The Conquering Tide (88 page)

On June 24, Holland Smith took a boat to the
Indianapolis
and asked Spruance for authorization to relieve Ralph Smith of his command. Turner emphatically supported the request. Carl Moore warned against it, referring to the risk of an open breach between the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps, but Spruance felt that he must endorse his ground commander's wishes. Moore wrote out the order and Spruance signed it. Ralph Smith was relieved of command and sent back to Pearl Harbor, a disgrace from which his career never recovered, and General Jarman took command of the division. Spruance told Nimitz that Smith's relief “was regrettable but necessary. He has been in command of that division for a long time and cannot avoid being held responsible for its fighting efficiency or lack thereof.”
⁷⁹

Within another week of hard fighting, the army broke through the strong pockets that had held it up. But it fell to the 2nd Division to stage the decisive attack on Mount Tapotchau, which they did after beating back several tank attacks in sugarcane fields west of the ridgeline. At last the peak was seized by a combined effort of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines and the 1st Battalion, 29th Marines. On the west coast, other elements of the 2nd Division fought a bitter action among the charred ruins of Garapan and broke through to capture Tanapag Harbor on July 3.

Now commenced the final stage of the battle for Saipan, when remaining Japanese units and stragglers fell back into the northern heights of the island, and the fighting deteriorated into “isolated, sporadic, and desperate resistance by the enemy. There was little semblance of organized opposition.”
⁸⁰
Small groups of enemy fighters took shelter in limestone caves. The positions were often bypassed, until special units came along and cleaned them out with flamethrowers and hand grenades. Often the Japanese emerged in one final, screaming charge, and had to be cut down with rifle fire or even bayonets.

Of the great naval battle that had taken place offshore, the infantrymen knew nothing. If they had, they would have thought little of it. “Our vision of the war was largely tunnel-vision,” wrote William Manchester, a marine private who fought on Saipan and later became a renowned biographer. “To each of us the most important place in the world was his foxhole. The impact of MacArthur's and Nimitz's twin offensives was lost on us. Most
Marines were as ignorant of Pacific geography as their families at home.”
⁸¹
After a week on Saipan, Manchester and his fellow marines looked very much like the men who had conquered Guadalcanal two years earlier—gaunt, bearded, caked with mud and soot, habitually staring into the middle distance with a vacant, weary expression. They marched in long columns, hugging the roadside ditches into which they would dive at the first indication of enemy fire. They did not salute an officer because to do so would mark him as a preferred target for enemy snipers. At dusk they dug a deep foxhole and did not stop to rest or eat until it was completed. The nights were neither dark nor quiet. The scarred landscape was lit by star shells and long-burning parachute flares. The stillness was disturbed by the engines of tanks on the move, by the rattle of machine guns and the whistle-blast of artillery shells. Veterans learned to identify each caliber of incoming shell by its sound: “There were shells that fizzled like sparklers, or whinnied, or squealed, or whickered, or whistled, or whuffed like a winter gale slamming a barn door,” wrote Manchester. “The same principle governed all these sounds: the projectile's blast created a vacuum into which air rushed.”
⁸²

For the remaining Japanese fighters, penned into a shrinking perimeter in northern Saipan, the barrage was relentless and deadly. The marines kept up constant pressure with their field artillery and truck-mounted rocket launchers. With complete air supremacy, the American land-based fighters and carrier planes rained down bombs, rockets, and strafing fire on the Japanese lines. To all of that was added the big guns of the warships operating offshore, which kept at it throughout the daylight hours and often continued into the night. The diarist James Fahey (whose ship, the
Montpelier
, operated off Saipan for several weeks) noted the uncanny contrast between the ship's commonplace routines and the carnage unfolding in plain sight ashore. “It was funny to see some of the fellows fishing from the side of the ship, others laying in the sun getting a tan, and up forward on the bow some of the officers are boxing, while on the beach men are killing each other, some are in agony from wounds. Our planes are strafing and bombing and our ships are bombarding the Japs. The two scenes are so close to each other and yet it is from one extreme to another or two different worlds.”
⁸³

