Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  Still, Captain Oya was elated. He had stopped the Americans. He could see their landing boats veering, turning, churning back to their mother ships. The enemy Marines were re-boarding their transports. They were sailing north, with their warships.

  It was then about nine o’clock, and it was then that Captain Oya received word that the Americans had landed up in the northwest and were pouring over narrow beaches there in incredible speed and volume. And all of Captain Oya’s guns were sited to fire to seaward. He was out of the fight. From now on, it was up to Colonel Ogata.

  Colonel Ogata had also been hoodwinked by that feint off Tinian Town. By the time he had realized that the true landing was being made over those undefended northwest beaches, it was too late for him to move troops there.

  Battalion after battalion of the Fourth Marine Division burst from the bellies of the LST’s and went racing shoreward. Full 533 amtracks-all the Fifth Corps could muster-brought them inland while the LCI rocket boats raced ahead and darkened the sky with showers of rockets. Even the 140-millimeter cannon which Colonel Ogata had set up in Faibus San Hilo to the right or south of the beachhead were knocked out by battleships which fired armor-piercers into the cliff face above them and tumbled both guns and emplacements into the sea.

  Only land mines which the Japanese had concealed between high- and low-water marks survived to defend these narrow beaches against the attacking Americans. Three amtracks were demolished by these, and many others were forced to bring their boatloads around to the coral ledges. But the Marines jumped up on the ledges, and that marvelous swift surge swept inland.

  At ten minutes to eight, the Marines landed. A half-hour later they had their beachheads. Before nine o’clock, there were reserve battalions speeding in from the sea. Then there were tanks punching inland, artillery was being brought in, and the assault troops were fanning out and sweeping aside the light resistance of Colonel Ogata’s startled defenders. Here was a pocket of 50 Japanese fighting out of crevices in the cliff ledges, there a pair of blockhouses the bombardment had missed—but they fell, and the beachheads were bought at a cost of 15 Marines killed and 225 wounded.

  Throughout the afternoon, Colonel Ogata sought desperately to reinforce his surprised northern sector. He tried rushing up small party after small party from the south, but the American planes spotted and scattered them. Two of Ogata’s tanks were knocked out while moving up. Many of his soldiers who sought cover would not venture forth again until night. They had been pounded for months as had no troops of the Empire, and now they were terrified of the “hell-jelly” bombs filling the air with gouts of sticky flame.

  By midafternoon the Marines had knifed inland to well over a mile. They could have gone farther, but General Cates was content with a defensible beachhead. At half-past four, still offshore in an LST, for he had no wish to add to the congestion of those narrow beaches, Cates ordered his regiments to halt, to tie in their flanks, to string barbed wire, to dig in. They nailed down a beachhead 2,900 yards wide and about 1,700 deep at its farthest penetration west. It rested on all the best terrain. Its flanks curved back to a sea filled with friendly ships. It had been seized at a cost of 77 Marines killed and 470 wounded. And it held 15,614 Marines.

  And Colonel Ogata was going to strike it. Outnumbered, his communications all but knocked out, his units scattered, his very authority being constantly challenged by the orders of Captain Oya to his south, Colonel Ogata was still going “to destroy the enemy at the beach.”

  Even though the Americans were off the beach, he would carry out that plan of “annihilation at the water’s edge” which so many Japanese commanders seemed to conceive concurrent with their own conception. In fact, he had already instructed his units to counterattack at two in the morning.

  At exactly that hour on the morning of July 25, about 600 screaming Japanese struck at the left flank held by the Twenty-fourth Marines. They were annihilated.

  A half-hour later the first of a series of strong thrusts began against the Twenty-fifth Marines in the center. About 200 Japanese found an opening at the boundary between this regiment and the Twenty-fourth. They poured through. They met muzzle-blasting artillerists and counterattacking riflemen. They were killed to a man.

  At half-past three the third and final assault fell on the Twenty-third Marines to the right. It was blown to bits. Five tanks were destroyed. At dawn, astonished Marines saw Japanese bodies flying 15 feet into the air. The wounded were blowing themselves up with magnetic mines—an end at once more powerful and spectacular than the customary hand-grenade suicide.

