The crossing took hours, and when the men reached the far bank, they flopped in the mud. The hot sun beat down on them, and the air was thick and wet. Even Rachitsky, who was the toughest man Borta had ever known and never allowed himself a break, lay there until he caught his breath. Then he rose to his feet and wobbled. He grabbed the branch of a tree to steady himself. Borta watched as the sergeant studied his map. Tucking the map in its case, he waved the men in. Enemy snipers had picked off a few guys in the lake, but most of the men had made it across. Clicking his fingers to get their attention, Rachitsky pointed to a grove of trees 200 yards in front of them.
“That’s our target,” he said.
None of the guys knew for sure what lay between them and the trees ahead. Would they make it across, or would they walk into a slaughter? Had they been following another man, they might have thought twice about moving forward. With Rachitsky in the lead, however, they did not hesitate. They set out, bending low at the waist, dropping to a knee every ten yards. At every sound their fingers tightened on their triggers. At each stop Rachitsky grabbed his field glasses and scanned the woods. When they were sixty feet away, he studied the grove. Seeing nothing, he waved the men forward. Borta and Lemon were on his right at the front of the platoon. Borta’s eyes were so clouded with mud and sweat that he could hardly see, and his feet, raw from jungle rot, burned with every step. Still, he had to suppress the desire to break into a mad run, covering the distance between him and the grove as fast as he could. He took a few more steps, cursing the water that sloshed inside his canteen. Then gunfire burst from the trees ahead. He and Lemon were on their bellies when they heard a Japanese juki machine gun. They could tell it was a juki by its slow, heavy thud.
Rachitsky was yelling now, “Hand grenades! Throw your grenades.”
Borta and Lemon rolled on their sides and whipped their grenades as if they were throwing a roundhouse punch. Rolling back to his belly, Borta saw the flash of an Arisaka rifle barrel and then he heard the sickly smacking sound of a bullet entering flesh. He prayed that it was not Lemon or Pluto Brem or Sergeant Rachitsky. Then he realized that he did not know where Brem was. He had not seen his buddy for an entire day. Had a sniper got Brem back at the lake? When he heard the sharp bark of a Browning Automatic Rifle to his right, he knew Brem was still alive. Then, off to his left, he heard Robert Roberts open up with his BAR. Roberts had been an assistant, but when his BAR man was killed on the second night, the rifle became his possession. Borta slammed in a new magazine. Suddenly the grove was quiet. Neither Borta nor Lemon dared to move. Everyone, it seemed, was waiting for fire to erupt again from the trees.
Then Borta heard it, Rachitsky’s voice. “Borta,” Rachitsky growled. “You there?” Thank God, Borta thought, the old man is alive. Before he could respond, Rachitsky wriggled on his forearms and belly to his runner’s side. “I want you to go to the beach and get some hand grenades,” he said. “And take Pluto with you.”
By late afternoon they had made it. Borta saw bodies sprawled across the beach: exhausted stretcher-bearers who, after delivering wounded Marines to the aid station, collapsed in the sand, and young men who had died in combat. Some of them looked as if they were napping, as if they might wake from a dream and curse him for disturbing their sleep. Among them were Japanese soldiers who had staged an early-morning raid after the tank attack had failed. Ultimately they would be thrown into a deep trench and buried, but for now they rotted in the sun. A few were Japanese marines, their caps decorated with a cherry blossom superimposed over an anchor.
Dusk was setting in by the time Borta and Brem, each carrying a crate of hand grenades, made it back across the lake. At Susupe’s eastern edge, they lay on their backs, resting against an embankment. Their legs and arms ached and their lungs felt as if they were on fire. Borta wondered if he had the strength to carry the grenades for the last eighth of a mile. Caked with mud, Brem wondered if he could stand the smell of himself. He had spent the night of D-Day in a foxhole that turned out to be a septic tank, and wading back and forth through the mud of Lake Susupe only seemed to make the stench worse.
Both Borta and Brem had let their guards down. When they heard a high-pitched crack, and a bullet struck the dirt between their heads, they froze, waiting for a second shot. Brem pointed in the direction of a shack. “From there,” he whispered. Then he and Borta formulated a plan. Borta’s job was to get around behind the shack and throw in a grenade and flush the sniper out. Brem would be hiding in front and would spray him as he ran.
