D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  Later that day, the Marines gathered up their dead. Lying on the field when Sherrod arrived was Major William L. Crouch, commander of the Marine battalion. His helmet and carbine were close to his body and near his hand were two letters from home, which he was probably trying to read as he bled to death. In a field not far away, the shattered bodies of the enemy were being stacked three feet high. Sherrod wrote in his notebook, “They are thicker here than at Tarawa.”51

  Mitsuharu Noda, a paymaster for Admiral Nagumo, survived this grisly fight:

  ABOUT TWENTY MEMBERS OF [NAGUMO’S] headquarters participated in the final battle. We drank the best Japanese whiskey—Suntory Square Bottle, we’d saved it to the last minute. We smoked our last tobacco—Hikari brand. We were even able to smile. Maybe because we were still together as a group….

  On July 7 at 4 A.M., shouting all together, we headed toward the enemy camp. … We were not going to attack enemies. We were ordered to go there to be killed. Some probably may have gone drunk, just to overcome fear, but that last taste of Suntory whiskey was wonderful. It was a kind of suicide. We didn’t crawl on the ground, though bullets were coming toward us. We advanced standing up.

  We had hardly any arms. Some had only shovels, others had sticks. I had a pistol. I think I was shot at the second line of defense. Hit by a machine gun, two bullets in my stomach, one passing through, one lodging in me. I didn’t suffer pain. None at all. But I couldn’t stand either. I was lying on my back. I could see the tracer bullets passing over. This is it, I thought.

  Then I saw a group of four or five men, Japanese, crawling toward each other on their hands and knees. Their heads were now all close together. One of them held a grenade upward in his right hand and called out an invitation to me: “Hey, sailor there! Won’t you come with us?” I said, “I have a grenade. Please go ahead.”

  I heard “Long live the emperor!” and the explosion of a hand grenade at the same instant. Several men were blown away, dismembered at once into bits of flesh. I held my breath at this appalling sight. Their heads were all cracked open and smoke was coming out. It was a horrific way to die. Those were my thoughts as I lost consciousness.52

  After this, the fight went out of the enemy. They waited in their holes to die or committed hara-kiri with knives or grenades—or by drowning themselves in the sea. (Before this battle only about 600 Japanese had been captured by all of the Allied powers.)53

  On July 9 the battle was over, although here, as on every other island in the Central Pacific, there was no surrender. It would take over a year to kill or capture the Japanese who remained hidden in caves.

  The Battle of Saipan lasted twenty-four days and the cost was steep—16,525 American casualties, including 3,426 killed or missing, more casualties than Americans had suffered in any previous Pacific battle. Only 921 Japanese of a garrison of nearly 40,000 were taken prisoner. Approximately 14,500 civilians were put into an internment camp, where they would live when they were not working on construction projects.

  The Japanese, Koreans, and native peoples were each put in separate, fenced-in sections. Each racial group appointed its own police force to keep order and patrol its perimeter.54

  While the camp was being set up, and the dead were being buried, American wounded were being taken out to hospital and troop ships anchored offshore. One of the four hospital ships was the Solace, which had taken in the wounded in the attack on Pearl Harbor. When Robert Sherrod went on board to gather material for a story, Solace had just returned from Guadalcanal for a second shipload of patients. The hospital ships were painted pure white, and the doctors, nurses, and corpsmen wore “spotless white….Everything about the ship was intended to make the wounded man forget about mud and foxholes … and the whine of artillery.”

  A U.S. STOCKADE CAMP ON SAIPAN (USMC).

  Each ship had beds for 480 men, but there were so many wounded at Saipan that patients were put on cots, sofas, and the bunks of ship’s personnel. Still, there was not enough space. Only one in five of the wounded could be taken aboard hospital ships. The rest, except for a few evacuated by planes, “sweated it out on the crowded bunks of transports.”

  The types of wounds the men suffered described the nature of the battle. At Tarawa, 57 percent of the Solace’s, cases had been bullet wounds. At Saipan, artillery and mortars caused 65 percent of the wounds, and there were five times as many wounds caused by bayonets and knives. Saipan had been an artillery fight, punctuated by brutal, close-in fighting and more and larger banzai charges than veterans in the Pacific had ever experienced. And because it was a far longer battle than Tarawa, there were many more cases of combat fatigue. The disorder was treated as callously here as it was in Europe. A third of the men suffering from combat fatigue in the early fighting were returned to shore with only one or two days’ rest.

