Borta was not on the beach long when Rachitsky informed him that their orders had changed. Rather than advancing east, they were to move south toward the sugar factory to assist the 8th Regiment. Rachitsky needed to confirm the change, and sent Borta back to check with headquarters. On his way, Borta was weaving between shell holes and foxholes when he heard a familiar voice. It was Carney. His friend’s helmet was tilted low on his forehead, but there was no mistaking the grin. Borta slowed to a trot. Carney pushed his helmet back. “Hot, eh, Chick?” Borta was too out of breath to respond, so he swung his leg, kicked sand into the Bronx-born Irishman’s foxhole, and dashed away. “You sonofabitch,” Carney called after him.
Borta returned to Rachitsky. “Yup,” he said. “The sugar factory.” Looking down the beach, Borta could see that it was wide open and completely exposed. Then he turned to Rachitsky, as if to say, “Sarge, are we really going to do this?” Rachitsky nodded. “Ready,” he said, and took off at a dead run. Borta was just twenty feet behind when he heard the shriek of a shell. “Close!” he yelled, and he and Rachitsky flung their bodies onto the ground. Rachitsky was back on his feet and ready to run again. “C’mon!” he yelled.
“I can’t,” Borta groaned. “I’m hit.” Rachitsky knelt at his side and seconds later shook his head. “Look,” he said. Then Borta realized that his canteen had been punctured, and what he feared was blood running down his legs was nothing more than his hydration mixture, water and salt. Not sure whether to feel like a fool or grateful that he still had the use of his legs, he was back on his feet when another shell hit. The concussion spun him around and momentarily he lost his bearings. When he saw the sugar dock, he was off again at a gallop.
Rachitsky, Borta, and six men from their platoon dove into a ditch just feet from the sugar factory. What none of them knew was that in the chaos they had run through the forward lines of the 8th Marines and were stranded in a no-man’s-land between the enemy and Marine forces. They did not discover their mistake until after dark, when machine gunners from each side fired white and red tracer bullets just over their heads, and opposing flares arced slowly across the sky, drenching the battlefield in a yellow light. They were in a fix, and Borta knew it. Reaching into his shirt, he felt for the cross his mother had given him. Back in Hawaii, he had tied it to his dogtags, using telephone wire. When he realized that it was gone, he thought for sure he was a dead man.
CHAPTER 25
A Long, Bitter Struggle
“Fix bayonets,” Rachitsky whispered. “The Japs are probably going to attack before it gets light.”
Borta heard the click of bayonets being checked and refitted onto rifle barrels. He was glad that he had whetted and sharpened his before leaving the LST. Every Marine knew the reputation of the Japanese. They were superb night fighters. They could slither through the forest and disembowel a man or slit his throat without being detected. Yet Borta was ready for them. He had his M1, whose hitting power he loved, instead of the lighter .30-caliber carbine that most runners used. “Let ’em come.”
When Borta felt the morning sun, he knew that the Japanese had missed, or passed up, their chance to counterattack. Rachitsky looked at Borta. The sergeant’s eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he grumbled.
The first thing that Borta noticed at the beach was the smell of burning flesh. He clenched the muscles in his throat to keep from gagging. Farther ahead, bodies lay strewn across the sand, baking in the hot sun. Although most were covered with ponchos, hordes of fat flies moved sluggishly from one to the next. Later someone from the graves registration detail would puncture the bodies with a hypodermic needle to reduce the swelling. One Marine with a large hole in his belly lay on his back with his arms and legs spread wide like a child making a snow angel. The walking wounded, in their blood-splattered dungarees, wandered around like blind men with glazed, wide-open eyes. Corpsmen hustled among the injured, stuffing ruptured chests with cotton balls, and putting on and tightening dressings and tourniquets and whispering words of encouragement. They had to act fast; in the heat and humidity as thick as grease, it didn’t take long for open wounds to become infected, even gangrenous. One corpsman, with a sad smile, stood over a moaning man, holding a bottle of plasma.
