Their Backs against the Sea: The Battle of Saipan and the Largest Banzai Attack of World War II

by Bill Sloan

  The man chosen to fly the plane with the first atomic bomb was Colonel Paul Tibbets, who was born in Quincy, Illinois, and had already compiled an admirable record with the B-29.

  ON 26 JULY 1945, the cruiser USS Indianapolis arrived at Tinian with the firing mechanism and uranium bullet for the first bomb. Once the top-secret cargo was delivered, the Indianapolis, one of the fastest ships in the US Navy, struck out for the Philippines.

  On 30 July, traveling alone, she was torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine. Marine Sergeant Ed Harrell, who came from a little place called Golden Pond, Kentucky, was one of a small handful of Marines aboard the Indianapolis as a corporal of the guard. He described the instant the two torpedoes struck, almost simultaneously, just as he was retiring for the night.

  “I began to doze off, and all of a sudden a massive explosion shook the ship,” he recalled. “I’m still wrapped in my blanket, and all that water begins to come on me. I’m real close, within thirty-five feet of a main torpedo that cuts through the bow of that ship.

  “All the debris is falling and much of the flash of that is in the air,” Harrell said. He began to realize that the bow was no longer where it was supposed to be, and he could hear the sound of the bulkheads collapsing below. As people emerged from the forward superstructure of the main deck Harrell could see that they were horribly burned. Flesh was hanging off their hands, arms, and faces, and they were screaming and begging for help.

  Harrell tried to make his way back to the quarterdeck, but when he reached it, he could plainly see that the ship was already listing to starboard. There was no question the ship was sinking. “There’s an old saying that there are no atheists in foxholes,” he said. “If you believe in a higher power, you begin to pray, and certainly I began to pray. I’m looking out, and what I see is eternity.”

  It took exactly twelve minutes from when the first torpedo hit the ship until it went down. Harrell climbed the rail and jumped into the water feet first and swam away from the ship. When he looked back, the bow was already underwater and the fantail was high in the air.

  “The screws are still turning, and boys are still trying to get off,” he said. “Some of them are jumping from pretty high up. Some of them are actually jumping into the screws. I could see them jumping, and you could hear them screaming.”

  About three hundred men went down with the ship.

  It was three and a half days before the survivors were discovered. Almost six hundred had perished of burns, exhaustion, dehydration, and madness. And sharks hung around the edges of the men who were clinging to bits of flotsam, makeshift rafts, and a handful of lifeboats.

  “I would say that sharks ended the lives of better than half the men,” said Harrell. It was the costliest wartime tragedy the US Navy ever experienced. Out of the 1,196 crewmen, only 317 survived.

  “A Marine buddy of mine happened to run into Mochitsura Hashimoto, the commander of Japanese submarine I-58, that had done the damage,” said Harrell. “They shook hands, and the Marine told Hashimoto, ‘After all these years and all that has happened, I forgive you,’ he said.”

  “I forgive you too,” Hashimoto replied.

  “Forgive me?” said the Marine. “For what?”

  “I lost my whole family at Hiroshima,” Hashimoto said.

  BAD WEATHER POSTPONED Tibbets’s flight on 3 August, but on 5 August meteorologists were predicting several days of clear visibility ahead. At 0030 Tinian time on 6 August the crew left the mess hall and headed for the plane. Flight Surgeon Don Young handed Tibbets a pillbox containing twelve cyanide capsules, one for each member of the crew. They were to be passed out in case of emergency. The crew could use them or not—it was up to them.

  The bomb was called “Little Boy,” and Colonel Tibbets named his plane the Enola Gay after his mother. When Tibbets climbed into its cabin and prepared for takeoff, he felt he was about to become a part of “the greatest single event in the history of warfare,” he wrote later. The four-and-a-half-ton bomb made the plane seriously overweight, and the Enola Gay needed every inch of the runway to take off. At 0245 Tibbets pulled back on the yoke, and the plane headed toward the Japanese islands. Six and a half hours later Little Boy was released over Hiroshima. The Enola Gay was ten miles away, but shock waves buffeted the plane.

