Strong Men Armed
Page 36
The next day, June 23, the three-division attack to the north planned by Howlin’ Mad Smith at last got going. The 27th Division-less its 105th Infantry still south at Nafutan Point —went into the line between the Second Marine Division on the left and the Fourth on the right.
The Fourth again made good gains, although the attack was still a matter of climbing another mountain to behold another mountain. The division’s chief objective this day was Hill 600, guarding the entrance to Kagman Peninsula, which stretched east into Magicienne Bay for about three miles. The Marines of the Fourth took Hill 600 and renamed it Hot Potato Hill for the fierce hand-grenade fight which won it. Then they swerved right or east to bite deep into Kagman Peninsula. They could have gone farther, but the 27th Division in the center was unable to move because of resistance met in a crackling lowland called Death Valley. The Fourth halted and dug in, for the lag in the center had exposed its left.
On the left of the three-division front the Second Division’s Marines began struggling up the cruel steeps of Mount Tapotchau-blundering through a jumble of limestone crags, lava heads and coral ridges, gullies, gulches and ravines, all piled one upon another as though kicked together, all exposed to the direct rays of a hot sun. All around Tapotchau were caves and subterranean forts from which Japanese artillery had attempted to destroy the Marines on the beaches. The short tan men of Nippon were still fighting from these, at closer, more accurate range now, and still invisibly.
Against them, against the slashing madness of Tapotchau itself, came the Sixth and Eighth Marine Regiments. They came without tanks, jeeps or bulldozers-for there was not even so much as a trail up the mountainside. They came warily, sending out probing patrols, waiting for the sound of firing which would signal that the patrol had found the enemy, and then going forward on foot, climbing.
But they advanced. And then, finding their right flank exposed by the 27th’s failure to make any appreciable gains, they too halted and dug in.
In the morning both the Second and the Fourth Marine Divisions moved out. But the 27th in the center was again slow, again unable to get through Death Valley. For the second straight day the attack was slowed down, and Lieutenant General Holland Smith relieved Major General Ralph Smith of his command of the 27th Division. The Army’s Major General Sanderford Jarman, who was to have been Saipan’s military governor, took Ralph Smith’s place. The pace of the attack began to quicken, but by nightfall there were still long vertical gaps between the Marine divisions ahead on the flanks and the 27th behind them in the center.
That night the Japanese counterattacked the Second Division’s front in the Tapotchau hills, coming in greatest strength against a machine-gun post held by Pfc. Harold Epperson with Corporal Malcom Jonah and Pfc. Edward Bailey. It was very dark. The Marines could barely make out the bulk of a dense wood about 50 yards away.
It was out of the wood that the Japanese came, running straight at Epperson’s pit. The young gunner opened fire. The short shapes began to fall. One of them seemed to crumple right under the muzzle of the gun. Epperson fired on. Suddenly the figure under the gun came alive. The Japanese jumped up. He tossed a grenade into the pit.
Pfc. Epperson threw himself on it and was killed.
He had saved the lives of his comrades and they were able to fight on and break up the attack—and he had won a posthumous Medal of Honor.
The following day-June 25—Mount Tapotchau’s peak was placed under direct assault.
Since June 22 the orphan First Battalion, Twenty-ninth, had been driving up a jumbled valley which ran between two ridges to Tapotchau’s crest. They had fought forward under Lieutenant Colonel Rathvon (Tommy) Tompkins, who had taken over after Lieutenant Colonel Guy Tannyhill had been wounded. They had been joined by the Second Battalion, Eighth, led by Jim Crowe’s executive, Major Chamberlin.
On June 25, Chamberlin and Tompkins conferred with Colonel Clarence Wallace, commander of the Eighth, and got up a plan to take Tapotchau.
While Tompkins’ men went up the valley, Chamberlin’s battalion was to attack along the ridge, where the bulk of enemy opposition could be expected.
But it was the valley that was nastiest. Tompkins’ men ran into rough terrain and a stubborn enemy, while Chamberlin’s Marines were moving swiftly along the heights, advancing as far as a 50-foot cliff which crowned Tapotchau like a top hat. Chamberlin sent a patrol up the cliff. The men returned with the report that the crest of Tapotchau seemed unoccupied.
