War Stories II: Heroism in the Pacific

by Oliver North

USS INDIANAPOLIS, 5TH FLEET FLAGSHIP

  25 MILES NORTHWEST OF SAIPAN

  SOUTHERN MARIANA ISLANDS

  18 JUNE 1944

  Saipan, the first American objective in the Marianas, is roughly the size of Manhattan Island and had been seized by the Japanese the same day they bombed Pearl Harbor. But by the spring of 1944, Tokyo had declared it to be part of their “National Defense Zone” and posted General Hideyoshi Obata and a 27,000-man garrison to hold it “at all costs.”

  To wrest control of the island from Obata’s troops, Admiral Spruance had assembled an armada of nearly 550 ships. It included 30 aircraft carriers, 1,000 aircraft, 14 battleships, more than 120 destroyers, and the amphibious shipping to carry the 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions and the 27th Infantry Division, totaling over 100,000 men.

  Spruance embarked in the 5th Fleet flagship, the cruiser Indianapolis, and had departed the Marshalls on 6 June as 150,000 young Americans were storming the beaches of Normandy, France, half a world away. On 11 June, he sent Marc Mitscher’s carrier aircraft on ahead to knock out any Japanese aircraft they could find in the southern Marianas. Once the Japanese air threat was eliminated, three battleships joined in pounding known and suspected targets on Saipan and stayed at it through the arrival of the amphibious force.

  On 14 June, in an effort to further isolate the Marianas, Spruance dispatched two of Mitscher’s fast carrier groups to the north to work over enemy airfields on Iwo Jima and Chichi Jima. That same afternoon, the rest of the battleships and heavy cruisers of his amphibious force arrived off Saipan and began blasting the fourteen-mile-long island with more heavy guns.

  But the naval aviators dropping the bombs and the gunners pumping their sixteen-inch and eight-inch shells at targets ashore quickly learned that not all the lessons learned at Tarawa were still applicable. Unlike the flat atolls of the Gilbert and Marshall islands, Saipan and the rest of the Marianas were jungle-covered, mountainous coral islands, honeycombed with natural and man-made caves. The Japanese made good use of all the cover, concealment, and protection the island offered against the American onslaught.

  While the bombers and large-caliber guns did their work, Navy UDTs confirmed that there were no mines on or off the landing beaches that Admiral Turner and General Smith had chosen on the southwest side of the island. Any celebration of this good news was quickly dampened by the impact of high-caliber rounds fired from Saipan that struck the USS California and one of her destroyer escorts, causing casualties on both. Clearly the pre–D-Day bombardment hadn’t been as effective as hoped.

  Among those watching the awesome pre-landing bombardment was Corporal Don Swindle. He had enlisted from Indiana and was still a teenager when he headed off to recruit training in San Diego. On 15 June 1944, he was a rifleman in the 4th Marine Division, preparing to invade Saipan.

  CORPORAL DON SWINDLE, USMC

  4th Marine Division

  Off Saipan, Mariana Islands

  15 June 1944

  It’s noisy as heck. And if you ever get the battlewagons in front of you or close to you, when those sixteen-inchers go off, it feels like it’s pulling your Amtrac right out of the water. You can actually see a sixteen-inch shell go by if you’re behind it.

  After they fired for three days, you look to see, and you say, “Surely there can’t be too many left.” They hit what looks like everything. But most of the time the Japs really dug in and they had good bunkers.

  We got about halfway in and our second battalion wave was hit. I was in the second or third wave, I think. We were receiving small arms and machine gun fire, but we were only able to take out one light machine gun.

  I had two Bangalore torpedoes at the bottom of my Amtrac and I had a grenade box. I was supposed to blow barbed wire in case we ran into it. But we didn’t.

  And although the others got knocked out on each side of us, our Amtrac got through. It was a rough ride and we bailed out as soon as we got to the beach.

  Then a sniper cut loose on us, evidently with a rifle, because he was firing single shots. He fired about five times at us.

  I was scared all the time. But that thought never entered my mind then. We had talked about this quite a bit before. None of us ever thought we were going to die. But a lot of us did.

