by John McCain
That afternoon a Japanese soldier in the same trench, pretending to be dead, suddenly came alive and bayoneted a sergeant in the Scouts. Gabaldon remembered him as the “type of Marine you see in the movies. He came into the Command Post holding his guts in . . . [and] had a smile on his face as if nothing had happened.” The sergeant was evacuated to a hospital ship, where he died from his wound.
The Japanese launched another large counterattack that night, June 16, including a tank assault. It lasted until dawn, “a madhouse of noise, tracers and flashing lights,” as one marine described it. Dozens of crippled tanks, most of them Japanese, burned through the night and were still smoking when the sun came up. “We shot at everything that moved,” Gabaldon remembered, “and God help the Marine who got out of his foxhole.”
But Gabaldon, for reasons he never convincingly explained, decided to get out of his. He took a carbine off a dead marine, left his heavier M-1 behind, stuffed some ammo clips in his pockets, and without telling anyone what he was doing, crawled off into the darkness. Later he said he was looking to avenge the attack on Pearl Harbor that resulted in his friends being sent to internment camps. He also said he thought if he brought back more Japanese prisoners for interrogation, he might be reconsidered as an interpreter. Whatever his motive, even if it were nothing more than the glory-seeking his critics accused him of, there is no denying what he accomplished. He approached a dugout where he recognized the smell of Japanese food cooking and waited there until dawn. He could hear Japanese soldiers inside reassure each other that the Imperial Japanese Navy would soon reach Saipan with supplies and reinforcements. When the sun started to rise, he tossed a couple of fragmentation grenades into the dugout, then a smoke grenade, and single-handedly took prisoner the dozen enemy soldiers who came out of the bunker to find a single marine pointing a weapon at them. He threatened to kill them if they didn’t surrender. Then he ordered them to strip and ran all twelve of them back to his command post, shouting, “Don’t shoot! Don’t fire! These are prisoners.”
Though Captain Schwabe was likely vexed by Gabaldon’s rank insubordination, he valued its results. The two prisoners interrogated the day before and the twelve captured that day provided useful intelligence. So he decided to authorize his enterprising subordinate’s freelancing. It would likely get Gabaldon killed, but it was obvious he was going to do it anyway. He was just a “lone wolf sort of guy,” Schwabe recognized. He would be the 2nd Regiment’s lone wolf from then on, bringing in as many prisoners as he could get to surrender using his bravado, cunning, and broken Japanese for as long as he wanted to and as long as he stayed alive.
The two days after D-Day saw 2nd and 4th Division marines advance by close-quarter fighting from their beachheads toward their objectives. Their progress continued slowly and they were still well behind schedule, but they were inching ahead against determined Japanese resistance. The army’s 27th Infantry Division had followed the marines ashore on the 16th. One army regiment supported the 4th Division’s right flank, and by the end of D-Day+2, the 4th had reached Saipan’s operational airfield and forced the Japanese to abandon it, which had been one of its D-Day objectives. The 2nd Division fought its way north toward the town of Garapan. That same day Admiral Nagumo’s gunboats hove into view behind the beachhead and attempted an attack from the rear. U.S. Navy gunboats and marine artillery destroyed the little fleet in detail.
On June 18 the Americans on Saipan awoke to a puzzling and worrying sight. The powerful American fleet that had brought them there and pounded Saipan for days and carried their supplies, ammunition, and reinforcements had disappeared from view. Admiral Spruance had ordered it to more secure positions as Admiral Mitscher’s task force broke off and rushed six hundred miles west to meet an Imperial Japanese Navy fleet that had been spotted coming through the San Bernardino Strait.
The conversation Gabaldon overheard the night he waited outside the Japanese bunker hadn’t been the false bravado or wishful thinking of a besieged enemy. Knowing American control of the Marianas would bring the home islands within range of American B-29s and determined to prevent it, the Japanese had launched Operation A-Go and dispatched an immense fleet for a final showdown with the American Fifth Fleet, using land-based as well as carrier-based aircraft to compensate for the greater number of American carrier planes.
