THE MARSHALLS AND THE SOUTH PACIFIC
As Mark Clark’s troops were battling the Germans in the rugged mountains south of Rome, halfway across the world calm, colorless Chester Nimitz was preparing to move on the Marshall Islands, only two months after taking Tarawa. This would be the necessary prelude to the decisive event in Nimitz’s sweeping Central Pacific offensive: the invasion and conquest of Saipan, as important to victory over Japan as the Normandy invasion was to victory over Germany. The invasions took place within nine days of each other, and inaugurated a year of unprecedented carnage for Americans—and in the Pacific, barbaric fighting fueled by racism and revenge. The final year of the war in the Pacific would be a death embrace with an enemy determined never to surrender.
U.S. SOLDIER GIVES A WOUNDED JAPANESE A DRINK ON KWAJALEIN, MARSHALL ISLANDS (SC).
The Marshalls lay 500 miles north of Tarawa and about 1,000 miles east of the Japanese naval base on the island of Truk. Kwajalein Atoll, at the center of the Marshall chain, was the main invasion target. Applying lessons learned at Tarawa, the Americans used underwater demolition teams to destroy mines and beach obstacles. and seized two nearby islets, placing heavy artillery on them, which, along with Navy ships and planes, pounded the world’s largest coral atoll into rubble. Only then did the 4th Marine Division, seeing its first combat duty as a unit, and the Army’s 7th Infantry Division, amphibian veterans of the Aleutian campaign, land on February 1. The Marines went after the Japanese supply complex and airfield on the twin islands of Roi and Namur, at the northern end of the atoll, and the Army stormed Kwajalein, the main islet of the atoll.
COFFEE ABOARD SHIP FOR THE MARINE CONQUERORS OF ENIWETOK ATOLL, MARSHALL, ISLANDS (USMC).
This time the first wave of troops advanced to the beaches behind armored amphibious tractors equipped with machine guns and rocket launchers, and every troop laden tractor had machine guns as well. The Japanese fought with predictable fury, suffering a casualty rate of over 98 percent, but by the fourth day, in a masterfully executed operation, Kwajalein Atoll was secured at a cost of MOO American lives out of an assault force of 53,000. Eniwetok Atoll, 526 miles to the west, was taken several weeks later, before the Japanese had time to build a formidable defense.
Nimitz’s swift victories in the Marshalls and the Gilberts were made possible by the pressure of MacArthur’s advance in northern New Guinea and the Solomons, which drew the Japanese fleet away from the Central Pacific just before the invasion of Tarawa. This was an unexpected dividend of the divided American command structure in the Pacific.3
In the steaming jungles of the South Pacific—at New Georgia, Bougainville. Biak, and other places—American and Australian forces fought small, desperate battles of annihilation as savage as Tarawa, and in even viler terrain and weather. There were no cities, or even large towns, only small, isolated settlements; maps were primitive or nonexistent; and there was not a single decent road in all of New Guinea and the Solomons, where the combined wartime population barely reached two and a half million. And because it was so difficult to see the enemy in the dark, enclosing jungle, or to move heavy military equipment through its wretched terrain, most fighting was at close quarter. “In no theater of war during the twentieth century did infantry experience as much combat at point-blank range as they found in the South Pacific,” writes historian Eric Bergerud.4
The jungle itself caused as much human harm as the enemy. The pitiless heat and suffocating humidity broke the spirits and stamina of strong men; fetid tidal swamps, thick with crocodiles, were breeding basins for mosquito-borne diseases; and the high, interwoven canopy of forest growth—great trees that seemed to reach to the sky—shut out the light, casting men into a perpetual darkness that drove some of them crazy. Soldiers and Marines went for weeks without seeing either the sun or the stars; and everywhere there was the smell of death and decay from rotting bodies and vegetation. “In the jungle, we were enveloped by a matted tangled tree canopy, 200 feet or so up,” an Australian soldier described the upland jungle of Papua. “Thornvines descended. Beneath us on the track was a slimy ooze of stinking death. The smell of bodies from both sides decaying just below fungus level. Buried just to the side of the track, they leaked their filth into the mash of mud and millions-of-years-old root systems that covered the ground. It drove some of our less strong soldiers to total nervous breakdown and weeping frustration.”5
Then there were the incessant rains. “The swamp and mud were knee deep at times,” Marine Charles Meacham recalls of his service on Bougainville. “On occasion when we were quote ‘sleeping’ at night, sometimes we’d have to hold our buddy’s head up in our lap as he slept because you were floating in mud and water. When it came your time to sleep, he’d hold your head up.”6
In this terrain, and under these conditions, opposing armies fought the most savage light-infantry war ever waged by modern industrial nations, a war without rules or restraint, one in which the Japanese suffered even more than Allied soldiers.7 With their supply lines severed by American air and naval power, they died in staggering numbers from disease and starvation.