  At dawn on 15 June, more than 8,000 Marines of the 2nd and 4th Divisions embarked in armored amphibians and armed LVTs. They were landed in under twenty minutes after a massive final bombardment. It wasn’t enough. The assault waves were greeted on the beach by furious artillery, mortar, and machine gun fire from the dug-in and well-prepared defenders. By dark, the 20,000 Marines who had come ashore were well short of their intended objectives and more than 10 percent of them were already casualties.

  The next morning, General Smith committed a portion of his reserve, a reinforced regimental combat team of the Army’s 27th Infantry division. Soon, they too found themselves having to fight for every inch of ground against 20,000 tenacious Japanese defenders who had pledged to the emperor that they would “push the Americans into the sea.”

  One of those the Japanese tried to push back into the sea was an eighteen-year-old Marine PFC, Rick Spooner, a native of California. For the next three and a half weeks he would experience a particular kind of hell.

  PRIVATE FIRST CLASS RICK SPOONER, USMC

  Saipan, Mariana Islands

  Pacific Ocean

  17 June 1944

  We’d heard of Guam, but we didn’t know where the Mariana Islands were. When our lieutenant briefed us, he said, “You’re going to land on Saipan.” Navy and Marine aircraft had pounded Saipan for days. So we were surprised the next day, when we went ashore, that the shelling hadn’t really bothered the Japs too much.

  I was in Fox Company. We headed in toward the island; there was a lagoon and a barrier reef around it. The Japanese had registered their artillery, anti-boat guns, and heavy mortars on the barrier reef. Going into the beach, we lost twenty Amtracs and there were some bodies and body parts floating in the water.

  We were on the first wave and had to get off at the first beach. But there were too many people there already.

  There were a lot of dead Japs on the beaches, and a lot of dead Marines, too, with more and more as we went along.

  The problem was that the Navy had laid down a heavy smoke screen, for which we were delighted at first, because that would mask our landing. But it also blinded all the landing craft drivers. So we wound up on the wrong beach.

  I was a young PFC and I was scared to death, but I hoped no one around me knew it.

  After leaving the beach, we were supposed to take a little Japanese fighter airstrip, secure it, and then dig in and wait. We managed to get across, but not everyone made it. There was no cover, no concealment. You had to run like hell and there was some fire, but we got across.

  Our next objective was to be at Lake Susupe. We all knew where it was—we’d seen it on the maps, but sometimes maps are very deceiving. Lake Susupe turned out not to be a lake, but a swamp. And it was bristling with Japs.

  We got up to the edges and took some casualties. Later on that same day we had to fall back to straighten out the regiment’s lines. You know, Marines don’t like to fall back when they’ve spilled blood. They don’t like to give terrain up, but whoever made the decision was smart. They did the right thing because pulling back probably saved a lot of lives.

  We were almost back to the beach but away from the swamp. There were places on that island that were coral, and the little entrenching tools we had were not really designed to go through coral; we needed jackhammers. But you know, when you’re scared, and someone’s shooting at you, it’s amazing how powerful you can be and what you can do with an entrenching tool.

  The first night there was a lot of artillery and we got some of our 10th Marines in. I heard 1,786 as the number that we lost those first twenty-four hours. By the time the campaign was over, we had more than 3,100 dead Americans just on Saipan.

  The second night was t
he most horrific night of the campaign, I think. We could hear all that noise, and of course we were scared of what was coming at us. The Japs had forty-eight tanks, with infantry, and came down toward the beaches. At that point, we had a new weapon—the bazooka—the little 2.36 rocket launcher. Colonel Willy K. Jones picked one up from a scared private that was our bazooka man, told the assistant gunner to load him, and he fired at a tank at very close range, right into the belly of that tank. He made his men believers in the bazooka.

  The next day, after that horrible attack, we counted twenty-four hulks of tanks knocked out by those Marines. Along with the tanks, there were about 1,200 enemy infantry troops killed. The Japanese had devastating losses.

  There’s no way anyone who’s ever been in combat can glorify war. It’s the most horrible experience and one of the worst things that a human being can live through. The sounds are bad—like an amphibious landing covering fire—and the smells are worse.

