Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  “Guam? Goddamit, man, these men have had Guam until it’s been comin’ out their ears!”

  So spoke a Marine officer to a war correspondent, and he spoke the truth. For weeks and weeks on end these men of the Third Marine Division and First Marine Brigade had looked at maps of Guam and listened to lectures on it. They knew by heart, now, that Guam had been American for forty years before the Japanese landed there on December 10, 1941; that this peanut-shaped island 32 miles long and four to eight miles wide was the biggest and most populous of the Marianas; and that its Chamorro inhabitants were deeply loyal to the United States, for which fidelity-including their reluctance to learn Japanese or to use the official new name of Omiya Jima, “Great Shrine Island”—they had come under fierce persecution, their schools and churches closed, their priests tortured and murdered, their men beheaded for so much as a smile at the sight of a U.S. plane. The Marines also learned that the general objectives of their assault were all on Guam’s west coast—the former U. S. Navy Yard at Piti, the old Marine barracks and airfield on Orote Peninsula, Apra Harbor and the coastal city of Agana. By the time the news of the fall of Saipan reached them, they had become so familiar with their individual objectives that they talked of them with the familiarity of hometown landmarks.

  News of Saipan’s fall, however, did not immediately release the Guam invasion force from the slack-jawed tedium of shipboard life in Eniwetok Lagoon. The high casualties suffered at Saipan had impressed Major General Roy Geiger, the Guam commander. He thought he would need about 40,000 troops to overwhelm the 19,000 men comprising the Japanese 29th Infantry Division and other units commanded by Lieutenant General Takeshi Takashina. Geiger asked for and was given the 77th Infantry Division then in Hawaii. It would take two weeks for the 77th to reach Eniwetok, but Geiger did not chafe at the delay. It meant that Guam would receive fourteen full days of naval and aerial bombardment-the heaviest preparation of the war-and there would also be time for the Underwater Demolition Teams to clear the landing beaches.

  Geiger planned landings on either side of Apra Harbor, just as the Japanese had landed. Major General Allen Turnage’s Third Division would land above Apra on the north. Below it, on the south, the First Brigade was to come ashore under Brigadier General Lemuel Shepherd of Cape Gloucester fame. When the two outfits joined, all of Guam’s military facilities would have been enveloped, and the way would be clear for the First Brigade to push out on Orote Peninsula to the west. The 77th Division would be in reserve.

  And while that 77th Division was sailing for Eniwetok, the men who were already there had turned the lagoon into a floating slum. All over the weather decks of the LST’s the Marines had set up tents, or slung ponchos and spread tarpaulins between themselves and the blistering sun. Their bedding was strewn everywhere. Men gasped in the heat and scratched prickly rashes. They made betting pools on the number of days they would be aboard ship before they landed (those holding numbers 48 to 52 were the winners) and they imposed careful cigarette rationing on themselves, while giving the clothes they wore fewer and fewer washings, for they had begun to fray.

  Each day officers herded these bored and enervated Marines together and took them ashore in landing boats. They ran up to the reef and piled out. They waded ashore. They walked over the little islets and felt the burning coral through the thinning soles of their boondockers. Then they waded out to the reef again and went back to the ships—to ennui relieved only by a surprisingly inexhaustible supply of ice cream or an occasional good joke.

  Such as that morning on which a group of Marines waded back to their boat:

  “Anyone here from Texas?” one of the coxswains called.

  A corporal brightened and pushed back his helmet.

  “Ah’m from Lubbock,” he said, his voice proud and expectant.

  The coxswain grinned impishly.

  “You can swim out, mate,” he said.

  They were laughing, too, on Pavuvu.

  Chesty Puller had contributed another Pullerism to his legend. He had been made a full colonel and had taken command of the First Marine Regiment. And then some comfort-loving clod of a quartermaster officer had issued Chesty Puller’s men sleeping pads. They were all of a half-inch thick and to the comfort-hating Puller they were as corrosive and beguiling as the soft voices of sirens in the ears of Ulysses’ men. Chesty Puller ordered the pads gathered up and thrown into the bay.

  “Goddamit,” he raged, “are they trying to make sissies out of my men?”

