As soldiers and Marines swept ashore on D-Day, African-American depot and ammunition companies, standing knee-deep in surf, with mortar shells raining down on them, offloaded shells, food, and water from landing vehicles and hustled them to front line troops. When they were shot at, they returned fire with rifles and machine guns they picked up on the beach. “My company landed about 2 P.M. on D-Day,” Captain William C. Adams, commander of the 20th Marine Depot Company, told a com bat correspondent. “We were the third wave, and all hell was breaking when we came in. It was still touch and go when we hit shore, and it took some time to establish a foothold.
“My men performed excellently…. Among my own company casualties, my orderly was killed.”27
The orderly was Private Kenneth J. Tibbs of Columbus, Ohio, the first black Marine killed in combat in World War II. Later that afternoon, Private Leroy Seals of Brooklyn, New York, was mowed down. He died the following day. Coming into the beach, four men of an African-American depot company were wounded by mortar fire and had to be evacuated, but the others went in, found guns, and fought as infantry, helping to maintain a precariously held position and to kill enemy infiltrators. The next day, they evacuated hundreds of wounded men to a hospital ship offshore, and under heavy rifle fire they “rode guard on trucks carrying high octane gasoline from the beach.”28
“The Negro Marines are no longer on trial,” said the new Commandant. Alexander A. Vandegrift, leader of the Guadalcanal invasion. “They are Marines, period.”29 It would have been good if it were true, but throughout the war African American Marines continued to be treated as separate and unequal.
That first night the Marines and Army reinforcements were pinned to the sand. but there was never any doubt that the landing would succeed. The Americans were here in greater numbers and with more firepower than at Tarawa. Still, in the words of one Marine, “There is something definitely terrifying about the first night on a hostile beach. No matter what superiority you may boast in men and materiel, on that first night you’re the underdog, and the enemy is in a position to make you pay through the nose.”30
DEAD JAPANESE SOLDIERS ON THE BEACH AT SAIPAN (USMC).
THE BATTLE OF THE PHILIPPINE SEA.
That evening Admiral Spruance got word that the Japanese fleet was steaming toward Saipan. The newly assembled First Mobile Fleet, with almost every warship in the Japanese Navy, had been sighted by American submarines in the Philippine Sea, that part of the Pacific Ocean between the Philippines and the Marianas. Its commander, Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, had sailed out to slaughter the American landing forces and destroy the United States Pacific Fleet “with one blow.”31 For the still confident Japanese high command, this would be the decisive naval battle that would bring the Americans to the peace table. “Can it be that we’ll fail to win with this mighty force?” a Japanese admiral wrote in his diary. “No! It cannot be.”32
The U.S. Fifth Fleet had more firepower—fifteen carriers and over 900 war planes—to Ozawa’s nine carriers and 430 combat aircraft. But Ozawa was counting on using Japanese airfields in Guam to refuel and rearm his planes and hit the American carriers in a devastating shuttle action. Observing radio silence, Ozawa had no idea that Marc Mitscher’s carrier planes had knocked out those airfields in preparation for the invasion of Saipan.
The fast-approaching Japanese fleet presented Spruance with an agonizing decision: to steam westward after Ozawa or to wait for him near Saipan while protecting the landing force, whose transports and cargo ships were still being unloaded. Remembering Guadalcanal, where the Navy had suffered the greatest defeat in its proud history after Frank Jack Fletcher’s carrier fleet pulled out and abandoned the Marines, Spruance stayed in a covering position, against advice from the aggressive Marc Mitscher. “I will … try to keep the Japs off your neck,” Spruance told Turner.
As Spruance sent out scout planes to search for the Japanese, he learned from Nimitz, at Pearl Harbor, that he was under the same imperative as Ozawa. “We count on you to make the victory decisive.”33
Spruance put his carriers and battlewagons in a blocking position to the west of Saipan, out of sight of the fighting men on the beaches. “Those of us on the ground of course knew nothing [of the impending naval battle],” says John Chapin. “The morning when [we] turned and looked out to the sea and saw that this vast fleet was gone—the sea was empty—I want to tell you, that’s a sinking feeling.”34
NAVY GUNNERS STAVE OFF JAPANESE AERIAL ATTACK (NA).