  While the Marines and Army were thus engaged, U.S. submarines patrolling far to the west detected two large Japanese naval formations passing through the Philippine Sea, headed east. Concerned that he would be unable to protect transports offloading in two locations, Admiral Spruance postponed the assault on Guam scheduled for 17 June and ordered Mitscher’s carriers and the battleships to form up west of the Marianas and head off the anticipated counter-attack. Spruance, aboard Indianapolis, departed Saipan to direct the battle.

  Captured Marianas airfield

  On the morning of 18 June, while his 103-ship armada, deployed in five task groups, raced west to engage Admiral Toyoda’s mobile fleet, Spruance received word that the Marines had taken the southern portion of Saipan and had seized the airfield. That evening, code-breakers and radio intercept operators in Pearl Harbor pinpointed his opponent 350 miles west of his position. Spruance went to his sea cabin that night knowing that 19 June was going to be a very busy day.

  At 0500 the following morning, Spruance had his seven battleships, fifteen aircraft carriers, and 900 aircraft ready to face Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa’s nine carriers and 430 aircraft, which had linked up with Admiral Matome Ugaki’s five battleships. Though Ozawa knew that he was outnumbered, he anticipated help from land-based Japanese aircraft flying out from Rota and Guam, not knowing that Hoover’s land-based bombers and Mitscher’s carrier pilots had all but eliminated the aircraft on those two islands and so badly cratered the runways in both places that the airfields were virtually unusable.

  Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, Japanese commander in the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.”

  What few aircraft that could launch from Guam were quickly dispatched by Mitscher’s fighters, and when reinforcements from Truk were detected by U.S. radar, they too were all shot down. Before noon, the only planes available to attack the American fleet were those flown by inadequately trained aviators aboard the Japanese carriers.

  The resulting battle was so one-sided that it quickly became known as the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.” U.S. aircraft and submarines ranged over and under the Japanese fleet. Ozawa’s flagship, the carrier Taiho, blew up and sank with 1,600 of his sailors when it was hit by a spread of torpedoes from the USS Albacore. Another American sub, the Cavalla, sank the carrier Shokaku. Of the 335 Japanese fighters, bombers, and torpedo planes launched against the Americans, 242 of them were downed.

  Twenty-three-year-old Chicago native Alex Vraciu was flying that day from the deck of the USS Lexington. He already had thirteen kills over the Pacific waters, and in the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot” he got eight more.

  LIEUTENANT ALEX VRACIU, USN

  Aboard USS Lexington

  Central Pacific Ocean

  20 June 1944

  While we were at the Marianas, I was on one of the hops, where a couple planes were shot down. We learned what they had done to some of our pilots: The Japs gouged their eyes out, cut off their ears, and worse. A lot of us had made up our minds what we were going to do.

  I had a mission “beyond darkness” on 20 June, the next day. Because it was late in the afternoon, some of our search planes discovered where their fleet was. It was beyond the safe range and it wasn’t till 1620 that we knew that we would be hitting them about dusk.

  Most of the guys out there weren’t qualified for night landings on carriers. We knew it was going to be tragic. But they launched over 200 of us. I was part of the squadron of nine fighter planes, nine torpedo aircraft, and fifteen bombers that were sent over to meet the Jap fleet. We knew that some of the planes would likely be half out of fuel before they got there.

  On that mission I lost my wingman, Homer Brockmeier, over the Jap fleet. We were struck by a group of enemy fighters and we had to fight for our lives. But I got the plane that got Brock. I haven’t forgotten that.

  They called the Marianas “the great turkey shoot.” We were shooting a bunch of planes that you had to hurry up and eliminate before they got your carriers.

  We weren’t attacking Saipan alone. We were about a hundred miles or so from the islands, waiting to see what the Japanese would be coming to do.

  The Japanese not only had their nine carriers, but they were using their army land-based aircraft and maybe some navy types. They were shooting down planes at Guam. Our radar found a huge group coming in and they called us: “Come back from Guam, because the action is starting!” And if we’d known that the action was going be there, we would have already been up in the air.