Borta found Landers lying among the dead and wounded. A piece of shrapnel had done a number on his leg. Ashen-faced, Landers told Borta that a corpsman had decided that he could wait. There were too many others losing blood too quickly to treat a leg wound. To hell with that, Borta thought. Wrapping Landers’s arm over his shoulders, he took him to the battalion aid station.
When Borta returned to Sergeant Rachitsky, he overheard someone tell the sergeant that thirty-two men from Company A were killed or injured in the D-Day shelling. Many of the wounded had lost arms and legs, including the company’s executive officer. Borta had just one question: Where in hell was Carney? For a moment he remembered what Carney had told him: There isn’t a Jap mother who has a son that can kill Mrs. Carney’s boy. He had believed it, too. Carney had not just made it out of Tarawa with his hide intact, he had been nominated for the Silver Star, and returned with a reputation for bravery and good luck. Surely Carney was okay. Whoever broke the news to Borta did it with the tactlessness that often accompanies war. “Carney,” the Marine said. “He had his head blown off. Larson got it bad, too. A shell cut him in half. Dajak’s dead, too.”
The other side of what had been the sugar factory now lay in rubble, its vats of sugar rotting in the sun and attracting millions of flies. Nearby, Graf and Bill More huddled in a shell hole. Two former H Company buddies, Sergeant Morris Lipfield, who had loaned Graf the money to get back to Ballston Spa on his first furlough, and a corporal joined them. The shell holes were the only good things about the bombing. Those who tried to fashion a foxhole, scratching at the earth, discovered that the coral was as hard as concrete. By evening most of the men, stained with sweat, had given up their digging and slid into the crowded shell holes. More urged everyone to be on alert: reports were that the Japanese knew that a gap existed on the 4th Division’s left flank between the 23rd Marine Regiment and the 2nd Division’s 8th Marines. Enemy soldiers would be probing that gap, searching for ways to get in behind the Marines.
If, after enduring a day of shelling, Graf believed that the Japanese would let up and conserve their ammunition, he was mistaken. The Japanese pounded the 2nd Battalion’s positions. Graf gritted his teeth against the noise, but each shell still made him shudder. Lipfield did his best to talk him down. “Hell,” the sergeant said, “if it’s got your name on it, it will get you no matter where you hide.” Graf knew that Lipfield meant to reassure him, but he wavered between being comforted and disturbed by the sergeant’s fatalism. The corporal, on the other hand, had turned the shelling into kind of a game. He had convinced himself that he could time the pattern as well as tell the size and direction of the flight of a shell just by the sound, and he provided a kind of running commentary. “No need to worry, boys,” he would say, as a mortar howled and curved through the sky. “This one will miss us by a mile,” or “This son of a bitch is close. Hit the deck!” When, not long after dusk, the 14th Marines’ 4th Battalion, which had come ashore on Blue Beach 2 at 5:00 p.m., began to answer the Japanese with its own artillery, the corporal turned enthusiastic. “Yeoww!” he yelled. “There goes one of ours; there goes a whole barrage of ours. Give those gooks hell!”
Enemy artillery shells shrieked and whistled throughout the night, and Graf’s mood turned reflective. What determined whether a man lived or died? Maybe, he thought, it was fate. If that was the case, it would not matter whether or not he hugged the inside of a shell hole. If the Japanese lobbed in a mortar, and his number was up, there was not a damn thing he could do about it. More likely, though, it was just dumb luck. It was not as if God had painted an X on some sucker’s back. The God he prayed to would not have a hand in this man-made foolishness; he would take no part in this or any othe
r war.
That night on the 4th Division’s left flank, Japanese infiltrators probed the gap that More had warned the men about. Again, had it not been for the 18th Marine Depot Company, whose members shot and bayoneted enemy soldiers trying to penetrate the security perimeter, the Japanese might have gotten through and wreaked havoc. If initially Colonel Jones had been opposed to using blacks in a war zone, he had become a convert, and again lavished praise on the “colored units forming part of the Shore Party.”
When the first strands of light wove through the trees, Graf was overjoyed to see another sunrise. Darkness added a horror to war that not even the Navy, launching five-inch star shells that lit up the night, could lessen. During a 6:00 a.m. lull in the enemy shelling, Graf decided that he was going to have to find Company E. Bill More pointed him in the right direction, and the two old friends parted ways, each wondering if and when they would see each other again.