  That dawn was also the end of Colonel Ogata’s defense of Tinian.

  Strewn all around the Fourth Division’s perimeter were the bodies of 1,241 Japanese soldiers and sailors. At least another 700 had been wounded. With a single stroke, Ogata had deprived himself of perhaps a quarter of the best troops which had survived the first day’s assault. He could do nothing else but fall steadily south until he and all but 255 of his command were destroyed.

  That took seven more days, with the Second Marine Division joining the attack. On July 25, the Second moved in behind the Fourth. It cleaned out the northern end of Tinian, then wheeled to move down the eastern half of the island. Second on the left, Fourth on the right, General Schmidt’s attack rolled south with the impetuosity which had not been possible on Saipan. On July 31, Tinian was declared fallen. On that night, Colonel Ogata himself fell—machine-gunned to death on Marine barbed wire—while leading the last banzai. There was mopping-up to follow, during which Pfc. Robert Wilson sacrificed his life for his friends by falling on an enemy grenade, winning the Medal of Honor. There was also a replication of the suicidal horrors of Marpi Point. But Tinian was the masterpiece of island war. Only 327 men had died and 1,771 had been wounded in securing Saipan’s southern flank and in seizing some of the finest bomber sites in the Central Pacific. It would indeed have been better if none had died and none had suffered, but such perfection is possible only against men of straw.

  By all the real and cruel standards of war, Tinian was amphibious assault mastered at last, the problem of how to land on a hostile, fortified island finally solved—and then made perfect by Colonel Ogata’s back-breaking banzai.

  12

  Marines of the Third Division and First Brigade had been taught everything there was to know about Guam—except that it was the Japanese liquor locker of the Central Pacific.

  Guam had whisky by the small pond, it had rivers of saki, it had lakes of beer by the uncountable case. It had, in this sea of intoxicants, the answer to a question which had puzzled Marines since the first banzai was broken at Tulagi on the night of August 7,1942. That was:

  Are they drugged or are they drunk?

  On Guam the night of July 25 the Japanese to the north were buoyant with booze, while those in the south were rip-roaring drunk.

  On the southern or Agat beachhead, the Japanese troops led by Commander Asaichi Tamai had been driven west on Orote Peninsula by the First Marine Brigade. On the morning of July 25 the brigade sealed off the mouth of the peninsula. The Marines dug in, Fourth Regiment on the left, Twenty-second on the right.

  Tamai made a desperate effort to evacuate his troops by water. Barges put out into Apra Harbor from Orote’s north coast. But Marine artillery on the mainland and on Cabras Island in the harbor blew them to bits. That happened at five o’clock in the afternoon. A few hours later, with the advent of a black night, while a daylong drizzle changed to a downpour, Tamai’s officers began passing out the whisky.

  Six miles to the north, outside the Asan-Adelup beachhead held by the Third Marine Division, the drinking did not begin until midnight.

  At Asan-Adelup the attack was not going to be the drunken suicide-rush brewing on Orote. This was to be the well-planned “single stroke” with which Lieutenant General Takashina hoped to “solve the issue of the battle.” Saki would be used to inflame the ardor of the troops, but not until after they had reached their assembly
areas on the Fonte Plateau east of the American lines. Six battalions from the 45th Brigade, the 18th Regiment and other units—about 5,000 men—began moving out at about ten o’clock under cover of Japanese artillery and guided by red flares. After they had assembled, patrols went out to probe for weak spots in the American line.

  They found gaps. By July 25 the Third Division’s line was about a mile deep and five miles wide, and it was held by only 7,000 riflemen. The alignment had the Third Marines on the left (with the detached Second Battalion, Ninth), the Twenty-first in the center, and the Ninth (less that detached Second Battalion) on the right. Between the Twenty-first and the Ninth was a gap 800 yards wide and held by a mere scouting unit. Many of the rifle companies were understrength. One Japanese patrol found a soft spot in the Marine left-center held by the First Battalion, Twenty-first, and another one of 50 soldiers ran into the Marine scouts in the 800-yard gap and drove them back.