Borta crept into some bushes in back of the shack and noticed that a rear window was shattered. Pulling the pin on a grenade, he let the spoon go. Despite the adrenaline slamming through his veins, he calmed himself long enough to count, “One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand.” It seemed to last a lifetime. When the grenade sparkled, he heaved it. Only it never came close to the window. It flew over the roof and exploded. Borta heard Brem cursing him, “Dammit, Chick, you nearly killed me.” Then he heard Brem running, firing like a madman, and showering the shack with bullets. The sniper was probably so full of holes that he looked like a piece of cheesecloth.
Walking back to their unit, they chortled like boys. Man, would Brem have a story for the guys. They would double up with laughter when he told them about Chick hurling a grenade over the roof of the shack. If only Carney and Larson were alive. They would laugh themselves sick.
It did not take them long to reach the spot where they had left the platoon earlier that day. When they spotted movement in the grove, they lay down and watched. Then Borta heard voices, American voices. Company A had taken the grove! As they approached the trees, they realized that something was wrong. Men shouted for corpsmen and stretcher bearers. One badly wounded Marine, who had obviously been injected with morphine, lay in the grass like a zombie, smiling while the man next to him, whose hand had been shot off, moaned in pain. Brem spotted a four-by-four section of dirt that was saturated with blood. It reminded him of hunting in the Pacheco Pass, of hanging and bleeding out a big deer.
Borta was wandering through the grove looking for Rachitsky when he saw a man lying on a stretcher. Someone had laid a poncho over him and pulled it up to his nose. As Borta walked by, he thought, Rachitsky? Then he thought, Nah, Rachitsky is too goddamned tough to die. Borta was just about to move on when someone walked by. “Sarge,” the Marine said, pointing to the body. “Poor sucker.”
Borta knelt down and pulled back the poncho. Rachitsky appeared to be taking a siesta. Soon he would pop up and give him that steely stare that made a man’s knees shake and his heart flutter. Rachitsky had never said anything to Borta that was remotely personal, but as his runner, he had come to love and respect the sergeant. Other than his father, there was not another man whom he thought more of.
Borta searched his memory for an appropriate prayer, something from Revelation or Romans or Isaiah. All he could come up with was, “Our Father, who art in heaven …” He clenched his jaw as he said the words, fighting back the tears. Dead or alive, Rachitsky would never tolerate crying. Borta finished the Lord’s Prayer and then studied Rachitsky’s watch. Not a scratch on it. He could take the sergeant’s and put it to good use. Rachitsky would forgive him. A runner who did not know the time was worthless.
Slowly Borta reached for Rachitsky’s hand, and then stopped. He felt like a crow feeding on roadkill, only the roadkill in this case was his dead sergeant. He pulled back his arm and turned away. Then he looked at Rachitsky and began to slip the watch off his wrist. The expandable band made it easy. He stopped again, and arranged the poncho over Rachitsky’s body as if he were covering a sleeping child, and then rose and made the sign of the cross. Rest in peace, Sarge.
A bunch of guys from Company A, their hair matted with rifle oil, their dungarees torn and bloody, sat together Indian-style in the grove, wolfing down cold C-rations: dehydrated eggs, potatoes, and canned meat. From them Borta learned that after their CO, Lieutenant Colonel
Tannyhill, had been wounded, his replacement CO, Lieutenant Colonel Tompkins, had led the push. Intent on taking the grove before dark, he had come up to the front lines to assess the situation and then called in four Division 2 tanks. After the tanks pummeled the grove, Tompkins personally led the infantry attack.
“Yeah, we got the grove,” one of the guys said, “but we lost Lieutenant Henderson and a bunch of other guys.” Moreover, Henderson’s platoon, of which Rachitsky was the senior NCO, had taken such a beating that the remaining guys were being assigned elsewhere. The following day Borta learned that he would be going to company headquarters.
As Borta was standing there among badly wounded Marines whose collapsed veins refused to take plasma, Lemon walked up and nudged him. Jesus Christ, Borta thought, I forgot all about you.
“Doin’ okay?” Borta asked.
Lemon looked at him blankly. “Right as rain.”