The Battle of the Philippine Sea began the following day, June 19, and lasted into the early morning hours of the 21st. It was the greatest carrier battle of the war. The clashing fleets were the largest assembled in a single battle. It began with an eight-hour air battle involving over a thousand aircraft. The American aviators who fought in it called it “the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.” The Japanese fleet discovered there were not as many land-based planes available for its support as expected; for weeks Mitscher’s aviators had been bombing Japanese planes on runways in the Marianas and Palau and on the island of Truk.
Japan lost three carriers in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, two sunk by American submarines and another by American aviators. It also lost nearly four hundred sea- and land-based aircraft and managed to destroy only twenty-six American planes. The smashing defeat effectively ceded control of the Marianas. There would be no relief for Saito’s army on Saipan. Nor could much of anything be done for Japanese garrisons on Guam and Tinian. The Imperial Japanese Navy would not continue as an effective fighting force much longer. It had one last epic battle to fight, at Leyte Gulf, and then it would cease, for practical purposes, to pose any serious impediment to the conquest of the Japanese Empire. The American fleet reappeared off Saipan, returning with its nearly inexhaustible cargo of supplies and ammunition for the invasion force and the supporting fire of its big guns and carrier planes. But despite this irreversible turn in the fortunes of war, there was still hard fighting ahead on Saipan, and on Tinian and Guam as well.
GENERAL SAITO, AWARE THAT there would be no reinforcement of his outnumbered army, set up his lines east to west with Mount Tapotchau in the center, in the rugged, hilly terrain of the island’s interior. There his soldiers, hiding in caves during the day and attacking at night, would make the Americans pay dearly for every mile gained in landscapes named for the sacrifices their conquest demanded: a line of hills remembered as Purple Heart Ridge, an open field called Death Valley, a small mountain cove dubbed Hell’s Pocket.
By the end of the first week on Saipan the two marine divisions, the 2nd pushing north along the west coast and the 4th having cut across the island to the east coast, had suffered more than six thousand casualties. General Holland Smith had them form the flanks of an east-west front with an army infantry regiment in the center, and on June 22 they started a long, slow slog north in the teeth of fierce resistance. The Americans cleared out the defenders cave by cave with flamethrowers and grenades after artillery had pounded the positions. They repulsed counterattacks at night. Dug-in Japanese on Mount Tapotchau and Purple Heart Ridge had clear fields of fire to the narrow, open expanse below, Death Valley, which the Americans had to traverse to reach them.
Smith ordered the rest of the army’s 27th Division to clear out remaining Japanese resistance in the southeast corner of the island. Progress was excruciatingly slow on both fronts, so much so that Smith relieved the 27th’s commanding general, Major General Ralph Smith, on June 24. The advance north had been almost completely bogged down by then, though the marine divisions on the flanks had gained much more ground than the army infantry in the center. The front had become U-shaped. Whether or not it was justified, the relief of an army general in the field by a Marine Corps general engendered considerable and enduring animosity in the offended service.
The entire line resumed its advance on the 25th. Five days of bitterly hard fighting later, all three divisions were advancing in a relatively straight line. The marines in the 4th Division on the right were fighting in cane fields. The soldiers in the 27th had killed the last defender in Hell’s Pocket, pushed through the last of the resistance in Death Valley,
and taken the last rise on Purple Heart Ridge. The 2nd Division had reached the outskirts of Garapan on its left, as navy guns reduced the town to rubble and most of its inhabitants fled to the hills, and reached Mount Tipo Pale and Mount Tapotchau on its right. Meanwhile the 2nd Regiment’s lone wolf was still busy freelancing.
Gabaldon said it became a game, to see how many he could bring in. He thought he could set some kind of record. One night he approached a large cave and called to the soldiers inside in what he described as a condescending form of speech, believing it would either enrage them or demoralize them. The first soldier who came out was enraged, and Gabaldon killed him. Nine others came out with their hands up after he warned them he had a hundred marines with him. He loaded them all in an ox cart and had them wave their white skivvies overhead as they approached the marines’ lines while he walked behind them, pointing his carbine at their backs. He started bringing in larger and larger groups. When some of the marines started a pool, and Hurley bet Gabaldon would take fifty prisoners, he brought in fifty-two. He went out each night, almost always on his own, and he almost always returned with prisoners. It was foolish, and he knew it. “I must have seen too many John Wayne movies,” he admitted. But he was addicted to the thrill. “I couldn’t stop. I was hooked.”
