Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  They reached it just before dusk. It was deserted. There were only the darkening burned-out bulks of eight Kawanishi four-engined bombers. There was only silence and offshore the black silhouettes of the transports they had not seen since June 15.

  The Marines waded out into the harbor and bathed their faces.

  “Son of a bitch!” one of them exclaimed. “If tomorrow ain’t the Fourth of July!”

  7

  There was no longer any hope for either Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito or Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo or the men they commanded. Their food and ammunition were spent-as were their bodies-and by July 5 they held only the northern third of Saipan. The airfield which Saito and Nagumo had ordered completed at Marpi Point was now a shambles.

  “General Saito is not going to get away in an airplane if we can help it,” said Howlin’ Mad Smith on July 5, and the American artillery wrecked the little field. Shelling also had destroyed communications between Nagumo and Saito, and yet, on July 6, these separated commanders had come to the same conclusion: it was now time for the samurai or nobleman to make the final gesture.

  In the early morning of that date, tired old General Saito gathered his staff in his cave. He was a pathetic figure. His beard was long and matted. His clothing was stained. All of his strength had deserted him and to sustain him he had only the last resource of that deep Oriental despair which is the other side of the coin of pride.

  “I am addressing the officers and men of the Imperial Army on Saipan,” he wrote in his final message.

  For more than twenty days since the American Devils attacked, the officers, men and civilian employees of the Imperial Army and Navy on this island have fought well and bravely. Everywhere they have demonstrated the honor and glory of the Imperial Force. I expected that every man would do his duty.

  Heaven has not given us an opportunity. We have not been able to utilize fully the terrain. We have fought in unison up to the present time but now we have no materials with which to fight and our artillery for attack has been completely destroyed. Our comrades have fallen one after another. Despite the bitterness of defeat, we pledge, “Seven lives to repay our country!”

  The barbarous attack of the enemy is being continued. Even though the enemy has occupied only a corner of Saipan, we are dying without avail under the violent shelling and bombing. Whether we attack or whether we stay where we are, there is only death. However, in death there is life. We must utilize this opportunity to exalt true Japanese manhood. I will advance with those who remain to deliver still another blow to the American Devils, and leave my bones on Saipan as a bulwark of the Pacific.

  As it says in Battle Ethics, I will never suffer the disgrace of being taken alive, and I will offer up the courage of my soul and calmly rejoice in living by the eternal principle.

  Here I pray with you for the eternal life of the Emperor and the welfare of our country and I advance to seek out the enemy.

  Follow me!

  But if those valiant, suffering Japanese foot-soldiers had indeed followed General Saito there would have been no banzai.

  For the aged commander of Saipan sat down to a farewell feast of canned crabmeat and saki. At ten o’clock he had finished. He arose and said:

  “It makes no difference whether I die today or tomorrow, so I will die first. I will meet my staff at Yasakuni Shrine.”

  He walked slowly to a flat rock. He cleaned it off and sat down. He faced the misty East and bowed gravely. He raised his glittering samurai saber in salute and cried, “Tenno Heika! Banzai!” He pressed the point of his blade into his breast and the moment he had drawn blood his adjutant shot him in the head.

  In another cave on Saipan at about the same time, Nagumo of Pearl Harbor sent a bullet crashing into his brain by his own hand.

  Tonight the Japanese would follow their leaders’ orders, without their leaders.

  On that same July 6 Holland Smith visited 27th Infantry Division headquarters and warned Major General Griner that a banzai would probably come against his men that night or early the next morning.

  Smith had long anticipated a strong enemy counterstroke south along the coastal flat on the island’s western shore. It was for this reason that he had kept his left or northern flank strong during seizure of the beachhead, and the fact that all the strong Japanese counterblows had been made there had confirmed his judgment. For this reason also he had ordered Major General Watson to keep the Second Marine Division’s west flank strong during the attack north.

