On its two-mile hike from the divisional bivouac to the day’s line of departure, Company G came upon a Chamorro man. Through gestures, the man made the Marines understand that a large group of people was hiding in a nearby cave. Lieutenant Leary feared a trap and ordered his men to advance with rifles at the ready. One shot from the cave was all it would have taken for Company G to release a torrent of fire.
The old man yelled into the cave and then waited. Soon people began to creep out, shielding their eyes from the glare of the sun. Once outside, they gathered together in a tight circle, like frightened cattle. A Marine interpreter spoke to them and directed them to a nearby trail.
Carl Matthews watched as a woman struggled to carry two children up the trail’s steep incline. Walking up to her, he held out his arms, as if to say, “Let me help.” The woman eyed him suspiciously and then shook her head, perhaps remembering what the island’s Japanese administrators had told her about the barbarous Americans. Matthews watched her as she trudged on. Then he offered again. This time she handed over a child. Dizzy and weak himself, Matthews labored up the hill with the child in his arms. Although he did not know it yet, the artillery shell that had fallen short the previous day had ruptured his left eardrum and blood vessels in his brain, causing it to swell. He had been fading in and out ever since.
To the east, along a coast pitted with caves and knotted with forest and thick underbrush, the 25th Marines encountered civilians, too. At first they tried to coax them out. However, after Japanese soldiers, hiding among them, shot and killed a number of Marines, the regiment abandoned all charity and blew the caves, civilians or no.
That evening the 25th Marines bivouacked on top of Mount Petosukara amid lashing rains. Shivering in their foxholes, they endured repeated attacks from small groups of Japanese riflemen. Armed with what the Marines called “idiot sticks,” poles with bayonets and knives attached, and grenades, and uttering bloodcurdling cries, enemy soldiers staged small banzai raids throughout the night.
On the coastal plain north of Tanapag, the Japanese were preparing for their biggest raid yet. Holland Smith had been warning his officers for days that the enemy would either “fight a withdrawing action ending in complete annihilation on the northern tip of the island, or attempt to muster their disorganized and crumbling forces into one all out ‘banzai’ charge.” Smith felt that a banzai attack was the most likely scenario. A Japanese prisoner, captured by the Army’s 105th Infantry and sent to G-2 for interrogation, confirmed General Smith’s fears—General Saito was rallying his troops for one last charge.
The intelligence that General Smith had from G-2’s interrogation of the Japanese prisoner was accurate. On July 4 General Saito had sent an aide on an inspection trip of the front lines. He returned with a grim message: the Americans could not be stopped. The following day the Americans pounded Paradise Valley so fiercely that Saito feared that he and his advisers would be buried alive in their command-post cave. The very next day the general, his chief of staff, and a handful of officers held a conference to discuss their options: “to starve to death or secondly, to make a last attack and fight to the finish.” They chose the latter, but not before General Saito contacted Tokyo by radio and requested permission to stage a gyokusai.
A gyokusai was the ultimate banzai, a final act of sacrificial self-destruction. Made up of two ideographs, which translate into English as “jewel” and “smashed,” the word gyokusai derived from an ancient Chinese parable about a man who chose to destroy his most precious possession rather than compromise his principles. The Japanese had used it only once before: on the island of Attu on May 29, 1943, when one thousand Japanese Marines, realizing that defeat was inevitable, charged the Army’s 7th Infantry Division, penetrating the American front line. Shocked rear-echelon troops rallied, and, after hours of hand-to-hand combat, succeeded in killing nearly every enemy fighter.
Saito chose July 7 for the historic event. Then he dictated his final instructions. An assistant made three hundred copies and then messengers went out to deliver the news to unit commanders.
The message read:
For more than twenty days since the American Devils attacked, the officers, men, and civilian employees of the Imperial Army and Navy on this island have fought well and bravely.…
Heaven has not given us an opportunity.… Our comrades have fallen one after another. Despite the bitterness of the defeat, we pledge “Seven lives to repay our country.”