He spent a long night in the hills near Mount Tapotchau pinned down by American artillery firing at a nearby concentration of Japanese. In the morning he picked his way through the enemy dead, collecting a few souvenirs and tins of crabmeat, some rock candy, and two bottles of sake. He was an avid looter, accumulating a store of Japanese watches, swords, medals, and other paraphernalia, even diaries, and supplies of lemon soda, Kirin beer, rock candy, and crabmeat. He once returned to the observation post with a phonograph, some 78s, and two canteens filled with sake. Another time he blew the safe of a bank that had been leveled by artillery, and he and a pal made off with a bag full of yen, which they eventually threw away. His prize possession was a Japanese officer’s .32 caliber pistol, which he wore in a shoulder holster for the duration of the campaign. He decorated himself with captured Japanese medals and wore aviator shades and a baseball cap with the brim turned up. In photographs he looks like a movie character, eager and friendly.
He had a lot of close calls. Once he was caught for hours in a ferocious cross fire, crouched behind a boulder with a Catholic priest, as marines were falling on his right and left. He was nearly killed again by friendly fire one night when sentries shot at him after failing to acknowledge his signal. Returning from another mission he commandeered a truck and loaded fifteen naked prisoners into it. When an officer tried to take the truck away from him, Gabaldon refused to relinquish it, complaining he could get killed trying to walk fifteen Japanese through a battalion at night. When the officer demanded to know who he was, Gabaldon didn’t give his name, answering only that he was a scout and interpreter. The officer told him to get out of there, that they already had “the best interpreter on the Island, his name’s Gabaldon.”
Some nights he couldn’t talk the enemy into surrendering; he would kill them then. He stood behind a boulder and shouted at the Japanese in one cave that they were surrounded. When two soldiers rushed out with bayonets fixed, Gabaldon shot them dead. Then he threw four grenades into the cave, followed by a satchel charge. Before the smoke cleared, he ran into the cave and sprayed rounds in every direction. He counted seven dead inside, two of them civilians, both women.
When he recounts these and other incidents in his book, he often uses the most disparaging language to refer to the Japanese he killed. They’re stupid and sneaky, cruel and disreputable. When he killed them, he was sending them to their “dishonorable ancestors.” In one instance he calls them vermin. He writes that he never got used to killing, yet he recalls his kills either matter-of-factly or boastfully. He kept a careful body count and boasted often that he killed thirty-three soldiers on Saipan. He proudly recalled taking careful aim and killing three Japanese so he could appropriate the Harley-Davidson they were riding. On a mission in Garapan he called on two “Imperial Marines” coming out of a building to surrender. They drew their swords, and he “fired off fifteen rounds, point blank.” One man was killed instantly, “but the other joker was squirming.” Gabaldon approached him and asked if there were other Japanese around. “I had shot his left arm off and he had a few holes in his gut, but the stupid sonavabitch swung out with his saber and I was forced to send him to Valhalla with a round in his temple.” He includes a reporter’s account of the incident in his book: “E.L.A. GETS TWO JAPS IN SAIPAN ACTION.” He mentions another wounded Japanese soldier he had to finish off, “going in for the kill my style, from up close.”
It’s hard to know how much of the swagger is intended to make his book a good read and how much reflects the real Gabaldon. There are clearly other sides to his personality. He wrote affectingly of a family of Japanese civilians held captive in a bunker with two Japanese soldiers, when marines arrived and tossed grenades into it. The mother died, the father was badly wounded, and an eight-year-old girl convulsed in death spasms as Gabaldon and the other marines worked frantically to save her. “This was a scene I hadn’t bargained for,” he wrote. He encountered a Japanese soldier badly burned by a flamethrower and stumbling around senselessly, and rather than kill him treated him compassionately. Instead of shooting an escaping prisoner, he ran the man down and became angry when another marine shot him.
