Unable to sleep after retiring to his quarters, Bill switched on the tiny light over his bunk. He had always enjoyed penning spontaneous verse when the muse called, and tonight its bid would not be ignored. He turned over a spare map and scratched the following lines across the back:
At Sea, off the Marianas
June, 1944
Peace at War
Through many a year I’ve failed to dream
And soothe my heart and soul with fancy,
Too long a slave to life’s routine
And none of nature’s necromancy.
But now by Ares’ paradox
My mind is free; no longer chained,
And damned up worry burst its locks
To loose those cares which long have reigned.
How easy here it is to dwell
On beauties dead and long forgot,
On stars and birds and ocean swells
And other charms that God hath wrought.
My ship for me a castle fair
And all around the sea, a moat
The drawbridge up; no stranger dare
Invade my world with boresome rote.
Time was the clouds could never be
Much more than shadows passing by;
But now they are the world to me,
And here, my other self, is why:
Confess, in all these years, to you
A cloud has been a cloud, naught more;
No towering castle in the blue –
Or tufted rug on heaven’s floor.
The sea, alas, has seemed but water
And salt, at that, your dull mind said,
Because poor fool, you never sought her
And only stared while beauty bled.
Now the truth burns through at last
And you, the light from dark can sift
Away the worry of the past
And in mind’s cup pure beauty lift.
Drink in the ocean’s white nip’d breasts
Pay court to her in all her moods
Come skip from cloud to flowing crests
And fill your mind with fancy’s foods.
See how the west wind comes a’ prancing
And slices wavelets at their crest,
To spin and swirl them off a’ dancing
Like Spanish Capes to castanets.
Thrill with the east wind’s vicious strafe
Which cleaves the billows through and through;
A pure white counterpane to make—
The spread for Neptune’s bed of blue.
And mark the ocean’s face when still,
An image of the clouds and sky,
No song do breaking waves then spill,
A breathless beauty to the eye.
Save when the south wind’s zephyrs trace,
The mirrored surface with design,
As water striders in a race
Or school fish airing in a line.
Seek out these beauties for, each day
The guns and falling death ignore
But if they speak, as soon they may,
Remember peace can come with war.
Naval bombardment of Saipan resumed the following morning: loud, lurid, and violent. Overhead, US planes circled and strafed. At 0400 tens of thousands of marines were served a princely breakfast of steak and eggs. For an unknown number of them, it would be their last meal. Chaplains were on hand to hear confessions and offer last-minute prayers.
At 0542 Admiral Turner’s voice bellowed through the ship’s loudspeakers: “Land the landing forces!” As rehearsed, the first marine-laden amtracs kicked up their wakes and churned toward the beaches of Saipan.
Rocky Mount’s flag staff watched from the ship’s rail as the battle, its blueprint so long in the making, unfolded before them. The plan had called for the simultaneous landing of two marine divisions on a beachfront spanning six thousand yards. Eight thousand marines were to go ashore in the initial wave; another twelve thousand would follow shortly thereafter.
But from the first hour forward, Operation Forager did not go according to plan.
The initial sign of trouble was a crescendo of murderous artillery fire when the leading line of amtracs reached the outer lip of Saipan’s coral reef. Death rained down as their ramps splashed into the surf and marines hurtled out, only to slog toward the beach through heavier than predicted surf and larger than anticipated hummocks of coral.
Almost immediately, a chorus of desperate wails competed with the deafening artillery barrages. “Corpsman! Corpsman, Corpsman!” rose up from men cut down all along the shoreline. The less fortunate floated voicelessly in the seaweed, lapping to and fro in the reddening tide.
Three days of brutal cannonade ahead of the landings—165,000 large shells and another 2,400 sixteen-inch shells—had done little to dislodge well-concealed Japanese blockhouses and gun emplacements. The fleet’s new, fast battleships had been trained for sea battle, not routing out hidden land targets. And they had fired their volleys from ten thousand yards offshore to protect the ships from return fire, too far for any real measure of accuracy. These errors would be grimly noted for future campaigns, as those at Tarawa had been.