The patrol’s return coincided with the arrival of Tommy Tompkins from the valley below. He brought with him a platoon from the Division Scout Company, for he had become convinced that a frontal attack up the mountain was impossible. He took the Scouts up the steep side of Tapotchau’s top hat. They were all but exhausted by the rigor of that climb, but at eleven o’clock in the morning there was no longer anything above them.
They broke into the clear, into the open where their helmets touched the sky, and all around them rolled the vast smoking, glinting, glittering, moving panorama of an ocean island under assault from the sea. They stood at almost the exact center of Saipan, with the northern extremity of Marpi Point on the west coast seven miles in front of them and the southern tip of Nafutan Point slanting the same distance to the rear on the east coast.
Tompkins ordered the Scouts to hold the crest while he returned to the valley to get his battalion. They occupied a 12-foot-square dugout abandoned by the enemy during the day’s shelling. They fought from it to hold off repeated Japanese thrusts at them, while all around Tapotchau the ridges shook to furious Marine onslaught calculated to pin the Japanese main body down while Tompkins’ men came up from the valley single-file.
At dusk, Tompkins and his men clawed their way up to the crest-where the Scouts had killed 40 Japanese while losing three of their own men. They, too, dug in. They hurled back the inevitable nocturnal counterattack, holding Tapotchau even as destroyers and rocket boats offshore shattered an attempt to reinforce southern Saipan by barge.
On the same night, Lieutenant General Saito began to tell Tokyo the truth about what was happening on his island. He signaled the chief of staff in Tokyo:
Please apologize deeply to the Emperor that we cannot do better than we are doing. However, because of the units sunk at sea, the various forces have no fighting strength, although they do have large numbers.
There is no hope for victory in places where we do not have control of the air and we are still hoping here for aerial reinforcements.
Praying for the good health of the Emperor, we all cry, “Banzai!”
The aerial reinforcements for which Saito still hoped would never come. Only the day before, Vice Admiral Joseph (Jocko) Clark’s carrier force had raided Iwo Jima and destroyed 95 fighters and bombers at a loss of six Hellcats. On the very day of Tapotchau’s fall, June 25, another American carrier force struck hard at air bases on Guam and Rota.
There was nothing for this ailing and aged commander to do but to retreat north and await the end made so clearly inevitable to him by the constant presence of those circling, booming American warships.
5
The Japanese cornered on Nafutan Point were preparing to break out of the trap.
Since the capture of Isely Field on June 18, these 600 soldiers of the 47th Brigade’s 317th Infantry Battalion had been holed up on their stern-browed peninsula-endlessly pounded by offshore American warships or battered by artillery supporting the American 105th Infantry blocking their escape route north. On the night of June 26, having eaten the last of their food and drunk their water, they prepared to make a break-out born of desperation. Their commanding officer, one Captain Sasaki, issued this final order:
“Casualties will remain in their present positions and defend Nafutan Point. Those who cannot participate in combat must commit suicide. The password for tonight will be Shichi Sei Hokoku [Seven Lives to Repay Our Country].”
Shortly after midnight, Sasaki’s men slipped down from their high caves a
nd stole through the outposts of the 105th Infantry. Many of them wore American uniforms, most of them were half-crazed with thirst-and all were bent on destroying Isely Field before wheeling east to Hill 500, where Captain Sasaki imagined brigade headquarters to be.
On Hill 500, most of Jumpin’ Joe Chambers’ men were already asleep.
The battalion had been placed in reserve, along with the remainder of the Twenty-fifth Marines, and ordered back to the hill they had captured on June 20.
Men such as Pfc. Tom McQuabe and Pfc. Bill Cramford-a BAR team holding down a foxhole outpost to the south or rear of Chambers’ command post—could hear the sound of sporadic firing to the north and be grateful for the chance to rest behind the lines.
Captain Sasaki’s band had gotten past the American soldiers. By two o’clock in the morning they had penetrated about a mile to the north. They blundered into the 2nd Battalion, 105th Infantry’s command post and fought a savage close-in fight, inflicting 24 casualties on the soldiers while losing 27 of their own men. Then they swept on to Isely Field, reaching it a half-hour later.