The barbarous attack of the enemy is being continued.… Whether we attack or whether we stay where we are, there is only death. However, in death there is life. We must utilize this opportunity to exalt true Japanese manhood. I will advance with those who remain to deliver still another blow to the American Devils, and leave my bones on Saipan as a bulwark of the Pacific.
As it says in the Senjinkun [the Japanese military code], “I will never suffer the disgrace of being taken alive” and “I will offer up the courage of my soul and calmly rejoice in living by the eternal principle.”
Here I pray with you for the eternal life of the Emperor and the welfare of the country as I advance to seek out the enemy.
Follow me.
That evening, as the last rays of sun left the valley, General Saito, Admiral Nagumo, and Brigadier General Keiji Iketa, chief of staff of the 31st Army, dined with their aides on squid, rice, and a few remaining tins of crab meat. Although there was little food for the men to pass around, all enjoyed plenty of sake. The next morning the general decided he was too old and sick to join the gyokusai. Instead, he, Nagumo, and Iketa retired to a small cave. Sitting cross-legged and dressed in their military finery, they unbuttoned their blouses and exposed their chests and stomachs. They shouted, “Tenno Heika! Banzai!” as they plunged their swords into their bellies and ripped from left to right, disemboweling themselves. Then, as instructed, their assistants shot them in the head, dragged their bodies out of the cave, and burned them.
In the early-morning hours of July 7, Colonel Takuji Suzuki, commanding officer of the 135th Infantry Regiment, whom General Saito had chosen to lead the gyokusai, waited for the troops to gather at the rendezvous areas. In a terrific thunderstorm thousands came, carrying rifles, knives, swords, clubs, poles with bayonets attached, and spears fashioned out of bamboo. At Makunsha they shared sake and beer. Those physically unable to join the gyokusai were given the option of taking their own lives or being shot.
CHAPTER 31
Red Flags
Lieutenant Paul Zacher from the Port Director’s office had inspected the E. A. Bryan and given the Liberty ship the green light to be rigged and loaded. Although her winch bearings had been greased and her piston rods and valve stems oiled, just hours later problems surfaced. The driver on the No. 1 winch was lowering a net of bombs when he realized the brake was stuck in the off position. A greenhorn operator would have panicked and sent the bombs free-falling. Fortunately he had been running the winches long enough not to have to depend on the brake. If he kept his cool and the steam pressure lasted, he could bring the load down without smashing it on the deck of the ship or dropping it on top of the men working in the hold.
After bringing the load down safely, the winch operator alerted the ship’s third mate, who was charged with keeping the ship, its crew, and its cargo safe, about the problem. He, in turn, relayed the message to the Bryan’s chief mate and engineer, who evidently never followed up. Some of the division heads may also have been notified. If they were, they decided that the problem was not an urgent one. As long as the winch was semifunctional, there was no point in losing valuable loading hours by shutting it down.
On the Bryan’s No. 4 winch, Lieutenant Richard Terstenson, one of Lieutenant Commander Alexander Holman’s two assistant loading officers, discovered that a valve (the petcock) was loose on the compression regulator. So much hot steam was escaping that the winch driver found it difficult to do his job. The steam burned his skin and created such a fog that he could not see his signa
lman on the deck of the ship. Terstenson immediately alerted the ship’s engineer, the same man who earlier had chosen not to attend to the defective brake on the No. 1 winch.
Still, the loading did not stop. For two solid months in the lead-up to the invasion of Saipan and the Marianas, the pressure at Port Chicago had been intense. The autocratic Captain Merrill Kinne, the depot’s head officer, constantly reminded his division heads of daily tonnage goals, and they in turn reminded the seamen. The port director’s office warned Kinne, as it had warned his boss, Captain Goss, that loading ten tons of high explosives per hour was beyond Port Chicago’s capacity. But Kinne, like Goss, wanted nothing to do with anyone looking over his shoulder, and banished the Coast Guard from the pier. “Explosives,” he said, “will be quite safe so long as one realizes that they are dangerous.” The expectation was that the Bryan would be topped off and sent downstream as quickly as possible.