  Tibbets was shocked almost speechless. As his plane left the area, he turned and saw a massive mushroom cloud that seemed to be coming right at them. “We were not prepared for the awesome sight that met our eyes as we turned for a heading that would take us alongside the burning, devastated city,” he said. “The giant purple mushroom… had already risen to a height of forty-five thousand feet, three miles above our altitude, and was still boiling upward like something terribly alive.

  “Even more fearsome was the sight on the ground below,” he said. “At the base of the cloud, fires were springing up everywhere amid a turbulent mass of smoke that had the appearance of bubbling, hot tar… The city we had seen so clearly in the sunlight a few minutes before was now an ugly smudge. It had completely disappeared under this awful blanket of smoke and fire.

  “I think this is the end of the war,” Tibbets told copilot Captain Robert Lewis as they headed back to Tinian.

  THE SECOND BOMB, called “Fat Man,” was bigger and more powerful than Little Boy. Philip Morrison and his crew of scientists had just finished loading the “man-made meteor” into a B-29 named Bockscar to be flown to its target by Major Chuck Sweeney.

  “It weighed 10,300 pounds—at least 1,000 pounds heavier than Little Boy,” Sweeney remarked when he saw the bomb. “Ten feet, eight inches long, five feet across with its high-gloss yellow enamel and black tailfins. It resembled a grossly oversized decorative squash,” he said. “I could see that many people had signed the bomb or left poems and messages with varying degrees of vitriol.”

  On 9 August the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. On 10 August Japan surrendered.

  chapter 13

  Dismay in Japan

  WITH THE FALL of Saipan, the people of Japan learned to their shock and dismay just how badly the Americans outnumbered and overpowered their forces in the Pacific. For the first time millions of Japanese began to wonder whether the war was actually being lost. The Sons of Heaven began to seriously question what they had come to think of as their divine mission.

  On 20 July 1944—just eleven days after Saipan was declared secure—General Hideki Tojo resigned as prime minister and chief of the Imperial General Staff. General Kuniyaki Koiso replaced him as prime minister, but because of a strategic rift between the Japanese army and the navy, he was forced to share authority with Admiral Mitsumasa Yonia, the navy minister.

  The war was steadily closing in on Japan on almost every front. Many fine restaurants and geisha houses were shut down, and the geisha were told to find war work. With fuel becoming more scarce, the Japanese authorities imposed travel restrictions on the average citizen; anyone wanting to make a long trip needed to acquire a police permit.

  Dining cars on trains were closed down, and the average citizen was unable to obtain rice. City dwellers traded off family possessions for black market food to supplement the lean rations of mixed, unhulled grain they received each month. Aluminum, copper, tin, and other materials the government needed were almost nonexistent.

  Meanwhile the late summer of 1944 dragged on, weighed down by stories of valor, sacrifice, suffering, and a giant airplane, which the people of Japan had come to call “B-san”—the B-29s. News reports of the B-29 bombings in Western China had made the rounds in Tokyo and other important Japanese cities, and the Japanese press roundly poked fun at them.

  In a raid near Kyushu one B-29 had been forced to make an emergency landing near the front lines. The captain of the plane had called for help, but the Japanese intercepted the message and got there first, destroying the B-29 on the ground. On 3 July, as Marines and soldiers were fighting tooth and nail at Saipan, Japanese newspapers carried photos of the bombing above the c
aption “B-29 in Flames.” Other stories had emerged from the same area during the rest of July, August, and September, accompanied by stories announcing that forty B-29s had been destroyed in the raids, when the actual count was only four.

  On 30 August B-29s raided the Yawata Steel Works at Kyushu, and the Japanese air force and anti-aircraft fire shot down three of the planes. One of them was recovered, patched up, and brought to Tokyo, where a massively attended public exposition was staged. Tens of thousands of Japanese flocked to see the B-29, and government posters on display boasted that this was one of a hundred planes shot down by defenders. This was patently untrue, but by this time the Japanese people were well aware of the B-29.

