At 3:40 p.m. on June 20, after one of his pilots sighted the Japanese, Mitscher made plans to strike Ozawa. Twenty minutes later the pilot confirmed his report: the Japanese fleet was apparently refueling, moving slowly and heading west. Now Mitscher put his plan into action, knowing that a portion of it would take place at night, and that “to destroy the Japanese fleet was going to cost a great deal in planes and pilots.” Later, in his after-action report, he wrote that he was launching his planes “at the maximum range” and “at such a time that it would be necessary to recover them after dark.” Most of his pilots, he added, “were not familiar with night landing and would be fatigued at the end of an extremely hazardous and long mission.” Nevertheless, Mitscher believed that the risk was worth it.
At 6:10 p.m. he gathered his pilots and gave them a pep talk. “Give ’em hell, boys,” he said. His pilots did just that, disabling two oilers, damaging the carrier Junyo, and sinking the carrier Hiyo. Then, realizing their fuel was running low, they disengaged and began their return trip.
At 7:45 that night the sky turned completely dark, and clouds obscured the moonlight. An hour later, with his returning planes circling, Mitscher turned his carriers east into the wind. Then, disregarding the safety of his fleet and naval procedure, he ordered his carrier commanders to turn on their lights. Truck lights, red and green running lights, signal lights, and glow lights, outlined the flight decks, and star shells pierced the coal-black night. Having dreaded the landing, his pilots realized that they might now get back alive. One described seeing the lights as equal parts “Hollywood premiere, Chinese New Year’s and Fourth of July.” By eleven that night, carriers had gathered, and destroyers, using huge searchlights and aided by a calm, flat sea, looked for the pilots who, unable to land, had splashed down. When the search was called off days later, only sixteen pilots and thirty-three crewmen were unaccounted for.
The following morning, June 21, Spruance ordered Admiral Mitscher and his carriers to pursue the retreating Ozawa. Although Spruance had given his vice-admiral the okay to strike Ozawa’s fleet if contact was made, the primary reason for giving chase was to comb the ocean for crippled enemy ships. At 7:20 that night, Mitscher had not yet sighted the Japanese, and after Spruance called off the search, he reversed course and headed for Saipan.
That evening, 300 miles south of Okinawa, a chastened Ozawa summoned his senior staff officer and dictated a letter to Admiral Toyoda, accepting responsibility for the defeat, and offering his resignation. Toyoda refused to accept it, although he understood the full implications of Ozawa’s defeat, as did everyone at Imperial Headquarters, including the Emperor: Japan’s carrier-based airpower was finished. Now they could only hope that General Saito was able to hold Saipan, for they understood that if they lost Saipan, too, the Philippines and the home islands would be the targets of long-range bombing raids.
Back on the island of Saipan, General Saito’s men clung to the idea that their powerful navy had driven off Spruance’s Fifth Fleet. The fantastic Tokyo broadcast, which stated that Japanese pilots had sunk eleven U.S. carriers, served only to confirm their unreal expectations. By June 21, even as the noose was tightening around their necks, the island’s defenders, like their general, still believed that reinforcements were on their way.
Reinforcements or no, Saito’s men had pledged to defend the island until the end. “We will fight hand to hand,” said one of his soldiers. “I have resolved that if I see the enemy, I will take out my sword and slash, slash, slash at him as long as I last …”
CHAPTER 28
Valley of the Shadow of Death
Although General Holland Smith was “determined to take Saipan and to take it quickly,” the reality was that when he left the USS Rocky Mount and came ashore, setting up the Northern Troops and Landing Force command post in Charan Kanoa, he knew that Saipan would be a war of attrition. On June 22, Navy pilots dropped another thirty packages of propaganda leaflets informing the enemy that because of the Japanese navy’s loss at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, no one would come to their rescue. “The American Navy,” it said, “has complete sea and air superiority.”
