The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  The self-destructive paroxysm could not be explained by deference to orders, or by obeisance to the death cult of imperial bushido. Suicide, the Japanese of Saipan earnestly believed, was the sole alternative to a fate worse than death. The Americans were not human beings—they were something akin to demons or beasts. They were the “hairy ones,” or the “Anglo-American Demons.” They would rape the women and girls. They would crush captured civilians under the treads of their tanks. The marines were especially dreaded. According to a story circulated widely among the Japanese of Saipan, all Marine Corps recruits were compelled to murder their own parents before being inducted into service. It was said that Japanese soldiers taken prisoner would suffer hideous tortures—their ears, noses, and limbs would be cut off; they would be blinded and castrated; they would be cooked and fed to dogs. Truths and half-truths were shrewdly wedded to the more outrageous and far-fetched claims. Japanese newspapers reproduced photographs of Japanese skulls mounted on American tanks. A cartoon appearing in an American servicemen’s magazine, later reproduced and translated in the Japanese press, had suggested that marine enlistees would receive a “Japanese hunting license,” promising “open season” on the enemy, complete with “free ammunition and equipment—with pay!”95 Other cartoons, also reproduced in Japan, characterized the Japanese as monkeys, rats, cockroaches, or lice. John Dower’s study War Without Mercy explored the means by which both American and Japanese propaganda tended to dehumanize the enemy. Among the Japanese, who could not read or hear any dissenting views, the excesses of American wartime rhetoric and imagery lent credibility to the implication that a quick suicide was the path of least suffering.

  Saipan was the first Pacific battlefield in which Americans had encountered a large civilian population. No one had known what to expect. Would women and children take up weapons and hurl themselves at the Americans? A pamphlet distributed to the 2nd Marine Division prior to the landing warned that the men would come into contact with a large population of enemy civilians: “We do not know how many of the Japanese civilians will actively fight us. . . . The women and children will be no more or less dangerous than our own mothers, sisters, or small brothers would be under similar circumstances.” The presence of civilians required close attention to the rules of war, the pamphlet warned:

  We must . . . be absolutely sure in our own minds that a civilian is fighting us or harming our installations before we shoot him. International law clearly demands that civilians who do not fight back at us—whether they are Japanese or Korean civilians working as laborers or specialists for the military, or noncombatants in the armed forces, like doctors and nurses, or ordinary civilians with no connection with the military—must, whenever possible, be taken alive, and must not be injured or have their possessions taken from them except after a due trial by competent authority. Neither such a person nor his property are the property of any one of us who captures him. It is one thing to kill a Japanese soldier in battle; it is an entirely different thing to kill civilians who have not fought against us, whether they are Japanese or not. The latter is murder, nothing more nor less.96

  Even the most hardened veteran American island-fighters had no wish to kill women and children in cold blood, and were distressed when civilians were caught in the crossfire. On D-Day plus two, William Rogal’s platoon was cleaning out bunkers and covered emplacements in the hills behind the landing beaches. When someone dropped a grenade into one such fortification, “to our horror the explosions produced screams and crying of children. Six or seven little Chamorro girls in school uniforms had taken shelter in the hole. Our corpsmen did what they could for their wounds but some of them looked pretty far gone. This was the only time I saw combat Marines with tears in their eyes.”97

  In the waters off Marpi Point, cruisers and destroyers continued to provide call-fire on Japanese targets. The crews watched as hundreds of civilians leapt from the sheer face of “Banzai cliff” and plummeted into the rocks and surf below. The tide carried the bodies out to sea. James Fahey noted in his diary that the sea was so thick with bodies that his ship could not avoid running over them. “I never saw anything like it for bodies floating around,” he wrote on July 13. “The water is full of them, the fish will eat good.”98 Bodies sometimes fouled the ships’ screws, and divers had to drop over the stern to pull them free. On Sunday, July 16, 1944, Fahey attended a mass on deck, but he could not pull his eyes away from the scene. “The ships just run over them. You can’t miss them all, the water is full of dead Japs. . . . [Y]ou could see them floating by, men, women, and children. The north section was loaded with floating bodies.”99

  Special Japanese-speaking units were sent to the front lines to broadcast surrender appeals to enemy soldiers and civilians. Loudspeakers were mounted on jeeps and on vessels offshore, and Japanese-speaking personnel (including Hawaiian Nisei) broadcast a series of set phrases toward the enemy enclave around Marpi Point. “Shimpai shinaide!” (Don’t be afraid!) and “te o age!” (put your hands up).100 The messages promised food and water, asserted that many others had already surrendered, and assured the Japanese soldiers that they had fought gallantly and could surrender with their honor intact. American floatplanes dropped leaflets marked “Surrender Pass,” which provided instructions for how to approach American forces—with arms up and a white cloth grasped in one hand.