Navajo radiomen positioned onshore sent their first chilling message back to anxious receivers in Rocky Mount’s communications center: “They’re being killed all around us.” There would be two thousand American casualties in the first hundred hours of the battle for Saipan, and it would get worse. Transports overflowing with the wounded rushed men from the beaches to the hospital ships throughout the day. Every sailor and officer who could donate blood did so.
Then came another staggering piece of news.
When Bill returned to the flagship’s communications center after giving blood, it was buzzing with excitement. A cryptic piece of radio traffic originating from a coastwatcher in the Philippines had been picked up by San Francisco’s KFS Radio and beamed to the fleet. If the stunning report could be verified, the largest amphibious campaign of the Pacific War—now under way and not going particularly well—was about to become its largest sea battle as well.
ON THE MORNING OF June 15, 1944, twenty-three-year-old coastwatcher Gerald Chapman picked his way barefoot up a craggy path to his lookout post: a sea cliff overlooking the San Bernardino Strait on the southern tip of Luzon. Lieutenant Chapman had previously covered the strait from the island of Samar as part of the expanding coastwatcher network in the Philippines. On Luzon, Chapman had a much better view of both the strait and surrounding waters, but heavy Japanese presence made his current operation much more difficult and dangerous. Here he had to keep well hidden and limit his airtime to avoid enemy triangulation of his position. Detection would result in his instant execution.
On that morning, Chapman sat down and prepared for another hot, solitary day. But no sooner was he in position than he scrambled back to his feet. Undernourished and weak from malaria and tropical ulcers, he didn’t trust the initial report of his naked eye. Chapman grabbed his binoculars and adjusted the focus, blinked, and adjusted it again.
Training the magnified field on the top of the waterway, he was sure now. Ships! No, an entire fleet! My God, such a fleet as he had never seen in his life! First, the outline of slim gray destroyers, and then the broader beams of cruisers, and then a phalanx of flat, boxy aircraft carriers hove into view. Soon there was no need for binoculars; he could see Japanese sailors all along the rails of an endless parade of vessels; they were looking out at both sides of the Strait, laughing and talking among themselves. Chapman ducked down as shadows of aircraft, their engines grinding, swept over his cliff outpost and fanned out eastward ahead of the flotilla, toward the Pacific Ocean.
When the last ship had passed, Chapman raced back to his low-slung, brush-covered radio shack. He cranked up his set with its meager 4-watt output and tapped out the message to Wendell Fertig’s Mindanao station, call letters KUS, praying that his rusty instrument would not fail him now. Optimally, his urgent messa
ge would move from Fertig along the flash line engirdling the Philippines and then beam south to Australia and east across the Pacific, alerting likely Allied recipients of the surprise armada’s approach:
Going east northeast . . . Jap Naval Fleet consisting of two small patrol boats, eleven destroyers, ten cruisers, three battleships, and nine aircraft carriers, last ship passed two four degrees nine min lat one from west.
The Japanese immediately blasted Chapman’s already weak transmission with intense jamming signals. But Chapman persisted, sending out the same message over and over again.
Bob Stahl, another coastwatcher posted on Samar, picked up Chapman’s repeated relay attempts. He noticed that the enemy’s jamming was unusually intense and that Chapman was struggling to get his message through. Stahl also knew how vulnerable Chapman’s lookout post was and that he was supposed to limit his airtime—and that Chapman was fully aware of the swift and gruesome fate that befell apprehended coastwatchers. Yet he doggedly repeated his relay attempts.
The intensity of the jamming, Chapman’s audacious persistence, and gut instinct told Stahl that this transmission must be of special significance. Without knowing its contents, he copied the entire message code and sent it out himself from his sturdier 12-watt radio. For hours, he received no response, even as Chapman boldly continued to relay.
Finally, Stahl received a response from KFS in San Francisco, directing him to move to a higher frequency. He complied, and resent Chapman’s message, still unaware of its contents.