Graf walked west toward the beach. As he passed the battalion command post, someone recognized him and yelled out, “You’re still alive?” There was something about the man’s voice that stopped Graf in his tracks. “What do you mean?” Graf asked. The guy shook his head as if he would prefer not to be the one to break the bad news. “Company E got hit hard last night,” he said reluctantly. “There’s not much left of it. Some gook observer called in artillery right down on top of them.”
Graf bit his lip as if trying to prevent himself from inquiring further. But then he blurted it out. “What about Lieutenant Roth?” Graf had been with Lieutenant Roth since his training days at Camp Pendleton when he first became the lieutenant’s runner.
“Dead.”
“You’re certain?” Graf asked. “Absolutely certain?”
“Yup,” the man answered. “I saw it with my own eyes. Killed instantly.”
Difficult as D-Day was for the 23rd Marines, farther south at Agingan Point, the situation resembled the debacle at Tarawa. The 25th Marines barely got ashore. Japanese artillery pounded the invasion beaches. If not for the Army’s Amphibian Tank Battalion, which absorbed a large portion of the artillery fire, the 25th would have been decimated. Those Marines who made it off the beach found the going especially treacherous. The Point was littered with spider holes. The Japanese defenders waited until a Marine unit passed by and then jumped from their holes to fire into the rear of a passing platoon. Later, in the early-morning hours of the second day, Japanese soldiers used civilians, mostly women and children, to lead their counterattacks.
At Agingan Point, the black Marines again showed their mettle. Prior to reaching the shore, the 20th Depot Battalion’s commanding officer, Captain William Adams, gave his men a pep talk. “You are the first Negro troops ever to go into action in the Marine Corps,” he proclaimed. “What you do with the situation that confronts you, and how you perform, will be the basis on which you, and your race, will be judged.” Upon reaching dry land, the 20th was hit by some of the fiercest D-Day artillery fire that American troops on Saipan saw. Adams and his men raced for cover, but Kenneth Tibbs, his orderly, did not make it. Killed by an artillery shell, he became the first black Marine fatality of World War II, and a hero to every Marine entering or leaving Montford Point.
If the men of the 20th, who had never trained for the situation in which they now found themselves, were demoralized over the death of one of their own, Captain Adams did not see it. Over the next few hours, despite the savage enemy artillery barrage and the snipers, the 20th succeeded in setting up cargo dumps without losing another man. If the 20th Depot Company had good fortune on its side, a platoon from the 3rd Marine Ammunition Company enjoyed a bit of it, too. While unloading an amtrac in the early afternoon, the amphibious vehicle took a direct hit. Though dazed and frightened, every member survived. That night, while defending the beachhead perimeter, the ammunition company beat back an enemy counterattack, taking out a .50-caliber machine gun in the process.
At Afetna Point, north of the sugar factory, the 6th and 8th Marines were fighting not to achieve their O-1 objectives, but merely to capture the beach. Strong currents had pulled their amtracs a quarter of a mile to the north, causing battalions to bunch up and mingle. Instead of pushing far inland, units struggled to reunite, and then fought fiercely just to cross the coastal road and secure a beachhead seventy yards in from the water. Small groups of Japanese soldiers used the chaos to their advantage, probing the gaps between the companies.
The 8th Marines met with especially stiff resistance. Japanese riflemen fired from pillboxes, and as the Marines advanced, enemy soldiers rushed them, shouting “Banzai!” and brandishing swords and bayonets. The Marines shouldered their shotguns—Company G had the 8th Marines’ entire allotment of shotguns—and blasted the Japanese at point-blank range. The seizure of Afetna Point proved critical. An open channel off Green Beach 3 meant that incoming vessels could reach shore without having to cross the reef.