With death upon them, some desperate men resorted to cannibalism. “There was absolutely nothing to eat, and so we decided to draw lots,” recalled a Japanese army lieutenant. “But the one who lost started to run away so we shot him. He was eaten….
“All we dreamed about was food. I met some soldiers in the mountains who were carrying baked human arms and legs. It was not guerrillas but our own soldiers who we were frightened of.”8
Moving into a position evacuated by the enemy on Noemfoor Island, off the coast of northern New Guinea, Chester Mycum of the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment spotted the body of his company’s scout lying on the ground. “It had been carved as though he were a piece of beef. All the flesh was gone from his legs, buttocks, and chest, and his heart and kidneys were missing. We had no doubt that they were eating our dead. We vowed right then never to take another prisoner!”9
The greater the desperation of the enemy the more dangerous he became, in the eyes of American soldiers, who lived in terrible fear of Japanese night attacks on their positions. Private First Class David C. Krechel was at Aitape, on the northern coast of New Guinea, when a Japanese soldier crept into the headquarters for his regiment and decapitated a radio operator with a sword blow. The next night Krechel was sleeping in a hammock strung between two towering coconut trees when he was awakened by a sharp pain in his legs. “I thought I had lost my legs because I figured a Jap had come up with his sword and chopped my legs off at the knees…. I lay there scared to death, afraid to move. I didn’t want him to swing again…. [Then] the numbness wore off and I was able to reach down and feel that I had legs…. I didn’t know what happened. But you didn’t dare to get out of where you slept. If you got up and moved around you got shot. So there was nothing I could do but wait till morning. [When] I got up the next morning, here’s this coconut lying right across the top of my shins.”10
THE MARIANAS
Control of the Gilberts and Marshalls, and shortly after, the Admiralty Islands to the west, just north of Rabaul, which were seized by MacArthur’s forces, enabled Task Force 58, the striking arm of Admiral Raymond Spruance’s Fifth Fleet, to deliver devastating blows at Japanese air and naval bases in the area. In mid-February. Admiral Marc Mitscher’s air fleet destroyed over 200 planes and sank 200,000 tons of merchant shipping in two days of nonstop raids on Truk.
With Truk neutralized, as Rabaul had been, Task Force 58 steamed with impunity into the waters of the Marianas, only 1,300 miles from Tokyo. “The Marianas are the key of the situation,” Admiral King declared, “because of their location on the Japanese line of communications between the home islands and the empire.11 King and Nimitz were convinced that Japan could be brought down by economic strangulation. American naval bases in the Marianas would quicken the inevitable, depriving Japan of the oil, rubber, rice, iron, and other commodities essential to wage modern warfare.<
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General Henry Harold “Hap” Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces, had another idea. The Air Force would defeat Japan, as it expected to defeat Germany, with long-range strategic bombing, the executing instrument a fearsome weapon just off the assembly line, the B-29 Superfortress, the world’s first intercontinental bomber. The air barons had originally intended to deploy these “Superforts” almost exclusively from bases in China, but Chiang Kai-shek’s inability to contain Japanese incursions in the area of the airfields made the Marianas a better location. From long island airstrips, American bombers could, in the words of George Marshall, “set the paper cities of Japan on fire.”12 With the capture of the Marianas, the Navy and Air Force together could apply overwhelming power, making a costly land invasion of the home islands unnecessary, in the opinion of both Nimitz and Arnold. Three tremendous weapons of war—the aircraft carrier, the long-range submarine, and the Super fortress—would finish off the enemy by blockade and bombardment. But as journalist Robert Sherrod wrote, “No man who saw Tarawa … would agree that all the American steel was in the guns and bombs. There was a lot, also, in the hearts of the men who stormed the beaches.”13
With the capture of the Marshalls, the war of the coral atolls ended. “We are through with the flat atolls …” declared General Holland Smith. “Now we are up against mountains and caves where the Japs can really dig in. A week from now there will be a lot of dead Marines.”14 The principal targets in the Marianas—Guam. Saipan, and Tinian—were large volcanic islands with developed infrastructures of sugar plantations and towns. Tinian was relatively flat, but Saipan and Guam, which had been an American possession since the 1880s, had a varied, luxuriant topography, much like Hawaii’s, with flat sugarcane fields, precipitous cliffs, jungle-carpeted mountains, and “big raw boned valleys.”15 Unlike Tarawa, all three islands had sizable native populations—on Saipan, mostly Japanese immigrants. But like Tarawa, all were strongly defended, especially Saipan. It was Tojo’s Pacific bastion, and he assured the Emperor it was invincible.