After a week of combat, the men of the 4th Division, with the 25th Marines on the right, the 24th in the middle, and the 23rd on the left, had driven east across Saipan, severing the southern third of the island from the north. Yet they had put little distance between themselves and the invasion beach. They were still short of what Smith called the “O-4,” or Day 4, objective. The sluggishness of the American advance disturbed the general, for Smith believed devoutly in the dictum of the great German military theorist Karl von Clausewitz: “For the victor, the engagement can never be decided too quickly; for the vanquished, it can never be decided too long. The speedy victory is the higher degree of victory; a late decision is, on the side of the defeated, some compensation for the loss.”
The good news was that Spruance’s victory in the Philippine Sea meant that transport ships would be returning to the island, and the supply channel could once again kick into overdrive. Marine depot companies would soon be working round the clock, landing tens of thousands of tons of cargo.
For Smith’s men it would be a blessing. They were contending with a dwindling supply of everything from water to medicine to star shells and artillery rounds. Worse yet was the problem of where to put the wounded. The hospital ships Relief and the Samaritan had left for Guadalcanal, following the route taken by transport ships, which had already delivered thousands of wounded soldiers to the Solomons. That left only the Solace and the Bountiful and an assortment of cargo vessels to take on men. Many wounded Marines had nowhere to go. Admiral Turner’s flagship was being used as a floating hospital. Men wearing casualty tags lined the corridors, waiting for a doctor’s attention. More than a quarter of these were badly injured mortar or artillery victims. Another 7 percent had knife and bayonet injuries sustained in hand-to-hand combat.
The health of the men, in general, was deteriorating quickly. Marines and soldiers alike were suffering from lack of sleep, heat exhaustion, prickly heat, and, despite sulfa therapy and opium derivatives, diarrhea, too. Dehydration was a major concern. The men found the water, sometimes stored in fifty-five-gallon drums that had once held aviation fuel, undrinkable. So they resorted to catching rain in their helmets, and when it did not rain, they popped salt tablets as if they were gumdrops. When they came upon cane fields that had not been burned, they sucked on sugarcane as if it were ambrosia.
The men’s feet were burning with jungle rot. The coral tore at their boots, and without foot powder or fungicide, their feet were swollen, raw, and blistered. For some men, even for those who cut slits in the sides of their boondockers to let their feet breathe, every step became a chore. Although most of them had tossed their underwear, the upper legs of many of the Marines were already infected with crotch rot and beginning to run pus where their pocket edges and trouser seams rubbed against their thighs. An opportunistic infection, brought about by poor nutrition and the compromised immune systems of the men, the crotch rot migrated down the men’s legs, causing them to grimace in pain and to walk like bowlegged cowboys.
The flies were maddening, and the men came to loathe them. Black flies, green blowflies, and bluebottle flies descended in thick clouds. More than a nuisance, they were a health hazard. Medics resorted to spreading the pesticide sodium arsenite on dead bodies, and company commanders punished men for not observing proper field sanitation. A common practice when they were in foxholes was to shit on their entrenching tools and throw the mess out. The following day, few bothered to bury it or cover it up in a cat-hole latrine. They pinched their noses and shut out the smell, and moved on.
It being the rainy season, the mosquitoes were a curse. They came out every day in the early morning and just after sunset, and descended upon the men, attracted by the smell of their sweat. The air hummed with them. Still, most of the men refused to wear their head nets. The head nets made it hard to see, and, given t
he choice of being bayoneted by a Japanese soldier who had been able to creep in close because one’s vision was obscured, or being eaten alive by mosquitoes, the Marines chose the latter.
What concerned the medics and Navy doctors was the “unusually high” incidence of tetanus and gas bacillus (gas gangrene). Because resident farmers used night soil, or human feces, to fertilize their fields, the ground was heavily seeded with the spores of both bacteria. Gas gangrene, which could spread from wound to wound, had a mortality rate of 50 percent, even when treated with penicillin.
The push across the island had taken its toll on the men’s spirits, too. Platoon leaders, artillerymen, even General Smith, were operating with inadequate maps that inaccurately estimated both vertical and horizontal distances. On some days the troops covered lots of ground and on others they moved at a snail’s pace. No one seemed to know the extent of Japanese casualties, either. The Japanese continued their practice of hiding their losses by carrying away their dead and wounded.