After what seemed an interminable wait, a coded response from KFS chirped through Stahl’s headset:
Message received.
Then, later:
Well done.
Stahl’s relay had also been picked up by navy submarine USS Flying Fish, lying off the Philippines. Her skipper corroborated what Chapman had observed:
Large enemy fleet headed east from San Bernardino Strait at 20 knots.
What Chapman reported was the gathering strength of the entire Imperial Fleet en route to prevent the US Navy’s seizure of Saipan. Its plan was to attack the Fifth Fleet—standing off Saipan in support of the marine landings—by a sneak attack from the rear. It was the same surprise strategy that had been deployed by Admiral Spruance at Midway—only applied in reverse. If the Japanese flotilla could take the Americans by surprise and strike a swift and decisive blow, it could save the hallowed Saipan.
AS THE BATTLE RAGED ashore, Admiral Spruance convened his commanders in the Indianapolis wardroom following receipt of Chapman’s relay. “Well, gentlemen, the Japanese are coming after us,” he said calmly, and then delivered another of his thoroughly risk-assessed decisions. Despite pressure to dispatch the bulk of his force as far west as necessary to obliterate the Japanese Fleet—a thrilling temptation with realistic potential—Admiral Spruance had concluded that his primary mission was to protect the vulnerable landings at all costs and to capture Saipan. He was also mindful of the Japanese penchant for diversionary lures, as well as the painful lessons from the first landings at Guadalcanal when the navy pulled back its ships prematurely—with nearly disastrous results for the marines ashore.
So, in this instance, Spruance decided to both protect the Saipan beachhead and sortie to meet the Japanese Fleet. He ordered Admiral Marc Mitscher and his powerful Task Force 58—comprised of fifteen new Essex and Independence-class aircraft carriers (with a total of 956 planes), as well as fast battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, all of which could sail at an impressive thirty knots—to ply northwest to meet the approaching armada. But also, guided by his primary mission of guarding the beachhead, he ordered a disappointed Mitscher to restrict his foray to a two-hundred-mile radius of Saipan. This was so the carriers could return quickly in case of a Japanese end run on the vulnerable island. Spruance further ordered a small but sturdy staple of escorts and carriers to remain in the immediate waters to provide continued bombardment and air cover to the beachhead—reassuring a visibly relieved Turner. “I’m going to join up with Mitscher and TF 58, but I’m also going to keep the Japs off your neck,” Spruance told him.
For the next thirty-six hours, Mitscher’s task force and the Japanese Fleet raced toward each other across the reaches of the Philippine Sea—the section of the Pacific Ocean between the Marianas and the Philippines. Finally, the location of the enemy fleet was confirmed: two hundred miles west of Saipan and on the move. Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, in command of the Imperial Fleet—large, but inferior in airpower to the Fifth Fleet—had mistakenly assumed he could advance so close because he would be supported by five hundred land-based planes on nearby Japanese-held Guam. Unbeknownst to Ozawa, however, those planes had been dispatched elsewhere.
On the morning of the June 19, Mitscher launched his planes to greet Ozawa’s first wave of 545 aircraft, to deadly effect. Three hundred and sixty-six were shot down by American planes. Another nineteen were downed by antiaircraft fire. The sinking of three Japanese carriers, the Shokaku, the Taiho, and the Hitaka, as well as a destroyer and a fleet tanker, soon followed, along with the downing of hundreds more enemy aircraft. An additional three carriers, a battleship, three cruisers, and three fleet tankers were also maimed. So lopsided was the aerial battle that a pilot from the new USS Lexington, a Texan, said it reminded him of a good old turkey shoot at home. The Battle of the Philippine Sea was thereafter nicknamed the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.
Admiral Spruance’s measured strategy not only broke enemy hopes of saving Saipan and destroying the Fifth Fleet, but it diminished forever their remaining carrier strength: they were floating airfields without aircraft. The engagement would rank into the twenty-first century as the biggest aerial battle in American history.