  On the afternoon of 1 November 1944, a solitary B-29 appeared high in the skies above Tokyo. It was the first US plane to fly over the Japanese capital city since Jimmy Doolittle’s B-25s in April 1942. The big silver plane circled slowly for a while, and Japanese fighters sent out to attack it could get no closer than 7,000 feet. The B-29 was sailing along at 32,000 feet, while the Japanese fighters’ maximum altitude was only 25,000 feet. At the time the B-29 was impervious to any type of gunfire at such altitudes.

  But what the Americans wanted was an airbase from which they could launch fighters to accompany B-29s to Japan and back. They found it at Iwo Jima. After one of the bloodiest battles in American history, US casualties totaled 26,000, with 6,821 dead. Japanese casualties totaled 22,000—almost the entire defending force on the island. When the battle ended, only 216 Japanese survived to be taken prisoner.

  The fall of Iwo Jima had no immediate effect on the Japanese people—it was just another lost island, as Saipan and Okinawa had been—but from Japan’s Imperial Headquarters it was viewed as a serious, if not fatal, setback. It was the only remaining base that the Japanese had for launching aerial attacks against the B-29 installations on Saipan and Tinian. In Tokyo officials knew that Americans were lengthening and improving the existing Tinian airstrips. By the summer of 1945 B-29s would have an intermediate base for emergency landings at Iwo Jima and—much more importantly—a base for fighters to use to accompany B-29s to Japan and back.

  The United States also found a man who didn’t mind going into the history books as an outright advocate of massive firebombings of civilian populations. His name was General Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay. He is credited with perfecting a highly effective—but intensely controversial—strategic bombing campaign against Japanese cities.

  Air Force officers designed and built a typical Japanese village in Utah and practiced bombing it with a new incendiary device made with jellied napalm. It was an almost perfect instrument for destroying small Japanese houses, whereby small bombs, weighing about six pounds, could be dropped in huge numbers. They would fall on roofs and explode, and the napalm would stick tightly to the surface of the roof. The resulting fire was next to impossible to extinguish.

  This was how LeMay would incinerate the major cities of Japan.

  On 25 February 1945, LeMay began this new type of bombing. A total of 231 B-29s were involved, and they dumped 450 tons of fire bombs on Tokyo. They destroyed sixteen square miles of territory and 28,000 buildings. Only the deaf and blind were still convinced that Japan was not losing the war.

  The planes came in very low, at around five thousand feet, scattering their incendiaries in all directions. The tests in Utah had proven that the type of fire-fighting equipment used by the Japanese could never contain the fires created, but not even the Americans had anticipated their effectiveness. High winds caught the fires, and the heat made the winds whirl faster and faster until a firestorm was created. The flames would jump an entire block, spreading the fire faster than it could be contained. Entire sections of the city erupted in flames and then collapsed into rubble, burying thousands of people in the ash and carnage.

  LeMay called it a “diller” of a raid. According to official US Army Air Force records, the count of the dead stood at 83,000 Japanese civilians killed, but facts strongly indicate that as many as 200,000 people may have died—about three times the death toll at Hiroshima five and a half months later.

  They called it “slaughter bombing,” which is what it was. An area of sixteen square miles had been completely gutted. Not only in Tokyo but also later in Nagoya, Osake, and Kobe. A total of 300,000 houses were burned to the ground.

  When Emperor Hirohito toured Tokyo some ten days after the raid, he was sick and shocked at what he saw. At this point, regardless of what his generals and admirals told him, he realized the war was lost and every effort must be made to end it.

  Standing in the way was an obstacle that probably only the Japanese fully understood. They feared that America’s definition of “unconditional surrender,” according to the Potsdam Declaration, included getting rid of the Emperor, the most sacred and revered figure in the world as far as the Japanese people were concerned. The thought was unbearable to the Japanese, so they hesitated… and waited.

  For more than a week the body crews hauled off the dead killed in the air attacks. They found them clustered in air raid shelters, in the canals, and along the river banks. Entire streets and alleys were impassable because of piles of bodies.