  But now the 27th Infantry Division had taken over the entire west or left flank, for on July 5, as his attack began moving on a front narrowing away to the northeast, Smith had reduced his commitment to two divisions. The Second Marine Division went into reserve, and the alignment became 27th on the left or west and Fourth Marine Division on the right or east. In the 27th’s sector was Tanapag Plain, about three miles northeast of Garapan.

  It was because Tanapag Plain was a lowland made for counterattack, as well as because the hemmed-in enemy could be expected to make his unfailing reaction to such predicament, that Smith came to Griner to warn him of impending banzai. He also cautioned him to be sure his battalions were tied tightly to each other’s flanks.

  But as night fell on July 6 the 105th Infantry Regiment which held the Tanapag Plain had not buttoned up its front. Its left-to-right alignment by battalions was 2nd, ist and 3rd —the last tying in with the 165th Infantry on high ground to the right or east of Tanapag Plain.

  Between the 1st Battalion in the center and the 3rd on the right was a gap of 300 yards-and north of it the Japanese had begun to mass.

  Across the sea, corpses in the water.

  Across the mountain, corpses in the field.

  I shall die for the Emperor.

  I shall never look back.

  The Japanese were singing as they massed, singing Umi Yukaba—the martial air which had been broadcast throughout Japan the day Premier Tojo announced the attack on Pearl Harbor. That had been December 8, 1941, and this was the black early morning of July 7, 1944. The hero of Pearl Harbor was dead, Tojo’s own iron rule was beginning to crack, and yet, here were between 2,000 and 3,000 Japanese promising to die in sea and field and forming ranks to do it.

  Down the coastal plain they swept. They rolled like a cattle stampede against the lines of the 2nd and ist Battalions, 105th, and they cut them off and overwhelmed them. They found the gap between the ist and 3rd Battalions, 105th, and thundered through it.

  Army artillery pounded them, Marine guns bayed—but still they swept over those army battalions, for there were so many of them. They had come determined to die and they made the American soldiers fight for their lives. Some soldiers shot so many Japanese that bodies clogged their fields of fire and they had to move their guns. Others shot themselves out of ammunition and fought with their hands. The 105th’s left and center was cut up into pocket after pocket. Lieutenant Colonel William O’Brien of the First Battalion tried to rally his men and was killed firing a heavy machine gun from a jeep. Sergeant Tom Baker of the same outfit was wounded and refused to leave the lines when his unit withdrew. He asked to be propped up against a tree. He was. By morning he was dead, but there were eight lifeless Japanese around him, and he was awarded a Medal of Honor along with O’Brien. Throughout the morning the fighting swirled within and around the lines of these two battalions. Their remnants were forced to form a hasty perimeter on the water’s edge. They were driven into the sea, by their own artillery as much as by enemy fire, and had to be rescued by small boats. In all, the ist and 2nd Battalions, 105th, suffered a total of 668 casualties.

  Meanwhile, the Japanese who had shot the gap during the night burst in a howling flood on the startled gunners of the Third Battalion, Tenth Marines. The gunners lowered their 105’s to point-blank range. They cut their fuses to 150 yards, to 100 yards. But still the enemy charged. The gunners disarmed their howitzers and fell back into a covered-wagon defense. They too fought on through the
morning, helped by men from brother artillery battalions-Marines such as Pfc. Harold Agerholm, who singlehandedly evacuated 45 wounded men until he fell from the wound that would make his Medal of Honor posthumous-and then the turrets of the 106th Infantry’s counterattacking tanks came into view.

  Then also on this morning of July 7 the Japanese hospitals disgorged and the banzai became a ghoul’s parade.

  They came down the plain hobbling and limping, amputees, men on crutches, walking wounded supporting one another, men in bandages. Some had weapons, most brandished idiot sticks or swung bayonets, others were barehanded or carried grenades. Behind them some 300 of their comrades who had been unable to move had been put to death. And now these specters, these scarecrows, were coming down Tanapag Plain to die. They were requited.