  The Solace had a crew of seventeen doctors, 175 corpsmen, and seventeen nurses. “Until long after the Saipan battle, the Central Pacific campaign,” Sherrod wrote, “was a womanless war except for the nurses aboard the hospital ships [and in a few field hospitals]. They were a source of curiosity for men who had not seen a woman in months or years.”55

  OPERATION AT AN AID STATION (USMC).

  DEAD JAPANESE TROOPS ON TINIAN AFTER A BANZAI CHARGE (USMC).

  That was one of the major differences between the war here and in Europe, along with the climate and the incredible distances between the battlefields, often a thousand miles and more, with nothing but water in between. Fighting men felt isolated in the Pacific as they rarely did in Europe, where there were nearby civilizations like their own. “And another adjustment I’ll have to make,” wrote Ernie Pyle, who was transferred to the Marianas from Northern Europe after Saipan was captured, “is the attitude toward the enemy. In Europe we felt our enemies, horrible and deadly as they were, were still people. But out here I’ve already gathered the feeling that the Japanese are looked upon as something inhuman and squirmy—like some people feel about cockroaches or mice.”56

  Just before Sherrod left the Solace, about 9:00 P.M., the ship began to receive wounded fighting men. As they were loaded from amphtracs, an embarkation officer, Dr. Richmond Beck, looked at the red-bordered casualty tag that each man had pinned on him and examined the wound, which had been dressed ashore. He made a quick diagnosis and sent the man to the proper ward. There the wounded man received another tag. “When we run out of tags we know we’ve got a shipload,” another doctor told Sherrod.57 The clothing of each man was cut off and tossed overboard. Then they sailed away from Saipan.

  For many of those ashore that evening, sleeping on the bare ground, tired and so far from home, Tinian and Guam were next. Tinian, just across the straits from Saipan, was overrun in nine days. Less important strategically but far more gratifying to the American public was the reconquest of Guam, which was completed by August 10 after weeks of fighting that was as vicious as that on Saipan. It was the first conquered United States territory to be retaken from the enemy. The fall of Guam ended the Marianas campaign. Even as the fighting raged, Seabees had been expanding the runways on Saipan. Tinian, and Guam for the arrival in a few months of the new B-29 Superfortresses. “Saipan was to Japan almost what Pearl Harbor is to the U.S.,” Robert Sherrod wrote after the battle, “except that it is a thousand miles closer to Japan’s coast than Pearl Harbor is to America’s.”58

  MARPI POINT

  Before the bombing of the Japanese home islands began, there was a profound perceptual change in both Japan and the United States that would make the last year of the war in the Pacific bloody beyond belief. The triggering incident occurred at Saipan.

  As the battle wound down, a group of Marines on amphibious tractors saw seven Japanese soldiers on a coral reef and went out to capture them. As they approached the reef, one of the Japanese, undoubtedly an officer, pulled out his sword and began cutting off the heads of the men who were kneeling in front of him. Before the Marines could get to him, there were four heads floating in the
lagoon. The officer, swinging his sword wildly, charged the Marines and was gunned down, along with the two remaining men. Marines had seen this kind of behavior before. No one was prepared for what happened next.

  On July 11, two days after Saipan was declared “secured,” two American reporters, Keith Wheeler of the Chicago Times and Frank Kelley of the New York Herald Tribune, and a photographer for Life, Peter Stackpole, arrived at press headquarters on the island with a story almost too horrifying to believe. During the final days of the fighting, remnants of the Japanese army and about 4,000 panic-stricken civilians had escaped to Marpi Point, on the northern tip of the island. There they began killing themselves, often in the most gruesome manner. Parents tossed their children from the high cliffs into the sea, or onto jagged piles of rocks. Mothers waded out in the water with their babies and disappeared in the surf. Fathers, mothers, and children stood in circles holding grenades given to them by the Japanese soldiers and pulled the pins.

