The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  Working with aerial photographs and radio intercepts, American intelligence analysts had estimated that the Japanese garrison numbered between 15,000 and 17,000 troops. That estimate was far short of the mark. Reinforcements shipped from Japan and China in April and May had brought the island’s troop strength to almost 30,000. The garrison included 22,702 army troops (the Forty-Third Division and a mixed brigade, the Forty-Seventh Independent) and 6,690 naval personnel, including more of the elite Special Naval Landing Forces (“Japanese marines”) who had fought at Tarawa. Overall command of the Marianas and Palau was entrusted to Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, whom the Americans remembered well as the commander of Kido Butai, the carrier strike force that had attacked Pearl Harbor and been smashed six months later at Midway. Nagumo’s command center was on Saipan. Tactical command of ground forces, and the preparation of the island’s fixed fortifications, was left in the hands of Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito.

  The Saipan garrison would have been even larger if not for the effective depredations of Pacific Fleet submarines. The Japanese army’s Forty-Third Division had sailed from Japan in two transport groups. The first, a half-dozen dilapidated freighters escorted by a small cruiser-destroyer force, had left Tokyo Bay on May 14. During the miserable five-day voyage, a sergeant recalled, the men had been crammed into a stifling hold, “laid out on shelves like broiler chickens.”

  You had your pack, rifle, all your equipment with you. You crouched there, your body bent. You kept your rubber-soled work shoes on continually, so your feet got damp and sweaty. Water dripped on you, condensation caused by human breathing. The hold stank with humanity. A few rope ladders and one narrow, hurriedly improvised stairway were the only ways out. We expected the ship to sink at any moment.5

  That first convoy reached Saipan without incident on May 19. But the second convoy, seven transports carrying 7,000 troops and most of the Forty-Third Division’s heavy weaponry, supplies, and provisions, was attacked by American submarines. Five of the seven transports were torpedoed and destroyed. Most of the troops were rescued, but the sinkings deprived Saito’s forces of armaments, provisions, and other important supplies. A rushed construction program was to have rendered Saipan “impregnable,” but in May the general complained to Imperial General Headquarters that a lack of needed construction materials and equipment had kept his men “standing around with their arms folded.” Coastal defenses and antiaircraft batteries had been erected hastily, and in many cases the work was incomplete. Defensive works were built of earth and wood, rather than heavy reinforced concrete as on Tarawa. Crates of ammunition, artillery, barbed wire, and other munitions were stored in naval depots near the western beachheads. American forces would seize much of this material intact. A report later submitted by Pacific Fleet headquarters estimated that just one-third of the heavy artillery on the island had been mounted in gun emplacements. Fortifications and firing positions above the landing beaches were “in much smaller quantities than had been heretofore encountered, with surprisingly few concrete pillboxes and blockhouses along the beaches.”6

  More than 1,000 miles lay between Saipan and Eniwetok, the westernmost atoll in American hands. Turner’s amphibious fleet would be required to operate at sea, within easy reach of the invasion beaches, possibly for many weeks. Reaching a safe anchorage would require a voyage of several days. Turner’s vulnerable transports would depend entirely on the air protection provided by Task Force 58. Japanese airfields on Saipan, Guam, and Rota were thought to be abundantly supplied with land-based fighters and bombers, and they could be reinforced quickly by aircraft staged through airfields in the Bonin and Volcano island groups to the north. Given the record of Mitscher’s recent carrier raids against enemy territory throughout the theater, the Americans could confidently rely on Task Force 58 to win control of the skies above the southern Marianas. But what happened if Ozawa’s First Mobile Fleet appeared on the scene? Would Mitscher be cut loose to go after it? Or must he remain near the beachheads and the invasion fleet? Therein lay a worrying ambiguity that had not been directly addressed in Spruance’s orders, or in FORAGER’s operational plans.