  There were rubber boats standing off Tinian’s southern shore. There were 12 of them. They were filled with Japanese officers. Among them was a huge figure. Vice Admiral Kakuji Kakuda was more than six feet tall and his bulk of more than 200 pounds was big even by Western standards. By all standards, bald and burly Kakuda was a coward and a drunk.

  He was the commander of the First Air Fleet on Tinian, but Kakuda could no more command than he could stop swilling saki or scheming for his own safety.

  On this night of July 15 he had collected his headquarters staff and begun to paddle south toward Aguijan Island and the rendezvous he had arranged with a Japanese submarine. But the sub did not show up.

  Admiral Kakuda paddled back to Tinian. He tried again for three more nights. Still the submarine did not appear. On the night of July 20 an American gunboat almost sent Kakuda’s rubber-boat flotilla to the bottom. The admiral retired in dismay. He hastened to a well-armored dugout on the eastern side of the island, and was never heard from again.

  That was on July 21, the day the Americans came back to Guam.

  10

  There had been a typhoon scare.

  Admiral Spruance had asked Close-in Conolly if he planned to postpone the Guam landings to avoid the typhoon headed his way. But Conolly’s weather officer assured him that July 21 would be a perfect day for landings.

  It was. It dawned clear and slightly overcast, with a light wind and calm sea, and in that dawn a voice came over the bullhorns of the transport ships.

  “Men, this is General Geiger. The eyes of a nation watch you as you go into battle to liberate this former American bastion from the enemy. Make no mistake, it will be a tough, bitter fight against a wily, stubborn foe who will doggedly defend Guam against this invasion. May the glorious traditions of the Marine esprit de corps spur you to victory. You have been honored.”

  The general’s voice ceased. “The Marines’ Hymn” crashed out and the men began to go over the side.

  It was an unusual D-Day morning, almost a theatrical one, but the Marines wanted Guam badly. Some of the NCO’s and officers going over the side had served there. Many of them had buddies among the 153 Marines who were taken prisoner when Guam surrendered. The recapture of Guam would heal an old hurt.

  At eight o’clock the Third Division’s first wave had made the transfer from landing boats to amtracks. The men crouched low as the ungainly craft fanned out and roared ashore, heading for those beaches lying between the “devil’s horns” of Adelup Point on the left, Asan Point on the right. At eight-twenty an air observer reported:

  “The rockets are landing and giving them hell. Good effect on beach. Landing craft seem to be about one thousand yards from beach.”

  Seven minutes later came this report:

  “First wave two hundred yards from beach.”

  Naval gunfire lifted and began pounding targets inland. At eight thirty-three the air observer reported:

  “Troops ashore on all beaches.”

  The Marines had returned to Guam, and already, the sands below the bleak white face of Chonito Cliff were streaked crimson with their blood.

  About six miles to the south, underneath Orote Peninsula, which formed the lower land arm of Apra Harbor, the First Brigade attacked with both regiments abreast. And heavy as the Guam bombardment had been, it had not knocked everything out. Japanese 75’s and 37’s were firing as the men of the Fourth and Twenty-second Marines rode their amtracks shoreward. Before the amphibians had waddled up on t
he sand, 24 of them were knocked out. Casualties mounted, and there was no one to care for them. Doctors and corpsmen were the heaviest hit. One battalion’s aid station took a direct hit from a 75 which killed and wounded all but one man.

  Corpsman Robert Law saw a shellburst spread eight Marines around him. One of the men had a shattered leg and his life’s blood was spouting carmine from it. Law gave the man morphine. The man smiled and asked for something to hold. Law shoved clods of earth into his hands. He pulled out his combat knife and began to amputate the leg. The Marine squeezed the clods of earth to dust. But he made no sound. Law bandaged the stump. When he glanced up, the Marine smiled at him again. Then he sank into unconsciousness.

  On the left, the Twenty-second Marines under Colonel Merlin Schneider were charging toward the rubble of Agat Village. Captain Charles Widdecke began to lead his company around Bob’s Hill, a mound overlooking the town. Machine-gun fire knocked them flat. They took cover in a trench. They dug in, expecting to stay there for the night. Down a trail straight toward them marched a dozen Japanese carrying the very machine guns which had pinned the Marines down. There was the crackling of American guns. The Japanese were slammed to earth and the way to the village was clear.