  Meanwhile the spirit of the kamikaze had spread with alarming speed, taking over all the Japanese armed forces. More US Navy personnel were killed and wounded in the battle of Okinawa than in any other engagement, and it was all because of the kamikazes—suicidal pilots who deliberately crashed into American warships. The kamikaze spirit was on the rise everywhere, even in the civilian population.

  Soldiers with satchel charges hurled themselves under tanks, and soldiers in small boats crept up on ships at anchor, clambered aboard, and charged the decks with sabers until they were cut down. One-man suicide submarines were ramming ships. All across Japan, civilians were being taught how to make suicide attacks when American troops landed.

  By April destruction in Japanese cities was so massive that the Cabinet approved a program turning large areas of Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka into farming zones. The agricultural workers would be women, children, and the elderly, who would be housed in temples and public buildings until proper housing could be built.

  Early in April the government created the National Volunteer Force, headed by the prime minister of Japan. It was to be a people’s army in which every citizen would spring to the nation’s defense. Women, the young children, and the elderly began learning to drill and use such primitive weapons as the pike and such modern ones as high explosives.

  The mobilization moved with surprising speed. The national medical association took over the civil hospitals and medical facilities, distributing doctors, nurses, and technicians from one area to another as needed. Units of a thousand men were established around Tokyo to begin building defense positions as part of the National Volunteer Force. Civilians were to take a major role in the projected hand-to-hand fighting on the streets of Japan when the American devils invaded.

  As these plans were announced, the government headed by General Koiso collapsed. As nearly as can be determined, Koiso quit because he could no longer pretend that he knew how to stop the American juggernaut. Admiral Kantaro Suzuki replaced him, but only after first refusing the appointment. He had no political knowledge, he said, but this was precisely the reason why Emperor Hirohito wanted him. The war could be stopped only if the Cabinet was in the hands of men who owed nothing to the militarists.

  “We need you,” the Emperor told him, setting a precedent by making such an outright request. Also brought into the government were a large number of civilians, including Shigenosi Togo as foreign minister, whom the Emperor knew was opposed to many of the excesses of the militarists. An antimilitary segment of society was gradually being formed in the highest councils of government, but there was still the important question: What do we do if the Allies choose to unseat the Emperor?

  On 8 May 1945, when news reached Japan that Germany had surrendered to the Allies, it brought no banner headl
ines to Japanese newspapers. The report of the surrender was terse and contained no details. All it meant was that Japan was standing alone against the rest of the world.

  Japanese armies were on the retreat everywhere. Troops in the Philippines were holding out with rifles and machine guns. In Burma Japan’s forces were falling back to the east. In China the last offensive was abandoned in May, and the Japanese were retreating toward the coast. By the end of May fifty thousand Japanese troops had been killed on Okinawa; in June another sixty thousand would die.

  Not only had the Soviet Union spurned Japanese attempts at open talks for peace as an intermediary, now it seemed likely that the USSR was actually joining the fight against Japan, with Russian troops massed at the borders of Manchuria and Korea.

  On 22 June 1945, the Emperor called a meeting of the Supreme War Council. It included the prime minister, minister of foreign affairs, army and navy ministers, and army and navy chiefs of staff.

  “We have heard enough of this determination of yours to fight to the last soldiers,” Hirohito said. “We wish that you, the leaders of Japan, will strive now to study the ways and means to conclude the war.” And he added bluntly: “In doing so, try not to be bound by the decisions you have made in the past.”

  The audience was stunned into silence. The Emperor had shattered all precedents. Never until this very moment had he spoken a word that implied criticism of the all-powerful military. The men he was addressing didn’t know what to do. None of these leaders was willing to say anything, and the meeting was adjourned.

  By this time the atomic bomb was a reality. It had been perfected in July, and some of President Harry S. Truman’s advisers suggested that he refrain from dropping the bomb; instead, they said, he could simply describe it. The American military strongly objected: not only would it give away the American hand, they said, but the Japanese most likely wouldn’t believe it anyhow.