GERALD CHAPMAN’S RELAYS MEANT abrupt alterations to Forager’s timetables, which meant that Bill Mott would not see his bunk for nearly seventy-two hours. With fleet adjustments and battle plans in rapid flux, he loped from cabin to deck to transport to wardroom and back to Rocky Mount’s CIC to relay real-time updates to Admiral Nimitz at Pearl Harbor, Admiral King at the Navy Department, and his former staff in the White House Map Room—waiting anxiously, he well knew, for battle news.
Meanwhile, mounting marine casualties quickly overwhelmed the fleet’s hospital ships, and scores were diverted to Rocky Mount for treatment. Stretcher after stretcher was handed up the gangway as Bill raced by. Many had limbs blown off. Others had bloodied bandages covering gruesome trunk wounds. Still others wore stained strips of cloth over their skulls or empty eye sockets. The ship’s surgeons, dentists, and medical corpsmen worked around the clock, in both sick bays and wardrooms. The latter had been hastily converted to emergency dressing stations outfitted with plasma, morphine, whole blood, dressings, instruments, splints, litters, and an ample supply of body bags.
The first of several Japanese prisoners was brought aboard as well—for medical treatment and questioning. Though he had known to expect it, Bill was taken aback by his first encounter—face to face and in the flesh—with an enemy who had so inflamed his passions over the previous thirty months. He had been more prepared for a defiant, insolent soldier than this frightened, bloodied teenager before him. The prisoner glanced nervously between Bill and the interpreter as he answered the basic questions: name, rank, division. The boy was hardly the embodiment of evil Bill had conjured so fully in his mind.
By sunset on June 19, the battle outlook on Saipan had improved. The ships composing Spruance’s ad hoc shore defense were doing their job and the marines had established a beachhead and were advancing inland. The US Army’s Twenty-Seventh Infantry Division, which had been standing in reserve, had also joined the fight. Saipan’s all-important airfield passed into American hands the next day, and the Fourth Marine Division reached the sea on the opposite side, bisecting the island. Given these positive developments, Admiral Turner handed over complete control of the landed forces to USMC general Holland “Howlin’ Mad” Smith. And with the return of Mitscher’s task force following the
“Turkey Shoot,” the tempo of the invasion was stepped up.
But two days later, a new kind of trouble started simmering—between the marines and the Twenty-Seventh Infantry Division. Here Bill found himself in familiar territory: in a bitter war of words between the army and the navy. He might just as well have been walking the halls of the Pentagon.
On June 22, USMC’s Holland Smith had positioned the Twenty-Seventh Infantry Division between the Second and Fourth Marine Divisions in preparation for a broad sweep across the island. The two marine divisions advanced on schedule, but the army division did not. By nightfall on the twenty-third, instead of a straight line of advancing troops, the line had taken on an ominously concave U shape. On June 24, the army infantry division was still bogged down, threatening momentum and dangerously exposing marine flanks on both sides.
A jowly bulldog of a man, Howlin’ Mad Smith stormed aboard Rocky Mount clutching his battle maps. He’d had enough. In an invective-laced conversation with Turner, the marine general lived up to his nickname, conveying in no uncertain terms his opinion of the Twenty-Seventh and its relatively young commanding officer, Army General Ralph Smith (no relation). Holland Smith had drafted a letter for Turner’s signature removing Ralph Smith from his Saipan command. But Admiral Turner—while never noted for his tenderness toward the opposite service—wasn’t going to relieve an army general at the height of battle without some flank of his own. Good reasons notwithstanding, there would be hell to pay between the services.
So Admiral Turner, Holland Smith, and a handful of hastily summoned aides, including Bill Mott, took Rocky Mount’s launch over to Indianapolis to confer with Admiral Spruance. Could Spruance fix this problem with Ralph Smith and the Twenty-Seventh Army Division? Spruance listened to his Forager commanders present their complaint and then asked what, precisely, they recommended he do. Both men advised that Ralph Smith be replaced by the more seasoned army general, Sanderford Jarman, who had already been designated to take over the Twenty-Seventh once Saipan was declared secure.
The Jersey Brothers Page 30