There were nearly 40,000 Japanese troops on Saipan, about 6,000 of them Marines under the command of Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, the hero of Pearl Harbor, who had been sent to the Marianas after being disgraced at Midway. The island’s army commander, Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito, was under orders from Tokyo to hold Saipan until the Imperial Fleet arrived from the Philippines with the intention of driving off and destroying the American carrier force.
Saito had every muzzle trained on the reef the Americans would come over. The island’s defense system, however, was not nearly as formidable as it could have been. American submarines had been conducting an effective interdiction campaign against supply and troop transports headed for Saipan, sinking ships laden with men and tanks, cement and steel. After Saipan was taken, a Japanese prisoner claimed that if the American assault had come three months later the island “would have been impregnable.”16
When Marc Mitscher’s Task Force 58 sailed from Majuro in the Marshall Islands to launch the Marianas operation, it took nearly live hours to clear the lagoon. The armada of 800 ships, nearly 1,000 planes, 100,000 sailors and aviators, and 127,000 troops, two thirds of them Marines, would be almost as large as the one assembled for the Normandy D Day landings. “I was at sea on an amphibious assault vehicle, on the 7th of June, when word reached us of the Allied landing at Normandy,” recalls Marine officer Edwin Simmons. “From the deck, as far as I could see, were the gray shapes of hundreds of Navy ships plodding in convoy toward their targets in the Marianas. I had a realization then of the overwhelming strength of our country—that we could do this at the same time that we were landing in Normandy and reopening a front in Europe.”
The joint expeditionary force was under the command of Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, nicknamed Terrible Turner for his volcanic temper. This was his fifth major amphibious operation, going back to Guadalcanal. The expeditionary troops were under General Holland “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, who while perhaps not as brilliant as Turner, was equally irascible. “The two men struck sparks like flint against steel,” Simmons says. But their partnership, “though stormy, spelled hell in bold red letters for the Japanese.”17
There was a thunderous preliminary bombardment, but naval guns were unable to destroy vital targets on the large mountainous island, where the enemy hid in caves and “spider holes.” As Admiral Nimitz said later, “The enemy met the assault operations with pointless bravery, inhuman tenacity, cave fighting, and the will to lose hard.”18
Here, unlike Tarawa, the reef would not be a problem. Underwater demolition teams had scouted the conditions of the reef, the currents, and the beach, and had blown up concrete and steel landing obstacles, taking sixteen casualties in this perilous operation. On the clear, windless morning of June 15, strong surf pounded over the reef, its sound blocked out by the rumbling of the big battleship guns. Over the loudspeaker of the transport that carried Robert Sherrod to yet another Pacific D-Day came the chaplain’s voice: “With the help of God we will succeed…. Most of you will return, but some of you will meet the God who made you…. Repent your sins.”19 When they heard this, more than a few men winced.
After the signal went up from the flagship, over 700 Alligators [LVTs] went tearing ashore, ninety-six abreast in every wave, many of them with turret-mounted cannons. They poured out of what looked to a Japanese defender “like a large city that had suddenly appeared off shore,” and by nightfall they had carried 20,000 men to the beach.20 The Alligators were to press inland almost a mile in a coordinated, four-mile-wide blitz, securing a strong defensive position to shield the beach. But their thin skin of armor could not stand up to the heavy Japanese guns, and they were cut to pieces, big plates of steel flying everywhere as they tried to cross the beach.