At 3:00 a.m. in the 6th Marines’ zone, the Japanese launched a counterattack. Shattering the calm that had fallen over the battlefield, a Japanese bugler sounded his horn, and nearly one thousand enemy troops from Colonel Takuji Suzuki’s 135th Infantry pushed forward. According to one member of the 6th Marines, they sounded as if they were “souped up on sake,” waving flags, yelling, and swinging their curved, two-foot-long katana swords like eleventh-century samurai warriors. Destroyers responded to the Marines’ calls for illumination shells, and two Marine companies, using the light, cut down the attackers. At dawn, Marines counted hundreds of enemy dead.
Aboard the Rocky Mount, Admiral Turner and General Holland Smith discussed early dispatches announcing that the Marines had carved out beachheads from outside Garapan south to Agingan Point. Smith, in particular, was heartened by the news. He considered Saipan “the decisive battle of the Pacific offensive.” In his opinion, the island was “Japan’s administrative Pearl Harbor … the naval and military heart and brain of the Japanese defense strategy.” Meanwhile, Admiral Spruance mulled over submarine reports indicating that the Japanese fleet was heading at top speed for the Marianas from its anchorage at Tawi Tawi in the southern Philippines. Admiral Toyoda, commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet, saw a naval showdown in the Marianas as Japan’s last best chance of turning the tide of the war, or, at the very least, negotiating a favorable surrender. Although Admirals Spruance and Turner had anticipated Toyoda’s aggressive response, they were now confronted with a series of crucial decisions. Spruance did not deliberate long. On June 16 he canceled the Southern Attack Force’s June 18 landing at Guam. He also directed the old battleships and cruisers, and some destroyers of the Joint Expeditionary Force, to a point twenty-five miles to the west of Saipan to guard against a surface attack. By the end of the day he ordered the Fast Carrier Task Forces to withdraw from the island. Finally he announced that all unloading of transports and LSTs would cease by darkness on June 17. What this meant for the Marine African-American depot and ammunition companies was that they would be forced to get as much material off the boats as they could in the next two days.
As Spruance left the Rocky Mount to return to the Indianapolis, his flagship, General Holland Smith pressed him. Was there any chance that Admiral Toyoda “would turn tail and run?” “No, not now,” Spruance answered. “They are out after big game.” Spruance knew that if the Japanese had wanted an easy victory, they would have disposed of the relatively small naval force covering MacArthur’s operation at Biak. The attack on the Marianas, however, was “too great a challenge for the Japanese navy to ignore.”
With the Navy terminating its support of the landing force, Holland Smith had his own decisions to make. Should he use his reserve force—the Army’s 27th Division? Smith did not deliberate long. Reasoning that it was “always better to get them [the reserves] on the beach rather than have them sitting out at sea on ships,” Smith made the decision to land the 27th Division’s troops—with the exception of the 106th Infantry—throughout the day on June 17. What also convinced him were
the conditions on the ground. Just one day into the campaign, with the casualty count pushing six hundred, he realized that he was up against perhaps as many as 32,000 troops—twice as many as intelligence analysts expected—charged with defending the island at all costs. Saipan would not be pacified quickly. His men were in for a long, bitter struggle.
On the beach, Sergeant Rachitsky gathered his platoon and explained their Day 2 task: to push on past Lake Susupe and to clear out any enemy stragglers in the process. He warned his men to be ready for an ambush and to watch for snipers. “No daydreaming,” he said, “or they’ll come in and slit your throats.”
Moving forward was the last thing in the world that Borta felt like doing. He wanted to find his buddy Landers and make sure he came out okay. If it meant that Landers would live, he would gladly be the butt of one of his practical jokes. He would give anything to hear the Missourian’s unmistakable drawl: “We sure pulled one over on you, Chick.”
The day was unbearably hot, and despite Rachitsky’s warning, Borta’s mind drifted. It was the height of the Depression, and his dad was between jobs. Later he found work at a Ford factory on Chicago’s South Side, putting together tank engines, but before the war, to make ends meet, he brewed and sold beer. On Friday and Saturday nights, people would buy a growler and sit in the Bortas’ living room. Mrs. Borta would serve homemade pretzels. Now he wondered if he would ever make it back home to Chicago, if he would ever be able to thank his mother for working so hard, or to take his father down to the corner tavern.
The Color of War Page 20