Later that day Lieutenant Terstenson told Lieutenant Commander Holman that he did not approve of the way the seamen rolled and skidded Mk-47 Torpex-loaded aerial depth bombs from the second tier of the boxcar down a wooden chute to the dock. Terstenson knew the hazards of working with ordnance, especially Torpex, a mixture of highly combustible RDX, TNT, and aluminum powder that packed an explosive power one and a half times greater than TNT and was sensitive to bullet penetration and, more important, impact. The Navy Bureau of Ordnance warned of “ ‘container dent’ sensitivity … new to the literature of explosives.” If, in the interest of speed, one was going to cut corners and ignore safety precautions, Torpex was definitely not the stuff to do it with.
“It’s dangerous, sir,” Terstenson told Holman. “They [the bombs] have a tendency to bang against other bombs laying on the dock.” Terstenson suggested using a forklift with a pallet on which to lay and lower the bombs, or at the very least putting a mat on the pier to cushion their fall as they slid off the chute.
That afternoon, Lieutenant Tobin, the 2nd Division’s commanding officer, was on the loading platform near the No. 4 hold of the Bryan, watching his men break out a boxcar packed seven tiers high with fragmentation bombs. Farther down the pier, near the Bryan’s No. 2 hold, Tobin saw what Lieutenant Terstenson had seen—men struggling to move high-explosive Mk-47 bombs off the boxcar. The sight made him nervous, but instead of reporting it, he climbed down into the Bryan’s No. 2 hold as if ignoring it would make it disappear. What he witnessed there alarmed him even more. The seamen pushed the 325-pound bombs around as if they were moving crates of oranges, banging them against each other and into the bulkhead.
“Dammit!” Tobin shouted over the din of the clanging bombs. The men stopped working and looked up, startled. “Take it easy with those bombs,” Tobin warned. “You’re going to blow us all to hell.”
When Tobin returned to the deck of the Bryan, he was frightened and furious. Had none of the loading officers talked with the seamen about handling Torpex-filled bombs, or was that another depot rule that would go unenforced? Tobin was convinced that Port Chicago was pushing the envelope, and later would admit to one of his fellow loading officers an “apprehension of danger.”
Tobin felt that what was missing from Port Chicago was a uniformity of procedure. Everyone seemed to have different expectations and preferences. There were officers who discounted rough handling because they thought it came with the territory. Others, like Lieutenant Richard Terstenson, insisted that there should be “no rough handling of any kind.”
In defense of Port Chicago, the West Coast’s main port and storage point for ammunition and high explosives, the demands of the war effort left virtually no time for implementing depot-wide standards. Lieutenant Commander Holman could do little more than show his officers and seamen a training film called “Safe Handling of Explosives.” Transferring those methods to the dock was something that everyone intended to get to—someday.
The Navy Bureau of Personnel was not of much help, either. It did not issue a comprehensive “ammunition handling” textbook until 1945, meaning that no standard practice for handling high explosives even existed. The Port Chicago Naval Ammunition Depot had to rely on an impractical Coast Guard manual titled Regulations Governing Transportation of Military Explosives On Board Vessels During the Present Emergency and the perfunctory U.S. Naval Magazine, Port Chicago, California, Manual of Loading and Dock Procedure. The manuals were kept on file but rarely consulted. Some of the officers did not even know that they existed.
Days later, after ninety-six hours of round-the-clock loading, a bleeder valve on the problematic No. 4 winch blew. A petcock could be overlooked, but a blown bleeder valve needed immediate attention. A civil service plumber was brought in to repair it. He replaced a worn-out nipple on the valve and then watched as the ship’s engineer tested the winch. Picking up his tools, the plumber began to leave.
“Where are you going?” the engineer asked.
“Well, I’m through,” the plumber said. As he turned to walk away, he saw seamen rolling huge bombs out of a boxcar. One bomb got away from them and fell two feet from the car onto the deck.
The plumber looked up at the engineer and shook his head. “I don’t like the looks of things around here.”