From their hiding places on the shoreline cliffs the Japanese put down a deadly line of fire on the beaches. That first night and the next day Major William Jones’s unit, heroes at Tarawa, helped to hurl back three enemy counterattacks, one of them a spectacular tank assault—the largest of the island war in the Pacific—which they broke apart with bazookas, naval fire, and their own “Steel Goliaths.” It was the “damned artillery and mortars,” veterans would say later, that made Saipan so tough to take; that and the rugged terrain—steep gorges and cliffs and a spine of volcanic mountains culminating in towering Mount Tapotchau. “Down our throats came this avalanche of artillery fire,” recalls rifle platoon leader John C. Chapin, who had just graduated from Yale with honors in history.
THE SHELLS HIT AHEAD, BEHIND, ON both sides, and right in our midst. They would come rocketing down with a freight-train roar and then explode with a deafening cataclysm that is beyond description…. We had no place to go. We had no foxholes. It was right out of the blue. Later we realized that sitting up on Mount Tapotchau, 1,554 feet high, Japanese observers had preregistered every possible location before we landed…. They were zeroed in on us and were hitting us with pinpoint accuracy.
SAIPAN. MARINES UNDER ENEMY FIRE ON THE BEACH(U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE).
All around us was the chaotic debris of … combat: Jap and Marine bodies lying in mangled and grotesque positions; blasted and burnt-out pillboxes; the burning wrecks of LVTs that had been knocked out by Jap high-velocity fire: the acrid smell of high explosives; the shattered trees; and the churned-up sand littered with discarded equipment.21
Circling offshore in General Red Mike Edson’s LVT, listening to the radio reports from the beach, Robert Sherrod penciled in his notebook, “looks like a real crisis.”22
One of the first of over 1,500 casualties on the beach was Jim Crowe, the Tarawa iron man. He and his aide were hit coming in, and Crowe was in agony with a severe sucking wound near his heart. “I thought I was dying,” he later described his final hour in combat. “And I thought maybe I’d better take a little interest in things. So I put my carbine in my hand [and] put my fist in this hole, which the doctors said saved me…. D’Natilly, my corporal, lyi
ng there, pulled his left arm up and looked at his wristwatch. And I said, ‘Why are you looking at your wristwatch, Bill?’
“He said, ‘Sir, I want to see what time I die.’”
A corpsman and a surgeon bent over them to try to help. “But then a shell hit down around my knees [and] just laid [the corpsman] wide open … and everything in him flew out against me.” The doctor also got hit, but survived, and Crowe took some shrapnel in one leg. Then a shell hit a tree right next to his head and wounded him further in the arm and wrist. “So I got up and left. I wasn’t going to stay there any longer.”23 Norman Hatch, the Marine Corps photographer, says that “Crowe had made a $20 bet with the division surgeon that if he got hit, no matter where, he would get to the aid station. Spotting his big red handlebar mustache, men on the beach offered to help him, but he insisted on walking, holding himself together with one hand while firing his carbine at snipers. When he got to the aid station, he barked at the surgeon, ‘Give me my twenty bucks.’”24
As Sherrod and Edson passed the battalion aid station, they spotted Crowe sitting in a shell hole, heavily bandaged and “breathing hard,” waiting to be evacuated. The surgeon administering morphine looked up and murmured, “not much chance. I’m afraid.” But Crowe refused to accept the verdict. “I hate like hell for this to happen, General,” he told Edson in a clear voice, “but I’ll be all right.” Then he turned to Sherrod, “I’ll see you stateside. We’ll throw a whizdinger.”25 Crowe survived, but he and Sherrod never did meet again. Growe’s battalion was taken over by another hero at Tarawa, the bespectacled, soft-spoken economics professor from Northwestern University, Major William Chamberlin.
Some of the stretcher-bearers at the battalion aid station that day were the first African-American Marines to see combat in the war. The United States Marine Corps had not accepted blacks since 1798 and had hoped to fight World War II as an all-white organization. “If it were a question of having a Marine Corps of 5,000 whites or 250,000 Negroes, I would rather have the whites,” said the defiant Marine Corps Commandant, Major General Thomas Holcomb.26 But under mounting pressure from President Roosevelt, the resolutely segregationist Marines had been forced to accept black volunteers and, later, draftees. The Corps formed and trained two Defense Battalions, the 51st and 52nd, and made sure they never saw combat, assigning them to outposts far in the rear of the Central Pacific advance. Ironically, it was the African American Marines who were not trained for combat who saw heavy action all across the Pacific, beginning, 800 strong, on the beaches of Saipan. These were laborers in military support units.
D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC Page 16