Nothing, however, could compare with war’s unending brutality. Somewhere near Magicene Bay, on Saipan’s eastern coast, Graf came upon a dying Marine, no older than he. Graf sat beside him and quickly realized that he had no miracles in his first-aid packet, only sulfa powder and a compress. The young Marine had a look of amazement about him. He could feel his life ebbing away, and he could not quite believe it. He was dying here, thousands of miles from home. He asked Graf to reach into his helmet and find the picture he carried there. Graf slipped his fingers inside and gave it to him. The young man held it in his hand familiarly, as if he had studied its details many times. Then his eyes grew blurry and his breath quickened. When he began to choke, the photo fell from his hand to the ground. Graf picked it up and looked at it. It showed the young man standing with two women: one, perhaps his mother, and the other, his wife or girlfriend. They were smiling into the camera.
Leaving the body there, Graf moved on, fully aware that Japanese soldiers regularly mutilated dead Marines, cutting off their heads and smashing in their faces until they were unrecognizable. Believing that their campaign was a sacred one, they did not consider the violence untoward. Their goal was “to extend the light of the Imperial power” over the “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere” and to eliminate the “White Race from Asia.” Mothers, bidding farewell to their sons, encouraged them to commit suicide rather than be taken prisoner. A Japanese soldier would perform seppuku, gutting himself rather than allowing himself to be captured. If captured, he expected to be tortured, because that was what he would do to a captured enemy. Though they had signed the Geneva Convention of 1929, which articulated a policy for the humane treatment of POWs, the Japanese never ratified it. At the onset of the war, Prime Minister Tojo boasted that “in Japan, we have our own ideology concerning prisoners of war …”
American Marines were appalled by the Japanese atrocities, but no one had a monopoly on hatred or rage. When American Marines smelled blood, they could be just as brutal, shooting Japanese soldiers, even prisoners, as if they were rats at a dump. Some killed prisoners and then pissed in their mouths. Platoon commanders took to rewarding their men, most of whom believed that the Japanese were less than human, with beer and whiskey to bring in prisoners. A secret U.S. intelligence memo reported that only the “promise of ice cream and three days’ leave would induce American troops not to kill surrendering Japs.”
As the 23rd Marines crossed the Devil’s Backbone, they encountered caves for the first time. The Marines’ procedure was to shout into a cave, promising food and water, especially if they believed that noncombatants had taken refuge there. One of the phrases they practiced was “Korosanai yo,” or, roughly, “We won’t murder you.” But often caves held both Japanese soldiers and civilians, and platoon commanders could not take any chances. Graf saw it countless times: a shot would come from a cave, and a platoon would lay down a wall of cover fire while a specialist, holding a satchel charge, crept toward the mouth. When he got close enough he would heave the charge and back off before it blew. Sometimes they threw in fragmentation grenades, scattering metal throughout the cavern, and other times they hurled phosphorous grenades that burned everybody inside. As for flamethrowers, when a sheet of fire reached the depths of the cave, Graf heard screams that made his skin crawl. Japanese soldiers and civilians ran out as their bodies melted from the heat. Later in life, Graf would write, “When men could not get near the entrance, we would call upon the tanks and these monsters would get in real close and pump shells into the opening. Other times we would call for the monster to end all monsters … the flamethrowing tank. These gruesome weapons sent a mighty flame into the caves, a hundred times more destructive than the back carrying type.”
Graf understood that it was kill or be killed—by June 22, total American casualties reached 6,000, with 3,800 of those coming from the 4th Division—but he could not help reflecting on the fact that just a couple of years before, most of the Marines had no conception of war. Like him they were “civilized” kids whose worlds consisted of sipping malts at the drugstore, watching Andy Hardy on the silver screen, going to high school, studying, playing ball, and holding their girlfriends close at weekend dances. But now they were killers, delighting in the sight of dead Japanese, never imagining, even for a moment, that they were human beings with homes and families. Later Graf would write, “They were devils, bastards, the one who killed our best buddy, the one who had raised his hands in surrender and upon approaching dropped a live grenade at our feet. It was he that infiltrated our lines and cut our throats while we slept. Or he who would pump machine gun rounds into our guts or blow off our arms with his mortar fire. Having no feelings, his only desire was to maim and kill. That was the infamous Japanese soldier. How ironic, that was also us.”