  In dogfights, we learned from the early guys that you can’t fight them at low altitudes. When I got to 20,000 feet, I couldn’t shift into high blower. So that meant 20,000 was my limit.

  But as it turned out we were in perfect position. There was a motley group of them, not in any particular formation, that had come over 300 miles by that time. They were at 2,000 feet, below us, headed in the opposite direction—a perfect position.

  We tried to keep them together because if they started scattering, we could miss the bombers in their formation. That day they had torpedo planes, dive-bombers, and some fighters in that group. There were a good fifty of them, so I pulled up on the other side and started my run.

  I came down on one and burned him. Using my dive to maintain my speed, I pulled up in the position for the next round, and then I made a run on two planes in a loose formation.

  I burned the first one, and as he was going down, I lowered my wing, got in position for the second one, and got him. So that made three.

  Then I worked back in and brought down a fourth one. I must have hit his controls at the same time that he was on fire, because he did a wild gyration and went on down. And then I looked up ahead and saw a string of three of them.

  So when I got the fifth one, another was still behind. I had to race to get that one, who’d started his dive already. I got that one and he blew up. I must have hit his bomb.

  A battleship AA gun must’ve blown up the one ahead of him, because he just suddenly went up in flames.

  All of a sudden, it was over as fast as it started.

  Depending on which historian you ask, something like 300 planes were shot down that day as part of the “turkey shoot.”

  I headed back to the fleet and felt good. I considered this my payback for Pearl Harbor.

  I was told afterwards that the whole battle took eight minutes. They said I used up only 360 rounds of .50-caliber ammo. We had 2,400 in the gun. But because I was going in so close, it was only ten rounds per plane, per gun. I had seventeen kills, and eighteen when I got one the next day.

  We lost a good hundred planes, for various reasons: out of fuel, battle damage, not being able to land aboard the carrier. You couldn’t believe the madness of it.

  As the remnants of the Japanese fleet fled toward Okinawa, Mitscher’s pilots sank the carrier Hiyo and severely damaged two others, Chiyoda and Zuikaku. On their final sortie of the day, they plastered the battleship Haruna—killing more than 500 of her crew. By sunset on 20 June, the Imperial Fleet had lost all but thirty-six of its
airplanes—to only nineteen American aircraft downed.

  That night, risking attack by Japanese submarines, Mitscher courageously ordered his fleet to turn on their lights so that the returning aircraft—low on fuel and exhausted from two days of near nonstop fighting—could make it back to their carriers. Even so, more than eighty U.S. planes were lost in this night recovery than had been brought down by the Japanese. When the battle was over, forty-nine of Mitscher’s pilots had been killed.

  By 24 June, Spruance and his fleet were back, standing off the Marianas and devoting their full attention to supporting the land battle on Saipan while other ships “softened up” Guam and nearby Tinian for invasion. On 9 July, the Americans pushed the remaining Japanese on Saipan into a pocket along some cliffs on the north coast of the island. There, more than 1,000 of them—including women and children—hurled themselves to their deaths rather than surrender or be taken prisoner. It was a terrible end to a brutal battle. More than 29,000 Japanese were dead, but 3,400 Americans had also been killed and another 13,000 wounded.

  Just twelve days later, on 21 July, after pounding Guam for as many days with air and naval gunfire, the 3rd Amphibious Corps—composed of the 3rd Marine Division, the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade, and the U.S. Army’s 77th Infantry Division—landed on Guam, the largest island in the Marianas chain. The Marine and Army units, relying heavily on naval gunfire from the fleet surrounding the island, moved slowly across the island from west to east. They met determined resistance from 8,000 Japanese, who holed up in caves while preparing for banzai charges every night until the island was secured.

  Sergeant Cyril “Obie” O’Brien had enlisted in the Marines after being turned down for Officers’ Candidate School because he was half an inch too short. He had seen action as a rifleman on Bougainville, but thereafter he served as a war correspondent. When the Marines invaded Guam, he went with them, filing reports from the front for American newspapers and wire services.