  The problem had been on Ernest King’s mind throughout the spring. Though his instincts were always aggressive, the COMINCH had misgivings about the looming confrontation with the Japanese fleet. Earlier in his career, war games at the Naval War College had exposed the logistical strains that would develop as the Pacific Fleet moved deep into enemy waters. King assumed that the Imperial Navy had conserved an elite cadre of aviators. The Americans had underestimated the Japanese in the past. Might they be on the verge of repeating the error? In an off-the-record interview with reporters in February 1944, the COMINCH confided his anxieties: “We know the Japs are a very patient people, and will spend years, if necessary, laying a trap for us to walk into, and we fear we may wake up one of these bright mornings with a very bloody nose.”7 From Tokyo’s point of view, King said, “it is better strategy for them to let us come to the very end of our long lines of communications and then attack us. Why should they come to meet us on some middle ground and away from their bases? We have to come to them, and they know it. Therefore they will make it as difficult as possible.”8

  Nimitz assured the COMINCH that Spruance was prepared for the contingency of a major fleet battle. Task Force 58 possessed a formidable numerical advantage: fifteen carriers to Ozawa’s nine, seven battleships to Ozawa’s five, and 950 carrier planes to Ozawa’s 450. But Spruance was convinced that the Japanese would not risk their fleet to oppose the invasion of the Marianas. He assumed that the enemy would wait for the most advantageous tactical circumstances. Since the main body of the Japanese fleet had not contested MacArthur’s landings on Biak, where it would have enjoyed a clear margin of naval superiority, Spruance assumed it would not travel more than 2,000 miles to the Marianas: “I was of the opinion that the Japanese fleet was waiting for a time when they could count on strong shore-based air to help them. Outlying groups of islands, such as the Marianas, could not be counted on for this, as we had demonstrated our ability to smother them with our superior carrier air strength.”9

  TASK FORCE 58, STEAMING in the vanguard of the American fleet, completed fueling on June 8 and 9. The weather was clear and the sea mild. A steady light breeze blew from the east. Radar periodically registered “bogies” to the west, but none made contact with the task force or its aircraft until the afternoon of June 10, when F6Fs were vectored ahead to intercept and destroy two Japanese patrol planes. On the following morning, a flight of G4M bombers approached from the northwest. They were also intercepted and destroyed. It seemed likely that the Japanese were now alerted to the approach of a powerful carrier force.

  The task force was now less than 200 miles from Saipan, well within air-striking range. With his presence unmasked, Mitscher knew he could expect another long, tense night dodging low-flying G4Ms armed with torpedoes. Even if the intruders did not score, they would keep the American ships on the defensive, maneuvering evasively, all night long. The effort would exhaust the crews on the eve of a long and demanding operation. Better to launch the customary fighter sweep now, he reasoned, rather than wait until dawn.10 At 1:00 p.m., ships in Task Force 58 turned into the wind and began launching planes—sixteen Hellcats from each Essex-class carrier, twelve from each light carrier, 208 fighters altogether. All were fitted with belly tanks, and about half were armed with 500-pound bombs.

  Arriving over Saipan, Guam, and Rota shortly before 3:00 p.m., they caught the Japanese unprepared. The Hellcats shot down about thirty Zeros and damaged some additional (unknown) number of aircraft on the ground. The attackers were met by intense antiaircraft fire, especially around the Japanese airfield on Orote Peninsula, Guam. Eleven F6Fs sustained fatal damage as a result of antiaircraft fire (three of the eleven downed pilots were later recovered). Alex Vraciu, now with the Lexington’s VF-16, flew a strafing run over a seaplane ramp on Saipan. A flak burst nearly took his plane down, but he stab
ilized and flew back to the Lexington, his engine running rough: “This is where the F6F Hellcat’s ruggedness is really appreciated.”11

  That night, Mitscher launched small “Bat Team” fighters to “heckle” the Japanese airfields—that is, to circle above them and strafe them intermittently, a tactic intended to keep the Japanese awake and leave them exhausted and on edge the following morning.

  Kakuta’s First Air Fleet had begun the day with approximately 435 aircraft manned and operable. The initial daylight fighter sweep on June 11 had destroyed as many as a third while also cratering the runways and demolishing many of the vital ground support facilities. At the end of the first week of aerial combat and carrier strikes, Kakuta’s flyable inventory was reduced to about a hundred planes. The remaining aircraft had survived only because they had been camouflaged under palm fronds and brush and dispersed to locations far from the airfields. Air reinforcements arrived in small numbers from the home islands and from Truk. But the First Air Fleet, upon which so much hope had rested, never posed more than a nuisance to American forces.