  Marine interpreters tried to stop them. They and civilians who had surrendered spoke through amplifiers, pleading with the people on the cliffs to give themselves up, assuring them they would be treated humanely. But their government had told them that the sadistic, hairy-faced Americans would rape, torture, and kill them. Tragically, even some who did choose life over death did not survive. Japanese soldiers assassinated many civilians who showed an inclination to surrender.

  The next morning, Robert Sherrod drove to Marpi Point. After he returned he wrote one of the most influential pieces of journalism to come out of the Pacific war, “The Nature of the Enemy,” which appeared in Time magazine:

  MARPI POINT … IS A LONG PLATEAU on which the Japs had built a secondary airfield. At the edge of the plateau there is a sheer 200-foot drop to jagged coral below; then the billowing sea. The morning I crossed the airfield and got to the edge of the cliff nine marines from a burial detail were working with ropes to pick up the bodies of two of our men, killed the previous day. I asked one of them about the stories I had heard.

  “You wouldn’t believe it unless you saw it,” he said. “Yesterday and the day before there were hundreds of Jap civilians—men, women, and children—up here on this cliff. In the most routine way, they would jump off the cliff, or climb down and wade into the sea. I saw a father throw his three children off. and then jump down himself. Those coral pockets down there under the cliff are full of Jap suicides.”

  He paused and pointed. “Look,” he said, “there’s one getting ready to drown himself now.” Down below, a young Japanese, no more than 15, paced back and forth across the rocks. He swung his arms, as if getting ready to dive; then he sat down at the edge and let the water play over his feet. Finally he eased himself slowly into the water.

  “There he goes,” the marine shouted.

  A strong wave had washed up to the shore, and the boy floated out with it. At first, he lay on the water, face down, without moving. Then, apparently, a last, desperate instinct to live gripped him and he flailed his arms, thrashing the foam. It was too late. Just as suddenly, it was all over: the air-filled seat of his knee-length black trousers bobbed on the water for ten minutes. Then he disappeared.

  Looking down, I counted the bodies of seven others who had killed themselves. One, a child of about five, clad in a ragged white shirt, floated stiffly in the surf.

  I turned to go. “This is nothing,” the marine said. “Half a mile down, on the west side, you can see hundreds of them.”

  Later on I checked up with the officer of a minesweeper which had been operating on the west side. He said: “Down there, the sea is so congested with floating bodies we can’t avoid running them down. There was one woman in khaki trousers and a white polka-dot blouse, with her black hair streaming in the water. I’m afraid every time I see that kind of a blouse, I’ll think of that woman. There was another one, nude, who had drowned herself while giving birth to a baby. A small boy of four or five had drowned with his arm clenched around the neck of a soldier—the two bodies rocked crazily in the waves. Hundreds and hundreds of Jap bodies have floated up to our minesweeper.”

  Apparently the Jap soldier not only would go to any extreme to avoid surrender, but would also try to see that no civilian surrendered. At Marpi Point, the marines had tried to dislodge a Jap sniper from a cave in the cliff. He was an exceptional marksman; he had killed two marines (one at 700 yards) and wounded a third. The marines used rifles, torpedoes and finally, TNT in a 45-minute effort to force him out. Meantime the Jap had other business.

  He had spotted a Japanese group—apparently father, mother, and three children—out on the rocks, preparing to drown themselves, but evidently weakening in their decision. The Jap sniper took aim. He drilled the man from behind, dropping him into the sea. The second bullet hit the woman. She dragged herself about 30 feet along the rocks. Then she floated out in a stain of blood. The sniper would have shot the children, but a Japanese woman ran across and carried them out of range. The sniper walked defiantly out of his cave, and crumpled under a hundred marine bullets.

  Some of the Jap civilians went through considerable ceremony before snuffing out their own lives. The marines said that some fathers had cut their children’s throats before tossing them over the cliff. Some strangled their children. In one instance marines watched in astonishment as three women sat on the rocks leisurely, deliberately combing their long black hair. Finally they joined hands and walked slowly out into the sea.

  But the most ceremonious, by all odds, were 100 Japs who were on the rocks below the Marpi Point cliff. All together, they suddenly bowed to marines watching from the cliff. Then they stripped off their clothes and bathed in the sea. Thus refreshed, they put on new clothes and spread a huge Jap flag on a smooth rock. Then the leader distributed hand grenades. One by one, as the pins were pulled, the Japs blew their insides out.