Contrary to the callousness and bravado that pervade his reminiscences and attitudes toward the enemy, which he attributed to his impoverished, rough-and-tumble childhood, Gabaldon often displayed a convincing empathy when he talked Japanese soldiers into surrendering. He used threats too, of course, and he maintained he was always the very picture of a cool, confident conqueror in the presence of his prisoners. But he often seemed almost to plead with them to surrender. He told them he understood the demands of Bushido, but they had fought bravely and honorably until fighting had become impossible and their families deserved to have them home. He told them his “shogun,” General Holland Smith, admired them as honorable warriors and would treat them honorably. They would not be harmed, he insisted, but fed, clothed, and shown respect, and would be returned unharmed to their families after the war. If they refused his offer of good treatment they could be certain he and the hundred or so marines surrounding their cave would kill them. But it need not come to that, and he hoped it wouldn’t. It was an effective combination of bravado, despair, and sympathy, all the more impressive considering in most instances Gabaldon claims he had to kill one or two before the others would surrender. But out they came with their hands up, singly, then by the dozens, then scores, then hundreds of them, naked, waving their skivvies, marching off to the stockade with the man who came to be called “the Pied Piper of Saipan.”
THE BATTLE OF SAIPAN began drawing to a close in the first week of July, but not without a few last spasms of horrific violence and bloodletting. The ratio of dead and wounded was 9 to 1, to the Americans’ advantage. The majority of Saito’s army was dead, sacrificed along with his tanks in the many failed frontal counterattacks. Only seven thousand were still able to fight. They were being pushed farther and farther north, until their backs were to the sea, and they were running desperately low on ammunition, food, and water. The seriously wounded were killing themselves now. The marines occupied Garapan on the Fourth of July. Gabaldon claimed he and a buddy were the first to enter the city, days before it fell.
General Smith issued orders for the 4th Division and the 27th to pivot west around the 2nd Division north of Garapan. He planned to relieve the 2nd once the 4th and 27th reached the west coast and use it in reserve in the invasion of Tinian on July 24. On July 5 General Saito and Admiral Nagumo met in Saito’s last command post, a cave north of the coastal village of Tanapag, in an area the Americans had heavily bombarded and nicknamed Paradise Valley. Saito, tired and wounded, held a ceremonial dinner with his senior commanders, then dispatched runners to de
liver to his scattered forces his final orders for one last mass frontal assault. The communiqué acknowledged they were doomed. “There is only death,” it read. “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.”
With that, Saito cut his wrists and an aide shot him in the temple. Nagumo and his chief of staff also took their own lives that night, reportedly committing ritual seppuku.
A final banzai charge was not a surprise to the Americans, who could hear preparations being made before it was launched and waited anxiously for it. It seemed every pitched battle on Saipan had ended with a suicide attack. This one would be different in two respects. First, it would be larger than any previous charge, the largest of the war, involving nearly all Japanese soldiers still capable of fighting and many who couldn’t, as well as civilians who had been convinced by propaganda that Americans would murder them in the most gruesome ways imaginable. Second, the Japanese believed the emperor had ordered the charge, which conferred a special distinction. It would be a gyokusai attack, a fight to the last man. Gyokusai translates literally as “shattered jade.” It is better to die with honor, like “shattered jade,” than live in shame.
The attack’s ostensible objective was to sweep through the American lines and retake Tanapag and Garapan. But the true purpose was to die and take as many Americans with them as possible. It began in the early morning of July 7, when several thousand Japanese swarmed from their cover, crying “Tenno Haika! Banzai!” (Long live the emperor! Ten thousand ages!), and rushed at the American lines. They carried rifles, swords, grenades, and knives fastened onto bamboo poles. Many of the walking wounded who joined the attack—and some were barely able to walk—were armed with only rocks and their fists. American artillery tore into them, and when they got too close, the gunners shortened their fuses and fired shells into the ground in front of them. Machine gunners swept their guns right to left, cutting down hundreds, thousands. And still they came. Mortar crews fired round after round until they ran out of shells. And still wave followed wave, breaking through the American lines in several places, overwhelming and nearly destroying two battalions in the 27th and one marine artillery battalion. The Americans put up a valiant and determined resistance. In one infantry battalion, the 105th, three soldiers would receive the Medal of Honor for their heroism that day, all of them posthumously. The fighting was soon hand to hand, with knives and fists. Some veterans who had fought on Tarawa and in other campaigns remembered it as the most desperate fighting of the war.