The Conquering Tide
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The SBDs of VB-10 arrived over the fleet at 15,500 feet and began a high-speed breakup into their dives. In a shallow dive, with 200 knots airspeed, Don Lewis went over his checklist, shifted to low blower, and pushed over. He attacked the Hiyo. She went into a radical turn, and Lewis corkscrewed several times to keep the target in his sights. The dive, said Lewis, “seemed to take an eternity. Never had a dive taken so long.” Flying through a massive volume of antiaircraft fire, the flight deck looking “tremendous” beneath him, he released his bomb at 1,500 feet and pulled out and up.65
A group of Wasp dive-bombers had paused to attack the fleet oilers, thirty or forty miles east of the main action. Two were so badly damaged that they had to be abandoned and scuttled. Other attackers planted bombs on the light carrier Junyo, the stern of the Chiyoda, a former seaplane tender, and the battleship Haruna. Four Belleau Wood Avengers armed with torpedoes dropped out of a cloud and made a high-speed run on the heavy carrier Hiyo, scoring at least one and possibly two torpedo hits. The Hiyo’s crew lost control of the resulting fires and had to abandon her later that night. She went down by the bow a few minutes before 10:00 p.m., bringing to three the number of Japanese carriers destroyed in the two-day battle. Zuikaku suffered badly enough that her skipper ordered the crew to abandon ship, but the fires were finally brought under control and the order countermanded. For once, Japanese damage-control efforts were successful, and the badly damaged carrier managed to limp back to the Inland Sea.
Lightened by the absence of their bombs, the escaping planes flew through a deadly gauntlet of antiaircraft fire. The Japanese formation was spread very wide across the sea, so it was a long flight to exit the screen. Fleeing planes were rocked hard by nearby bursts, and columns of water shot up ahead and among them as the destroyers and cruisers fired their main batteries into their paths. Pilots flew down to wave-top level, pulled up, and kicked their rudders right and left, hoping to prevent the gunners from finding the range.
Buell’s plane took a direct hit and almost went down. An antiaircraft shell blew a hole through the middle of his starboard wing, and a piece of shrapnel penetrated the cockpit and cut a gash across his back. The wing trailed a tail of fire, which began burning through the wing’s aluminum skin, exposing the frame beneath. The wounded Buell forced the stick as far left as it would go in order to keep his unwieldy dive-bomber in level flight. (That the wounded Helldiver could fly at all, let alone fly all the way back to Task Force 58, was proof of its rugged construction.)
Admiral Ugaki recorded that the antiaircraft fire was so heavy, it took on a life of its own. Even after the American planes had left the scene, it continued sporadically into the night. “Most of the fire was aimed at stars,” he wrote. “Even within a single ship, orders were hard to deliver. Firing couldn’t be stopped easily.”66
On the long return flight, in gathering darkness, American warplanes coalesced into small groups. Adjusting their engine settings to “slow cruise,” they tried to coax every possible mile out of each gallon of remaining gasoline. One pilot, battling fatigue, breathed pure oxygen through his mask even though he was at just 2,000 feet altitude, hoping that it would give him energy to complete the mission. The radio circuits remained busy as pilots discussed their predicament. Hours passed. Fuel needles dipped toward empty. Entire sections or squadrons decided to ditch their planes in one location, reasoning that several rafts lashed together were easier to spot than a single one. Most of the aviators kept their cool, Vraciu recalled, but “some of them were breaking down—sobbing—on the air. It was a dark and black ocean out there. I could empathize with them, but it got so bad that I had to turn my radio off for a while.”67
Even for those pilots with enough fuel to get home, it was no easy task to find the American fleet. Flying in darkness was a new experience for all but a few. Some were drawn off course by lightning flashes on the southern horizon. Those who flew long enough picked up a homing beacon—a faint signal through the earphones—and followed it back to the fleet.