At 4:30 a.m. on June 18, the 10th Marines spotted thirty-five Japanese barges, packed with soldiers, off Flores Point north of Garapan. The Marines had no idea where they had come from, but it was obvious that the Japanese were trying to reinforce General Saito’s garrison, hoping to land the slow-moving barges under the cover of darkness. Their plan, however, failed. The Marines, together with Navy vessels, sank thirteen of the barges, while the other twenty-two reversed course to escape harm.
At sunrise that same morning, the troops discovered that Admiral Spruance’s fleet had left the previous night. For the men who had been in the Solomons, the explanation was an easy one: the Navy bastards had hauled ass again, just as they had done at Guadalcanal.
The reality was that Admiral Spruance was 200 miles west of Saipan, preparing to meet the challenge of Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, who, upon implementing Operation A-Go, was planning to destroy the U.S. Pacific Fleet with “one blow.” Because Admirals Ozawa and Toyoda did not know the damage that Admiral Mitscher’s Task Force 58 had done to its land-based planes (Ozawa was counting on five hundred planes from Yap, Guam, Tinian, and the Palaus), the Japanese high command was confident that the showdown could be won.
MacArthur’s efforts to the south in New Guinea, however, complicated the Japanese response. In April, American pilots had destroyed the Japanese air base at Hollandia, and on May 27, MacArthur’s forces invaded Biak Island, off New Guinea’s northwest coast. Uncertain about where the United States would execute its major thrust—would it be Biak, or would it come somewhere else?—Japanese admirals committed vital naval resources, including two battleships, cruisers, troop-carrying destroyers, and fighter planes from its First Air Fleet, to defend the island and its airfields. Admiral King undoubtedly took a measure of satisfaction from Japan’s indecision. He had been preaching that a two-pronged approach would keep enemy intelligence guessing as to where the major American blow would come.
On June 11, with the carrier strike on Saipan, Toyoda and Ozawa no longer had any doubts about where the U.S. advance would take place. Temporarily suspending “Operation KON,” the defense plan for Biak, Toyoda green-lighted A-Go. From his flagship at 8:55 on June 15, he sent out a message to all his commanding officers. “On the morning of the 15th, a strong enemy force began landing operations in the Saipan-Tinian area. The Combined Fleet will attack the enemy in the Marianas area and annihilate the invasion force. Activate A-Go Operation for decisive battle.” He ended his address by invoking the words of Admiral Heihachiro Togo, who in 1905 defeated the Russian fleet in the Tsushima Strait between Korea and southern Japan. “The fate of the Empire rests on this one battle,” Toyoda said. “Every man is expected to do his utmost.” Admiral Ozawa transmitted his words to every ship in the Mobile Fleet. Two days later, Ozawa’s forces massed in the Philippine Sea. On the following morning, the admiral addressed the ships under his command, relaying the message he had received from the Emperor through the chief of staff of the Imperial General Headquarters’ naval section: “ ‘This operation has immense bearing on the fate of the Empire. It is hoped that the forces will exert their utmost and achieve as magnificent results as in the Battle of Tsushima.’ ”
Although the Japanese navy was still formidable, Spruance’s force was superior in almost every way—and the admiral knew it. Nevertheless, Spruance saw his mission as twofold: he had to meet Ozawa’s naval offensive while first protecting the forces on Saipan. Although he was eager to engage the enemy, by venturing too far from the island he risked the possibility of a Japanese “end run” that would expose his ground troops there to danger. Lending credence to his fears was a document that MacArthur sent him detailing Japanese carrier doctrine. It instructed carrier force commanders to occupy the enemy by feinting in the middle, while sending detachments around the flanks to execute a pincer movement. The Japanese had used the strategy effectively in the Coral Sea and in battles around Guadalcanal, in addition to attempting it at Midway, where Spruance defeated the carrier force’s center before the flanks could close in.
Not everyone agreed with the admiral’s decision. A frustrated Admiral Mitscher lobbied repeatedly for an aggressive pursuit of the Japanese fleet, arguing that the Expeditionary Force, which remained around the island, had enough warships and escort carriers to protect the Marines and soldiers. Spruance, however, remained firm. His orders, he said, were clear: to protect the invasion force, “proceeding west in daylight and towards Saipan at night.”
By June 18, Spruance’s fleet was 200 miles west of Saipan, and 300 miles from Ozawa. Although Spruance did not have a fix on Ozawa’s position, the Japanese admiral knew where the Americans were, and was eager to strike the first blow, knowing that his carrier planes had a greater range than their American counterparts.