Ozawa’s search planes found Mitscher’s fleet on the afternoon of June 18. Mitscher wanted to push out into combat range, but Spruance doubled back toward Saipan to prevent a Japanese force from passing him in the night and hammering the beachhead. The next day, Ozawa launched four massive raids against Task Force 58. With the enemy air fleet closing in from 150 miles, the old circus rallying cry of “Hey, Rube!” went up, and fighters scrambled and flew west to meet the threat. This would be the greatest carrier battle of World War II, with almost four times the forces engaged at Midway. But with the inexperienced, poorly trained Japanese pilots outnumbered and fighting superior Hellcats, it was less a battle than an eight-hour aerial massacre. Ozawa lost 373 planes to the Americans’ thirty. The pilots called it “The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.” But it was more than a fighter fight. Torpedoes from submarines Albacore and Cavalla sent two Japanese carriers to the bottom of the Philippine Sea.
One of the last of the planes to return to the USS Lexington was Lieutenant Stanley Vraciu’s F6F Hellcat. As his fighter screeched to a stop on the carrier deck, he pulled back the canopy, looked up at Mitscher standing on the deck with his long billed lobsterman’s cap pulled low over his tanned face, and held up six fingers. Six kills! “The skill, initiative and intrepid courage of the young aviators made this day one of the high points in the history of the American spirit,” writes Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison.35
“Now,” says Morison, “the hunter became the hunted.”36 The next day the thin, leather-faced Mitscher sent three carriers after the crippled but still dangerous Japanese fleet. Scout planes failed to locate the enemy’s position until 5:40 in the after noon, but Mitscher, aware of the extreme risks of a night raid, launched 216 planes from ten carriers in an astonishing ten minutes. “Give ’em hell, boys; wish I were with you,” he told them before the cry went out to “Man Aircraft!”37
At 6:40, after flying almost 300 miles, they spotted the Japanese fleet. With the setting sun barely touching the horizon and the sky splendid with brilliant orange and red clouds, the Hellcats struck. They sank the carrier Hiyo and blasted from the night sky another sixty-five enemy planes, while losing only twenty of their own, in an engagement that has been called the Battle of the Philippine Sea. This left the retreating Ozawa with only thirty-five out of the 430 planes he had had in his command on the morning of June 19.
The dusk raiders who smashed Ozawa’s fleet now faced a new danger. I hey had begun this mission knowing they had only a slim chance of returning because the Japanese carriers had been spotted at the maximum range of their planes. And after they had taken off they learned that Ozawa was sixty miles further west than first reported. Now, after a fuel-draining attack, they had to fly back over 250 to 300 miles of ocean on a moonless night to the blackened fleet. The ships’ lights had been turned out to avoid detection by Japanese submarines. Many of the pilots were dizzy with fatigue and none of them had been trained to land on a carrier at night.
When the gas-starved planes came within range, the group commander of four carriers, Rear Admiral Joseph “Jocko” Clark, turned on the deck lights and pointed searchlights into the sky to act as homing beacons. Mitscher ordered all of Task Force 58 to do the same, a decision that Clark considered “one of the war’s supreme moments.”38 A pilot who was sent up in a night fighting Hellcat to help guide the planes home said the scene was like “a Hollywood premiere, Chinese New Year’s and Fourth of July rolled into one.”39
Lieutenant E. J. Lawson, retur
ning to the Enterprise, saw plane after plane go plunging into the sea. Almost half the planes landed on the wrong carriers; one plane tried to land on a red-lit destroyer and had to veer off at the last second and splash into the sea. Pilots and crewmen were scattered all over the waters around the gigantic fleet, blowing the boatswain’s whistles they carried for such emergencies and “blinking their little waterproof flashlights.”40 All but forty-nine pilots and crewmen were recovered by the end of the next day.