Admiral Mitscher had previously informed all Task Force 58 ships that they should, when ordered, point their searchlights vertically into the sky. Lighting up ships in enemy waters defied prevailing doctrine, and might have been fatal had there been Japanese submarines in the vicinity, but Mitscher felt obligated to accept the risks. The decision to turn on the lights became an important part of Mitscher’s legacy, a badge of his personal regard for his pilots. But the decision was not unprecedented, nor was it deemed especially controversial at the time. The prior week’s action had allayed fears about the enemy air threat, and the enemy submarine threat had been reduced by the hunter-killer groups, which had destroyed six or seven Japanese boats in the previous ten days. During the Battle of Midway two years earlier, Spruance had ordered the Enterprise and Hornet lit up to recover aircraft returning from a late-day strike against the retreating Japanese fleet. To a historian who congratulated him for his courage in rendering that decision, Spruance later offered this comment:
I think you are greatly overemphasizing the importance of turning on the lights at night to bring planes back to the carriers and to get them safely on board. A carrier without its air group is a disarmed ship, a liability and not an asset. The time to consider the risk in turning on the lights for a night recovery is before launching the attack. If the planes are to be launched so late in the day that a night recovery is probable, and if the tactical situation is such that you are not willing to do what is required to get the planes back safely, then you have no business launching the attack in the first place.68
In the historical literature, Mitscher is often quoted as giving a terse, cinematic order: “Turn on the lights.” But that order is almost certainly apocryphal. According to Arleigh Burke, the Task Force 58 staff had earlier prepared a detailed plan to light up the task force. Nor was “Turn on the lights” an order that a seasoned carrier task force commander would have given. It was too unspecific. Which lights? The red and green running lights? The signal lights? The truck lights at the masthead? The glow lights on the flight deck? The hooded lights that could be seen only from astern, by a plane on final landing approach?
In prewar exercises, it had been discovered that a searchlight pointed vertically into the sky rendered a ship visible from a long way off. At about 8:30 p.m., when the radar screens lit up with planes approaching from the northwest, and the task force turned into the wind to begin recovery operations, vertical shafts of light appeared all across the task force. Most of the carriers turned on their other exterior lights as well, and a few had rigged floodlights on the island superstructures to illuminate their flight decks. Many of the battleships and cruisers also lit up, and destroyers fired star shells from their 5-inch guns.
It was a scene no witness would ever forget. The great fleet, spread across the horizon as far as the eye could see, made a phantasmagoric spectacle. Lieutenant John A. Harper, landing signal officer on the Belleau Wood, thought it looked like “a big city at night.”69 Hal Buell, approaching from the westward in his damaged SB2C, was reminded of “Coney Island on the Fourth of July.”70 E. J. Lawton, flying an Enterprise Avenger, compared it to a “Mardi Gras setting, fantastically out of place here, midway between the Marianas and the Philippines.”71 The screening ships lit up alongside the carriers—a well-intended gesture of solidarity that probably did more harm than good. Paul Backus, an officer on the South Dakota, recalled that one or two planes made passes on the battleship as if to land, before realizing the error at the last moment and zooming off into the darkness.72
Mitscher had ordered pilots short of fuel to land on any available carrier, and had told the carriers to take any airplane that entered her landing circle. In the anarchic recovery, nearly half of the planes that landed on a carrier did so on the wrong one. Planes approached in disorderly groups, without sufficient intervals. “It was kind of every man for himself,” said Ramage.73 Pilots played chicken with one another. Many “took their own cuts” (landed
even when waved off by the landing signal officers). Some ran out of fuel as they were directly astern of the flight decks, and crashed in the carriers’ wakes. Desperate pilots refused to give way to one another. One landing signal officer waved off two planes approaching simultaneously, and then threw himself flat on deck as they flew “over us so low it seemed they almost grazed us, flat as we were.”74 Exhausted, confused, or wounded pilots forgot to run through their pre-landing checklists, failed to lower their landing gear or tailhooks, and belly-crashed. Buell ignored a late wave-off and dropped his damaged Helldiver onto the Lexington. The plane bounced, failed to catch a wire, and catapulted over the crash barriers. Wreckage skidded toward the airplanes parked on the bow. Two sailors were killed, and six parked aircraft destroyed.