  On the right, Colonel Alan Shapley’s Fourth Marines drove toward Mount Alifan, about 2,000 yards inland. They passed through a grove of palm trees and concealed snipers. Sherman tanks led them through a maze of pillboxes and blockhouses. They sprinted through the slippery muck of a rice paddy, leaping across its myriads of tiny interlacing streams. They ran the gantlet of machine-gun fire and mortar shells, they threaded the strong points of Alifan’s foothills while the lumbering tanks bucked and roared and sealed off cave after cave, and by nightfall they held a beachhead a mile deep.

  Behind that beachhead, “The Old Bastards” were wading ashore.

  They were not really so old, these dogfaces of the 77th Division’s 305th Infantry Regiment. But they were in their late twenties, something like an average of four to six years older than their youthful comrades in the First Marine Brigade.

  They had to wade into the southern beaches from the reef simply because the Marine amtracks had suffered heavy losses and they had none of their own. Fortunately, the young bastards ahead of them were busily cleaning out the enemy. The soldiers had only the discomfort of waist-high water and occasional potholes to hinder their walk ashore. The entire regiment was on land by nightfall, the last to arrive being its commander, Colonel Vincent Tanzola, who was saved from being stranded on the reef when a rubber boat drifted by. He grabbed it and paddled ashore.

  The southern force had the situation in hand.

  “Our casualties about 350,” General Shepherd signaled General Geiger at half-past six. “Critical shortage fuel and ammunition all types. Think we can handle it.”

  But up north, the Third Division was fighting hard for its beachhead.

  By noon of July 21, there were two battalions of the Twenty-first Marines atop the central height which frowned down on the Asan-Adelup beachhead.

  Colonel Arthur Butler had discovered a pair of defiles to either side of the hill. He sent a battalion up each of these passes while a third battalion swept the ground below the cliff.

  It was a fight all the way up, the men of the ascending battalions all but melting under the combination of fierce heat and the long debilitating weeks aboard ship. Gasping for breath, their dungarees dark with sweat, they tumbled among the rocks and boulders and lay where they fell. NCO’s and officers dragged them erect and sent them climbing again-to be savaged by crisscrossing Japanese machine-gun fire or blown to bits by the grenades which the enemy rolled among them.

  But they reached the top, linked up, and drove forward.

  On their right, the Ninth Marines were moving swiftly through easier terrain, and lighter resistance. They attacked with artillery firing in support, for the northern landings had been such near-perfection that there were 105’s ashore by noontime. They had been brought over the reef in “ducks”—those amphibian trucks developed by the Army-and unloaded by A-frames mounted on accompanying ducks. By midafternoon Chonito Cliff had been overrun in the center and the right.

  But on the left the Third Marines were being torn apart.

  The steep sheer seaward face of Chonito Cliff winked with the muzzle-blasting of Japanese machine guns as the Third moved beneath it toward Adelup Point. The Japanese pulled back only after the Point had fallen, and then the most savage fighting of the Guam campaign began. It was here that the Third Marines lost 815 killed and wounded within forty-eight hours, among them two Medal of Honor winners-Pfc. Leonard Mason, who died destroying a pair of machine-gun posts, and Pfc. Luther Skaggs, whose leg was shattered as he took command of a mortar section and led it forward to annihilate a Japanese pocket.

  It took four days for the Third Marines to clean out their sector and make contact with the Twenty-first Marines on their right. It also took four days for all of the division’s regiments to drive forward and establish the Asan-Adelup beachhead to a depth of about a mile and a width of 6,000 yards. By then, the First Brigade to the south had expanded the Agat beachhead, had turned its sector over to the 77th Division and had marched north to the mouth of Orote Peninsula and sealed off the Japanese there.

  By then also Lieutenant General Takashina was satisfied that the Americans at Asan-Adelup had all their supplies and equipment ashore and that he could now destroy them at one blow as he had planned to do. Takashina had already begun to assemble his units on the Fonte Plateau just east of the Asan-Adelup perimeter. His suicide troops had infiltrated the Marine lines with explosives strapped around their waists or stuffed in packs. They were, in effect, human bombs. Their mission was to destroy the American artillery, tanks and transport.