Although neither the Navy nor the Army recognized it at the time, this great sea battle was yet another vindication of America’s “double-thrust” strategy in the Pacific.41 The American victory in the Philippine Sea, part of Nimitz’s Central Pacific offensive, made it impossible for the Japanese to give full attention to MacArthur’s final drive up the coast of New Guinea, toward the Philippines.
TAKING SAIPAN
Back on Saipan, the ground troops had no idea that this battle had been fought and won, reducing the options of the island defenders to death by one of two ways: at the enemy’s hands or by their own. As the Americans gathered up their strength and moved off the beach, the Japanese fell back into a hastily organized defense in depth, using the terrain to advantage. They burrowed into caves all over the islands, and from Mount Tapotchau they poured down fire on the advancing Marines and Army infantry.
Private Robert F. Graf describes the system for flushing Japanese soldiers out of caves:
QUITE OFTEN THERE WOULD BE MULTI-CAVE openings, each protecting another. Laying down heavy cover fire, our specialist would advance to near the mouth of the cave. A satchel charge would then be heaved into the mouth of the cave, followed by a loud blast as the dynamite exploded. Other times it might be grenades thrown inside the cave, both fragment type, which exploded sending bits of metal all throughout the cave, and other times [white] phosphorous grenades that burned the enemy.
Also the flame thrower was used, sending a sheet of flame into the cave. burning anyone that was in its path. Screams could be heard and on occasions the enemy would emerge from the caves, near the entrance. We would call upon the tanks, and these monsters would get in real close and pump shells into the openings.42
MARINES HURLING HAND GRENADES AT ENTRENCHED JAPANESE SOLDIERS ON SAIPAN (USMC).
The cave teams had to be on guard for snipers in nearby trees, or for Japanese who “played possum,” as one Marine related, “by smearing blood of other Japs [we had killed] on themselves and lying still as [we] came up. However, within the battalion my instructions were, ‘If they didn’t stink, stick it.’”43
Of the approximately 29,000 civilians on the island, 22,000 were Japanese, the vast majority of them from the prefecture of Okinawa. There were also Korean slave laborers, and Kanaka and Chamorros people, the original inhabitants. The local natives surrendered willingly, but some Japanese and Koreans hid in caves. American soldiers often put their own lives on the line to try to help them. “The thing that really got to me,” said one Marine officer, “was watching these boys of mine; they’d take all kinds of risks; they’d go into a cave never knowing whether there would be soldiers in there, to bring out these civilians. The minute they got them out, they began to feed them, give them part of their rations, and offer their cigarettes to the men. It made you feel proud of the boys for doing this.”44
A MARINE FINDS A WOMAN AND CHILDREN HIDDEN IN A CAVE IN SAIPAN (USMC)
But as the Americans began to lose friends in these cave operations, and as water supplies grew short and polluted, forcing some men to chew on napalmed sugarcane stalks to try to kill their thirst, distinctions were often not made between armed re-sisters and defenseless civilians. The troops learned a Japanese phrase, which translated loosely meant: throw your rifle away and come out with your hands up. “We tried this,” recalls John Chapin, “[and] I never got anybody to come out.”45 If a flamethrower was called for, the people inside the cave, who had learned the English word for it, would usually kill themselves. The cave would then be sealed by a bull dozer.
When sick and scared civilians did come out of their hideouts, there were some heart-tearing scenes. A captured Japanese woman who was crying uncontrollably approached Robert Graf and began hitting him on the arm and pointing to his pack. “I didn’t know what she wanted until an interpreter came over and explained that she wanted some food and water for her dead child. She pointed to a wirker basket that contained her dead infant. I gave her what she requested, and she placed the food and water in the basket so that the child could have nourishment on the way to meet [its] ancestors.
A MARINE ESCORTS AN ELDERLY SAIPAN WOMAN AND CHILDREN IN HER CARE TO AN INTERNMENT DEPOT (NA).