When a wrecked plane fouled a flight deck, the crew worked quickly to extract the aviators from their cockpits and shove the wreckage over the side. Keeping the decks clear for the dozens of planes circling above was the overriding concern. By a lucky stroke, the Enterprise managed to recover two aircraft simultaneously, an unprecedented feat—two aircraft approached abreast, wingtip to wingtip, and each snagged a different arresting wire. Sam Sommers marveled at the approach of a badly damaged Hellcat to his carrier, the Cowpens. Half the aircraft’s rudder had been shot away, and the pilot could make only gradual and tentative turns. Eschewing the normal circular landing approach, he came in directly from astern, giving up altitude little by little, and landed flawlessly, “like a dragonfly on a lily pad. . . . He didn’t bounce. No tire screeched. There were about four inches of surface at the top and bottom of where his rudder had been.”75
The light show attracted at least one confused Japanese pilot, who very nearly landed his Aichi dive-bomber on the Belleau Wood. It flew down the crossleg at suitable speed and altitude, wheels down and flaps set for landing. Lieutenant Harper, assuming it was American, signaled “too high” with his paddles. The plane went higher, suggesting that the pilot was reading the signals improperly. It was banking away when a spotlight revealed the red “meatballs” on the fuselage. The Belleau Wood suddenly darkened, but the antiaircraft gunners did not have time to react. (In retrospect, Harper regretted that he was unable to coax the plane aboard: had he done so, it would have been the most dramatic capture in the history of aviation.) The cruiser Oakland later reported that a Japanese plane had made an apparent landing pass before turning away and disappearing into the darkness.
For lack of fuel or available flight decks, planes were forced to make water landings all around the task force. Gas-starved engines began to cough and catch; the acrid smell of burning hydraulic fluid seeped into the cockpit; the stick went dead in the pilot’s gloved hand. Because a deadstick water landing was riskier than a powered landing, many pilots chose to ditch even though they had fuel to spare. If a pilot was on top of his emergency landing checklist, he remembered to unhook the radio cord from his helmet, tighten his shoulder straps, confirm that his canopy was retracted and locked, bank into the wind, open his flaps, put the plane into a nose-up landing attitude, and drop slowly until he was just 10 or 15 feet above the sea. Then he chopped the throttle and braced for impact. In calm seas—and the sea was mercifully tranquil that night—the impact might be no greater than that of a hard carrier landing. He had a minute or perhaps even two minutes to unbuckle and climb out onto the wing. His parachute would keep buoyant for several minutes; when it got heavy, the pilot could inflate his Mae West.
From the Task Force 58 ships, men could look around and see downed planes and pilots and crewmen all around them. Passing carriers dropped light buoys. Floating airmen shined their waterproof pack lights and blew their whistles. Some fired flares. Destroyers scanned the sea with searchlights. Coming alongside a floating man, they lowered cargo nets and hauled him aboard.
The last planes were recovered and brought aboard by 10:15 p.m. The task force turned northwest and proceeded at 16 knots. Searchlights scanned the sea ahead. Each task group left a single destroyer behind to search for and pick up downed aviators. At first light, the sky would fill with search planes to cover the zone in which many aviators were expected to be found.
Of the 216 planes that had participated in the strike, eighty ditched at sea or deck-crashed on recovery. Another twenty went missing and were presumed destroyed in air combat over the Japanese fleet. The number of personnel in the missing planes totaled 209 (100 pilots, 109 aircrew), but 100 men were fished out of the water that night and another 60 picked up in the ensuing days. That cut losses to 16 pilots and 33 aircrewmen. Task Force 58 could readily afford to lose a hundred planes, especially since the losses could be made good by drawing reserve aircraft from the jeep carriers stationed near Saipan.
For the Japanese, another round of grievous air combat losses was exacerbated by a night recovery that was proportionally even more disastrous than Task Force 58’s. By Ozawa’s count, he had only thirty-five flyable carrier aircraft remaining in his arsenal at the end of June 20. His losses since departing Tawi Tawi a week earlier exceeded 400 planes. If there was any cold consolation at all, it was that none of his ships was crippled—in two days of battle, every Japanese ship that had been struck by a bomb or torpedo had either sunk or managed to contain the damage, so that the First Mobile Fleet could make way at a brisk 20 knots. Ozawa had a 300-mile lead in his homeward dash. Task Force 58’s fuel limitations (the destroyers were low) and the delays involved in recovering downed American airmen precluded a vigorous chase. The defeated fleet refueled at Nakagusuku Bay, Okinawa, and then returned to the Inland Sea.