  According to Marine Lieutenant Robert B. Sheeks, a Japanese-language officer who organized such appeals, it was not always easy to persuade his fellow marines that the effort was worthwhile. “The whole idea at the time seemed outlandish to most Marines,” he recalled, “as everyone was convinced that no Japanese would ever surrender.” His superiors had at first provided little encouragement or funding for the program. A Hawaiian newspaper had absorbed the cost of printing the surrender leaflets, as the military would not allocate funds for the purpose. Sheeks’s unit had even diverted its own recreation funds to buy loudspeaker equipment. Only after repeated petitions were they permitted to land the loudspeakers on the beach. On Saipan, Sheeks toured the island and proselytized to the various unit commanders. Their skepticism gradually gave way as it became apparent that the appeals were working, at least in some cases. No one liked the sight of women and children leaping to their deaths from the northern cliffs. In the end, both commissioned and noncommissioned officers gave full priority to the surrender broadcasts, and provided the manpower and protection needed to get the loudspeaker-jeeps up to the front lines. “In spite of tough talk, a lot of Marines were quite cooperative and even kindly toward prisoners, both civilian and military,” said Sheeks. “When they saw the miserable condition of refugees they tried to help them, gave them water, and bandaged them up. Most Marines were kind guys, basically.”101

  THE FINAL ATTACK ON MARPI POINT was something of a footrace, as various units of the 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions competed to be the first to overrun this last morsel of contested territory on the island. Holland Smith pulled the 27th Infantry Division back and employed it as a reserve force. At 4:15 p.m. on July 9, the 4th Marine Division reported that they had seized the point, and Admiral Turner declared the island secured. An official flag-raising ceremony was held at Holland Smith’s headquarters in the village of Charan Kanoa. The announcement came as a surprise to the many marine units on the island that were still engaged in fierce firefights. To call Saipan secure was to say only that no portion of the island remained under the control of organized enemy forces. Thousands of Japanese soldiers were still hidden in caves or heavily vegetated ravines throughout the island’s hilly north—and every so often, for weeks afterward, a small group of desperate and isolated enemy fighters rushed out at the Americans in a climactic suicidal banzai charge.

  The conquest of Saipan was the most costly operation to date of the Pacific campaign. Of the American ground forces, 2,949 men were killed and 10,464 wounded. In the final tally, about 27,000 Japanese fighters, virtually the entire garrison, were killed in action or took their own lives. The
Americans captured 736 military prisoners of war, most of whom were Korean labor troops. Even before the island was declared secure, construction teams had begun the work of converting Tanapag Harbor into a modern depot. Mines and wrecked small craft were cleared to open a 150-foot channel to the waterfront, and heavy earth-moving equipment began the work of improving and extending the piers and building new seaplane ramps.

  In Tokyo, senior officers of the Imperial General Headquarters had already written off Guam and Tinian. No naval interference was possible after Ozawa’s overwhelming defeat at sea, and if the Americans had conquered Saipan, they would not be thwarted by the smaller garrisons on the islands farther south. The tenacious defense of Saipan had forced the Americans reluctantly to postpone the capture of Tinian and Guam, originally scheduled to occur within a week after the landing on Saipan. Nimitz, troubled by the long delay, had pressured Spruance and Turner to fix a date for these latter operations. But Holland Smith had insisted on holding the Guam troops in reserve for possible deployment on Saipan, and in light of the tougher-than-expected fight on that island, it was decided that another reserve force, the army’s 77th Infantry Division, should be brought up from Hawaii to join the Third Marine Amphibious Corps (the 3rd Marine Division and the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade) under General Roy Geiger. On July 7, with the battle for Saipan entering its final phase, Admiral Spruance finally felt confident enough to fix the landing dates for Guam (July 21) and Tinian (July 24).

  Both islands had been subjected to intermittent aerial bombing since the Saipan landing, and Japanese airpower on the islands had been virtually snuffed out. Rear Admiral Dick Conolly’s Southern Attack Force began continuous daily naval bombardment of Guam on July 8. For the thirteen days prior to the first assault, Japanese defenses on the western beaches suffered under a rain of projectiles ranging in caliber from 5 to 16 inches. It was the most sustained preinvasion naval bombardment of the war.

  Thirty miles long and 210 square miles in area, Guam was the largest island in the Marianas and offered the most potential as a forward operating base. It had the archipelago’s best deepwater harbor at Apra. Its large airfield at Orote was the best in the region, and its expansive rolling tablelands and hard coral soil would provide good sites for more. It was unique in having been American territory for more than four decades before the Japanese invasion in December 1941. A large proportion of all U.S. Navy stewards and messboys were Chamorro natives of Guam, contributing to a feeling that Guamians were members of the extended “navy family.” Under the Japanese regime, the island’s people had suffered from forced labor, crop confiscations, compulsory education in Japanese, and summary punishment for suspected disloyalty.