  There was now a broad undefended avenue running to the American rear, and in its path, 200 yards inland from the beach, was the Division Hospital.

  Already many of the wounded in the hospital were stirring uneasily to hear the sound of Japanese artillery shells exploding around the batteries of the Twelfth Marines a few hundred yards to the left or north.

  Not far from the hospital a young artilleryman of the Twelfth Marines felt a terror that is the palsy of the soul.

  He had crawled into a cave to take cover from the Japanese shells. He had gone to sleep. He had awakened to find someone sitting on him. He felt for his carbine. Someone was sitting on that. There were perhaps a half-dozen of these intruders. He could hear the clinking of their canteens and smell the sour reek of saki, could hear the soft jabbering of their voices, could feel on the man astride him the hard round shape of a magnetic mine.

  A squad of Japanese infiltrators had crept into his cave and were sitting there awaiting the daylight—when they would depart to attack the Marine guns.

  It was eleven o’clock at night on Orote Peninsula, and an indescribable clamor had erupted in a mangrove swamp outside the right front of the First Marine Brigade.

  “Listen at’em,” a Marine hissed to his foxhole buddy. “Damn if it don’t sound like New Year’s Eve in the zoo!”

  The Japanese were screaming, singing, laughing, capering—they were smashing empty bottles against the big mangroves and clanging bayonets against rifle barrels.

  Hoarse voices cried, “The Emperor draws much blood tonight!” Others rose in fits of cackling presumed to be terrifying. Some tossed grenades, yelling, “Corpsman! Corpsman!” or “K Company withdraw!” If they had hoped to unnerve the Marines or to goad them into giveaway fire, they had less than success. Their uproar only helped artillery observers call down a restraining fire on the edge of the swamp, while carefully registering all the Japanese avenues of approach with the combined guns of the brigade, the corps, and the 77th Division —as well as with the light and heavy mortars and 37’s of the front-line companies.

  At five minutes before midnight, a Japanese officer staggered out of the swamp. He waved a saber in one hand, a big flare in the other. Stumbling into view behind him, wielding their rifles and light machine guns, as well as pitchforks, idiot sticks, baseball bats and broken bottles, came his saki-mad followers. A Marine spoke into a telephone:

  “Commence firing!”

  Maniacal voices began bellowing over the mouth of Orote Peninsula. The ground shook. Flares cast their ghostly light. Puttee-taped legs, khaki-clad arms, went flying through the air. The ground to the left front became a slaughter-pen. Within it the Japanese began to run amuk. They screamed in terror. Those who survived fled back into the mangroves, where the Marine artillery pursued and punished. Between midnight and two in the morning, 26,000 shells were poured into the swamp.

  Forty-five minutes later another banzai began on the far right flank with the cry of, “Marines, you die!”

  The Japanese rushed in among the Marine foxholes, where flares and star-shells displayed them in all their drunken madness. They reeled about. They tossed grenades into foxholes with the giggling cry, “Fire in the hole!”—and lurched crazily on. They clambered over heaps of their own dead to jump into the holes with the Marines, to die there—and often to kill as they died. Waves of attackers following them were caught in a crossfire and cut to pieces. Morning showed 400 Japanese bodies strewn in front of this position. On the First Brigade’s left, a single platoon killed 258 Japanese without the loss of a single man.

  Commander Tamai’s attack had failed utterly.

  But up in the north, Lieutenant General Takashina’s counterattack was breaking through.

  Takashina’s grand banzai came in three columns, and it was only the first—and strongest—of these which had no success.

  This stroke was made around midnight by the full force of the 48th Brigade on the left of the American line, the sector held by the Third Marines reinforced by the Second Battalion, Ninth Marines. It was against this last battalion that the 48th Brigade struck.

  But the 48th never got through.

  Seven times the Japanese attacked the American left, and seven times they were hurled back.