RETURNING TO THE WATERS OFF SAIPAN on June 23, Admiral Spruance was obliged to answer anxious queries from Pearl Harbor. Most urgently, Nimitz wanted a firm date fixed for W-Day, the invasion of Guam. (Plans for Operation FORAGER had named that date as June 18, just three days after the Saipan landings, but that schedule was never realistic and had been suspended on June 16.) The ground campaign on Saipan, now in its ninth day, had stalled in the island’s interior highlands, where Japanese troops were taking full advantage of the onerous terrain. After conferring with Smith and Turner on the Indianapolis, Spruance reluctantly admitted that he was unable to promise a date for Guam. No troops could be withdrawn from Saipan until the Americans had broken the deadlock in that island’s mountainous spine, and all floating reserve forces needed to be kept in place until the issue was decided. That was the unanimous opinion of Smith, Turner, and General Roy Geiger (who was to command American troops in the Guam operation). “I did not, and do not, like the delay involved,” he told Nimitz, “but I felt that I had to accept the judgment of the generals who have to do the job as to the tools they require.”76
American forces controlled about a third of the island, including almost all of the territory south of a line bisecting the island between the eastern landing beaches and Magicienne Bay. Approximately 1,500 Japanese troops had been surrounded within a strong position at Nafutan Point on the island’s southern coast. (The Nafutan pocket had attempted several breakouts, including a ferocious banzai charge on June 26 that won the Japanese soldiers temporary possession of the adjacent Aslito Airfield, but they were now securely bottled up and running short of ammunition.) On June 22, the first American planes flew into Aslito—a squadron of USAAF P-47s that had catapulted from jeep carriers offshore. Seventy-four P-47s were operating from the airfield by June 24. On Saipan’s eastern shore, the 2nd Marine Division was pushing against obdurate resistance north toward the town of Garapan and Tanapag Harbor. The 4th Marine Division tidied up the zone between the mountainous ridge and the western shore. Holland Smith ordered the 27th Infantry Division into the middle section of the front, the high ground between the two marine divisions.
On June 23, the three divisions launched a coordinated attack all along the fighting front. Holland Smith had intended his mixed marine-army forces to drive north in a line abreast, advancing simultaneously and relatively quickly. But Ralph Smith’s army division was slow off the mark, launch
ing its attack about an hour late. Running up against guerrilla-type opposition in the island’s steep, rocky, treacherous midsection, the soldiers took cover in foxholes and awaited massed artillery support to clear the ground before them. But that gave the enemy time to move reinforcements into the cliffs and caves around Mount Tapotchau, the highest point on the island. There they set up machine guns and mortars in well-sheltered high-ground positions.
Positioned on the right and left flanks of the stalled 27th Division, where the coastal terrain was flatter and more forgiving, the marines sustained their forward momentum. They flanked and overran strong positions, or simply cut them off and bypassed them, leaving them to be cleaned out by reserve units. The discrepant pace of advance created a shallow U-shape in the American lines, an arrangement that threatened to expose the interior flanks of the two marine divisions to punishing counterattacks. The army would have to pick up the pace or the entire front might degenerate into a bloody stalemate.
Once again, as during GALVANIC and FLINTLOCK, the performance of the 27th Infantry Division was unfavorably compared to that of the marines. In this instance, however, the disparity seemed to threaten the success of the entire operation. Holland Smith was well attuned to the interservice sensitivities at stake on Saipan and their potential to make trouble in Washington. But he was under intense pressure from higher-ups to complete the pacification of Saipan, and he needed every part of the line to move. In a series of dispatches to Ralph Smith’s command post, Holland Smith urged a more spirited attack. But on June 24, the “U” deepened. Smith sent Major General Sanderford Jarman forward to the 27th Infantry Division headquarters to discuss the problem. Jarman, who was slated to command Saipan’s garrison once the island was secured, returned to the Fifth Amphibious Corps headquarters at Charan Kanoa to report that Ralph Smith had pledged to achieve further advances the following day. If he could not get the division moving, Ralph Smith had told Jarman, “he should be relieved.”77