The Japanese set one P-47 on fire and damaged a few others, before they were beaten off by a counterattack of Seabees and Marine engineers. Sasaki’s men turned right and headed for Hill 500, about three miles above them. It was getting light.
“Japs!”
Tom McQuabe and Bill Cramford yelled the warning with a single astonished voice, even as they saw the short men slipping through the half-light toward Hill 500.
The Japanese replied by hurling a grenade which landed in the Marines’ outpost foxhole and wounded McQuabe. Cramford got his BAR going, shooting off three clips before he, too, was wounded—and the Japanese rushed past screeching, “Shichi sei hokoku!”
Huddled in a hole beneath a strip of galvanized iron, Pfc. Jim Ferguson and Pfc. Ed Martin heard the shrieking and the sound of gunfire. Ferguson knocked aside the roof with the muzzle of his tommy gun. A helmeted Japanese stared down at him. Ferguson shot him dead with a stream of .45 slugs. Now Sasaki’s men-many of them armed with only “idiot sticks”—were hacking wildly at the Marines. One of them bayoneted Pfc. Robert Postal-but Postal killed him with a rifle shot as he struggled to withdraw the blade. Another knocked Pfc. Jim Davie down with a shovel. A third charged Pfc. Ken Rayburn with a lowered bayonet. Rayburn’s carbine jammed. He seized a pick mattock and hurled it into the Japanese’s stomach.
While Chambers’ men quickly recovered from the surprise of finding the “front” to their rear, the rest of the Japanese were battling with the artillerists of the Second Battalion, Fourteenth Marines.
The American uniforms they wore helped them get close to the artillerymen between Isely Field and Hill 500. The Marines let them come, mistaking them for an Army patrol scheduled to appear at about that time.
By the time a sharp-eyed Marine yelled, “Those ain’t doggies, those are Japs!”—it was almost too late. But the machine guns set up by the artillerymen to protect their guns opened up quickly. The battle raged on for most of the morning, until the men of the Fourteenth Marines had killed 143 of the attackers and lost 33 killed and wounded themselves, and the Twenty-fifth Marines had come down from Hill 500 and cleaned out the remainder of Sasaki’s band.
It had not been anything like “seven lives to repay our country.” It had been a massacre. And as the men of the Twenty-fifth turned to march back to Hill 500, they stopped to watch a Japanese bomber trying to get down through the storm of antiaircraft fire puffing over Isely Field.
“Blow up, you son of a bitch!” a Marine yelled.
The bomber did blow up, and a yell of fierce delight rose from the throats of thousands of Americans who had been watching the plane’s descent. Then the crackling of small arms and the booming of artillery signaled that the attack to the north was still running into enemy resistance.
6
Even with Tapotchau captured, the attack to the north could not become an all-out lunge until the three divisions had spent some time shifting, pinching out, and tidying up the front.
In the days between the mop-up of Nafutan Point on June 27 and resumption of full-scale attack on July 1, the Fourth Marine Division on the right or eastern flank had to clean out Kagman Peninsula before it pushed still farther north.
In the center the 27th Infantry Division still had difficulty moving, and General Jarman relieved one of his regimental commanders. By July 1, however, the 27th had drawn even with the Marines on both flanks and had also received a new commander-Major General George Griner.
On the left the Second Marine Division held fast on the coast beneath Garapan while it hit slowly through The Pimples, the four hills north of Tapotchau. Once The Pimples had been passed, the Second would hurl one regiment into Garapan—now flattened by naval gunfire-while the other units swung left or northwest into Tanapag Harbor just above the city.
Also during this interval the Guam invasion was postponed and the Third Marine Division was sent back to Eniwetok Lagoon while the First Marine Brigade was held in floating reserve. Saipan had been much too tough to allow the Guam landings to proceed. The Japanese had fought with a doggedness and skill which had slowed the American advance beyond expectation. Without water, forced to chew leaves and eat snails or hunt big tree frogs, the Emperor’s soldiers had made the invaders’ life a hell of exploding shells and flying rock splinters.