  The fight raged for ten hours and was not spent until around nine in the morning of July 26. Before it was over the Second Battalion, Ninth Marines, was cut in half—but its men had killed 950 Japanese. Captain Louis Wilson of F Company was wounded three times, but stayed to rally his men and win a Medal of Honor. Once the bull-chested Wilson ran 50 yards in front of his lines to rescue a helpless Marine. As the battle began to go against the enemy, he gathered 17 men and led them in a rush on high ground commanding his own position. Thirteen of those men fell, but Wilson and the others took the hill.

  In the morning they pursued the retreating Japanese from there, moving through assembly areas cluttered with empty bottles and saki-sour canteens.

  Takashina’s second column was formed by the 2nd Battalion, 18th Regiment, led by Major Chusa Maruyama.

  Maruyama brought his men up to the soft spot discovered by the probes of earlier patrols. It was held by a 50-man company of the First Battalion, Twenty-first Marines, and stood at the left-center of the American line. At four in the morning of July 26, Maruyama ordered his men to throw grenades.

  They fell in a hissing volley behind and among the Marines.

  “Wake up, American, and die!” the Japanese yelled, and rushed.

  So tightly were they bunched, so oblivious were they to the death that swept among them, that they overwhelmed that undersized company and ripped a hole in the lines. The flanking Marine companies bent back their flanks. The left held by Captain William Shoemaker’s A Company beat back Maruyama’s attempts to widen the hole. Shoemaker went among his men. “If we go, the whole beachhead goes,” he told them. But a rumor swept the lines. Company A was being ordered to withdraw, some men whispered. Shoemaker heard it. He leaped to his feet, a big man bulging at the seams of his captured Japanese raincoat. His voice roared out in the dark.

  “By God, we hold here!”

  They held. On the right of the opening, Captain Henry Helgren’s C Company was also holding. Both outfits began pouring an enfilading fire into Maruyama’s men racing through the narrow hole. The Japanese were dashing for the beach and the massed American equipment back there. Some of them ran with land mines in their hands. Others had packs stuffed with 20 pounds of explosives or had charges strapped to their legs or wound around their waists. The Marine fire struck them and the rain-swept blackness was illuminated with blinding white flashes as these human bombs blew up. But many others got through, sweeping down on Marine tanks parked to the rear.

  They attacked the tanks with their bare hands. They kicked them, beat upon them with their fists, backed off and fired useless rifle rounds against them—all in an effort to get at the crewmen within—Marines who were even then swiveling machine guns to shoot the squat tan men off each other’s tanks with the aplomb of cows mutually switching flies off one
another’s backs.

  Unable to destroy the tanks, Maruyama’s men ran farther down the draw. They came to the cliff, destroyed two platoons of Marine mortars, and began attacking the First Battalion’s CP, their drunken yells and the booming of their grenades counterpointing the shouts and firing of a pick-up force of Marine cooks, clerks and communicators which had been assembled to counterattack them. The CP fight—in which Maruyama was killed—ended at daylight with the destruction of the Japanese soldiers who had broken through.

  Up at the opening which they had torn in the Marine line, Captain Shoemaker and Captain Helgren were counterattacking. They fought back across the hole, slamming it shut like a pair of swinging doors. A company of engineers and three weapons platoons were sent to reinforce them. They arrived just before Maruyama’s reserve struck at the restored line in a second thrust.

  Howling, stumbling, waving sabers, bayonets and long poles, the Japanese rushed at Shoemaker’s and Helgren’s men and were destroyed.

  The left-center of the Marine line was now safe.

  The third column of Takashina’s banzai was formed by the 3rd Battalion, 18th Regiment, under Major Setsuo Yukioka.

  Shortly after Maruyama’s stroke began, at about a quarter after four in the morning, Yukioka’s men struck a company of the Twenty-first Marines on the center-right. They captured two machine guns, but then the Americans re-formed and drove them out. Yukioka took his battalion sliding along the Marine front, and it was then that they blundered into that 800-yard gap between the Twenty-first Marines in the center and the Ninth Marines on the right.