  Ringed by coral reefs and rocky cliffs, Guam was a tough prospect for any amphibious attacker. The island’s most indispensable military assets were Apra Harbor and Orote Airfield, which directly adjoined one another on the midsection of the west coast. Beaches to the immediate north and south of this area presented the least difficulties for an amphibious landing. Conolly’s battleships, cruisers, and destroyers had concentrated their guns on those beaches and the ground above them, around Asan Point and Agana to the north, and Gann Point and Agat to the south. For all of these reasons, there was never any doubt in the minds of the Japanese about where the Americans would put their forces ashore. Lieutenant General Takeshi Takashina, the island commander, had superintended the construction of formidable entrenchments and fixed fortifications above the beaches; on the other hand, those same defenses had been shelled heavily and at length in the two weeks before the revised W-Day.

  On the morning of July 21, the 3rd Marine Division and the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade landed simultaneously on the Asan and Agat beaches, respectively. Shore artillery opposed the landings and inflicted heavy punishment, particularly on the southern force. The southern beachhead was quickly expanded to swallow up Agat Village; the marines in this sector then pushed north through furious opposition to sever Orote Peninsula from the rest of the island. In the north, the 3rd Marine Division stood up to a counterattack at dawn on July 22, then drove up into the hills behind their tanks, suffering heavy casualties, until they controlled all of the area between Chonito Cliff and Adelup Point to Asan Point, to a depth of about a mile inland. The Japanese employed night infiltration tactics and mass bayonet charges, but as on Saipan the attackers lost many men in these gambits. On the night of July 25, a ferocious counterattack fell on the 3rd Battalion, 22nd Marines—a mass of drunken soldiers led by sword-wielding officers emerged from the edge of a mangrove swamp and penetrated through the lines to a command post and field hospital. The attack was broken up by heavy machine-gun, artillery, and mortar fire. The Japanese army suffered heavily in this sequence, losing many of its senior officers. On July 25, the U.S. Army’s 77th Division, less one regiment to be held in reserve, came ashore at Agat and took over defense of the beachhead.

  The 4th Marines overran Orote Peninsula in five days of hard fighting between the morning of July 26 and July 30. On July 28, the 3rd Division joined up with the 77th Infantry Division on Mount Tenjo, fusing the two separated beachheads into one continuous line. Once the Orote Peninsula and Apra Harbor were overrun on July 30, things got much easier for the Americans. Within six hours after it was captured, the Orote airstrip was repaired, and the first American aircraft (a Navy TBF) came in to land.

  General Takashina was felled by machine-gun fire as he retreated from his command post on the night of July 28. His successor, Lieutenant General Hideyoshi Obata, ordered a tactical retreat, under relentless artillery and naval fire, into the jungle hills of the island’s north. Without resupply, his troops soon began to starve. The last push northward came on August 8 and 9, when General Geiger ordered, “Push all Japanese from Guam.” The last organized resistance was stamped out on August 10, although thousands of enemy soldiers remained at large in the hills, either singly or in small groups. Spruance and the USS Indianapolis anchored in Apra Harbor, and Admiral Nimitz and General Vandegrift landed at Orote Airfield. Obata followed Saito and Nagumo and died by his own hand. American casualties in the conquest of Guam included 1,214 men killed and nearly 6,000 wounded.

  Tinian, lying just three and a half miles from Saipan, was a relatively uncomplicated operation. A sham landing near Tinian town was followed quickly by an invasion in force by the 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions on the northern beaches. Supplies and reinforcements could be landed promptly from nearby Saipan. Flat and forgiving terrain allowed the attackers to move quickly. Taken by surprise, Japanese defensive arrangements were thrown into turmoil. In nine days of fighting, the Japanese forces were forced into a shrinking pocket in the south. A last banzai charge was broken up on the night of July 31, and the island was declared secured. Holland Smith rated the battle for Tinian as “a model of its kind,” in which “the result brilliantly consummated the planning and performance.”102 The island was to be the major airbase of the Twentieth Air Force, which would eventually operate more than 1,000 B-29 Superfortresses from the Marianas.

  THOUGH AMERICANS WERE SLOW TO APPRECIATE IT, they had just won the decisive victory of the Pacific War. Capture of the Marianas and the accompanying ruin of Japanese carrier airpower were final and irreversible blows to the hopes of the Japanese imperial project. For another year the Tokyo junta would clutch at the absurd hope that further exhibitions of fanatical resistance might force the conqueror to the negotiating table. But FORAGER had provided airfields from which the big new bombers could strike the population and industrial centers of the Kanto Plain, including Tokyo. It had provided a base of submarine operations at the crossroads of the Pacific, bringing the enemy’s critical sea-lanes within immediate reach. The Americans had demonstrated that they could win dominion of the skies anywhere in the Pacific, with carrier airpower alone; that they could leap across long ocean distances to invade well-defended continental landmasses; and that the naval-air-amphibious juggernaut could move faster and farther than the enemy had i
magined possible. The Imperial Japanese Navy had staked its hopes on winning a decisive naval battle in the western Pacific, but that contest had been forced on Ozawa before his aviators were ready, with the result that Japan’s carrier air force was permanently and irreversibly demolished. Loss of the Marianas brought down the Japanese government and ushered into power a new prime minister and cabinet with a putative goal of finding a way out of the war (though they would fail in this regard).