  “The time has come,” Takashina told his commanders, “to solve the issue of the battle at a single stroke by an all-out counterattack.”

  That was on July 24, the day when the time had come for Tinian, 130 miles to the north.

  11

  Short and sweet-this one will be short and sweet.

  That was what the Marines of the Fourth Division thought as they stood on the rain-swept decks of the LST’s taking them to Tinian’s northwestern beaches. It was a dream as old as Tulagi, and even though the realities had been the extremes of the long black night of Guadalcanal or the scarlet short hell of Tarawa, Marines going into battle still looked about them eagerly for signs that this time it was true.

  Off Tinian the morning of July 24 the fact that the fight would be short seemed guaranteed by the streamlined combat issue the men carried. Packs, bedding rolls and gas masks had been left on Saipan. Besides their weapons, the men had only a can of rations, a spoon, a pair of clean socks and a bottle of mosquito lotion—all stuffed in a pocket.

  “Hell’s bellsl” a Marine swore. “It’s a silly picnic kit!”

  That Tinian would also be sweet seemed to be indicated by that panoply of American might ringing the island with steel and booming guns. Battleships and cruisers, five escort carriers and three of the big ones, Army and Marine fighter squadrons, Army bombers already operating from Isely Field on Saipan, 156 big field pieces massed hub to hub and firing from southern Saipan-all this was arrayed against that lovely flat checkerboard of canebrakes and rice paddies that was northern Tinian. And America’s newest weapon was being tried out for the first time. Some planes were dropping napalm bombs, those tanks of jellied gasoline which the fliers accurately called “hell-jelly.” Gushing flame clouds were mushrooming everywhere beneath the smoke, setting the northern canebrakes afire and flushing out concealed Japanese, burning buildings in Tinian Town.

  Unknown to these Marines exulting in their nation’s power there was another reason why Tinian might be short and sweet: the quarrel between Colonel Kiyochi Ogata, commander of the 50th Infantry Regiment, and Captain Goichi Oya, commander of the 56th Naval Guard Force. Between them they commanded slightly more than 9,000 soldiers and sailor
s, and between them there rankled that endless rivalry of the Anchor and the Star. Its bitterness was manifested by the diary entries of one of Ogata’s artillerymen, who wrote:

  9 March—The Navy stays in barracks buildings and has liberty every night with liquor to drink and makes a great row. We, on the other hand, bivouac in the rain and never get out on pass. What a difference in discipline!

  12 June—Our AA guns (Navy) spread black smoke where the enemy planes weren’t. Not one hit out of a thousand. The Naval Air Group has taken to its heels.

  15 June—The Naval aviators are robbers…. When they ran off to the mountains, they stole Army provisions….

  25 June—Sailors have stolen our provisions….

  6 July—Did Vice Admiral Kakuda when he heard that the enemy had entered our area go to sleep with joy?

  On the Navy side, Captain Oya never let his men know that with Vice Admiral Kakuda abstaining from everything but saki, command on Tinian had passed to Colonel Ogata. Captain Oya’s plans to defend Tinian Town were independent of those made by Colonel Ogata for the rest of the island. It was at Tinian Town that the southwestern beaches had been heavily fortified under Oya’s direction, and here, too, Oya had concentrated the bulk of the island’s coastal guns, which, being naval, belonged to him.

  At about half-past seven in the morning of July 24, while the Fourth Marine Division sailed toward Tinian’s northwest beaches, Captain Oya ordered his six-inch guns to open up on the big American warships guarding the men of the Second Marine Division as they boarded landing craft and roared toward Tinian Town in a feigned invasion.

  Oya’s gunners had a splendid target in old Colorado, only 3,200 yards offshore, and they hit the big battleship 22 times before she could get out of range. Colorado lost 43 men killed and 198 wounded—many of them Marines on duty at the antiaircraft guns. Six hits on the destroyer Norman Scott killed her skipper, Commander Seymour Owens, and 18 other sailors while wounding 47 more. But then the Japanese guns were spotted and knocked out by a rain of American salvos.