  By nightfall of July 7 the beaches of Tanapag Harbor were clogged with Japanese dead. Next day the Second Marine Division came out of reserve to mop up the area, and a tank sergeant named Grant Timmerman won a Medal of Honor by smothering a grenade with his life to save his crew. Fighting fluttered on throughout that night, but by morning of July 9 the mop-up was finished and men were beginning to make the count of enemy dead that reached nearly 2,500. Gunnery Sergeant Claude Moore of the First Battalion, Second Marines, was among them.

  Sometimes Gunny Moore bent over to count, and once, as he did, there came a shot from a sniper in a cave. Moore went down bawling his dismay. A corpsman rushed up to assuage the gunny’s wounded posterior. He knelt down and gasped.

  “Damned if it didn’t go in and out both cheeks!”

  A beatific smile chased the grimace of pain from Gunny Moore’s face.

  “Four Purple Hearts,” he breathed. “And all with the one bullet!”

  Several hours later-at four in the afternoon-the Second, Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Marines drove up to the island’s northernmost extremity at Marpi Point. They reported they could see nothing in front of them but blue sea.

  Saipan had fallen, and now the Japanese civilians began to make the final gesture.

  8

  Marpi Point was a high plateau. It rose 220 sheer feet from the shore above a clutter of cruel coral rocks. Its seaward face was honeycombed with caves. At Marpi Point had gathered half of Saipan’s civilian population, together with the surviving remnant of its military defenders, and here, throughout the afternoon and night of July 9, throughout the following day, there occurred an orgy of self-destruction which sickened those Marines who were powerless to halt it.

  Surrender pleas broadcast from sound trucks, the entreaties of the Marines themselves, the pleading of prisoners-both civilian and military-nothing could deter these Japanese civilians in the horrible slaughter of themselves and their families.

  Men and women jumped hand in hand from the cliff onto the rocks. Fathers stabbed or strangled their babies to death, hurled their tiny forms over the cliff, and threw themselves after them. Soldiers prodded groups of civilians out of the caves, posed arrogantly before them, and blew themselves apart. Cowed, the civilians also committed suicide.

  On the beaches below, one boy of about fifteen paced irresolutely over the rocks. He sat down and let the water play over his feet. A roller gathered out on the sea. He awaited it stoically. It broke over his body, it swept him away. He lay face down in it—and then, suddenly, frantically, unable to restrain the youth of his life, his arms flailed the water.

  But it was too late. He lay inert. His trousers filled with water, and he sank.

  Not far away, three women sat on a rock combing their long black hair. They stood erect. They joined hands and walked slowly out into the sea.

  A father, mother and three children had also walked into the water. But they had come back to the rocks. A Japanese soldier in one of the caves shot the father. The soldier fired again and hit the woman. She dragged herself along the rocks but the sea seized her and floated her out in a spreading stain of blood. The sniper took aim on the children. A Japanese woman ran across the beach and carried them away.

  The sniper strode out of his cave, preening himself, and crumpled under the concentrated firing of a hundred Marine weapons.

  Sometimes the Marines were able to rescue a child, and then an entire squad of men would rush about for dried milk to placate the squalling infant whose mother had chosen to leap alone. One big Marine squatted in the road brushing flies from the face of a dazed six-year-old girl, while the tears streaked his earth-stained cheeks.

  Along the reefs to the west of Marpi Point, knots of Japanese soldiers had gathered to commit suicide. An amtrack full of Marines approached one group, just as six men knelt down and an officer backed off to draw his saber from its scabbard. The Marines called to him to surrender. He swung. He hacked off four heads, and as the Marines approached the reef, he and the two remaining men charged. The Marines cut them down.

  Underneath Marpi Point, 100 soldiers emerged from the caves to frolic on the rocks. They bowed ceremoniously to the Marines above. They stripped and ran into the sea. They came out and put on their clothes. Their leader distributed hand grenades. One by one, they blew themselves up.

  By July 10, the waters off Marpi Point were incarnadine and so clogged with bodies rolling on the swells that small American ships could not run into shore to rescue civilians from the soldiers who held them. Nor could they have come ashore if the waters had been clear, for the soldiers had begun to snipe at them and the rocket boats and minesweepers were forced to turn their guns on the caves.