But the invaders had also taken a fierce toll among the defenders and Howlin’ Mad Smith was confident that his renewed assault would quickly overrun the northern half of Saipan. On June 29, Smith and General Watson of the Second Division went up to Mount Tapotchau to study the terrain Watson’s men would be attacking two days later. It was nearly their last look at any terrain, for Japanese mortars began crashing around them. They jumped from their jeep and ran for a foxhole, waiting there until the barrage stopped-and then quickly departing Tapotchau.
Next day a fierce American mortar barrage produced the same effect upon Lieutenant General Saito. He pulled back to his sixth and last headquarters, another cave, and the main body of his, troops began retreating north to new positions.
The following day—July 1—the Second Marines attacked Garapan and found hardly a building intact in a city that had once housed 15,000 people. Hanging everywhere among the ruins, making a poignance of the desolation, were thousands of bright silk obis, the sashes which Japanese women bind about their midriffs and which the women of Garapan left behind in their flight to the north. Only occasional snipers hidden beneath scraps of iron roofing, or machine guns holed up in ruined buildings, delayed the first day’s advance of the Third Battalion, Second, commanded by Major Harold Throneson. But during the night 200 Japanese slipped back into Garapan’s rubble to set up machine guns.
Throneson’s men routed them next day after vicious fighting. By dusk the Marines held the lower half of the city. A command post had been set up on “Broadway” across the street from the ruined Bank of Taiwan and alongside a Spanish-style Catholic Church which was one of the few buildings still undamaged. Some of the Marines went in. They paused, shocked. Up on the altar was a plaster statue of Christ with the face blown away.
Underneath Sugar Loaf Hill in the foothills to the right or east of Garapan the face of a young Marine had been blown away. An enemy gunner had shot him as he slithered forward over a rock. The bullet tore off the top of his head and sent his helmet clanging against the rocks. Blood spattered on a nearby sergeant.
“Goddam it, Mac!” the sergeant roared to everyone with hearing. “Let’s go up and get those bastards!”
They went up, hanging onto stone knobs with one hand, hurling grenades with the other-sometimes shot from their holds and dropped to the boulders below-but going up, up and over, cleaning out the caves and taking Sugar Loaf Hill.
Then they descended on Garapan to the west. They fought into Royal Palm Park and gaped at the 40-foot stone shaft supporting the figure of a Japanese statesman. He wore western dress. He was 10 feet tall.
The conquerors of Tapotchau and The Pimples were coming down from the mountains. Their faces were smeared with dirt and grimy with beard stubble. Their dungarees were stiff with sweat and dried earth. Their hands were black. They were walking as wooden men with leaden feet. But now, those dull sunken eyes were beginning to gleam. For they had seen the blue beckoning water of Tanapag Harbor, and the tanks had begun to lead them down the last hills to the canefields below.
And there were the Japanese-running.
They were being flushed from their foxholes by the roaring 75’s of the Shermans. They were in full view, and the Marines were rushing down the hill, dropping to their knees, firing, jumping up and running forward to fire again, their gaunt faces suddenly alive with victory, their eyes glittering with a fierce joy.
They came down the hill and swept through the canebrake and halted a few hundred yards short of the harbor, while to their left rear the Marines in Garapan began attacking up to them.
“Slaughterhouse is back!” a Marine sergeant in Garapan yelled, and the men of the Third Battalion, Second, understood him to mean that Lieutenant Colonel Arnold Johnston had returned to command them. Johnston had brought the battalion into Saipan, had been wounded twice and then evacuated. But now, on the morning of July 3, he had rejoined the outfit and taken over from Major Throneson.
“Crazy Gyrene bastard!” the sergeant swore. “He’s dead but he won’t lie down. He’s back there stompin’ around on one gimp leg and a Jap cane.”
He was, and Lieutenant Colonel John Easley had also come back for the attack to the harbor. He had been wounded on D-Day while leading the Third Battalion, Sixth, ashore. There were many men in the ranks like Johnston and Easley fighting up to Tanapag with bandaged bodies, helping to overrun the few snipers standing between themselves and the big seaplane base the Japanese had built there.