  Some seemed to make a little game out of their dying—perhaps out of indecision, perhaps out of ignorance, or even some kind of lightheaded disrespect of the high seriousness of Japanese suicide. One day the marines observed a circle of about 50 Japanese, including several small children, gaily tossing hand grenades to each other—like baseball players warming up before a game. Suddenly six Japanese soldiers dashed from a cave, from which they had been sniping at marines. The soldiers posed arrogantly in front of the civilians, then blew themselves to kingdom come; thus shamed, the civilians did likewise.

  What did all this self-destruction mean? Did it mean that the Japanese on Saipan believed their own propaganda which told them that Americans are beasts and would murder them all? Many a Jap civilian did beg our people to put him to death immediately rather than to suffer the torture which he expected. But many who chose suicide could see other civilians who had surrendered walking unmolested in the internment camps. They could hear some of the surrendered plead with them by loudspeaker not to throw their lives away.

  The marines have come to expect almost anything in the way of self-destruction from Japanese soldiers—.But none were prepared for this epic self slaughter among civilians. More than one U.S. fighting man was killed trying to rescue a Jap from his wanton suicide.

  Saipan is the first invaded Jap territory populated with more than a handful of civilians. Do the suicides of Saipan mean that the whole Japanese race will choose death before surrender? Perhaps that is what the Japanese and their strange propagandists would like us to believe.59

  This is precisely what the Tokyo warlords wanted their own people as well as the Americans to believe. They wanted the Americans to believe it in order to frighten them into backing off from their insistence on unconditional surrender, which would mean the invasion of Japan and the mobilization of its people into a “Hundred Million Special Attack Force,” ready to die like the victims of Marpi Point. And they wanted the Japanese people to believe it in order to prepare them for the sacrifice they would be called on to make if the enemy invaded the home islands.

  “Saipan was the decisive battle of the P
acific offensive,” Holland Smith wrote.60 It brought down the government of Hideki Tojo and paved the way for the withering bombing campaign on the home islands that Tojo clearly foresaw. “When we lost Saipan,” said one of the Emperor’s military advisors after the war, “Hell is on us.”61 A war cabinet headed by General Kuniaki Koiso replaced Tojo’s government. With the Americans less than 1,400 miles away, it began making preparations for an expected invasion.

  MARINES GATHER TO PAY RESPECTS TO THEIR COMRADES WHO FELL ON SAIPAN (USMC).

  The new government correctly read American intentions. Saipan led to a major change in U.S. policy in the war against Japan. Only a few days after the fall of Saipan, at a meeting of top commanders of the American and British armed forces. General Marshall made the following motion:

  “As a result of the recent operations in the Pacific it was now clear to the United States Chiefs of Staff that, in order to finish the war with the Japanese quickly, it would be necessary to invade the industrial heart of Japan.”

  The Combined Chiefs of Staff then redefined the aims of the war in the Pacific:

  “To force the unconditional surrender of Japan by: (1) Lowering Japanese ability and will to resist by establishing sea and air blockades, conducting intensive air bombardment, and destroying Japanese air and naval strength. (2) Invading and seizing objectives in the industrial heart of Japan.”62

  That September, at a meeting in Quebec, Roosevelt and Churchill formally approved the new war policy.

  With the likelihood of an American invasion, the Japanese government began a massive propaganda effort to convince the general population to prepare to embrace death, as had the martyrs of Marpi Point. Heavily censored versions of Sherrod’s article began to appear on the front pages of Japanese newspapers alongside editorials celebrating the “patriotic essence” of Japanese women and children who chose “death rather than to be captured alive and shamed by the demonlike American forces.”63 Stricken from the Sherrod article were references to Japanese soldiers killing their own countrymen, and to the thousands of Japanese citizens who did surrender and were treated humanly. These official versions of Sherrod’s article “became fuel for an unprecedented orgy of glorification of death,” writes historian Haruko Taya Cook.64 When the American “beasts” appeared, the government declared, the “one-hundred million” must be victorious or die together. Beginning in August, all citizens were to receive military training, with bamboo spears as their chief weapons.65