Late in the afternoon on June 22, as the 23rd Marines moved north in the direction of Hill 600, a civilian woman approached Graf. She was probably the wife of an Okinawan farmer. As she got closer, Graf could see that she was crying. When she started to hit him and point to his pack, he was taken aback. What the hell was she doing? An interpreter who had been watching explained to him that the woman wanted food and water for her baby. When Graf looked at the basket of woven bamboo that she carried on her back, he could see that her baby was dead. Giving her food and a canteen anyway, he watched as she delicately placed them in the basket next to the child.
More and more civilians were being lured out of caves by the testimonies of others who had agreed to put their lives in the hands of the Americans. Some walked out holding crucifixes so that the Marines knew they were Christians and did not pray to Shinto gods. The Americans gave them water, cigarettes, and chewing gum, and sometimes carried those too small or too weak to walk. They escorted the civilian internees to two stockades not far from the invasion beaches, where they turned them over to the civil affairs section. Graf’s heart ached for them. They emerged half mad with fear, smelling of sweat and rot, and choking of thirst.
The 25th Marines discovered a cave holding more than one hundred people, mostly young women and their children and old grandfathers and grandmothers. They had stayed alive by licking the moist cave walls where the dew formed every morning. These people were the real victims “of civilized man’s method of settling their differences.” In thousands of years of living, Graf thought, man had not progressed much. The true savages were the ones who persisted in settling their disputes with blood.
The only consolation was that Easy Company had captured a Japanese storage dump that day. Haskell had found some beer, Jurcsak some brandy, and Graf had managed to abscond with a few bottles of sake. Later, after digging their foxholes, the bottles made the rounds, and by nightfall the three men, joined by other members of the company, drank until they were numb.
Buffeted by the wind and slowed by cold hands that made holding entrenching tools difficult, G Company was just getting settled for the night on the 23rd Marines’ far right flank, not far from E Company. Only the 25th
Marines separated them from the island’s eastern coast.
Matthews knew that the push across the island had been a costly one. Official statistics revealed that companies had been reduced to just 50 to 60 percent of their original strength. His own depleted battalion, the 2nd, had to be reinforced by the 3rd Battalion’s rifle companies and its 81-mm mortar platoon. If not for the ability to call in bombing strikes, the Marines would have gained less ground and lost even more men.
Matthews was one of those who made the strikes possible. Before the planes arrived, his job was to set out the panels. In his field pack he carried two large sheets of colored cloth, one red and the other yellow. These were the pilots’ targets. He placed the red one directly in front of the advancing Marines and the yellow, pointing toward the enemy. The pilots knew that it was not safe to strafe or bomb behind the yellow panel. Setting them out, however, was dangerous. It required that Matthews creep out in front of the forward platoon, exposing himself to enemy fire. Statistics showed that no group among all the services had so high a casualty rate as Marine Corps second lieutenants, and Matthews knew that runners assigned to them rarely fared better. They were often called upon to perform the least desirable assignments, like putting out the panels. So, all things considered, it was nothing less than a miracle that he was still alive, especially when he considered what had happened to so many of his comrades. First there was Witte, and then Robert Howard, a likable, seventeen-year-old New York native, who, after taking a sniper’s bullet, told Lieutenant Leary, with tears in his eyes, that he was too young to die. Matthews wept when Howard’s breathing grew tenuous. Lieutenant Leary was also shaken. He stayed with the private until he died, and then disappeared behind a farmhouse. Minutes later he returned, and Matthews could tell that the lieutenant had been crying.
The Color of War Page 24