Back on Saipan, General Saito had just received a message from Hideki Tojo: “Because the fate of the Japanese Empire depends on the result of your operation, inspire the spirit of the officers and men and to the very end continue to destroy the enemy gallantly and persistently; thus alleviate the anxiety of the Emperor.” It was not Saito, however, who responded to Tojo. That task was left to the chief of staff of the 43rd Division. “Have received your honorable Imperial words,” he replied, “and we are grateful for boundless magnanimity of Imperial favor. By becoming the bulwark of the Pacific with 10,000 deaths we hope to requite the Imperial favor.”
Had Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo learned of the day’s events on Saipan, nothing could have quelled Hirohito’s fears. Driving toward Aslito, the Army’s 165th Infantry Regiment captured the vital airfield before noon on June 18. General Holland Smith was cheered by the Army’s progress. Later that day in a radio recording, an enthusiastic General Ralph Smith, commanding officer of the Army’s 27th Division, said, “This is an appropriate point to emphasize the perfect teamwork that has existed between the Navy, Marines, and the Army. It irritates me a little to read these stories.… Nothing could be farther from the truth out here in the field.… One of the 165th’s officers remarked to me this morning that Saipan has sealed the brotherhood between the services.” Unfortunately for Ralph Smith, the harmony would not last.
On the following morning, in the Philippine Sea, 100 miles west of Guam, American Hellcats attacked and shot down thirty-five Japanese air reinforcements. Unaware of the loss, Ozawa sent sixty-nine planes toward the American fleet for the first of four air strikes. It was a clear day with unlimited visibility, and once radar spotted the enemy planes, Admiral Mitscher launched his Hellcats. American pilots had an easy time finding the enemy fighters. A Japanese-speaking lieutenant aboard the carrier USS Lexington monitored the radio chatter of the approaching pilots and passed on vital information to the American crews. With the lieutenant’s reports and superior numbers, the Americans sent most of Ozawa’s planes spiraling into the sea. Antiaircraft fire took care of the few that made it past the barrage. Because they were heavy with bombs, they were easy targets for the gunners. At 9:00 a.m., Ozawa launched a second wave of 110 planes, a third wave an hour later, and a fourth wave of eighty-two at 11:30 a.m. Outcl
assed and outmaneuvered, Japanese pilots succeeded in damaging the USS South Dakota, a battleship, but not a single American carrier, and by the end of the day, Ozawa had lost nearly four hundred planes. Triumphant American pilots referred to their lopsided victory—and the greatest carrier battle of the war—as “the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.”
While American pilots chalked up kills, American submarines also entered the fray. The submarine Albacore fired on Ozawa’s flagship, the Taiho—at 33,000 tons and 850 feet, the Taiho was the newest and biggest carrier in the Japanese navy—hitting her with one of six torpedoes and rupturing one of her oil tanks. Six hours later she exploded. Although a lifeboat rescued Ozawa and his staff, much of the Taiho’s crew was lost. The Cavalla, which had sent Admiral Spruance the first warning about the Japanese fleet leaving Tawi Tawi, also got in on the action, hitting the carrier Shokaku with three of six torpedoes at noon that same day. Fumes, fed by ruptured oil tanks, leaked through the ship and fires broke out. Three hours later a bomb magazine exploded, and the Shokaku broke apart.
That night Mitscher deliberated about whether or not to send out night-fighting Hellcats with mounted belly tanks to search for Ozawa. Although the belly tanks enabled the Hellcats to extend their reach to 400 miles, Mitscher held them back, believing that his pilots were exhausted. Had Mitscher sent out his planes, they might have caught and surprised Ozawa and decimated his carriers. The admiral and his staff were aboard the cruiser Haguro, still trying to reach the other carrier divisions and to get some sense of the day’s losses. While Ozawa knew that he had lost two big carriers, he knew little about the damage to his air groups. Based on the exaggerated reports of pilots who had made it back from the “Turkey Shoot,” and despite the fate of his two big carriers, Ozawa believed that June 19 had been a success. The official Tokyo broadcast boasted that Japanese pilots had sunk eleven U.S. carriers. So instead of fleeing north, the admiral made plans to refuel the following day and then to resume his search for the American fleet.
The Color of War Page 23