“Every illness that we had been briefed on was observed: leprosy, dengue fever, yaws, and many cases of elephantiasis. Most of them were skeleton-thin, as they had no nourishment for many days. Many were suffering from shock caused by the shelling and bombing, and fright because they did not have the vaguest idea as to what we would do to them.”
This is a part of the Pacific War few historians deal with, “civilians.” in Graf’s words, “caught in a war that was not of their making.”46
Some injured women and children found their way to a small American field hospital, where they were taken care of by ten Navy nurses led by First Lieutenant Birdie B. Daigle. “We found Saipan a scorched island with many killed and wounded,” Daigle wrote in her diary. “All buildings had been completely demolished and the populace had taken a horrible blow….We worked, day and night, behind the lines….During the day we tended civilians, at night servicemen became our patients. I wish the people at home could have seen the results of war bombardments on those civilians….
“At first we had so many wounded to take care of, and so few facilities, the job seemed too tremendous. Sometimes we felt like crying. It was just that we needed so much in order to do our best work.”47
On June 23, after capturing the main towns, airfields, and strongholds in the southern half of the island, Marine and Army troops launched a great three-division drive to clear the island of all resistance. It would be a desperate fight. The Japanese commanders on Saipan had just received a message from Tojo: “If Saipan is lost, air raids on Tokyo will take place often; therefore you will hold Saipan.”48
Holland Smith spread his forces across the entire middle of Saipan, from east to west, and ordered them to push northward with resolve. The Marines moved on the right and left flanks and the Army’s 27th Division, a New York National Guard unit, took the center, fighting slowly and in disorganized fashion through some of the toughest terrain on the island. The plodding movement of the 27th, which had not fought well at either Makin or Kwajalein, incensed Holland Smith, for it dangerously exposed his Marines on the flanks. After a sharp warning to the commander of the 27th, Major General Ralph Smith, and a consultation with Spruance, he relieved Ralph Smith, setting off an interservice feud that continued long after the war. “Ralph Smith is my friend,” Holland Smith told Sherrod later that day, “but, good God, I’ve got a duty to my country.”49 Nimitz, a diplomat as well as a warrior, was not sympathetic. He made sure Holland Smith never again held an active combat command.
On June 25 the Marines took Mount Tapotchau, a turning point in the battle. There was no celebration; everyone realized that the island would not be taken until nearly every Japanese soldier had been killed. General Saito, wounded and cornered in the cave that served as his command post, sent a final message to his troops, imploring them to follow him in a sacrificial charge against the enemy. In another island cave, Admiral Nagumo sent a similar message to his sailors and Marines. But neither the general nor the admiral went forth to lead his troops. Nagumo put a bullet in his brain. Saito fell on his ceremonial sword but failed to strike cleanly. Writhing in agony, he was finished off by a pistol shot from his adjutant.
A LONE MARINE WATCHES FROM HIS FOXHOLE AS A MARINE FLAMENTHROWING TANK FIRES ON A JAPANESE PILLBOX (USMC).
The final fight, the most fear
some banzai charge of the Pacific war, came at 4:30 in the morning on July 7, 1944. Over 3,000 screaming Japanese soldiers and sailors broke through a gap in the lines of the 27th Division. Some had rifles, grenades, and mortars, but many carried only clubs, rocks, swords, and rusty bayonets wired to bamboo sticks. After this “human storm” overran elements of two Army battalions, a second wave came through and killed the wounded. Those Japanese soldiers who remained hit three artillery battalions of the 10th Marines and were blown to pieces at point-blank range by 105mm howitzers, but not before overrunning twelve guns, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with artillery gunners and reinforcements, and blowing up an ambulance that tried to evacuate the wounded. “It reminded me,” said an American officer, “of one of those old cattle stampede scenes of the movies. The camera is in a hole in the ground and you see the herd coming and then they leap up and over you and are gone. Only the Japs kept coming and coming. I didn’t think they’d ever stop.”50
D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC Page 17