  It was then that a naked woman in the last stages of childbirth waded into the water to drown herself and her child.

  Eight days after this ultimate expression of the horror of Bushido, the very high priest of the cult-Premier Hideki Tojo —was himself fallen. The loss of Saipan, the catastrophe of the Battle of the Philippine Sea, had broken the power of the man who led the Empire into the war. He was forced to resign on July 18, although this disgrace did not shame him into the final gesture made by his misguided followers on Marpi Point. Hideki Tojo chose to live, until the Americans came to Japan and he was convicted as a war criminal and hung.

  Saipan had cost a total of 14,111 American casualties- 3,674 soldiers, 10,347 Marines—while destroying all but 1,000 prisoners of the island’s 30,000 defenders. But Saipan also caused changes as important as the fall of Tojo. After Saipan, Japan was within bombing range of air bases which she could not neutralize, as she would do in China; she had no more carrier air power; and the inner works of Empire lay open to attack. The force of the blow struck by the Americans was measured in anguish by Fleet Admiral Osami Nagano, supreme naval advisor to the Emperor. Hearing of Saipan’s fall, Nagano held his head and groaned:

  “Hell is on us.”

  9

  Back in San Diego, California, during this July of 1944, the new Fifth Marine Division had completed training and was preparing to shove off for Camp Tarawa in Hawaii.

  On Pavuvu Island in the Russells, staff officers of the First Marine Division were drawing plans for the assault on a little island which was spelled Peleliu and pronounced “Pella-loo.”

  In Eniwetok Lagoon the long wait was ending for the men of the Guam invasion force.

  And in the narrow waters between Saipan and Tinian, on that very night of July 10, while Marpi Point still shook to the last of the suicide cave explosions, there were a pair of destroyers discharging Captain Jim Jones and his Recon Boys into rubber boats.

  Tinian, three and a half miles to the south of Saipan, had to be taken. Its seizure, along with the reconquest of Guam, would consolidate the Marianas. More, Tinian held an excellent airdrome with two 4,700-foot runways and there were three more being built. Though Tinian was but 10½ miles long and a maximum of five miles wide, it had enough level ground to make it the chief B-29 base in the Pacific.

  But Tinian had very few landing beaches. The only ones known to be suitable for invasion, opposite Tinian Town on the island’s southwest coast, were also heavily defended. The Marines dared not ris
k them.

  That was why the Recon Boys of Captain Jones-together with sailors of two Underwater Demolition Teams-had come into the strait between Saipan and Tinian. They were looking for unguarded landing beaches on Tinian’s northern nose.

  In two groups, one bound for the western beaches, the other for those on the east, they paddled softly to within 500 yards of their objectives. Then they slipped into the water and swam the rest of the way, floating silently past parties of Japanese engaged in mining work.

  They found that the eastern beaches were a wicked labyrinth of boat-blocks, underwater mines and barbed wire, set among natural obstacles of boulders, potholes and 20-foot cliffs. But on the west were two narrow beaches to either side of a cliff. One was 60 yards wide, the other 150 yards.

  It did not seem possible to land a regiment, let alone two full Marine divisions, on such abbreviated beaches, but they were judged acceptable by the new Fifth Corps commander, Major General Harry Schmidt.

  Schmidt had taken over after Lieutenant General Smith had been made commander, Fleet Marine Force, Pacific. Schmidt had handed his Fourth Division over to the aristocratic Major General Clifton Cates, a veteran of World War One and a regimental commander on Guadalcanal. The Fourth would be in assault while the Second Marine Division sailed down to Tinian Town to make a feint off the fortified southwest beaches. Then the Second would turn around and land behind the Fourth.

  Schmidt was making an armored battering ram of that Fourth Division. He gave it the Second’s tanks and artillery, and he would send it in with all of Saipan’s guns banging away. The Marines would move from shore to shore in landing boats. The invasion was scheduled for July 24, which was three days after the assault on Guam.