  Spruance ordered two task groups, half of Mitscher’s force, to divert north and raid the airfields on Iwo Jima and Chichi Jima. Mitscher assigned the job to Task Groups 58.1 and 58.4, commanded by Rear Admirals Jocko Clark and William K. Harrill, respectively. Task Group 58.1 reached its point option on the afternoon of June 15 and launched a large composite strike against Iwo and Chichi Jima. Hellcats shot down about two dozen Japanese fighters while the accompanying bombers worked over the airfields, ammunition dumps, fuel tanks, and ground complexes. F6Fs armed with small fragmentation bombs cratered the runways and then banked around for low-altitude strafing runs. Again, the sturdy construction of the American planes worked to their advantage, and many damaged or shot-up aircraft returned safely to the carriers.

  A small typhoon was brewing in the area. Late afternoon brought towering seas, and green water broke over the flight decks. On the Belleau Wood, a plane hurtled over a crash barrier and started a raging fire. Winds and sea rose steadily through the night. Flight operations were impossible in those tempestuous conditions, so Clark maneuvered his carriers well to the east, into calmer waters. By midday on June 16, the storm had abated enough to allow for another large strike. VB-2 pilot Harold Buell, flying a SB2C Helldiver from the Hornet, was assigned to attack shipping in the small harbor of Chichi Jima, a place nicknamed the “punch bowl.” It was a technically difficult dive into a snug harbor surrounded by steep hills, with only a single exit to the west. Antiaircraft fire was intense. Buell, who returned to strike this same harbor several more times in the course of the war, later wrote, “Chichi Jima was a tough, dirty target that always scared the hell out of me and left me feeling like I hadn’t accomplished anything except to stay alive when I got safely outside the bowl again.”12

  ON THE MORNING OF JUNE 13, forty-eight hours before the first scheduled landings, the first bombardment group arrived off Saipan and Tinian. It included seven new “fast” battleships under the command of Vice Admiral Willis A. “Ching” Lee, detached from Task Force 58 to make an early start of working over Saipan’s beach defenses, accompanied by about a dozen destroyers. The group rained 16- and 5-inch high-explosive shells down on the zones immediately inland of the landing beaches, and for all appearances the entire area was left a smoking ruin. For fear of mines on the ocean shelf, Lee’s battleships remained at long range, 10,000 to 16,000 yards. The destroyers drew in close to shore and concentrated their guns on both islands’ barracks and bivouac areas.13 Under the cover provided by the barrage, six minesweepers swept the waters off the landing beaches. No mines were found. On June 14, two 96-man Underwater Demolition Teams (UDTs) were transported to the edge of the fringing reef. Frogmen swam in close under the Japanese shore artillery, charted the reef, and determined the lanes that the landing craft should take the following day. The divers found no artificial beach obstructions. They blasted out coral heads to clear paths for the landing craft. Under fire by artillery on shore, the demolition teams lost four men killed and five wounded.

  The weather was beautiful, very sunny and bright, almost blindingly so—but the breeze was constant and the air was pleasantly dry. On the transport fleet, approaching from the east, the landing troops found that they were able to sleep far better than they had in the South Pacific. Men dozed on deck, some in sun and some in shade; men wrote letters, played cards and checkers, tossed a medicine ball for exercise. Carrier planes patrolled overhead throughout the daylight hours. The sheer size of the fleet was a balm to their spirits. On many ships, the radio chatter between the planes above Saipan and the battleships offshore was piped through the ships’ loudspeakers, allowing the men aboard to form a mental picture of the action. Scale plaster models of Saipan were laid out on wardroom tables, with the locations of landing beaches, airfields, towns, and known shore batteries marked in colored ink.

