, Twenty-fifth Marines, under Lieutenant Colonel Justice Chambers.
Chambers was known as Jumpin’ Joe for his exuberant style in the field. He looked a bit like a buccaneer, big and raw-boned, with a cut-down bayonet knife dangling from his cartridge belt alongside a .38 revolver stuck in a special quick-draw holster. Under his left armpit was a .45 shoulder holster. If it were not true that Jumpin’ Joe had used these weapons, as a Raider captain under Red Mike Edson, at Kwajalein, and latterly on Saipan, the effect might have been a caricature of what is supposed to be a type of Marine commander.
But Jumpin’ Joe was genuine, as were the men who called themselves Chambers’ Raiders and who spent the last half of their eight days on the line overrunning the defenses around Hill 500.
The hill was actually a clutter of rocky peaks which commanded most of southern Saipan and which also covered the approaches to Mount Tapotchau. It was about a mile inland from the eastern coast. It was pocked with caves filled with machine guns carefully sighted in on the flat, approaching plain.
Chambers got his men across the plain and up to the base of the hill by laying down a covering smokescreen. Before they attacked, the hill’s defenses were showered by 4.5-inch rockets fired by rocket trucks, just appearing in the Pacific War. Then Chambers’ men charged. Hunched, bent-over figures shadowy in the thinning smoke, they went up Hill 500 while artillery shells walked briskly up the slopes ahead of them. Six machine guns gathered in a single cave raked them, but by midafternoon they had taken Hill 500.
“We lost fifty men, but we came a’hellin’ and took our objective,” Jumpin’ Joe Chambers said.
Of these 50 casualties, only nine were killed, although there were more that night when the Japanese counterattacked, waving knives and bayonets lashed to poles—“idiot sticks” as the Marines called them.
In the morning Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson joined the battalion as a division observer while Jumpin’ Joe led his men farther north toward Tapotchau. In two days they had overrun Hill 500’S peaks and were debouching into a valley beyond.
There they walked into a trap. Machine guns to either side began chattering and mortars could be seen rising from a clump of woods to the front. Pfc. Vito Cassaro, Chambers’ radioman, was hit almost immediately. Chambers and Carlson went out to rescue him and bullets made smacking sounds in someone’s flesh.
“I’m hit,” Carlson gasped.
The famous Raider leader had been shot in the leg and another bullet had shattered an arm. He was dragged to safety, along with Cassaro, and placed on a stretcher.
“Last time I was wounded was the First World War,” he told Chambers. “If I can keep ‘em that far apart I’ll be all right.”
He was carried to the rear, still chomping on his foul pipe while he dictated a memo covering the location of a new division command post. Behind him, as Chambers’ Marines pulled out of the valley pocket, it was seen that there was still a wounded man lying out in the open. He was unconscious. His crumpled body made a fine aiming reference for the Japanese gunners in the woods beyond. Each time someone crawled out for him, a spate of bullets drove him back.
Then the tanks arrived. A Sherman commanded by Lieutenant Robert Stevenson lumbered out into the valley with bullets spanging harmlessly off its steel hide. The Sherman straddled the unconscious Marine. It rolled forward and obscured him.
“Open the escape hatch and drag him in,” Stevenson ordered.
It was done, the man was saved—and the other tanks joined Stevenson to lead the advance. Half-tracks and 37’s also came up. The emplaced Japanese began to withdraw.
“Come get us, Marines,” they cried.
“Take your time, boys,” the Marines replied. “We will.”
The Japanese began blowing up positions and supplies. They blew up an ammunition dump near the battalion CP and the blast knocked Jumpin’ Joe Chambers unconscious.
“But you can’t go back there, sir,” said the battalion surgeon.
“You’re a casualty.”
“Casualty, hell!” Jumpin’ Joe exploded. “You’ll have to lock me up if you want to keep me here.”
Chambers returned to his battalion, but to his ill-concealed annoyance, and to the unconcealed delight of Major Taul, the objective had already been taken. All along the line by late afternoon of June 22, the Fourth Division had gained 2,000 yards. On the left the Second Division held half of Mount Tipo Pale and was prepared to strike Mount Tapotchau itself about 600 yards northeast.
By nightfall of this eighth day of battle about six of Saipan’s 14 miles in length were in American hands. This represented most of the southern half of the island, although there was still a Japanese pocket down at Nafutan Point on the southernmost tip of the east coast. The Japanese on Nafutan—about 500 of them—had been bypassed in the rush to take Aslito Airfield. They were now hemmed in by the 27th Division’s 105th Infantry, which was preparing to clean out the point.
Elsewhere on Saipan the engineers had made rapid progress on improving the airfield-now called Isely Field after the Navy flier who was killed in preinvasion attacks on it-and they were hauling supplies from the Charan Kanoa beachhead about three miles to the northwest by means of a narrow-gauge railway formerly employed in the Charan Kanoa sugar industry. Isely Field was fit to receive squadrons of Army P-47 Thunderbolts assigned to Saipan combat patrol and scheduled to arrive the following day. Out on the bay the battleship Maryland was holed on her port side by a Japanese aerial torpedo strike launched the afternoon of June 22. She would have to return to Pearl Harbor.