Lieutenant Ben Bradlee, future editor in chief of the
Washington Post
, served off Saipan on the destroyer
Philip
. For several days Bradlee communicated by radio with a “call-fire” coordinator ashore. This man, a marine lieutenant whom Bradlee never met, was so close to enemy lines that he
often wanted shells planted on targets immediately adjacent to his own position. During some of these radio transmissions, Bradlee swore he could hear Japanese soldiers yelling in the background:

I've lost his name, unfortunately, but this guy was one brave son of a bitch. He would ask for gunfire in such-and-such a place—often within a few yards of his foxhole—and I would relay the coordinates he gave me to the gunnery officer. First “Fire,” then deafening explosion. Then pause, while the 57-pound shells streaked toward their target, followed by comments from our unseen buddy. “Fan-fucking-tastic”; “Bullseye” maybe. Often, even. And sometimes: “That was a little close, friends. Back off a blond one.”
⁸⁴

Some 140,000 rounds of 5-inch ammunition were fired on targets ashore during the month-long campaign for Saipan. That remarkable figure did not include the larger-caliber weapons of the cruisers and battleships. All told, according to records later submitted to the Navy Department, 11,000 tons of naval ordnance fell on Saipan. With such a superabundance of firepower in the offing, the call-fire coordinators did not always limit their targets to known enemy locations. “It was often employed,” Nimitz told King in his report on
FORAGER
, “against an area where enemy installations were only suspected rather than known to exist.”
⁸⁵
And why not, so long as the ammunition resupply train, staging from Eniwetok, continually replenished the fleet's magazines?

As on Tarawa and other Pacific islands, the shells persistently failed to penetrate fortified bunkers or caves, but heavy bombardment provided an effective neutralizing effect immediately before tank or infantry attacks. Men ashore sometimes requested night illumination of the enemy lines, then closed the radio link and bedded down for the night. Ships offshore, in compliance with the most recent request, kept the area brightly lit with an uninterrupted sequence of star shells and other illumination rounds. Piercing nightlong radiance over “no-man's-land” deterred the night attacks and infiltration tactics that the Japanese infantry had employed to lethal effect in earlier campaigns.

Suffering under cumulative punishment from land, air, and sea, the Japanese garrison was driven to desperation. Caves and entrenchments provided some measure of bodily protection, but any movement of supplies or troops across open ground drew prompt, accurate, and powerful salvos. Even when
it did not kill or maim the defenders, incessant bombardment drove them to the end of their wits. Sergeant Takeo Yamauchi, one of a relative handful of Japanese soldiers to survive the battle for Saipan, later described the ordeal:

The extreme intensity of those flashes and boiling clouds of smoke still remain in my mind today. They went sixty meters straight up! Huge guns! From battleships. A total bombardment from all the ships. The area I was in was pitted like the craters of the moon. We just clung to the earth in our shallow trenches. We were half buried. Soil filled my mouth many times. Blinded me. The fumes and flying dirt almost choked you. The next moment I might get it!
⁸⁶

Small and isolated outfits went to ground in caves or heavily vegetated ravines. Stragglers, having lost contact with their officers, joined up with other groups and awaited orders that never came. Internal communications broke down. Food and water ran low. They struggled up into the northern hills, retreating haphazardly from the advancing enemy forces. Pitiable civilian refugees, including entire starving families, fell in with the soldiers and begged for food, water, and protection. For a few days in early July, Yamauchi and a handful of survivors from his platoon took shelter in a deep ravine. Their officers had gone missing. They concealed themselves in the underbrush, avoided the low-flying Hellcats, and waited for orders. All around them were the putrefying bodies of fallen comrades: “Corpses burned black. Hanging from the branches of trees, tumbled onto the ground. Corpses crawling with maggots.” When Yamauchi proposed that they attempt to surrender, he was firmly rebuked: “Squad Leader, you're talking like a traitor. Behave like a military man!”
⁸⁷

In a fortified cave near the island's northwest coast, General Saito found it increasingly difficult to maintain contact with his remaining forces. He had been obliged to move his field headquarters five times; his sixth and final command post was in a place the Japanese called the “Valley of Hell.” His field telephone network was of no use because the ground cables had been chewed up in the weeks-long barrage. Message runners appointed to carry dispatches to commanders in the field were often cut down in their tracks. On the morning of July 6, he radioed the Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo and reported that the cause was lost. He issued one final order to all Japanese army forces remaining on the island:

Heaven has not given us an opportunity. We have not been able to utilize fully the terrain. We have fought in unison up to the present time, but now we have no materials with which to fight, and our artillery for attack has been completely destroyed. Our comrades have fallen one after another. Despite the bitterness of defeat, we pledge “Seven lives to repay our country.” . . .