CHAPTER 32
Island of the Dead
At 4:00 a.m. on July 7, Colonel Suzuki raised his sword. After bowing in the direction of the Imperial Palace, his troops began to move south down the Tanapag Road. To the Americans, it sounded like a stampede. The Japanese covered the three quarters of a mile in ten minutes and ran smack into the 105th, one of the 27th’s regiments, which earlier Holland Smith had relieved of frontline duty. Men fired at each other at point-blank range, and slashed and lunged with their bayonets. A small group of Americans dashed back to the regimental command post half a mile south of Tanapag to sound the alert. In the meantime, the enemy found a gap between the 105th’s battalions. They poured through. Then they turned back north and attacked the Americans from the rear. Marine artillery units, observing from the surrounding hills, fired on their own men.
At sunrise the Japanese came across a field and stormed the position held by the 3rd Battalion, 10th Marines. Setting their fuses at a dangerous four tenths of a second, the Marine artillerymen fired at will. The shells exploded so close that they sprayed their own positions with shrapnel. To avoid being killed by flying fragments from their own shells, they bounced them off the ground fifty yards in front of the gun tubes.
Pushing forward, the enemy soldiers ran up against the 105th’s regimental command post, half a mile south of Tanapag. Members of the Headquarters Company heard the advance and were waiting. They cut down the Japanese as they swept across an open field. By early afternoon, Headquarters Company, joined by units from the 106th Infantry, counterattacked. Although other enemy units staged smaller attacks throughout the day, the gyokusai, the largest and most vicious of the Pacific war, had finally foundered.
After leaving the front lines on the morning of July 6, the remnant troops of the 1st Battalion, 29th Marines were treated to ten-in-one rations, powdered C-ration coffee, and fruit cocktail. Chick Borta’s mouth watered at the mention of hot food. Had he been a smoker, like so many of the other men, he might have relished that first long drag of a cigarette. Many of the smokers had gone days without a puff.
Although Borta had planned to eat himself sick, by the time the rations were distributed, he was so exhausted and his temperature had soared so high that he could barely sit up. His legs felt like dough. So, instead of eating he spent the night in the 2nd Division hospital in Garapan, riding out a 103-degree temperature.
That night, woozy with fever, he heard the distant sounds of the gyokusai: the cries of the charging Japanese; the machine guns raking the fields; and the roar of artillery. It was not until two days later, however, that he knew for sure that he had not been suffering from auditory hallucinations.
On the morning of July 9, a group of Marines came into the hospital. They were short on men and needed anyone
capable of walking and holding a rifle to join their patrol. Borta had already gone through a cycle of fever and chills and knew he had a window of time before his temperature spiked again, so he volunteered.
The first thing Borta noticed were fat clouds of flies moving heavily through the air. Then the patrol came upon a tidal creek choked with dead soldiers. He could have walked across without getting his feet wet.
Reaching the Tanapag Plain, Borta reminded himself that what he was seeing was real and not a fever-induced vision of hell. Dark blood stained the ground. Hundreds of Japanese corpses lay strewn across the dirt with maggots swarming over them. Some looked as if they had died happy, their mouths curled up and teeth bared in a macabre grin. Samurai swords, knives, pistols, rifles, and spears were everywhere. Men assigned to burial details—the lucky wore gas masks—searched through the piles, trying to identify the Americans, puking and retching as putrid gas escaped from the bloated bodies, whose skin was the color of coconut meat. Bulldozers clawed and scooped out trenches and holes and then filled them with dead Japanese doused in kerosene. Years later, what Borta and his fellow Marines would always remember about the battle for Saipan was the stench of the dead. They would smell it on the breeze, at ball games, as they drifted off to sleep, even on their wedding days.
The post-gyokusai statistics were mind-boggling. Burial crews handled over 4,300 Japanese bodies. The Americans, too, suffered heavy casualties. The 105th lost a total of nine hundred, with four hundred killed. The 3rd Battalion, 10th Marines lost a total of 140 men, including seventy-five dead. Eighty percent of the men in its H Battery were either killed or wounded.
The Color of War Page 28