  On the night before D-Day, the 2nd Division marines scrubbed themselves and their dungarees. They arose well before dawn and ate a hearty breakfast. The island now loomed off the starboard bow. The flat snub cone of Mount Tapotchau was barely discernible against the slightly lighter sky, but patches of the island were now and again illuminated by muzzle flashes or star shells. The fire support group, commanded by Rear Admiral Kingman, rendezvoused with the amphibious assault group under Admiral Turner. At first light the enormous fleet, numbering several hundred vessels, moved into assigned stations. The big guns put on a typically majestic show as they blasted the shore defenses. Sailors began lowering the landing craft. The marines, noted combat correspondent Pete Zurlinden, seemed relaxed and even bored as they watched the naval guns and carrier bombers spread destruction along the shore. They sorted through their gear one last time and sighted along their rifles. Virtually all of the noncommissioned officers were veterans of previous amphibious assaults. “To most of them,” wrote Zurlinden, “this is an old story. . . . They are quiet, laconic in their conversation.”14 They had seen and done it before.

  From his flagship Rocky Mount, Admiral Turner raised the signal “Land the Landing Force.” At 8:13 a.m., the force control officer signaled the first-wave landing boats to gather behind the line of departure, 4,000 yards offshore. The assault beaches were spread along a four-mile front to the north and south of Charan Kanoa, a sugar refinery and village on the southern part of the leeward coast. The boats motored toward shore in a line abreast, LVTs crammed with troops and accompanied by armed and armored amtracs, gunboats, and army DUKWs (amphibious trucks). Those first boats got ashore with few casualties, and within eight minutes marines had a foothold on every landing beach. The second and third waves followed close behind. Machine-gun fire was heavy above the southernmost landing beaches, designated Yellow 1 and Yellow 2. There the marines were pinned down for more than an hour, and could do nothing but dig into the sand. A larger-than-expected western swell broke over the reef and overturned boats loaded with ammunition, machine guns, light artillery pieces, and drinking water.

  As they reached the reef, about 1,000 yards from shore, the fourth and fifth waves were under intense artillery and mortar fire. The weapons, positioned on ridges above the beaches, had been registered to hit the reefs, and when they opened up, the entire reef line seemed to erupt in a barricade of whitewater and flames. This first salvo was so closely timed that witnesses offshore assumed a series of mines must have been detonated by one signal. A few craft took direct hits and suffered 100 percent casualties. But the American fleet was very generously supplied with landing craft, more than 800 altogether, and enough got through to deliver 8,000 men to the beaches in the first twenty minutes.

  For the remainder of that critical first day, the marines concentrated on holding the beaches and getting more men, equipment, and weaponry ashore. Seven battalions of artillery (75mm and 105mm howitzers) and two tank companies landed in the afternoon. Twenty thousand marines were ashore by the end of the day. Japanese artillery and mortar fire remained unrelenting t
hroughout. Marines employed shell craters as makeshift foxholes and continually deepened them as the barrage continued and intensified. Direct hits claimed many lives. Five battalion commanders were wounded and evacuated; one battalion lost three commanders in quick succession. Lieutenant Robert B. Sheeks was crawling up the beach when a mortar shell hit two marines immediately to his left. “There was an explosion and these two guys just evaporated. We couldn’t see any sign of them. They were disintegrated, just mixed in with the sand and vegetation and scattered all over the place.”15

  The naval bombardment had succeeded in knocking out most of the big coastal guns and in pulverizing some of the larger fixed fortifications that were easily seen from the offing or from planes overhead. But General Saito’s forces had effectively concealed smaller mobile artillery pieces and mortars in the high ground inland of the beaches. Holland Smith gradually ascertained that Japanese troop strength on the island was about 40 to 50 percent higher than anticipated by intelligence estimates. By nightfall the marines had penetrated about 1,500 yards inland at the deepest point in their perimeter. Their artillery could not yet effectively reach the enemy, who was tucked behind the ridgeline, but the carrier bombers aimed their bombs and machine guns at the muzzle flashes, and the naval guns began to find the range, helped by aerial spotting floatplanes. On the morning of June 16, heavy fighting continued all along the perimeter. American casualties surpassed 2,500. Smith requested all available reinforcements and recommended that the invasion of Guam, previously scheduled for June 18, be indefinitely postponed.