Whether we attack or whether we stay where we are, there is only death. However, in death there is life. We must utilize this opportunity to exalt true Japanese manhood. I will advance with those who remain to deliver still another blow to the American devils. I will leave my bones on Saipan as a bulwark of the Pacific.
⁸⁸

Saito's declaration that he would “advance with those who remain” was evidently to be understood as an allegory. The general was exhausted and badly strained; he wore a long beard and was (according to one of his officers) “a pitiable sight.”
⁸⁹
He held a last banquet with his officers, a meal of canned crabmeat washed down with sake. Then he left the cave, sat on a rock, faced the east, gripped a ritual dagger with both hands, and plunged it into his abdomen. In its fullest expression, ritual
seppuku
, or suicide, required the dying samurai to carve out his bowels by slicing across and then diagonally upward. It is not known how far Saito's knife traveled before his aide-de-camp fired a shot into his right temple. As for Admiral Nagumo, whose command post was in another bunker, he is said to have followed Saito's example. But no eyewitness report of Nagumo's suicide survived, presumably because all who saw it took their own lives in turn, or were slain in battle. According to secondhand reports, the bodies of both commanders were cremated and their ashes scattered.

“Seven lives to repay our country” was the slogan often employed to rally Japanese soldiers to a suicidal attack, usually in the form of a massed
banzai
charge. Each son of heaven was to do his utmost to slay seven devils before he was taken down in turn. A Japanese warrior ablaze with the
Yamato
spirit (so it was said and even at times believed) would go on fighting even after he had received mortal wounds. According to an ancient samurai myth, a swordsman beheaded by an adversary could (if he possessed sufficient power of will) muster the dying strength for one more mighty swing of the sword, thus taking his slayer down with him. An American marine nearly shot dead by a blinded Japanese soldier in Garapan marveled at the
man's “fighting resolution”: “Instead of seeking aid for his terrible injury he determined to go out fighting, killing one last enemy.”
⁹⁰

Saito's final orders summoned all remaining Japanese soldiers (included all walking wounded) to a rendezvous at the village of Makunsha, on the Tanapag Plain near the northwest coast, after nightfall on July 6. From there they would launch an all-out “general attack” or
banzai
charge into the American lines. The immobilized wounded were to take their own lives or be killed in their cots. Runners spread out to disseminate the orders, and soldiers from all through the shrinking perimeter did their best to converge on the little town. Private Taro Kawaguchi answered the call, though he no longer had a weapon. He left one final entry in his diary. Noting that he had faced north, bowed to the emperor, and bid a silent good-bye to his parents and relatives, Kawaguchi pledged to do his best in the climactic attack. “Looking back through the years, I am only 26 years old. Thanks to the Emperor, both my parents, and my aunt I have lived to this day and I am deeply gratified. At the same time it is deeply regrettable that I have nothing to report at this time when my life is fluttering away like a flower petal to become a part of the soil. . . . I, with my sacrificed body, will become the whitecaps of the Pacific and will stay on this island until the friendly forces come to reclaim the soil of the Emperor.”
⁹¹

About 3,000 Japanese troops answered the call, or managed to get to the staging point without being immolated in the ongoing artillery bombardment. The uninjured and best-armed men were positioned at the head of the column, four men abreast. Those who still carried rifles fixed their bayonets; others armed themselves with makeshift spears fashioned from knives or bayonets attached to the end of long wooden poles. At the end of the column was placed a pathetic cavalcade of sick and wounded men, bleeding and bandaged, some hobbling along on crutches, many with no weapons at all.